style="font-size:15px;"> They came easily now, a simple jargon. Sometimes though the old man visibly stopped to consider his child’s rebuke.
Liam gauged the sadness, wished he hadn’t said anything, wanted to simplify it but knew it possessed all the simplicity it could have, a man on his deathbed in dreadful doubt.
Christmas night they visited the convent crib, Liam, Susan, Gerard, Mrs Fogtrthy, a place glowing with a red lamp.
Outside trees stood in silence, a mist thinking of enveloping them. The town lay in silence. At odd intervals one heard the gurgle of television but otherwise it could have been childhood, the fair green, space, emptiness, the rhythm, the dance of one’s childhood dreams.
Liam spoke to his father that evening.
‘Where I work we try to educate children differently from other places, teach them to develop and grow from within, try to direct them from the most natural point within them. There are many such schools now but ours, ours I think is special, run as a cooperative; we try to take children from all class backgrounds and begin at the beginning to redefine education.’
‘And do you honestly think they’ll be better educated children than you were, that the way we educated you was wrong?”
Liam paused.
‘Well, it’s an alternative.’
His father didn’t respond, thinking of nationalistic, comradely Irish schoolteachers long ago. Nothing could convince him that the discipline of the old style of education wasn’t better, grounding children in basic skills.
Silence somehow interrupted a conversation, darkness deep around them, the water of the floods shining, reflecting stars.
Liam said goodnight. Liam’s father grunted. Susan already lay in bed. Liam got in beside her. They heard a bird let out a scream in the sky like a baby and they went asleep.
Gerard woke them in the morning, strumming a guitar.
St Stephen’s Day, mummers stalked the street, children with blackened faces and a regalia of rags collecting for the wren. Music of a tin whistle came from a pub, the town coming to life. The river shone with sun.
Susan divined a child dressed like old King Cole, a crown on her head and her face blackened. Gerard was intrigued. They walked the town. Mrs Fogarthy had lunch ready. But Liam was worried, deeply worried. His father lay above, immersed in the past.
Liam had his past, too, always anxious in adolescence, running away to Dublin, eventually running away to England. The first times home had been odd; he noticed the solitariness of his parents. They’d needed him like they needed an ill-tended dog.
Susan and he had married in the local church. There’d been a contagion of aunts and uncles at the wedding. Mrs Fogarthy had prepared a meal. Salad and cake. The river had not been in flood then. In England he worked hard. Ireland could so easily be forgotten with the imprint of things creative, children’s drawings, oak trees in blossom. Tudor cottages where young women in pinafores served tea and cakes home made and juiced with icing.
He’d had no children. But Gerard now was both a twin, a child, a lover to him. There were all kinds of possibility. Experiment was only beginning. Yet Ireland, Christmas, returned him to something, least of all the presence of death, more a proximity to the prom, empty laburnum pods and hawthorn trees naked and crouched with winter. Here he was at home with thoughts, thoughts of himself, of adolescence.
Here he made his own being like a doll on a miniature globe. He knew whence he came and if he wasn’t sure where he was going, at least he wasn’t distraught about it.
They walked with his mother that afternoon. Later an aunt came, preened for Christmas and the imminence of death. She enjoyed the tea, the knowledgeable silences, looked at Susan as though she was not from England but a far-off country, an Eastern country hidden in the mountains. Liam’s father spoke to her not of 1916 but of policemen they’d known, irascible characters, forgetting that he had been the most irascible of all, a domineering man with a wizened face ordering his inferiors around.
He’d brought law. He’d brought order to the town. But he’d failed to bring trust. Maybe that’s why his son had left.
Maybe that’s why he was pondering the fate of the Irish revolution now, men with high foreheads who’d shaped the fate of the Irish Republic.
His thoughts brought him to killings now being done in the name of Ireland. There his thoughts floundered. From where arose this language of violence for the sake and convenience of violence?
Liam strode by the prom alone that evening, locked in a donkey jacket.
There were rings of light around distant electric poles.
He knew his father to be sitting up in bed; the policeman he’d been talking about earlier gone from his mind and his thoughts on 1916, on guns, and blazes, and rumination in prison cells long ago.
And long after that thoughts on the glorification of acts of violence, the minds of children caressed with the deeds of violence.
He’d be thinking of his son who fled and left the country.
His son now was thinking of the times he’d run away to Dublin, to the neon lights slitting the night, of the time he went to the river to throw himself in and didn’t, of his final flight from Ireland.
He wanted to say something, urge a statement to birth that would unite father and son but couldn’t think of anything to say. He stopped by a tree and looked to the river. An odd car went by towards Dublin.
Why this need to run? Even as he was thinking that, a saying of his father returned: ‘Idleness is the thief of time.’ That statement had been flayed upon him as a child but with time as he lived in England among fields of oak trees that statement had changed; time itself had become the culprit, the thief.
And the image of time as a thief was forever embroiled in a particular ikon of his father’s, that of a pacifist who ran through Dublin helping the wounded in 1916, was arrested, was shot dead with a deaf and dumb youth. And that man, more than anybody, was Liam’s hero, an Irish pacifist, a pacifist born of his father’s revolution, a pacifist born of his father’s state.
He returned home quickly, drew the door on his father. He sat down.
‘Remember, Daddy, the story you told me about the pacifist shot dead in 1916 with a deaf and dumb youth, the man whose wife was a feminist?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I was just thinking that he’s the sort of man we need now, one who comes from a revolution but understands it in a different way, a creative way, who understands that change isn’t born from violence but intense and self-sacrificing acts.’
His father understood what he was saying, that there was a remnant of 1916 that was relevant and urgent now, that there had been at least one man among the men of 1916 who could speak to the present generation and show them that guns were not diamonds, that blood was precious, that birth most poignantly issues from restraint.
Liam went to bed. In the middle of the night he woke muttering to himself, ‘May God have mercy on your soul,’ although his father was not yet dead, but he wasn’t asking God to have mercy on his father’s soul but on the soul
