pistons, crankshaft
to where I stood in the doorway in my school trousers and jumper, terrified at the sight because to one side lay the body of the 35, gutted of its most essential parts and forlorn now, its components ordered across the floor in such a way as to make clear not only the sequence of its dismantlement but also the reverse order in which it would be restored to the full working harmonic of itself and my father standing over the whole thing, sighting through a narrow length of fuel line, blowing through it till he was satisfied that it was clean through its length before he laid it on the floor, giving it its proper place in the sequence and explaining to me, saying simply
it was burning oil
as if this were some viral malfunction likely to spread from the machine itself and infect the world’s wider mechanism, throwing the universe itself out of kilter to bring it crashing down through the heavens because I knew well that this dismantlement went beyond a fitter’s examination of a diesel engine, well beyond stripping out the carburettor to clear the jets – once again my father had succumbed to the temptation to take something apart just to see how it was put together, to know intimately what it was he had put his faith in as
he stood over this altar of disassembly with nothing in his hand but a single, open-end spanner which he waved over the assemblage as if it were a gesture of forgiveness and when he told me that this single tool was capable of breaking down the entire tractor, dismantling the whole thing to its smallest component and that it was then sufficient in itself to put it back together again without need of any other instrument my fear only deepened as I recoiled at the thought that something so complex and highly achieved as this tractor engine could prove so vulnerable, so easily collapsed and taken apart by this single tool and so frightened was I by this fact it would be years afterwards before I could acknowledge the engineering elegance of it all and see it as my father did – something graceful and beautifully conceived, not the instrument of chaos it presented itself as to my childish imagination and
this may have been my first moment of anxious worry about the world, the first instance of my mind spiralling beyond the immediate environs of
hearth, home and parish, towards
the wider world beyond
way beyond
since looking at those engine parts spread across the floor my imagination took fright and soared to some wider, cataclysmic conclusion about how the universe itself was bolted and screwed together, believing I saw here how heaven and earth could come unhinged when some essential cottering pin was tapped out which would undo the whole vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in their wheeling rotations and send them plummeting through the void of space towards some final ruin out on the furthest mearing of the universe and even if my fear at that specific moment did not run to such complete detail, only such cosmic awareness could account for the waves of anxiety that gripped me as I stood over those engine parts on the hayshed floor
soul sick with an anxiety which
was not soothed one bit the following day when my father drove the tractor out of the hayshed with a clear spout of smoke blurting from the exhaust as it bounced down the narrow mucky road and into the field beyond where it took off into the distance, my father perched up on the seat, getting smaller and smaller in the dim light before man and machine disappeared into a dip in the land as we watched from the gable of the house – Onnie, my mother in her housecoat and Eithne clutching the Polaroid camera which seldom left her hands, a present from visiting Yanks –
he’s like a child with that thing, my mother said
until he was gone from sight as completely as if they had been rubbed from the world and even if the tractor’s successful restoration did not surprise me neither did it do anything to rid me of the gnawing conviction that nothing less than the essential balance and smooth running of the universe’s mechanism had now been tampered with in some way that might eventually prove fatal to us all and it is no exaggeration to say that
the sight of that engine spread over the floor would stand to me forever as proof of a world which was a lot less stable and unified than my childish imagination had held it to be, the world now a rickety thing of chance components bolted together in the dark, the whole construct humming closer to collapse than I had ever suspected, a child’s fear that sometimes, to this day, takes hold of me and draws me back to that hay barn, just as it did a few years ago when
I was in the village and standing outside Kenny’s shop with a carton of milk and a newspaper in my hand, standing on the pavement watching
a huge low-loader pass up the main street, a long, growling beast of a machine hauling itself along in low gear with the driver high up in the cab over the wheels, taking her carefully through the narrow street, making sure she did not strip the wing mirrors off the cars parked on either side of her while the flatbed behind carried something that was dismantled in sections and tied down on both sides with ratchet straps and chains, something that at first sight appeared to be the luminous bones of some massive, extinct creature, now disinterred, with its ribs gathered into a neat bundle around the thick stump of a massive spinal column which time and the elements had polished to such a cool ceramic gloss that if I were to leave my hand on it I would have been surprised if it felt like anything other than glass, and it was only when the whole thing had passed by completely and I saw the back of the trailer hung with caution tape and hazard decals that I recognised the load as a wind turbine which had been completely broken down with the vanes and conical tower separated from the nacelle and stacked lengthwise along the trailer but with enough corrosion around the flanges on the base sections to indicate that this turbine had recently been taken apart as a working project, faulty or redundant or obsolete in some way or other, possibly
burning oil
as my father might have said
so I stood there watching it pass, thinking there was something sorrowful in seeing this felled machine being hauled through our little village out here on the Western Seaboard, something in me recognising this as a clear instance of the world forfeiting one of its better ideas, as if something for which there was once justified hope had proven to be a failure and the world had given up on some precious dream of itself, one of its better destinies, and I was not the only one who’d stood to stare at its passing because three doors up, on Morrison’s corner, an old man had stopped in mid-stride and was standing with both hands planted down on the boss of his stick, looking on as the trailer made its careful way through the village, while across the street a few others stood and stared on in spite of themselves, generating a stillness which held for a long moment as the low-loader rumbled by, crossing the square and down the street before turning out of sight beyond the church and off out the Westport road before people became aware of themselves and were now looking at each other querulously and laughing as if they had succumbed to some childish foolery in the middle of the day while, standing across the street from them I wondered where this fallen turbine might be going to, at the same time thinking it was surely a mistake to believe that such things ever go anywhere at all or, more accurately, that there is a place to where such things could go, as stillness and stasis was the very nature of these constructs, much like myself at that moment, stuck as I was in a renewal of that same old anxiety I had experienced as a nine-year-old in the hayshed looking at that diesel engine, the component parts of the world spread across the floor except that now
four decades on
when the idea has come a patient arc through my life I now understood that if I saw the dismantled tractor as the beginning of the world, the chaotic genesis which drew it together and assembled it from disparate parts, then this wind turbine was its end, a destiny it had been forced to give up on, a dream of itself shelved or aborted or miscarried, an old idea which echoed
a radio
