Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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"What?" "I want to go to my mother's grave." He squatted on a rug near the stove and picked up the ends of hemp rope. The fresh hemp had the same smell as the tea I was drinking. "She's not buried in the Methodist churchyard in Dunclogher. She's with her father's family in the ruined church by the river. There's a fence around the old church and a gate with a lock, you have to stop at the post office to ask for the key. I can't ask Moira to take me because she's Catholic and wouldn't want to be seen there, and I can't ask my father—he won't go to her grave himself." His mat began in the center; he pulled the ends tight. "I don't mind going." I washed the few breakfast dishes in the pantry and then we set out together on the road through Dunclogher. He carried a cane but was not skilled with it; I guessed he did not often leave the house. He waited outside the post office while I went inside to borrow the graveyard keys from the woman inside. She also sold hair oil, cabbages in bins, sweets, newspapers. I bought a roll of mints to give her a little business. "Shockin' weather, so it is," she said, handing me the pair of rusty keys tied together with string. "Not many tourists come to Dunclogher; no saints or poets buried here. Maybe some relative of yours?" "Not that I know of." "Well, bones are bones," she said, as though she were saying cabbages are cabbages. Outside, I put a mint into Brian's hand, and then he took my arm and used my guidance instead of the cane. His shaggy hair, obviously home-cut, was damp with the heavy mist that did not so much fall as slide. He sucked the mint, enjoying it. Except for the post office and two pubs, there was very little to the village. We passed a row of brick terrace houses with damp alleys behind and then some empty fields. The ruined church was on a hill on the right side of the road, but at first I didn't see the river behind. I turned the larger key in the gate lock and put it, lock 32 and all, into my pocket. I felt weighted down. Brian seemed content to hang on to me, but I didn't know where I might find his mother's grave. I didn't even know her name. Then he said, "My grandfather's name was Muir. She'd be buried there, in his family plot." The church was made of stone and was now roofless, so that we went under an arch and were again in the rain. The tower was the only part that had not crumbled. We slipped in the wet grass. The gravestones on the slope behind the church were so close together that one leaned against the other. Ivy grew into the stones so that they cracked. I could see the river now, and a short way upstream was the linen mill where the Strachans had worked. No clacking of the looms, just the squabbling of ducks on the water. I led the way down the slope, Brian's hand in mine, looking for the Muir name. On the bank of the river were a few clumps of daffodils, their buds like tightly clenched fists. "What river is that?" "The Lagan. It goes wandering to Belfast and empties into the Lough. To the Irish Sea. I've never been there." He laughed in an ironic way; I was supposed to feel scorn for someone who lived so close to the sea and couldn't get to it. But I would rather have had him stay in Dunclogher, though I couldn't tell him that. Then I found the stone. A low square white stone, marked only with her name and dates of birth and death. Elizabeth Muir Strachan. I pulled his hand down so he could trace out the inscription. "I believe it now." "Didn't you before?" "My father and Moira took her away in the night and they would never talk about her, so I never felt sure. She might have only gone away on a visit." "How old were you then?" "Eleven." He had been kneeling in the grass; the knees of his corduroy trousers stuck to his skin. We began to walk uphill to the church, threading our way 33
etween the gravestones and the paper-fragile snowdrops. "There's a tower," Brian said suddenly, as though remembering something he hadn't thought of in years. And then he looked doubtful. "Or did I invent it?" "It's there, all right." "Can we climb it, do you think?" I turned the lock with the smaller key on the string and put it into my pocket with the other. The door was wood, heavy, saturated with rain and age. The slimy narrow steps turned like a screw thread up the dark shaft. Tufts of moss grew between the stones. I had then a sense of what blindness must be like for Brian. He tapped with his cane on each step and I felt the wall. When we reached the top he said, "Tell me what you see." "How do you know I can see anything?" "I know light from dark. When I first lost my sight, I thought it was because there were weights on my eyelids and if I only tried hard enough I'd be able to open them." "There's mist out there. Chimney pots, bogs, cottages with smoke curling up, some sheep." We stood together at the slit between the stones where monks had shot arrows at infidels, and he touched my wet hair. "What is the color of it?" "Brown." "Like Moira's." "No, not as dark as hers." "That would be right." "Is Moira your father's wife?" He laughed. "Sure, she's our housekeeper." I didn't know whether to be pleased or not. "I wonder why my father brought you to our house." "Why?" "He never drinks whiskey. You like him." "Yes." "We'll go down now." 34 There was almost no conversation in that house. When Ivor came down for his tea in the late afternoon nothing was said about his absence, and there was no more word about going to Belfast. As he broke his egg and scooped out the contents, he glanced at me, not surprised to find me part of his household. When he finished eating he nodded to me, the same way he had in the Dundalk pub the day before. Without knowing where I was going, I followed; we took our coats from the hooks by the stove and went out to the yard in back of the house. His workshop was there, a wood lean-to with a corrugated roof. He set about lighting the paraffin heater and arranging his tools before he spoke. "Moira tells me you and Brian walked out of the house this morning." He handed me a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a block, and we each attacked an end of a pine cabinet framework. I didn't say anything. "Where did ye go? It was a grand day for a stroll, I have no doubt." "It rained." I suppose Moira herself saw us scrambling around the gravestones. It would not be simple to do anything private in this place. "Does Moira know everything?" "No, not everything." "Brian wanted to see where his mother was buried." He laughed shortly. "To see it." "He wanted to make sure she was really there." He picked up a cabinet door and held it in place, measuring with his eye the way it would swing. "She's there, right enough." He leaned the door against the wall and scraped the sandpaper over the frame again, working toward me. "And did he tell you how she died?" "I didn't ask." "She had bone cancer; she was only twenty-nine years old; it took her two years to die." He scrubbed 35
Page 1 and 2: ROBERT TAYLOR, JR. Union Street Sta
Page 3 and 4: espect for those who supervise him
Page 5 and 6: In bed, on the verge of sleep, she
Page 7 and 8: They sit together in the turret, on
Page 9 and 10: RICHARD SPEAKES Scrimshaw The man t
Page 11 and 12: ELAINE FORD Whin I met Ivor in a pu
Page 13: I'd only spoken it once. "Moira, an
Page 17 and 18: in the street." "How do you know it
Page 19 and 20: CLEOPATRA MATHIS Journey in the Sno
Page 21 and 22: STEPHANIE STRICKLAND RICHARD HENSLE
Page 23 and 24: cloth from a New York mill, the col
Page 25 and 26: JANE MILLER The Heart Climbs Devili
Page 27 and 28: URSULE MOLINARO The Chemistry of Mi
Page 29 and 30: now. Any day now, perhaps. Perhaps
Page 31 and 32: silhouette on the historical balcon
Page 33 and 34: Where she had perhaps planted the t
Page 35 and 36: JAMES BRASFIELD The Stringer Called
Page 37 and 38: C: You have translated Whitman into
Page 39 and 40: also describe my high school years
Page 41 and 42: sequence and sequence. Not in the b

Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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