Lynch - Booking passage: we Irish & Americans

BY THOMAS LYNCH

POETRY

Skating with Heather Grace

Grimalkin & Other Poems

Still Life in Milford

NONFICTION

The UndertakingLife Studies from the Dismal Trade

Bodies in Motion and at RestOn Metaphor and Mortality

This book is for

P ATRICK L YNCH AND M ICHAEL H EFFERNAN
Brethren, Boyos

and for

P.J., B REDA , AND L OUISE R OCHE
Friends for Life

I think, as far as the Irish people are concerned, it will be necessary to study the priests, the politicians, the publicans and the peasants. I omit hotel-keepers, the garage proprietors, the shop-keepers, the dairymen and the boarding house keepers, because in every country these types openly fly the flag of commercial piracy and even the most ignorant tourist will not fail to recognize them and to beware of them. However, if I discover, in my examination, any particular local eccentricity, I am going to set it down.

from A Tourists Guide to Ireland , by Liam OFlaherty

What we call monsters are not so to God who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it; and it is for us to believe that this figure that astonishes us is related and linked to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man. From his infinite wisdom there proceeds nothing but that is good and ordinary and regular; but we do not see its arrangement and relationship.

from Of a Monstrous Child, by Michel de Montaigne

I had a vision, or a nightmare, the other night. Dreamt I went to the Patents Office in Dublin Castle to try to patent being Irish. I had drawn up a very detailed specification. You see, I want this unique affectation protected by world right. I am afraid of my life that other people will find out being Irish pays and start invading our monopoly. I am not sure that certain sections of the population in America have not already infringed our immemorial rights in this regard. I did not get very far with the stupid officials I saw. They held that copyright did not subsist in being Irish and more or less suggested that it was open to any man to be Irish if he chose, and to behave in an Irish way.

from Bones of Contention in the Nationalist and Leinster Times,
by George Knowall (aka Myles na Gopaleen
aka Flann OBrien, aka Brian ONolan)

Contents

PROLOGUE

Fit & Start

I M COMING THE coast road into Moveen. This part replays itself over and over to a standstill, until Im hardly moving. Out in the ocean are islands Ive never seen in the pictures I have of this place. I take this as a signal Im dreaming.

It is early morning. Ive been flying all night. The air is sparkling, dewy, and new. Ive landed safely and am on the last leg of the journey.

Gulls diving everywhere are the souls of the dead, rising in the wind, hailing me by the working of their wings: Nora and Tommy, my mother and father, Mary Maloney and her brother Sean, sometimes Sam Curtin, Johnny Hickey, Peg and Siney Burns, the brothers Hedderman, Danny Gorman, Kant Lynch, that one-eyed man, the pink Collins sisters, Bridey and Mae, and their brother Patrick. Patrick was a lovely dancer.

Sometimes they set to dancing in the dream, the Caledonia, the thump of their boots on broad flagstones mixes with the music in the updrafts of air. Andrew McMahon and Patrick Murray. And John Joe, J. J. McMahons ancient father. Haughs and Walshes, Deloughreys and ODeas, and Paddy Mullany, a saintly class of a man, and lately Tom and Catherine Collinss boy, killed by a tractor gone astrayall of them circling and dancing and diving among the islands. The sea is rising now, silver blue, the gulls are dancing everywhere.

And everything is becoming new again and known. The Holy Well and Bishops Island, the quarry and the rising, falling cliffs, then finally that curl in the road before Dunlicky, where the vista opens to the whole southwestern narrowing of land to its peninsular denouement at Loop Head. I stop and look and listen here, where in the year of three eights, some cousins of mine were swept into the sea by a freak wave whilst they were collecting sea grass for the gardens or the dinner. Theres a new stone here to mark the place and time where, twenty-some years ago, two boys from Cork drove off the cliffs on motorbikes. Nora wrote with word of the misadventure. Drink, as she told it, had been taken.

Sometimes in the dream my youngest son, Sean, is painting that picture of Murrays Islandthe fourteen-acre stone that rises two hundred feet out of the ocean and has always looked to me from the landside like a great gray whale turning in the sea. Poor farmers, it is said, used to graze their sheep on this rock. They rowed out in curraghs to the sloping western side. Was I told that in a dream? Now it is mostly rookery. And Sean is stationed by a heap of rocksall that is left of Dunlicky Castle. He has his canvas and his oils and his brushes. His sister, Heather, stands in the tall grass taking photos while his brothers, Mike and Tommy, are fishing the cliffs. Shoals of mackerel ruffle on the soft sea. Mary is back at the house making tea. Sitting above the mantel now, the painting was done when Sean was the age I was when I first came here, when this coast road first began to appear and reappear in the space between my waking and sleeping.

The road slopes downward to Moveen, past the fishermans cottage gone to ruins at Goleen, where a stream slips under the road, down the rock ledges into the sea. Smoke curls from P. J. Roches chimney, his mare and filly foal grazing in the field by Goleen. I make left at the bottom of the hill and back the narrow road past the fields and cattle and households of neighborsMahanys, Murrays, Keanes, McMahons, and Carmodys, Downses and Carmodys again. A mile from the sea, Im at the gate I stood at all those years ago for the first time, home.

When I wake from all of this, the cry of gulls gives way to bird whistle. The roar of the sea is the mornings early traffic. The kettle gives way to the coffee machine. I go online to Clare FM and wait for the noontime news with Noel Fogarty. Its 7 A.M. in Milford, Michigan. Theres news of the world, the country, and the county with the weather forecast and death notices. After news of the war and protests at Shannon, the gridlock in Ennis, and the chance of dry spells predicted for the evening, Clare FM regrets to announce the following deaths. Noels voice is proper and calm and among the sad details most recently: Michael Murray, Moveen West, removal from Lillis Funeral Home, Kilkee, to St. Marys Church, Carrigaholt, to Moyarta Cemetery. May they rest in peace.

The Lord have mercy on him, Michael was a quiet, decent man who farmed the westernmost acres of Moveenhigh, dry pasturage and a herd of Friesiansthen turned the spread over to his son, P. J., and built his retirement home by the road where he and Mary could live out their years. Id often see him on my walks, painting the garden wall, working with his grandson in the yard, checking the fences around the cliffside fields. Wed have a little chat and go our ways. That was my last sight of him, last April, working his way down the land toward the sea to check on the yearlings grazing therea Moveen man in his field, among his cattle, the sun divided by the evening clouds, the huge sea gone silver before him there on the western edge of his world.