stopped. Swaying in the dark, he'd be pissing on his shoes as he looked up for stars. He was twenty and tired of waiting.
At night he'd hear the cattle lowing or the hens being disturbed. Up at six, the clang of the milking buckets, a cigarette in the mouth early, the rhythmical swish of the teats squirting into the bucket.
What decided it finally was not his father's deteriorating condition or his own frustration. Rather, it was the questioning of his brother by the Garda one evening. It was a casual thing, to look as if they were doing something about the IRA. Mick came home late. He was triumphant, Minogue realised. He had been questioned in the barracks in town about his connections with the IRA, a proscribed organisation. It didn't matter that it was moribund, maintained by diehards and barstool heroes. Mick had found his vocation, Minogue understood. Ireland was to be his religion.
Maybe, as Mick accused him, it was the books he read. Books full of pessimism and anti-religious feeling. Maybe it wasn't fashionable to be devoted to your country anymore, Mick would sneer. Youth? Mick didn't have it either. Curious though, Kathleen had remarked after they had all met at a neighbour's funeral years later, Mick didn't seem to age.
Minogue tried his hand at bartending in Dublin. His mother wanted him to do the Civil Service exams. He spent a lot of time in the libraries. He saved money for a trip to America. He met Kathleen O'Hare who was new to the Civil Service. She poked fun at his accent, knowing his irritation to be waxing love. He in turn complained about Dublin people. She teased out his plans. She said she had to be fair with him, not to lead him on, because if he was serious about America, she couldn't go. Her family needed her and America frightened her, she admitted.
'You're nobody there, Matt,' she'd say.
Minogue was reading the Frenchman, Sartre, and he felt that he wouldn't mind being a nobody for a while. Maybe a holiday in America, Kathleen said.
She had been very fair to me, Minogue thought. He was determined to repay her honesty with a loyalty the intensity of which surprised him. Minogue didn't fancy himself as a man who went in for the lovey-dovey stuff, but not because he wanted people to think he was a hard man. He would be happy with loyalty and company. Within a year, he was through the Garda training in Templemore, surprising himself even more by doing well at it. They married. With the America money and Kathleen's economy, they saw themselves into a new house in Kilmacud. Minogue didn't mind it at all, not even the cliff-heights of a mortgage.
In that same year, Minogue's father had died, leaving Mick the man of the house. Their mother grieved for a long time. The doctor called it reactive depression. Minogue's sisters and their husbands called on weekends. One sister, Maura, gently asked him what he thought about her moving to Canada and how would their mother take it. Families grew. Something was stirring in the country, money.
Kathleen delivered a baby boy, Eamonn, a big hairy child. Eamonn died unaccountably some seven months later, forgetting to breathe, it seems. The death precipitated the worst years of Minogue's life. For all their cleverness, the poems and the books meant nothing after that. Kathleen overcame her dread and went to see a psychiatrist. Minogue was helpless, encumbered. They promoted him to detective.
It wasn't until six years later that Kathleen conceived again. Minogue felt frightened being an expectant father again. None of their acquaintances joked with them. Minogue had been marked as different already.
Iseult was a different baby from the start. Kathleen took heart. The coldness leaked out of Minogue. As if to remind them that it wasn't chance, Daithi was born the following year. Minogue was always watching. He was careful not to live for his children but his determination was manic. They would have university, the loan of the car, good teeth, pocket money, clothes, French, parties, books. Fearing his own intensity, Minogue immersed himself in it all the more.
As they grew, Minogue wondered-but didn't much care about-his promotion. He became a detective sergeant. Others passed him on the ladder.
Optimism seeped into Ireland in the sixties. One evening he watched civil rights marchers being beaten up near Derry. Was that still going on? He knew vaguely that the civil rights people were Catholics and that the Unionists controlled the North. The police beat up the marchers. That Paisley lunatic and his huge lips and mouth sneering on the television, a hysteric from another century. A new IRA appeared in the streets. Minogue was relieved. The people he worked with and the people he met were glad too. There were rumours of sending in troops to Derry to protect the Catholics. Hooded bodies turned up in ditches. Bombs demolished shops and factories. Men were shot to death at their doors. Troops went berserk. Petrol bombs arced lazily and burst in the night on the evening news. British Ministers recoiled at the hatred. Minogue's brother called in and had a glass of whisky.
'Majority my foot. How is it that a country that's held up to be the birthplace of parliamentary government can give in to a crowd of seventeenth-century bigots who represent about two percent of the population of Great Britain. How is that, can you tell me?'
New laws and courts, armed guards and the army at trials. The word'terrorist' showed up in the news a lot. The old guard of the IRA, well clear of Belfast and Newry and Derry, lauded their northern heroes. Mick exhilarated in talk. He was well-to-do now. The country was to join the European Economic Community although Mick didn't agree with the move in principle. Still, Mick was not an activist, Minogue knew. Mick was for Ireland going it alone and his zeal couldn't countenance socialism. He couldn't approve of guns from Libya or Russia or from the madmen in Germany.
The brothers met intermittently at hurling matches. In Hayes' Hotel in Thurles, they^d be pressed together by the swell of men trying to get to the bar, eager for pints after the game. Both locked into the throng of countrymen in the streets and pubs of provincial towns. Minogue would catch sight of his brother through the struggling mass; the strong smells of his own youth-the porter, the cowshite, the hair oil-rising up around him. They never quarrelled.
Minogue knew that his brother knew more than he'd tell. The mannered ambiguity and the lifetime's practice with evasion meshed the two men. Ah, Minogue thought sometimes as the stout hit his stomach, we have the same sisters and mother and father, isn't that the strangest thing? How's things Matt? Grand and how's yourself and yours? Can't complain, Matt, back to the wind. And how's Kathleen and the two children? Good, thanks be to God. Not thanks be to God at all, to Kathleen probably.
Minogue had felt a God in the singed grass at the side of the road, in the slowness of things winding down. The young fellow with the scattered blots and freckles of blood thick all over his face and everything silent and slow and slower as the smoke moved off. Minogue had spent a long time thinking about it in hospital. It was never fear really, more a surprise, especially so because there was something so familiar there at the time. It was like a face maybe. Maybe like those Zen fellas, a face he had before he was born. Not smiling or puzzled or anything at all really, more a feeling that something was there. A watchful presence, interested and disinterested at the same time. Great calm, silence. Maybe a trace of regret as it receded. Life marches on, each wave of people full of themselves, but less so as they get closer to the edge with the years. Then it's our turn.
Lying in the hospital bed, Minogue had imagined all the life, plants and animals, all the plankton in the sea, all the organisms in his body. This small hating island off the coast of Europe… There were people dying of hunger elsewhere, without the time or the energy to be on their mad summer marches, without any dirty little pubs to plot in. Ah, but that wasn't the half of it even. People are nice here a lot of the time. More inane phrases drifted by Minogue and he'd turn aside to sleep.
Then, driving back up to Dublin after the games, Minogue would sometimes dream what life would have been like had he left for the States those years ago. He might be a cop on the beat in New York City. He might be a farmer in Montana with a Ford pick-up truck and steers. His wife would be a blonde with big white teeth and a skin that'd tan. Maybe two cars. The kids would have American accents.
No end in sight to this business, is there, Matt? That is if the English insist on being blackmailed by those Orangemen. No, Mick, it doesn't look like it.
Mick didn't shoot the guns, but Minogue was sure he cheered the count of soldiers or loyalists killed.
Maybe it'll spread, Matt. It may well, but we'll do what we can, Mick.
Minogue listened to the things his brother left unsaid. Minogue had by then given up any ambition of rescuing his brother or indeed any of his countrymen from whatever threw them effortlessly between savagery and kindness.
Agnes laid the vapouring cups on the table. Slowly the two of them sipped their tea. Occasionally, a gust sprayed rain on the window and rattled the frame. Finally, Agnes spoke:
'A great day for going to the library… or a funeral.'
