Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

I saw her last night he said

you saw who

Onnie, I saw Onnie

Jesus Christ, Dad, Mam’s been dead for three months and

I woke up last night and she was standing at the end of the bed looking at me — she had two bags of shopping with her and do you know what she said

she’s dead, Dad, I know it’s hard

she said, go over and see the state of the grave I’m lying in and

I’ve told you before, we’ve been through this — you can’t put a headstone on the grave yet, you have to give the ground time to settle — eleven months to a year, that’s the usual waiting time with

his eyes brimming as if his broken heart had opened some spring which flowed up through him and him standing there alone in the half-light of the kitchen, the dog out eating the grass along the margins of the road and

sometimes, if you were passing you might see him at the gable of the house, leaning on the stick and smoking, watching the cars going to town in the evening but, if you stopped to talk to him over the fence he’d take off like a frightened hen and you’d hear him pulling the bolts on the door from the road and you could imagine him sitting there alone in the waning light of the kitchen, watching the television, wasting away in confusion and neglect while winter closed in around him and the television stayed on but the bulbs started to go out in one room after another as doors were closed for the last time on these same rooms with bottles and unread newspapers piled up on the chairs and the dresser and the sofa under the window, while all around him the house gradually came apart with paint peeling and curtains fraying and doors swelled in their frames from the dampness

till the day

I stood outside the barred gate pleading with him to sign a grant application form so that he could get the house renovated, the whole thing sealed and insulated, windows and doors and the whole lot painted, all he had to do was put his name to the bottom of the application form, that’s all he had to do, I’d look after the rest, organise the paperwork and contract the job out to a registered builder, all he had to do was sign his name, but would he sign

would he fuck sign

I will in my fuck sign, he said, from inside the gate,

I’ll sign fuck-all or put an X on anything either, he roared, coming here with your forms looking for signatures — by Jesus, you must think I’m fierce innocent if you expect me to fall for that one — but I’ll tell you one thing now and not two things — I know well what your game is — I’ll sign that form and the next thing I’ll find myself in the county home and this house will be sold out from under me and yourself and your sister dividing it up between ye, isn’t that what you’re up to, isn’t that what you’re after

it’s not what I’m up to and it’s not what I’m after and

like fuck it’s not — take your application form and your grant and your contracts and fuck off back to where you came from and

that’s the thanks I got

standing outside the gate waving the form at him, begging him to see reason and telling him that it was only for his own good and that this was the right thing to do and all I wanted was that he’d have a roof over his head and warmth — a small bit of comfort living on his own and, my hand to god, I had no intention of putting him in the county home or any other home for that matter because this was his home, I knew that, no one wanted to put him away and

my heart clenched in my chest with a desperate love for this man who had been the hero of my life but who now was so confused he was incapable of seeing who or what was good for him, and this above all else cut me to the bone, how a man who had walked so sure-footedly through the world could now misread it so completely that he could see no good in anything anymore, not even in his own son, me standing outside the gate with my temper gone and my patience gone but still pleading with him and for myself that he should

sign the fucking form, for the love of Jesus

talking to the back of his head now because he was hobbling away down the path to the house and I watched him go inside and pull the door behind him, and even at that distance I could hear the bolts ramming home, the sound echoing through my head as I stood there a few minutes longer, hardly able to move from heartbreak and despair before I eventually pushed myself off the gate and drove back home to phone Eithne that evening and tell her what had happened, beginning a long argument with her and losing my temper, trying to convince her that I had done all I could do to help him, begged and pleaded with him, pushed the forms under his nose but it was no good, nothing was any good, there was no talking to him and

what the hell did she want me to do

what more could I do

wrestle him to the ground and force him to sign, was that what she wanted because if she thought she could do a better job she was welcome to try, I was at my wits’ end with the whole fucking thing and

and

it’s all grief, all that anger is grief, Eithne said at the other end

what do you mean grief, falling out with everyone, abusing people, that’s the funniest grief I’ve ever come across

anger is a well-known stage of the grieving process so

I could feel a geyser of frustration coming to a head within me

Jesus, Eithne, don’t go giving me that pop psychology shite — I’m his son and if he can’t

if this is the way you spoke to him I’m not surprised that

I slammed down the phone, or she slammed down the phone or both of us slammed down the phone together, either way the call ended with a bang and I sat there in a rage before going to the cupboard and opening a bottle of Jameson to sit drinking in this kitchen till the early hours of the morning and that was the last word I spoke to Eithne and

it was around this time also, and for whatever reason, that he upped and

bought a new tractor

I swear to Jesus

a span new John Deere, a small 5E, about 60 hp, and with no cab on it, reminding me of the old Massey Ferguson 35 he had long ago — standing in the yard, gleaming in its green paint and god knows what it cost, I was afraid to ask him because he began talking straight away of his plans to hire out to agricultural contractors for silage-making and turf-cutting and so on, with him driving of course — this man who could hardly walk without the aid of a stick, the power in his legs gone, him near crippled with dampness in his bones — and he housed the tractor in the old shed at the end of the yard and put a fine galvanised roof over it, but that’s as much as he ever did with it because if he started it five or six times after that that was about the height of it, he never did any work with it, none that I ever knew of anyway — who was going to hire a man who could hardly walk, tractor or no tractor, he could hardly pull himself up on it — so it stayed there in the shed with the same fill of diesel it had arrived in the yard with and whenever he wasn’t gazing at it from the kitchen window he was out with a cloth wiping the windscreen or buffing the headlamps, polishing it like it was his special toy, which of course it was because this was his second childhood and all this care and attention for a fucking tractor when his own house was going to wrack and ruin about him with dampness running down the walls of every room and a scraw of black mould now growing in the bathroom but

he hardly had the tractor in the yard a month when he sat into it and turned it on and it stalled stone dead on him, no stir out of it, lights and gauges coming on all right but no spark or turn on the ignition, not a gig out of it and when, by chance, I went over to him that evening he was looking into the engine with all its mass of wiring and electronics, all confused and clueless and I had a look at it myself but couldn’t get her started so I put in a call to the garage where he’d bought it and got a man on the other end who remembered the sale and was surprised to hear the complaint and who asked the usual questions