Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

no, the battery had a full charge

no, all the wiring was connected as far as I could see and

yes, the lights were coming up

after which he stalled for a moment before saying

leave it with me a minute, I’ll get back to you

which he did, fair play, and I took the call at the far end of the yard watching my father standing beside the dead tractor, looking upset and bewildered as I called to him

you won’t believe this

believe what

seemingly your tractor’s ignition has been disabled by satellite

what

yes, by satellite, an anti-theft device

they’re saying I’m a thief

no one’s saying you’re a thief

I’m not a thief

there’s been some delay in your payment registering, so their system has no record yet of a transaction, as far as the system is concerned the tractor is stolen and

so it is saying I’m a thief

it’s not saying that, it’s a security device fitted to a lot of plant and farm machinery, it’ll be switched on in an hour and

with nothing else to be done we turned to look up at the sky as if we might spot that enabling pulse or spark from on high, neither of us with any clue what we were waiting for, whether or not the satellite was in some sort of stationary orbit over us or whether we had to wait for it to rise above the horizon before it would reach out across the heavens and turn the ignition on our tractor and

it was easy to feel foolish standing there on the wet concrete looking up at the grey sky, neither of us with anything to say as the moment deepened to that feeling of helpless stupidity when there is nothing you can do before he threw up his hands and turned for the house without a word, the wild head on him and the hobbling walk

where are you going

but no word out of him as he pulled the door behind him and it might be hindsight putting this shade on the whole thing but I’ve always believed that was the moment he parted company with the world, both of them with nothing to say turning their backs on each other because

a couple of weeks later he was found lying on the concrete walk outside the house by a neighbour over the village, Mattie Moran, who was on his way into town to collect his dole when he spotted him from the road and pulled over to hop in across the wall and go down on his knee beside him, putting his ear on his chest to hear if he was breathing before picking him up and laying him into the back seat of the car, stick and all, telling me afterwards that

it was like lifting a bundle of sticks — there was more meat on a sparrow’s ankle and he

drove him to the hospital where he stayed for the next three weeks and they washed and fed him while they ran all those tests which finally revealed the pancreatic cancer that would kill him within a couple of weeks, by which time there was less than six stone of him in the bed and only that he still had the wild head of hair on him you could hardly see his face in the middle of the pillow, but I combed it and did my best to tidy it and then I put him in his grandchild’s confirmation suit because he was now so shrunken none of his own would fit him and we lowered his coffin into the grave beside Onnie on the twenty-seventh of November and I stood there with Mairead and Agnes and Darragh beside me, the four of us huddled together in the chilly sunshine reciting a decade of the Rosary, the First Glorious Mystery, the Resurrection, our murmured prayers carried away on the breeze and while standing there, on the lip of his grave I thought that this was surely a day for the big questions

life, the universe, the whole fucking thing

nothing less seemed adequate to the moment and I did indeed find myself sifting through the sorrow of his last year and wondering to myself whose idea of justice was satisfied in his final confusion and humiliation and to what end or purpose had he been allowed to waste away in such confused, ragged ignominy, these questions sifting through my mind beneath the murmured responses to the Rosary but

I must have been wrong

it was neither the time nor the place for such questions, for I stood there under a November sky that had turned the colour of concrete and watched the gravediggers shovel the soil over his coffin when a man came up to me and said

I’m sorry for your loss, but he wouldn’t swap places with us now, he’s with Onnie and that was all he cared about and

he was hardly three months buried when I went into Coffey’s and ordered a plain granite headstone and border with black and white quartz gravel to be put up before the month was out, which drew another call from Eithne, giving out to me that she hadn’t been consulted and that it was too soon to put up a headstone plus a whole slew of other things and I told her that she shouldn’t feel left out, that I would split the bill with her, she shouldn’t worry about that and

you know well that’s not what I mean she said

do I, well I’ll tell you this — it won’t be your bed he’ll come sitting on the end of when he comes back to haunt

for Christ’s sake Marcus, she said

so I banged the phone down once more and it would be a full six months before I talked to her again, when she called to the house and put out the hand-of-peace with tears and hugs, her anger well behind her, mine also burned away, and telling me that she had been to the graveyard and that she appreciated the job I’d done, a really nice job and that it suited them both, not flashy in any way and thanks for writing

Erected by the Family

that was nice, she appreciated it and sure enough she pulled out her pen and wrote me a cheque for half the cost of the whole thing and there wasn’t another word said about it as we sat there realising for the first time that we were without a father or mother and

does that make us orphans now, Eithne wondered, sniffling into a hankie, do you think

we might be a bit old for that, two middle-aged adults with families, I think those things rule us out but

I’m not so sure, I didn’t know there was an age limit on it, besides, I feel orphaned and

her face softened into grief, both parents gone in little over a year, that’s hard, that’s very hard and

it is and it was

twelve months which pushed us into a brother-sister intimacy new to both of us, with a desire to reach out with phone calls and texts passing between us just to make sure we were all right, even if that was precisely the question we never asked as we kept our messages to a deadpan of information exchange and gossip, jokes and quips, these bland words hiding and nurturing this new and baffling need for each other which grew from our shared loss, nothing odd in it, the fate of half the world, but none the less desolate for it, which even as we sat there in the sitting room that day was not anything we could foresee, me and the sister reaching out to each other and

still

still something twitchy and indistinct about this day

now into the early afternoon, twenty to one by the clock on the wall and

that buzz in the radio sounds as if the signal is coming through a blizzard of interference, some sort of grainy impedance breaking up the songs no matter what station it’s tuned to, national or local, every voice and melody reduced to a grainy burr of static, nothing coming through at all but the certainty of being wholly displaced here in this house, my own house and the uncanny feeling of dragging my own after-image with me like an intermittent being, strobing and flickering even while

sitting here with my hands placed flat on the table in front of me or

going through the rooms, up and down the hall, one moment to the next, fading and pulsing, overwhelmed in light one moment, shadow the next, visible as a flame in sunlight so that anyone who looks upon me would have to angle their gaze to see me clearly because