52 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
is an educated reader of mood’s nu-
ance. It wasn’t Death, by any chance,
that stood there?
A
s he opened the door the man
turned to him with an owl’s incred-
ulous eyes and spoke lowly to inquire—
“There’s a cuckoo, hey?”
“Oh, there is,” he said. “In the bushes
beyond the schoolyard. He’d let you
know all about himself.”
“Loud all right, a throttle on him.
Would you sell me a pint?”
“I can’t do that.”
The man let his jaw drop in an ex-
aggerated, vaudevillian way.
“Are you not allowed to sell takeout?”
“Some are doing so in the towns.
I’m not. I have no stock at all.”
“Hard aul’ times all right. I noticed
the window was open. Thought I’d
chance it.”
“There’s no harm in that.”
“You wouldn’t recognize me, I
suppose?”
“No, but I’m trying to place you.”
It was true that he was. The stranger
was fastidiously keeping the two-metre
distance and he had to narrow his glance
against the sunshine to make him out.
The face had an antique bearing; it was
somehow medieval. The clear, hard
gleam in the eyes—these were eyes that
might seek a quick killing. But he spoke
pleasantly enough.
“I grew up not far from here,” he said.
Age receded from the stranger’s
face then to allow an O’Casey be made
out. A poor family from a sad stretch
of the shore road they had been. One
of those families that had broken up
and trickled away in all directions.
They’d left a wound of a house be-
hind them. The gaping maw of the
blank doorway had stood on the shore
road for years as invitation to the mis-
eries banked within. It must have been
three decades since the family had
lived there. Hadn’t there been a story
about the father gone mad?
“Are you an O’Casey?” he asked.
The man smiled broadly and parted
his lips to show a proud battalion of
remade teeth.
“You’d be a long time stepping out
from your own shade,” he said, con-
firming the speculation.
The afternoon conspired with its
languors. The heron stood beyond time
on the wrack-encrusted rock. The
O’Casey peered across his shoulder,
into the gloom of the barroom.
“I’d take a whiskey?” he tried.
“I suppose if I don’t charge you for it.”
He turned from the doorway and
crossed the floor of the barroom—his
breath was coming more thickly now.
He dipped beneath the bar and pol-
ished a whiskey glass that did not re-
quire polishing and set it beneath the
optic to fill a single measure of Pow-
ers. He was watched all the while and
smilingly from the doorway.
“I’ve no ice even,” he called out. “A
drop of water?”
“I don’t take it.”
He brought the drink and placed it
in the stranger’s hand.
“I don’t remember which one you
were,” he said. “There were a few of ye,
I think?”
“There were eight of us for chil-
dren,” O’Casey replied. “Your father
would have put mine out of this place
more than once.”
“Is that right?”
The man turned his face bayward
again and bore down on the slow years,
the decades. He sipped at the Powers
and made no comment on it. The world
had grown so quiet in this season of
eeriness. Down the long solitude of the
shore road, across the new fresh green
of the fields, upon the clear and boat-
less bay, there was not a soul otherwise
to be seen.
“One night my father came home
from this place trembling,” O’Casey
said. “I remember he sat looking into
the fire and I could tell that he could
hardly breathe.”
Keeping his eyes fixed on the bay,
letting them fill up with its springtime
radiance, O’Casey dredged from the
past a woman’s voice, his mother’s, and
it was perfectly got—
“What’s wrong with you, Joe? Wrong
with you, for the love of God? Did he
say something?”
“My mother worried over him all
the time,” O’Casey said. “His nerves
weren’t set right. He had what she called
his spells.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t recall any ...”
“Ah, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t re-
call any of it. You’d have been away at
the boarding school.”
The greatest mystery is how oth-ers perceive us. The pub had been a
respectable premises always and he
could not have imagined that the fam-
ily was other than well regarded. But
he realized, too, that the charge of
snobbery is often an astonishment to
those so arraigned.
O’Casey finished the whiskey
quickly and held out his hand to offer
the empty glass but as he reached for
it O’Casey withdrew it again, as if play-
fully, and he did not smile. He just set
it down on the stoop by his feet and
turned and walked away.H
e reëntered the pub and locked the
door. He sat at a low table in the
guise, briefly, of a customer. He looked
around the bar for a slow minute. No
singsongs; no recitals; no displays of ro-
mantic affection. This had been a house
that favored schoolmasters, respectable
farmers, country solicitors. The meagre-
ness of his world closed in. In such a
quietness all was amplified. The veils
slip away; the edifice itself might crum-
ble. In late March of the year the light
was rawly new and revealing.
“He’d mind a mouse for you at the
mart in Ballina,” Tim Godfrey said. “A
careful man, he would not be found
wanting. Hard enough tack to have a
father the like of that?”
He must concede that it had been.
It was many years since Godfrey had
haunted the premises, had across the
low tables roamed a humorous gaze.
Godfrey had been a Church of Ireland
farmer from the Ox Mountains trans-
planted by a peculiar marriage to the
North Mayo plain—from beyond the
place himself, he could see it more
clearly. True enough that his father had
been a careful man. Growing up in the
house of such a man you could hear
yourself thinking. Without a single
word being said you could sense that
you were being measured for what tasks
might be presented. The running of
the pub was at slow length presented.
He rose and went behind the bar
and set a glass beneath the optic and
poured himself a large Bushmills and
diluted it with three or four teardrops
of tap water. He drank it in a swoop
and felt the slow fire descend into his
belly. It was years since he had taken a
spirit. The charge of its heat stirred
him powerfully. He had felt the inten-