After the Rising & Before the Fall

1925

1925

Here comes Useless John, skulking up Mucknamore’s main street. Every evening the same time: twenty minutes past seven. You could set your clock by his leaving. Straight past this house he’ll go, walking another three full miles to Ryan’s of Rathmeelin for his nightly imbibement. Five bottles of stout and a couple of whiskies he’ll have – or more, if somebody else is buying.

And here comes young Cissie Cummins running up to have a go at him. “Hey, Useless!” she shouts up the road in his wake. “You’re useless!” She keeps a safe distance, mind, in case he might turn and give her some of his talk about Coolanagh.

Coolanagh. The word alone is enough to frighten Cissie out of her brazenness. I can hardly bring the ink out to write the name of it myself. “Do write it,” Peg says. “Write all the words. Get them all down onto paper.”

Like I used to before.

It was good, right enough, when I used to do that. But then I got afraid of where my mind went, when let on the loose. No need for fear, Peg says. Just write it. The best of it and the worst of it. Put it all into a secret book only for myself. It’s what she does and it always helps her.

And that woman has faced down enough, Lord knows, and come up only the better.

So. Coolanagh.

Coolanagh that night.

December 1923, two years ago already, if you can believe it. The December of the big fog. None of us had ever seen a fog like it, the way it clung, shrouding the sky and the water, pressing thick and white against our windows. People were shadows moving about in it. Everyone’s talk fixed on it. Where had it come from? Would it never pass off? And what were we to do about the herring?

The shoals, long awaited, were in. A bay swarming full of fish we had, but every fisherman in the village grounded.

Six dreary days of this, morning, noon and night, until, on the seventh day, it shifted. Within an hour of daylight, the air started to stir. Hopeful men got up and sat by their windows, watching the mist peel back and the sea reveal itself, inch by slow inch.

John Colfer was one. As he tells it today, from his high stool in Ryan’s public house, when he saw the island emerging, like a big battleship creeping into the bay, he knew it was over. He left his house, went down to the hut, and dragged his, as the fisherfolk do, across the sand and shingle into the water, then clambered in, trousers wet to the knee.

Off he set, boat slicing through the water and the patches of mist, small fallen clouds, that floated on it still. Just as he was about to pull right of Coolanagh, to steer his way out into the bay, one of those billows shifted, revealing a shape on the flat sands close by.

Colfer stared. Shreds of mist teased his eyes. Was it...? It couldn’t be...? Even as he was asking, he knew. By the hammering of his heart, he knew.

He steered his boat across, as close as he could go without danger, close enough to confirm. Yes, it was a person, jutting up out of the sands like a rock sculpted. Like a bust of himself. Face bulging blue and smeared with sand but unmistakeable. Dan O’Donovan. My brother.

It was his eyes that were the worst of it, Colfer says, when launching his horror tale to the audience. Wide open, apparently. Crusted with a grainy glaze of sand. “One look at them eyes and I knew I was dealing with a corpse,” he’d say. “No living person could stand it.”

Shameless, not Useless, is what John Colfer should be called, for that is what he is, flourishing his finding of my brother in exchange for drink. But for all his bar-stool blather, he has at least held his lip on the question everyone was always asking: what was Dan O’Donovan doing out on Coolanagh sands on that night, in that fog?

Colfer’s reply to that question is alway the same: three heavy-fingered taps to the side of his nose.

In the main it’s admired, this reluctance of his to put words on his thought. “Not so useless in that department, thank God,” Peg says. They know what he thinks all the same, with him footing it all the way up to Ryan’s each day. He hasn’t come here since it happened and we all know he never will again. Nothing is said of that. Even the nosiest has to admit that Mucknamore has had enough talk.

Wasn’t it talk that unhinged the country, words like ‘betrayal’ and ‘honour’ and ‘principles’? Principles, my eye. Wasn’t it talk that turned our young fella’s guns on each other? So if another young fella was dead, where was the use in asking why? Wouldn’t the answer only lead to another question? Wasn’t the country riddled with why?

Cruel it was, all the same, to see what John Colfer’s queer mix of story and silence has done to him, how the gap between what he said and what he could have said has grown so wide that he’s fallen right into it. His only pleasure now is turning on the children who jeer him, frightening them with his stories about Coolanagh, and the voices that can be heard calling from out there, on a quiet night, when the wind blows a certain way.

He’s never married and now he hardly will. The bit of a farm his mother left him lies neglected. His boat rots in the hut from lack of use while he walks the village drunk, or fixed on drink. Finding Dan the way he did, knowing what he knew, not being able to do anything with the knowledge: that’s what turned the man useless.

My brother did that to people.