Long ago, men in rural Ireland lived outside in fields, or in sheds or places where they could lean over gates and contemplate the nature of reality in a cloud of blue cigarette smoke as they listened to the sound of singing tractors.
Old men, in particular, were afflicted with low verbal ability. They would stay outside in the shed all day whenever strangers were visiting the house.
When I was a child we used to drive to Gowna in Cavan to visit an old relation of my mother's. The white-haired old granny would sit at the range and discuss all the recent car accidents with my mother, while the woman of the house – her daughter – made tea and put butter on hot scones. But the man of the house, the father, was always outside in the yard.
I figured he couldn’t be that busy. There’s only so many things he could have been doing in a yard of chickens and dead tractors. But he never came in. Even when the scones were buttered and the tea sugared, the woman of the house would say “Bring that out to your father” as she handed her curly-haired son a mug of tea and a saucer with a hot scone.
Dismissive phrase
I got the impression that men were disabled from expressing emotions at an early age. And it was always disappointing when I too was sent out to the backyard with the dismissive phrase: “Why don’t you go out and play?”
I preferred listening to stories about car crashes and people mangled by combine harvesters. Not that those stories ever precipitated my banishment. In fact, it was only when the old lady said something such as “Did you hear what happened those young girls after the dance last Saturday night” that my mother would instantly turn to me and suggest I needed fresh air.
I was back in the same house during the summer, and it was barely recognisable. A marble-top island stood in a vast kitchen tiled in blue, and there was no trace of the old granny or anyone else from the old days. Apart, that is, from the curly-haired boy, my own age, who had come home from the US with his daughter, to bury his father, that mysterious man who had lived in the back yard.
His daughter was very American; a lanky thirtysomething with round spectacles on the edge of her nose.
“Use a big jug,” she was saying, as if she knew just about everything there was to know about making a latte. And her father was struggling with a coffee machine as big as a television set that had been stuck up on the worktop.
I joked: “How long have you been in America and you don’t know how to make coffee?”
He said nothing.
“That’s because he’s useless at anything more mechanical than a shovel,” his daughter joked.
Growing up in the US, she was probably au fait with an endless variety of coffee machines, and she used words like “fall” and “awesome” so frequently that it was difficult to imagine her as the seed and breed of the country folk I remembered in my youth. She had a designer handbag slung across her shoulder that may have been glued on. Everyone admired it that morning at the funeral when she walked into the church.
A row over coffee
When I got to the house after the burial, I saw her father standing in the kitchen like a cow lost in a fog, and her chiding him about the coffee maker.
“If you don’t use a big jug it will spill all over the place,” she repeated as the steam spout churned a froth of white milk up out of the jug and all over the worktop.
“That’s the biggest god-damn jug we have,” he hissed. I didn’t see why they were having such a row over coffee.
It is more than 50 years since we were both little boys standing in that same kitchen, but in a way nothing had changed. When he saw me standing at the door, the argument stopped and I said: “Hello. I’m sorry for your trouble.” And the man who once had curly hair dissolved in tears, and his daughter just said, “He misses his dad.”
He nodded but said nothing, because even a lifetime in the US can’t adequately teach a person how to put language on their sorrow.