Part 31 (2/2)

The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing On the back of the byre door, biding its time Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket And a potstick to mix it in with water.

Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.

But the slop of the actual job Of brus.h.i.+ng walls, the watery grey Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.

Where had we come from, what was this kingdom We knew we'd been restored to? Our shadows Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered The full length of the house, a black divide Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench.

p.i.s.s at the gable, the dead will congregate.

But separately. The women after dark, Hunkering there a moment before bedtime, The only time the soul was let alone, The only time that face and body calmed In the eye of heaven.

b.u.t.termilk and urine, The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.

We were all together there in a foretime, In a knowledge that might not translate beyond Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down You broke your arm. I shared the dread When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.

That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate In his nightmare when he meets the hags again And sees the apparitions in the pot I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth, Steam and ululation, the smoky hair Curtaining a cheek. 'Don't go near bad boys In that college that you're bound for. Do you hear me?

Do you hear me speaking to you? Don't forget!'

And then the potstick quickening the gruel, The steam crown swirled, everything intimate And fear-swathed brightening for a moment, Then going dull and fatal and away.

Grey matter like gruel flecked with blood In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot Where his head had been, other stains subsumed In the parched wall he leant his back against That morning like any other morning, Part-time reservist, toting his lunch-box.

A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt, Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped Level with him, although it was not his lift.

And then he saw an ordinary face For what it was and a gun in his own face.

His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady, So he never moved, just pushed with all his might Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip, Feeding the gutter with his copious blood.

My dear brother, you have good stamina.

You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people, You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep Old roads open by driving on the new ones.

You called the piper's sporrans whitewash brushes And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen.

But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.

I see you at the end of your tether sometimes, In the milking parlour, holding yourself up Between two cows until your turn goes past, Then coming to in the smell of dung again And wondering, is this all? As it was In the beginning, is now and shall be?

Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush Up on the byre door, and keeping going.

Two Lorries

It's raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.

There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew's old lorry Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman With his Belfast accent's sweet-talking my mother.

Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?

But it's raining and he still has half the load To deliver farther on. This time the lode Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt (Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother: The tasty ways of a leather-ap.r.o.ned coalman!

And films no less! The conceit of a coalman ...

She goes back in and gets out the black lead And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother, All business round her stove, half-wiping ashes With a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt And the last delivery. Oh, Magherafelt!

Oh, dream of red plush and a city coalman As time fastforwards and a different lorry Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes ...

After that happened, I'd a vision of my mother, A revenant on the bench where I would meet her In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt, Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes.

Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman Refolding body-bags, plying his load Empty upon empty, in a flurry Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry Was it now? Young Agnew's or that other, Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt ...

So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman.

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