Drumcliff or Rori the Biker

Excerpt from Drumcliff or Rori the Biker (a work in progress by Elizabeth McKague

The funeral ended at eleven. The year was 1974.

The worst thing about history is that lovers love.

Rori wrote on the backside of a napkin. It was baby blue. He’d turned it around. There was a picture of an orange tulip inside a silver horseshoe printed on the front. He set down his pen and took a second sip from his pint. It had been 5 years since he was back in Ireland. Nothing had changed. It could have been 15 or 50 years and nothing would have changed. The rain still made the hills green, the stones still spoke and Dustin McBride still sat on the last stool at the end of the bar, facing the door, waiting for eternity to swallow him.

Fifteen minutes passed in silence before Shannon approached Rori.

“One more?”

He didn’t need to nod, just looked at her with that suave glint in his big blue eyes.

The world outside of Brendan’s Horseshoe Pub was overcast with courage and his country still cried out for freedom. Rori picked up his pen and wrote:

I’ll be broken by sundown.

Now he nodded at Shannon as he took a sip, perfect glaze of foam and wrote:

Then back to my cave in Drumcliff.

Rori O’Ceallaigh didn’t really live in a cave. He lived in a run down, 18th century mansion furnished with ghosts. He called it a cave because of the three bats that hung like upside down candles from the defunct chandelier in the foyer.

The sky was black and bursting with stars as he walked the six miles home at nine p.m. It was the onset of autumn and the days would soon get shorter. Days are too long already, he thought, and night is slow and hours pass too quickly.

His grandmother had died a few days ago at the fine age of 93. That’s why he came back. After a dreary mass at the Church of our Lady Assumed into Heaven, she was buried that morning in a grave that looked out over Killala bay in the Enniscrone cemetery. She loved water. Rori was afraid of water. She left him the mansion in her will. He never even knew it was in the family. Nobody had lived in it for nearly a century. She’d been living in a tidy little flat in Sligo town. He visited her there just before he left for the States. He never knew his grandfather O’Ceallaigh, strangely enough, like his own father; the man had died at the young age of 44, long before Rori was born. He was not close to his grandmother, he had just visited her five years ago because he was hoping to be offered a bit of cash. She only offered him a cup of Bewley’s tea, and a cheese and pickle sandwich. And now, he’d inherited a mansion. He had absolutely no idea—at this point—what the hell to do with it. So he climbed the stairs to the second best bedroom, the first being occupied by the ghosts, and went to sleep as night clouds jumped over the hills like a flock of sheep and muffled the din of all those mocking, brilliant stars.

“Rori! Rori!”

His older sister’s defiant voice, along with her boots thudding up the creaking staircase, woke him the following morning. He listened to her open and immediately shut the door of the master bedroom, then the bathroom, the guestroom, and the library and then there she was, standing at the bottom of the bed with her hands on her ample hips.

“What the devil do you think you’re doing, Rori?”

He didn’t sit up. He half opened his eyes.

“We waited up for you until midnight. I finally called down the pub and talked to Shannon and she said--”

“What time is it Lauren?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Do you have your car?”

“Of course I have my car. Nobody in their right mind—how else can—this place is in the middle of nowhere.”

Lauren liked broken sentences, Rori thought then reconsidered maybe she likes broken thoughts. Poor Lauren. Our country is broken. Poor Ireland. That’s why we have Tinkers. They like to fix things. God bless the Tinkers. I wish I had a pot of tea and a pan to fry something up.

“Blood sausage.” Rori said.

“What?” Lauren removed her hands from her hips and ruffled the bedclothes. “You’re talking in your sleep. Blood what? Wake up.”

Rori stretched but kept his eyes closed. He was disinclined to open them, fearing a residual reflection from all those mocking stars from the previous night.

“Breakfast.” He mumbled.

“Tom’s waiting in the truck.”

Rori slowly propped himself up against the dusty pillows, thinking how the pillows were older than his grandmother and how the pillows had not changed. Pillows are stupid, maybe I should write that down. He stared at his sister, “Does he want breakfast?”

“Who?”

“Tom.”

“He already ate.”

“Did you cook?”

“Of course.”

Rori jumped out of bed, feeling light as a cloud, “Then he wants breakfast.”

Upon Lauren’s adamant insistence, Rori walked the three quarters of a mile that evening out of town from Brendan’s Horseshoe at dusk. Tom was a pig farmer. Lauren was a pig farmer’s wife who was an encyclopedia of tittle-tattles. They lived in a well-kept house on a pig farm. She’d made up a room for him. The bed was too soft and covered with a quilt their grandmother had sewed. He went into the kitchen the next morning. There was an abundance of bacon. He smiled watching her seven-year-old twin sons passively getting ready for school. The sun, surprisingly, gleamed through the white lace curtains. Outside in the yard, the dogs were barking at the chickens.

“Are you finished?” Lauren glared at his plate.

“Sure. Yes.”

“But you only ate the tomatoes.”

Rori stood and went to the back door, opened the top half and tossed his food to the dogs. “Can I borrow your car today?”

Lauren grabbed the plate from his hand and put it in the sink. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I have to take the boys to school-- I have an appointment at-- the boys have football practice—Michael’s becoming—but John doesn’t seem to… why?”

“I need to pick up some things, buy some things.”

“Ask Tom. He’s going into town later, I think. Johnny! Michael!”

The twins appeared in the kitchen with sparkling white teeth. Rori leaned his torso forward so that his face was level to theirs and said, “You know, when I was your age I walked a mile and a quarter every day to get to school.”

Jonny laughed and Michael pouted suspiciously.

“He’s fibbing, boys.” Lauren turned to her brother as he straightened his tall frame back up. “You only walked to school for one month and you weren’t their age… you were fourteen.” She picked up a hairbrush and began to brush Michael’s hair. “And the reason… keep still… it doesn’t hurt… the bus driver… he didn’t pay…keep still…”

Rori decided to help her out, “Yes, I was twice your age Mike, and I really wanted to go to a concert at ----- castle to see Frank Sinatra, I wanted to be a singer back then. Anyway, so my mother gave me some money to pay the school bus driver—we had to pay him every month, it was the way back then you see. Now, I know it’s not right but I really wanted to see Ol’ Blue Eyes so I used the bus money to buy a ticket and walked to school that day.”

“Whose Ol’ Blue eyes?” Jonny asked.

“Sinatra.” Lauren answered, “He was a famous singer.”

“Oh.” Jonny ducked as his mother then took the brush to his ginger hair.

“Oh, but now when my mother, your grandma, found out… oh, she was furious and made me walk to and from school—even in the rain—for the whole rest of that month!”

“But then you took the bus to school?” Jonny wiggled under the evil hairbrush.

“Hah!” Lauren barked.

“No. I did not. So, the next month when she gave me the money to pay the driver, well, I walked straight to school instead of getting on the bus where it stopped at the end of our road, and that afternoon, used it to buy a second hand bicycle from a classmate and rode home so fast I even beat the bus!” He laughed.

Lauren had to giggle too.

“And was grandma Maeve angry again?” Michael asked.

“As a matter of fact she was thrilled! You see, now she didn’t have to pay the bus driver anymore because I could ride my bike to school.”

“Even in the rain?” Jonny’s face relaxed as his mother set down the hairbrush.

Rori took a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket and stepped out into the yard, “Even in the rain.”

Tom was a complacent lad and Rori had always liked him. He drove his pick-up truck with his eyes on the road as if he were humming a tune even though he wasn’t. “So what did you do in the States?” He asked his brother-in-law.

“I rode a motorcycle.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, just rode around.”

“For five years?”

“Pretty much. It was pretty fun.”

“Sounds fun.”

“It was fun.”

“Glad you had fun.”

Tom parked in front of Paddy’s hardware store. He bought feed and a new shovel. Rori purchased a ladder, drywall, lumber and so many tools, cans of paint, electrical wires and plumbing supplies that the back of the truck could not contain it all.

“We’ll have to make a second trip.” Tom frowned but didn’t seem disconcerted by the fact. Rori guessed it would be a good excuse to shirk out of a few of the day’s chores without having Lauren nag at him.

“Going for a pint?” Rori asked.

Tom shrugged and they headed down the street to Brendan’s. Just as they were crossing before old Ryan’s shop, Tom called out, “Maeve! What are you doing?” and Rori dashed forward to help his mother unload a crate of turnips and parsnips from the back of her 1959 VW van. “Ma, c’mon now, we’ll do this.” He took the crate into the market and Tom followed with another filled with cabbage and carrots.

Maeve sat on the bumper of the van as Rori returned and grabbed a sack filled with potatoes. “What are you doing? Where’s Aonghus?”

“His back went out again. I had to get this crop to old Ryan before it went bad.”

Rori eyed his mother, “Everything’s okay, Ma? The farm is okay? Aonghus is okay?”

“Everything’s fine. Da is fine.” She smiled at her son, “Lovely day.”

Aonghus Walsh was Rori’s stepfather. Maeve always referred to him as ‘Da’ and to Rori’s biological father as ‘Pa’. Quinn O’Ceallaigh, as noted earlier, died when Rori was eight years old. He’d worked himself to death. He was a very talented carpenter and used to point out to Rori all the things that he’d built: shutters, doors, furniture, entire houses, storefronts and even the wood beam ceiling in the church that still stood just down the road and in his child imagination, Rori truly believed that his own Pa had constructed the entire town of Sligo-- with his bare hands! He used to look out of his bedroom window at night into Quinn’s work shed below to watch his Pa carving or sanding a piece of wood. He thought the work so delicate yet so brawny. He was proud of his Pa. The old shed was surrounded by little blue wild flowers that he later learned were called ‘forget-me-nots’.

Around the same time as a child, he also learned that the cool picture hanging in the sitting room was actually a print of his ancestors’ coat of arms. It depicted a shield in which two lions stood on their haunches with long chains in their hands, on either side of a tower. On top of the shield a green dragon sat on a gold crown and blue and white ribbons flowed down, surrounding the shield. The Gaelic spelling of his family name, O’Ceallaig, was written below upon a banner that also read Eurris fortis mihi Deus, a phrase that his mother repeatedly translated from Latin out loud each time she passed before the fancy, gold-framed picture, making the sign of the cross over her chest and uttering, “My God is running strong.”

As Rori unloaded the last crate of vegetables, Maeve said, “Lauren tells me you’ve been sleeping at Drumcliff.”

“Just the one night, after the funeral.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“The mansion? Don’t know yet. Fix it up a little bit and then see, I suppose.”

Maeve stood and followed him into the market to collect her pay from Ryan. “Well, I’m just glad your home son. This is where you belong.”

He didn’t respond in reverence of her show of emotion. She made it sound as if he were back in Ireland for good and that was the farthest thing from his intentions, or so, at this point, after just three days and a wee bit of jetlag, he surmised. “Tom and I are going for a pint. Join us?”

Maeve climbed into her van and put the keys in the ignition, “Oh, no, no; I better get back to Aonghus. See you for dinner on Saturday.”

Rori nodded as he leaned in through the open car window and kissed her cheek.

Besides old McBride at the far end of the bar, the Horseshoe was surprisingly deserted for 2 p.m. on a Thursday.

“Where is every body?” Tom asked Shannon who replied, “Well, it ain’t raining out today now, is it?”

Rori laughed and Tom said, “Not even Jimmy O’Connor—he’s always sitting right here on the third stool by the door at this hour.”

Shannon poured out two pints, “Oh he’s not going to show his face in the pubs for a while. Didn’t you hear about the sheep? The whole town’s talking about it. Happened just the other day.”

Rori sipped through the foam. “What sheep?”

“Well…” Shannon leaned forward with her elbows on the bar, excited to repeat the latest gossip. Her tube top dipped a bit and Rori blatantly eyed her cleavage. She continued, “So, six months ago good Martin Doyle you know, he counted his sheep and noticed that one was gone a missing. He searched his fields high and low but couldn’t find her anywhere. It was a mystery but he soon got over it and kept it to himself; didn’t tell his wife or his son or the neighbors—no one. Then just last Sunday it was, right after Mass mind you’s, he comes into the pub and sits right next to O’Connor and drinks his Guinness quietly. Then, out the blue Jimmy turns and says, ‘Hey Martin, did you ever find out what happened to that missing sheep?’ And Martin looks Jimmy in the eye and says, ‘Yes, I did. Just now.’”

The boys laughed as Shannon straightened up and adjusted her tube top. The story about the sheep got Rori thinking about the open back of Tom’s truck, stocked to the brim with his new tools. “You think the stuff in your truck is okay?”

“Okay?” It took Tom a minute but he soon understood, “You’ve been in America too long, except for O’Connor, we’re still an honest little town.”

The yellow beam of light that had been pouring in through the pub’s open door dimmed and Rori began to reminisce. He was tall and strong and rather hairy; a moustache, goatee and long jet-black hair with a few streaks of grey tied back in a ponytail. Although no one fucked with him, not even once, during his travels in the States, he witnessed several dirty crimes and even stood in to try and stop them a few times. In New York mostly, especially in Spanish Harlem. That’s where she lived. East 114th street across from Thomas Jefferson Park, in a red brick tenement house with a noisy air-conditioner, always on, sticking out of the bottom half of her fourth story window. They used to sit together on her fire escape in the cool of the evening and drink chilled red wine. It wasn’t proper etiquette, but that was her thing—chilled red wine. It was August, sweltering.

“Nice weather for September.” Tom was saying to McBride, who nodded very slowly.

“Unusual for this time of year.” Shannon added, fussing once again with her tube top. It was orange, the exact hue of the tulip on the blue napkin that Rori refrained from writing on, thinking, no time for poems today, gotta get those tools to the mansion.