Tears and Glass Houses

Tears and Glass Houses

Seamus Galvin is up and out earlier than usual. Early March birdsong and a restless mind drive him out from the leaba. He closes the back door gently, not to wake his father. In the yard, a fox arrows in behind an outhouse.  

Too early to break the morning silence with machines and labour, he walks out to the main road in front of the house and stands. Across the road, the N70 stretch of The Wild Atlantic Way, lays the Galvin's land as it rolls down in mounds, boulders and furze in some six hectares of misshapen fields to the sea. Behind it, the Atlantic is blue-glass still. He crosses and enters the land and walks in the direction of the skull-and-bones remains of a Famine house that his mother’s ancestors came out of. Continuing down along the stream cut out from the offerings of the Dunkerron mountains, he arrives at the headland. Below him, the lapping hush of low breaking waves.

He follows the sound, picking his steps on the riprap stones to the water. Walking the beach, he turns back to look at his lone footprints. He thinks of his mother. He remembers when his small wellingtons printed alongside hers. He rubs the overturned currach to feel less lonely. The gleaming residue of water as the waves recede after breaking, revealing the curlicued prints of the lugworms in the sand. He walks the thin golden strip of the private beach until it’s ended by a reef of headland. He climbs the juts of rock and pulls himself up into a groove that allows him to stand and look over the reef and back into the headland and the building site in the distance. 

In the pink dawn sunrise, the crane still slept in the sky, anesthesised to the weight of the pallet of lead flashings that hung from its mouth. Far below, pallets of fine Liscannor flagstones were apricating in the morning sun. He can see the foundations have been poured and he thinks about what a house would look like on top. A family inside. A mother. A father. Maybe two or three or four children - all together and happy in this home. 

When he arrived at the back door into the kitchen, his father was up and taking down a plate from the press, his back to Seamus. 

“I’ve an egg on.”

“Lovely, thanks.”

“You were out early,” his father turns to face him.

“Ya, I thought I saw one of the Charolais a bit lame yesterday.”

“Oh, which fella?”

“The quiet buck,” Seamus tells him, “but he seems the finest this morning.”

His father half nods his head in the way of approval while moving towards the sink.  

“I’ll make tea,” Seamus says.

They take their seats at the kitchen table and have their breakfast in few words. As he butters his soda bread, Seamus takes furtive glances at his father. He was getting older and more feeble, it seemed, with each passing week. The osteoarthritis in his hands only adding to Seamus' worries. It made him sad when he focused too much on the taut skin stretched over the bulbous knuckles, the fingers on each hand slanting towards the little finger like plants in the dark crowding towards light. How could they be the same hands that could hold two bales in each, the baling twine gnawing down into the palms like a cheese cutter?

The locals used to say that Dan Galvin wasn't born, he was quarried out of the rock around Cahersiveen. But outrageous neglect of a hip that needed replacing ten years ago and a broken heart from burying a wife too young, had taken the brute power out of him.

“They're finally making a bit a progress down at Peadar Clifford's,” Seamus begins, telling him about what he’d seen that morning at the headland. It was more of an attempt to distract himself than anything else.

“Bout time for them and they there almost two years.”

He brings the cup before his lips but lowers it slightly again.

"And the cost of havin’ that crane there for two years, mother of merciful God,” he adds, staring through the lace curtain as if the crane was parked outside.

"Tis no skin off of John Clifford's nose, the cost of it, and he over in Boston, having a big fat Yankee balance with the money he got for that piece of land,” Seamus says.

“Peadar Clifford is turning in his grave with what that eejit did.”

John Clifford was Peadar Clifford's nephew and when he died, he left his small holding to John. When some anonymous bidder paid close to one million for the two acres of hardship, it sent the locals into a frenzy. 

Seamus Galvin watched the plot for months after, waiting for any sign of life or movement down at Cliffords. Almost a year had passed when the Galvins received a letter in the door from Drilltech LTD informing them that they would be blasting rock down at the site and to keep any cattle or other livestock they owned away from this area. And now, interest reached fever pitch.

Seamus would stand in the grove, watching lorries come and go, removing deposits of history, truck by truck, from Gortdromagh. He would take walks at night down to the site, the torch on his phone showing him the progress. He took some photos of the crater-sized hole for the raft foundations. 

When the block work had started, he took to frequently rowing out to their lobster pot to get a better vantage point of the development. 

On the Saturday night of St Crohan’s Summer Festival, Seamus met Óige Murphy outside the backdoor of The Black Shop, sucking the guts out of a vape and pursing brilliant white cumulus billows into the night sky. 

"Well Óige, many inside? 

“Nice crowd. I’m on my own. Call two pints and I’ll be into you.”

Inside, Seamus takes a place at the counter amidst the smell of oxter sweat and stale slop trays. 

And so Òige told him about the job he was doing down there and how it was the easiest money he was ever making. 

As Óige gabbles, Seamus notices the back of his neckline. Óige is poured over the counter, his folded arms taking his torso weight. Against the bright bar light, the hairs at the lower nape of his neck are coming up through his silver chain, a cadre of strands pullulating from a carpet-like mass from under the t-shirt line. Unaware of Seamus' staring, Òige continues about the job and the money and the ease of it all. 

The following Saturday night, he met Óige again. This time Óige was drunk and even more ebullient about the “cash-cow”. 

“I’m tellin’ you boy, they're throwing it away down there," burrs of dried Guinness caked to the sides of his mouth.

"And here, listen to this bossman," he adds, straightening his frame somewhat, as if to suggest that what was coming next was of bigger significance.

"I met with the project manager, a man outta Dublin”.

Óige pauses, waiting for eye contact from Seamus.

“He told me that the owners want to extend the plot for a boathouse.”

Óige brings the pint to his mouth but pauses.

“He wanted to know who owned the land right down at the shoreline.”

Seamus shifts uneasily on his stool.

Óige empties his glass, belching after the spumous froth.

He stares at Seamus, swaying a little. Waiting. 

"Ah fuck off, sure tis only winding me up now is all you are!" 

"I'm not. I'm not. Honest," Óigè says, “as sure as God, that's what he said.”

Óige scratches at the stump of his phantom index finger.

“I gave him your number so we'll see if it's lying I am." 

Seamus takes the last dregs of his pint and considers the empty glass.

“Would the old man sell off some part of it, d’you think?”

Seamus shrugs his shoulders, all the time considering the glass. 

“Ye could buy yerselves a decent bit of land up around the Staigue.”

Seamus brings the empty glass to the counter and signals to the barmaid for two more. 

He didn't sleep much that night as his mind played out the possibilities the money could bring. Buy some decent land that would give back to the farm. Change the transport box. Buy himself a car of his own.  

Later the next morning he goes down to the shoreline and readies the currach. He brings it to the water's edge and hops in. The sun is high in the August sky as a heatwave firmly takes its grip. The water is navy blue and its stillness seems to lend it the density of oil. He feels his heart-pump begin to quicken as he settles into a rhythm and arrives at the pot nicely out of breath. 

A small, lead-grey buoy floats peacefully. He reaches out and fishes the buoy into the currach. The cold braided sink-rope, trellising shreds of ulva sea lettuce, is a welcome balm for his hot hands. He thinks on the green seaweed, pondering how long and from where it travelled to meet this fixed line that inched its way through the water. He continues to reel in the lobster line hand over hand, straining under the dead weight of the wire trap below.

On his way back to the headland he stops and contemplates the build, monitoring its progress as he had been doing the past several months. It is beginning to really take shape now that the windows are in. Windows. Christ, he’d never seen so many windows. “Windows”, in truth, is a misnomer. These are walls of glass that cause his eyes to squint in the glare. He sits watching the behemoth in the early morning solitude, the only sound, the splashing in slops of the sea where it hits the sides of his vessel. His eyes take in the skeleton of light steel, the thin skin of white concrete above the floor-to-ceiling glass which meet at transparent corners, giving the illusion of the house dissolving into the rock.

He dreamt that night of his mother. They were together again and going out to check the pot. He reaches out and touches her hand on the oar. But it wasn’t her hand, it was older and gnarled with lumpy veins like the roots of an ancient tree grown up through the earth. 

She pulls the grey buoy up into the currach. But the grey buoy is a stopper and the ocean begins to drain. She reaches out and touches his hand. “It’s ok Seamy, don’t worry, I’m here.” They funnel gently down, down, down to the sea bed floor until the boat sandpapers to a rest. In the dream, the first thing he sees on the seabed is a blood-stained poly drum barrel that his father sawed in half as a fodder trough for a pig they kept when he was a boy. The sow had traumatised the young Seamus when he saw her eat two of her newborn piglets.

To the right of this in front of a great stoneberg of rock, Rex, an old Collie sheepdog they had in the early nineties, was barking and pawing up the sand furiously. When Seamus stepped out of the boat to investigate he could see that it was his father who was buried beneath but he was only sleeping and when he woke him up, his father had a fifty euro note in his hand which he gave to Seamus. When his father climbed into the boat, the Galvins were together again.

The dream bothered him for days. He kept trying to recall the exactness of it. The old dog. His father buried. The money. His mother. Did it mean something? Was it a message from her? 

He broached the potential sale with his father later that week at breakfast.

"We should look at gettin' rid of that dog's leg where it turns at the grove, we'd get well paid for it and it of hardly no use to us."

"No use to us?" his father repeats, "sure haven't we the six cattle grazing below there."

"Yerra sure what grazin' is in it and it full a furze and rock!", Seamus says, wending a crumb of soda bread with his finger around the table in front of him. 

"There'd be someone out there with more money than sense and he'd want a big fucking glass house lookin out at the Skelligs!”

He presses the travelled crumb into his finger.

“And they’d pay top fucking dollar for it,” he adds, bringing his finger to his mouth. 

“Top dollar! Will you stop! Your head is full of notions from listening to that gombeen Michaèl Òg," his father gives back.

“My head is not full of notions Dad, this is an opportunity for us.”

“An opportunity?”

“Ya, an opportunity! To get rid of two acres of shite and buy a decent stake of land up by the Staigue that we can actually do something with.”

“Acres of shite?”

“Ya, acres of shite!”

“Acres of shite you call it, is it?”

“Pure shite,” Seamus gives back.

“Your mother -”

“Oh for fuck sake, don't start that.”

“Your mother's people came out of that SHITE and now you want to sell it to make easy fucking money is it?”

“Ya, I do. And what's wrong with making easy money? We're killing ourselves here Dad, digging out fucking rocks to try harvest what bit we can!”

“You've some neck. Your mother would be ashamed of you.”

Seamus steps towards him, finger pointing at his chest.

But before he comes face to face, Dan Galvin moves first and slaps him, the noise jumping up above them and bouncing down off the low ceiling.

Seamus instinctively brings his hand to the side of his face, as if touching it would confirm what had actually happened. 

The Galvin mens’ eyes mirror each other momentarily before Seamus turns and makes for the door. 

His whiskey breath on the wind takes him home from The Black Shop. Across from the house, he staggers and puts his weight on a paling post that seems to wake and move forward at the disturbance. He looks out across the water, feet feeling out for balance on the road. The summer moon is spilling a wedge of buttered light onto the water's surface and he thinks of his mother and imagines them in the currach rowing the wedge to the moon. 

Sleep came thin and jagged. A raucous Chough nesting up behind the barn woke him at 6.05 and he was out in the yard before breakfast. He turns the engine and the cold teleporter sends wispy skeins of smoke into the morning sky.

He has the silage bale secured in the front shear-grab when he sees his father's black form in the side mirror lumbering towards the lean-to off the hay barn. Reversing out, a ripening hangover shrouding his brain, and still processing the pin-prick heat of the slap from the morning before, he glances in the mirror again only to see his father on the ground, having fallen over on his side and trying to right himself, hopelessly, like a beetle on its back. He puts the machine into neutral. He stares in the glass. He makes for out of the seat. He pauses. Stooped in a half squat. Time comes into the yard and slows within itself. He glances in the mirror again. He plants in the seat and puts the machine back into reverse. 

Even above the noise of the hurried engine, the shattering crunch of bone. He pulls forward half a wheel rotation and reverses again before pulling forward. He looks in the glass. Dan Galvin seems to have changed body position so that now, it appears, he is on his back, like he is having a nap right there in the yard. Seamus dismounts and comes to the back of the rear right wheel. His father's scissored legs lay right on top of left. His right wellington boot is pancaked on the concrete, its contents devoid of shape and form. Above his knee, a spear of bone lances through his trousers. Up closer, his torso lays at an angle that is jarringly at odds with the position of his legs. He approaches him with a childlike fear and stares down at his father. Crackles of black spots perforate his peripheral vision and Seamus feels faint. He drops to his knees. 

“Dad…Dad… are you…are you okay?" he hears himself ask. Dan Galvin emits a low basal drone carried from the back of his throat.

“Seamus,” his father whispers.

He comes nose to nose.  

“Why Seamus?”

“Dad” Seamus whispers, “Dad, Dad, are you okay?”, his voice getting louder.

“Christ Dad, what am I after doing? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. I didn’t mean that. Help me Dad please, help me.”

He pulls his father’s torso up and brings his own legs, one at a time, out straight so that now he is sitting on the farmyard with his father’s head in his lap. 

“Dad, keep your eyes open. Keep them open Dad. Keep looking at me!”

Seamus reaches into his trouser pocket for his phone.

“Dad, stay looking at me, I’m getting help now. You’re going to be okay. We’re going to be ok Dad, you and me.”

 A blood-gargling hack and blood peeps out the side of Dan Galvin’s mouth.

“Oh no, please no Dad. Please no!”

Tears and snot mix and fall onto Dan Galvin’s face. Seamus wipes them away and wails uncontrollably. 

“I’m sorry Dad. Christ, I'm so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

He watches the capillaries break up in his father’s eyes, the light receding. Seamus Galvin wails and wails in the front yard and a fox pokes his head from out behind the outhouse.