Now, we mostly live away, and Father’s Day is spent sending him WhatsApp videos from the grandkids and calling him to see if he liked the jumper/socks/Irish country CD we’ve sent him. But when we were children, he awoke each Father’s Day to the sound of soft padding at the carpet outside his room, and the doorknob stiffly turning as we filed in, conveying good wishes for the holiday. Or, more likely, he would have woken one hour earlier, to small, quick feet scurrying through the hall and to the kitchen, where his special breakfast was prepared. In that thick way of children, we had mastered the art of whispering louder than we spoke, and a cacophony of hushed screams, frantic scribbling and clanging saucepans would resound through the house, masked only by the steady clatter of moderately serious trips and falls, themselves so common as to have become white noise.
I imagine my father sat up in bed with a book set aside for the purpose, studiously ignoring the fights breaking out among the grubby little servers now traipsing down the hall, pushing a battered tea trolley towards his door. This contraption was three turns of a screw away from being shrapnel, and sported thick brass wheels which, even on the plush brown carpet of our hall, made a noise like the Eiffel Tower being folded into a quarry. It would groan under the weight of a cooked breakfast, some inane trinkets, a flower, an errant sock and the multi-coloured foliage of our many crumpled handmade cards. Once we’d made our way down the hall with all the stately grace of an exploding foal, my father’s bedroom door was thrown open. Feigning alarm and surprise, he pretended he’d only just now been roused by the eleven children unloading on to his carpet, pyjama-striped and laughing, like the freckled contents of a rural Irish clown car.
Standing in that bedroom, we’d laugh as he delighted over his plate of burned rashers, runny eggs and beans that looked like they’d been pre-digested. Luckily for him, we’d interrupt this feast to thrust our cards in his face. We would sing songs and read poems and hand him gifts; one year I gave him a frankly terrifying sculpture of him that I’d constructed from pasta shells. Back then I knew how to sum up what he meant to me. Thirty years later I’m content to reach for that, even if he’d probably prefer I wrote an entire chapter about dogs and priests.
6
An Entire Chapter
About Dogs and Priests
Father Huck Balance stood in full vestments, scowling at the dog as the wind wrapped his stole around his face. He had been swinging the thurible fairly hard, and milky incense was now spewing out of it in a dense, Catholic fog. Rain was beginning to fall, and the smell of ozone mingled with the sweet musk of Mass to create an uncanny feeling of everything being out of place. It was the kind of grey, half-started day you’re always reading about in Irish short stories, where strong, unreasonable men attend the rural funerals of even stronger and less reasonable men. This was weather fit for killing your uncle, or nearly-but-not-quite bringing the wake house to a standstill by confessing your love for the widow of the departed, a woman you haven’t seen since that last time, so many years ago, that you, our author, are certainly about to describe in some detail. But we were not gathered by a hillside grave, nor huddling toward a country wake. We were standing outside our house waiting for the priest to bless our new twenty-six-foot ABI Award Superstar caravan. It was July 1992, just nine months after my mother’s death. By this point, I was likely so inured to Catholic rituals – and my family’s common deployment of them – that events like this, though interesting, even exciting, didn’t seem particularly odd. I’ve since realised that most families did not have priests out to the house to bless their caravan; it was more the sort of thing that bishops would do at Dublin airport with the plane carrying the Irish football team to a major tournament.
Even for a family like ours, who were fairly used to priests calling round, seeing one in full regalia, just walking around our house and garden, was a thrill. It was a cousin of that confusion you get when you spot a teacher in the supermarket. Here the feeling was multiplied, since Father Balance arriving in his full rig produced the opposite effect of a teacher sighted in the wild. Outside of school, teachers could seem pathetic and drab, shorn of the power that hung about them in their natural habitat. I once saw Mr Johnston in West Side Stores. A man who breathed fire and crushed souls from 8 until 3 each day, now pondering, dead-eyed, whether to buy a 3-for-2 pack of Rootin’ Tootin’ Cottage Pies, or a shop-soiled Vegetable Varmint Vegan Lasagne. Father Huck, by contrast, brought the magnificence of his station with him, as if Christ’s power was not just all-encompassing but conveniently portable. On secondment to this outpost, he transplanted the gravitas of his own, greater universe to the spot between our house and the garage, projecting it entirely on to the large caravan in front of him. As we pulled our sleeves down over our hands against the cold, he stood implacable and resolute, broadcasting the solemnity of God in the very same place where, just twenty-five minutes earlier, our dog, Nollaig, had been eating his own shite.
Nollaig was no longer ingesting effluent, but still refused to honour that half-state of reverence the rest of us were attempting, the type of quiet awkwardness that’s general when you have Mass in a weird place and everyone tries to act as though it’s perfectly normal. He was barking and growling, as if mocking the events unfolding in front of him. Father Balance said nothing, but I thought I caught a glint of contempt in his eyes at each interruption. What, he seemed to say to our dog, is so funny about a priest blessing a gigantic caravan in the rain? I presume the smell of the incense was what was bothering Nollaig. Either that or Mr Devenney, our otherwise kindly neighbour, had landed us with one of Ireland’s few Protestant sheepdogs. Such dogs could, of course, sow discord among the others, annex the lands of Catholic cows and march provocatively past contested field routes each July. On the plus side, most farmers agreed, Protestant dogs would probably be more willing to put in a shift on Sundays.
Whatever his denomination, Nollaig – Christmas in Irish – had long established a reputation as something of a cheerful arsehole, and was less a beloved pet than an uncaring brute who tumbled through our lives like a demented frat boy in an American campus comedy. We all pretended we liked him, perhaps out of fear he’d steal our lunch money or push us into a drinking fountain. He’d been a gift for my sister Mairead the year before my mother died, although a combination of his spirited nature and Mairead’s being just seven led to her slowly being forgiven of prime responsibility, and it was instead assumed that he was the family’s problem. He ate everything he could get his paws on, and several things he should never have been able to. He once savaged a frozen chicken that had been in one of the two big chest freezers we had in the garage. How he managed to open its lid, which was large, heavy and stood four feet off the ground, is still a matter of speculation. When Conall was two years old he grabbed Nollaig’s lead in a fit of misplaced affection, and Nollaig shot off at such speed that the baby of the family was jolted, Buster Keaton fashion, off the ground. For a few seconds he trailed behind our dyspeptic hound in mid-air, fully horizontal, as his little fist gripped the tether now hurtling him toward certain death. In the end, Conall got away with a few cuts and bruises, but for him, my parents and most of the rest of my family, it was extraordinarily traumatic. Personally, I consider it one of the best things I’ve ever seen, and feel as though it made the rest of Nollaig’s bad behaviour broadly worth it. In any case, whatever his thoughts on virgin births or the holy catechism, there was just as much a chance Nollaig was dismissive of priests due to general misanthropy rather than outright sectarianism. In the end, I’m happy to presume our dog was a prick, not a bigot.