On the main street of Granard I met Duffy
Whom I had known before the age of reason
In short trousers in the Senior Infants' room
Where once upon a winter's day Miss Walls
Lost her head and cut the legs off us
For dirty talk we didn't think she'd hear.
'Well, for Jesus' sake,' cried Duffy, coming at me
With his stick in the air and two wide open arms,
'For Jesus' sake! D'you mind the sally rod?'
2 A Chow
I'm staring at the freshly scratched initials
Of Robert Donnelly in the sandstone coping
Of Anahorish Bridge, with Robert Donnelly
Beside me, also staring at them.
'Here,' he says,
'Have a chow of this stuff,' stripping a dulse-thin film
Off the unwrapped ounce of Warhorse Plug –
Bog-bank brown, embossed, forbidden man-fruit
He's just been sent to buy for his father, Jock.
The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to
At the burning-out of a neighbour, I want to lick
Bran from a bucket, grit off the coping stone.
'You have to spit,' says Robert, 'a chow's no good
Unless you spit like hell,' his ginger calf's lick
Like a scorch of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent.
3 One Christmas Day in the Morning
Tommy Evans must be sixty now as well. The last time I saw him was at the height of the Troubles, in Phil McKeever's pub in Castledawson, the first time we'd met since Anahorish School. I felt as free as a bird, a Catholic at large in Tommy's airspace.
Yet something small prevailed. My father balked at a word like 'Catholic' being used in company. Phil asked if we were OK. Tommy's crowd fenced him with 'What are you having, Tommy?'
I was blabbing on about guns, how they weren't a Catholic thing, how the sight of the one in his house had always scared me, how our very toys at Christmas proved my point – when his eye upon me narrowed.
I remembered his air-gun broken over his forearm, my envy of the polished hardwood stock, him thumbing the pellets into their aperture. The snick of the thing then as he clipped it shut and danced with his eye on the sights through a quick-quick angle of ninety degrees and back, then drilled the pair of us left-right to the back of the house.
The Evans' chicken coop was the shape of a sentry-box, walls and gable of weathered tongue-and-groove, the roofing-felt plied tight and tacked to the eaves. And there above the neat-hinged door, balanced on the very tip of the apex, was Tommy's target: the chrome lid of the bell of his father's bike. Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses.
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