The Christian Brothers had done their anointed task and Minogue had endured. He could almost carry on a conversation in Latin. At least he could entertain a few Romans with recitations from Livy. He remembered the stupidest things even yet: which forms took the subjunctive, expressions like iter fecerunt, Hannibal with the vinegar, breaking boulders in the Alps.
The odd teacher along the way indulged him. He read out parts of the Aeneid by gaslight at home in the kitchen. His parents listened with a reverence for the holiness that Latin brought to the house. His father would cough and say that Virgil borrowed his stuff from the Irish stories.
They heard about camps for Jews on the continent. A lay teacher risked George Orwell, God forbid, and even loaned Minogue books by Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis. The wet fields waited for them in the spring. One of the fields might flood. A pig might get stuck in a dike. They bought a tractor, the talk of the townland.
In school, the civics classes taught you codes of conduct. May brought the altar to the Blessed Virgin into the classroom, lilacs inevitably. The Catechism showed him how to answer hypothetical questions which a Protestant might ask you if you were in a bus, say. No opportunity for converting was to be lost. Minogue's mother thought that one of her sons might have a vocation for the priesthood. She fastened her hopes on Mick and he turned toward her hope. Minogue watched his sisters grow up, do civil service exams, go to dances, get a job in the bank and more. Minogue stayed on the farm while Mick deliberated.
More cars appeared on the roads. There was a change in the music at the dances. Minogue began to favour pints of stout and he found that he was well able to drink them all evening in the pub. Coming home on the lane, the drink tidal in his belly, he'd stop for a piss in the ditch. He'd hear the rustlings in the hedges when the stream stopped. Swaying in the dark, he'd be pissing on his shoes as he looked up for stars. He was twenty and tired of waiting.
At night he'd hear the cattle lowing or the hens being disturbed. Up at six, the clang of the milking buckets, a cigarette in the mouth early, the rhythmical swish of the teats squirting into the bucket.
What decided it finally was not his father's deteriorating condition or his own frustration. Rather, it was the questioning of his brother by the Garda one evening. It was a casual thing, to look as if they were doing something about the IRA. Mick came home late. He was triumphant, Minogue realised. He had been questioned in the barracks in town about his connections with the IRA, a proscribed organisation. It didn't matter that it was moribund, maintained by diehards and barstool heroes. Mick had found his vocation, Minogue understood. Ireland was to be his religion.
Maybe, as Mick accused him, it was the books he read. Books full of pessimism and anti-religious feeling. Maybe it wasn't fashionable to be devoted to your country anymore, Mick would sneer. Youth? Mick didn't have it either. Curious though, Kathleen had remarked after they had all met at a neighbour's funeral years later, Mick didn't seem to age.
Minogue tried his hand at bartending in Dublin. His mother wanted him to do the Civil Service exams. He spent a lot of time in the libraries. He saved money for a trip to America. He met Kathleen O'Hare who was new to the Civil Service. She poked fun at his accent, knowing his irritation to be waxing love. He in turn complained about Dublin people. She teased out his plans. She said she had to be fair with him, not to lead him on, because if he was serious about America, she couldn't go. Her family needed her and America frightened her, she admitted.
"You're nobody there, Matt," she'd say.
Minogue was reading the Frenchman, Sartre, and he felt that he wouldn't mind being a nobody for a while. Maybe a holiday in America, Kathleen said.
She had been very fair to me, Minogue thought. He was determined to repay her honesty with a loyalty the intensity of which surprised him. Minogue didn't fancy himself as a man who went in for the lovey-dovey stuff, but not because he wanted people to think he was a hard man. He would be happy with loyalty and company. Within a year, he was through the Garda training in Templemore, surprising himself even more by doing well at it. They married. With the America money and Kathleen's economy, they saw themselves into a new house in Kilmacud. Minogue didn't mind it at all, not even the cliff-heights of a mortgage.
In that same year, Minogue's father had died, leaving Mick the man of the house. Their mother grieved for a long time. The doctor called it reactive depression. Minogue's sisters and their husbands called on weekends. One sister, Maura, gently asked him what he thought about her moving to Canada and how would their mother take it. Families grew. Something was stirring in the country, money.
Kathleen delivered a baby boy, Eamonn, a big hairy child. Eamonn died unaccountably some seven months later, forgetting to breathe, it seems. The death precipitated the worst years of Minogue's life. For all their cleverness, the poems and the books meant nothing after that. Kathleen overcame her dread and went to see a psychiatrist. Minogue was helpless, encumbered. They promoted him to detective.
It wasn't until six years later that Kathleen conceived again. Minogue felt frightened being an expectant father again. None of their acquaintances joked with them. Minogue had been marked as different already.
Iseult was a different baby from the start. Kathleen took heart. The coldness leaked out of Minogue. As if to remind them that it wasn't chance, Daithi was born the following year. Minogue was always watching. He was careful not to live for his children but his determination was manic. They would have university, the loan of the car, good teeth, pocket money, clothes, French, parties, books. Fearing his own intensity, Minogue immersed himself in it all the more.
As they grew, Minogue wondered-but didn't much care about-his promotion. He became a detective sergeant. Others passed him on the ladder.
Optimism seeped into Ireland in the sixties. One evening he watched civil rights marchers being beaten up near Derry. Was that still going on? He knew vaguely that the civil rights people were Catholics and that the Unionists controlled the North. The police beat up the marchers. That Paisley lunatic and his huge lips and mouth sneering on the television, a hysteric from another century. A new IRA appeared in the streets. Minogue was relieved. The people he worked with and the people he met were glad too. There were rumours of sending in troops to Derry to protect the Catholics. Hooded bodies turned up in ditches. Bombs demolished shops and factories. Men were shot to death at their doors. Troops went berserk. Petrol bombs arced lazily and burst in the night on the evening news. British Ministers recoiled at the hatred. Minogue's brother called in and had a glass of whisky.
"Majority my foot. How is it that a country that's held up to be the birthplace of parliamentary government can give in to a crowd of seventeenth-century bigots who represent about two percent of the population of Great Britain. How is that, can you tell me?"
New laws and courts, armed guards and the army at trials. The word'terrorist' showed up in the news a lot. The old guard of the IRA, well clear of Belfast and Newry and Derry, lauded their northern heroes. Mick exhilarated in talk. He was well-to-do now. The country was to join the European Economic Community although Mick didn't agree with the move in principle. Still, Mick was not an activist, Minogue knew. Mick was for Ireland going it alone and his zeal couldn't countenance socialism. He couldn't approve of guns from Libya or Russia or from the madmen in Germany.
The brothers met intermittently at hurling matches. In Hayes' Hotel in Thurles, they^d be pressed together by the swell of men trying to get to the bar, eager for pints after the game. Both locked into the throng of countrymen in the streets and pubs of provincial towns. Minogue would catch sight of his brother through the struggling mass; the strong smells of his own youth-the porter, the cowshite, the hair oil-rising up around him. They never quarrelled.