There was another son called Eneas of course but he was only spoken of sideways, although once or twice it seemed he did sneak home, returning from the wide world where apparently he roamed to sleep the daylight hours in his mother's house, and only venturing forth at night. This was a small mystery in a time of great mysteries, and I don't remember me paying special heed to it.
'Why's your brother Eneas gone from home the most of the time?' I asked Tom once.
'Just a little peccadillo,' said Tom, and that's all he would say at first.
But another time we were in town together and one of his rivals, one of the up and coming Republican men, taunted him mysteriously in the street. He was a man called Joseph Healy and by no means a blackguard.
'Ah Tom,' he said, 'the policeman's brother.'
'The what?' said Tom, not with his usual ease and bonhomie.
'Never mind, never mind. Sure we all have our skeletons in the cupboard, I am sure.'
'Do you want to make something of this, Healy, in the council elections upcoming?'
'What? No,' said Joseph Healy, almost contritely, because though they were opponents, everyone in truth liked Tom, and Healy as I say was a decent skin at heart. 'I was only teasing you, Tom.'
Then they had a hearty enough handshake. But I could see Tom's mood had changed, and all the way up the street he was quiet and darkened. In a country of cupboards, every one with a skeleton in it, especially after the civil war, no one was exempt. But I could see that Tom resented that, and bitterly. Tom after all had a plan, a road to travel, which was an admirable thing in a young man like him. But skeletons he could do without obviously.
The mother was of the same mind. She loved the glory of Jack and she loved the glory of Tom, even if Jack looked in the ransacked trunk of old decency for his clothing, and Tom was a man to wear a modern hat in the new Ireland. This I gleaned from their conversations, and I always paid heed when they spoke of her, as a spy might pay heed to chit-chat in bars, because I had a feeling that some day I would need every scrap of information I could get, if I was to survive actually meeting her.
If ever there was a cold card in that game it was the blank, dark card of my own mother.
In those strange days when if anything unexpected could happen, it probably would, Mr de Valera became head of the country.
'Now the guns are back in the Dail,' said Tom darkly. 'How do you mean, Tom?' I asked.
'They're so afeared of being there, they're after bringing their guns into the chamber.'
Now Tom spoke with understandable disgust, as these men were the very ones his own crowd had striven to subdue, imprison, and alas execute. So how it came about that the very men against the Treaty, and who lads like Tom had wanted erased from the Irish story, were now the men in charge… You could almost feel a lurch in the life of Sligo. It was fellas like Joseph Healy were up now. This was hard and bitter for Tom all things considered. Myself, I wouldn't have had three thoughts about any of them, but that even in his love-talk Tom could flummox me with the politics.
We were lying up the back of the great dune that gave Strandhill its name in fact, when he uttered the above sentiment. It was a greater obstacle to his future than any he had experienced. He had never been a gunman himself, coming to maturity after all that. To give him his due, he thought the time for guns was past. He had a sort of idea that North might be joined to South at last, but with the crazy notion that it would be some man like Carson would be the first 'king of Ireland', as he jocularly put it. This was an old notion of men like Tom. There was a sort of dancing swing to his notions, like his music. Joseph Healy would've put a bullet in Carson if he could have done it quietly and gone home to his family after.
It was families and young ones mixed up in it now, it wasn't just single lads going round, and lassies maybe helping them.
Well, in spite of all that, he soon turned to kissing me again, in the quiet dunes, with the seagulls outraged but only them seeing us, and the sea bearing Tom's heroic record the other side of the sand. Strandhill's habitual breeze raged along the marram grasses minutely. It was bitter cold but kisses dealt with that.
And a few weeks later walking across the bridge by the Swan Hotel who should stop me but the fading figure of John Lavelle.
He was nearly a young man still but the fringe of something else had touched him. He looked hard beaten by his time in America, or wherever he had been, and I looked down and saw the soles of his shoes were well worn. I imagined him hopping trains like a hobo and gadding about futilely generally. He was handsome though, with his narrow grey face.
'Look at you,' he said. 'I hardly knew you.'
'Likewise,' I said. I was on my own, but wary, because Sligo was like a wretched family, everyone knew everyone and if they didn't know everything about everyone, they wanted to. I think John Lavelle noticed my furtive looking.
'What's up?' he said. 'You don't want to talk to me?'
'Ah, no,' I said. 'I do. How are you keeping? Were you away off in America then?'
'That was the idea,' he said. 'It didn't go just like that. The best laid plans.'
'Ah sure, yes,' I said.
'At least I can walk free in Ireland now,' he said.
'Oh?'
'What with Dev in now.' 'Oh, yes. Well, that's good anyhow.' 'Better than the fucking Curragh jail.' The curse word made me jump, but I thought he had the right to use it.
'Is that where you were?'
'That's it.'
'Well, John, I'll see you around the place.'
'I'm going down home a while to the islands, but yes, you'll see me back here all right. I'm going to be working for the council.'
'You're an elected man?'
'No, no,' he said. 'On the roads. Council work. Digging and the like.'
'That's good. It's work.'
'It is work. Work's hard to find. Even in America I'm told. You working yourself?'
'Cafe Cairo,' I said. 'Waitress.'
'Good for you. I'll come see you when I get back to Sligo.' 'Ah, do, yeh,' I said, suddenly uneasy with myself, and embarrassed, I knew not why hardly.
John Kane brings me my soup just now.
'This bloody job will kill me,' he says. 'I'd rather be a mole-catcher in Connaght.'
All the while with his unfortunate gobbling of the throat.
'But there are no moles in Connaght,' I said.
'In none of Ireland. Isn't it the perfect job for an old man? Them bloody stairs.'
And off he went.
The mother's bungalow was nice enough but it smelt of boiling lamb – in my vivid state of alarm, I might have said sacrificial lamb. Somewhere down the back of the house you sensed pots boiling, curly kale, cabbage, from Old Tom's garden, and a lamb, boiling, boiling, spewing its distinctive mild, damp smell into the corridors. That was my impression. I was only near that bungalow twice in my whole life and both times felt like dying just to be near it. In those days, the odour of cooking meat turned my stomach. But boiling meat took the biscuit. Why, I don't know, since my mother relished all forms of meat, even offal and innards that would frighten a surgeon. She would dine quite happily on a lamb's heart.