“How many dead people do you know?” said Mickser, suddenly.

Immediately, painfully, I felt my answer would show me once more his inferior.

“Do you mean ghosts?” I said, slowly, to gain time.

“No,” said Mickser, “I mean corpses.”

“But don’t they get buried?” I cried.

“They’re not buried for three days,” Mickser said, scathingly. “They have to be scrubbed and laid out and waked. You’re not allowed to keep them any longer than that, though, because their eyes go like this.” Here he put up his hands to his eyes and drew down the lower lids to show the inner flesh swimming with watery blood. “They rot,” he explained, succinctly.

“Mind would you fall, Mickser!” I said, hastily, thinking he might let go his eyelids if he had to steady himself on the gate-post.

We were sitting one on each of the big gate-posts at the school-house that was down on the main road. We were supposed to be sitting there watching the cars coming home from the Carlow and Kerry football finals. But it wasn’t much fun. As Mickser said, it was only the family man that came home straight after a match. The real followers, the enthusiasts, didn’t come home till near night; or near morning, maybe! And they were the only ones it was any sport to watch.

“Those ones have no drink taken,” Mickser said contemptuously of the cars that were going past at the time. “It’s great sport altogether when the drunks are coming home. Passing each other out on the roads. On the corners, mind! But your mammy wouldn’t let you stay out long enough to see them.”

It was only too true. It was a wonder she let me down to the road at all. You’d think she knew there’d be no fun in it. She had a terrible dread of fun, my mammy. She always saw danger in it.

“You can go down to the school-house and look at the cars coming home if you’re careful. And mind yourself!” she said to me. “Keep well in from the road! And another thing! Don’t sit up on that high wall the way I saw you doing once.”

That was why we were up on the gate-posts, although they were much higher than the wall.

“Gate-posts isn’t walls,” Mickser had said definitively.

That was Mickser all over. You could count on him to get you out of anything. But he could get you into anything too! You never knew where a word would lead with him. This talk about dead people seemed safe enough though.

“How many do you know, Mickser?” I asked, fearful, but fascinated.

“Oh, I couldn’t count them,” Mickser said, loftily, “I bet you don’t know any at all.”

“My grandfather’s dead.”

“How long is he dead?”

“He died the year I was born. On the very day after,” I said, having heard this told as a matter of importance by my mother to many, many people.

“Bah!” said Mickser. “You can’t count him. If you could, then you could count your great-grandfather, and your great-great-grandfather, and your great-great-great-grandfather and…” but he stopped enumerating them, as a more vivid denunciation of my foolishness occurred to him. “Isn’t the ground full of dead people? People that nobody knew?” He pointed down below us to where, through the nettles, the clay under the wall showed black and sour. “If you took up a spade this minute,” he said, “and began digging down there, or anywhere you liked, you’d be no time digging till you’d come on bones; somebody’s bones! Oh no!” he shook his head; “you can’t count people you didn’t see dead, like my Uncle Bat, that was sitting up eating a boiled egg one minute, and lying back dead the next. He’s the best one on my list though,” he added, magnanimously. “I saw him alive and dead. Most of them I only saw dead, like my two aunts that died within a week of each other. Everyone said it was a pity if they had to go it couldn’t have been closer together so they could have made the one wake of it. But if they did I might have to count them as one. What do you think?” He didn’t wait for an answer though. “How many is that?” he asked.

“Only three,” I said, and my heart rose. He mightn’t be able to think of any more.

Not a chance of it. He looked at me severely. He was a bit of a mindreader as well as everything else. “I want to pick out the good ones for first,” he said.

That overwhelmed me altogether.

“Ah sure, Mickser,” I said, frankly and fairly, “you needn’t strain yourself thinking of good ones for me, because I never saw one at all. One of my aunts died a year ago all right, and they had to take me to the funeral because they had no one to leave me with, but they wouldn’t let me into the house till the funeral was ready to move off. They took it in turns to sit out in the car with me.”

“And what was that for?” Mickser looked blankly at me.

“I don’t know,” I said, in a grieved voice, but after a bit, in fairness to my mother and father, I felt obliged to hazard a reason for their behaviour. “Maybe they thought I’d be dreaming of it in my sleep. Not that it did much good keeping me outside because I dreamt about it all the same. I kept them up till morning, nightmaring about coffins and hearses!”

“Did you?” Mickser was genuinely interested, but baffled, too, I could see. “Coffins and hearses?” he repeated. “What was there about them to have you nightmaring? It’s corpses that give people the creeps.” He looked at me with further interest—with curiosity. “I wonder what way you’d take on if you did see a corpse!” Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “I have it!” he said. “There’s a wake being held this very day in a cottage the other side of the town.”

“Mind would you fall, Mickser!” I cried again, because there looked to be every danger of it with the way he was hopping about with excitement.

“Do you know the cottage I mean?” he asked. “It’s at the level-crossing. Do you know the woman in it: the one that opens and shuts the railway gates? Well, her son is dead. Did you know that? Did you ever see him?

“A big fellow with red hair is it?”

“That’s the one! She used to have him sitting outside the cottage most days on a chair in the sun. He was a class of delicate.” Mickser tapped his own pate. “Up here,” he said. “Did you know that? Well, he’s dead now anyway. He died this morning. Isn’t it a bit of luck I was put in mind of it? This is your chance of having one corpse, anyway, for your list. But we’d want to get there quick,” he said, jumping down off the gate-pier, into a clump of nettles below, without minding them any more than if he was a dog. “We’ll have to get down there before the crowds start coming. They’ll be glad to see us then no matter who we are, because they’re always glad to see the first signs of people arriving, after the cleaning and scrubbing they’ve been at all night. And they love to see children above all — at first, that is to say. ‘Look who we have here,’ they’ll say.” He mimicked a woman’s voice so well I nearly fell off the pier myself. “‘Bless their little hearts,’” he went on. “‘Come in, children. Sure there’s no prayers like the prayers of a child.’ Up they bring you straight to the bed, and down they put you kneeling beside it where you can get a good gawk at everything. Oh, but it’s a different story altogether, I can tell you, if you leave it till late in the evening. They’re jaded tired by then, and you haven’t a hope of getting inside the door. ‘Out of this with you, you little brats.’ That’s all you’ll hear then. ‘This is no place for children — out of it, quick!’ They’d take the yard brush to you if you didn’t get yourself out of sight double quick. So we’d better get up there immediately. What are you waiting for?”

I was hanging back for more reasons than one.

“I was told to stay here,” I said.

“You were told not to be climbing, too,” said Mickser, as quick as a lawyer. “So you can’t say you were doing what you were told, anyway. Not but it’s doing all you’re told to do that has you the way you are this day, knowing nothing about anything. Come on out of that, and I’ll show you what’s going on about you, or if I don’t, I dread to think how you’ll end up in the finish. Sure fathers and mothers are the worst people in the word to depend on for finding out the least thing. They’re all out for keeping us back. I’ve proved that many a time with my own ones. And there’s yourself! To think they wouldn’t let you see your own aunt laid out! I know it wouldn’t be me that would be done out of a thing like that. And what’s more, you oughtn’t to put up with it either. You ought to tell them there’d be no nightmaring or carrying-on about corpses if you were let get used to them like me. Are you coming, or are you not?”

*  *  *  *  *

It was a sweet, mild afternoon as we set out for the edge of the town to where the level-crossing was, and the small, slated house to one side of it. It was very familiar to me when I was a bit smaller and my mother used to take me for a walk out of the town to get the country air. We often had to wait for the gates to be opened for us, although the train had already thundered past.

“What is the delay?” my mother would ask impatiently.

“I have to wait for the signals, ma’am,” the woman in charge of the gates would say. “You can pass through the wicket gate if you like, ma’am, but that’s none of my responsibility.”

“Oh, we’re in no hurry,” my mother would say hastily — in order no doubt to give me good example.

But there was no need to warn me about it. I had heard Mickser say he put a halfpenny on the line one day and the train made a penny out of it. I had no fancy for being flattened out to the size of a man. And anyway, I used to be very curious about the big, white-faced boy that was always to be sitting in the little bit of garden outside the house in a chair; a chair brought out of the house, not one you’d leave outside like we had in the garden at home.

“Does she take it in at night?” I asked.

“Of course she does,” said my mother, in a shocked voice; but she must have thought I meant the boy. “Please don’t stare,” she’d say to me. “Why do I always have to tell you the same thing?”

Only when the gates were opened, and we were crossing over the rails, would she let on to see him for her part. It was always the same.

“How is he today?” she’d ask the woman.

And the woman’s answer was always the same too.

“Poorly,” she’d say. At times — but rarely — she’d add a few words. “It’s a great cross to me, but I suppose God knows what he’s doing.”

“We must hope so anyway,” my mother would say, piously, and she’d step over the rails more quickly till we were on the other side. “How is it,” she’d say testily to me, “those gates are always shut no matter what time of the day we want to pass?”

And now, today, for the first time in my life, the railway gates were wide open.

“Do you think they might have forgot to close them on account of the wake?” I said, hanging back nervously as Mickser dashed over the shining tracks. But in the middle of the line he stopped and looked back at me.

“God knows it’s high time someone took you in hand,” he said. “You’re nothing but a sissy. What harm would it be if they did forget? Haven’t you eyes? Haven’t you ears? And if it comes to that, haven’t you legs? Come on out of that!” But before he went on himself he looked up and down the line. “We’re the first here,” he said, looking ahead again towards the cottage. “They’re not finished yet,” he said, expertly sizing things up.

To me it was as if the little house had been washed down from top to bottom like I was washed down myself every Saturday night, and not only was the house immaculate, but the bit of garden outside it was the same, neatened and tidied, and the big stones around the flower-beds to keep back the clay from the grass were whitewashed every one. It was a treat: the stones bright white and the clay bright black with not a weed to be seen out of all the weeds there used to be everywhere. But the chair wasn’t out!

“We’re too early, maybe,” Mickser said, and he sidled over to a window to one side of the door. I couldn’t see near as well as him, being behind him, but I saw enough to open my mouth. What with white counterpanes and white tablecloths and white mantelcloths and white doilies, the place was got up like the chapel at Lady Day. And, in the middle of it all, like a high altar, was a big bed with a counterpane as white and glossy as marble and…

But Mickser didn’t let me see any more. He pulled me away.

“I don’t think they’re ready yet,” he said. He seemed to be losing his courage just as I was finding mine. He put his hands in his pockets and sauntered towards the door. “There now, what did I tell you?” he cried, as we barely missed getting drenched to the skin by a basin of slops that was sloshed out the door at that minute. He looked at me. “Did you ever go down the line?” he asked, suddenly. And I knew he’d let up altogether on going to the wake.

“I’m not allowed to walk on the line,” I said. I was bent on seeing that bed better, and what was on it. “Let me get a look in the window anyway,” I said, and I skipped over the flower-bed and pasted my face to the glass. What did I expect to see? I don’t know. Not the full-grown man that was carved out on the bed, hard as stone, all but his red hair. The hair was real looking, like the hair on a doll. “Hey, Mickser. Give me a leg-up on to the window-sill?” I cried, getting more and more curious and excited.

“Are you pots?” said Mickser. “If they came out and caught you up on that window-sill you’d be clouted out of here with one of those stones,” and he gave a kick to one of the big white stones, leaving the black track of his boot on it.

“A true word if ever I heard one!” said a voice. And a thin bit of a woman in black came round the gable-end with her sleeves rolled up and no smile on her, I can tell you. “Out of here with you!” she shouted. “This is no place for you!” Just the very thing Mickser claimed would not be said to us. But before we had time to get out of the flower-bed another woman came running out of the front door — and this time it was the woman herself that had charge of the railway crossing.

“It’s not right to send anyone from the door of a dead-house,” she said, dully.

“Hush now: they’re only gossoons,” said the other one.

“He was only a gossoon too,” said our woman. “Only a child; that was what the priest said to me many a time. Not that he ever had any childhood, any real childhood.” She lost her dull look for a minute and a livelier look came into her face. “Isn’t that strange? I never thought of it before, but he was like an old man when he ought to have been a babby; and he was nothing but a babby when he ought to have been a man. I did my best, but it was no use. And you can’t do everything, isn’t that true? He’d have liked to have other children to keep him company, but they wouldn’t understand.”

We weren’t sure if it was to us or the other woman she was talking. I wanted to say that I’d have kept him company, only I didn’t know if my mother would allow me. That didn’t sound very polite though, so I said nothing. It was good I didn’t say anything, because I think it was to the other woman she was talking.

“There now! There now!” said the other woman. “Isn’t it better God took him before yourself anyway?”

“I used to pray He would,” said the woman, “but now I’m not sure I was right. Wasn’t it the unnatural thing to have to pray for anyway? Don’t all women pray for the opposite: to die before them and not be a burthen on them? And wasn’t it a hard thing to have to bring him into the world only to pray for him to be taken out of it? Oh, it’s little you know about it, and if there was a woman standing here in front of me, and she had the same story as me, I’d say the same thing to her. Isn’t it little anyone knows about what goes on inside another person?”

She was getting a bit wild looking, and the other woman began dragging at her to get her back into the house. “Hush now, you’ll feel different as time goes on.”

“Will I?” said the mother, looking wonderingly at the other one. “That’s what’s said to everyone, but is it true? I’ll feel different, maybe, sometimes when I look at the clock and have to pull off my apron and run out to throw back the gates. I’ll feel different, maybe, when some woman stops to have a word with me, or when I have to take a jug and go down the road for a sup of milk. But in the middle of the night, or first thing when the jackdaws start talking in the chimney and wake me out of my sleep, will I feel different then? And what if I do forget?” Suddenly she pulled her arm free. “I’ll have nothing at all then! It will be like as if I never had him.” At that she put her hand up to her head and began moaning.

Stepping behind her back, the woman that wanted to be rid of us started making signs at us to be off with ourselves, but it was too late. The dead fellow’s mother started forward and caught us by the hands.

“We must make the most of every minute we still have him,” she cried. “Come inside and see him.” She pushed us in the doorway. “Kneel down and say a prayer for him,” she commanded, pushing us down on our knees, but where her voice had been wild, now it was wonderfully gentle. “He was never able to pray for himself,” she said, softly, “but God must listen to the prayers of children if He listens to nothing else. I used to long for him to be able to say one little prayer, and I was always trying to teach him, but he couldn’t learn. When he’d be sitting out in the sun on his chair, I used to show him the flowers and tell him God made them. And do you know what he’d say?” She gave a little laugh before she told us. “‘Who’s that fellow?’ he’d say! And he’d look around to see if He was behind him! But the priest said God would make allowances for him. I sometimes think God must have a lot to put up with no more than ourselves. That’s why we’ve no right to complain against Him.”

But I wasn’t listening. When she put us kneeling down, I put up my hands to my face and I started to say my prayers, but after a minute or two I opened my fingers and took a look out through them at the man on the bed. I was a bit confused. Why was she saying he was a child? He was a man if ever I saw one! Just then the woman swooped down on me. She saw me looking at him. I thought she might be mad with me, but it was the opposite.

“If only he could see you here now beside him,” she said. She leant across me and stroked his hands. And then she began to talk to him, instead of about him. “Here’s two nice little boys come to see you!” she said, and her eyes got very bright and wild again. “He never had another child come into the house to see him in all his life. He never had another child as much as put out a hand and touch him. Isn’t that a lonely thing to think?”

It was indeed, I thought. I wondered if it would be any use me shaking hands with him now. And it might be she saw the thought in my eyes.

“Would it be asking too much of you to stroke his hand?” she said, and then, as if she had settled in her own mind that it wouldn’t be asking much at all, she got very excited. “Stand up like good boys,” she said, “and stroke his hands. Then I won’t feel he’s going down into his grave so altogether unnatural. No — wait a minute,” she cried, as she got another idea, and delved her hand into her pocket. “How would you like to comb his hair?”

I was nearer to the head of the bed than Mickser, but Mickser was nearer than me to the woman, and I couldn’t be sure which of us she meant. I wanted above all to be polite, but against that I didn’t want to put myself forward in any way. I stood up in any case so as to be ready if it was me she meant. She was taking a few big red hairs off the comb. Mickser stood up, too, but it was only to give me a shove out of his way.

“Let me out of here!” he shouted, and sending the woman to one side and me to the other, he bolted for the door. The next minute he was flying across the lines.

And me after him. I told you I wanted to be polite to the people — the dead one included — but after all it was Mickser brought me, and it wouldn’t be very polite to stay on after him. Not that he showed any appreciation of my politeness. He was very white in the face when I caught up with him, and I thought maybe there was something wrong with him.

I was full of talk.

“Well! I have one for my list anyway, now,” I said, cheerfully.

“I suppose you have,” he said, kind of grudgingly I thought, and then he nearly spoiled it all on me. “That one oughtn’t to count by rights. He wasn’t all in it when he was alive; he was sort of dead all along!” He tapped his pate again like he did the first time. “Up here!” he added.

I thought about that for a minute. “He looked all in it there on the bed!” I said, stubbornly.

But Mickser didn’t take well to talking about him at all. “I’ve had enough of corpses,” he said.

You don’t know how sorry I was to hear that. I had been wondering when I’d get a chance to go to another wake.

“You’re not done with them altogether, are you, Mickser?”

“I am,” Mickser said flatly. “Come on back to the main road. The cars are coming along good-o now. Can’t you hear them? Some of those boyos have a few jars in them, I’d say, in Spite of the wives.” He looked expertly into the sky. “There’ll maybe be a fog later on, and in that case they’ll all be coming home early — even the drunks. Come on!”

“Ah, you can go and watch them yourself,” I said. “I’m going home.”

The truth was I was too excited to sit on any wall for long. I wanted to go home because there were a few things I wanted to find out from mother, if I could bring the talk around to the topic of corpses without letting on where I got the information I had already.

*  *  *  *  *

As I ran off from Mickser across the fields for home I felt that I was a new man. The next time there was a funeral I felt sure there would be no need to leave me sitting out in a car. I felt sure they would all notice a change in me when I went into the house.

“Wipe your feet, son,” my mother cried out to me through the open door of the kitchen, the minute I came in sight. She was scrubbing the floor. “Not that you’d be the only one to put tracks all over the place,” she said, and I could see what she meant, because there, in the middle of the floor, was my brother’s old bike, upended, with the wheels in the air, resting on its saddle, and he busy mending a puncture. Or perhaps it was my father she meant? Because he was sitting the other side of the fire with his feet in a basin of water. It must have been my father she meant, because she lit on him just then. “This is no place for washing your feet,” she said. “There’s a fire inside in the parlour. Why don’t you go in there and wash them? I haven’t got room to turn around with you all.”

“The parlour is no place for washing feet,” my father said quietly, and he pointed to the bike in the middle of the floor. “When that fellow’s done with that bike you’ll be glad to have a bit of water on the floor to swish out the mess he’ll have made. Why don’t you make him take it out in the yard?”

My mother sighed. She was always sighing, but they weren’t the kind of sighs you’d heed. They were caused by something we’d done on her, all right, but they were sighs of patience, if you know what I mean, and not complaint.

“Ah, it’s a bit cold outside,” she said. But she turned to me. “Here, you, son,” she said, and she picked up my satchel and shoved it under my arm. “Let you set a good example and go into the parlour and do your homework in there by the nice fire.”

But I wasn’t going into the empty parlour.

“Dear knows!” my mother said with a sigh. “I don’t know why I waste my time lighting that fire every evening and none of you ever set foot in there until it’s nearly night. I only wish I could go in and sit by it. Then I’d leave you the kitchen and welcome.”

But I think she knew well that if she was to go in there that minute it wouldn’t be many minutes more till we’d all be in there along with her: myself and my satchel, and my father with his feet in the basin, and the old bike as well if it could be squeezed in between the piano and the chiffonier and all the other big useless pieces of furniture that were kept in there out of the way.

“Ah sure, aren’t we all right here,” said my father, “where we can be looking at you?”

“You must have very little worth looking at if you want to be looking at me,” my mother said, in a sort of voice I knew well sounded cross but couldn’t be, because she always stretched up when she spoke like that, so she’d see into the little mirror on the mantelshelf and she smiled at what she saw in the glass. And well she might. She always looked pretty, my mother, but she used to look best when we were all around her in the kitchen, annoying her and making her cheeks red and she fussing around trying to keep us in order.

“Mind would you catch your finger in the spokes of that wheel!” she cried just then to my brother.

“Mind would you catch your hair in it, my girl,” said my father, because as the kettle boiled and the little kitchen got full of steam, her hair used to loosen and lop around her face like a young girl’s. And he caught a hold of her as if to pull her back from the bike.

“Let go of me,” she cried. “Will you never get sense?”

“I hope not,” said my father, “and what is more, I don’t want you to get too much of it either, girl,” he said.

“Oh, go on with you and your old talk. Before the boys and all!” she cried, and then she tried harder to drag herself free.

“She’s not as strong as her tongue would have us believe, boys,” said my father, tightening his hold. And then he laughed. “You’ll never be the man I am!” he said, and this time it was my mother herself that giggled, although I didn’t see anything specially funny in what he’d said.

Indeed at that very minute, in the middle of tricking and laughing, my father’s face changed and it was like as if he wasn’t holding her for fun at all, but more like the way he’d hold us if he had something against us.

“You’re feeling all right these days, aren’t you? You’d tell me if you weren’t, wouldn’t you?” he cried. And then, abruptly, he let her go, and put his hands up to his head. “Oh, my God, what would I do if anything happened to you!”

“Such talk!” said my mother again, but her voice sounded different too, and although she was free she didn’t ask to move away, but stood there beside him, with such a sad look on her face, I wanted to cry.

And all the things I had wanted to ask her about the poor fellow at the level-crossing came back into my mind. But I didn’t feel like asking her then at all. And do you know what came into my mind? It was a few words of the prayer we said every night of our lives.

“. . . the living and the dead . . .” Over and over we’d said them, night after night, and I never paid any heed to them. But I suddenly felt that they were terrible, terrible words, and if we were to be kneeling down at that moment, I couldn’t bear it: I’d start nightmaring, there and then, in the middle of them all, with the lamps lit, and it in no way dark.

But the kettle began to spit on the range, and my mother ran over and lifted it back from the blaze.

“How about us taking our tea in the parlour?” she cried. “All of us. The kitchen is no fitter than the backyard with you!”

And in the excitement I forgot all about the living and the dead. For a long time.