Chapter 6 The Empty Ends

Oona died in her ninety-first year, in the front bedroom of Gort, with the door open onto the stairs so that the sound of the kitchen could reach her, and the family sat at the table, the night before she died and the night after, in a quiet rotation of tea and silence that the house knew by heart. Eamon, who was eleven, was permitted to watch her lie — that was the word the country used, to sit with the dead — on the second afternoon, and he stood at the foot of the bed with his mother and looked at the small, stern, finished face that had commanded the kitchen of his earliest memory, and he did not cry, because he had understood, in the way children understand things at the table, that she would not have wanted him to put on a performance for the furniture. The wake was in the kitchen, as was proper, because that was where a person's life had actually been lived, and the table was brought out to its full length and every chair in the house was filled, and the neighbours from Carra came up the yard in their dark clothes and were given tea and bread, and the conversation was the low, even, practical conversation of a wake, and the closed-eye knot looked on from the second board and said nothing, as it had said nothing at every occasion the house had ever offered it, which was the whole point of the knot, and of the table, and of every still thing that keeps a room steady while the people in it come and go. After the wake, the table was returned to its working length — not all the way down, Niamh could not bring herself to take the leaves out yet — and the house began, very gradually, to be a house of two. Callum, who had grown old around the rim of his own grief in a silence that his mother had respected and that his daughter understood, moved through the kitchen in the mornings with the care of a man who is no longer sure the floor will be where he left it, and he took to spending the long part of the afternoons at the window end of the table, with a cup gone cold and the page of a newspaper he was not reading, looking out over the yard the way his mother had looked out at the sea, with the glass between himself and the weather. It fell to Niamh to care for him, and to Eamon to keep him company, and the two of them did it the way the house had always done things, around the table and without fuss. It was Callum, in those years, who gave Eamon the history, and he gave it in his own way, which was flat and factual and oddly complete for a man of few words: the notch under the leaf that was his father, who had died before the sea could be argued with; the single sleeve of a letter in the account-book drawer that was the last word from the woman who had been his wife and had gone out by the front door; the half-letter in the end grain, begun and abandoned, which he would not explain and did not pretend to understand, but which he had come, in old age, to think of as the mark of every departure the house had ever swallowed, the one stroke that said I meant to stay and was called away. Eamon listened to his grandfather the way he had listened to his great-grandmother, which was with the whole of his attention and no interruption, because the house had taught him, in the only way the house knew how, that the stories were kept in the wood and that the wood would not repeat them. He went over the table's country on his own in the evenings, his fingers finding the burn ring and the grooves and the letters in the end grain, and he could have drawn its map from memory by the time he was thirteen: the river of grain running out to the sea at the far end, the closed eye in the second board, the deep soap-worn hollows before the chairs, the seam of the leaves that let the family grow. Callum died on a windless night in the deep of winter, sitting in his chair at the window end of the table with a cold cup in front of him and the lamp still lit, and it was Niamh who found him, and it was Niamh who understood, standing in the doorway of her own kitchen, that he had gone the way he had always meant to go if he was given the choosing of it: at the table, with the weather outside the glass and the grain running to the sea under his hand. The men from the town carried him out in the morning, and the chair at the window end stood empty, and neither Niamh nor Eamon could bring themselves to move it; it stood there through the winter, square to the window, wearing the hollow of a lifetime in the seat, and it was Eamon, in the spring, who finally lifted it and carried it out to the shed. They were two, then, in a house that had been built for a company of five, and the table stood at its broadest length with the leaves in, and the boy made a kind of quiet war against the size of it — he set his plate almost anywhere along the boards, moved from place to place the way a young animal tests the corners of a new pen, so that the wood would not learn the shape of two people and settle into it. Niamh watched him do it and said nothing, recognizing in him the same argument she had carried at his age: that the table had been made for a family, and that to be made smaller around it was a kind of surrender. But the house was old and the roof was the roof of an old house, and the money was what it was, and in the year Eamon turned twenty-three they were seated one evening at their two far ends of the table, the lamp between them and the river of grain running the whole dark length of the boards between their plates, and Niamh said, levelly, the thing she had been carrying since the winter: "Eamon, we will have to either fix this house or leave it." She said it the way the house said things, plainly and without dressing. "And the table," she said, "is a table of its size. It was made for a family. We have to decide what the family is now, and what the table is worth, because whatever we decide, the table is a part of the price of it." She had expected him to answer, and he did not answer, and the silence went on so long that the lamp settled and the wick needed trimming; the boy sat with his hand flat on the boards beside his plate, following the grain with his thumb, and when he looked up at last his eyes were angry in a way she had never seen in her own family, and he said, "It's not worth anything. That's the point of it. You don't price the thing that kept the count." And because he was young and had laid his hand on the closed-eye knot without knowing he had done it, he could not say anything more, and the two of them sat at their two ends of the long table in the lamp's circle, the whole company of the house reduced to two places and the great length of the boards between them holding, faithfully, the shape of everyone else who had ever sat there.