All The Happiness A Man Could Need

A story of lasting love by Rory ffoulkes

Daddy has barely ever left Ballyhowen in his life, save for going to market or tending to business.

‘Why would I go anywhere else when I have everything here?’ he’d say, gazing

contentedly into Mammy’s eyes – or, if she wasn’t there, dreamily in the direction of an apparition of her only he could see.

And people would smile, happy to concede: ‘Sure, maybe Jack McLaughlin has all the happiness a man could need’.

Because perhaps he did, with a heart so in chime with Mammy’s that he couldn’t bear to be away from her, four-hundred acres of good pasture, no debts to pay, and our prime beef in restaurants in every corner of Ireland.

I begged Mammy time and again to tell me about their early morning ritual.

About the way, careful not to wake her, he’d glide cat-like from the bed, tenderly brush the blonde curls from around her closed eyes and lean over to kiss her temple as delicately as autumn sunlight shimmering gold on a spider’s web.

And, though he didn’t know it, how she’d open one eye to watch him slip through the door and then snuggle deep into the pillow, the warmth of his love coursing through her as she drifted back to sleep.

‘They can pave it over for all I care,’ Daddy spat, hot tears in his eyes. Big Colm McGinley and he squared up. The others held them back. Not here, they pleaded. Not with Mammy lying right there in her coffin.

‘I’ve never seen a man so broken,’ I overheard Mary Toland say, not realising I was in earshot. The other women exchanged doubtful glances when, not even believing it herself, Shelagh Coughlan replied: ‘It'll take time, but he’ll get over it someday’.

And later, hidden by the overhanging gingham cloth as I clutched my knees tight to my chest beneath the table groaning with sandwiches, I heard men ask one another in seething whispers how McLaughlin could even contemplate selling the farm — and to housing developers at that?

How could he betray Ballyhowen so? Leave it with such a cavernous, indelible scar, and polluting it with outsiders who’d never understand our ways.

‘Sure, it’d been better if he’d just taken a shotgun to himself and let the executors auction it off piece-by-piece,’ said Liam Brennan, a man who I thought was Daddy’s friend. And I could sense the group nodding in agreement, before another man - whose voice I didn’t recognise - reminded them that McLaughlin had a daughter to care for.

An uncontrollable sob surged up from the gullet and out from my mouth and, before I knew it, Daddy was under the table, his big arms wrapped around me, sobbing over-and-over: ‘We’ll be away from here soon enough’.

But why? Why would we go? If we leave Ballyhowen, what chance of catching a fleeting glimpse of Mammy’s smile or hearing her voice gentle upon the breeze?

Rory is @PGWodelouse on Twitter.