Though he felt his voice thin and wavery, though his head floated and spun and nausea rocked and lurched in his stomach, through all the misery, Aaron felt a sharp, clear joy. Just as Marvin had told him, he was going to beat these bastards at their own game.

NINE.

IT WAS NOT THE presence of death which caused the strangeness, for he had seen death before. His dead father merely added to the aura of strangeness which emanated from the living who surrounded the coffin. He viewed them all from the remoteness of his absence; perhaps that was a large part of it. They were, after all, his family, grandmother, mother, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins; but the year and a half he had been away from all of them gave him a sharply piercing clearer vision of them than he had ever realized possible and he felt a shock of recognition with each face he encountered.

Toward the corpse he felt a numb indifference for it had no relation to the hard and powerful man who had driven him from this home and family. It was too diminished and characterless to have anything at all to do with those strong hands, the sharp voice, the piercing, knowing eyes which had seen into the deepest, most hidden places of his very being. It was an effigy and a poor effigy at that, not even suggesting the man his father had been. He knelt, prayed, was conscious of the eyes taking in the scene; he felt only a fleeting guilt-laden sense of weariness because he could feel nothing at all.

His mother's face, familiar, known, unchanged, was at the same time a different face, or confronted him now in a different way. The light-gray eyes sought something he did not understand. He realized, though, that something was being asked of him.

He was now Brian O'Malley.

The kids, his brothers and sisters, had grown and changed in the period of time he'd been away; Roseanne most of all, Martin least.

Roseanne seemed cut out of her own flesh, fine carved as though she'd formerly been an indication of the woman she would become. She embraced him with a quick, mature hug and she whispered in his ear, as though she'd rehearsed it carefully and selected the words she liked best, "Oh, God, Bri, it's good to have you home." She had never said anything even remotely personal to him before. He sensed a feeling of relief on her part, a passing of responsibility. With him home, she was no longer the oldest.

His brother Martin had gotten larger, but he'd always been a large, solid boy, older beyond his years. At fifteen, he was nearly as tall as Brian's six feet; broader in the shoulder and hip. Martin hugged him, held his shoulders for a moment. He was the natural member of the family, who didn't think primarily of himself, of what impression he might be making on any observer.

His brother Kevin was undersized at thirteen, with bad skin and a weak, wet handshake. A tic played at the corner of his nose and he didn't meet Brian's gaze but ducked his head and peered up at him fleetingly.

His youngest sister, Kit, stared at him warily. She was a small, tense girl of ten and even before he'd left they'd been strangers. There were eight years between them and he had no idea what, if anything, went on inside her head.

It was his grandmother who thrust him into the center of this lagging wake, which had gone into the third day by the time he arrived. She cast aside her exhaustion and with a great surge of energy she tied him irrevocably into the history of his family.

"Jesus, look at him," she instructed and they all fastened eyes on him. "He's the living image of his dead father. Sweet Mother of God, and don't I remember my own son just turned eighteen and didn't he have the exact face and size of this one here?"

She searched among her remaining children for confirmation. Peadar and Matthew O'Malley agreed with her, assured her. The other members of the family stared first at the dead father, then at the living son, and the judgment was rendered: he was that same Brian. No more and no less, a continuation of his father.

He felt a deep choking cry but there were no sensible words to tell them who he was. He stood quietly for their inspection and said nothing.

Old Mrs. Kerrigan, a friend of his grandmother's came, waited for him to walk her to the coffin. He knew she must have been there before, but she nodded brightly, eyes from corpse to son. She was nearly deaf and her voice was unnaturally loud.

"Sorry for your trouble, Brian."

Her hand, given first to his grandmother and then to him, was misshapen and dry. The two old women lingered and peered down together and nodded their heads up and down. Their eyes met for a brief instant and Brian caught something between them, something which appeared and disappeared so instantaneously that he might have imagined it, but he knew he had seen it. It was a knowing, shrewd look, almost triumphant, and it sent a shiver through him.

Mrs. Kerrigan made a deep sound in her throat. "God's will, Mrs. O'Malley. Ah, yes, well, that's the way of it, isn't it?"

There was a firm hand clasped on his shoulder and he turned, expecting a man, one of his uncles or one of his father's friends. It was his Aunt Ellen and she leaned close to him and whispered, "Come on into the kitchen now. Let's get some food into you."

He wouldn't have believed he could eat, but as his aunt put the plate of food on the kitchen table before him he was overwhelmed by hunger. He ate without tasting; just the physical act of shoving food into his mouth, gulping it down, seemed to fill a vast pit of emptiness which had opened up inside of him.

"Here, lad, you'll have a glass of beer to wash it all down." She sat across the table from him, then turned and brusquely chased away the collection of boys, including his brother Kevin, who stood in the doorway watching him. "Go on outside now in the courtyard and keep your voices down. I don't want to be hearing any of you again."

They jostled and pushed each other, five or six of them, as they scrambled into the courtyard, which was O'Malley territory for the simple reason that the O'Malley apartment was on the ground floor and the bedroom windows faced the first small courtyard.

"They're close to exhaustion," she explained. "You must be tired yourself, Brian. Oh, you're that thin. You've been sick, have you?"

He nodded, wiped his mouth. "I'm fine, Aunt Ellen, really I am. Thanks again for arranging things, for seeing I got the fare and all."

Her hand pressed his arm, dismissed any trouble she might have gone to. She studied him frankly, openly, the way she did everything. "Well, it's a full-grown man, despite the thinness. You'll fill out quickly enough. Your ma is going to need you, Brian. Listen, in a few days' time, stop upstairs and see your Uncle Matt. He's going to offer you a bit of a job helping him on the milk wagon, but don't tell him I told you. Let him think he's telling you for the first time. I just want to set your mind at ease in case you were worrying about how you'd manage and all. Ah, eat up now, eat up, you need something to sustain you."

His Uncle Peadar sat across the table from him next. He was a thin man and his reddish hair was shot through with gray. His light-blue eyes were red-rimmed from weariness. Peadar O'Malley was a fireman and he told Brian, "The boys from my house will be out in force for your dad's funeral tomorrow. He'll have his full inspector's funeral, will Brian, and it's only fitting. But he was that well thought of that the lads from my house will be there too. Did Father Donlon have a chance to tell you the details?"

"Yes. Yes, he did, Uncle Peadar."

Peadar reached for a water tumbler which was half filled with whiskey. He drank deeply, sighed. "Ah, yes. And the radio says it'll be a clear day and mild. Thank God for small blessings, I always say." Then, after carefully searching his memory for something to say, he added, "The mayor himself came to the wake the first day, did you know that? Yes. A fine little man he is, for all his faults. They say he's a little bit crazy, but it's hard to tell with them Italians, isn't it? They say his wife is a Jew. Now isn't that a strange thing for an Italian, to have a Jewish wife? But then, I guess you'd not have to go too far, for isn't my own sister Maureen married to John Kinelli and him a wop himself. Ah, yes, well."

His mother entered the kitchen finally, stopped at the doorway, surprised to see him completely alone at the table. "I came to fetch some tea," she said, as though she needed some excuse. She moved to the stove, fussed at the kettle, filled it with water, lit a match and held it to the pilot light. "Did you have enough to eat, Brian?"

Her eyes and hands moved constantly, neither making contact with him. "There's the cups to wash. I'd best wash the cups, they get used up and needed so quickly. Will you have some tea, Brian? The water will boil before you know it. Well, will you just look at the mess of this kitchen. You've never seen it look like this before, have you now?"

She moved about, collected and scraped and stacked. He got up, brought his plate to the sink and began to scrape it clean. She tried to take it from him.

"Here," she said, "what are you doin'? You've no need, I'll do that for you," she said, as though he was a stranger or a guest.

"That's okay, Ma, I'll do it."

"No. No, I'll take care."

They stood for a moment, the plate held between them. She bit down on her lip and turned away quickly, her attention taken completely by the running water.

He came behind her, touched her shoulder lightly. "Ma, listen. I want to tell you..."

Without facing him, she leaned her cheek against his hand, then shook her head. "Not now, Bri. Not now."

He knew she couldn't turn to him; if she did, if they faced each other, she would shatter; she had to hold together and she had to do it completely. His hand moved down her arm and he was surprised by the sharpness of her bones, a deep sense of physical surprise. He wondered if she had always existed this way. Beneath the calm solidity of her outward self, had this other vulnerable woman been present all the time? He was shocked by her youth; her face in profile was a girl's, unlined, untouched. He had remembered her older, fuller, and she seemed diminished by grief; vulnerable, innocent.

"Thanks for waiting for me, Ma. Father Donlon told me how you even waited the Rosary service until I got here."

Her head nodded quickly and she said sharply, "It was only proper."

"Listen, do you think Kevin is strong enough to carry..." He faltered, unable to continue.

She turned to him now and her face was totally without expression. Her words were matter of fact, as though she was discussing an ordinary circumstance. "I think he'll find his strength and I think all three of you boys should help to carry your dad. There'll be your uncles Peadar and Gene and Matt and some men from the Department as needed. Since Kev is so small, your Uncle Matt said something about him walking at the front. That way he won't get too much of the weight, but he won't feel he's being left out of it."

"Okay, Mom."

She dried her red hands on her apron. "I told the boys they were not to stand watch tonight, Brian. They've not slept much these last days. Everything's been so...so..." Her hand waved vaguely. "But Martin says he'll take his turn with you; he has the strength, God knows. We'll be all right, Brian." She searched his face with a sudden look of desperation, as though reality cut through ritual unexpectedly and caught her unprepared. Her voice went small, tiny, chilled him. "Won't we be all right, Brian?"

It was what he had been waiting for without knowing: her turning to him. "We'll be just fine, Mom. Don't you worry about it. We'll all be just fine."

He listened to the diminishing household sounds with a growing sense of uneasiness for he was now completely alone with his father. He knew it had been planned and that this was supposed to be a totally significant moment, this last private meeting with his father.

Brian felt only a sense of his own sinful awfulness: he could not feel grief. He fingered his rosary and recited prayers but some true sense of himself would not allow him to deceive himself. He was merely going through the ritual; there was no true piety, no grief involved, and he did not know why. He stayed on his knees, prayed, but neither for his father's nor his own immortal soul. He was too numb.

As his fingers moved, he began an Our Father, but his lips fell open and soundless as he gazed, finally, on the visage of the man who had fathered him. The dark hair, combed neatly off the wide forehead, was slightly wrong; the part was too high and threw the face off balance slightly. The black brows were stiff and immobile, and that too distorted the face, for his father's face was constantly in a state of animation; it had been a listening, watching, expressive face and now it was wooden and masklike.

Where was it gone? The life of the man, his flash, his spark, his anger, his sound, all the things he had been?

He had been begotten by this now dead man within the body of the woman in the other room, and he knew now, from the lusts and sins of his own body, that his creation had taken place in a steamy, wet and forceful physicality. And this dead man himself had been sinfully thrust into the body of the old woman whose light moans punctuated the silence even now, through her fitful and uneasy sleep.

This corpse had been a child and a man and a father.

Why hadn't he ever realized this before? And what did it have to do with him, anyway?

It had to do with him because child he had been and man he was and therefore: therefore the fact of death had to do directly with himself. Brian felt the beads tremble as he let them dangle over his hand and he tried to pray but couldn't; he was appalled at himself, at the terribleness of the uncontrollable thoughts about his father's body, his own conception, his father's conception. He shuddered, felt the tears wet his face and he moved and formed words, prayed quickly, hoping to latch on to the sense of prayer.

He moved to the next bead, heard the noise beside him.

"He doesn't look very natural, does he, Brian?" his brother Martin asked.

Brian turned away, smeared his face with his arm, blinked hard. Brian studied the round, placid face. There was a sprinkling of light freckles across Martin's nose and wide cheeks. His eyes were almost navy blue, startling in their darkness because his hair and lashes were so fair.

"He doesn't even look like Dad," Brian said.

"Oh, he's long since gone from here," Martin said with a calm certainty. "Pray for him, Brian. He needs all our prayers. But yours are special."

"Why? Why do you say that?"

"He was a hard man, Bri. Harder on you than on the rest of us because you were the oldest. I think he wanted to make you hard because he always knew you might have to share the responsibility."

Brian was puzzled and curious at the strangely mature explanation. He'd never thought of anything like that; he had just assumed that his father wasn't too fond of him.

As though reading his thoughts, Martin added, "It was never anything more personal than that, Bri."

Because he wanted to believe him, Brian nodded, and side by side, the brothers knelt, prayed, stood quietly and kept the watch by their father's coffin through the night.

PART TWO: The O'Malleys.

TEN.

MARGARET O'MALLEY EXPERTLY WORKED the thread hack and forth, in and out. Beneath her skilled fingers, the hole closed so perfectly that no one could say for sure just where the tear had been. They were hard on clothes, she thought, but God's love, what youngsters weren't?

Her hands fell still. How many tears and rips and holes had she mended? How many clothes had she cut down, shaped, taken in, let out, made do with, for brothers older and younger, sisters yet to be taught, and then for her own children? With deep and quiet pride, she knew that not one of hers, no matter how poor they'd ever been, no matter how empty the pot, not one ever walked about in clothes which advertised their need.

It was something her mother had taught her when she was just a small girl: We may be dirt poor, Margaret, but we're not dirt.

She hadn't thought of that for years; nor of her mother. Strange, to think of it now, this quiet night. She gathered the clothing and her needles and threads. There was no need to be mending now, this time of night. She just liked to keep her hands busy until the last child was home; she'd better start getting over that, with Brian practically a man. And whatever was he up to half the time, she didn't know, acting so secret, storming out of the house, so hard on the younger ones at times, then at times, so like the young boy again. She didn't know how to be mother to a man; she'd never been before. She turned the lamplight low and gazed through the sheer curtains to the quiet street.

Sweet Jesus of the Sorrows, be my strength.

Margaret gasped and her hands tightened on the arms of the chair.

Why, that was my mother's prayer and never my own. Never, in all my thirty-eight years, until this very moment. Sweet Jesus of the Sorrows, he my strength. Through all the hunger and pain and ache of death, her mother had leaned on that prayer. She'd had nine horn, four miscarried, three buried and six raised, her mother. Three of us here, so far from home: me with my brood, little Ellen all grown with her passel of kiddies, and Jimmie John with that strange, unholy life he'd entered into. And all the others still at home.

God forgive me, twenty years I've been here and the other place is still what I think of as home. Well, it's what's in my secret heart and there it stays: home.

Ground, hard and rock-covered and unyielding, filled with earth-starved corpses it was, and offering nothing to the living but its own sweet beauty and you can't eat the beauty of the hills nor drink the sparkle of the evening waters as they rushed back from the day's journey to the sea. But wasn't it strange and wonderful though, the way the waters came back to where they belonged, no matter how far they poured away from shore, leaving the vast shallow mudholes, thick and gummy and good for nothing but muck on bare feet; yes, the waters came streaming back all silver-sparkled each evening, as though they knew they'd belong in this place only.

Margaret's people, the O'Briens, were a gentler people than the O'Malleys. They had about them the soft, shy, quiet ways of a people accustomed for generations to listening to the sound of the land beneath their feet and the wind about their heads. The harsh, querulous complaints of sheep were more familiar to their ears, and comfortable for that matter, than the loud, boisterous, hearty commotion of the O'Malleys, who settled among them in a clatter of arrival.

No one moved to the west; the west was the barren place, its voids filled only with sorrows too bitter to mention. Clare and Galway and Mayo were the places of wild beauty from which people came and held only in memory, with the hard and cold and hungry days mellowed and gentled by time and distance.

But the O'Malleys, father and mother and sons and daughters, came, thrust themselves upon the quiet wind-swept hills, moved into a deserted, half-destroyed hut, collected stones from odd places, filled the holes, turfed the roof, washed down the walls and set the peat to burning without anyone's by-your-leave. There was no one really to send them packing, for the former tenant, gone so long none could recall his name or story, had no claim to the house. The actual owner, far from his property, had no informer or agent to set or collect rent from the dead ruins which had been so heartily resurrected by the O'Malley clan.

The O'Malleys filled places in their lives that no one in Clifden had dreamed were empty. They brought an excitement which was more than just the rare intrusion of strangers. They brought with them a certain daring and determination and sense of life which the bleak, weary, drained and emptied villagers and countrymen around the tiny town watched with wariness at first, then with interest, then, gradually, with a reviving enthusiasm of their own toward life.

The O'Malleys had no intention whatever of rotting or dying off in silence. They let it be known they were just biding time until they would be able to retrace their steps across the face of the land to the Irish Sea, to embarkation, to the New World. What had brought them, in obvious flight, to the west, was a mystery to which they never referred, nor permitted any in their hearing to refer, and it was a matter of much speculation.

The O'Malleys let it be known that their plan was a migration: the whole lot of them, not just an eldest son, or daughter with a position waiting, but the whole bunch of them, part and parcel, from parents to oldest son, Peadar, to youngest girl, Maureen. They'd go when the time and cash came together, and if they'd be damned, well, then, they'd go and be damned and so be it.

Kevin O'Malley, the father, was a large red-haired and red-faced man who announced himself in the town's main pub to be a man of all trades and entertainments. He briskly listed his accomplishments to an unimpressed gathering: tradesman and craftsman; common laborer or skilled; a head for facts and figures; a teller of stories to hold the listener spellbound; a player of tunes and a singer of songs. To prove the last boast, he motioned to his oldest son, a tall, vague, reddish-haired shadow of the father, who provided a fiddle which Kevin fondled for a moment and then briskly played.

He cajoled them all to join him in singing but they held back until his own voice, strong and clear, reached into them, surrounded them, embraced them, until they could feel the very tune reel inside their blood. One by one, the younger men first, uncertain and shy, glances cast at their elders, who finally moved their own lips, unloosed their own voices, joined in, unable to remain silent in the face of Kevin O'Malley's singing.

No one had any money to speak of, yet, carefully, eyes averted, as though they might be committing an offense, they placed the large copper pennies in the hat which rested, upturned, upon the bar.

"Don't be shy, lads," Kevin O'Malley roared at them. "Jasus knows, there's none to hear the dumb man and doesn't it bring joy to your hearts to hear the gifted!"

He traveled the countryside, his sons with him, his wife and girls awaiting him at home. He returned with his wagon filled with kindling or grain or a sheep or goat or two. Sometimes, he brought a rare bag of coins. Rarely did he return empty-handed, and when he did, he would embrace his wife and girls with rough heartiness and sit over mugs of tea and plan for future encounters with fate.

They acquired, somehow, through shrewd trade or dumb luck, a lean and fragile greyhound with haunted eyes and trembling frame. They raced him and won; raced him and lost; purchased a mate for him; raised some pups; sold some; raced others. Won and lost, but won more than lost.

Occasionally, Kevin and his sons disappeared for long periods of time and then returned home silent and thoughtful, reluctant to join the men in the pub or around the open fire in someone's hut. There were rumors went about at those times: that the O'Malleys had been up to a bad day's work to the north. But whatever the bad day's work might be, no one would care to speculate out loud, and the rumors, dark and dour and curious, would hang over them for a while until Kevin appeared, all gloom cast off, with a generous offer of a sup and a swallow and all such talk would cease. Yet there was always that about them: an aura of unspoken deeds done in the black of night, mysterious, unknowable and vastly intriguing.

Kevin brought into the town great surly brutes of men who hammered at each other's bodies and heads with mallet fists to the amazed and excited shouts of the men of five neighboring communities who traveled upward of ten miles by foot and wagon and paid their bread money to watch the matches.

Kevin sold and traded and acquired and dispensed: animals, goods, services, arrangements of all kinds. The O'Malleys seemed to live off the land or from up their sleeves for they were never known to spend hard coin. Cash was for the family's migration to America and for nothing else in this world or the other.

Kevin O'Malley's last great spectacle was not intended by him to be his last; it was as his fate decreed without consulting himself.

On his travels, he had come upon a huge beast of a man, nearer to seven feet tall than six, with shoulders wide enough for two men and legs as stout around as solid old trees and arms to match. He managed to convince the lad-he was a simple farm boy-to test his strength by lifting heavy things: stones and logs and man and animal. Kevin caught the basic flaw; while the lad had strength, he had no technique. He bent from his ample waist, so that when he lifted, all the exertion went to his back. Huge and strong though he was, he was no great weight lifter and Kevin took care not to teach him too much: just enough for Kevin's purpose.