What I Took Home
The funeral was on the Monday. I will not describe it in detail, because funerals in the west go the way they go, and there is a grammar to them that anyone from the place will know and anyone not from it will not be helped by the telling.
The removal was on the Sunday evening. The neighbours came up to the house first, because the house was where you went, and the house took them in the way a house takes in water in a wet February, grudgingly at first and then completely. My mother stood in the sitting room by the new red couch and she shook hands for an hour, and I stood beside her for the first twenty minutes, and then I got her a cup of tea, and then I stood beside her again. Caitriona ran the kitchen. Caitriona ran the kitchen with the authority of a woman who had been running kitchens at wakes since she was sixteen, and I saw, for the first time, what my brother had married, and it was not the girl I had disliked in sixth year; it was a country woman of the specific and serious kind who steps in when a house needs to be kept running, and who does not take thanks, and who remembers the names of the children of people she has not seen in ten years. I will not pretend I came away friends with Caitriona. I came away indebted to her, which is a different and longer thing.
The Mass was on the Monday in the church in the village, the same church I had made my Communion in. The