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On the eve of his funeral, a sister remembers with love a very special brother gone now, writes YVONNE NOLAN
IT ALL begins with words. Words that teem and toss about, they stream and eddy. They’re torrential and pressing and insistent. They are lovely to hear inside, they talk to you; they are a delight to hear coming in, hovering, banking, waiting to land – that tree, sitka but call it evergreen, the flowers “sweet william” but who is he to be so sweet as to be like raspberry curdling and bleeding into cream? Our place, Corcloon, not a village or a town, but our fields and our neighbour’s fields, watched over from miles by the chimneys of a power station, sentinels. The sounds: the ominous scrape and clang of the cemetery gate, the calves bawling for a bucket, the wheedling miaow of the insincere and part-time house cat, the crunch of wheels on gravel, the throaty rasp of Tom Coyne’s Volkswagen as he changes gears, the red American kettle that sings on the range, the hum of voltage through an electric clock, the thunk of the handpump taking water from the well; a deep, dark place – you can’t see the bottom.
