Plunged into an enlightened dark on Little Christmas

When it comes to raising up the spirits of times past, whiskey and candlelight can be powerful evocations

THE LIGHTS WENT out on Nollaig na mBan; the relentless flow of television news and soap opera came to a standstill.

I was in a lovely big dark kitchen, like a cave, with candlelight, and whiskey on the table, and three old women around the solid-fuel range, and their old men at the table, talking of rushes and horses, and shooting ducks in the morning.

The electricity was off for hours. The women were silent, and their busy hands were still at last, and in the candlelight their youth returned, their eyes sparkled and their skin glowed with heat like a forest of lanterns.

“There’s rushes in the field beyond the river,” a man said, “near the forestry.”

“Rushes in Westmeath!” another exclaimed, “that’s a disgrace!”

“It comes in the cattle hooves,” the third fellow explained. “The cattle carry the rushes from Leitrim when they’re bought in.” “Isn’t that a terror,” one of the women said, wiping her brow, “we don’t know our own bodies.”

A clock ticked in the shadows and we sat so long by candlelight that eventually the faces around me were transformed; the men dissolved into ghosts, but the women grew more beautiful in the flickering light, in the shape of stories told, and shards of love remembered.

And whenever death was mentioned, it was with bleak and comic relish. “There was a lady buried in Kinnegad,” the woman of the house said, “and she was very rich and she had a diamond ring on her finger when they locked her away in the vault. Later that night, one of the servants broke into her coffin, but couldn’t get the ring off her finger. So he got a knife to do the job and as the blade was going through the bone, the old lady woke up.”

They asked me, did I ever see a dead person? I smiled and said: “Too many.” I recalled a woman in Fermanagh who lived alone with lots of cats. I used to see her at first light, standing in the porch of the shop across the street from my bungalow, waiting for hours until the shop opened.

One day, I went over and asked the shopkeeper who the early customer might be. He told me that the old woman had no clock, and lived alone. “All she ever buys is tins of cat food,” he said.

Months later, the cat woman went missing and a flotilla of small boats was launched to search for her on the waters of the Erne. I was in the boat that found her, face down, beneath the bridge at Trasna island.

I was working as a local curate, and so it was the first of numerous encounters I had with death along the shores of that beautiful river; closing coffins, touching dead faces, shovelling clay into open graves, and trying to say comforting things to the broken-hearted.

When I opened the front door of a house and gazed at the mourners in black suits and dresses, with red-rimmed eyes, marooned in a blue fog of tobacco smoke, I would summon up archaic words about God’s will, though the words were so clichéd that they stuck in my throat.

And apart from duties that brought me close to the dead, there was little else to do.

I had a glasshouse full of tomatoes and a garden of roses, which I inherited from the previous curate. And I too had a cat that gave birth to four kittens in a box beside the washing machine in the utility room.

I was completely alone, and had little interest in either tomatoes or roses, so even they began to wither. The roses got black spot and the tomatoes were drenched with greenfly by the end of the summer.

When I was finished telling this story, the woman of the house gazed at me, as if she was seeing me for the very first time.

The hour was late and the whiskey almost finished; the whispering voices and flickering candles had brought the dead in close, but suddenly the electricity returned. The women were disappointed, and called for the lights to be turned off again; but the men would have none of it. They rose to their feet like uneasy heroes, in overcoats and muck boots, clutching their lamps; they were ready for dawn, ducks, and the real world.

mharding@irishtimes.com