Hanging with the Elephant by Michael Harding Page B

suddenly distressed by the crowds standing around, looking at the coffin as it was slid out of the hearse. With my brother andcousins, I put my shoulder to the grim timber box and we negotiated our way up the hill on a narrow path that led through other graves and tombstones, until we were at the place where my father had been buried forty years earlier. It was a path she had travelled well each summer to put flowers on his grave and stand bewildered with a little beret on her head as the priests blessed the graves, when hundreds of people from Cavan squashed together around their family plots to remember their dead.
    A black slab declares my father’s dates of birth and death. Halfway down the smooth limestone are the words: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want’, which is what my brother and I had agreed was sufficient at the time. But our mother insisted without us knowing that a further phrase be added, so that in its entirety the slab now reads: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want – erected by his sons.’
    I smiled when I saw it again as her coffin rested on a platform of crossbeams astride the empty hole in the plot where she would soon be planted.
    The priest said his prayers. The relations and old friends shaded their eyes from the July sun and mumbled a decade of the rosary beneath dramatic tufts of cloud. And that was it. A blustery summer day. Strong showers and intermittent blasts of sunlight. My mother was in her grave.
    An old man who had known her well grabbed me by the elbow so suddenly that I almost fell into the black hole.
    ‘How are you now?’ he enquired.
    ‘I’m fine, Mr Dolan,’ I replied, because as a child I had only known him by his surname.
    ‘Well, your mammy is gone to a better place,’ he declared.
    Mr Dolan was old now but I remembered him from those Friday afternoons when I was six and I used to go shopping with Mother. He worked in a grocery shop on Main Street. He had long wavy blond hair back then, and a blue tie, and he was the one who had a stylish way of wrapping the ham in brown paper and then slipping the white twine around it and cutting the twine with a tug of his fingers, which always amazed me. He would present the parcel of cold ham to my mother and wink at me, or give me a mint sweet from the big jar with the image of the polar bear. But he too had grown old, and his face was skeletal. His hair had turned white, his blue tie wandered in the wind and his dentures were not firm in his gums; they floated about his mouth as he scrutinised me and leaned his enormous purple nose into my face as if he could smell my emotions. Everyone knew I had been sick. I had been depressed for a year or two, and it was no secret. But he sniffed me with an intimacy that made me feel ashamed.
    ‘I heard you went through a bit of a stormy patch last year,’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘but it’s over now.’
    ‘Of course it is,’ he agreed. ‘Sure it happens to the best of us. It’s the interior weather. It’s like everything else. It’s unpredictable. One day sunshine and then a week of rain.’
    He squeezed my elbow tightly once more.
    ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said. ‘But you need to mind yourself now.’
    And suddenly he was gone. He dashed into the crowd as the crowd crushed in for my hand and mumbled their sympathy in my ear.
    I kept up a show of grim cheerfulness throughout the funeral pageantry. But inside I was numb and brittle. I felt my depression might return at any moment. I suspected Dracula was standing under the rowan trees on the edge of the graveyard waiting to embrace me when I was alone.
    ‘She was a big age,’ someone said of Mother.
    ‘She was ninety-six,’ I replied.
    ‘Sure it was time for her to go,’ another one said.
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘She had a good innings.’
    ‘She did.’
    ‘She was a monument.’
    ‘She was.’
    And on it went for half an hour at the graveside. Old broken men and