The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry Page B

chime.'
    'What is that?' I said.
    And as I spoke my mother appeared in the door behind my father. She was holding in her hands a square porcelain object, with its elegant dial, and around it someone, no doubt in New York, had painted little flowers.
    'I don't have it ticking,' she said, in a small voice, like a fearless child, 'for fear.'
    My father stood up.
    'Where did you buy it, Cissy? Where did you buy such a thing?'
    'In Grace's of the Weir.'
    'Grace's of the Weir?' he said, incredulously. 'I have never even been into that shop. I would be afraid to go into it, in case they charged me for entering.'
    She stood there, shrinking in her unhappiness.
    'It is made by Ansonia,' she said, 'in New York.'
    'Can we take it back, Cissy?' he said. 'Let's take it back to Grace's and see where we are then. We cannot go on making payments to Fine. They will never give you what you gave them for it, but they might give you something on it, and maybe we can close the debt with Mr Fine. I am sure he will oblige me if he can.'
    'I never even heard it tick or chime,' she said.
    'Well, turn the key in it and have it tick. And when it strikes the hour it will chime.'
    'I can't,' she said, 'for they will find it then. They will follow the sound and find it.'
    'Who, Cissy? Us, is it? I think we have done all the finding now.'
    'No, no,' said my mother, 'the rats. The rats will find it.'
    My mother looked up at him with an eerie glow in her face, like a conspirator.
    'We will be better to smash it,' she said.
    'No,' said my father as desperate as you like.
    'No, it would be better. To smash it. To smash Southampton and all. And Sligo. And you. I'll raise it up now, Joe, and bring it down upon the earth like this,' and indeed she did raise it up, and indeed she did throw it down on the thin damp cake of concrete on the floor, 'there, all promises retrieved, all hurts healed, all losses restored!'
    The clock lay in its porcelain pieces there, some little ratchet loosened, and for the first and last time in our house, the Ansonia clock chimed with its Toronto chime.
     
    It was soon after this, so soon, that I have to report, my father was found dead.
    To this day I don't know what killed him exactly, but I have puzzled it over these eighty years and more. I have given you the run of the thread, and where has it led me? I have lain all the facts before you.
    Surely the matter of the clock was too small a thing to kill a man?
    Surely the dead boys was a dark thing, but dark enough to darken my father forever?
    The girls also, yes, that was a dark matter, bright though they were as they fell.
    It was my father's fate to have those things befall him.
    He was just as anyone else, and anything, clock or heart, he had a breaking point.
    It was in the next street in a derelict cottage, where he was working to rid it of rats, at the behest of the neighbours to right and left of the empty house, that he hanged himself.
    Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
    Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father.
    I cry out for him.

chapter nine
    I suppose I must add the few unpleasant things that befell my father after death, when he was no more than a big pudding of blood and past events. It is possible to love a person more than oneself, and yet as a child, or nearly woman, to have such a thought, when your father is carried into the house for the inevitable wake…Notthat we hoped to have many to wake him.
    His motorbike was put out into the little yard by Mr Pine our neighbour, a cold-eyed carpenter who yet put himself immediately to assist us. I need not tell you it was never brought in again but was left to fetch for itself as best it could in the outdoors.
    In its place was set the long penny-halfpenny coffin with my father's large nose poking up. Because he had hanged