God’s Backyard
I grew up in a landscape that locals boasted was God’s backyard. All one had to do was walk down the lane from our single village street, and left or right, some proliferation of golden gorse, or precision of stone wall or matrix of mountain range begged applause for its grandeur. Long before I could utter my first words, in Irish or English, such love came over me, thrown at my mother’s feet in the field behind our house, that I assumed the damp grass upon which I sat to be an extension of limb and vision. That everywhere I would go from here on, there would trot before me an article of nature to drape my path. Some final touch God had put to His great creation when He landed at the far-flung tip of our peninsula. Emptied what was left in His basket of bog and rock and impossible beauty to complete the backyard in which my mother now labored.
Mamma, for her part, never looked further than the task before her. Practical in all things, including affection, she would drop me on the same grassy mound every time we went outside to hang yet another long line of clothes. On those coveted breezy days, the ones that would blow the living bedbugs out of Jesus himself, Mamma would make her slow way down the length of the twine line, pegging sheet after sock after jumper to catch a pocket of wind. As she went, her lips constantly moved to some silent conversation, possibly as some ploy to improve my hearing acuity for future gossip-gathering. Either way, not to be outdone, I would mimic her inaudible chatter with gibberish that produced more saliva than sense. I recall once plucking daisy heads by the fistful to offer Mamma some comfort and prize all at once, to share with her the blanket of blossoms of which there seemed no end and to temper what I already absorbed of some unnamed sadness that was mine to salve. In that memory, a felt sense of pure love prevails where Mamma, on the one hand, was all I wished to become, and the land upon which I sat was everything I never wished to leave.
Once, when I was slightly older, and I could reach the pegs by myself, Mamma and I faced one another across the line, untangling towels and underwear and jumpers. It was late summer and the sun had etched the western mountain into a beastly shape, as though some giant had stepped from the Atlantic and had been frozen by his first contact with the landscape. Not an unlikely scenario if he landed in the dead of an Irish winter mind you.
I saw an opening, Mamma entangled in a sheet that had seen better years at the turn of the century. Which is to say, in that moment, we weren’t quite face to face.
Look, I said to Mamma, that could be Gulliver behind you frozen solid inside Canúig Mountain.
I did this. I tested the limits of her endurance to my ponderings. She never used a word such as ponderings. I did. She preferred words like daftness, touched in the head, in another world, meaning a half step from the mental home. Repetitive, yes. But in her eyes, never redundant. The more she could peg you to the disease of your own idiocy with as many middle names as she could fit on a baptismal cert, the more she hoped her view of you would do you some good.
I’m doing you a great service, she’d say. People will roll their eyes into the back of their heads if they hear that silly carry on from you. And then, as though inspired by the image of such hazardous eye-rolling, she would add, not that some of them couldn’t do with their eyes being stuck back there, a fact that would leave her visibly torn between the tiresome obligation of loyalty to her own flesh and blood not being a laughing stock and the prospect of the people she despised, which included, most people if not everyone on the parish census, being permanently blinded by her children’s obvious stupidity.
I kept looking for the ways I could match my insides to some outside comment from my mother that would say: it’s perfectly fine for a nine-year-old to sweep through the kitchen on the handle of a brush as the Virgin Mary on horseback, her younger brother on a smaller horse, playing either Joseph or Jesus unable to keep up with Her Immaculateness, and even more normal for a girl to eye her dessert plate and describe the shades of Neapolitan ice-cream as God’s fairy liquid of color.
I kept trying. Mamma kept adding middle names to my dictionary of identity.
But this one day, I spoke of the mountain, how Gulliver could easily be waiting for a person to come and tap him on the toe and unfreeze him. Whatever way I said what I said, with no small amount of trepidation in the saying of it, the last whispers of childish fiction fast leaving me, Mamma surprised me.
She popped her head out from behind the neon orange of a nylon sheet, and stared at me. This was always a dangerous moment, the moment between being baptized afresh with her disappointment and sheer disbelief, or maybe, being granted some small nod of approval.
What is it with my crowd, she said, that ye love this God forsaken place so much?
It shocked me.
Mamma had never spoken so plainly to me. Even I could feel that there was nothing here but genuine truth.
What…what do you mean? I stammered.
I became aware that I was actually stammering to my own mother. Not with the expectant shame of the soon to be scalded but with the self-conscious shock of a wish granted for which I wasn’t ready, that this would be the day Mamma would start talking from her insides.
This place, she said again. This place and its hold on my crowd.
And the way she said this place turned me inside out. Like I was being branded with some fresh hatred of something I had till now only loved.
Don’t…don’t…you like it here?
I could barely ask the question.
Here, even as I said that word, seemed to reverberate out into the unspoken implications of her answer, that soon I might very well be unmoored not just from love of landscape but from some sense of anchoring that came with knowing, at the very least, where I belonged. I belonged here. In this village. Where I had grown up.
But now, there took root between myself and Mamma some new language. I wasn’t ready.
I remember that exact feeling. I remember wishing she’d christen me with some well-regarded nickname that had come upon her while ironing clothes to get the wet out of them or kneading brown bread till the Formica table screamed for mercy. We always knew when she had stumbled onto a jewel because she’d laugh out of the blue and we’d ask, what’s so funny Mamma, hungry for the intimacy of being let in on a private thing, and she’d toss her head in prophetic satisfaction and say: ye’ll know soon enough.
That’s what I wanted now. I wanted one of those private names that she’d been saving. If you squinted at one of those names, you could take it in as pure affection. Nurse it to your chest when the family began to sing it like a national anthem. Treat it like a compliment.
Look how loved I am, you’d think to yourself, and puff out from all the attention.
But none of that on this particular day. Only a strange look on Mamma’s face, like she had been truly betrayed.
Why would I love it here? she asked, her face completely perplexed.
This was way too much inside talk, so much so that I could now grasp Mamma’s dislike of it. Made note to avoid it going forward.
Amn’t I from Waterford, Mamma said, filling the silent gap and answering her own question lest I get it wrong.
And that’s when I got it.
My mother and I came from two different places. She came from the east coast. I came from the southwest. She came from a people she called civilized. I came from, in her words, a crowd of futtah fattahs. She came from indoor plumbing when she first got married and landed, as she often said, in the dark ages.
I cannot remember what I said, or if I said anything after that.
The revelation of our separate origins had done, for once, the thing Mamma was always hoping to do. It put a muzzle on my meanderings and the relation they bore to something I would later see, in part, as my need to deify everything—deify people places and things into something better than their realities. It wasn’t poetry then that Mamma sometimes heard and put a stop to, nor a natural faculty for language and imagination, though that was all there too, but the unavoidable weeds of what she recognized in herself, in her surroundings, and in a remote region that was now her prison, the weeds of some unspoken damage that sat on every face and feature, in every seeming utterance.
Something new came loose inside me. Some way I could hear Mamma, could hear what she was saying, as though for the first time. A great lump sat in my throat, and choked all words clean out of me.
Mamma, satisfied with what she had exposed of her emotions, spoke to me then in that same straight-forward tone, like she had given me the hard spud and was now going to give me the dollop of butter.
A savage loves his native shore, she said. That’s all there is to know. A savage loves his native shore. I suppose we all do.
This last bit she said like she and I had already lost one another.
And off we went, her on one side of the clothes-line, me on the other, towel by sock by trousers.
• • •
Éanlaí Cronin’s writing has appeared in Bryant Literary Review, Agave Magazine, Delmarva Review, White Wall Review, Sweet Tree Review, String Poet, Peregrine, Sinister Wisdom, Big Muddy, The Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Courage to Heal, Entropy Magazine, and The Magic of Memoir. She was long listed in the National Poetry Competition United Kingdom in 2017; a Winner of the Eastern Iowa Review’s Lyric Essay Contest in 2018; and a Top Ten Finalist in the Fish Short Memoir Prize contest in 2018. She enjoys photography, searching for the elusive “perfect chair,” and public speaking. Her website is www.eanlaicronin.com