In the Village of the Foreigners

Abstract

In the Village of the Foreigners Kieran Quinlan We were dining at a trendy chain bistro in Birmingham, Alabama, called Babalu—I Love Lucy episodes looped endlessly in the background—when the call came. At first, I couldn’t understand the unfamiliar voice at the other end. Pressing the screen hard against my ear, I pushed through the Friday crowd waiting to be seated and stepped outside to hear clearly: Michael was dead. I told my cousin I’d be in Galbally by Sunday. By the time I zigzagged my way back to our table, the food had arrived: little bowls of fancily named edibles on rough slabs of rectangular slate, a variant of all the other new eateries in the area. As I sat down, I let Mary know about Michael. His death had been more or less expected. He was eighty-nine, a couple of decades older than me. I wasn’t troubled. Now, in Dublin, I’m groggy from the overnight flight, two viewings of American Hustle on the plane, and barely an hour’s sleep. The entrance to my hotel at the airport is blocked by roadwork; I circle it three times before I concede that my British-accented GPS was right all along. A few hours of intermittent rest and I’m on the road again in my rental. I hadn’t thought to bring sunglasses to Ireland in December, but the light is so blinding on this Sunday noon that I have to squint to see ahead of me on the M7. Michael had been suffering from mild cognitive impairment for a while before his death at a nursing home in Fermoy. I hadn’t noticed. “You wouldn’t,” his eldest son Francis explained to me a year earlier, when I’d visited Michael in his own house. “My father does quite well when you’re around because you remind him of the past.” I remind him of the past. I never before thought of myself as being quite so antique. I’d said then that I wanted to come for the funeral. “You’ll be doing that for yourself,” Francis responded as we stood together in the concrete yard of what had once been my grandparents’ home. At the time, I was taken aback by his directness, but I assumed Francis was offering me a way out. I’m all the more pleased now to be keeping my word. Michael was my last immediate family tie with Ireland and his death has pushed me back into the final chapter of that decades-interrupted narrative. Previous [End Page 9] visits have been for vacation or academic conferences. Now, Ireland is real once again, its psychic claustrophobia almost tangible, and the journey itself already having an immediacy and seriousness I haven’t experienced for a long time. On the M7, meanwhile, it hits me that I’ve never before set out for the country without first visiting cousins or friends in Dublin. As an only child living in a row house with my widower father and his unmarried older sister in the 1950s, I used to love leaving the city for summers with my handsome young uncle and maternal Ryan grandparents in the village of Galbally in County Limerick. When I was eleven or twelve and could take the train alone, I’d pack my cardboard suitcase weeks in advance of the trip. Michael would be at the Emly station to meet me in his black Ford Prefect. A car was a luxury we didn’t have in Dublin. My father walked to work at the Guinness brewery every weekday morning, and on Saturdays as well. At summer’s end, my heart would sink as the train home approached Kingsbridge Station and I glimpsed again the tiny houses with their grim back yards and was reminded of my confinement. The truth is that in Dublin, where my much older, bookish dad was a tradesman, money was tight; in the country, where my grandparents had a pub, a farm, and a sand and gravel business, and where my unbookish uncle was a businessman—he even had a letterhead—there was always more cash around. It was...