My father was a difficult man. He only every spoke to me in proverbs. When Mum died I was still young enough to think that boycotting her funeral could bring her back. But my father came into my bedroom and pinned me up by the neck, his voice booming,

‘Son. You have to go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours’.

When I was twelve, I came home from school and said that I hated my teacher. He let the newspaper slacken in his hands and his severe, red face came into view.

‘Boy. If you’ve got nothing nice to say about someone, say nothing at all.’  And then he disappeared behind his newspaper.

I was eighteen when he finally died. Rather than lie, I gave no eulogy at all.

Outside my bedroom window a storm had found the island. Every day the sea looked more ragged and chased us further into the Atlantic. Angry waves threw themselves onto the cliffs to frighten seagulls and fishermen. No skipper could make the crossing during the storm so food was rationed and no priest came from the mainland for over a week.

He used to make me go to mass with him when I was young. We never missed a Sunday. I’d waddle up the hill in my red wellies, taking three steps to match his colossal stride. During mass I kneeled, stood and blessed myself whenever he did. I was always praying for mass to end so we could go to Concannon’s shop for the rashers and sausages. The shop wasn’t far from the church and sat at the top of the hill where the road crested the foot of Dún Chonchúr. Mick Concannon was a tall man with a tobacco yellow smile and a maroon jumper that he wore every day. He sold small amounts of everything in winter, and in the summer, he’d sell hot chips from a hatch on the side of his shop. He used to sneak me sweets when my father’s back was turned but after a while I had to stop taking them.

On the first morning of the storm, Mick’s face appeared in my front door window; a puzzled landscape of cracks and fine furrows. I was in the kitchen frying an egg. When I opened the door he asked for ‘The Sergeant’. Usually, he would be up already. I gave three loud bangs on his door and poured Mick a cup of tea while we waited for him to surface. Mick said the winds had knocked down the telephone lines and he needed to use my father’s radio to check if the ferry was coming from the mainland. He had nothing to say after that and just stared blankly into his teacup. I went to my father’s bedroom door again and gave another three loud knocks. I shouted ‘Sergeant’ but got no reply. Gravity hummed over the silence.

When I entered the room, my father was sitting up in bed beside a spent bottle of whiskey. His head was wilted towards his right shoulder and the drawn curtains. His black shoes and Sergeant’s jacket were on the floor by the bed but he was still wearing his shirt, trousers and socks. ‘Da?’ I said, still holding onto the door handle. It looked like my father but stripped of his explosive vitality. It reminded me of the dummies I put in my bed when I practiced running away to the cliffs. I stepped into the room and came closer to his bed.

‘Da?’

There was no answer. His skin was green and either his face had shrunk or his nose had gotten bigger. It looked like a beak. I touched his shoulder. He was cold and his eyes were closed to small dark slivers. He probably died in his sleep without even noticing. His skin was pulled tight across his forehead, and at one corner of his mouth, flakes of dried spit gathered under his moustache and looked like dandruff. There was no breath. Mick was standing at the doorway looking in.

‘It’s really him’, I heard myself say.

The day after he died I cleaned him up as best I could and laid him out on his bed. I dressed him in his Sergeant’s uniform and shined his shoes. I put Brylcreem in his hair and combed it straight back into a neat black sheen just the way he kept it. I shaved his face and trimmed his moustache. I cleaned under his fingernails, interlocked his grey hands on the drumlin of his stomach and placed his Garda cap on the bedside locker. I used to try it on when I was a child; the impossible size of it brought the rim over my eyes. I arrested my Bosco doll for every crime I knew of and locked him up in a cardboard box jail with ‘midnight blue’ crayon bars. But my father needed his cap for work and after a while I was forbidden from playing with it anymore.

Duty-bound sympathisers trailed in and out of the house leaving a crime scene of biscuit crumbs and half-drank cups of tea behind them. They assured me that they were sorry for my loss and I acknowledged them with a trained nod.

I proposed a gathering in the pub. Most of the regulars were there but a few were conspicuous in their absence and I made a note of their names in a flip notebook I had started carrying around in my breast pocket. We were flanked on all sides by another unruly evening, poorly made for travelling home, so the fire was lit and we sat there in a loose bunch telling stories about my father.

Mick Concannon invented flattering lies about him for my sake, and as the night ambled on and the drink got the better of my reason, I could have convinced myself that there was a kinder version of my father whom I had never met – but I didn’t. As far as I knew nobody had ever liked him. His unswayable enthusiasm for brutalising every man, woman and child in the parish with the fine print of the law, was matched only by his passion for whiskey. On the island, he was so unanimously detested that he became the standard by which other surly people were measured; the zenith of human callousness. To hear them talk about him I may as well have been at the wrong wake, so rather than listen to stories of some other son’s father, I gulped the rest of my pint and hit the bar.

Tom had tended O’Flaherty’s Bar for as long as I could remember. He was the authority on the world, the island, and everybody on it. He had big forearms that he crossed whenever he was making a point or when he had no pint to pull. What he didn’t know probably never happened at all.

He put his hand out. His palm was red and meaty, like being handed a raw steak.

‘Sorry for your loss Jimmy.’ The ’s’ sounds struggled through his mouth and whistled on their way through a gap in his front teeth.

‘Thanks Tom.’  My hand was lost in his but I returned as hearty a handshake as I could.  My father’s barstool pontifications still caromed about my head like pennies in a washing machine.

‘The measure of a man is in his handshake.’  I handed Tom’s big paw back to him and asked for a Guinness.

My father spent his final years in the pub; what he referred to as “headquarters”. Over the past few months Tom had thrown him out of the pub as many times as he had opened it. I used to hear him stumble up to the house terrorising the night with drunken accusations, and once, at the peak of his drunkenness, I heard him crying about Mum.

The day she passed away, he was in the armchair waiting for his dinner. There were three pots on the stove and my mother moved ceaselessly about the kitchen, drawing trails of steam in her wake. When she fell, she brought two full pots down on top of her. Steam rising from her body was the only thing that moved in the room. My mother always looked like she knew what she was doing. Even when she lay on the ground littered by parboiled potatoes and carrots, I expected her to sit up at any moment with a sound reason for making such a mess on the kitchen floor.

I left Tom fixing my drink and went to the toilet. When I came back there was a generous whiskey beside my pint. Tom poured one for himself and raised his glass towards me,

‘May God give peace to Sergeant Bernard.’

I clinked his glass and took a nip of whiskey. ‘Amen.’

A smooth, warm glow untied the knot in my stomach, and wisps of turf smoke pooled in my throat. It was a peat-smoked, twelve year old Scotch; nothing like the poteen I stole from my father.

‘I need a favour Tom.’

Tom put down his glass and crossed his arms.

‘I need help with the burial tomorrow.’

Tom had the same expression on his face that he gets when he’s stuck on the crossword.

‘Sure there’ll be no ferry tomorrow with these winds.’

‘Ah I can’t wait for the priest, Tom.’

‘Well you can’t bury the man without the benefit of clergy either.’  His voice took the tone he kept for drunkards to be thrown out.

‘I can’t wait Tom!’  I had said it louder then I intended and my eyes were brimming with water. I took a deep breath and lowered my voice before continuing.

‘Look, with this storm forecast for the rest of the week, he’ll be half rotten before I get a chance to bury him with a priest.  I can smell him already, you know.’

Tom said nothing for a while but he mimed hesitation.

‘I understand,’ he said finally, nodding and looking away to pour me another pint even though I hadn’t ordered it.

‘I know’, I said. ‘I just want him out of the house.’

Tom arrived early the following morning. I was still struggling with my hangover as I opened the door. He was duffled-up like an Eskimo and was kicking at the tufts of grass growing on my doorstep. His pony waited behind him in the rain and there were pickaxes and shovels on the cart. He stepped inside and brought a gust of wind with him.

I nodded and hugged my chest against the seeping chill. Half-heartedly, I offered him a cup of tea. He held up a flask and shook it, so I showed him to where the empty coffin was leaning in the corner of the kitchen, before going to my room to put more layers on. When I returned, Tom was in my father’s room and had laid the coffin beside the bed. He clasped his hands together, and with his eyebrows arched he looked at me and said,

‘Right?’

‘Right’, I said.

Tom grabbed him under the arms and I stood with one leg on either side of the coffin and grabbed my father by his ankles. He was heavier than I expected and I felt cold coming through the fabric of his navy slacks. Tom heaved him up and I slung his legs out of the bed and lowered them into the coffin. When I released him, his feet rolled from side to side on the heel of his black shiny shoes and for a second, he was dancing in his coffin. I had never seen him dance. Tom covered him with the lid and secured it with brass screws, taking him out the back door, feet first.

I made sure all the windows and doors were locked before we left and Tom strapped the coffin and tools down with heavy ropes tied in bowline knots. The pony was reluctant to set off into the strong wind and Tom had to convince him with a willow rod. The cemetery was on the far side; six miles made arduous by the importunate storm and the unreasonable shape of the island.

We climbed the hill towards Dún Chonchúr and down the other side passing the empty church (where Tom blessed himself), the dormant pub, and the houses with flickering amber windowpanes. It was hard to see past the downpour and the road stretched forward for only a few metres before being swallowed up by sweeping sheets of rain. The wind made it hard to hear, or talk, or catch a clean breath, so Tom had to shout slowly to make conversation.

‘We’ll have to send to the mainland for our Guards as well as our priests now. That’s mainland politicians for you. They never did any good for us.’

I nodded and said that he was right.

Tom grumbled his throat clear and continued, ‘For all of his faults, your father was the most committed policeman we ever had here.’

Tom was a born diplomat. I said he’d be a hard man to replace, but I don’t think I said it loud enough for Tom to hear over the wind.

The roads took us past the ruins of the island’s other pagan fort, Dún Fearbhe, poking its head out of billowing clouds. I used to think Zeus lived up there. Two weeks ago, I took poteen from my father’s room using an empty jam jar and went to the remote Dún where I was less likely to be caught. The poteen tasted like fire, but I got enough of it into me to know what all the fuss was about. I climbed the wide walls and haunted the fort’s dead Gods. I roared back at the sea and at the mainlanders who thought they were better than us. Towards the end of the afternoon, I threw rocks at the cows below until they all ran away, and then at the walls until my throwing arm got tired. The dark was hurrying in, so I began a slow pace home and tried to play the part of a sober young man, out for a walk. I did well hailing my neighbours in their fields along the way, with an easy smile and a tip of my cap, careful not to be too enthusiastic or uneven.

As I came through the front door, my act was undone when I stumbled on an upturned corner of the rug. My father was sitting in his armchair near the fire.

‘Well?  What the Hell is the matter with you?’  His voice was rasping like there was phlegm boiling at the back of his throat.

I was promised a hiding if he ever caught me drinking so I said, ‘nothing,’ and turned to leave the kitchen but bumped into the table and knocked a knife onto the floor. As I stooped to pick it up, my father rose from his seat in a determined stride towards me. I heard him sniffing the air for clues as I struggled to regain an elusive balance. My father’s face was gathering closer behind a mist of stars. I thought I was going to pass out when the white noise finally lifted; everything in the world had stopped dead in its tracks. We were standing toe to toe and there was a foreign expression of fear on his face. I followed his eyes down to the knife tip that was touching the breast pocket of his uniform. We stared each other down over a crushing silence until he slapped my hand and the knife splashed silver on the floor like a gasping fish.

That was Friday evening and my face was only beginning to swell. He left me with one empty bucket and one filled with water, and locked the cell door behind him. On Monday my bruises were yellow and he released me. Neither of us had said a word to each other since.

When the pier came into sight, the small amount of shelter offered by the stone walls was gone and our progress was met by the full force of the driving rain. I pulled my winter coat tight about my neck and we turned left where the hill tapered to meet the pier. The turn skirted the fringe of the island for another half mile before it arrived at the cemetery and faded into sand. We clung tight enough to the cliffs to taste salt from the waves.

The cemetery looked directly out to sea, there was a road to the pier on the left, a path to the faerie hill on the right, and a plane of limestone crags stretched out behind it. Tom said that most cemeteries are at crossroads to make it hard for the dead to find their way home. This one wasn’t.

The cemetery gate was rusted and brittle. At my mother’s burial I tried to grab hold of my father’s hand. He jerked it away and said that was my mother’s job. ‘She’s dead’, he said, and stepped through the gate ahead of me.

As the priest read the prayers and they put her in the ground, my father’s emotions were tightly concealed behind his moustache. I was crying so hard nobody could hear the priest, so Maire Concannon came over and patted my back like a baby.  After the funeral, my father and I stayed behind while all the others filtered out of the graveyard. When the last mourner had left, he looked down at me and said,

‘You shamed your mother today with that performance. Shamed us all, in front of the whole village.’ Then he stooped down to my eye level and said with as much malice as he could summon; ‘Crying is for girls and criminals. So, which did I raise?’ I looked at the ground, but knew that not to give him an answer was to invite punishment. ‘A criminal’ I said.

He snorted as he threw his head back. ‘I’m going to O’Flaherty’s. You go home.’

I returned to the graveside sucking the air silently through my pale face. He stopped at the gates and shouted back, ‘I’ll make a man out of you yet.’

For sometime afterwards I tried to beat my father at forcing these drawn-out silences. His were always larger and louder than mine. He was the size of a man whose silence rippled like a quiet, bubbling threat.

We dug his plot next to my mother’s. The rain had made the soil heavy and my hand’s broken blisters stung with every blow of the shovel. Apart from its weight, the soil seemed willing and we met few stones large enough to slow our progress. We set the coffin on two planks over the grave and lowered it using the ropes we’d used to tie up the cart. When it was done, Tom turned away to give me a moment alone but he returned to help once he heard the first shovel load land on the coffin lid. We were thorough in our work and the hole filled quickly. I said a prayer for my mother before I left.

As is customary with burials, we took separate paths and avoided our usual routes home. I shook Tom’s hand and told him I’d see him in the pub later on. He took the pier road because it was the only one able for the pony and cart. I walked the other way, past the faerie hill and down along the foot of the island where the terns make nests behind the sand dunes and attack you if you get too close. I looked over my shoulder as I climbed walls and jumped fences, but saw nothing behind me except the rain that was starting to ease.

The house was dark and hard to distinguish from the line of the night as I approached it. On my way from the gate to the front door an overgrown fuchsia clawed my sleeve. I’d have to do something about the garden now that it was mine. When I got inside, I turned on all the lights, lit the fire and put the kettle on. My jumper splashed like a wet mop when I dropped it to the floor. My father had plenty of smart clothes that hadn’t fit him in years, so I went into his bedroom and opened his wardrobe. His first Sergeant’s uniform was hanging inside a plastic cover. The one that hadn’t been stretched by his belly. It was crisp and dark blue, and when I put it on it fit just fine. I closed the wardrobe door to look at myself in the mirror. His Garda cap was still on top of the bedside locker. It wasn’t his hat anymore. There was also a bottle of whiskey, and that was mine now too.

I was feeling a distinctive brand of terrible the following morning. Nausea and remorse were trying to outbid one another for my attention. The scalding racket from my own delicate movements was already too much for my nerves, but the rapping at the front door was scoring wounding channels in my head. When I pulled the door open, the sun was blinding and there was a priest standing on the step. He looked confused.

‘Could I speak to the master of the house…Sergeant? I understand there’s been a death.’