Brothers separated by an ocean, linked by loneliness

Once upon a time there were two brothers. One went to Chicago and the other stayed at home in Ireland and took over the farm. The Chicago man married and had three sons, and they grew up and went to Denver, Kansas and Florida. But at home in Ireland the farmer never married; he just grew old dancing at other people’s weddings.

When Chicago man was in his 60s he used to walk by Lake Michigan, sitting on a bench near the north shore, thinking about his brother in Ireland.

And sometimes when he lay down to sleep, the faces of the dead came back to him, especially his mother’s face, and he would hold them, and imagine he heard their voices once again, which often caused him to weep as he wandered about his apartment and looked out of the window at snow falling on America.

The farmer envied his Yankee brother, who came home one summer with his white-toothed wife and they all went to a lounge bar in the town to have a couple of drinks. But unlike Chicago man, the farmer had no one to hold his arm or walk him across the street to the taxi at the end of the night. And when the Yankees were gone, there was nothing to do all winter because the farmer hated standing alone in the popcorn queue in the cinema just to buy a single ticket.

Wandering barefoot
But Chicago man was left alone too as he grew old, because when the children were reared they moved off, and the wife died of cancer and, on the day they buried her in the snow, he began to envy his brother in the little homestead back in Ireland, and he imagined him surrounded by all their old neighbours.

But all those old neighbours were long dead and the young ones had emigrated and the farmer was desperately lonely too, on the side of the mountain, without the sound of another human in the house, as he wandered barefoot along the corridor at night on his endless trips to the bathroom.

Over the years he had watched the girls he grew up with pledge their lives to men from faraway places such as Enniscrone and Bundoran. He had danced with dozens of bridesmaids because he was valued as a good dancer, though he never held one long enough to risk his emotions. Never held anyone close enough to put all his scrawny acres on the table and ask someone to come home with him forever.

Dancing defiantly
And although he danced through the years at Christmas parties and summer festivals, or when a nephew came one summer from Denver to trace his ancestors, nonetheless he remained a lonesome figure on the hills, carrying hefty loads of fodder to sheep in winter or steering an old red tractor through the bog in summertime.

And despite a hip replacement, he danced defiantly into old age. Even when he was no longer able to climb the hill with his bike to visit the pub on Saturday nights he still went to the day-care centre every Tuesday, on the bus, to get a wash and a hot dinner.

He danced there too with other toothless and half-blind old fogeys before the bus returned him to his quiet cottage in the hills for another week.

The social services installed a phone for the farmer, so that he would not be so isolated on the mountain, and he called Chicago sometimes, although the two brothers spoke little except about the weather.

The farmer believed that Irish weather always resembled what the weather had been like in Chicago the previous week.

Sometimes, after a phone call, he would lie awake all night, listening to his mother’s clock still ticking on the landing until dawn broke across the mountain, and what he dreaded was the thought of his elder brother falling victim to a slow disease in such a far-off country.

“I knew he wasn’t well,” is all the farmer said when his brother fell dead suddenly outside a restaurant near Chicago Avenue and the body returned across the ocean to Shannon, and then up through Clare and Galway in a hearse, to the little country chapel where they both got their First Holy Communion long ago.

And when the remains of Chicago man were planted in the graveyard, the farmer went back to his empty house where a sheep dog whimpered underneath his mother’s kitchen table and he felt as desolate as if that lovely woman had only then departed from him forever.