(CREATIVE NONFICTION)

WRITTEN IN STONE

​EANLAI CRONIN

This kip of a village is a testament to resilience.

Nothing changes. Not the farmhouse at the crossroads exposing brickwork through flaking plaster.  Not the stone sheds peppering the back fields, housing cattle and pitch-black darkness. Not the reek of fresh stacked sods, slicking rain off rounded edges. Not the chimneys belching turf smoke like signals to the angels. Nothing changes.

Here’s my favorite part. Five miles before home, as Mamma flips the indicator at Direen cross, I close my eyes in the back seat. I count the fields in my mind, one, two, three, then say, Aghatubrid Church. I open my eyes, and sure enough, we are sailing past the metal crucifix, the stain glass teardrops, the wrought iron railings, and I am smiling at my exactness.

Between the twin pillars of Dadda and Mamma, I catch a glimpse of the fifty-yard straight stretch before the hairpins. l close my eyes again, Mamma’s near joy at her clear vision now palpable in her rare speeding. She wishes all roads were needles, one straight line from start to finish.

Bend, I say, and open my eyes. Sure enough we are turning the first of many corners, stony hills to the left, ablaze with gorse and heather, wild fields to the right too coarse for grazing and too marshy for foundations.

All the way to the village crossroads, I play my game.

Bogs, I say. Small bridge, I say.  Old school. Big bridge. Cross.

Then just at the precise moment the village comes into view, I whisper, home, and open my eyes to everything that has stayed the same. Everything that will never change.

Now aren’t you glad you came back, Mamma asks? What would you be doing in Dublin for the summer? And miss all the fun here. The brown bread and apple tarts. The buns.

I want to lean into her offerings. She is laying her best before me. I can hear it, can hear her asking me to take them. Take her bread. Take her tarts. Take her scones and queen cakes. They will line up all summer long like apologies and promises. They will tell me what she can’t. They will tell me that she loves me. See, here’s a cut, fresh from the oven. See, here’s a bun. I put raisins and currants in it. Tell me what you think.

After Easter, when I left for my final college term, she handed me a fresh loaf for my suitcase, still warm, wrapped in tinfoil.

Don’t let it go stale, she said. It’ll only be good for a few days in this heat.

By day three, I hadn’t opened it nor had I offered it to any of my seven roommates with whom I shared a house. We were all students. We were all hungry. All the time. But I didn’t want to give it away. And I couldn’t explain, to myself or them, that it was partly shame and partly greed. Shame because I was afraid Mamma’s strangely shaped cakes (they were always uneven) would draw comments. Maybe pity. Greed because I wanted to keep this thing that said she loved me. Not that I could have explained that either. I just kept it in the suitcase. It turned green. I threw it away.

Did you eat that cake I sent with you after Easter?

Yes, I say. We are driving up the lane now, our gable end like its own border.

Did the girls in the house like it?

They loved it, I say. They all loved it.

She pulls into the space before our turf shed. This is one thing that changes. Mamma and Dadda spend hours by the range at night discussing the merits of where to park the car. In front of our house. Across the road in the clearing before the shed, where we are right now. Or in the garage with its corrugated iron roof that tries its best to stop the rain but is now peppered with rust holes. When it lashes, and you’re inside, it can sound like the end of the world, all hail and hammering. But come sunlight, needle beams of dusted gold through the riddled ceiling augur goodness unending from a God never done listening, always looking for occasion to bedeck the world with beauty.  

Mamma and Dadda get out of the car, stand back a few paces from this new parking spot. They assess its merits. Shade from rain. Safe from passing cars. Well off the road. I sit in the back seat and listen. Eyes closed. Their voices murmur that same song I slept and woke to in childhood, that quiet hush of permanent knowingness, that net into which every fish will swim, every Irish word lost will live, every recipe handed down from mother to child without pen or ink memorized.
These things will last into the grey of evening and the white of morning. Days, months, years will spin and I will be here, in the back of this car. Mamma and Dadda will always be alive. I will always have a foot in childhood, and there will never be a life where I am pressed into grief or sadness.

Are you coming? Mamma calls from the street. I’ll make us some tea.

This single street lives inside me. The hut which the bonnet now tips, once a one-room abode where two great aunts lived. One window. One door. Their entire world in one room. Next to it the fallen down remains of another abandoned dwelling. Slates careening off in high winds, hitting the road with some hidden memo. The shop next to that, again, one small room, all the goods we might ever need, squeezed onto shallow shelves, stacked floor to low ceiling. The pub across the way, one room for the men, another for the women. The business of serious drinking in one. The business of cupped whispers in the other. The church beside that. One side for the men. The other for the women. Converging in the middle for communion. It is all here. All sitting beneath the skin of who I already am. I skip from house to house in my mind as easily as a child running in and out for short visits. I am nineteen. Life is knocking. I can hear it. It says: get a teaching job. Marry a man. Have many children.

I do not listen. Instead, I freeze this moment in my mind. Dadda behind me, still alive. His color good today. In the log book of his life, today counts. He will live till midnight. I declare that. Any day where he does not die before noon, we all call that a victory. Heart attacks happen mostly in the morning. I am pleased in the back seat that my petitions have been answered.

Mamma jogs to the front gate, swift on her feet, tireless in her presence. She will make bread tonight, will draw cakes in and out of the oven. She will fill the house with a litany of sustenance. Praises for the bread will be our fervent exchange, our way back, and through all differences.

I count, in my mind, the steps from here to the front door, from there to the kitchen, a little competition, of which I will be the winner. I emerge from the passenger door, begin my tally. One. Two. Three.

Everything here is written in stone.

Everything is in this moment.

Everyone is alive.

Five. Six. Seven.

A map well remembered. A place etched onto heart and bone.

Nine. Ten. Eleven.

The gate, mustard and worn. I am right. I smile. Triumphant.
​
Dadda stands by the door, laughing. 
​

The author said about this piece: "​Love of place at a particular time in life propelled this piece for me. The narrator hovers between adolescence and adulthood and still occupies a state of wonder about life’s details. Writing through that prism of innocence gave rise to a loving yet unsparing tone that allowed for an exact, yet kind delivery of people and place."

Eanlai Cronin's essays and poems have appeared in The Courage to Heal, The Magic of Memoir, String Poet, Sinister Wisdom, and Peregrine. Most recently, her short memoir "Documented" was chosen as a top ten finalist in the Fish Publishing short memoir contest. Currently a student in San Francisco's Writers Studio master class, she is submitting her first completed memoir Girl in Irish to literary agents and has begun work on her second book--another memoir.