Two Walls and a Roof (16 page)

After a desperate struggle she managed to rise up and took off out of the kitchen to the front door
,
gasping for air. Then from the safety of the kitchen door she kept shouting in at him to
,
“Get out, get out will you”. He still didn’t hear a word she said so she started throwing book
s
at him. Still he kept going till the machine mysteriously stopped working. When finally father came out of the chimney, he
realize
d the disaster he had caused and one look at Nannie
’
s face meant no fiver was coming. He gathered his machine and left for home, all the time Nannie was tongue lashing him heavily for his utter stupidity and deafness.    But to make matters worse, the soot had so clogged up the motor that it had burned it out completely. By then it hadn’t been a good day at
all, and he retired to his bed
cursi
ng and swearing at his ill luck
for ever having h
ad any dealings with the Mahony
s.

His immunity to electrocution was proven many times
. O
n one occasion mother had asked him to hang up a curtain line over the East Wind window.  Father
’
s answer to every problem was a six inch nail, so he got two of them and his little hammer and got to work.  These were driven into the wall and a wire line was strung between them.  He went to bed after that exertion saying he had done enough for one day. Then when mother proceeded to put up the curtains, she got a massive shock from the wire line but couldn’t believe it, and so she went back to try it again.  More violent shocks followed, so she went upstairs and told her Henry that she was getting ‘electrocuted’ from the curtains. He
told her to cop herself on.
“You
’
r
e
never happy
. I
t
’
s impossible to get shocks from curtains
,
now let me sleep will you”, and back he went to sleep.

Sometime later she again tried with the same result, and even then she was beginning to question her sanity, especially when the father tested the line with his wrist, which was his version of tes
ting for a live wire. Of course
he felt nothing and pronounced it all to be safe, then he hung up the curtains convincing the mother that she was as usual imagining things, or simply going insane as he suspected, and that it was she who was driving him to the drink.  Months later the mother asked Kyrle to test the wire line and when he did, unsurprisingly enough, he found the line to be fully ‘live’.  The father had driven a nail into the live wire buried in the wall beneath the numerous layers of wallpaper
. Then
he attached the wire line to the nail
,
and during his hand test felt nothing as usual.

Nothing was ever ‘earthed’ in our house either, as we never had an earth rod buried in the yard due to its high cost and father
’
s belief that the earth concept was just trouble in the making. We had the earth wires always connected up to the sockets so it looked safe, but they ended up going no
where. Father always said earth
s were not
needed and only blew fuses,
that they were nothing but trouble, and that it was impossible to get electrocuted. H
e believed we were all like him
(genetically immune)
except for the mother, who
was a Mahony after all, which
explained why she got the shocks and we did not.

Father was never a gambler
. I
n fact I think none of us ever were, but my brother Hugh told me of the one time when father would most definitely have made a killing on the horses
,
but he drank the bet instead.

It was just after the war around 1948 and I believe petrol was still being rationed at the time. My father had a hackney business and as such he had a supply of petrol coupons which he sold to the great horse traine
r Vincent O’Brien at face value:
an unheard of act at the time. This was the same Vincent O’Brien that father had taken to Shannon on the day of my mother’s assassinated attempt on him with her bullets incident. As a result of father’s kindness at helping out such a great man, Vincent seems to have given him a guaranteed winning tip for a horse called Cottage Rake, who was unheard of at the time and was a huge long shot. Father told his good friend Arthur O’Lowery of the tip and drank his bet before ever putting it on the horse. The horse won the Cheltenham Gold Cup
,
and from what I can gather, half of Buttevant also won huge amounts of money including Arthur on the
race. Father used to say wryly
that his best friend built a house on his tip while he drank my mother’s money in Arthur
’
s pub, such was his bad luck.

One of my fondest memories of my dad was us being together on the night of the first Moon Landing. Space travel had always fascinated me
.
I suppose it came from my candle flying days or readings about it over the years. But I will never forget that day when the whole world was watching television
,
except for my mother and the Nannie. Mother had no interest in it at all, and Nannie denied the whole thing, saying it was a con job by the
Americans to fool the Russians,
her belief turning into a well documented conspiracy theory some years later. However
,
myself and the father were glued to his small screen under the stairs for the whole event. We sat transfixed as the black and white images flashed before us. When those magical words
,
“The Eagle has landed”
,
came over the speaker we both shook hands and father said
,
“Tis a great day to be alive, John, and never forget it
. Boys O’Boy
s the Americans have done it”. I said
, “Y
es
,
yes they have
,”
and I got so excited that I ran out into the main street looking up at the moon and began shouting
,
“They are up th
ere, the Americans are up there.
Horray for the USA”
.
A bowsie from Kit
’s looked on at me
and shouted something at me, but I don’t
know what it was and cared less as I stared up at the m
oon. I just jumped up and down on the road. Father came out to the door and then both of us looked up at the moon in awe. I felt an amazing closeness that day to my dad, and longed to see America
. Stand
ing at our door I told him so. I said
, “Da, one day
I will see America”. I was nineteen years of age and it would take me just under thirty years to
realize
that dream. My father just smiled as I spoke, but it was a doubting smile. I think he felt such a great country was beyond the reach of us Cahills.

My f
ather was diagnosed with cancer
and when I asked him what the doctors had said, his exact words were
,
“John, tis all up, I’m going to die soon
. Look after your mother”.
I felt a terrible s
adness creep over me right then. A
ll my many criticisms of him were gone, and all I could think of was,
‘
I’m lo
sing my dad faster than I ever imagined
I would
’
.

Father
’
s last days were very hard for him and our mother
,
as well as for all of us. Mother found it terribly hard to see her Henry suffering and wasting away before her eyes. Fortunately
,
even though abroad
,
my sisters all helped out and came home to visit him at various times.  He was adamant that he wanted to die in his own bed, in his own ‘two walls and a roof’ and mother respected that wish. He gave her a few frights when she thought he
was going, and on one such time
(a Sunday actually)
she rang me in a big panic telling me he was f
inished and to get home quickly. W
ithin five minutes she was back on again saying he was okay, the panic was over.  That night I went home to see him.  He was sitting up in his bed reading the paper as if there wasn’t a thing wrong with him.  I castigated him for scaring us to death in a nice jovial way, and then he pulled me aside and said
,
“John, I’ll be gone by Wednesday
,
” and he was.  It was an extraordinary statement and has remained with me since in mystery.  That same night he asked me to buy
him a bottle of Lucozade, a non-
alcoholic drink
, which I did. O
n ta
king a big slug from the bottle
he announced to my surprise, “Jekus Boys that’s real good stuff, John”. 
I told him rather insensitively
that if he had reached that conclusion forty years earlier, we would all have been far better off, but he just smiled and didn’t reply
. T
here was no need to state the obvious at that late stage of his life.

That same night my daughter Lynda, who was a very young girl, began filming my father talking to me. We all knew, especially him, what we were doing
. W
e were trying to preserve him after he had gone. We did the small talk and skirted around his passing and it got too sad for Lynda who broke down into tears. I have that tape of my father, just hours from his death,
making funny faces at my child
so as to make her stop crying, such was his good side. That tape is beyond price and now and again I see my dad at his very best.

After some very hard months of bitter but resigned suffering, my poor father died, heavily dosed with morphine. My sister Tishie and brother Hugh couldn’t make it.  They rang him at the final moments. Tishie was snow bound in an airport in Scotland, and Hugh was holed up in a friend’s house in Australia crying his eyes out. Father seemed to be waiting for Tishie to arrive at his bed any minute
. S
he had made every effort to do it, but the weather had snowed in the airports and she was not g
oing to make it and told him so
on her last phone call. When father
realize
d that his Tish could not be there, but that she was safe, he quietly slipped away from us all in body but not in spirit. I truly believe that as long as his stories are told, as long as we speak of him, as long as we laugh at his jokes and his life, he will remain with u
s
till we ourselves are gone too.

I will always thank most sincerely the Marymount Hospice Movement in Cork
,
especially the nurses
,
for their most wonderful kindness to my father and to the many thousands of others afflicted by the terrible ailment of cancer. It
’
s no accident that
many
years later
,
both me and my son Kyrl
,
would be
in
directly responsible
for raising almost two million e
uros for cancer treatment
in the
hospitals
of
Cork
, Marymount among them
. I feel privileged to be part of the 96FM radio team who have made all this happen and I know
that
my dad is
very
proud of us
all for doing this work because I can feel it
.

In a moment of weakne
ss, I had earlier promised Hugh
that at the funeral Mass I’d read out a fax from him on the
altar,
thinking I’d modify his words and shorten it when he sent it to me.  When it did arrive, it was so beautifully written that I secretly crie
d while reading it, and at the c
hurch
I completely broke down on the a
ltar in front of the very large crowd of people attending the service. I struggled and stammered along, tears flowing down my face, and I felt so ashamed for my stuttering, especially in front of people from my home town. It was so terribly hard to do that I almost gave up on the reading, but somehow I continued on to the very last words. Hugh’s fax had described in a beautiful poem what his father had meant to him. It showed a love that was pal
pable, it showed his sayings,
his u
se of the words ‘Jekus Boys’ and
his humour
. It
was written by a son too far away to come home, but with a memory that described his dad in a way that showed how much he was loved.

A simple promise mad
e by me on a phone call to Hugh
had turned ou
t to be the most difficult task
I had ever to perform in my life.  The task, though terrible for me personally, was eased by the wonderful Buttevant congregation, who gave me a standing ovation when I finally finished. Father
’
s many fr
iends knew him as Hughie Cahill:
a musician and a handy man, perhaps a man who drank too much, but one who did not have a bad bone in his body, and they showed me their respect for my dad that night.