‘Cratloe Wood Lake’ by William Keohane

When June arrives, and the school term comes to a close, I spend the weekends with my granny Mauno in Cratloe.

Here by the woods, the lake, the days pass by in a slow reverie. My grandfather, Donal, was a forester here. He planted the saplings that grew into trees. I am learning to name them: the oak, the ash, hazel, and beech, recognizing each one by the shape of its leaf.

The rain pours, as it always does. Streams bubble up beside the trail in Cratloe Woods. This is where the silly frogs choose to lay their eggs; not the lake, where it is safe, where the water is bound to stay, but these small kingdoms of rain. They dry up quickly in the sun. As the water goes, the spawn go too. I want to save them, just this once.

‘Okay,’ my dad agrees, as he always does. ‘Just this once.’

Along the path, motionless spruces guide us, like signposts, towards the hilltop. The silent watch-keeps Donal planted. His memory runs concentric circles inside each one of them. Below, within the soil, a network of roots. Spreading all across the woods, across the whole of County Clare, down the mountainside and into Craughaun Cemetery, where the sediments of Donal’s bones are sleeping. We do not die, we just become another thing. I imagine the grains of him, travelling up through the heather, the grass, the roots, the trees. Up into the spruce needle canopy above, watching us, watching the tadpoles.

My father hands me a metal pail and I dunk it in the stream to collect the jellied globs, a cluster of unseeing eyes. He helps me to carry them down the hill and we settle ourselves into the car again. I hold the bucket on my lap in the back seat and hug them tightly; I don’t want them to spill. They pulsate against my chest as we move towards home.

In our garden, we rest the bucket under a tree in the shade. The summer heat is out in full intensity. My mother, the poor thing, a foreigner who hates the rain. She’s bought an inflatable pool, filled it to the brim with water and her optimism.

The tadpoles are safe in their corner. Still, I worry for them. They need a bigger tank. Each one is a tiny planet, bubbling in that small dark space. I want to give them a universe. And so, I pour them into our swimming pool, instantly un-swimmable, dots of glossy black spreading out across the surface.

My mom, who is tanning in the garden, sees what I have done and sighs. ‘I guess we’ll have to live with this.’

And oh, how they change. Each day, I come outside to watch them turning into frogs. First, the little stumps, the legs. Slowly, the tails segment and fade; they shed themselves and learn to move in their new shapes. They grow. The parts they do not need fall away.

We will gather them back into the bucket again, in time. Bring our small frogs to the woods and leave them off. For now, I sit and wait and watch them changing, becoming something new.

*

Mauno’s home in Cratloe, Co. Clare, is a harbour of memories. It was there, on her gravel driveway, where I first learned to cycle a bike. Mauno and her sister, Bridie, in their long tartan skirts, their white whisps of hair, beckoning me forward with a gentle ‘keep going!’ My small white bike, the training wheels off, the two of them, standing as pillars at the end of the lane.

It was there, in the uncut flaxen grass of the hills, falling away from her garden, where I collected slugs and snails, where I caught small blues, the butterflies, in a makeshift net. I would wait until they settled, slow, then cup my gentle hands around their fluttering to feel the kiss of wings, and then, always, a quick release.

Mauno taught me that ‘all creatures are God’s creatures’. She fed the birds with apple cores, berries, monkey nuts; she would crush them up in her knotted hands and throw the shards into the wind. When we would find a broken egg, a small dead shrew, a crumpled bird, we would bury them together in the soil beside the shed. I would dig the small opening in the ground, to save her bending down; she would softly place the body in, and cover them with an earthen blanket, the close. She taught me how to honour the dead.

She was born Maureen Tuohy on the 31st of July, 1931, and became ‘Mauno’ as soon as her grandchildren were born. We couldn’t wrap our small tongues around the ‘r’ in Maureen, so it was lost. And soon after, that name became what everyone called her. Soon after, the postman was delivering letters to Mauno Keohane.

In the white church with the red door, visible from the front porch of Mauno’s home, I was baptised. She had insisted on it, and my parents were happy to oblige. My mom and dad were not religious people, but Mauno was. Rosary beads were never far from her fingers. My parents were not conventional people, either; when I was born, they gave me a name, one that was unique and beautiful, relatively uncommon. They were married for five years before they had me. One summer, while they were abroad for a wedding in Italy, they met an architect, a strong, intelligent, esteemed woman, and decided, before I had taken any form, before they had made the moves to make me, that they would name their firstborn after her.

Growing up, it caused me trouble. My name didn’t blend well with the other students, the Conors, Sarahs, Jacks, the kids that I shared classes with. And later still, when I told my parents that the name they gave me no longer fit, how were they to react?

A name is our very first gift, and I returned it.

I still remember how Mauno would pronounce my old name, the vowel sounds harshened by her nasal drawl, how she would call me for dinner, call me in from the garden, beckon me into the bathroom to wash off the day’s collected dirt and grime from under my nails.

I never heard her say the name William.

In that same church where I was baptised, I was told, Mauno once chained herself to the entrance in protest. The full story has been lost with time, but from what fragments my father has told me, there was some corruption, some unresolved issue with the priest that left her furious. She did not have much money, as a widow on her husband’s pension. She did not have much power. But she had a precious, forceful thing: a body.

And so she turned herself into a barrier. Twenty-four hours later, her arms untied from the metal gate, the priest resigned, left the parish for good, and Mauno lived on in her small house next door. She had fought her battle, and she had won.

I slept over in Cratloe most Saturday nights. The small details I remember: the stories and poems she read me as I fell asleep, the taste of the toothpaste that she kept above the sink, her dentures soaked in water overnight, the heated blanket under the covers, the smell of dust and down. Small robins in the garden, their likeness captured in cards and figurines upon the mantlepiece.

In the morning, she would take me to Sunday mass. Afterwards, we’d walk the fifty odd steps home, where she would feed me a famine food lunch of overboiled turnip, carrots, potatoes, and offer me a Polo mint, if I was good. I would always save it for later, hold the icy taste in my mouth in the car ride home instead, so that I felt her presence just that little bit longer.

*

In memory, certain days are painted clearer than others. Somehow, the ones furthest away, those childhood days, are the brightest. I call them into present tense and I am eight years old again, settling in to the back seat of my father’s Saab, in the carpark by the lake in Cratloe Wood, spawn bobbing in the pail between my knees.

I am sixteen, and she is leaving Cratloe, moving to the nursing home in Carrigoran, and I am saying goodbye to her house, walking the corridors, glancing into the silent rooms. She is saying goodbye too; I don’t know if she is crying. Why don’t I know this? Why am I cupping my own grief tenderly, and not standing beside her, holding her by the arm as she walks through the empty museum of her life? She must be heartsick, watching the life drip from her home: the pale patches on the walls where old photographs have been taken down, the gatherings of dust in vacant spaces where the furniture has been removed. While I wander aimlessly, Mauno must be standing in the front garden with my father, saying a quiet farewell to the stones, the gravel, the grass, before we drive away.

Why am I not standing with her? I am a foolish teenager, too wrapped up in my own sense of loss to acknowledge hers. Shrapnel shards of my childhood are embedded in the pale carpet underfoot. I walk through the house, searching for them, trying to gather pieces of my lint-like memories.

I have forgotten Mauno is the whole floor, in every room, and I am only specks. Her whole life, a bright painted mural beneath the faded, peeling wallpaper. I am only fingerprints.

And I remember her forgetting, the grey smoke day she lost my father’s name. She is in bed in the nursing home in Carrigoran, a bed she hasn’t left in some time, and she is ghost-like, rail-thin. The two planets of her blue eyes hold my focus, under her thick glasses with their pink plastic rims, the frames wrapped up in band-aids so as not to hurt her, not to dig in to her delicate ears.

‘Mauno,’ I ask her, ‘do you know who we are?’

She looks right at me, right through me, and then shifts her focus to my father, studying his face: the roughness of his beard, that she had always told him to shave but he rarely did; the etching of lines across his brow, mirroring hers, only shallower. His nose, her husband’s nose, my nose: its steady slope, its upward turn, the way the nostrils greet you first, those two small caverns, the way the bristles flutter when he laughs.

She looks at him and christens him again.

‘John,’ she says.

My father is Kieran.

When I was small, I used to call him ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’. These were my words, alone, but I soon realized others called him Kieran: my mom, my grandmother, my aunts, his friends, and so I learned to call him by this name. The right name, his real name, the name that was in use.

People must have thought this strange, that it was very formal for a child to use their parent’s name. I didn’t feel this way, and I don’t think he did either. I loved the way his name, Kieran, sounded, and to say it made me feel lucky, like I was holding something small and magic in my hands – a rusted horseshoe, a bright green clover. It felt like love, like closeness. I called him his name, he called me mine.

I look at my father, as the wrong name lingers in the air around him, as we both try to decipher who John could be.

‘It’s Kieran, Mum,’ he says. ‘Your son.’

*

John was one of the names I considered, early on.

At night, in bed, before I told anyone, I would scroll through Google searches on my phone. ‘Baby boy names’. ‘One Hundred Boy’s Names.’ ‘Simon,’ I would say aloud to test it out. ‘Mark. John.’

They were all so biblical.

Without a name, I felt untethered, anchorless; beneath my feet, the world dissolved.

It took a while before the right one arrived, that late-night train, a distant brightness, growing ever closer. I waited, nameless, at the station for some time, and then it came: it took a while to board, to step in, settle, find my seat, to hold myself inside of it, that name, that word, a metal casing for the body. Once I had it, it pushed off fast. It hurtled me along the well-worn iron tracks into the now.

A name, I think, is just a stamp pressed upon a stretch of time. And now is not the time for that discussion. My name is glowing in the distance. It’s coming.

*

I remember the end.

In the campus library, another familiar home for me, and I am sitting in my favourite soft-backed chair, the one I always hope will be free, the one beside the window, where I can catch the sunset through the tinted glass. I love it here, even in those late evenings before a deadline, when I am vibrating with bitter caffeine, hunched over some dense textbook, crumpled in frustration.

This is one of those nights. Late, and the screen bites at my eyelids. I draw spiral outlines with my cursor while I wait for the words to come, flicking my eyes between handwritten notes and the computer until the two white backgrounds, brilliant and dulled, begin to blend into one.

A statistics assignment, due before the end of the autumn term, before the Christmas exams, and a module I am struggling with, more than any of the others; I cannot seem to speak the language of numbers, and I pray the tepid coffee by the keyboard will help me find clarity. I have only hope, caffeine, this Dell desktop, and my shoddy classroom notes.

My father calls. I expect he’s checking in to see how I’m doing, and I am grateful for a brief break from the brightness, so I leave my desk, walk out into the hushed hallway to answer him.

‘I think it’s time,’ he says. ‘I think she’s going.’

Soon, we are in the car together, travelling in the dark towards Carrigoran, away from the near-empty university car park where my dad collected me, and onto the motorway, passing the cement factory breathing bitter white clouds out onto the night sky, and under the tunnel, under the Shannon River, where the fish swim above us, the ducks rest in the rushes. Above ground again, driving by the old tumble-down castle, and under the overpass, under the road to Cratloe, the road to her old house which is sleeping there, somewhere in the darkness, and all the other sleeping things, the woods, the lake, my childhood memories, and past Bunratty village where we used to go for Sunday lunch, and I would push her in her wheelchair, into the lift, up to the restaurant, Meadows and Byrne, for small forkfuls of mashed potatoes, which, in later days, I would help to lift into her mouth in much the same way my father did for me when I was a baby.

After midnight, we arrive in through the doors and although they are usually locked at this hour, a staff member is waiting at the glass to let us in, and it’s the latest I have ever been here, the whole building a pure, damp quietness. Down, through the winding corridors, to find the laminated sign on her open door, to find her name, ‘Maureen Keohane’, and in through the threshold of her bedroom door to find a single candle lit, and time outlined in red on her digital radio-clock, as if to count the moments we had left.

We had done this before; there had been many other nights when we thought that she was going and she had stayed with us a little longer, she had kept steadfast. Nights in hospitals in Ennis and in Limerick, and right here in this very room, when I had kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘goodbye, I love you.’ Nights, the same weight as this one.

Something strange about this night. The air in the room, the bed rearranged, no longer nestled in the corner. Yes, the bed, in its new location, jutting out, the head of the frame against the wall, and she is the centre of the room.

Something about her breath, the way it is lingering in her chest a little too long, something about the way her face looks now without her glasses on, and with her dentures out. Here in the dark room, nothing is familiar. Where is the glass she used to place them in before she went to sleep?

When I was young, she would warn me: ‘Make sure you take care of your teeth.’ But she didn’t do this herself; when she was a little girl she would crack heavy nuts between her molars, and then they were gone, and strange facsimiles took their place. I was fascinated by the routine of the dentures, the glass they rested in at night, the flat round cleaning tablet, like magic. How the dentures absorbed all the fizz until they were sheer porcelain again. What if they slipped out when she was drinking her tea, and fell into the pale brown liquid, and turned to the colour of sand?

And her tea, she always had it with no sugar, with a single drop of milk. ‘Sugar is bad stuff, it will only rot your mouth,’ she used to say, whereas I make mine with three, and fill it to the brim with milk until it is pure paleness. I am no good at listening to advice.

Something stirring in my mind, the tinkle of metal against my skull. Something I haven’t told her. She hasn’t spoken in some time now; I want to say a year, maybe more, since she last uttered a word.

Words, those evasive things, how often they do not come when we need them to; moth wings, beating their way up toward the light, only to recede.

I haven’t told my father yet, either. I haven’t told anyone at all. I haven’t even told myself. I’m not sure I want to hear it aloud.

I can hold on to my old life a little longer. It does not sting yet, when I hear that beautiful, difficult word, my name; when I hear ‘girl’, when I hear ‘she’. This moment, right now, is so much more important; what I wouldn’t give to have her open her eyes and say anything at all, say the old name, call me anything. I’d take John, I’d take any face, any word that she offered. I’d make it my own.

Her wrinkled lines seem to be easing with each passing moment, and she is warm, still warm, but her hands, I am holding them in mine, are limp. They’re not doing what they usually do. They have this grip, you see, this unyielding grip onto nothing, they curl into themselves, and her nails dig into her palms. It’s a self-made stigmata.

It looks like pain.

The first time I saw it, I wanted to peel them apart, to wrench my hands into hers, to stop her from hurting herself. The nursing home staff helped us, offering foam balls for her safety, and my father and I unfurled her fingers, so she had something to hold on to, something that was not her own discomfort. But her palms are loose now, and soft. Her skin, paper-thin, translucent. I can trace the grooves of her hand with my forefinger, my father on the other side of the bed is doing the same thing, we are doing this work of love, our gentle touch in tandem.

Still, in the silence around her, I pet the soft hairs on her head, like baby hairs, and I remember when she used to cut mine when I was younger, the sound of the scissors with each gentle snip, and how my mother always had trouble with the fact that I’d return from her house near the woods, to ours near the city, shorn like a sheep. Mauno would cut long strands of my blonde curls off, and I never objected, because in my mind, hair was an inconvenience, and my childhood tomboy life was much easier if I could run around without a fringe obscuring my vision. If I could jump into ponds and streams and dry off quickly.

Only I have shorter hair now, much shorter, a lad’s cut, close to the skin around the back and sides, and it felt, from the first moment I caught it in the mirror, that I was always meant to look this way.

And I remember when my father saw my short hair for the first time I thought that he might cry, as if this was some great leap I was making, a turn from who I was before, and I suppose it was in many ways, but I had not left any part of myself behind in the barbershop, only some fibres resting on the floor, and yes, I looked different, slightly lighter, but I came home the same person that I always was, and always will be, only I had come a little closer into focus.

And I went in to see her soon after, and I wondered if she’d react the same way as my father to my new boyish hair, but she was too far gone to notice, really, at that stage. I don’t think she even knew who I was, then, I don’t think she knew.

The long night swims on, red lines rearrange on the digital clock, I pet her hair a thousand times or more, and I can feel the fatigue settling into my bones as the coffee buzz from earlier dulls. It is after 2am now and there has been no change.

‘We should go home to sleep, I think,’ my dad says to me.

I would have stayed all night if he had suggested it. I would have sat there in the tranquil room, but life goes on in these quiet moments. There are things to do in the morning, we should go home, I should make sure that latest Word document is backed up. In the bustle of the moment I forgot to double check, I don’t know where I put the USB, I might have left it in the library, it might be gone now, all that work, those hours lost. It could be still inside the desktop on the second floor, or in my bag safe in the boot of the car, or it could be gone forever.

‘Will someone be here with her?’ I ask my dad.

‘Yes,’ he says. His sister is on the way, driving down from Belfast on darkened roads, just as we did hours before. In all the time that we’ve been here, at Mauno’s bedside, she’s spent those hours on the road, alone, and what’s been going through her head? What music has been playing on the late-night radio as she drives to see her mother, hoping to catch her one last time before she goes? And what if she doesn’t make it?

But she does. We leave, and she arrives. And Mauno slips away.

*

Around the anniversary of her death, my dad and I drive to visit her headstone. To say hello. I was a pallbearer at her funeral, along with my dad, my three cousins. In the West, pallbearers are usually relatives of the dead, usually men. But not at Mauno’s funeral.

‘She was a feminist,’ my dad told us, in the small chapel filled with golden light the day after she died. ‘She would have wanted both men and women involved. She would have wanted it equal.’

That day, the ground was frozen solid. The six of us carried her gently, concentrating hard on our movements. Trying not to slip, trying to place her softly into the earth, into the November snow.

We stand, my father and I, in front of her marbled headstone. It is winter; a mound of brown earth acts as her blanket. Her husband, my grandfather Donal, beside her.

I can tell her now. Enough time has passed. I’ve made myself known. All that time I had been waiting for the chrysalis to hatch, to find the words. So many years of waiting for the wings to touch the light, and now they’re here, they soar up into the air, and it is pride now, that I can speak of this, the shame no longer on my tongue, but I still recall the taste of it, metallic sourness.

The new words in my mouth are sweet. I can say I am a man. And I have told everyone, everyone except for her.

‘Hello, Mauno. I miss you. I wanted to let you know that my name is Will now. I hope that’s okay with you.’

There’s no reaction, of course, only silence, my vapour breath above the frost, above her, and my father’s wordless clouds beside me.

My own reaction, my relief, and my nerves, how my hands shake like leaves as the words are released, how the disclosure is no easier when you are speaking to an ether. As with the times before, my whole body is a bumblebee, a buzzing thing.

Somewhere, in a distant realm, I wonder if she’s listening.

As my father and I drive away from her resting place, he puts his hand on my knee. No answer from the graveyard frost, and so he speaks an answer for me.

‘She would have been absolutely fine with it, you know. She was a traditional Irish woman, yes, but she was also progressive. Maureen told me once she wished she had been able to become a priest.’

I cannot say anything, or else the tears will fall, so I simply smile back at him. I smile all the way home.

*

One year later, we visit again.

Dew droplets on the grass beneath my feet, and that teenage morning comes to mind, that last day in her house, my sixteen-year-old self, Mauno’s early stages of dementia decline. How each room of her house was cleaned with care. All the remnants of a life; the furniture gifted to her sisters, her daughters. And I remember her room, in Carrigoran nursing home, always filled with robins, red-breasted, in all the small paintings, cards and figurines. Now when I see one, I always think of her. I always think it is her.

Her old house is home to a new family now. We pass by it on the way to the graveyard; there’s a swing set in the garden, a football in the driveway. Someone else’s beautiful childhood is happening there.

Before we leave them, this time, he says: ‘Let’s look for her.’

There are no robins to be found. Two horses resting in the field beside her, blackbirds singing with sunset beaks, and a cluster of curly cows are grazing, slow. But no robins.

‘I wonder why there’s no sign of her today,’ my father says into the air.

And then, behind us, a march hare. A giant thing, her white tail is snow amidst the frosted grass; she’s leaping towards the trees, away from us. And out of sight. My father and I stand and stare at the absence, knowing. Knowing it is just like Mauno to appear in the unexpected.

You were searching for a robin, were you? Let me do you one better.

As we drive away, he tells me the story I know well, but never tire of hearing. Of her time spent in London when she was my age. A city she could have stayed in, a life she could have lived.

‘I asked her once,’ he says to me, ‘why she decided to leave. “Why didn’t you stay in London, Mum? Why did you come home?”’

And her response, I know before the words spill from his lips. That one night, in her room, she was looking out into the London dark, and saw the moon above her, huge and white. And she thought of home, of the fields she grew up in, of the feeling of cows’ tails between her fingers. She thought: ‘That’s the same moon that shines on Fairhill, on the fields, on the cows, on my father’s house.’

Something about this thought, something about the pull of the moon, brought her back. Brought her home to a different life. To this final resting place.

Towards the end of her life, she could not remember the names of those around her. Her son was gone, her daughters too. At a certain point, she lost her voice. And yet, at times, if you gave her a line of a poem, a line of a song, a line of a prayer, off she would go. The words flowing from her lips as a stream, the memory of their ingrained structure loud and clear. Her eyes would brighten, and for a moment, only a moment, she would remember.

The day after her death, the few possessions that remained in Carrigoran were separated out between her children and grandchildren. I asked for only one thing from her room. One small book. It was the book she would read to me as I was falling asleep, all those years I stayed and slept at her house. Edward Lear’s The Owl and The Pussycat, with its purple cover, its dog-eared pages, each word of the poem impressed on my mind, from the start to the end.

I still have it within me, learned by heart. I haven’t forgotten.

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

From issue #12: autumn/winter 2021

About the Author
William Keohane is a writer from Limerick. In 2021, he was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and was one of ten poets selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series. William holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick.