Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.

To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

A couple of years ago, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill.  This was no small act, given that I was reared in Northern Ireland by a mother who ironed everything, including dishcloths and handkerchiefs. On this, her birthday, she is far away in the place that made her, rural South Derry. And, when I  close my eyes to imagine her there, she is not as she usually is these days, inches away from me on a computer screen struggling to remember a password. Rather, she is standing at the ironing board in the kitchen of my childhood home on the Dublin road. Deftly, she places the steaming iron in its stand and turns to shake out one of da’s shirts. Resuming “the smoothing,” she eases into a story she has told before, a lesson in it for good measure.

The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. Ma, leaning over the ironing board, smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in pillowcases, pausing for dramatic effect – to remind me to consider the lilies, to “mark her words” that there will be plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea. Implicit in her explicit admonishment not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away.

Mostly, she has struck an artful balance between shielding me from the world while empowering me to find the voice to explore its realities. But not all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was in Northern Ireland.

I recall a morning in the summer of my 12th year. It was wash day, and I was bored. My mother was ironing, and the quiet of our kitchen was interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, the Irish Beatles – had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including heartthrob lead singer, Fran O’Toole.

Our David Cassidy was dead.

Until this moment, with unfathomable naïveté, we believed musicians like The Miami were immune. For so many of us, they had represented what could be, themselves and their audiences criss-crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. It was as bass guitarist Stephen Travers recollected in his address to The Hague some years later, “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” It didn’t matter. On that night in 1975, what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as the rest of us.  It became known as “The Day The Music Died,” but such a tagline fails to convey the monstrosity of it, the chilling choreography behind it, and the harrowing legacy of. As Stuart Bailie points out “The paramilitaries had literally shot the piano player.”

Eventually, we would hear reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, had been shot 22 times in the face. Twenty-two times. Vulnerable and on the ground, he had begged for mercy from men who only kept shooting.  Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Des suffered only minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen was seriously wounded and survived only by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.

That summer morning, I remember my mother kept ironing one of my father’s shirts, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was unimaginable – young musicians, Catholics and Protestants, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. No longer in denial, what would become of us?

Eventually, I would flee Northern Ireland, and sometimes I still feel guilty for having left it. Perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.

“Keeping Going”

From the sectarian and political, to the personal, my mother’s birthday draws me back to another world, another time with her, when I knew my dance steps well. The miles between us fall away, and there she is rushing in from our back garden, a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain.  Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual,  my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.

My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen on the Dublin Road, but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August afternoon before the fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.

Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.

And still we dance.

Happy Birthday ma. We love you.

From Clearances V by Seamus Heaney

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984I

“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line 
Made me think the damp must still be in them 
But when I took my corners of the linen 
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem 
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook 
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, 
They made a dried-out undulating thwack. 
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand 
For a split second as if nothing had happened 
For nothing had that had not always happened 
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, 
Coming close again by holding back 
In moves where I was x and she was o 
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”

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