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.

---

It is my mother’s birthday, and she is far away in a village in Northern Ireland, in the place that made her. The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. In my mind’s eye, she is standing at the ironing board in the kitchen, just the way she was one morning when I visited her this Spring.

Smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in my denim shirt – pausing to make a point about something I have forgotten – I find myself remembering again all the times she told me – from behind the ironing board – to consider the lilies,  or to “mark her words” that there will be plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea. “What’s meant for you won’t pass you by.” Implicit in countless explicit admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away.

Mostly, my mother has struck an artful balance between shielding me from the world while encouraging 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 one morning in the summer of my 12th year. It was wash day, and I was bored. She was ironing, the quiet of our kitchen 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 the heartthrob lead singer.

Our David Cassidy was dead.

Until that moment, with unfathomable naïveté, we believed musicians like The Miami were immune. They 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.” But on that night in 1975, what happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much a target as the rest of us.  It became known as “The Day The Music Died,” tagline that fails to convey the monstrosity of it, the chilling choreography behind it, and its haunting, harrowing legacy.  As Stuart Bailie points out “The paramilitaries had literally shot the piano player.”

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.  Stephen was gravely 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, listening to the radio, my mother kept ironing, 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, we wondered what would become of us? Would we stay? Some of us would.

---

Sometimes I still feel guilty for leaving Northern Ireland, leaving my family. Perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – to 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 always draws me back to another world, another time with her, when I knew my place, my steps in the dance.  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 my mother’s ironing board 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.”

Comments

comments