"The Feather Detective"

Chris Sweeney

Roxie, petite with thick glasses and an ear-length bob of graying hair, gazed out her window toward the shadows of the forest, where warblers, flycatchers, and other seasonal travelers of the Atlantic flyway were passing through on spring migration.
offering up scientific analysis showing that the feathers recovered from the scene of the crime matched bits of feather that were found on Andrews’s clothing at the time he was apprehended. <> To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this marked the first time that feather forensics would be used in a homicide trial.
* Roxie’s investigatory superpower was an unmatched ability to take a tiny fragment of feather, look at it under her microscope, and identify the type of bird from which it came. She reached her conclusions primarily by analyzing the shape and patterns of structures called barbules that are invisible to the naked eye. It didn’t matter if the piece of feather looked like pocket lint that had been whipped around a blender—Roxie almost always determined its avian owner. She was, as far as anyone knew, the only person in the world who possessed this unusual self-taught skill set.
shouldered his way through the crowd of panicked onlookers toward a small dock where boats were shuttling anyone with dive gear out to the wreckage. <> The window-rattling impact he felt a half hour earlier was Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 careening into Boston Harbor.
Quesada went public with the news almost immediately, telling the world that a flock of European Starlings took down Flight 375. <> The speckled passerines first gained a foothold in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to activist groups intent on introducing non-native species to the U.S. by releasing them into the wild. In one of the more famous instances, a wealthy New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin allegedly set free one hundred European Starlings in Central Park, in what some have described as part of his bizarre quest to release all the species of birds mentioned by Shakespeare.
Warning signs were everywhere, and some experts began suspecting that birds played a role in a number of unexplained crashes. Throughout the late 1950s, the U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Navy launched a program to document and study bird strikes at the navy station on Midway Islands, where huge albatrosses menaced pilots and their planes. One of the program’s key determinations was that the birds tended to loiter around dunes that created rising air currents; by leveling certain dunes, the air force successfully encouraged a good portion of the birds to relocate to areas well outside its flight paths.
* Making a proper research skin is a delicate procedure that involves snipping and stripping out everything inside the bird other than the skull, wing bones, and leg bones, while keeping the feathers intact and as natural looking as possible. It’s more plastic surgery than taxidermy, and Roxie’s talents bordered on high art. <> Her male counterparts over the years had been promoted to lofty positions and dispatched on expeditions around the world to collect every type of animal you could imagine, from polar bear fetuses to zebra longwing butterflies. All the while, Roxie didn’t wander far from the bird collection,
Some birds’ feathers could look a dozen different ways depending on how the airplane hit it, what part of the bird the feathers were recovered from, what time of year it was, and the age of the bird at the time of the strike. A tiny Horned Lark, for example, could leave behind a yellow, black, brown, or white feather. There was no instruction manual Roxie could turn to for help.
Somewhere in these microstructures, she thought to herself, there had to be the equivalent of a human fingerprint, a unique identifier
He was the illegitimate son of Hugh Smithson, a well-to-do baronet who owned a sizable amount of land and eventually earned the plum rank of Duke of Northumberland. .. The sweetness of his successes could never fully mask the bitterness of being born a highbrow bastard. Within weeks of his mother’s death in 1800, James Louis Macie changed his name to James Louis Smithson, reclaiming part of his estranged father’s identity and bestowing upon himself the dignity he believed he deserved... From his secretive birth in Paris to his death in Italy, the man’s life twirled like one long melodrama. Death, however, proved merely an intermission, for Smithson had staged a postmortem plot twist
* in 1836, President Andrew Jackson dispatched attorney Richard Rush to London with orders to pry the fortune free from British hands. It took two years of maneuvering through the notorious rat’s nest that was the English Court of Chancery.. From New York, the gold coins were routed to Philadelphia, where the Treasury Department reminted the precious metal into Goddess of Liberty ten-dollar gold coins. All in, Smithson’s gift totaled $508,318, a monstrous sum at the time equivalent to roughly 1.4 percent of that year’s federal budget.
A sharp naturalist with a talent for identifying mammal skulls, Roosevelt knew the strengths of the Smithsonian’s collection and he understood its weaknesses—namely that it was shallow on plant and animals from Africa. As he mulled over the details of his upcoming trip, the president’s ambitions ballooned. What if instead of simply going hunting, Roosevelt led a full-fledged scientific expedition to East Africa on behalf of the Smithsonian?
* The first weeks of a yearlong presidential expedition deep into the tropics were a juggernaut of logistics and personnel issues. More than 250 porters, gun bearers, horse tenders, and other staff accompanied Roosevelt, hauling hundreds of wooden crates filled with rifles, munitions, traps, taxidermy tools, and canvas tents—on top of “four tons of fine salt” needed to preserve the various hides and skins they’d be mailing across the Atlantic.
The high school curriculum required that she take either home economics or civics. While Roxie had little interest in the so-called science of homemaking, she understood that civics was a literal boys’ club; not a single girl had enrolled in it. As she chewed over her choices, pangs of adolescent angst undulated through Roxie’s gut. In the end, she caved to the social pressures of the era and did what she was expected to do.
* most other times the young women were expected to be on school grounds. This never posed much of a problem until Roxie learned that Amelia Earhart was flying into town on a Thursday to put on a show in an autogiro—a silly-looking single-seat aircraft with a rotor stuck to the top of it.
For entertainment, she trapped rabbits on campus, at least one of which she skinned and turned into supper in her dormitory’s kitchen. She embarked on barefoot hikes in the dead of winter to test her grit
in the summer of 1934. Roxie, sporting a blouse and a pair of black-and-white-striped slacks, was stranded off the coast of one of North Carolina’s barrier islands, stuck chest-deep in mud that might as well have been wet cement. Each time she tried to take a step forward, the viscous goop constricted tighter around her frame and yanked at her tennis shoes. If the tide came in, she’d be doomed to a watery grave.
Pivers Island: President Theodore Roosevelt signed off on the construction of an expansive marine research laboratory, only the second scientific facility of its type in the U.S., the other being Woods Hole laboratory on Cape Cod.
The next morning, she woke to a hot red rash running up her arm. The diagnosis was blood poisoning and the remedy in the pre-penicillin era was a course of sulfa drugs, a class of synthetic chemicals that can cause harsh side effects.
Taxidermy and curio were enjoying a moment; displaying local fauna in a family’s parlor or living room was a way of displaying one’s affluence and knowledge. The Brimley brothers cleaned up on this trend and went on to establish a formal company, Brimley Brothers, Collectors and Preparers.
* She grasped a scalpel and made a clean slice down the bird’s breast to its vent. Slowly and methodically, she emptied the animal’s innards, separated the femur from the fibula and tibiotarsus, snipped through the soft tissue and vertebrae, and flipped the animal’s skin inside out over its skull. From there, she scraped out all the hunks of fat and tissue she could find and followed the remaining instructions in a book on taxidermy that she’d purchased in anticipation of this moment. Having apparently overcome the sewing deficiencies that plagued her in high school home economics, she took a needle and thread and closed up the bird.
* While the article referred to Roxie as a “pioneer” and applauded her commitment to the trade, it failed to note that Roxie was still not being paid for her services nearly four years after joining the museum staff. In order to generate income, Roxie did custom taxidermy work on the side.
In October of that year, Roxie gave birth to her first son, Clarence Grimmer Simpson. Motherhood weighed on her like a thousand-pound anchor.
The whole world was shifting, and Roxie was unsure of what direction she was sliding. Her son was growing; her husband was drinking. Her adventurous twenties were done and over and her thirties were off to the type of tiresome start that dragged most people into middle age and mediocrity. She didn’t want to settle.
Roxie arrived for her first day at the museum on June 5, 1944, hours before Allied soldiers stormed the shores of Normandy. The men in the taxidermy studio weren’t likely to admit it, but the museum—or more precisely, the museum’s birds—needed Roxie.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Smithsonian transmogrified into an unlikely instrument of war and established a committee focused on “exploiting every facility of the Institution” to support the troops... Museum officials escorted military personnel on secret tours so they could analyze the design of medieval helmets, discuss Inuit shipbuilding techniques, and study scores of other arcane artifacts in hopes of gleaning battlefield advantages.
* Taxidermists typically require sizable worktables given the nature of their tasks. But the men, eyeing Roxie’s diminutive stature, provided her with what looked like a card table because they thought it would suit her size. The idea that it was the specimens that took up table space and not the practitioner apparently never entered their minds.
A properly prepared research skin should be sewn up tightly, with the wings pinned back, legs crossed, and beak edging slightly upward. All the fat, guts, organs, and glands should be removed from inside the animal to ensure pests don’t swarm and replaced with enough cotton to fill it out, but not so much that it’s lumpy.
Some of the men liked to stage elaborate practical jokes, including one in which the hiss of an air compressor and a twenty-foot-long dead python were combined to scare a custodian half to death. To pass the hours, the crew teased each other in a way that only people who spend their days preserving dead animals could find funny. One memorable zinger was that Watson Perrygo used so much arsenic on his specimens that he was like a “sparrow taking a dust bath in it.”
bathing in the luminous pigments and stark shadows of Johannes Vermeer’s work—her favorite artist at that time. On Sundays, she’d spend hours riding streetcars from one end of the line to the other, jumping off to explore new pockets of her adopted city and do a bit of birding.
E.G. brought these skills to the Smithsonian, where he once labored for months on a three-hundred-pound python, shaping the sinuous mold and then painstakingly replicating the pattern of the snakeskin by painting each scale by hand... But it is a safe bet that Roxie’s second pregnancy came as a shock to both of them. She was forty-four years old. He was sixty-six.
The Chesapeake Bay is among the most popular watering holes for these birds. Since long before the dawn of man, huge flocks have been flying back and forth between the temperate wetlands and estuaries of the mid-Atlantic and their breeding grounds in the Arctic, a journey that covers some four thousand miles. At the time of the Vickers crash, the largest concentration of Tundra Swans in the world would have been found in the Chesapeake watershed.
On a more fundamental level, regulators never properly accounted for the higher speeds of modern aircraft, which made it more difficult for pilots to evade birds and increased the likelihood that collisions could wreck airplanes and claim human lives. A two-pound bird hitting an airplane going five hundred miles per hour could generate twenty tons of force.
Feathers engender obsession. This holds true across centuries, countries, and cultures. Navajo shamans and Ivy League scientists, ancient Roman fortune tellers and moneyed fly fishermen have all fallen under the enchanting spell of plumage. Infatuation with feathers went mainstream in the late eighteenth century... When the Titanic sank, the highest-insured pieces of luggage on board were reportedly a dozen crates of feathers worth an estimated $2.3 million (after adjusting for inflation).
Made of beta-keratin, the same rigid protein that forms reptiles’ scales, feathers are light and soft, yet strong enough to withstand the punishing forces of high-speed aerial acrobatics and long-distance journeys over harrowing landscapes and through treacherous conditions. <> Feathers are the Swiss Army knife of animal outerwear. In addition to enabling flight, they provide insulation against arctic blasts and waterproofing against tropical downpours. They camouflage predators and prey alike, and they are essential to wooing mates and propagating certain species.
* Swallow-tailed Kites have forked tail feathers that allow them to maneuver like fighter jets so they can hunt down dragonflies, wasps, and other agile insects. Owls have serrated wing feathers to mute the noises of flight so they can silently swoop through the dead of night to ambush their quarry. Anhinga have feathers that are less water resistant than most other birds, an adaptation that helps them move easier underwater.
most feathers follow a similar structural blueprint. There is a central shaft, the lower tip of which is called the calamus or quill and the upper portion of which is called the rachis. Branching off the central shaft are the barbs—there are pennaceous barbs that are bladelike and plumulaceous barbs that are soft and fluffy and tend to be clustered near the base of the feather. Branching off the barbs are tiny microstructures invisible to the naked eye called barbules.
She knew how to make slides and differentiate minute details of plants under the microscope. She also knew that when trying to identify plants, it was always best to first determine the family and then narrow it down, if possible, to a handful of likely species. A similar approach seemed sensible for birds.
* “But [cleaning] single feathers that had gone through aircraft? Now that was a whole new ball game,” she admitted... She’d drop the feather pieces into the sudsy bath and use forceps to whip up a small whirlpool. The feathers would bend and swirl, the barbs clumping together and forking apart. Stir too hard and the feather fragments twisted with one another—potentially bad news if the airlines only sent a little bit of material. Stir too gently, and the grime remained in the barbules.
When the lab was outfitted with lines for compressed air, Roxie insisted that some feathers fluffed up better if she administered it in a musical rhythm rather than a steady, hissing stream. When dealing with doves, she preferred a cha-cha cha-cha-cha, cha-cha cha-cha-cha... Twiddling the rachis between her fingertips or watching downy barbs dance like blades of windblown grass as she hit them with the compressor—it was all part of the obsession that was starting to take hold.
the Pacific program ran parallel to a classified set of studies led by the army’s biological weapons program at Fort Detrick, which included testing experimental bioweapons such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis and Q fever... It was, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the first and last time the Smithsonian engaged in classified research, a “mésalliance between science and secrecy during the height of the Cold War,”
It was the slow accretion of knowledge that came from analyzing hundreds of samples and sketching the microstructures on index cards over and over that allowed her to start accurately identifying the birds to which these feathers belonged... Roxie trained herself in pattern recognition, forging a mental algorithm for quickly sorting through and recalling microstructures. <> Sometimes she could identify a feather in an afternoon—ducks, for instance, were fairly easy for her, as were pigeons, the nodes of which looked like blooming crocuses. Other times a single sample would take six months or a year to identify.
Sexing cranes: There’s a very good reason why proctologists sedate their patients before a colonoscopy, but gassing cranes was out of the question. In order for Roxie to examine a Sandhill Crane, zoo staff had to first tape its bill closed, being careful not to accidentally cover the nostrils, and then fold the long, thin legs in half, taping each at the joint. The bundled-up bird was then laid on its back with a cloth draped over its head. A staff member hovered above, gently squeezing the wings of the supine bird to minimize movement
she performed the procedure on three Manchurian Cranes, three White-naped Cranes, two Sarus Cranes (the tallest flying bird in the world), one Demoiselle Crane, one Wattled Crane, four Blue Cranes, and four Black-crowned Cranes. It was the avicultural equivalent of a blind wine tasting:
The roughly thirty-eight square miles that make up Bitter Lake Refuge sit at a confluence of geographies, with the Chihuahuan Desert running up against the southern edges of the Great Plains. The nearly thousand-mile-long Pecos River cuts along the eastern side of the refuge and carries south to the Rio Grande, while the western edges are pocked with sinkholes, lakes, and wetlands.
Rosie arrived at the zoo seven years earlier in 1956, after a rancher found the bird hobbling around his farm in Central Texas with a broken wing. He loaded the animal into his truck and drove it 120 miles south to San Antonio, where he handed it off to Fred Stark, director of the zoo.
an impassioned memo to Fish and Wildlife. “I would be a dissembling coward if I did not admit that I was shocked and distressed by what I saw. The two birds are merely existing, shut up in a ridiculously small pen scarcely large enough for a pair of tame ducks,” Allen wrote.
Douglass successfully ran out the clock on Roxie. After nearly six weeks on the road, she boarded an Eastern Air Lines flight back to Washington without ever setting eyes on Douglass and without ever examining any of his zoo’s six Whooping Cranes.
Government officials rushed to clean up the mis-sexed mess, changing the crane’s name to Canus, a portmanteau of Canada and U.S. <> Over the next four decades, Canus became the most prolific progenitor the Whooping Crane community had ever seen.
Freeman was self-deprecating with an “adaptable but excitable disposition,” as one air force performance review put it.
few people would have expected the first astronaut fatality to be attributed to a bird—it was the banality of tragedy cloaked in feathers.
* The field of ornithology largely excluded women, while idolizing all types of problematic personalities, from sexists to racists to fabulists. John James Audubon, America’s most influential ornithologist, was an anti-abolitionist who bought and sold slaves while collecting ecological intel from African Americans and Native Americans that he met during his field expeditions.
A Black teenager skinning birds in the back rooms of the Smithsonian was a surprising sight to many people, including Paul Banko, a teenager from Virginia who also spent the summer of 1964 skinning birds under the supervision of Roxie. Working alongside Baskerville was the “first personal contact with Black kids” Banko ever recalled having, and Roxie’s equal-opportunity approach to bird-skinning struck him “as very progressive for those racially turbulent times.”
* Widowhood: Grief is formless. It can be a bog of melancholy for some people, a fount of self-destruction for others. Roxie found liberation through it. Marriages and children had long stifled her ambitions... However glib it may sound, E.G.’s death afforded her a level of independence that she’d not been privy to since her days in North Carolina, and she decided that it was time to go all in on her career.
* One such instance, and one of the first truly high-profile criminal cases to come Roxie’s way, occurred in April 1971 outside of Detroit... Prostate on the roadside and dazed from the blow, Brownlee laid motionless as the men slathered him in tar and then dumped a bunch of feathers on top of him... The case made national news and Miles’s conviction was a big win for the feds, for feather forensics, and for Roxie.
When her eldest son, Clarence, got married, Roxie hosted and catered the ceremony and reception on her property. About halfway through the event, while guests were still feasting and partying, she repaired to the kitchen and began a deep clean of the oven. One of her new in-laws asked her why she wasn’t outside enjoying the company, to which Roxie barked about how the stove needed cleaning and it didn’t make any sense to wait until after the party
* To manage the pressure of testifying, Roxie turned back to her days in Meredith College’s theater troupe and started treating her courtroom appearances as if she had been cast in a leading role. Once you raise your hand and are sworn in, you are no longer you, she told herself. You are an actor, and your audience is that jury.
Deedrick was the first person who was in the right place professionally and intellectually to take on the challenge, and Roxie didn’t want him to lose interest or patience. During those first few skinning classes, she was uncharacteristically effusive, telling Deedrick that he was the best skinner she had ever had in her class.
Separately, scores of women across the Smithsonian banded together under the Smithsonian Institution Women’s Council and found an ally in Gloria Steinem, who spent part of 1978 working in the Smithsonian’s Castle as part of a fellowship... Roxie wasn’t involved with the women’s council, and the council wasn’t focused on federal agencies that happened to have employees based in the museum, like Fish and Wildlife. She clung to the belief that it was better to keep her head down, her mouth shut, and her eyes on her work.
* The tricky part for Zug was that Jones’s complaints appeared to have merit and he couldn’t just blow off the head of the Fish and Wildlife lab. He drafted a memo in late 1978 that excoriated Roxie for misusing her status as research associate and instructed her to remove anything pertaining to her feather-identification research from the museum. The memo noted that while Roxie would retain her affiliation with the Smithsonian, she could only access the collection for certain work... They weren’t fanboys of Roxie by any means and could have kept mum. Instead, unbeknownst to Roxie, they rallied behind her and drafted a collective response to Zug, contending that Zug misunderstood Roxie’s work and was misstating the problem. While never mentioning Jones, the trio explained that Roxie’s use of the collection for feather identifications for law enforcement and the FAA were “entirely appropriate.” They added that Roxie’s research associate status wasn’t tied only to her blackbird research, but also to her long-running and very popular bird-skinning class and to work she did to identify feathers and bird parts for a litany of scientific colleagues... The men also apparently saw this as an opportunity to get Roxie to clean up her office
Loons are well adapted for the water, where they spend most of their time, and have a distinct anatomical structure in which their legs are tucked far back on their bodies. This helps make them excellent swimmers, but renders them slow and clumsy on land. If one alights on a hard surface such as pavement, it often becomes stranded, unable to gather the necessary speed to lift off.
* Standing there, looking at an animal she loved crammed awkwardly in a hole she broke her back digging, Roxie knew what needed to be done: out came the hacksaw, and off came Star’s legs.... “What I love about it, is that it’s Roxie in a nutshell,” Katherine Urbano, her granddaughter, said, describing the anecdote as the perfect encapsulation of how Roxie’s sentimental warmth collided with her unrelenting pragmatism.
Few people understood the contours of Roxie’s personality as well as her youngest son, Rob, who grew up second to her workload, absent a father, and with health issues to boot. In addition to his double cleft palate as a child, Rob later developed a bacterial infection that left him with ankylosing spondylitis,
They were private, reserved, and at times volcanic in their temperaments. A thread of codependence bonded mother and son, and they were emotionally and physically anchored in Manassas.
They found Musgrave and his two employees guilty of multiple counts, including conspiring to kill protected birds. Unsatisfyingly, the high-profile trial and the extensive police work amounted to nothing more than a few misdemeanors. Musgrave the baronet incurred about $10,000 in fines and was barred from working on game preserves in the U.S. for one year. None of the men served any jail time—one of them allegedly fled to England before the sentence was even handed down.
devised DNA extraction and sequencing procedures to monitor the caviar trade. That process once helped take down a New York food distributor who was harvesting roe from American paddlefish and selling it as high-priced sevruga caviar. Paddlefish are the ichthyological equivalent of an old-growth tree, capable of living over fifty years.
Airport authorities started hiring wildlife management teams to control bird populations. Extreme measures were sometimes required. <> At JFK, a colony of Laughing Gulls in the nearby Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge grew from 15 nesting pairs in 1979 to more than 7,600 pairs in 1990... the Department of Agriculture pushed forward with a shoot-to-kill program that exterminated 63,000 gulls from the airport over a decade stretch.
The air force innovated itself into a conundrum in the late 1980s: it had made huge strides in developing fighter jets that could fly at downright-frightening speeds while just a few hundred feet off the ground. That’s also the elevation most birds fly at. Adding to the problem was that conservation efforts dating back to the 1960s had started to pay dividends
* One time Roxie helped them determine that a series of collisions at a base in Turkey involved storks—large birds that posed a grave threat to pilots. It seemed like an odd bird to have repeated problems with, and the BASH team didn’t know how to deal with it until they got boots on the ground and discovered the base was overrun with terrestrial snails, a favorite snack of storks. The solution? Assigning 250 soldiers to handpick every snail they could find off the runways and surrounding property.
As one BASH team member later told Roxie, her identifications for the air force were “the cornerstone in developing a [bird strike] database second to none and quite frankly envied throughout the world.”
DNA testing was quickly becoming the gold standard of species identification and appeared poised to supplant morphology. That didn’t render Roxie’s knowledge moot. To identify feathers without understanding the barbules that make them unique was like using a supercomputer to test mathematical models without knowing how to do long division.
Roxie had learned a lot from mentoring Sabo that she could apply to her budding relationship with Dove. She learned the power of kindness, and she learned the power of vending machine snacks and carbonated caffeine. Like a chameleon of calories, Roxie adjusted her tastes to match the mentee.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton named Goglia to the National Transportation Safety Board, the first certified airplane mechanic to ever be appointed to the agency... One day in the late 1990s, Goglia was sitting in his office when he got a call from someone at the Smithsonian asking if he’d like to come over to the National Museum of Natural History and meet Roxie. Goglia’s heart raced. He knew of Roxie’s work and he knew that she’d been involved with the Boston crash.... He and Roxie spent the whole afternoon together. They talked about Flight 375, how bad it was, and how it changed everything... It was a cathartic afternoon for Goglia, two strangers whose lives and careers were shaped by a shared tragedy and the birds that caused it.
Most airworthiness standards pertaining to birds for commercial aircraft have not been updated since the 1970s, when a Tundra Swan downed the Vickers over Maryland. Some experts, including Richard Dolbeer, worry that population increases of large birds have outpaced the FAA’s requirements for bird strikes. There’s no right side of the debate.
The pattern on the geese Sully struck was completely different from that seen in the resident New York birds and most closely resembled the isotopes seen on feathers from a population that probably hailed from Canada. The origin story had potential legal implications: if the geese were from a domestic flock, Dove explained, it could have bolstered the argument that airport authorities weren’t doing enough to keep local birds from loitering.
As for identifying the badly degraded feathers that sat before Dove on this December morning, DNA samples and isotope analysis were of no use. These bird parts didn’t come from an airplane engine. They came from the gut of an invasive Burmese python that someone captured and killed near the Everglades... What concerns Dove is that the birds of the Everglades didn’t evolve with this type of predator. In the last century, the population of Florida’s wading birds has declined by roughly 90 percent thanks to the usual culprits—hunting, development, pollution. A new species of snake to contend with is the last thing these birds need.

"This is Happiness"

It came with cold air and curtained light. It came like a judgement, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on. It came for a handkerchief of blue sky, came on westerlies, sometimes – why not? – on easterlies, came in clouds that broke their backs on the mountains in Kerry and fell into Clare, making mud the ground and blind the air. It came disguised as hail, as sleet, but never as snow. It came softly sometimes, tenderly sometimes, its spears turned to kisses, in rain that pretended it was not rain, that had come down to be closer to the fields whose green it loved and fostered, until it drowned them.
I know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s lexicon.
lonely old houses out the country that are home to rheumatism and damp and the battle of the long afternoons, its doors are shielded by caution and fear of the corrosive nature of nostalgia.
by the mercy of creation the soonest thing to evaporate in memory is hardship and rain
Rain: That it had once started was already a fable, as too now would become the stopping. <> The known world was not so circumscribed then nor knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding.
Road: The one outside my grandparents’ house was mud, tramped hard and soft and hard and soft again, it was foot- and wheel- and hoof-made and bowed upwards in its centre like a spine along which pulsed the townland,
In the fields the cattle, made slow-witted by the rain, lifted their rapt and empty faces, heavy loops of spittle hanging, as though they ate watery light.
One of the privileges of living in a place forgotten is the preservation of individuality. In Faha, because the centre was distant and largely unknown, eccentric was the norm.
They were men from out the townlands whose character was made crystalline by solitude. That they were going to attend church was not in doubt, but because of the thorny relation of religion to the masculine they would show no eagerness and shielded off any sense of the spiritual with a studied casualness and a mastery of the essential art of saying nothing.
People in Faha hadn’t got the hang of parking yet. That Holy Week it was still five years before the introduction of the driving test, and another three before anyone in Faha would attempt to pass it.
one huddled abashed but no less seedful one of Morrisseys, each born in April nine months after the hay-making and each with something of summer in their natures.
Some women took the head-covering rule as an invitation to display, most notably Mrs Sexton who had a line in outlandish hats, one creation a kind of exotic wonderland with a hill of artificial flowers that were an Indies atop her, complete with tiny green hummingbird, and required significant mastery of equipoise as she came to the altar-rail.
What I was like then is hard to capture, the Crowe-ness in me manifest mostly in self-contradiction, my character an uneven construct that swung between flashes of fixedness and rashness, immovability and leap.
* his first tactic when I told him I was leaving was to say nothing at all. He tented his long fingers and tapped them, like a small church coming asunder and being pressed together.
It was a common stupidity then to think of your father as unreachable. I did not try to reach him until twenty years later, the year he was dying, and the first time I ever called him by his name.
But there’s something undoing about the dying light of mid-afternoon. In that empty old house on Marlborough Road all that had stitched me into this life came undone and I couldn’t escape the feeling that folded against my back were wings that had failed to open.
Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation. Perhaps following the prompting of his physiognomy, he had the philosophy that life was a comedy. Like one of those rubber figures that cannot be toppled, in him this philosophy was irrefutable,
* There was a world of saints then and people knew the Saints’ Days and whose feast fell when, and from the full gallery they chose favourites. Doady’s missal bulged with all the regulars... as well as a personal selection of Saints of Last Resort.
shouting down the line the kind of wooden conversation they may one day use on Mars. The telephone had a winder on the side and, like the cartoon bombs in comics, a large battery on the floor with wires coming out of it.
In her speech were bits of Irish and words that were halfway between two languages, accommodated into the mixture but strange as sloe berries
They lived by dispute, and as there were often several running concurrently you had to be alert to keep up, to understand that when Doady shouted ‘Water!’ it meant Ganga had let his hands drip instead of turning them in the cloth... But in all Ganga maintained the equilibrium of the just and could not be risen or riled. And in this was the theatre of their marriage, which in Faha was also a spectator sport,
Half an hour later, once he had gone outside to see to the animals, Doady took the tongs and repositioned all the sods, the way they should be. She said nothing about it, he said nothing about it. The fire survived it all.
Doady with glasses off, then on, then off again worked by paraffin lamplight with wools and threads of unmatched and often garish colours at elbows, knees, seats and cuffs, every angle of him that needed to be thatched back in against the exuberance of his leaking out.
Making the Welcome remained a kind of constitutional imperative. My grandparents, like all the old people in Faha then, preserved intact ancient courtesies. The cost of it, the way they would be living in the days after we left, was not hinted at, nor did it once occur to me.
during the Second World War Ireland fell out of synch with the world. The British, with breathtaking command, introduced something called Double Summertime, putting the clocks two hours forward to enable a longer working day. The Irish did not, and in fact Dublin was, is, and will always be twenty-five minutes and twenty-one seconds behind Greenwich
Rain in Clare chose intercourse with wind, all kinds, without discrimination, and came any way it could, wantonly.
when you’re a boy your grandfather’s chest has a peculiar and profound allure, like a spawn pool for salmon, wherein mysteries are resolved.
* the well (which was not the well you see with stone wall and pulley in English picture books, but a glassy green eye in rushy ground two fields over, which was ‘cleaned’ in summertime by the antique practice of slipping into that eye an eel), and carried back again, slopping until you found that pace, old as time, by which a man or woman walks with water.
the smell of rain in all its iterations, the smell of distant rain, of being about to rain, of recent rain, of long-ago rain, the insipid smell of drizzle, the sweet one of downpour, the living smell of wool, the dead smell of stone, the metallic ghost stench of mackerel that disobeyed the laws of matter and like Jesus outlived itself by three days.
It was where you lived by the clock of your stomach, came back to the house only when you were hungry, ate whatever was put before you, and ran out again, only partly aware of the privilege of solitude and the gift of time.
up on the bog there was turf to be turned – ‘You’re the perfect size for this job’ – lifted and turned and footed again, and again, because with turf the rain defeated all ploys amateur and ingenious to make believe it didn’t exist,
seventy since public electric lighting was switched on while Charles Stewart Parnell, addressing a large crowd, used the light as a symbol of a free Ireland, Faha still had no electricity.
you felt blindly for her teat which was a thing unimaginable, large as your boy-hand, pink and coarse and somehow worn too as you coaxed down and not just squeezed out a fierce jet of milk that came hot and greyish and shot alarmingly sideways against the enamel of the bucket with an urgent milk-music.
You fell brownly asleep and into another dimension where a ragged version of yourself plunged through a world vivid but infirm until you woke to unseen light and a bat asleep upside down just above your bed.
a man who had probably been slight when young but the world had muscled and beer had bulked him, so although of mid-height he was strong and square and full, but he carried the weight of himself with a look of bemusement, as if it was he who told the world the joke of himself.
Because this was sixty years ago some details are imagined. Nobody who’s lived an anyway decent amount of life remembers everything.
* The travellers came out of storytime, you felt, and although some were notorious and some had the guards in plodding pursuit, for the most part they were harmless, understood to be a stray thread stitched into the fabric of the countryside
Perhaps... because of the mysterious attractiveness of those even tangential to music, he had a long train of rumoured paramours and illicit relations, all of which were in defiance of his actual looks and testament to the unknown depths of females.
* You live a decent length you get an appreciation for the individuality of creation. You understand there’s no such thing as the common man, and certainly not woman... Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them... had the confidence of the storyteller when the story is still unpacked, its snaps not yet released.
he’d say, throw the eyebrows and extend towards you an inverted newspaper, folded even as a tablecloth, inside which was what you didn’t yet know about Sputnik, what the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs had promised now, and the news of Manchester United, to which, with the native affinity for tragedy, the sensate half of the country now supported after the Munich crash.
Time has unpeeled a history of infamy for the country’s institutions, and failures of compassion, tolerance and what was once called common decency were not hard to come upon. Faha was no different;
I’m at an age now when in the early mornings I’m often revisited by all my own mistakes, stupidities and unintended cruelties. They sit around the edge of the bed and look at me and say nothing. But I see them well enough.
And because an old man has only the story of his own life I am running across it still, a lanky seventeen-year-old from Dublin, shy and obdurate both, running with a premonition that I thought was doom but was maybe fate if you’re a party to that. I was running believing I was going to save him, when of course it was he who would save me.
So compelling is the evidence of our own eyes and ears, so swift is your mind to assemble your own version of the story, that one of the hardest things in this world is to understand there’s another way of seeing things.
We’re all, all the time, striving, and though that means there’s a more-or-less constant supply of failure, it’s not such a terrible thing if you think that we keep on trying. There’s something to consider in that.
* A key thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.
This was a country that through the ministry of the Church and other interested parties was encouraged to think of change not only with suspicion but outright fear,
* when the electricity did finally come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling... In the week following the switch-on, Tom Clohessy couldn’t keep mirrors in stock, had a run on hand-, oval-, round- and even full-length as people came in from out the country and bought looking glasses of all variety, went home, and in merciless illumination endured the chastening of all flesh when they saw what they looked like for the first time.
* Showing a keen understanding of the national character, the Electricity Board had secured a concluding masterstroke. By special arrangement, and the goodness of His Grace the Archbishop, each house that took the electricity would get a free Sacred Heart Lamp.
When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there’s a certain infirmity to your footing. May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.
‘The notional is to be made actual,’ he said, and in the instant after, realising his register had gone over the heads of the parishioners, added: ‘The electricity is coming.’
The doctor kept his foreignness to Faha intact by being punctual, a thing unique in the parish, and establishing the phrase Troy-Time, which meant exact and the opposite of Tom-Time, which meant any time other than when Tom Keane said.
Irish forests, we had learned in school, were felled to make Lord Nelson’s fleet and were now fathoms deep with the rest of the Admiralty. Instead, after extensive research, which in those days meant sending a man, the Board learned that the best place to purchase the poles was the country of Finland.
Like all who had to outwit savage climate, Mr Salovarra eschewed sentiment and offered an inflated price of £4 a pole... Right here is the only one, said Mr Salovarra and smiled. He had the kind of teeth that suggested the tearing of fish-flesh.
In the deep woods was a preternatural silence and a sense of the beginnings of time, and Mangan was not surprised to learn of the Finnish epic poetry of the Kalewala in which the earth is created from pieces of duck egg
sometime you could do worse than go out into the country, find one of those quiet roads where time is dissolved by rain, look out across ghost fields that were once farmed and you’ll still see some of those poles An tUasal Mangan first laid a frozen hand on in the forests of Finland.
it’s human nature to dream, and in the vexed nature of marriage to hope time will harmonise the irreconcilable.
He looked blankly at his audience, air leaking out of his performance, then some switch inside his memory was thrown, he blinked twice, tapped his forefinger on the table, and added: ‘Of course, there can be trouble with the insulators for the HT and the LT fuses too.’
The rain having departed, the evening sky was million-flecked. It felt opened, as though previous ones you just now realised had been closed. Because there was no electric light, because we were at one of the edges of the universe, and because they were usually shielded with an impenetrable cloud, the stars hung with naked wonder.
interest in others perhaps the first of the many things extinguished by alcohol / There are better smiles on deflated footballs.
(all places had their own propriety, and Craven’s was that it was a place of despair, it was where there was no further to fall, where you could hunker down and linger in the dark
It wasn’t only that this didn’t happen in Craven’s, it was that there was something raw in it, something deeply felt, that was, even to those who had descended blinking into the umbrae and penumbrae of numberless bottles of stout, immediately apparent and made those who first looked now look away. <>Christy sang. I cannot tell you how startling it was. If you believe in a soul, as I do, then my soul stirred.
* It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is... that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness... It felt like an intimacy you weren’t entitled to, but knew it privileged you
drunk: The stars slid down the velvet sky. You could put them back in place by locking them in your gaze and lifting your head slowly, slowly up. Stay, stars.
It is a freeing thing to flow into the dark. Now that I am entering my Fourth Age, the Age of Completion they call it, I think of that cycle ride and take courage from it. We could barely see the road we raced down. We came round the bend at Furey’s and past Considine’s discovering that blind cycling is its own art and into each instant compresses the knowledge of how to master it.
flew glorious for one long and sublime instant before landing face-first in the cold puddle and muck of reality. <> 11. By the grace of new chapters, it was morning.
Thatch has the density of a fairytale forest... The roof is minutely alive and feels forgiving, as though it has lifted like an eyebrow towards the sky with surprise and welcomes back the all-but-forgotten.
* I cannot be sure what I heard that night, what I heard later and added to the fog-memory, and what invented, a perplex that deepens after sixty years, but with less consequence. The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. So, though the narrative was flawed, the sense was of a life so lived it was epic.
And so, it was only gradually, over the days to come, when they lifted their eyes and saw the improbable plane of blue overhead, that people began to acknowledge to themselves that up to now they had been living under a fall of watery pitchforks. <> At that time, there endured in Faha an antique belief common in all rainy places, that sunlight was curative.
let escape brown flights of moths whose larvae dated to the days of Parnell and who now transitioned to powder in mid-air. I saw them but did not remember for fifty years until I saw a figure pixelate on a screen. The moths of Easter, I said aloud, and they flew in memory and dissolved again the way the smallest things of your life do... Set outside, big-jointed furniture creaked an asymptotic series of aches that soon went unremarked because it was understood to be the bone-music of resurrection.
he had told the crews the best way to solve any disputes was shame... Second, there was the question of unworthiness. This had been ingrained by the Church from birth. With recourse to a pure Aristotelian logic, the bishops understood that making people feel lesser was a way of making the Almighty mightier, and with native extremism Faha took that to new lows.
* There was one of those mild breezes that in April can seem eloquent. What I remember are the birds, sudden quickened flights of them, ten, twenty taking flight together, with a magician’s flourish, leaving bare one tree and finding another. <> From a lifetime, how do you recall such a thing? The truth is you don’t exactly. But you think you do, and you might have. At this stage that’s good enough. Main point is, it seems to me every life has a few gleaming times, times when things were brighter, more intense and urgent, had more life in them I suppose.
He had the wan face of a farmer in calving season, eyes small from lack of sleep and close encounters with viscera.
A mirror of what confession was for the soul, surfaces had to be made spotless. I’m probably not the only one who, going from house to house and witnessing this, would have thought: what soaps and abrasives it might take to launder my spirit.
Women enjoy watching men work, the same way men enjoy watching women dance. There’s otherness and mystery in it.
Blackall’s. The one-time land agent’s house, it was infamous in the parish, its history leaving a stain that had endured the way it might at a plague site despite the passing of a hundred years and the balm of generation.
He lifted the teacup and performed an impeccable demonstration of how you deny reality.
Savouring the turn in the story, she said no more. She looked above us into the immensity of the firmament. ‘And,’ she said again, forefingering the bridge of her glasses and with the unbounded theatrics of all the O Siochrus milking all the udders of the pause... She lowered her voice. ‘Didn’t Sullivan the undertaker find the host after, stuck to the roof of her mouth.’... The conundrum landed, we were silently all Sullivan then, trying to decide which way to send the host.
There was every reason to feel natural joy in the world, but for the one that makes it accessible. When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you’re young, the unlived life in you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.
When you’ve been raised inside a religion, it’s not a small thing to step outside it. Even if you no longer believe in it, you can feel its absence. There’s a spirit-wound to a Sunday. You can patch it, but it’s there,
You were inside the engine of Easter. With the enduring magic by which a people, on budgets thin as air, not only survive but celebrate, the feast was everywhere being readied.
She knew who was in which grave, and who in the one below that one (and the ones below those too, who were working their way back to the surface through the self-raising agent of a colloquy of worms fat and contented from passing through life, until chosen by Simon of the Kellys as best bait for the smirking salmon passing in the river).
Mrs Moore landed... Flo, the world’s saddest feather duster... She held the record for ash-balancing. She would work with a burning cigarette held out ballerina-style in one hand, a tower of ash she didn’t need to look at building nicely while she dusted, or performed a slow-motion version of same, the dust in no danger, until the tower was certain to fall, and at the last moment, as though it were a smoking extension of herself, she would bring the cigarette to her small mouth and suck like the damned. She would draw on the cigarette and the smoke-coloured dashes of her eyebrows would float up and leave no doubt that from ashes to ashes was her destiny, and not such a bad one at that.
Mrs Moore was my grandfather’s surprise and understood that she was the least likely emissary of love, his way of acknowledging to Doady that he knew she was afflicted, and company would be a balm. Knowing that Doady would refuse any such, he had presented it as charity. Knowing that Mrs Moore would not accept charity, he had presented it to her as an act of kindness to his wife.
* One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You can begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that, and unlike the clear-edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound-map even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. .. Which, I suppose, is both my method and aim in telling this story too.
It was inexplicably tender, the slightly abashed boyishness of a big man in his sixties. <> ‘For her I once ate a dozen purple tulips,’ Christy said, and in the blueness of his eyes you could see he was amazed by and not a little admiring of his younger self, who entered the garden on that statement and strode through, all innocence and earnestness, a wildly impetuous boy with small boots, glitter eyes and tufted hair, in love with Annie Mooney... Maybe you’ve seen that sometime sitting with an older person, the youth they were passes through their eyes, and is in silence acknowledged, hopefully acquitted.
Softly whistling all the while, he held in both hands the bulk of his belly and tried in vain to push it inside him. When this failed, by pressing from the top he tried to send it south below his beltline. He pulled up the underpants to try and arrange a meeting. Abandoning this, he sucked in his breath and stood to his full height and with both hands again pressed his belly in and upward, as if its rightful place was in his chest cavity. It remained there for five seconds, and for five seconds he was delighted at the figure he cut, the vanquishing of time, gravity and human sinkage.

‘How long is it since you saw her?’
‘In the flesh? Near enough fifty years.’
I nearly laughed.
‘But in every other way, some time every day since.’
And that stopped me. That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.

no one then spoke of their ailments, there was a now depreciated philosophy of offering it up and half the people of Faha were dead before they thought to complain of a pain.
‘Well, I can’t help. I’m not going to church. I don’t believe in God.’ <> ‘Sshhh.’ He patted down the thought with both hands like it was a small fire.
I was now aware that he had orchestrated everything, the job with the electrics, coming to Clare, to Faha, and to Doady and Ganga’s, so as to be at the altar-rails of St Cecelia’s on Easter Sunday to see Annie Mooney.
* With a slightly lesser view of humanity but an undiminished zeal, Mrs Queally unearthed a cousin of a cousin of her husband’s who worked in the Buttermarket in Limerick, took the bone-shaker two hours to the city, from the personal abundance set aside for the Bishop’s Palace purloined a portion, and came back on the bus with an archangel’s look of victory, the front four seats bedecked with lilies.
Eyes straight ahead, the women prayed that kind of timeless praying that rises murmurous and general the way you imagine the land might pray, dangles of rosary beads moving through fingers like some circular riverworks of soul.
The Latin rose and hung above the candled altar like air carvings, intricate and ornamental, and other, which was how God was supposed to be at the time.
In profile her face had a graven look, but also something of what, I would only come to understand years later, time did to great beauty, refine it, as though after coming through a fire.
To Ganga and Doady, Easter was an inarguable actuality same as the rain or the river, and with as little call for debate. I wasn’t wise enough to envy them then.
Doady did a small genuflect with her face. ‘Welcome, Mother.’
It is a dolorous fact that a meal, months in the dreaming, weeks in the planning and days in the preparation, is eaten in minutes.
Ganga, whose habit was to open his trouser belt after eating, made it halfway before he caught Doady’s glare and turned the unbuckling into a patting.
After a liquid lunch in Craven’s, he had found the margins of the roads badly drawn.
A small thing will feed a lover, and the thought that Annie Mooney had recognised him in the church that morning was enough to keep Christy’s heart high and his eyes glossed.
Without specific destination, but the knowledge that the heartland of the music was north of Kilmihil and south of Miltown, we pushed the bicycles out of Faha along roads hard and curved like bones in the moonlight.
As though an infinite store had been discovered, more and more stars kept appearing. The sky grew immense. Although you couldn’t see it, you could smell the sea.
It was a given then that with musicians in Clare it was difficult to start them, to stop them impossible.
They had no apparent inclination to take the instrument cases out of where they were stacked in the windowsill, until they did. And when they did, the air was changed. There’s no other way to say it. The smoky, dark corner of a dingy pub forgot that it was a nowhere. It became a locus, a centre, and we became a company, focused around tables where, behind abandoned butts smoking in ashtrays and pint glasses paused in mid-tide, two fiddles, a flute and a concertina made time stretch so it was now and back across the ages in the same moment.
the sliding slope of Church Street like a crooked yawn, the misaligned huddle of the shops and houses curved into a comma, paused beneath a sky now both opal and pink, the picture of actual earthly peace, or as near as. <> Christy sang the song up to the front windows of Gaffney’s chemist shop. I stood a little ways behind, like one holding the horses... With screwed-up eyes and throat-cords bulging, with bubbling porter-sweat and cuckoo-spittle, he was singing her into being and, by the power of an antique passion, porter and the potency of an old song, seeing her too. Whether the Annie Mooney of years earlier or the one in St Cecelia’s that morning, I couldn’t have said.
* because of what would become a lifelong weakness for fine words and minor chords, I think I believed not only would calamity pass but the tactic would prove ingenious... To the serenade, Nolan’s dog was not a convert... in the case of Faha was augmented by Clancy’s cock, Hayes’s hens, and then, wait, Healy’s ass in the half-acre behind the hardware shop. In truth nothing in creation could be declared a fan, and, though the singing was neither drunken nor loutish, soon enough a rough chorus was barking and braying and the village was started from sleep with the forked hair and quizzical eyes of the burgled.
I realised that unlike those of us whose hope only came in one size, slim, Christy’s was still broad enough to survive the failure of his first approach... leaving behind us the operatic scene, the singing of the love-song, and a story that I’m assured is still told, embroidered into fable, sixty years later.
In an effort to elevate the status of the game and replicate the wireless commentaries on Radio Éireann, Thomas Nally employed a bullhorn and ran up and down the sideline broadcasting a pro-Fahaean version of what was happening. Not to be outdone in the battle for reality, Boola had a Brophy with a bullhorn who did likewise, running up and down the same sideline
Once standing, any decent story has a life of its own and can run whichever way it wants. So the details that Doady came home with, Christy’s calling out Annie’s name, his beating the chemist’s door with his fist and crying against the glass, like a child with a runny nose it may have picked up anywhere.