The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín Page B

fire burning in the grate.
    â€œWhen you’re older you’ll love books,” Stephen said. “There are great books.” He was wearing a pullover over his pyjama-top.
    As the light faded Stephen lay back with his head on the pillow and his eyes closed. Eamon thought that he was asleep until he began to cough. At first it was a weak wheeze which came in waves with his breath, and then it seemed that he could no longer breathe, and then Eamon could hear him struggling for breath as the real coughing began. It sounded as though he was going to be sick. Eamon waited by the window watching him. “Get newspaper quick,” his grandmother said to him as she came rushing in. “It’s in the bottom of the press in the kitchen.”
    He ran out of the room and down to the kitchen where he found an old newspaper and brought it back to the front room. His grandmother was holding Stephen in her arms and saying “you’ll be all right” to him over and over. He thought that his Uncle Stephen was crying. He went back out into the hall and stood there listening to them. After a while he went down and sat in the kitchen. When his grandmother appeared he saw that the newspaper she had in her hand was bright with blood.
    On Christmas morning he awoke early, before the first thin strip of grey dawn appeared over Vinegar Hill, and went downstairs and turned on the light in the back room. The room was still warm from the fire. He found his present from Santa Claus on the table and set about unwrapping it. It was what he had wanted: a fort in separate pieces and some soldiers. There were also several bars of chocolate.
    He went back upstairs, his teeth chattering with the cold, and dressed himself. By the time his father appeared he had assembled the fort on the dining-room table. He showed his father how he had pieced it together.
    It was a clear day with edges of frost on the pathway down towards the Back Road. They walked to nine o’clock Mass,meeting those coming home from eight o’clock Mass and greeting them with “Happy Christmas” and “Many Happy Returns.” At the bottom of Pearse Road a woman asked him what he got from Santa and he told her that he got a fort and soldiers.
    They walked up the aisle of the cathedral to Our Lady’s side altar, but there was no room there and they had to kneel on the ground until a woman moved over and made space for them, but there still wasn’t room for Eamon on the seat and he had to sit on the foot-rest.
    The preparations for the consecration began to the constant sound of coughing and shuffling, soon replaced by a reverend silence once the bells rang. He watched his father out of the corner of his eye as he opened the missal at the place where the black-edged Mass card for his mother was kept. He watched his father’s lips move as he prayed, the missal still open, and his mother’s smiling face, familiar he had looked at it so many times, centered in the card and below it the date of her death—16 August 1934—and the age twenty-eight. He turned away as his father closed the missal, having finished whatever prayer it was he had been saying.
    They went home after Mass and had breakfast. Then his father gathered all the presents they were to take to his grandmother’s house: books for his grandfather and Uncle Stephen, a scarf for his Aunt Margaret and a cardigan for his grandmother. He found some wrapping paper and sellotape and set about writing cards for each of them.
    â€œThese are all from you now,” his father said, “and you’re to hand them to everybody.”
    His father put all the presents in a shopping basket and gave it to Eamon to carry. They walked down John Street and Court Street towards the Market Square. His father stopped to talk several times. Eamon held his hand and tried to tug at him to make him hurry up, but one man in a brown coat who was on his way to have his Christmas