The Heather Blazing Read Online Free

Avenue. Sometimes, the two men would talk for hours, lighting cigarettes and letting the car fill up with smoke and the smell of sulphur from the matches.
    Sometimes they spoke in hushed voices, as though he, the boy in the back of the car, might listen to what they were saying and repeat it elsewhere. He tried to follow the conversation. Agreed, agreed, his father said, agreed. He repeated the word to himself until it lost all its meaning and became just a sound. They were silent in the front of the car. Now, he thought, if he concentrated enough, the priest would start up the engine. But once more nothing happened. Why did he not start it? What were the two men thinking about? They drew on their cigarettes without saying a word; they bothseemed to be thinking about something. He listened as they began to speak. They were talking about a woman, but he could make no sense of their conversation.
    â€œIs Father Rossiter Fianna Fail?” he asked when they came home.
    â€œPriests can’t join parties,” his father said.
    Soon afterwards, there were often long silences in the car; Father Rossiter would drive them to the door and the two men would sit there discussing something for a while before falling into a long silence. His father began to go down town in the evenings to meetings and Mrs. Doyle came over from Pearse Road to mind him. “How lucky you are,” she told him, “just to be here on your own. Think of all the houses which have ten or twelve in the family without enough clothes to wear, or even enough food. You’re lucky too that you’re living in this nice house and your father’s a teacher, because otherwise in a few years,” she said, “you’d have to go to England to get a job.”
    She left the fire set for them every evening, or if it was very cold she would light it and leave the fireguard up against the hearth so that when they came in from school the back room would be warm. Eamon had to take charge of it, because his father sat at the table absorbed in what he was reading or writing. His father never noticed anything, even a spark on the rug which could, Mrs. Doyle said, burn the whole place down. His father would let the fire go out. He would stand up and look at the embers and the ash and then point to the rug, laughing to himself. “ Rugadh é in Eireann ,” he would say, as he knelt down to try to get the fire going once more.
    He remembered the Woodbines in Mrs. Doyle’s hand and the smoke in her voice, just as he remembered the long silences in the car, and the radio coming slowly alive with sound, and news of the war and Mrs. Doyle one evening telling him that his father was going to buy the Castle.
    He waited until they were walking home from school together.
    â€œAre we going to sell the house,” he asked, “because I don’t want to live anywhere else.”
    â€œWe’re not going to sell anything,” his father said.
    â€œThe Castle is too big for us. Is there electricity in the Castle?”
    â€œWhat has you going on about the Castle?”
    â€œMrs. Doyle says that you’re after buying it. It’s too dark and old. No one goes near it.”
    â€œBut it’s for a museum, it’s not to live in,” his father said.
    Soon, as he lay curled up on the back seat of Father Rossiter’s car, he heard them talking about a museum. But the two men mumbled too much for him to catch any more of what they were saying. He asked them, but they continued talking and he had to ask again.
    â€œIt’s for old things, historical things, like old books, old letters,” his father said. “People can come and look at them on display.”
    *  *  *
    Mr. McCurtin next door showed him a map of the world. Mrs. McCurtin said that he should be in his bed, but he waited up to hear the news on the wireless and he studied each country in Europe and down into Africa to see which was in German