Joe wanted to say, Terrible, since you’ve asked, but he knew Pat didn’t want an answer, most likely blamed him for the war, him being on British soil and all.

It rained all through the days of the wake and was still falling when Uncle Gerald came with the hearse to collect the body from the house. The rain drummed on the slate roof of St Brendan’s. It rained as they left the church and walked towards the burial ground, his daidí in his pine coffin with the flowers dripping and the wilting wreath in the shape of a chopper. The rain turned to hail, glacial to the touch, icy water skidding to the earth and soaking into the soil, falling in grey rivers over the tombstones and monuments, eddying in the dips in the paths and the space around the graves. It splattered off the umbrellas and the hats of the mourners and soaked the trouser legs below the raincoats. It seeped into the leather of the shoes. The mourners walked to where the pit was dug, six feet deep, in a plot big enough for Bridey too when her time came, and stomped their sodden feet in the soggy earth at the side of the grave. Father Murphy in his white surplice and purple stole, Joe in his, sopping cassock heavy with water, clinging round his legs so it was difficult to walk. The coffin was lowered into the grave and the ropes relaxed and Father Murphy nodded to Joe who stepped forward with his rain-soaked missal.

‘May his soul,’ his foot began to slip in the quagmire round the rim of the hole, ‘and the souls of all the faithful departed,’ Joe put his other foot behind him to keep his balance but the waterlogged ground couldn’t hold the pressure and with a slurp, ‘through the mercy of God,’ sucked him down so that he slid over the side of the grave as if it were an open scree. He flung out his arms and let go of the missal, ‘Rest in peace,’ and landed with a thud on the foot end of the coffin, which tipped in the sludge and settled with a slap, spitting gobs of black mud over the crisp white lace of the surplice he’d borrowed from Father Murphy.

Joe stared at the layers of earth in the mud wall in front of him: the thin, black topsoil and the red clay beneath marbled with severed roots, washed white like a slab of best porterhouse veined with fat, and beneath the clay the cracked tips of grey stone. The hole smelled like a winter night, dank and decayed, and as he tried to push himself up, the sides began to crumble with the weight of water and there was a roar as they caved in around him, pushing him back, covering his feet and legs and waterlogged cassock and splattered chasuble in a thick flow of ooze.