Boneyard in Ballmoran
On the rare clear days, Ballmoran passed for an ordinary town, sheep in the fields, sloped stone walls, grass bent with wind. At the turn of the century, it had been the thriving heart of tallow production, drawing men and their families from across the island and farther still. But when the fog settled in, thick and white as the tallow itself, the town vanished. The neighbouring settlements called it “the town that God forgot,” and to Finn Duffy, the name felt fair.
That morning, the sun made a modest effort, shining weakly but mercifully through a thin layer of cloud. It might have made for a pleasant day had it not been for Aengus Brennan -- seventy-three, and proprietor of the town’s only pub -- roaring blue murder over what his wolfhound, Domhnall-Boy, had found. As he did every morning at nine, Aengus was setting out the pub’s tables and chairs when Domhnall-Boy came crashing through the back door dragging half the yard’s mud with him. Something pale was clenched in his jaws, and he set to gnawing it, drool pooling steadily on the floorboards.
“I couldn’t budge the fecking thing off him!” Aengus said.
Domhnall-Boy had gotten hold of things before -- one of Aengus’s work boots, a pie tin from the rubbish, an unsuspecting gull -- but he always tired of them soon enough, leaving the evidence strewn about the pub, much to Aengus’s great displeasure. This time, though, when Aengus finally wrestled the thing loose, it wasn’t a bird or a boot, but a jawbone -- a human jawbone.
“And that’s when I called yeh.”
Finn was no stranger to being called upon. After his father passed, hadn’t he become the unofficial town mayor, counsellor, and general fixer for all 256 souls, God help him. A job he neither wanted nor asked for. When Finn was a lad, Ballmoran still had people. The tallow boom had seen to that; there was money to be made and hands enough to make it.
Back then, Finn and his pal Rory, only two houses down, worked their shifts -- Finn at the chip shop/video/petrol station, Rory at Aengus’ pub. They met at eight every night. They would then climb the highest hill, turn a slow circle, and look for the glow -- a patch of light, a bonfire --whatever marked that evening’s bush party, and head toward it.
On more than one of those nights, Finn and Rory had made a pact: to leave Ballmoran by any means, to find work that didn’t require the town’s unofficial uniform -- denim coveralls blotted dark with the stain of tallow. The plan had seemed simple enough. When the mills shut down, most of the families drifted toward Dublin. Rory followed his older brothers to Liverpool, working the docks. The town emptied almost overnight, leaving only the elderly, the shuttered factories, and the lingering smear of tallow grease that never quite washed away. Before long, Finn found he was the only able-bodied Ballmoran left.
“Stop pissing around with the grandas and get yer arse over here, Duffy. The city’s class -- and the cailíní, Christ above,” Rory had said.
But the years slipped on, and whenever Finn attempted to raise the matter of leaving, the townsfolk responded as they always had.
“You can’t be going and leaving us, Finn Duffy” scolded the ladies of the Ballmoran Parish Sunday Seamstresses. “Think of the wains, Finn. Did you never once think of the wains?”
What wains? Finn wondered. At thirty-two, he was the youngest person in Ballmoran by more than twenty years.
By Monday morning, Mrs. O’Sullivan found a sternum nestled in her foxgloves. By week’s end, the tally had grown to four femurs, six collarbones, half a skull, five kneecaps, nine ribs, eleven vertebrae, the other half of the skull, and fourteen assorted small bits --fingers or toes, no one could quite agree.
If Ballmoran lived on the island’s edge, its cemetery lived on the edge’s edge. It seemed that weeks of spring rain, mixed with the unrelenting spray off the North Atlantic, had worn the topsoil thin, slowly coaxing old bones back to the surface. The graveyard had never expanded, even as the population did. After a famine, a flu, and a generous dose of tuberculosis, bodies piled up; rather than enlarge the grounds, townsfolk simply stacked their dead like firewood, plot upon plot, each grave a little shallower than the last. After twenty-six days of unbroken rain, the earth finally gave way, loosening a century’s worth of remains for the gulls, grouses, and wagtails to peck at, scatter, and ferry across town.
Something had to be done.
---
Finn gathered the Ballmorans for a town hall meeting in Aengus’ pub, the only place big enough, and convenient, since most of them were already there. His first proposal was to contact the neighboring cemeteries and ask if any had space to re-bury the bones. “Castlewellan’s lovely” Finn said, trying his best not to sound cloyingly optimistic. “Only an hour off, and the same grand view of the sea, like. I could put a word in.”
“It’s not right” someone fired back. “You don’t lift your own from the ground that holds them. Me great-granda’s in Ballmoran soil, and his granda before him. That’s God’s order!” Echoes of agreement clattered the room.
Finn suggested relocating the bones, though this would mean digging up centuries of remains, a job only he was physically capable of doing. Then there was the matter of finding a place for them. He asked if anyone might spare a piece of land; there were empty fields everywhere. But Ballmorans were God-fearing folk, and where God was involved, good sense rarely followed.
“No backyard of mine will be a hooley for ghosts!” Eamos Kelly said, hammering his cane on the floor. “Wasn’t it the widow Donovan that cursed her late mother-in-law, God rest her soul, and sure as hell, not a fortnight went by before her cat turned up stiff in the street, would you know?” He crossed himself twice for good measure, and the crowd followed suit.
He proposed casting the unearthed bones into the sea. “We could have a ceremony and all. Make it a Viking burial of sorts.” Mentioning the Swedes was a mistake. “What you after, Duffy? Comparing us to those yellow-haired, herring-eating, furniture-making giants!” The crowd bellowed, muttering and nodding like one.
Six weeks went by and still no decision could be reached. And despite the scavenging, the gathering of bones, Finn’s days carried on much the same as ever. Each morning, he woke at a quarter to six, saw to the goats, lifted the eggs warm from the nests, thatched whatever roof was sagging, checked the stone fences for gaps, and walked the shoreline.
He liked ending the day by the shoreline. Something about the thinning light made space for the thoughts he spent the rest of the day ignoring. The air smelled briny; the scent of old salted stones, dark and rich like wet earthworms turning in the soil. He wondered if the waves ever got tired of coming back to a place that never changed.
Resentment built in the pit of his stomach then, sour and fetid like a kidney pie gone off. He thought about how easy it would be to walk away -- to let this cemetery mess become someone else’s problem. To hell with you -- the lot of you he thought I could be somebody -- somebody great.”
But even as the thought shaped itself, he felt its untruth. What if he couldn’t? What if after leaving the island he was just him, Finn, decent with a hammer and not much else? Here he had a purpose -- small, perhaps, but something. Here he couldn’t deny the small pride he took in being needed, in knowing which roof leaked, which goat limped, which fence stone had shifted overnight. Out there, beyond the fog, would he simply dissolve into the vastness – a man without weight -- a man he didn’t recognize?
The waves rolled out and gathered themselves again, and he understood why he always ended up here. It wasn’t just envy at the waves rolling out, but comfort in the certainty of their return. It struck him as strange then—this desire to forget, and yet not be forgotten.
---
By half nine, with the usual morning tasks behind him, Finn turned to the work that had lately become routine -- sorting whatever the night’s storm had loosened from the graveyard.
This morning’s haul was a small one—six finger bones, each no bigger than a matchstick. He brushed the soil from them and laid them out on the worktable. Without thinking, he arranged them by colour: the bright, younger ones on the left, white as dried fishbones, the older, darker ones on the right, stained by decades, possibly centuries, of mineral-rich earth. A tiny gradient of the town’s dead.
Some of these must be ancient, Finn thought. Some must belong to children. Poor wee things, their tiny lives cut short by fever or famine or whatever old miseries swept through these parts. Had they dreamed of leaving Ballmoran too— or had the world taken them before dreaming was even an option? So many small lives folded into the earth now scattered across the fields like stray buttons. A voice interrupted his thought.
“Duffy!” Eamos Kelly stood at the fence, thumping his cane. “The pub isn’t open yet. Near half nine. Some of us have to get on with our day.” By get on, Finn knew he meant drink himself sideways and shout at birds. Still, he frowned.
“Aye, it’s strange. Aengus never sleeps past the taps” Finn said and wiped his hands on his trousers.
---
As the village dogsbody he kept half the town’s spare keys, Aengus’s included. He crossed the square and let himself in through the pub’s back door. The hinges gave a low groan. The coloured glass windows cast soft patches of green and red across the floorboards. The air was stale and dense, with the sour-sweet stench of beer that lived in the carpets. A smell a man welcomed at night and cursed the morning after.
He lingered in the doorway, listening. The usual sounds were missing: the clinking of glasses, the off-key rendition of Molly Malone Aengus belted each morning.
“Howdo, Aengus – are you in?” Finn called out.
Domhnall-Boy’s breath reached him then -- hot, meaty, and panicked. The wolfhound was lying beside something on the floor, panting in short, laboured bursts. A small whimper puffed out of him, almost apologetic. He stepped further into the room. There was Aengus Brennan, lay beside the overturned stack of stools, still on the floor, his great hands slack at his sides, his eyes half-open.
For a moment Finn just stared, struck by how small the old man looked in the middle of the empty pub. He’d known this day was coming; Aengus had been passed his pub-keeping years for a long while. Still, he’d been the closest thing Finn had to a father since his own died when Finn was nineteen.
He stepped forward and knelt beside Domhnall-Boy, resting a hand on the dog’s trembling head.
“You’re alright. You’ll be alright,” he repeated, partly to the dog, partly to himself, and he supposed, partly to Aengus, whose body now had nowhere to go. The soft fur beneath his hand felt damp. Only when he wiped his cheek did he realise it was his own tears slicking the wolfhound’s coat.
---
Light spilled in through the heavy oak doors, bright and unkind as Finn stepped back from the bar. He’d lifted Aengus’ body onto the tabletop, there being nowhere else long enough to put him.
In twos and threes the townsfolk drifted in for the meeting Finn had called. Just as it was about to start, Finn caught sight of Eamos Kelly at the counter, reaching straight across Aengus’s body to pull himself a pint—managing only half a glass at the awkward angle.
“Are you joking me, Eamos?”
Eamos didn’t look up. “Aengus would’ve wanted it,” he said assuredly, giving the tap a final pull and taking a long sip.
“What about the tallow shed?” someone ventured. “It’s empty. Plenty of space. Dry, even.”
“Aye, and you want him smelling like chips and sausage for eternity, do yeh?” came the sharp reply. “God forgive you.”
“What about the shuttered schoolhouse?” chimed the widow Donovan, raising her finger in the air. “It’s dry, and no one steps foot in it anymore.”
“The roof’s half rotten,” Finn reminded her. “And the rats are bold this time of year. He wouldn’t last the night with them.”
“D’you think we could hang him in the back storeroom, like they used to with the hams?” someone said. Finn shook his head, imagining Aengus dangling, Domhnall-Boy at his feet. “No,” he said softly. “No.”
“Could put him in the pub cellar,” Eamos Kelly said, scratching at his jaw. “It’s cool down there, Aengus would’ve liked it. It smells like old hops.”
“You can’t put a good man in strange soil,” said Mrs. O’Sullivan, clutching her rosary. “He must go with his own.”
“The cemetery’s where he belongs” came the final verdict. “Anywhere else and he’ll walk.”
“But the cemetery isn’t safe,” Finn sighed. “The rain’s chewed the land to shite. You’ve seen it.” He glanced around, the room was silent.
“A temporary resting place, so” a voice concluded. “Just until Duffy finds a proper spot.” And that was that.
---
“Christ alive” Finn muttered as he got his arms under Aengus. The solution wasn’t clever or elegant, but it would do – for now.
He found an oilcloth behind the pub, folded over a stack of ale-barrels. He wrapped Aengus as tight as he could and lifted him into the truck bed. Domnhall-Boy scrambled up after him having yet to leave the old man’s side.
Before the meeting disbanded someone from the Sunday Seamstresses started singing “Danny Boy” as they stood around Aengus. Just a thin line of song at first.
Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…
But then others joined in.
From glen to glen, and down the mountainside…
Finn shut the tailgate and got behind the wheel, turning the engine on. Their joined voices echoed in his head now, rising and falling with the road as he drove toward the graveyard.
The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling...
A gust of wind swept over the graveyard gate as he pulled up. The evening was sliding into a bruised plum. The slope looked worse than he remembered – the ground uneven and agitated. He stepped out, boots sinking into the wet soil.
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide…
He chose the driest patch he could find, a small section less stirred by wind and rain. He drove the spade into the ground, the soil resisting at first, clinging to the blade, then finally giving way.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow…
The grave widened slowly. Domhnall-Boy circled its edge, his white paws blackened with mud. Finn’s movements were exacting; sure, this was only a temporary plot, but it had to be deep enough that overnight rain or morning birds couldn’t reach Aengus.
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow…
Finn lowered the body into the grave. He paused a moment to wipe his brow before beginning the re-piling process. He worked slowly, patting and shaping the mound at each interval.
“It’s I’ll be here…” He sang the final line aloud, “In sunshine or in shadow…” even now, he hated that it caught in his throat. That line always had a hold on him—equal parts comfort and equal parts curse.
When he straightened, he gestured toward the truck.
“Come on, Domnhall-Boy, let’s go.”
The dog let out a whine and pressed his paws into the newly settled earth, unwilling to leave. Finn crouched giving the dog’s collar a firm tug.
“Let’s go, Domnhall-Boy. I don’t want to be here any longer than I need to.”
In protest, the dog sank lower, leaning into the mound and anchoring his back legs like brakes.
With a sigh, Finn conceded. He went to the truck, rummaged around, and returned with an old coat. He laid it down near the grave’s edge. Domnhall-Boy circled it once and curled tightly onto it.
Finn pulled out a bit of jerky from his coat pocket and set it down. Filling the cap of his thermos with water, he nudged it toward the dog, giving him a final scratch under the chin.
“Stay dry,” he whispered. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
---
Finn stepped through the door just as the first few drops of rain spotted the stone path. He lit the stove and set about making a simple tea of coddle, potatoes and a heel of day-old bread.
How had he’d gone from finding Aengus to herding the town without so much as a bite? He thought. Hunger caught up with him all at once. He ate quickly, standing at the counter, and when he rinsed the bowl and set it to dry, a deep tiredness washed through him. His mind was crowded with anxious thoughts of tomorrow, even so, sleep found him easily. He lay down without fully undressing, the tune rising and falling again as he closed his eyes.
I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow
---
That night the rain hardened and the fog rolled in, pushing inland until it smothered the town in a thick fleece. Beneath its cover, the ground shivered loose. Small cracks along the cliff-edge spread and widened until the earth surrendered and slid into the waiting dark.
A tangle of dirt and bones went with it, dropping clean into the sea without a sound.
At first light the fog still held. And until it rose, no one in Ballmoran would know what the night had taken.