Eulogy for an Irish Cowboy

By Cian Thomas Ennis

Artwork by Emma Chi

Dedicated to Thomas Ennis

I carry with me, in a ragged rucksack, the most awful truths. This cumbersome load may not be examined, nor must it ever be sold for profit, yet here I am, laying its contents out on the table for all to see.

Part One: Reminiscence

At times I call out to you in song, my namesake. I whistle the tunes that you once did for me, “oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling”. Although I may not believe in a utopian afterlife as you did, I long for one. I hurry my ideology out the door, and pray to an apparition.

I can see you, waltzing along, your feet on the metal gauze of the panopticon. Observing the fetters on the tides, placed there by a tyrannical moon. You gaze across a nebula, to bear witness to your garden. Once, it was Eden incarnate, and now it is a scorched tundra, set alight by the candle of inertia. You recall how you once cheered on your grandchildren as they did play. Providing them with a hammer, nails and rotten wood, ensuring an elated joy is conjured upon their gob. You sat on your rickety handcrafted chair, as we ran circles around you. An old man, unable to keep up with the ecstasy of childhood wonderment. Simply happy, to witness an abundance of jubilance.

Your watchful eyes penetrate the place between heaven and hell, and within this realm of uncertainty, I reside. Like some ancient god you observe, and whisper in my ear, the virtues of morality. Never have you advised me regarding the decisions that pertain to my future, nor have you provided me with any holy directions. Your gouged eyes are that of an archaic prophet, and you call on me to take pious action, when the stragglers appear.

I could never truly comprehend the importance you held in this world, while you still inhaled dust. You did not care for poets or generals, those self indulgent strategists. Rather you cared for what was immediate, ever present before your eyes. I thought you to be an eccentric, babbling old man, and that you most certainly were, but I, ever the fool, failed to see the greatness in your novelty act. Another reminder of the great coalescence of madness and virtue.

You loved unabashedly. I recall, but not fondly, the carnage that ensued in the months prior to, and the months following, the death of the woman who we both held dearest. The image of you, planted on the staircase, with your face in your hands, as water breached the crevasses of your fingers, like some Old Testament flood, and me, standing at the foot of the stairs, just some confused child attempting to tread water. This was not the actions of a man who envisioned himself as a stoic cowboy. No, this scene did not have a profit hungry crew behind it. When this image once again visits me at the most obscure points of my life, I wish to reach my hands across the netherworld, so that I may wrap them around you and say, “even cowboys cry”.

With your death, came the desecration of Eden. What I once felt was guarded by eternal providence, seems to have been only maintained by our labour. The apple must fall from the tree, yet it is your prerogative whether or not you let it rot. In tandem, we would tend to the flowers that eclipsed the banal grey of our dirty old town, but now the dahlias have had their time in the sun, and with time they have lost their mirth. They have become the cud of clay, feasted on by the cannibalistic earth. This is the consequence of not uprooting what has long been dead, but I cannot bear to return to this lonely Eden, to ponder on the seasons, all on my lonesome. I will leave the detritus to be consumed. The inevitable destiny of matter.

Part Two: A Stranger Enters

One year has passed since I participated in the ever disappointing Catholic funeral cortege. One year has passed since I’ve had a pall to bear. Oh how reminiscence makes me melancholy. Enough with that now. A stranger has entered the funeral home. What excitement!

I never understood Patrick Kavanagh’s magnum opus ‘Epic’ until a man, whose name I still do not have the privilege to know, graced the crusty red carpet of yet another funeral home, conveniently built beside a shabby pub. A rough and tumble man, with wrinkles as evidence of years of toil and trouble and hard labour, solemnly stride into the wake. An earnest sadness was found in his eyes, one that could not be found in many of the vagrants who pranced around, only there for a laugh, commenting on how much I resemble my grandfather, almost as if they wished to inform me that I too shall die. My father, ever the loquacious host, left us mourners to greet him with a firm shake of the hands. There shall be no pistols at high noon here, we don’t live in Texas. Silently, I considered what they might be chattering about before becoming distracted by the pageantry of the coffin lined with silk and my grandfather cast into it. The stranger absconded from the affair, but not without planting a kiss upon my grandad’s forehead, and scribbling in the book of the dead. Curiosity, as it often does, got the better of me, and I scurried off to absorb what the cryptic drifter noted. He did not leave a signature, yet he wrote a brief statement of condolences.

‘To my partner those many years ago

Our neighbours would have been left parched.

If we did not rise before light,

and ramble through the dark streets of Dublin town,

This was the sacrifice we made

So that those who awoke when the sun did

Had milk to drink.’

The stranger had worked with my grandfather on a milk float before a city was made of our town. Over forty years had passed since redundancy had come their way, the stranger then was just a boy then. Callously, their jobs were slashed, and it was only my own blood who received a severance payment. My chagrin quickly turned to an ecstatic pride, when I learned that my predecessor split the loot between them. The quintessential ragged trousered philanthropist.

Part Three: Ruminations

Is one of the markers of greatness the arrival of some mystical pilgrim? No. Not necessarily. That is not the point I wish to make. The stranger acted as an archaeologist, revealing information about the past of one’s life that was buried in the shadow of mourning. It is the reason behind his actions that I attribute greatness to my grandfather, the commitment to be with one’s former partner at the end of the famine road.

To be great, one does not need to have their name on some self-indulgent book of poems, nor do they need to stage a revolution, nor do they need to subdue one. To be great, or even fantastic is to utilise this asphyxiating existence to choose the path of the righteous man day in and day out. A kind of anarchistic direct action which simply means doing good for your common man, even if it is some arbitrary nonsense, like allowing your confidante to cry into your shoulder, like a good cowboy would. You must act in relation to the environment around you, even if it requires philosophical martyrdom.

To be great is to be forgotten. Death looms on the landing, but if we act desperately, and we act true, a stranger may arrive, with dahlias, not yet dead. I scoff at death, for in doing a singular good act in one’s life, you live on in the minds of the free. Not yet bound by oak, you live on ephemerally.

As Patrick Kavanagh wrote, ‘Gods make their own importance’, and yet, we are all just fallen angels, attempting to rectify the original sin of our creation.