Master Patrick Buries his Grandmother

Post Six

The penultimate vignette of Wandering Rocks is a truly heart wrenching part of the book. Patrick Dignam, one of the Dignam children has been sent to town on the afternoon of his father’s funeral. Ostensibly on an errand but more likely because he was bored and becoming irascible among the mourners in the house. We expect he is about twelve years old, though eleven would be more in keeping with the revivalist essence Joyce ascribes to that number.

He reflects on the funeral.

               ‘Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr. Dignam, my father. I hope he is in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.’

Paddy Dignam senior is the third lost parent to feature in the book following Rudolph Virag and May Dedalus among several others mentioned in passing such as Ellen Bloom and Lunita Laredo. Bloom’s reflections upon his father permeate throughout but what strikes me here connects more to Stephen.

The riddle in Nestor seemed nonsensical but there were a few strands of interest.

The cock crew,

The sky was blue:

The bells in heaven

Were striking eleven.

'Tis time for this poor soul

To go to heaven.

The answer to which is ‘the fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.’ Cue bewilderment and annoyance among the schoolboys.

Reference to burial at eleven alerts to Dignam’s funeral at this time but perhaps more interesting is Stephen’s subsequent musing while attending to Cyril Sargent:

               ‘A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.’

Its not much of a stretch to expect this fox to resonate with Stephen who has recently buried his mother nor considering Stephen’s guilt, to visualise blood on his hands just as it coagulates in the fox’s fur. The fox scrapes. Why? Surely only to dig up the body. Is she dead? Can she be revived? Sadly for the fox and for Stephen, no. Dead is dead, as Bloom will definitively confirm at Dignam’s funeral.

Which brings us back to Master Patrick. Shortly before young Dignam’s poignant thought he was excited by an advert for a boxing match into which event he thought he might sneak, young though he is. But hope is dashed when he realises the advert is historic and like his father, it’s been and gone. He is drawn to something that seemed so real, so near he can almost touch it, almost be there. So close to a time when his father was alive. It would be so easy to sneak into that fight, so easy for the fox to dig up his grandmother. Except for one minor detail, we haven’t figured out how to turn back time.

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