to say the prayers, and when we returned to the room, Grandma gave Dad money to bring a few bottles of stout from the pub. Mam said, No, no, but Grandma said, He doesn’t have the pills to ease him, God help us, and a bottle of stout will be some small comfort.Then she told him he’d have to go to the undertaker tomorrow to bring the coffin back in a carriage. She told me to go with my father and make sure he didn’t stay in the pub all night and drink all the money. Dad said, Och, Frankie shouldn’t be in pubs, and she said,Then don’t stay there. He put on his cap and we went to South’s pub and he told me at the door I could go home now, that he’d be home after one pint. I said, No, and he said, Don’t be disobedient. Go home to your poor mother. I said, No, and he said I was a bad boy and God would be displeased. I said I wasn’t going home without him and he said, Och, what is the world coming to? He had one quick pint of porter in the pub and we went home with the bottles  of  stout.  Pa  Keating  was  in  our  room  with  a  small  bottle  of whiskey and bottles of stout and Uncle Pat Sheehan brought two bot- tles of stout for himself. Uncle Pat sat on the floor with his arms around his bottles and he kept saying,They’re mine, they’re mine, for fear they’d be taken from him. People who were dropped on their heads always worry someone will steal their stout. Grandma said,All right, Pat, drink your stout yourself. No one will bother you. She and Aunt Aggie sat on the bed by Eugene. Pa Keating sat at the kitchen table drinking his stout and offering everyone a sip of his whiskey. Mam took her pills and sat by the fire with Malachy on her lap. She kept saying Malachy had hair like Eugene and Aunt Aggie said no he did not till Grandma drove her elbow into Aunt Aggie’s chest and told her shut up. Dad stood against the  wall  drinking  his  stout  between  the  fireplace  and  the  bed  with Eugene.Pa Keating told stories and the big people laughed even though they didn’t want to laugh or they weren’t supposed to laugh in the pres- ence of a dead child.He said when he was in the English army in France the Germans sent gas over which made him so sick they had to take him to the hospital.They kept him in the hospital a while and then sent him back to the trenches. English soldiers were sent home but they didn’t give a fiddler’s fart about the Irish soldiers, whether they lived or died. Instead of dying Pa made a vast fortune. He said he solved one of the great  problems  of  trench  warfare.  In  the  trenches  it  was  so  wet  and muddy they had no way of boiling the water for the tea.He said to him- self, Jasus, I have all this gas in my system and ’tis a great pity to waste it. 83