Jackdaws

Jackdaws are recurring birds in the graveyard scenes surrounding the deaths and burials of Oliver McCourt and Eugene McCourt. For Frank McCourt, their presence gives grief a visible target: he wants to protect his brothers’ graves and imagines striking the birds that gather there. His father, by contrast, suggests that a jackdaw might be somebody’s soul, bringing religious uncertainty into the same landscape of mourning.

At Oliver’s Grave

After Oliver’s burial, jackdaws perch among the trees and gravestones. Frank dislikes them and does not want to leave Oliver with them. When one waddles toward the grave, he throws a rock at it. His father says not to throw rocks at jackdaws because they might be somebody’s soul. Frank does not know what a soul is and does not ask; Oliver is dead, and he hates the birds. He imagines returning as a man with a bag of rocks to leave the graveyard littered with dead jackdaws.

That imagined future turns a child’s helplessness into a blunt, retaliatory wish. The birds are not shown harming Oliver, but their proximity to the grave makes them the objects of Frank’s anger. His father’s appeal to the possibility of souls offers a spiritual explanation that Frank cannot use to soothe himself: at this moment, his attention remains on the dead brother and the jackdaws he resents.

At Eugene’s Burial

Six months after Oliver’s death, Eugene dies of pneumonia. At his burial, the jackdaws are quiet in the trees as evening falls. The narration describes them as resting so they can rise early and feed their babies, setting the ordinary cycle of animal care beside the family’s loss of a child.

When the men cover Eugene’s coffin with earth, Mam cries out, and a jackdaw croaks in a tree. Frank again wishes he had a rock to hit it. The sound recalls his earlier anger at the birds around Oliver’s grave, but the burial scene does not resolve that anger; it returns at the moment the earth closes over another brother.

Narrative Significance

The jackdaws connect the brothers’ graves through repeated appearances, giving Frank’s grief a recurring image and action: the birds gather or call, and he wants to drive them away with stones. Against this child’s concrete response, the adults’ words and gestures place death within religious and funeral customs. His father speculates that a jackdaw may be a soul, while Eugene is dressed in a white gown with rosary beads before the family follows his coffin into the graveyard.

The birds remain birds in the scenes, described through their movements, calls, and daily habits; the possibility that one might be a soul is offered as the father’s belief, not confirmed as fact. Their recurrence therefore holds two registers together without settling the question: Frank’s immediate anger at what he sees near the graves, and the adults’ efforts to make death legible through faith and ritual.