Susan McGahern’s transfer to Cootehall

Susan McGahern’s transfer to Cootehall moved her children and household from Corramahon to the barracks while she remained gravely ill behind. The journey was both a practical relocation and a wrenching separation: furniture, farm animals, and children left together, while the narrator struggled to say goodbye to his mother. Three days after the arrival, the family learned that she had died.

A move made under the pressure of illness

The narrator understands the move as having been arranged when Susan’s death seemed near. His father had apparently heard from Maggie or Uncle Pat that the end was close, and the preparations had begun before the morning of departure. The brown hens had not been let out; instead, they were packed into crates for the journey. The family’s ordinary routines were already giving way to the work of leaving.

Margaret and Monica went to school by a route past Brady’s pool and house, the old Mahon brothers’ street, the quarry, and Mahon’s shop. The rest of the children were kept from school. A lorry came to Corramahon with only its driver, and Uncle Pat directed it down the cart path to the house. It could just turn and park on the cinders between the house and the flower garden. The preparations were not presented as a leisurely move: the household was being dismantled while Susan remained in the sickroom.

Clearing Corramahon

The men loaded the downstairs rooms first. The table, chairs, yellow dresser, pots, buckets, basins, flour bin, milk churn, and tea chests of crockery went onto the lorry, along with lamps emptied of oil and religious pictures taken from the walls. Upstairs, the wardrobe, chest of drawers, mattresses, bedding, and white enamel pots had to be carried down the narrow, rickety stairs. Susan’s bicycle and the narrator’s small bicycle were loaded too.

The iron beds held up the work. Damp had rusted their joints so firmly that bicycle oil and brute strength could not separate the sections. A hammer finally did what the other efforts could not; its blows rang through the small house and made the thin walls shake. The furniture was cleared in perhaps an hour or two, though to the narrator the time seemed much longer. The labor gives the departure a stark physical form: a home reduced, room by room, to a load secured on a lorry.

The last visit and the journey

While the lorry filled, the narrator stood by the overgrown flower garden, delaying the moment when he would have to enter the sickroom for the last time. He had already said goodbye to the cows, white bullocks, and goats on the hill. When he approached the old jennet, it galloped away, apparently taking him for someone come to harness it for work. Breedge, Rosaleen, and little Dympna had visited their mother; Katie had gone in with the baby. Their excitement at the bustle felt incomprehensible to him, and he watched them with silent resentment because they seemed not to understand what was happening.

At last the nurse signaled him in. With the rooms emptied, the house seemed larger. He crossed the landing past the open doors of the small, bare bedrooms and went to Susan’s bed, where Maggie and the nurse were present. He told his mother that the lorry would soon leave and bent to kiss her. She did not move. Unable to remain, he hurried out into the blinding day, wanting to delay departure but fearing that if he returned to the room he could not leave it again.

The children climbed aboard among the furniture and crates. Katie sat in the cab with the driver and the baby; Breedge, Rosaleen, and Dympna were placed in the back, with Dympna between her sisters on a mattress. The end board was raised and secured. As the lorry jolted along the road, its furniture shook against the crates, held in place by ropes, and the hens clucked for nearly the entire journey. The narrator kept looking toward the upstairs window until the lorry pulled away. Only after the family was on the road did he begin, gradually, to join his sisters in reaching through the crate to feel the rushing air.

Arrival and the news of death

The route carried them through Fenagh and Keshcarrigan, past Leitrim village, across the shallow Shannon at Battlebridge, and along narrow roads to Cootehall. They passed the church, Henry’s field, Lenihan’s Bawn, and the barracks, then turned through a short avenue of sycamores. The landscape offered a sharp contrast to the cramped, rattling load: beyond the black and red navigation signs stood the slow river, the glittering lake, and the dark woods of Oakport Estate.

The barracks had been empty for so long that its big rooms echoed. The girls called out to hear their voices return, then laughed and called again, until their father shouted at them to be quiet. They began to cry. Once the furniture had been carried inside and the lorry had driven away, the narrator went outside. The barrack boat floated in the inlet, and potato plants filled the tilled garden. That night he slept with his father in a large iron bed with broken brass bells, looking out through a single window toward the river and Oakport Estate; numb with grief, he scarcely cared where he slept.

The children were not sent to school the next day or the day after. On the third day, a telephone rang in the dayroom. Guard Cannon came along the hallway and told their father that there was a personal call. While their father took the call in private, Guard Cannon stayed with the children. Katie asked whether it was from Corramahon. When he nodded, she burst into tears, and the narrator began to weep with her. Their mother was gone and would never answer to her name again. Breedge and Rosaleen first laughed at the sudden crying, then fell silent when their father returned and told them that their mother had died at a quarter to three.

Significance of the transfer

The move changes the meaning of departure as it unfolds. At first it is organized through practical details—school, crates, furniture, farm animals, and a route to Cootehall—but for the narrator each task measures the dwindling time before his last visit to Susan. His sisters can be excited by the motion and newness of the journey; he experiences the same movement as being taken away from his mother. The later news of her death makes the transfer the threshold between family life at Corramahon and a bereavement the children must face at the barracks.

The contrast between the departing household and the mother left in the sickroom remains at the center of the episode. The lorry carries almost everything that can be packed, yet it cannot carry the narrator back to the moment beside her bed. His first response at Cootehall is numbness; when the message comes, grief passes from Katie to him in a sudden shared outpouring. The transfer is therefore not simply a change of residence. It is the physical separation that precedes the confirmation of loss.