Fiction by Seán Hill

Getting The Electric

It’s not something my grandfather ever really talked about. He had said once, a long time ago, “the ESB drove the ghosts from the countryside.” He was talking about the Electricity Supply Board during the electrification of rural Ireland from the 1940s to ’60s. It always seemed pretty clear to me what he meant, but it was only when I half-jokingly mentioned it once again near the end of his convalescence was I met with a sigh, a minute of silence, then him looking me dead in the eyes and telling me the whole thing.

As a young boy, my grandfather, like many young folk, used to do what were called “messages” for some of the older people in his home village of Dunbannig out in the rural west, such getting milk or bread or mail for them, himself not being old enough to be of much use on the farm, and education of any kind was sporadic. It was during his messages in the days after the neighbouring village of Ballyrackert “got the electric” that he heard the first murmurs. Small things, like the farmers on the road who complained of the state of the fields, like an animal had gone mad and kicked the dirt up all over, or something big had got into a chicken coop. Or Mrs. McRae in the shop who went on about the cold in the night, getting odd looks as the stifling summer sun streamed in the door. None of this weighed on my grandfather’s mind at the time, and in fact, he said, he was wholly ignorant of the vast majority of such murmurs. But that was soon to change.

Mr. Walsh, the ESB area organiser, had come back from some prior visit for a decision, and this time most assented. Might take a short while, he said, though “not so long that they’d become unfashionable!” But no one laughed. My grandfather noted, in the time leading up to electricity, boys, including his brothers, were hired to keep watch on pens and barns at night, though they all ended up congregating near houses, and that was mostly because of the calls that seemed to pass through the night air right until the sun came up. He remembered the priest from three towns over arriving one afternoon, saying blessings were in demand in Dunbannig. It didn’t stop people refusing to answer the door for their messages, or his parents from whispering until someone came in the room, or keep his sister Margaret from staring through the window in the evening. People running behind the houses, she’d say. They sometimes caught her eye, and stared back.

It happened one evening when it was just my grandfather, his sister, and their mother by the fire. He was pondering over one of his mother’s borrowed books from Ballyrackert, but his sister had gone to watch out the window, again. She stayed that way for a long time, utterly still, strange for any child to be, eyes fixed on the blue night. In the quiet hearth crackle, her little voice was a shock when she said someone was at the door. Their mother called for Margaret to come over at once and stop playing. There was no argument. Their mother hadn’t taken her eyes from the fire once the whole night, but her head snapped up like a frightened bird when, suddenly, someone tried the door. It was bolted, and my grandfather said maybe it was dad, but his mother only called for both of them to come to her. It wasn’t insistent, it came every half a minute or so, someone pushing on the door a little harder than before. She held their shoulders hard to stop them from turning around.

But my grandfather couldn’t help himself—young boys rarely could when told not to do something. He craned his neck to the window. Something, he said to me most seriously, darted away the second his eyes passed over the smoky pane. The door groaned long and loud. Seconds later a wave of cold swept over his hands and face. In the firelight he saw the door, ajar, with what was very clearly a hand gripping the frame. Margaret was crying. His mother didn’t budge an inch, but she was speaking the Lord’s Prayer and her hands around them were like vices. My grandfather swore then, upon his life, his wife’s memory, his family, and his God, that what that peered through the doorway was not an animal, and was also certainly not a human being.

The next thing they heard were his brothers’ voices coming up the path. But how long they had stayed there, with that thing inching closer, could have been minutes, or hours.

For a week after that, his parents’ large silver crucifix, a family heirloom, hung on the front door. In the daylight, electric work had progressed, and there were new poles and lines all along the roads. Houses had been fit with lightbulbs. The family couldn’t have them on quick enough. Soon, after some minor tests, a time and date had been set the next night for the grand ceremony of putting on the lights. Apparently Ballyrackert had put on quite a party, but what Dunbannig did was probably audible for the next several towns over. My grandfather and his sister were allowed stay up for it, and eventually went to bed under the supervision of an older brother, and a the warm glow of an electric lightbulb.

Did you know, my grandfather said, even now in some countries they’ll make way for certain hills or sites, so as to not disturb them? The Irish government had, it seemed, paid no such heed in its march towards modernity. And Dunbannig was, it turned out, the last place in the entire district to get the electric. He didn’t want to imagine just what had been driven their way in all those years.