Gone away he had. Like many before him, he had left home. Went off to the USA. But success abroad could not be measured for him in great wealth and gain. He had more important things to concern himself with, not least of all his pipes.

By JACK LYONS

I CAN STILL SEE HIM. A gaunt, lonely figure winding his way up the mountain in the half-light of dusk. His flight ticket from Kennedy to Shannon still crumpled in the pocket of the same gabardine coat he went away in. And now he was back.

After ten years he was back. Just as single, just as without woman or child as the day he first went away. Could any woman live with this man! I wondered, as I watched his slow progress towards the house. He was, as my mother always said-and she, his sister of some fifty-five years--stubborn as a mule. Pig headed.

As I looked down the hill at him from the parlor window it occurred to me that no woman would spend too great a time stuck on a man as my uncle Peter. Too set in his ways. Too single mindedto share the inner most thoughts most men would want to share with a fellow human being. Too much in love he was with the pipes, the only thing he could fall back on to manifest his genius. Sometimes his drunkenness. Sometimes both in spite of himself.

When I was growing up he would sit on the side of his bed in the back room and attach himself to those uileann pipes. Coax controlled volumes of melodic air through the brown sack. I used to sit by the fire out front in a kind of begrudging admiration while the haunting strains filled the room.

They used to say in Clancy's bar, and still do, that uncle Peter had a kind of power. That once the sack got breathing and the reeds started to hum he could raise the Tipperary dead and resurrect half the banshees in Clonmel--in a manner of speaking, of course. Gifted he was, as everyone knew.

And now he was back. Back in Dromreigh. And what purpose did any lonesome drifter ever need! A mule-headed brother to my aging mother who doted on him, and who cried after him the day he packed the battered suitcase and flew economy class to New York.

And what did he do there! What great stateside feats did my uncle accomplish in the ten years of his emigrancy! None more than the only thing he really knew: entertaining the grandchildren of the Ellis Island inductees. 711e diaspora that spawned a generation of immigrant bartenders, construction workers and hotel owners. In a brief set of wind blown magic, my uncle Peter was capable of transporting hearts and minds back to the old sod by the soft lilt of his brogue and the wild wail of the loneliest pipes in Manhattan.

Oh, he had a power all right. An ability to break the heart of his only sister with his comings and goings. London, Belfast, New York--the suitcase was always on hold. In the ten year span of his sojourn to the other side of the Atlantic he had managed to write my mother no more than half a dozen letters, less than a letter a year. He certainly hadn't kept the post office busy. When the odd letter arrived with the Bronx postmark I used to gaze at the handwriting on the front and the way he embellished Gaelic lettering into written English. Educated. And eccentric.

Well, at least I kept a job down and tended the acre. Unlike him the wandering minstrel as my mother often referred to him. But basically she adored him. Adored him because he'd been the youngest in a family of eight. And each one went through the eye of the emigrant needle. Two were banking in Toronto, another a cleric in Rome, the rest scattered around the globe. Except the dairy manager, he stayed close.

And of the pick of the bunch; the one individual who could safely be referred to as the black sheep of the family, now approaching the house with a worn suitcase--my uncle Peter. Career opportuni- ties and college degrees meant nothing to him. He had no degrees! It was almost a boast. His was an education of the soul, he told people.

I grew up trying to come to terms after the father went sudden in his sleep, uncle Peter would call me to come sit by him and his pipes, while he articulated notes and quavers on to fresh music sheets. His unusually big hands controlling the now of blue ink from his fountain pen like a Japanese scroll. Then his gentle pressure on the wind sack and the lilt. It was all there for me and I only had to turn my head.

"Come in and learn something worth- while." He'd call from the back room to where I'd be sitting out front, stoking a warm fire and watching the grey mist sweep close. But I'd shun his request with some kind of uncertain justification. Because I'd be weather watching, clock watching, and girl watching. And too damn busy to learn anything about sucking in air.

Because I had never learned an instrument his words of encouragement hardly ever left my consciousness later on. At times they haunted me in his absence. And now, on a cold Saturday evening, as I watched him approach from the parlor window, his worn shoes grating into the gravel--the same gravel drive he'd promised to pave fifteen years ago!-I found it hard not to admit that I'd missed him, if only for her sake.

He'll be at the door any second. I sense his wise old grey eyes checking the roof and the eaves to see what jobs might lay in store. Here he is. Tired from the flight and looking like he hasn't tasted her homemade bread in ten years. The faithful airline-tagged suitcase gripped tight. Inside the case, temporarily dismantled and wrapped in tender mummification, his uileann pipes. I can't deny a feeling of mature relief that he's back. So maybe this time I'Il listen. Maybe there's still time for me to learn the wild pipe and resurrect a banshee, or two. ·