Harman had turned for a moment, as he waited for the front door to be opened, feeling himself scrutinised beneath the imperious arc of the security light. Despite his terrible anxiety, he had wondered at the way it cast itself into the yard and struck the dank Fermanagh acres beyond its reach into a solid, black block. Now, inside the house, he felt himself somehow accused. Pastor McKittrick was…. He was…. He seemed to be choking on the news that Harman had just brought him and he swung away, his physical vehemence clearly conveying, To hear it from you!
“Muriel!” he roared.
The phone rang as Muriel McKittrick put her head around the door, already looking at Harman for clues – he’d rushed by her into the house with a mere, breathless, “The pastor?” “Tell her!” McKittrick ordered Harman, without taking his eyes from his wife.
“There’s been… an incident,” Harman began. “At the Gospel Hall. Jack Clemans and Margaret Baird maybe. Shooting…. A shooting. People wounded. I came to tell….” He glanced at McKittrick. Surely it was a husband’s place to break such news to his wife? But McKittrick continued to glare at Muriel and so Harman stumbled on. “We were just ending the service, singing the last hymn….”
“Are You Washed In The Blood Of The Lamb?”, McKittrick cried. “Do you hear that, Muriel?” She put a hand over her mouth. “Do you hear that?” McKittrick persisted. “Go on!” he commanded Harman, who protested, “Pastor!”
Husband and wife were fixed on each other and silent, so he continued. “The gunmen came into the porch, firing, and that’s where Jack was hit, and he… he fell into the hall and staggered up the aisle with them behind him, firing away. And Jack kept coming….” Harman stopped. The poor woman knew enough now. The phone rang on.
“And they….?” McKittrick prompted him but he shook his head so it was McKittrick who went on, “And they got him by the shoulders and turned him around, and they looked him in the eye and shot him in the chest.”
Harman wondered at the pastor’s determination to spare his wife nothing. It was cruel – and would they not answer that phone!
Muriel McKittrick was white-faced but now she held on to the door-edge with both hands and her lips were compressed into a tight line. “Mr. Harman,” she said suddenly, “this is dreadful for you.” Turning to her husband she asked, “What will you do?”
He looked at her with such contempt that Harman thought he was about to spit on her but he just pushed past her out of the room. She leant her head onto her hands where they held the door. “God,” he heard her say, tonelessly.
Should he stay and comfort her? Not when so many… so many people…. The phone, that had stopped briefly, rang again. He picked it up. “No. It’s Eric Harman here. I’ve told the pastor. He’s…. I don’t know…. He’s left the house.” He heard a car start up. “What? Yes. I’ll tell him.”
She hadn’t moved. Harman was perplexed and then suddenly exhausted. He sat down abruptly, his hands hanging between his knees. He shook his head. What was wrong with his ears? They felt full of something. The phone rang again. Just as if it were his own home, he leapt up with an exclamation and picked up the receiver. He stuffed it under a cushion and sat down again and only then did the action seem out of place. He had to clear his head. He was trembling. He looked up. No drink in this house.
“If you look under the kitchen sink,” he heard her whisper, still not moving, “you’ll find a dram.”
Gingerly, in the kitchen, he opened cupboards. He sniffed at an unlabelled bottle. He found a glass, then took a second one. She let go of the door when he returned. They drank. She spluttered but downed the measure doggedly. Then, at last, she left the doorway. “Tell me,” she said.
He told her, half-hearing his own horror and, bizarrely, he sensed, his excitement. For what had he seen? Jack Clemans’s comic turn, dragging one leg and grunting. Margaret Baird up at the front, turning with lips pursed, ready to castigate, her fat cheeks puckered in practised disapproval, and then her doubling over but jerking up and back sharply as though someone had goosed her and she had seemed to recline languidly, still holding her hymn book open. And then a man – a stranger – in the aisle had turned his way. The roaring! The red plastic seats suddenly higher than his head. The metal chair legs – stems and trunks and undergrowth! He had crawled, desperately, cravenly…!
He felt a pressure on his hand. She was offering more whiskey. He shook his head. “I don’t know how many died,” he said. “It was still going on when I got out and I’d been late so my car was, y’know, first out and I just thought, ‘Tell the pastor!’ Was that… stupid?” He looked up at her.
She shook her head.
“No. Stupid,” he insisted and then contradicted himself. “Och, I don’t know.”
“Norman McAllister?” she asked
“He was leading the singing, of course. I don’t know.”
She sighed.
“He’s a good young man,” Harman assured her, pointlessly now, perhaps, he thought.
She nodded.
“Very keen, Norman,” he added, helplessly. She folded her lips, one into the other, till they disappeared. He stared at her. She had not gone plump and comfortable like wives in their sixties do. He had always admired her. “I should be doing something,” he said.
“Like what?” She looked hard at him. “Stanley shouldn’t have made you do that.” He pretended not to know what she meant. “Making you repeat it all to me. He was punishing you.” She paused. “Did they enjoy it?”
He was puzzled.
“Those men, those gunmen.”
He considered. “They… they were… workman-like.”
She seemed satisfied. Why was that the right answer, he wondered. She obliged. “If you’re going to kill someone, I think it’s better – not so evil – if you don’t enjoy it.” She considered and added, “Though I imagine the actual doing of it is satisfying in a way.”
He said something he was sure of, “Pastor McKittrick was very angry.”
“He missed his chance.”
“His…?”
“I told him to stay at home.”
“Thank God…!” Harman began but she went on without pause, “Yes, ‘Stay at home’, I said. ‘You’re jealous, Stanley. You’re afraid that young Norman McAllister is a better preacher than you and you stand in his way. Is it God’s work you’re doing or your own?’ He was furious… inside, I mean. Not outside. No. He stayed home.”
The doorbell rang and she went to it. Harman heard an exchange between an agitated male voice and her near silence. When she returned, alone, she said, “Norman’s dead. Well, now. I did God’s work, all right!” She laughed.
He stood up, appalled. “Mrs. McKittrick…!”
“I’ve been married nearly forty-one years. I can tell you exactly what my husband will say. It’ll be, ‘Norman the martyr. Dying with his flock’. Poor Stanley.”
He could think of no response. She picked up the bottle and secured its cap. She glanced around for the phone. He fetched it from under the cushion. She replaced it, saying, “It won’t be easy for you.” She saw that he hadn’t understood her. “She’s a good wife to him.”
How she had leapt ahead, he realised! His own son. His Catholic daughter-in-law.
“And you’re good to her,” she insisted. “I see you driving her and your grandchildren to Mass. Oh, Eric!” she cried. “Don’t be ashamed!”
“I have to go,” he announced stiffly.
“Don’t… leave us. Some will think you should, after this.”
“I have to go,” he repeated.
Next evening, Harman saw Pastor McKittrick on the TV news, “I say, as a shepherd of God’s people, to the God-appointed powers of this land, take up the sword to destroy evil in our midst. Those men who cut down the flower of our flock will not be forgiven by me nor by any Christian man nor by God himself till they repent their sin. No forgiveness without repentance.” Then he added, with relish, Harman thought, “And to those who would take the part of the men of blood I say, ‘Come ye out from among them’.”
“You were not at the service?” the reporter asked.
“No,” McKittrick replied curtly. “But…” he went on, with a fierce energy that obliged the reporter to stay with him, “a tape-recording was being made of that service and this very day, three young men accepted Christ into their lives just through hearing it. The blood of the martyrs is a powerful witness.”
Harman thought of his son. Sam would never repent of his marriage to Eilish. Nor should he – the conviction shot through Harman. He groaned.
Harman went out into the yard and looked across his fields. The trees dripped with recent rain. Everything had been rinsed and the clouds were bundling themselves away over the hills. “No,” he told God. “I’m too old.”
But God persisted.
“Not me, Lord. Not me. I crawled away.” But he couldn’t make himself believe that had been wrong.
He had no excuse. He was to be a witness.