Mc MANUS was safe. He felt safe. They walked in the twilight, down between the rock ridges and over the lower ones, to the little bay. Mrs. Burke always determined the routes they took. When he tried to choose the paths, climbing to the higher ridges, she said no, too high, and she knew best. He was content. She pointed to a tall thin rock standing alone on a ridge. It looked like a man. It stood out in the twilight in a harsh silhouette. That’s what we’d look like, she said, and he knew she was wise. The rocks and ridges and the mountains behind them closed in, the little fields closed in, the sea closed in. He was safe. England was almost forgotten; the run from Ballycastle was almost forgotten; the American girl on the coach—what was her name?—was almost forgotten. Powers and the Provos lurked, but they were in the North and he was in this fortress and the longer he stayed here the more baffled they would be—then England. But not yet. When the thought that he should go crossed his mind, he put it away; nervously. It disarmed him.
The first night they sat on the shore, listening to the retreating tide, he saw the sailing dinghy lashed to its moorings, high and dry on the wet sand. “It’s mine,” she told him. “The mackerel run just outside the bay. Sometimes I fish. When it’s safe, we can fish.” We. She said we a lot now. They were together day and night.
In the day he thought more and more of the night. It was never spoken of. He called her Mrs. Burke. She called him child. Mother in the day, mistress in the night. But he thought more and more of the night and his lust for her grew. He closed his eyes and could not see her, but he felt her, soft and warm and lustfully inciting. It was his first fulfilled lust. It made him dependent. He wished the days away.
The doctor and his wife brought their groceries. The doctor hinted, his wife nagged, and Mrs. Burke sent McManus to the garden while they argued. He could hear them. He heard them the day the doctor’s wife said they would bring no more groceries. “Get rid of him! How’ll you explain your double rations to Jim O’Keeffe at the shop?” she asked as if she had played her joker.
“There’s more than one shop in Schull.”
It upset McManus, but only till they left. Mrs. Burke always wore her little smile when they left. It was the flag she flew to celebrate small victories, and his cocoon rewove itself. Sometimes, the notion that it was all unreal crept into his head and he put it away. The real was cold; this was warm.
The morning after the doctor’s wife said there would be no more groceries, Mrs. Burke took the bus to Schull “to lay in supplies,” she said.
“You should have a car,” McManus said, thinking of being alone. “You’d be quicker.”
“The bus is fine.”
“Don’t be long.” He felt feebly dependent.
She laid a long rough forefinger on the back of his hand. “Why, child?” The face was severe, the voice a little above a whisper. It was her approach to tenderness in the daylight.
“I want you back,” he said, and because it was more than he meant to say he said more. “You’ll be seeing the doctor and your sister.”
“Oh, yes.” She picked up her handbag, a worn old thing scuffed at the edges.
“She’ll ask you where you. . . .” It was not a daylight question. “Yes, she will.” She shrugged awkwardly and took his hand and turned the thing away. “Walk me to the hedge.” At the gate she said, “Don’t be seen now. Don’t answer the door.” In the time he had been in the house nobody but the doctor and his wife had come to the door.
“No,” he assured her. She was away, striding down the lane. He watched her to the corner where the lane turned between honeysuckle hedges and in another hundred yards reached the road. She was out of sight. He went back to the house and closed the door. It was the first time he had been alone since he came to the house and a lost uneasiness nagged him. The clock slowed down. He wandered the little house and the little garden, tried to read, to lie still on the bed, to see Mrs. Burke on it in the light of day, and all he could realize was her absence. He expected her back long before it was possible; not hungry, for something to occupy his time he ate the stew she left for him in the oven, washed the dishes, made tea, was too impatient for her return to make more tea when the notion occurred to him. He went again and again to the gate to stare up the lane.
Then she was late, well past the reasonable time for her return and uneasiness turned to anxiety, and anxiety to irritation, and irritation to anger. She had no right. He was alone. She was the only human connection he had. The doctor and his wife brought groceries yesterday; why the hell did she need to go into Schull for more today? What was she doing anyway? Making it up with her sister and brother-in-law? They were more important to her than he was. What was he to her anyway? Little more than a schoolboy, with a woman of . . . what, fifty? What did she want with him? Why did her in-laws nag about him? Why did the doctor keep telling her she needed an invalid of her own? Why did the sister go on about where she slept? They knew something he didn’t? That maybe she did things that frightened them? Maybe behind the severe, secret face of the widow of Thomas Burke was a middle-aged woman sick with lust and she saw him as the relief she wanted? Resentful son and jealous lover, when twilight came and there was no sign of her, “To hell with her,” he said, “if she can go out for the day then by God I can look over the wall.”
He went out and walked to the rock ridge across the fields behind the house. They called it The Hill. He had never been on top of it. She had never allowed him. He scrambled up now, through gorse and heather and lichen and bramble and the shock of what he saw brought him to his knees in a bed of ferns.
His isolation was an illusion.
He traced the course of their land to where it disappeared between the honeysuckle hedges and emerged at the road. At their junction were three houses, one of them a grocer’s shop. To the left, below the road and concealed from ground level by the ridges between, was another little house, and up on the slope of the mountain that rose like a great brown rock half a mile to the north was a cluster of green and yellow fields and, on their edge, a white cabin. A man appeared from nowhere on the bus road. He had a pack on his back and wore a tweed suit and a tweed hat and as he walked he swung a thorn stick. His head was down as if his thoughts were far off. McManus crept back among the ferns and scrambled halfway down the slope of the hill.
The woman had neighbors. Why did they not pass, or call? There was a crossroads grocer’s shop less than a quarter of a mile from the house. Why did she not buy there? How did he reach her house? By the road? Stumbling over the ridges? Who saw him? Why did he not break his neck, or a leg, or an arm? He wanted the woman back, urgently. Anger flew, dependence seeped through him. The dark seeped over him. He went up to the crest of the hill again, and sat among the ferns, watching in the sudden blackness where the road should be, for the lights of the evening bus. She had to be on that one. It was the last of the few.
He was full of apprehension. Small life moved on the hill, making him start. Field mice, he thought, or rabbits; reassuring himself.
The voice behind him said, “Don’t move. I’ll not hurt you.” It was a northern voice.
The silence felt very long. His heart swelled and pounded. In the dark, on the hill, unseen and sneaking, a northern voice that said “I’ll not hurt you” sounded like a threat. The voice said, “I’m comin to sit down behind you.”
He heard the feet among the ferns, just above him, and the body settling. “Sit right still,” the voice said, “I can see you clear and my gun would blow a hole out through your front a foot wide.” I’ll not hurt you? McManus felt ill with fear.
“You’re McManus.”
What good would denials do? “Yes.” He was resigned, as if he had collapsed inside. A sort of sadness took him over. He wasn’t the kind. He was too soft. He wasn’t like McGuinness, the Provos’ military leader in the Bogside who was his age but not his kind. McGuinness would despise him and wouldn’t understand him, anymore than he could understand McGuinness, now that he had met the kind. Fear was pointless. They were here. The whole stupid escapade would be over in minutes. More grief for his father and mother. The sadness was for them, not for himself. In his deep sense of defeat he didn’t care about himself, but his father and mother had only one life work, their children, and they’d soon both be dead. He was thinking of how they would survive this second stage of what he had brought on them when the man spoke again.
“I mean you no harm, son.”
He didn’t hear. “What?”
“I said, I mean you no harm.”
“All right.”
“I have questions. Answer them up sharp. I don’t want to have to make you.”
“All right.”
“Who’s Mary Connors?”
“She’s a widow in the Falls.”
“Was she Pat Powers’ fancy woman?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think?”
“I thought that’s where he was some nights.”
“Who’s Val Cleery?”
“He’s Danny O’Connell’s number two in the Belfast Officials.”
“Ever see him?”
“On Divis Street once. Powers pointed him out to me.”
“Would you know him again?”
“Yes.” Now he was puzzled.
“What was your sister’s name?”
What was? Now the man was cutting at the bone. His questions were bewildering; frightening in their pointlessness. Devious. But to what end?
“Powers killed her,” the man said.
The shock was more shattering than the first sound of his voice. Why was he talking about Maureen? “I know,” he said.
“You know?”
“I thought so. He missed me. She helped me.” What did it matter? “You’d have to kill somebody, wouldn’t you?” he said bitterly. And, “You’re that kind of scum.”
It didn’t bring retribution. “He killed her fella too. Broke his neck up the Glens.”
McManus said nothing. He was trembling. How did he kill Maureen? His mind was the color of blood.
“He choked your sister to death.”
So they were going to drag out his entrails before they killed him. They were like that. Jesus Christ, they’d killed a Catholic truck driver from Newry. The man wouldn’t join them, wouldn’t use his job to spy for them, wouldn’t use his truck for them, wouldn’t pay tribute to be left in peace. So they jumped him one night, took him across the Border, broke all the bones in his face, shot him down both arms, four times in each, shot him in the knees, then in his stomach, and only then in the head. The last sweet ounce of venom was squeezed out of his death. McManus couldn’t imagine cruelty like that. That sort of cruelty was beyond imagination. But he could imagine his parents’ pain. That was in the mind, in the head. His own death would be his own release. A queer little thought came into his head: If he was a Christian, was he supposed to be aware, after death, of his parents’ suffering? It was queer, he thought, that with his Catholic upbringing, in a Christian country, he should think of his death as escape from the knowledge of his parents’ agony.
The man behind him knew about the mind.
“She was found in Evish Lake.”
He could hear the man’s breathing.
“She was naked.”
McManus was crumbling in the long silence between. He wanted to scream.
“He raped her.”
“Don’t, mister, don’t.” He was huddling among the ferns, hot needles in his nerves.
The man struck a match. “Look at me, son.”
He was holding the match under the brim of his tweed hat when McManus turned his head. “I’m Val Cleery,” he said. “I need help and I’ll get it from you.”
He was Cleery. The shape of his big gun stared into McManus’s body. “Powers shot down Danny O’Connell, McManus. I’m here for him,” Cleery said.
McManus turned his head away. Sweet relief ran in him. The lights of the bus came up the road from Schull and stopped at the three houses. She was coming. He got up and walked round Cleery, sat down again on the side of the hill facing the house, and paced her along the lane. She would take less than four minutes, with her stride.
“She’s not right in the head,” Cleery said.
“Who?”
“The woman. Thomas Burke’s widow.”
“What do you know about her?”
“The man in the shop at the corner told me. You’ve been in there all the time, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I was sick. She looked after me.”
“You were down at the foot of this hill the other night with her.”
“Yes.”
“I was up here, listening. What’s she doing? Playing mother to you?”
“Yes.”
“Is that all?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not that young, McManus.”
“You’re dirty.”
“Oh, it’s not me, boyo. It’s the man in the shop.”
“He doesn’t know I’m here.”
“That’s right. But he knows about the last young lad she had.”
“I know nothing about her.” He said it lamely, hating the man.
“They do, over the hill. Two years ago this summer this young lad came wandering this way with a pack. He took a notion to stay around here the rest of the summer till the university started again and nobody along the road wanted him for that long. He came down the road she’s walking on this minute and stayed there. The doctor and her sister had the great rows with her about it.”
“People take summer boarders.”
“Not when they’ve only one bed in the house. The shop says she’s not always right in the head. Never speaks to them since that time, he says.”
“Who says . . . ?”
“Oh, they know at the crossroads. Every damn thing about everybody. They know everything she’s got in the house. But I know anyway. I’ve been in when you and her were down on the shore.”
“Well, I sleep in my sleeping bag, if it’s any of your business.” It sounded childish, even to him.
“It’s none of my business. You’re right. Powers is my business. . . .”
He heard the gate squeaking on its hinges. The lights went on in the house. The back light went on in the yard and the back door opened and she was there.
Cleery touched him on the arm with a pair of night glasses. McManus took them. He watched her in the garden, looking about, looking up to the hill. She pushed through the fuchsia hedge into the field, looking about. Then she went back into the garden, into the house. The yard light went off. All the lights went off. She had looked for him and he was not there. Poor woman. He felt a warm tenderness for her, pity maybe; he didn’t try to analyze it. He wanted back to the house. Poor lonely soul. He stood up.
“Sit down.” It was harsh.
McManus sat down. “What do you want?” he said.
Cleery took his binoculars and put them in his pack. “Powers is here, son.”
“Where?”
“He was with a wee runt by the name of Kiernan from the Bogside and another man, trying the chemists and doctors in Skibereen and Ballydehob. I didn’t know why, but if you were sick, as you say, they know it. They have their Bantry men beating the bushes for you, coming this way.”
“They won’t find me.”
“Oh, but they will, boyo, they will.” It was more than expectation. It was conviction. He didn’t say he would see to it, and McManus didn’t hear that in the man’s certainty. Daniel Sorahan would have heard it, Kiernan would have heard it. McManus let it slide over his mind. “When he does, I’ll be waiting for him.”
“How did you find me?”
“By accident. You weren’t the kind, son. You shouldn’t have been with the Provos. You should have been with us. So I went and talked to your mother and told her why, straight out. Son, your mother wants Powers dead.”
He could believe it. In his months in the Belfast ghettos he had come to believe that the killing would stop when the terrible warlike women of Ulster decided it must; not before. They conceived hatred and vengefulness as they conceived children, and passed the venom in their blood. He could believe that his mother wanted Powers dead.
“She told us your family used to spend the summers at Goleen, up the road from here. She said we wouldn’t find you on any dung heap.”
That was his mother all right. He was running for his life, but she knew he wouldn’t do anything low-class. Like any middle-class Ulster Protestant, she was implacably better-class.
“We tried the cottages for rent, the let ones and the empty ones, from Goleen to Mizen Head, and watched all the good houses. I was watching this one with the glasses a couple of days ago and you came out the back door.”
“We?”
“There’s three of us. Danny O’Connell’s brother and Danny’s eldest son. Danny’s widow said the boy had to come. They’re away keeping track of Powers and his dogs.”
Forty years from now somebody would still be taking vengeance for these days, and Irish Christians disdained the Moslem Arabs and their blood feuds. I have to go from here, McManus thought. “I can’t help you,” he said.
“You’ll help. You’ll remember your sister. We promised your mother we’d get you out. The price we didn’t tell her because we didn’t know. We know now. He’ll come here for you and I want to be in the top floor of the wee stone barn at the back. The one with the hens on the ground floor.”
“It’s her home. I can’t promise you anything.”
“Then we’ll just have to go down and talk to her.”
“She’s not in this.”
“She was in it from the minute she took you in. She’ll stay in it till I kill Pat Powers. Go on away down now.”
They went carefully down the rocky hill, across the little field and through the fuchsia bushes into the garden.
Cleery stopped him. “You’re going to help, McManus. Go in and tell her what we want. And you remember this, you’ll get nothing for nothing. Your mother wants Powers dead. Danny’s widow wants him dead, and I want him dead. And I’m not codding you, you get that woman to agree or I’ll come in and do more than talk. I want the top part of the barn, and I want food and water up there and I want her to bring it. You’ll stay in the house. If you want help to leave here alive, you’ll get me all I want from her. Go on in and don’t take long. If she’s not out to talk, and right quick, by God, I’ll come in.”
McManus went into the house.
He switched on the kitchen light. She was not there. There was no sound in the house. “Mrs. Burke?” She did not answer. He looked into the bedroom and didn’t see her at first. She was sitting in the dark room in an armchair pushed back against the wall.
“Mrs. Burke.”
“You only went out.”
“You were long.”
“I had reason.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought you were away.” She got up and came to him, standing in the doorway. Her rough fingers touched his face. “We’ll have to be careful, child.” She squeezed past him sideways into the kitchen, her fingers lingering on him. “It was dangerous to go out by yourself. We’ll have to keep the windows shut and snibbed. When I go to the hen house or the garbage you’ll have to lock the door behind me and I’ll knock to get in. You’re not to look out the windows. We have tons of food and we can do without milk and I got Springtime evaporated milk for our tea. . . .”
He watched her pace the kitchen as she talked and for the first time noticed the crammed rucksack on the floor by the table. He hefted it. It must have weighed forty pounds. He cut in on her chattering. “‘You could have hurt yourself carrying that. . . .” He had never seen her like this before, without cold composure. He had never seen her smile as she did now, her face paler, her eyes excited. Or nervous? He didn’t know enough about eyes or states of mind in middle-aged women to know. He saw only the brightness, and the smile, and they made the narrow face almost handsome.
“Och, no! I’m strong,” she said and lifted the rucksack from the floor. “I’ll lock up,” she said.
“No.”
The smile went. Her cheeks seemed to sink. Standing under the light, the bone structure of her face shone. “What’s wrong, child?” It was her kindergarten voice.
“There’s a man outside. . . .”
“They’re here?” It was a little cry.
“Who?”
“Them that’s after you.” It was the most Irish she’d sounded since he first heard her voice. This time he understood: her schoolteacher’s control was slipping.
“What happened in Schull, Mrs. Burke?” he said. He wondered how much longer Cleery would wait outside before he smashed in waving his big gun.
“Kate,” she said. He couldn’t tell what was important to her. She was flitting now; thing to thing in her head.
“Kate.”
“Them that’s after you. They were asking Seamus. A big fellow, rough, red. . . .”
“Powers.”
“. . . and a little man. His trousers were too big for him. And another one I knew, Dan Sorahan of Bantry. . . . Seamus said they described you . . . this big man did, down to your eyebrows, your tweed suit, your pack, your stick, and your sickness. . . .” She locked her hands. “. . . and a girl that was with you. American, they told him.” She sounded huffy. “Where’s she now?”
“I don’t know. I only saw her on the coach. I can’t even remember her name.”
“Brendine Healy, they said.”
“That’s it. Mrs. Burke. . . .”
“Kate.”
“Kate, please. There’s a man. . . .”
“Sorahan said she left the bus with you. . . .”
“She didn’t. There’s a man. . . .”
The man opened the back door, waving his big gun. “What the hell’s taking you, McManus?” he said.
“This is the man,” McManus said to her. She stood very still, looking. She didn’t appear to be thinking, merely staring, as if something bad had happened to stun and empty her mind.
“What does she say?”
“We hadn’t got to it yet.”
“Jesus Christ! You’ve a lot to talk about. Tell her now.”
McManus told her. Nothing about her changed. Her face was empty, her stare not steady but fixed.
“And then you’ll get him away?” she said to Cleery, when it was all told, and her voice was empty.
“If we can.”
“All right,” she said. It was spiritless, as if it had no meaning, as if she had not understood what was said to her or what she said to them. “All right.”
Cleery was crisp, commanding. Sandwiches, he said. A flask of coffee. Two if she had them. He turned out her groceries on the table. Sandwich spread, that’ll do fine; Brand’s beef spread, that’ll do; cooked ham, that’ll do and hurry it up. Butter some soda bread too, and a cup of tea now. He sat at the kitchen table and drank his tea and ate soda bread as she buttered it.
She buttered more as he ate, wrapped what he did not eat, put his coffee in a flask, and his bread and sandwiches in a paper bag, and walked into the bedroom. The door closed behind her.
“I’ll take your sleeping bag,” Cleery said, and tucked it under his arm.
“You’re going to wait for all these men with an old .45?” McManus asked him.
“Jesus, no. We’ve had the new ironware stowed up in her barn loft for two nights, son.” Cleery was amused. “We’ll be in for our breakfast in the morning—early,” he said.
“We?”
“Aye. They’ll be here as soon as Powers and his tame tigers start beating the bushes on this side of Schull.” He went out, leaving McManus to close the door.
She was lying on the bed in her gray flour-sack dress, her broad shoes on the floor, her glasses on the dressing table. It was the first time he had noticed that her eyes were deep brown. Whether she saw more than the ceiling she stared at, he couldn’t know. “Coming to bed, child?” she said at the ceiling.
Go to sleep, Mrs. Burke. Go to sleep, Cleery: all of you, for the love of God, and let me make a run for it.
“Yes.” He closed the curtains over the big window. Cleery out there, are you watching to see how I’m doing without my sleeping bag? So you know now. Wrong in the head, is she, by God? Harbored a wandering student, did she, in a house with only one bed? She’s like me, she’s empty and lonely and needs somebody to touch. Do you know the feeling, you stupid bastards? Spread the word from the crossroads to any bloody questioner who asks about Thomas Burke’s queer widow, but I know how she feels. Go to sleep and let me run for my bloody life. . . .
“Your face is angry,” she said.
“Yes.”
“About him?”
“Yes.” About all of them. And you too, Mrs. Burke. You need me at the wrong time. I know how you feel, but it’s my time to run again. Don’t you know we’re always running away in this God-damned country; from one thing or another?
“Taking you away?”
“Yes.” She was entitled to a lie, and its feelings, and whatever hopes were in it. And she’d sleep quicker.
“They wouldn’t have found you.”
“I know.” He warmed to her. Pity or affection? He didn’t ask himself. It didn’t occur to him to ask himself. He was as young now as when he joined the Provos. I’m sorry, Mrs. Burke. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I have to run away again.
“Come to bed, child.”
He reached for the light switch.
“No.” She got off the bed in an awkward movement and he saw the movement. Its awkwardness warmed his warmth for her, a kind of pity; he knew that; affection was better; sometimes it grew out of pity, didn’t it? He owed her affection. “Could you stand me in the light?” she said.
“Don’t talk like that. It’s nonsense.”
“Then take off my clothes.”
Now? Waiting for the guns to go? With my mind on running? She turned the back buttons of her dress to him, waiting. I can get hard: All right, by God, I’ll give her a ride that’ll make her sleep. A long last one, Mrs. Burke, for both of us. He could see her smiling, listening to the fussing of his clothes and shoes as he took them off. He laid the gift of God against her. He had learned a lot in the dark. He unbuttoned her dress and raised her skirt slowly, kissing her neck. It was a long neck, and that he hadn’t noticed either. His fingertips traced patterns on her hips and he felt her shiver. She pulled her dress over her head and threw it on the floor. “That’s Knocknamadree,” she said, smiling the way he’d never seen her smile, with her head on the tilt looking at him when his fingers ran over her soaring left hip, and “that’s Gabriel,” she said when he caressed the right one and he knew she could hear the voice of Thomas Burke. . . . Holy God, she lived in Thomas Burke’s books. She was created in books and poems and lived in them. What she said was from a seduction scene in a little stone barn in Burke’s Carry Your Own Coffin, a novel about love and girls and young men and priests in Ireland, and Cleery was out there in the original little stone barn and Knocknamadree was the mountain beyond The Hill and Gabriel was the mountain behind Schull. It was a passage they used to read with the book hidden under their desks in school. Their Protestant friends said they hid the book behind their Bibles and read it in Church and Sunday school. The memory fired his lust. Maybe she lived in fantasies, but the same fantasies, from the same books, served them both in their own place and time. He knew how it went on; let her have it; make her fantasy real. Then she’d sleep. He drew her pants down slowly, kissing her back on the way, laying his face against her hips as she untangled the pants from her feet, and set her legs apart—how did Burke put it about the country girl standing like this on the hay in the little barn?—“like a standing mare”? It fed him blind, like a stud at a mare and tenderness bolted. He gripped her belly and her breasts and chattered loving obscenities that her lusting laughter multiplied as he bundled her onto the bed and mounted. Her big hands took God’s gift and buried it, “Fuck me, my sweet child,” she said, and rutted to his brutal rhythm, clamping him in her great thighs, her hands full of his flesh. She came, convulsing endlessly; presently her hips rose and fell gently and she said, “Child, child, child, oh child, I’ve been well and truly fucked.”
She wrapped him in her arms and legs and held him on her, and he waited, saying nothing. Sleep would come. But she talked, rubbing his body.
“Do you think I’m a hoore of a woman?”
“No. I love you.”
“I’m an old woman, though?”
“No, you’re not.”
“But I’m just a horny old widow lusting for young boys?”
“No. You’re a glorious woman, a wonderful woman, and I love you.”
“That’s what Thomas Burke said. You’re not ashamed lying here in the light this way?”
“It’s wonderful.”
She rutted at him, binding him with her arms and thighs. “Can we do it in the day?”
“Like this. Every day.” He wished it could be true.
“He was younger than me.” She was with her maker again. “He used to catch me in the barn, in the kitchen, in the fields, on the shore. He never said, ‘I want to make love to you, Kate.’ He never said, ‘I want you’ or ‘I’m going to take you.’ He lusted after me something terrible and stripped me in the barn or in the fields in the dark and he always said, ‘I’m going to fuck you, woman.’ He fucked me naked in the cold dew. . . . Sometimes he thought I wouldn’t want him, that maybe I’d leave him, but oh God, he could have fucked me all day and all night and I’d have wanted more . . . oh God, how I love Thomas Burke . . . up there at the grocer’s shop on the corner they told Seamus I wasn’t right in the head. . . . They all killed Thomas Burke.” Her eyes were wet.
He listened, and wasn’t sure now who killed Thomas Burke.
“Thomas Burke made up old tales about Ireland,” she said, “and made out they were about me. I know them all by heart.”
“Tell me one.” She’ll tire. She’ll sleep. Then I’ll run for my life. Forgive me. Her arms and thighs relaxed their hold. She spread her legs. “Stay on me, child, while I tell it. There was this time Gall McMorna set out on a journey before the light was up.
“When he reached the shore of the lake he lay down on his face to ease the dryness in him.
“This voice came at him while he was drinking and the first time he heard it he said, ‘I heard a trout breaking the water.’
“It came to him the second time and he said, ‘The birds are calling to the light.’
“The third time it came he said, ‘The air is bending the grass.’ “Then the voice said, ‘McMorna is the beautiful champion.’
“And the small man stood at his full height and said, ‘I’m a diminutive creature, with no beauty at all.’
“The voice said, ‘McMorna sings like the blackbird.’
“And McMorna said, ‘My song frightens the corncrake.’
“ ‘Come up the bank to me,’ the voice said, ‘and I’ll make you taller than Finn and your song sweeter than Cuchullain’s.’
“McMorna went up the bank and there was this young girl, lying naked in the grass and her glowing like wrought gold.
“ ‘Take your pleasure and give me sons to give me sons,’ she said, and McMorna swam like the salmon in a golden stream, taller than Finn, sweeter than Cuchullain.
“But when the light came the girl under him was an old wandering woman, her breasts the broken hills, her belly as creased and cracked as the Burren, her legs the dead willows, and he leapt off her like a frightened deer, and ran over the hills.
“When the light was dying she was behind him shining like fine silver and he lay down to rest, the strength run out of him trying to leave the woman.
“In the dark she said to him, ‘Suckle my two breasts, McMorna, aren’t they the sweet green hills to cool your face on? Lie on my belly, McMorna. Isn’t it as soft and rich as a meadow in Meath? Bound between my thighs, McMorna. Aren’t they the young limbs of the oaks of Derry? Lay your mouth on my mouth, McMorna, for isn’t my tongue the darting salmon of Shannon? Broach my womb, McMorna, and give me sons for me to haunt in the day and whore with when the night comes.’
“All the night McMorna whored with the shining girl and when the light was up there was no will in him to run from the old woman and they walked and whored together night and day from that time on.
“ ‘What name do you go by?’ he asked her when the light was going down and they were looking for a place to lie down.
“ ‘The name they call me,’ she said, ‘is Cathleen the Whore-Mother.’ ”
Her voice was sleepy, her eyes were closed and wet, her body was soft and relaxed, her legs flat on the bed, her arms by her sides. Her face was old. He rose off her gently and settled beside her. She drifted, mumbled, and was gone.
He looked at her in the hard light. The face was tired. She was the only naked woman he had ever seen, the only woman he had ever loved, and the breasts were full, the belly white, the thighs long, and she was marvelous in his sight. She was kind and lonely. Her lust was glorious and she shared it with him. She was created by a poet and storyteller and she lived inside his poems and his stories and he didn’t understand that. She was there, that was all. And, God forgive me, at the right time she’s asleep. He bent over her and kissed her nipples. She smiled a little as if she knew. He was sorry for her. He was sorry to go.
Half an hour, he thought, and lay gently. The light was on. Cleery would be sleeping now. He could dress, and get his money and his gun and be far gone walking, before she woke. There’d be a lift on the road beyond Schull and Cleery could do nothing and Powers could do nothing and he’d be in England by the first plane out of Cork. He watched her with pity and gratitude and heard the key slip into the lock of the front door. His breath choked him.
“Kate!” he shook her and she smiled and curled towards him, more than half asleep.
“Kate! Who has a key to the house?”
“What?”
“Who has a key to the house?”
“My sister,” she said sleepily, half holding him.
“She’s got it in the door!”
Mrs. Burke shot upright in the bed, propped on hands that were a little behind her, her arms stiff, her breasts out, her eyes unfocused, and the doctor slammed the bedroom door back against the wall, standing in the doorway with the eyes of a charging bull.
“You hooring oul sow,” he shouted. “By God, I knew you were at it again.”
McManus hopped out onto the floor guilty, confounded, and overwhelmed by the vulnerability of the naked threatened by the fully clothed. To him the doctor’s clothes and boots were as substantial as a suit of armor; he was fearful for his tender genitals and his naked feet. He could feel the impact on both, of the enraged doctor’s boots. He snatched his trousers from the floor and didn’t dare disarm himself by trying to get into them. All he could do was stand there, foolishly covered by his trousers, held foolishly in front of him.
“You dirty little shit,” the doctor yelled. “That’s what you stayed around for!”
“Don’t dare talk like that in this house,” Mrs. Burke said in a deep loud voice so full of righteous outrage that McManus risked a quick glance at her.
She was still propped stiff-armed on her hands, her back held straight, her breasts flaunting. Her head was high and her ankles crossed. She seemed unaware of her nakedness, aware only of stiff indignation. “You’re jealous, Seamus. You’ve always had a grievance because you picked the frigid sister. Hand me my glasses. They’re on the dressing table,” she said curtly, “and get control of yourself.”
“Holy Mother of God,” the doctor said despairingly, “sitting there in your skin giving orders,” and went round the end of the bed to get her glasses. When the man was safely across the bed, McManus stepped frantically into his jockey shorts and trousers and got his vest and shirt on. Watchfully, he sat down to put on his socks and shoes.
“She woke up in the middle of the night,” the doctor said, and handed her her glasses, “yakking about the three men who came looking for this dirty bastard. ‘Get her out of that house,’ she says, so get up now and get out.”
Mrs. Burke put on her glasses and stepped out of bed, naked in her spinsterish steel-rimmed spectacles. She reminded McManus of a thin man he had seen changing in a locker room, bushy-bearded, bespectacled, naked. The hairy head looked too large for the hairless body. Mrs. Burke’s steel glasses seemed to bear some incongrous relation to her pubic bush and her belly did bulge and droop a bit. Merciless God, did everything end in farce? She was swelling with defiant confidence and dignity.
“You’re my sister’s monkey on a string, not me. We’re not leaving. We’ll cope. Away on with you.” She walked round the bed and sat on the arm of McManus’s chair, indifferent to her nakedness. “Off you go home, Seamus,” she said briskly, and waved the doctor away.
“Holy Mother of God!” The doctor held out appealing hands.
“Kate, will you for Jesus sake put on your clothes and come home with me.”
“No.”
The doctor appealed to McManus. “All right, McManus, you have a lot of influence in this room. You ask her.”
“Mrs. Burke,” McManus began lamely. All he wanted to do was slip through the open door unseen, and run for it.
“Kate,” Mrs. Burke corrected.
“Kate,” McManus tried again.
“No.” She was smiling her victory smile.
“He can come too. I’ll get him out. I’ll get him to Cork Airport. . . .” The doctor opened a cupboard and threw her dressing gown across the bed. “Put it on, Kate,” he yelled.
She put it on. “We’ve settled all that.” She looked confidently at McManus. “Do you want to go, child?” Her hand was on his head. Her face was certain of his answer.
“Yes.” He felt treacherous.
The doctor saw daylight. “All right. Come on. The car’s at the crossroads. . . .”
Mrs. Burke walked to the bed. Her face old and desolate. She stood silent for a moment, staring at the bed. “You want to go.”
“They’ll find me.”
“No.”
“Yes, they’ll find me. They’ll kill me. You come too.”
She dropped the dressing gown at her feet. Her belly bulged, her breasts drooped, her hips were creased by skin from which past substance had retreated. She got into bed, “You too,” she said, and pulled the covers up to her chin.
“I can’t go without you, Kate. She’ll eat me alive,” the doctor pleaded, seeing only surfaces. “Please, Kate.”
“Take him,” she said.
“Take him where?” The voice from the kitchen made their nerves leap like plucked strings. Cleery and another man and a thin pale youth were standing inside the half-door. Cleery waved his big gun at them. “Who thinks he’s going anywhere, missus?” His white face sweated bitterness. He stepped into the bedroom and tapped his gun carelessly on McManus’s shoulder.
It was the combination of bitterness, carelessness, and strutting gun-power that petrified McManus. He had seen it in the Provos, in innumerable acts of intimidation against helpless Catholic families unwilling to have their houses used as snipers’ nests, or when strutting boys were collecting dues for “the Cause” or hunting informers or doubters or critics, or defaulters or non-cooperators. . . . The Officials were a little more stable, a little more political, but the gun was their answer also when the skein of human behavior was even slightly tangled. So he said nothing, for he didn’t know what answer would meet Cleery’s need and the wrong answer could pull the trigger and resolve the doubts in Cleery’s mind. There was no point in cold bravery, even if he had been capable of it, for bravery might humiliate Cleery and therefore enrage him beyond restraint, for courage placed a limit on their power to terrorize and that could not be endured; fear fed their contempt for the fearful . . . McManus merely looked and his heart boomed in his ears.
Mrs. Burke stared at the ceiling.
The doctor said, “My wife sent me to bring her sister home,” and worked his tongue and his jaws to make saliva.
The three pale heads turned to the doctor who stared palely back, the russet gone from his face. McManus saw them all in a sort of disassociated tableau, still and peculiarly distant.
Cleery turned to McManus. “You were going to make a run for it.”
“Yes.”
“But not now.”
“No.”
“You’re a gutless wee shit.”
There is nothing to say when that is true. He said nothing.
“Y’are, aren’t you?” Ram self-knowledge down the victim’s gullet.
“Yes.”
That was a satisfying admission. Cleery nodded thoughtfully. “Your sister had more guts.” Cleery knew more than Powers about the mind. He smiled when the tears of shame and pain started in McManus’s eyes. “Didn’t she?”
“Yes,” McManus said like a little cry.
“Scum,” Mrs. Burke said.
Cleery turned to her. She was glaring at him with scorn.
“He was all man in there w’you, missus, wasn’t he?”
“Scum,” she said, and turned her face to the ceiling.
“Gabby oul bag,” Cleery said, his humor lightening with each victory. “There’ll be no run for it.” He prodded McManus. “Dead or alive, you’re bait, boyo. You all stay here now till Powers gets here. . . .”
“My wife . . .” said the doctor, and decent fear for her safety stopped him.
“Fuck your wife . . . or get McManus t’do it.” The doctor shriveled. “Your wife’s sitting in thon grand Mercedes up at the crossroads. Let her sit. If she comes down here, she stays till we’re done w’Powers.” He nudged his head at the other man behind him. “He’s Kevin O’Connell, Danny’s brother. He’ll stay in here t’keep you all quiet. And that’s Danny’s son, Diarmuid. When the shop opens, he’s walking up there. D’you know what he’s going to tell them, McManus?” Grinning, he turned away and led his little army into the kitchen. He walked with Diarmuid O’Connell out of the house and closed the door behind him.
“Relax,” the man Cleery called Kevin said, and sat down in Thomas Burke’s rocking chair by the kitchen fire.
Silence sat in the bedroom, dissected by the rhythmic creaking of the rocking chair.
“I’ll show them something,” Mrs. Burke said softly to the ceiling.
Kevin came to the bedroom door. “You two,” he said, “in here. Sit at the table. You, missus. You stay in bed. You look in the need of sleep.” He waved them to their stations and closed the bedroom door. Mrs. Burke lay on her back, staring at the ceiling as if she intended to do it harm.
Time ticked by in the kitchen. The man Kevin watched it on his wrist in the stirring silence and seemed to judge the quarter-hours with uncanny precision. When an hour had passed he stood up. “He’s sleeping by now,” he said. “Away on. Quiet now.”
“We can go?” the doctor asked with relieved astonishment.
“Quiet if you don’t want shot,” O’Connell said to McManus. “I know all about it, son, your sister and that. Powers murdered my brother Danny. All I want is Powers dead. As long as he thinks you’re here, you don’t need to be. I’ll handle Cleery. Away on.”
“Mrs. Burke too?” McManus said.
“Thons your desperate woman. I’d be glad to see the last of her.”
McManus went back to the bedroom. “The man says we can go if we do it very quietly. Get dressed, Kate, and come away on,” he said.
“Come here, child.” Her face was even older, even more severe; there was no trace of a smile round the wide mouth or of humor in the eyes. The eyes were lifeless. “Sit here,” she said, patting the bed beside her. He sat down and she took his hand. “Tell me honest, child, were you happy in this bed with me—in the dark?”
“Yes, Kate.”
“In the light?”
“Yes, Kate. Get up and come on.”
“You did my heart good, child.”
“You mine, Kate.”
“You’re for England now.”
“If I’m lucky.”
“We have a brother there. He’s rich.”
“Come away with the doctor, Kate.”
“He lives in East Grinstead.”
“Never mind that, Kate. Get dressed and come on.”
“Get me a folder from the bottom drawer over there.”
O’Connell stood impatiently in the doorway, “Will you for God’s sake cut it and get outa here?”
“Five minutes, sir,” Mrs. Burke said, with surprising charm, and McManus brought her the folder. “My brother has no children,” she said. “He and his wife go to Spain every summer. He’s a stockbroker.” She said it with naïve pride. “We can use his house anytime in the summer.”
“Use it now, then.”
She wrote on the pad from the folder and gave him what she had written. “There’s a key at an estate agent’s in the square in East Grimstead. Give him that. He’ll give you the key. You’ll be safe there.”
He took the letter. “Thank you, Kate. Now come on.”
“You’re a gentle child. Stay gentle. Kiss me again.”
He bent and kissed her.
“I’m always left, child. I’m always left.”
O’Connell was back in the doorway. “For fuck sake, if that’s what you want, get into bed and get it. Make up your bloody mind!”
McManus leapt from the bed. God, everything went sour, everything was ridiculous in the end. He was ridiculous. “Goodbye, Kate,” he said in confusion and grabbed his money and his gun from the drawer and rushed from the room. “She won’t come,” he said to the doctor.
“Then let her stay.”
O’Connell took the gun from McManus. “You won’t need that. You should never have touched one. You’re the great bloody pair,” he said, “and by God, doctor, no polis or we’ll come for you.”
They went through the front fuchsia hedge to avoid the creaking gate, and down between the slate ridges and through the grassy hollows to the crossroads. The doctor’s wife was asleep in the back seat.
“I’ll drive,” McManus said, and took the wheel. He thrashed the car through the narrow twisting roads and wakened the doctor’s wife.
“Where’s Kate?” she screeched.
“She wouldn’t come,” her husband said curtly.
“You should have made her come. Let her rot. I did all I could for the crazy woman. Why’s he driving?” the woman whinnied.
“Shut up,” the doctor said as if for the first time in his married life.
“Seamus!”
“Shut your bloody mouth!”
The Mercedes roared through Schull. “Schull! Schull! Stop!” the doctor shouted. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Cork Airport.” McManus didn’t speak again. He was away. Again. Well away. He’d be in England in hours with a place to hide. Well away. Again. Thank you, Kate.
“I’m dying with sleep,” Mrs. Sullivan complained, and joined in the exhausted silence.
The light came up. The brakes ground in the fourcourt of the airport. McManus got out without speaking and walked into the lobby. There was a Cambrian Air flight to Cardiff at a quarter to nine. Yes, there was space on it. Yes, he would take it. He would take anything to get away quickly.
“Hullo,” the voice at his shoulder said.
He turned and said, “Brendine Healy of Boston.”
“I tried to find you,” she said. “You look all right now. I don’t mean it that way. I mean you’re looking well . . . not sick . . . you know?”
“Oh?” he said. “I see,” he said, surprised at first and then surprised at the sudden relief that ran through him. Laughing, suddenly, for the nightmare, the unreality was shattered in his head, and the normal, the real was with him. He reached out his hand to touch it.