by Dermot Healy
So, he thinks of other things.
Having fought off these three weaknesses, the traveller is filled with hope that here by the pool he will find both the nature of his quest and of this curse that has had him wandering the earth for thirty years, employed in various ventures he must not think upon. For this was the third and final test and the most difficult of all, seeing as he did not know what the test involved or how, being without such knowledge, it might be successfully accomplished.
All he knows is that his soul has been burdened with this quest and that with its completion he may have fulfilled his destiny.
He fed out a dark line of horse hair into the depths. The silver hook shone like an eye. Nervously, he held tight to the eye of the fish, so that whatever form the salmon might change into, the traveller would still have a grasp of its true self, thereby retaining his sense of himself and his sense of the girl, who existed in a further dimension. But, as had so often happened, the traveller was to lose sight of how things stood before. In the pool three silver eyes hung in the dark like stars. Then one eye closed. Suddenly, he found the weight of the salmon on the line. Instinctively, he jerked the hook home and began to draw in. Then, fearing to hurt the mouth of the girl, he slackened off. The fish broke free. With one flick of its tail the salmon changed everything in the nature of itself, so that the traveller, if he must follow on, must also lose his sense of himself.
He was stricken with guilt that he had come so close to completing his quest. And his last thought before the salmon changed back into a woman was: I should have gone by the pool and met her on the far side. I should have hauled in. Now I have no identity and that’s how you lose the loved one. Because you leave nothing for them to see except a mirror that distorts them into images of grotesqueness.
It was the traveller that was changing into everything he saw, not they that changed. He realized this as the salmon splashed to the surface of the pool. Then, changing shape, swam towards him.
Feeling wretchedly sad, Jonathan Adams found himself lying next to the ceiling. Below him he heard his daughter continuing with the story. He heard the wind again. The knocking. The feeling returned of being underwater. The journey had drained him. He descended slowly, then went up again. A car turned outside, its wheels churning up rain. For a while he felt like the traveller outside the Tower of Babel, stepping in and out of the consciousness of himself and others. He lay waiting for someone to come and relieve him, that he might continue on. But no one came.
And so Jonathan Adams died after a debilitating cancer of the bowel that he bore with courage. Up till the last the women read to him. Till dawn they read. And whenever they’d stop reading he’d open his eyes immediately and search the room to see why the voice had suddenly ceased.
“You’re a good man,” said Nurse Eitne.
“Why?” he asked. “Why do you say that?”
She did not know how to answer him.
The marathon reading of Irish mythology continued, night and day, long after he had gone unconscious, for the women knew he was lonely for the sound of their voices. The last time he was coherent was two days before his death. He looked at Catherine’s shoes. “Do something about those shoes,” he said, “they need polishing.” He struggled up and made his way to the toilet. Coming back to bed he saw Maisie and said: “That’s it, I won’t be doing that again.” She read on.
Those last two days there was always a woman’s voice in his subconscious. Then at last the voice stopped.
III
THE HARES
17
The Mourners
Jonathan Adams was buried in Fermanagh. Only there, it was finally decided, could his tombstone proclaim that he had been a Sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The hearse that took him North was from Belmullet. His family followed behind in a hired car. And behind them in a Fiat rusted by salt from the sea came Joe Love, Bernie Burke and Eitne Noone. Despite Maisie’s entreaties the Mullet folk had decided to attend the funeral in the North.
Outside Blacklion, on the Florencecourt Road, when they were safely in the North, the cortege came to a stop.
“Looks like a roadblock,” said Bernie Burke, who was driving.
“Well don’t do anything hasty,” advised Joe Love.
“What’s going on?” asked Eitne.
With a sense of disbelief, the Mullet mourners saw another hearse emerge from a side road. Soldiers climbed out from behind a hedge. Three police Saracens cruised up behind.
“Are we going to be kidnapped or what?” asked Bernie.
“Just keep looking ahead,” whispered Joe.
A soldier appeared at the window and Bernie wound it down.
“Morning,” said Bernie.
“OK,” said the soldier, “you with the funeral?”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
A man in a black bowler and long black coat appeared, and along with him, two men dressed in ill-fitting black suits. The three swiftly tipped Jonathan Adams’ coffin into the Northern hearse. His policeman’s gloves and cap were placed on it and armfuls of funeral bouquets alongside. The hearse from Belmullet returned to the South and the new cortege took off into the North. “Jazus,” said Bernie, “they’re putting the foot down.” They went off up back roads, skirting towns till they arrived at the station in the village where the dead man had served his time. All the vehicles slowed to a halt, and stayed there outside the fortress, with their engines running, for a long surreal moment.
Joe Love turned to Bernie: “I told you he was an important man.”
All that could be seen of the station was a tall concrete wall, spiked with reams of barbed wire, huge green galavanize gates and a small door, behind sandbags, that opened into the wall. Beyond that were slated roofs covered by green netting and a single watch-tower. The man in the bowler hat stepped out and stood at the front right-hand side of the hearse. He nodded. The Saracens and the two cars took off again at walking pace. Another few mourning cars slipped surreptitiously in behind as the cortege drew towards the church. Then, flanked by two columns of uniformed policemen, who were in turn protected by armed British soldiers, Jonathan Adams’ coffin was ferried on the shoulders of four young policemen into the quiet graveyard.
“By jingo,” said Joe Love, “he was in the guards.”
“The RUC are not the guards,” whispered Eitne.
Willy was waiting by the grave. And he chose the same verse to read, from the Gospel according to St Matthew, as the priest had spoken over Matti Bonner: He is not dead. He sleepeth.
He is not dead. He sleepeth.
“Imagine,” whispered Bernie Burke in awe, “he went to his grave without taking a drink.” Maisie, in a black wide-brimmed hat, accepted his cap and gloves and the Union Jack. She shook the hands of the Mullet folk and the police inspector. Then she got into the car. Catherine and Sara stepped forward to the edge of the grave. Justin Ruttle from Rathkeale put his arms around them. The policemen stood to attention for a minute’s silence. They seemed to be waiting for a command that never came.
The house, after the funeral, was cold and unwelcoming. The girls moved with trays of sandwiches between the group of policemen in the living room and the few relations who were standing in the hallway and the kitchen. John Lavell, who had driven the Adamses from Mullet, Bernie Burke, Joe Love and Eitne Noone sat together nervously on a sofa, shifting uneasily as if they were only there on false pretences. If anyone spoke to them they answered with unsure smiles. They sat with cups of tea on their knees, each smoking and tapping their ash into a saucer.
“A word in your ear,” Bernie whispered to Catherine.
She leaned down.
“Would there be a drop of drink in the house?”
“I think there might be sherry.”
“Oh, that’ll do nicely.”
“You’ve disgraced yourself again,” announced Joe Love, “asking that poor girl for drink.”
Isolated from the others, they watched the
holstered revolvers, the pictures of masons on the walls, the extract from the scriptures above the fireplace. They in turn were observed – the sea-shined faces, the cracks of dirt in their hands, the tobacco-stained fingers, the old-fashioned blue suits, the quiet repetitive voices.
“So you were friends of Jonathan,” said Willy, with a brisk smile.
“I wouldn’t say that.” Bernie felt the back of his neck and bared his teeth. He looked uneasily at Joe Love.
“I am his brother, you see,” continued Willy.
“Ahhh! I’ve got you.”
“You look like him, too,” nodded Joe.
“The eyes,” said Bernie.
“And the chin.”
“He has him round the eyes.”
“I was not aware that I looked like Jonathan.”
“Oh, but you do,” agreed Eitne.
“He was a good soul.” Bernie reached up and gratefully took a glass from the tray Catherine held. He downed half the drink in one go. “And he’ll be sorely missed.”
“And what line of work would you be in?” asked Joe Love.
“I’m in the church.”
“Good man, Father.”
“Can I get you something?” Catherine asked her uncle.
“No, thank you.” Willy gave an abstemious grimace and wandered off. Justin Ruttle accepted a glass and sat in an armchair by the Mullet folk. They talked of the weather and compared the winds in the west with those in the south. A conversation ensued about exactly where the Gulf Stream reached Ireland. They talked land, pigs, cattle and storms. Across the room the policemen talked of the complications of the new witness forms that had to be completed in triplicate; the younger ones listened to their elders fondly reminiscing about conditions in the old stations; they talked of computers, lawnmowers, the Canaries, judges and cars. They remembered Jonathan Adams, a figure from another age.
Maisie, her mind still raddled by the stories she had been reading out loud till first light over the preceding days, moved among the RUC men dispensing cakes and tea, overcome with the feeling that somehow she had betrayed her husband, that he had died not as a sergeant in the police but as something else, something she could not as yet define.
After an appropriate interval, all the policemen left together. She shook each man’s hand on the doorstep. “If there’s ever anything we can do . . .” “Look after yourselves,” she said. They ran down the footpath and into the waiting cars. A bristle of rifles covered their retreat. Then the Mullet folk got up to go.
“We’ll see you in the summer,” Joe Love said.
“I hope so.”
Maisie stood on the road waving till the two cars were out of sight.
“Nothing would stop them but they come,” she explained to her father. “I’m sure they found it unsettling being here. You see, we never told them he was in the police. Now everyone will know who we are.”
“You should come down with me to Rathkeale for a while.”
“And what about the girls?”
“We can look after ourselves,” said Catherine.
“Oh yes,” she said. “I’m sure you could. I was not much older than you when I married your father.”
She did not return to Rathkeale. Although her father thought she should sell the house and leave now that there was nothing to hold her in Fermanagh, she said she’d wait and see. That year Sara would be finishing her A-levels, the year after that Catherine. Then she’d see. And, as she explained, there was always their retreat in Mullet. After her father was gone, she started immediately into the business at hand.
She wrote away to have her husband’s pension transferred into her name. She opened a filing cabinet in a drawer and marked it Jonathan. Into it went all her correspondence with insurance companies, the Department of Social Security, the Northern Ireland Police Department. Meanwhile she sat out the escalating war in the North and waited for her daughters to finish school. Weeks sometimes passed without anyone calling.
She sold off the geese.
For a period she began regularly attending service with Catherine and Sara in an attempt to meet people again. But everyone, once service was over, withdrew to their houses. The three women were on their own. Then they too stopped going to church. It was not the same thing without Jonathan.
The afternoon Sara finished her last exam, Maisie hired a car to take them all to Belmullet. When they arrived they expected to find the house in chaos. The walls running with damp. Food gone off in the kitchen. The upholstery in the car ripped. Instead, everything had been put in order by Eitne Noone. And Joe Love had come round to light fires. Bernie Burke came down with fish for their tea. The house was just as they’d left it the day they went to the funeral. Now the family cut the grass, aired the house and washed his car that stood outside in the galvanize shed. Somehow, doing all these things gave them the necessary release to mourn.
First Maisie developed asthma and later Catherine went bald. Then both, attended by Sara, stayed on in Mullet to recuperate. It was a great, tall, silent house to be sick in. For a long period of disembodiment and relapse The Dwellings figured in their consciousness as a place perched high on stilts. Added to this was the maddening sound of the crows. The crows were making a battering sound. Hell was outside. The whole day long they feverishly preened themselves on the few small storm-battered sycamores beyond the house, then stopped, looked up suddenly, cawed and began again.
Inside the three women mourned.
As the weeks passed, the girl’s mother strode into their consciousness as a single unaligned being. The old relationship was over. Death had put a distance between them. She became a woman who, like them, had been mothered, lived through childhood, experienced adolescence and encouraged courtship. Her womanness shocked them. The secrets Maisie used to tell Jonathan, she now told them. With a cross look in her eye she demanded their attention. Became conspiring and dependent in a flagrant way. Then she’d banish them.
“I miss the birds,” she said. “I miss the geese. It’s not the same.”
It came as a shock to the girls to find that their mother had become cold and withdrawn, even selfish, as she surrendered to the sickness and the identity widowhood had given her.
With the loss of Jonathan Adams they for a while lost Maisie as she struggled with the sentiments expected by the living of those recently bereaved. Neighbouring women they hardly knew called round to offer their condolences. First the Irish language and now death had opened up their house to strangers. The women, who brought warm home-baked bread wrapped in linen, sat by Maisie’s bed talking and celebrating death till all hours. They cursed and called on God to protect them. They spoke of their bowels, they described their menfolk with frightening candour. They spoke of their depressions and the visions they’d seen as children. They brought wild flowers and boxes of Cadbury’s chocolates. Milk was left at the door. Sheets were ironed. Mass cards, which the girls did not fully comprehend, arrived. A boy was sent round to clean the gutters. A man called to get their orders for groceries. Bernie Burke cleaned the chimneys. The travelling shop called twice a week instead of once. And Maisie revelled in the care, after keeping her distance from the outside world since the day she’d married Jonathan Adams.
She began experiencing the pang of remembering the time before the future was cast. She fetched out of the past aunts from Limerick; characters, young lovers she’d known when she was a girl in Rathkeale; nights step-dancing in Askeaton with the RCs; veiled stories told in her own kitchen of Cromwell who had given their Dutch ancestors the land they owned in Ballingrane; she could see herself walking behind her mother through Adare – her voice suddenly changing into that of a vulgar fifteen-year-old. This talk frightened Catherine. These were the stories their father must have heard of a young girl’s first awakening, but hearing them the girls were embarrassed and affronted, for these were seductive tales, stories that had turned into fantasies intended for a man.
Then suddenly would come the change in mood.
“I notice first,” said Maisie Adams, “people’s lips.” She fell into a doe-eyed reverie. “Maybe that’s why I chose him.” She laughed. “He was tasty in every way.”
“Were you happy with Daddy?” Sara interrupted.
“I married your father,” her mother answered vehemently, “and that was that. He was twice my age. And so . . .” she hesitated, “so correct! So intelligent.” She laughed unashamedly. “I don’t believe he thought he was mortal.”
She looked at them.
“I had no ambitions for myself.”
Such selflessness angered the girls. But then her voice changed, warning them off. She began to look different, as if she had spent the last twenty-eight years in a different role. Now she seemed intent on picking herself up as she might have been. And the Jonathan Adams they knew had gone missing somehow. She dabbed her lips politely with her handkerchief, then took two long breaths and coughed, her knuckles pressed into her chest.
“I used to climb out of the back window of the kitchen quarters in Brookborough to see him,” she said, drawing her knees in. “I always liked a man in a uniform.”
Again came the unwholesome lusty laugh.
“Poor Jonathan!” Then she added. “And poor Matti Bonner.”
And though their mother was again speaking of their father, this merging of her present life with her younger self threatened the girls. She began to ask them intimate details of their love lives. From upstairs they heard the visiting women burst out into gales of laughter. Maisie Adams had, in a frightening way, returned to grow up alongside her daughters.