War Children

by Gerard Whelan

  ‘Well?’ Da said.

  ‘We’re asking around about a friend of ours,’ one of the men said. He spoke with a country accent.

  Da looked at them for a long while.

  ‘Come in,’ he said then, and they came in past him. They were young men in caps, with long dark coats. They looked serious and shifty at the same time. I was too numb to take them in, really, but I could sense the others tensing. Da closed the door and came over to the table. He sat down and looked up at the men without asking them to sit.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘We had a friend staying with Mrs Nolan,’ the man with the country accent said. ‘He had a bit of a problem.’

  ‘Someone informed on him,’ the other man said impatiently. He was a Dub.

  Da looked from one to the other.

  ‘Well, it was no-one in this house,’ he said. He sounded tired. ‘We minds our own business, and we don’t like peelers.’

  ‘We believe,’ the first man said, ‘there was money involved.’

  Da looked like he was going to spit, but Ma would have taken the head off him if he’d done it in the house.

  ‘Blood money, so,’ he said. ‘No good ever came of blood money.’

  There was a clatter on the back door, and I jumped. I must have made some noise too because Ma came over and held me. Da was on his feet facing the door with his fists clenched. Each of the strangers stuck a hand in a pocket of his topcoat.

  The back door was always on the latch. It opened now and Chancer Foley came in. His face was white.

  ‘Mick,’ my Da said. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

  Chancer Foley held up a silencing hand. He looked past my father at the two strangers.

  ‘Youse are looking for the man that put your friend on the spot,’ he said.

  There was something odd about him that I couldn’t place. Then I realised he wasn’t drunk. Here was Chancer Foley sober – a sight Mattie had said she’d never seen.

  The two young men looked at Chancer. They took their empty hands out of their pockets.

  ‘What do you know about it?’ the second one asked. He was thin-faced, intense.

  Chancer Foley started crying. It was an ugly sight, without even drink to excuse it.

  ‘I’m the man,’ he said. ‘I’m who you’re looking for.’

  I felt something like a lump of ice moving up and down my spine.

  ‘I had a daughter,’ Chancer said, ‘and one time my daughter told me I’d do anything for drink-money. I’d sell human life for it, she said, and I’d pay for it in hell.’

  His whole face was moving as he spoke, big spasms moving across it. His eyes were mad.

  ‘Well, I done it!’ he said. ‘I sold human life for it. And she was right – I’m paying. But it’s not enough.’

  He looked over at my Da.

  ‘She was a mad young one,’ he said. ‘Mad as a hatter. You could neither talk sense into her nor beat it into her. But she was only a young one, when all is said and done. There was no harm in her.’

  There was a drip on the end of Chancer’s nose. He wiped it with his coat-sleeve.

  ‘Them boyos the other day,’ he said to the two men. ‘The Auxies. They were looking for a man. They said they’d pay good money for word of strangers. And money is money.’

  ‘Blood money,’ my father said.

  ‘Blood money, aye. I never knew what that meant.’ Chancer held up two shaking hands, the dirty palms washed clean in places by the sweat and maybe tears on them.

  ‘When I looks at these hands now,’ he said, ‘I sees them full of me own daughter’s blood. It was on the street outside today, her blood. A big lock of it. Me wife had to go out and scrub it up when she came back from work. I found her still at it when I came home. She had the blood washed up this long time, there wasn’t a sign of it on the stones. But she was still scrubbing. She’d scrub the very stones out of the ground on that spot if she could.’

  He put his hands down and looked at the men.

  ‘There’s a stone wall outside here where this whole thing started.’ he said. ‘Your mate saw the Auxies coming the other morning, and he thrun the gun over the wall. I seen him do it. I wants youse to take me out now and put me up against that wall. I’m asking youse to do it. Begging youse. I’d do it me own self only I’ve nothing to do it with.’

  The second stranger, the intense one, moved as if to go over to Chancer; but his friend stopped him.

  ‘It was your daughter that was shot?’ he asked quietly.

  Chancer looked at him with mad eyes.

  ‘Sure, what do you think I’m talking about?’ he said. ‘You stupid culchie!’

  The young man looked at him evenly.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’ve been punished enough.’

  Chancer Foley moved quicker than I’d ever seen him move. He crossed the room and grabbed the man’s coat by the lapels. He was taller and heavier than the countryman, and he glowered down at him.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  The countryman reached up and pulled Chancer’s hands from his coat. He looked up at him coldly.

  ‘It’s a priest you need,’ he said. ‘And I’m not a priest.’

  He nodded to his friend. The two of them bade us goodnight and went out, closing the door after them. Chancer looked around at us. He started to say something to my Da, but something in Da’s eyes stopped him. Chancer ran out the back door, leaving it open behind him. A couple of days later his body was fished out of Dublin bay by a dredger. There were no signs of violence.

  * * *

  The court where I grew up is gone now. There’s a block of offices and apartments on the site. Well-dressed young men and women come and go, talking on their mobile phones, running busily up and down steps that are rarely empty. My mother and father are long gone to their reward. My brother Ray fought in the British army during the Hitler war. He died in Germany in 1945. My brother Jim went to America. I was over there last year for his funeral. I often think of Mattie, and wonder what would have become of her. One time when myself and my husband were home on a holiday we went to the National Museum. They’ve a special display there about them times, with guns and uniforms from the Rising and from the Tan war. There’s an Auxie uniform there that set the hairs of my neck standing up when I saw it. But the thing that struck me most was a pistol, a Mauser pistol, there in a glass case. It was the spit and image of the one that Mattie Foley brought into our kitchen that morning. You could even see the same words stamped on the metal: Waffenfabrik Mauser … Oberndorf A. Neckar. And for the first time in too many years I thought of Antonio Neckar, with his headaches and his craftsmanship.

  There was a couple looking into the case at the same time as me, and when they spoke to each other I recognised the language as German. They even said something about Mausers – maybe surprised to find so many of the guns had come from their own country. And though it wasn’t like me at all, I turned to the couple and asked them about the words stamped on the pistol, and I learned that Waffenfabrik wasn’t a thing you’d cover sofas with at all, but that it just meant ‘weapons factory’. And I learned too that the rest of the inscription meant only a factory site, Oberndorf-Am-Neckar, the Neckar being a river and Oberndorf-Am-Neckar being the same sort of a name as, say, Kingston-on-Thames, where my sister-in-law used to live. And, of course, it’s not that I’d ever believed that there really was a fellow called Antonio Neckar, because I’d known all along it was only a mad story, but in a foolish kind of a way I found myself standing there not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Because, mad or not, Mattie Foley had called out to Antonio with her last living breath. And as we left the museum I seemed to hear a little girl’s voice echoing in the high rooms, up in the rafters, singing a daft old song:

  ‘Oh, Oh, Antonio,

  He’s gone away.

  Left me alone-io,

  All on my own-io.’

  I think that, in a strange way, and t
hough I hadn’t thought about him for years, Antonio Neckar came alive a bit in my own mind that day. Because those things in the glass cases – the uniforms and the guns – they were only history, and history is a name for things that are dead. And Antonio, even though he’d never existed, was still more alive than those things. Because Antonio, with his headaches and his craft, like Mattie Foley with her dirty dancing feet, would never be a dead thing in a museum. The only museum he’d be in was the museum of this old woman’s heart. And a heart may be old, but so long as it is beating it’s a living thing; and the things that are inside it are not dead. And somewhere in a corner of my own heart, in a place full of dreams, a bit of me will always be sitting on the Empty Steps with Mattie Foley, listening to her mad stories, eating sausage sandwiches, maybe, and waiting for Antonio.

  Mulligan’s Drop

  Statia’s father had twisted his ankle jumping down off a ditch, and it had turned black and swelled up till he could hardly walk for the pain. Old Bridie Murnaghan, who had cures for most things, had put a poultice on it and told him to rest his foot till the swelling went down.

  ‘Rest it?’ Phil Mulligan said. ‘Sure, how can I rest it? I can’t afford the time!’ He said the word ‘rest’ with a peculiar bitterness, as though it were a curse.

  ‘You can’t afford the time not to,’ Bridie told him. ‘Just be glad you’ve the childer to help you out around the place. You’ll be off that leg for a week as it is. If you don’t let it fix itself fully then you’ll be off it for a month or maybe more.’

  Phil Mulligan made a bad invalid. He wasn’t used to inactivity. But Bridie was right about the children at least: the three boys and their mother could manage most things between them, and a week wasn’t such a very long time at this time of year. It would have been different at harvest time.

  As for Statia, she helped when she could – or when she was let, which wasn’t the same thing. She was thirteen, and the youngest, and a girl, and her brothers seemed to take all three things as meaning she was useless. She was set to feeding poultry and doing more of the cooking – and to fetching things for her father in the house, which was the worst job because Phil Mulligan was annoyed at being laid up and seemed to be in a permanent bad humour. He’d never been sick in his life before, and he didn’t like it at all. But even he knew that he was being unfair, and made rough apologies to Statia in between times.

  ‘I hates feeling useless, child,’ he’d say. ‘But I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.’

  In some ways, though, Statia liked having her father around the house. It was a novelty. And she didn’t take his bad temper to heart, because she knew it sprang mostly from worry. The boys were sensible and competent, but they hadn’t their father’s experience. And Phil Mulligan hated to be dependent on anyone, even his own family. Dependence was weakness in his book; and weakness frightened him.

  Statia did resent the fact that she wasn’t let help in the harder, outdoor work. She liked fetching cows from the fields of an evening, or any of the other things her brothers wouldn’t let her do.

  ‘Think yourself lucky, child,’ her mother would advise her. ‘When I was your age I was worked like a slave. We wants something better for you.’

  Statia didn’t understand what she meant. What could be better than knowing how to do farm work? It was all that she wanted to do. One day she hoped to be a farmer’s wife herself, with a brood of boys like her mother had. What use would she be then if she’d spent her childhood being kept from learning things properly? It was very frustrating.

  ‘I’m only a skivvy round this place,’ she said to her mother. ‘I’m fed up making pots of tea and throwing meal to chickens.’

  ‘Sure, someone has to do it,’ her mother pointed out. ‘And you’re the smallest, Statia – what do you want to do, carry bales of hay?’

  Statia didn’t know what to answer. But as that week passed, what with her father’s foul temper and everything else, she got more and more fed up. The house and yard began to seem like a prison. She longed for a day out somewhere, away from the tea and the cleaning and the chickens. A day? An hour would do. Anything to get away from blank walls and the constant demands of her father and her brothers.

  One evening towards the end of the week Statia went to open a new sack of meal to feed the hens, and found there was no new sack there. It was the kind of little thing that got overlooked in an emergency.

  ‘It’s my own fault,’ Phil Mulligan admitted. ‘I knew I should get some but I was putting it off. Stephen can go down to Caffertys’ in the morning and ask them have they the lend of a sack till I’m back on my feet.’

  But the next day there was a fresh emergency: a cow and her calf had gone straying from the boggy field near the river.

  ‘I told youse that ditch in the bog field needed mending,’ their father scowled at the boys when he heard. ‘I told youse to mend that before putting any animals into the field. Now they’ll end up drownded!’

  And he had told the boys, but in their excitement at being in charge they’d forgotten. Now they all had to go and look for the strays.

  ‘What about the feed for the hens?’ Statia’s mother asked.

  Statia saw a chance, and took it.

  ‘Why don’t I go for it?’ she asked.

  ‘Would you be all right on your own?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Mammy!’ said Statia, exasperated.

  ‘That ass don’t like hauling the cart up Mulligan’s Drop,’ her mother warned. ‘You knows that.’

  The way to Caffertys’ led across the little hump-backed bridge on the Rasheen river, down in the deep river valley. On Caffertys’ side the road sloped gradually up from the bridge, but on this side the land dropped suddenly down a steep hill that was known locally as Mulligan’s Drop. Years ago some of Statia’s ancestors – even Phil wasn’t sure who, or how far back it had been – had owned the land on either side of that road: ‘And ’twas a good day’s work when he got out of it, whoever he was,’ Phil would say, ‘for ’tis useless land not worth working.’

  The ass was always grand on the road to Caffertys’, but sometimes gave trouble on the way back after crossing the bridge, when suddenly Mulligan’s Drop became – from an ass’s point of view – Mulligan’s Rise.

  ‘And why wouldn’t he give trouble?’ Phil Mulligan would ask sometimes. ‘How would you like hauling a full cart up that hill?’

  Statia had seen the way the ass, pulling the cart back along that road, would sometimes cast its broken-hearted eyes up the awful hill with a kind of shock when it reached the Rasheen bridge and – as often as not – just stand stock still in protest. When this actually happened, her father was far less understanding of its plight. Statia had often seen him break his stick uselessly on the ass’s back in an effort to get it to go on.

  ‘You’ll go up there,’ he’d shout at the ass, ‘if I have to kick you up it! You’ll go up if I have to carry you itself!’

  Statia herself thought that beating only made the ass more stubborn. She’d noticed that the beast reacted better to her own soft voice and kindnesses than to her father’s blows and curses. And even Phil Mulligan, reluctantly, sometimes had to admit that this was the case.

  ‘Statia will be all right,’ he said now. ‘I seen her get the ass up the Drop sometimes after I’d gave up trying.’

  It wasn’t like him to be so supportive, and Statia guessed he was moved by a kind of guilt for the hard time he’d been giving her. He was tempted to go with her himself, he said; he could sit in the back of the cart and still rest his ankle, and the fresh air would do him good. But Statia didn’t fancy company – least of all her father’s. The few hours on her own were what she wanted. And if her father came then he’d only be rushing her.

  ‘But what if the ass won’t go up the Drop for me today, Da?’ she asked. ‘We’d all be stuck there then.’

  Her father grunted. You could see that the idea of getting out had appealed to him too. He wasn’t used to staying still
for such a long time.

  ‘She’s right, Phil,’ Statia’s mother said. ‘And what if we need you here?’

  ‘Sure, how would you need me, woman? Haven’t you three big lads here? Not the cleverest lads, maybe, but they’re strong.’

  ‘No,’ his wife said. ‘They’re not the cleverest – they takes after their father. Sure, isn’t that why we needs you here to … to direct them.’

  Statia was surprised to see her mother giving her a wink on the sly. She hid a smile. Maybe her mother too thought her father had been hard on her this week. Maybe she too thought Statia could do with a few hours off.

  Phil Mulligan was satisfied to be thought needed. He settled himself on the settle bed where he’d been all week.

  ‘It’s true for you,’ he said to his wife. ‘The place needs an organising brain.’

  Statia could feel the muscles twitching in her cheeks. The hidden smile was trying to turn into a grin. She coughed. She wanted to get out while the going was good.

  ‘I’ll go and put the blinkers on the ass,’ she said.

  As Statia left the farm her mother walked a few steps of the road with her and loaded her with warnings.

  ‘Watch out for strangers,’ she said. ‘If you see any men with guns then cast your eyes away from them. Don’t even let on you notice them. And if you see any soldiers in lorries then be very careful. If they’re Tans, get off the cart and put it between you and them, and keep your head down until they’re well gone.’

  There were ugly stories about drunken Tans shooting rifles at anyone they passed in their lorries. A few people had been shot and even killed. You didn’t hear things like that so much about the proper police or the army, but then they tended to be sober. The problem with the Tans, people said, was that they seemed to have no discipline. The best thing to do with them was to stay out of their way altogether, but sometimes that was easier said than done.

  ‘I won’t look for you before teatime,’ Statia’s mother said.