The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘I feel like letting rip. Ah, Pauline, we’ll shake the old lodge into rambunctious life. A wind will tear through the door and blow the cobwebs out the windows.’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens. Remember Joey, Cookie and Father Bosco. They may be celebrating too.’

  He was gazing down into his wine glass, his high, heavy head bent in an attitude of butting. It was a powerful head with little flesh to cover the jagged bone structure. It made her think of flint-stone beneath a coat of moss, hard to the touch and deceptively soft to look at.

  ‘They’re all knots to be undone, and the tightest knot, the closest to my throat, is Gulban. He’s holding me back, he knows it himself. Nothing has changed in our family since Mother died twenty years ago. Even Sunday lunch is always shoulder of mutton. We never have fish, because he doesn’t like fish. And when he says that he wouldn’t eat salmon or lobster if his life depended on it, he gives the impression that anyone who would is morally deficient. He knows only one way of life – his own. It’s as well that I’m not dependent on him. You and I could make a go of it anywhere. In many ways the best thing we could do is start a new life away from his curmudgeonly niggling.’

  ‘I said I’d give you my answer within a week. You’d be foolish to leave now, though. Another year won’t kill you.’

  ‘If you do say “yes”, I’d like to take you to America for our honeymoon.’

  ‘It isn’t as romantic as Italy.’ She tried to tease him.

  ‘We won’t go to New York or Hollywood. We’ll take a train to Chicago, Peoria, Kansas City and Des Moines.’

  ‘They don’t attract me.’

  ‘They’re the cities of the Red Men. Gulban made them live in the bedtime stories he told us when we were small. For that at least he deserves my thanks. So let’s drink to the Red Men. For me they weren’t just ancestors, they were heroes.’

  Chapter 3

  With drums and guns, and guns and drums,

  The enemy nearly slew ye,

  My darling dear, you look so queer,

  Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye.

  His dark baritone rose above the purr of the engine on the level road, her father’s song but not her father’s voice. He was only forty when he died, and she was then only nine. The loss was the first touch of an icy tide that had not ceased to flow, and it denied her the university education that would have been hers had he lived. She was left with her mother in genteel poverty, outside life, looking in through the windows of the House of Heron. For the past eight years she had slaved for Gulban, inside at last but not an insider. Now everything would change. It was a dream she could hardly admit to having dreamt.

  A drooping branch scraped the wing of the car.

  ‘Jack,’ she shouted. ‘Keep out of the ditch.’

  ‘It’s not the wine. I’m tired after the work and the day.’

  ‘Pull in here. You can have a nap while I drive.’

  ‘What I need is a walk to wake me up. We’ll go down to the beach again. We should be there inside five minutes.’

  The tide had come in since they left. Under the half-moon the beach was a narrow strip of grey with shaggy clumps of bent-grass at the upper end. Ahead, the rocky spit and the dark graveyard wall ran down into the water, which looked shallow, flat and pale.

  He led her into the shadow of the graveyard wall and kissed her on the mouth and neck, then on the mouth again. His kissing was quiet and insistent, pulling slowly at the tides of memory within her, awakening associations in a landscape of dream. She was caught between the rough stonework of the wall and the jagged bone of his body. For reassurance she sought the flesh inside his shirt, kneading with her fingers the unyielding muscle along his spine. She was standing, not in the shadow of a wall, but in the lee of an erratic tor that rose solitary and unreconciled out of a flat, unknowable terrain.

  They made love where they stood, and all the time her mind was a windhover scanning an ebbing tide that sighed as it retreated and moaned among rocks as it sought unavailingly to return. She was not free; like the tide she moved within constraints that seemed alien, mechanical and inexorable. She felt entrapped by a grapple of arbitrary memories: the discordant scream of the seagull, Mrs Bugler turning to inspect her empty seat, the cuckoo that failed to call again. She told herself that it was not his fault that the evening had been, for her, a barefoot walk over sharp stones.

  ‘We should have done that before. It was a lovely end to a special evening.’ He hugged her again.

  ‘It was my answer to your question.’

  ‘Then I should have asked it long ago.’ With his arms round her waist, he lifted her clean off the ground. ‘It’s only the beginning,’ he said. ‘We’ll go from strength to strength, the two of us. We’ll have a swim now to wake us up for the road.’

  ‘The water will be icy.’

  ‘That’s just it.’ He pulled off his unbuttoned shirt.

  ‘You go in. I’ll sit here on a rock and wait.’

  First she listened to his splashing. Then he passed the sandy shelf where the waves curled and broke, and he waded out into the smooth water beyond, with faint moonlight on one shoulder. The night was full of sea sounds and wafted perfumes that came and went between the irregular slapping and gurgling. Now he was swimming away from the shore, a black head turning between glinting arms and elbows. He seemed determined to leave land and life behind. She began to feel the edge of the breeze on her neck. Then he turned and propelled himself backwards to the shore with splashing feet. He rose out of the sea, a dark animal between two elements, neither of which was his own. She turned towards the eastern sky. She wanted the sun to come up that minute and the dawn light to dance on his dripping skin. She wanted morning to be hard and clear, without muted edges or colours that merged in deceptive ambiguity. She wished for clarity and definition, because clarity and definition was what a life with Jack would mean.

  He dried himself with his underpants and put on his shirt and trousers.

  ‘It was like ice. Better than the coldest of cold showers. ‘I’ll be all right now, wait and see.’

  ‘What will Gulban say when he hears we’re to be married?’ she asked.

  ‘He’ll be pleased. He has a high opinion of you, though it would choke him to admit it. Gulban wouldn’t admit to having a high opinion of anyone.’

  When they got back to the car, he put his wet underpants in the glove compartment, and she sat beside him with her cardigan round her shoulders. A rain forest of cloud had sprung up before them in the west, and in the south a yellowy haze had melted the rim of the moon.

  He drove slowly and in silence, while she thought of Gulban whom her mother used to call Gull, but only when they were alone. Gull was not an abbreviation of Gulban, the name Joey gave him as a baby after he’d heard Bosco jokingly refer to his father as Gulbenkian. Neither was it meant to denote a man who is easily deceived. Her mother called him Gull because she saw him as the living embodiment of greed. ‘Nothing will satisfy him,’ she would say. ‘He hasn’t one appetite that isn’t insatiable.’

  After Pauline’s father died, Gulban began visiting her mother in the evenings. Her mother was still good-looking then, and Gulban may have seen her as the residue of a talented man’s estate, what her mother once called ‘an acquisition to flaunt before the congregation on Sundays’. Her husband had been dead only two months when Gulban proposed to her. She was a far-sighted woman who didn’t say yes and didn’t say no, but many years later she told Pauline that even if her eternal salvation depended on it, she’d never forgive him for being so insensitive. Pauline suspected that she must have feared him. For all Pauline knew, she may have given him oblique encouragement, because his visits continued for another five years.

  He would drop in after supper and sit in her father’s low armchair while her mother played the piano, or he would take Pauline on his knee and give her mental arithmetic, because, he said, ‘a girl who can add and subtract quickly will never put a foot wrong that she can’
t put right again’. When she was fourteen, he told her mother that he would pay for her education.

  ‘She’s so bright that she should be given a chance,’ he said. ‘She’s so bright that half a chance will be enough.’

  His ploy may have been transparent, but her mother expressed her pleasure with a smile, and she told Pauline to give him a big hug which she dutifully did. The boarding school he chose was the cheapest he could find after a search that took so long that the Michaelmas term was already three weeks old when she started. The older girls giggled when they saw her uniform which had been bought second-hand by Gulban and was two sizes too big for her.

  ‘She’s about to make her growth,’ he had told her mother. ‘She’ll grow into it before Christmas.’

  When he’d gone, her mother remarked that it was a pity his generosity had been compromised by parsimony, and that they must not hold it against him because counting pennies was second nature to him. Such generosity had been a great sacrifice for so careful a man, not least because it was to remain a secret between the three of them.

  Uncertainty pursued her throughout her schooldays. Her mother would remind her to smile whenever he spoke to her, though Pauline was by then old enough to sense that it was her mother’s smiles that mattered. When she was in her fourth year, his visits stopped, and the following summer he told her mother that he could not see his way to pay for her final year. Pauline was heart-broken. She was a keen pupil with academic ambitions. Overnight the future she had confidently imagined for herself had become a pipe-dream. By then her mother’s health had begun to fail. Pauline stayed at home to look after her, and was soon to discover that whatever money her father had left had gone. When Gulban offered her a job as a receptionist at the hotel, she was only too pleased to accept. She worked hard, and she tried not to bear him a grudge. When he –

  ‘Christ!’ Jack cried, as they turned a corner.

  He braked sharply, and they skidded towards a sleepy-looking sheep that had been lying in the middle of the road. He steered this way and that. There was a sickening thump.

  ‘Stupid animal,’ he said, reversing.

  They were in the cutting with a high bank on each side. He got out and dragged the sheep by the hind legs to the grass verge, before pushing it over the edge into the drain. The broken streak of blood glinting in the headlights made her feel slightly sick.

  ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘the wing is dented.’

  ‘And the sheep is dead,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ He climbed back into the car without opening the door.

  ‘I think you’d better let me drive.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘You came into the bend too quickly.’

  ‘There was nothing I could do. She was lying right in my path. Only quick thinking kept us out of the drain.’

  ‘Be reasonable, Jack. You’ve had too much to drink. You’re tired. We’ve had a narrow escape, so don’t let’s tempt providence again.’

  ‘Look who’s talking! You’ve had as much wine as I’ve had.’

  ‘I had only half a glass from the second bottle.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better drive, then. If we’re stopped, you’ll have a better chance of cheating the breathalyser. But be careful. We mustn’t kill any more sheep. Sheep are harmless, even if they are stupid. They shouldn’t be killed except for gigot, rib or loin chops.’

  ‘Jack!’

  They changed places and she put on her cardigan because she had become aware of a dampness in the air. She liked driving his new sports car. It was low on the road. It cleared hills like a bird and held well on corners. It was solid and reliable, and perhaps a bit predictable, like Jack himself. In the lower end of a valley they ran into a patch of fog which was gone in a minute. The icy indifference of its touch made her shiver, and she remembered Jack dragging the dead sheep with one hand.

  ‘We won’t bother getting engaged,’ he said. ‘We’ll surprise everyone and get married before Christmas.’

  ‘October is my favourite month. I’d like to get married in October.’

  ‘What about the last day of October? The tourists will have gone, we can go off on our honeymoon with a clear conscience, and we’ll have a whole hotel for the reception. It will be a family affair: Gulban will give the bride away, Cookie will be best man, and Father Bosco will bless the lucky couple. All that remains is to find a suitable job for Joey.’

  ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘I want you to promise me something.’

  ‘Is it a condition?’

  ‘No, I’d just like you to give up going to Fort Knox.’

  ‘I’m fond of bridge. Apart from driving, it’s my only relaxation.’

  ‘I don’t mind bridge, but I don’t like Mrs Bugler. People talk about her, she’s got a reputation.’

  ‘She’s a formidable lady.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Only people who’ve never been inside Fort Knox say these things. If she lived in a glasshouse, they wouldn’t find her half as interesting.’

  ‘She’s ruined several young boys from around. I overheard one of the waitresses say yesterday that she isn’t the village bicycle but the village tandem.’

  ‘I’m trying to imagine it. The mind just boggles and boggles.’

  ‘Jack, will you promise?’

  ‘I’ll sleep on it and tell you when I wake up.’ He gave her a playful peck on the cheek.

  It was half-past three and dawn was creeping up the sky. A house at the end of a lane was still a dark, unknowable form, and two shadowy bullocks rising for an early bite in a field of tussocks moved slowly with eerie unfamiliarity. She came over the crest of a hill to find two floating bars of mist below and three lumps of cloud on the western horizon, three black sheep grazing with their backs to the wind. She drove slowly down into the mist, her fingers tight on the wheel. It was blowing across the road from the right, yet when she reached the spot, it had vanished. She felt lonely and uneasy for no identifiable reason; she would have preferred it if Jack were awake. Then she realised that though she’d driven along this road many times before, she had no idea where she was. Nothing looked familiar. The road and the green verge on her left flowing towards her into the beam of the headlights were endless and featureless. In vain she sought a landmark that might set her mind at rest.

  As she went into a corner between steep hills, the flowing road vanished. Without warning, she was surrounded by thick, grey mist. She knew that she must stop at once. She braked, and the nose of the car went up. She was airborne, the steering-wheel loose in her hands. With a sickening thrill she knew that she was going to die. The nosedive came abruptly. She saw a clutter of intestines, and a cargo of herring being unloaded, slithering into boxes in a cascade of quicksilver. There was a metallic scratching and birdlike wail, a loud kra-a-ah of pain followed by a thud and a headlong scrunch against up-rushing, irresistible dark.

  She woke and knew that Jack had gone from her side. It was light. The mist had dissolved. The car was up-ended in a narrow river with its rear resting on the bank. The windscreen was shattered. Her arm and cheek were bleeding, and her left side was a flight of arrows shooting pain all the way down her leg. The musical gurgle of water falling among rocks accentuated the terrible silence. Jack had been thrown clear. He was lying face down in the shallow river with his head between two stones.

  ‘Jack, Jack!’ she called. ‘Oh, no!’

  When she tried to move, the car rocked on its pedestal. Slowly she dragged herself out of the seat, over the boot on to the heathery bank, the pain in her arm and leg no longer hers alone. She allowed herself to slide down into the water near the spot where he was lying prone. She lifted his head and turned him over. The open gash above his right temple had been washed clean by the flowing water. Thin blood trickled afresh. She sought his pulse. She tore open his shirt to feel his heartbeat, and with both hands slapped his cheeks. He
r head seemed to roll on her shoulders. He made neither murmur nor movement.

  She leant against the peaty river bank, her feet in the running water. The slimy stones were reddish-brown, as was the shoal of fine gravel, upstream from which rose a bleached stump of bog-oak, a gigantic molar with a two-pronged root that penetrated her skull and brain in a gratuitous act of violence. Within her was a stranger who saw nothing but fragments – pointed rock, torn flesh, splintered bone – washed by water that sluiced and trickled. A wagtail balanced on the opposite bank. The river was an ocean she must cross to reach what people called the world. Now the hotel would empty, the bustle of guests would give way to silence. All evening he had seemed driven by demons, set on a course of self-destruction. He drank wine like water. He talked and talked, the words obscuring an overwhelming compulsion. He’d been pitched from his seat. The impact had stunned him. Water had got into his lungs. Death from asphyxiation. Her mind rejected the flashy lure of inevitability. His death was senseless, absurd, incomprehensible. She kissed him on the mouth. She could not understand why she was not moved to tears, why the thing she felt was rage and a cold, inhuman urge for revenge.

  It was five o’clock. Almost two hours had gone since she’d left the road. She dragged him downstream past the car, on to a low part of the river bank. He was cold and limp. His right arm swung as if broken. He looked unshaven, which was strange because when he kissed her by the graveyard wall his chin felt smooth. A green streak of algae hung from the corner of his mouth. She went back to the rocks and with cupped hands poured water over them to wash the bloodstains away. The car was a tin toy broken by an impatient child. She examined the padded steering-wheel and took her handbag from under the driver’s seat. As she climbed the stony slope to the road above, she rested several times to breathe. Her side ached and her left eye kept closing. There were no skid marks where she’d gone off the road. The car had shot up over the sod dyke, there hadn’t even been time to brake. Now she knew where she was, but the knowledge had come too late. There was a village about a mile further on. She sat on the roadside wondering if that was where she should go.