The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  The short June night was endless. She kept dozing and dreaming and waking again. Her mother had gone shopping, and she and Joey were playing hide and seek in the house on their own. He had locked the front and back doors to keep Cookie out and to ensure that she could not escape. She knelt in the darkness of the cupboard under the stairs, holding her breath as a loose tread creaked above her. She heard a crackle, and, as she peeped through the cupboard door, she saw the curtains and the sofa in flames. Smoke was pouring across the room. Terrified, she called to Joey to open the front door. He had left the key in the kitchen, and the kitchen was now cut off. She panicked. She began to cry. He led her upstairs while behind them the fire was spreading from another room to the hall. The bedroom floor was already hot. Joey pulled her on to the bed and opened the window at the top. Through the smoke below, she could see neighbours gathering and Slash Gildea running with a ladder. Suddenly, his face was on the other side of the pane. Joey pushed her through and Slash handed her down to one of the men below. As she looked back up the ladder, Joey’s frightened face vanished from the window.

  ‘He’s fallen through,’ someone shouted.

  Slash smashed the downstairs window with two blows of a spade. He clambered in through the thickening smoke while the other men kept pouring water from buckets through the broken panes. Slash seemed to be gone a week. Then she saw his blackened face and Joey unconscious in his arms. Smoke was rising from Joey’s clothes and his face was a raw and shapeless layer of burns. She did not see him again for over a month. He was rushed to hospital, and when he came back one side of his face was red as newly killed beef.

  She opened her eyes and looked up at the rim of the hollow. A small animal with a cunning head and cocked ears peered down at her. She felt stiff in her legs and arms. The lighthouse beam came round again, revealing an untidy clump of couch-grass. Her teeth began to chatter. She pulled on Joey’s trousers and lay down at the foot of the slab again with her knees touching her chin. The cottage spewed flame and acrid smoke and Slash was calling to her to hurry up. She got a light aluminium ladder and climbed in through the dormer window. He was choking and coughing. She lifted him in her arms and carried him to safety as if he were only a teddy bear. He was lighter than Cookie and Joey and not much heavier than Bosco and Jack.

  She climbed out of the hollow and wondered if she could discern a thinning of the darkness in the east. She waited in a state of indecision, not quite certain if what she saw contained a hint of blue. Gradually, the horizon rose into view. The hotel came forward out of shadow, the headland took shape before her eyes. Soon she could make out the white of other houses and remnants of the east-running road over the moor. She thought she had seen a movement on the slip. She looked through her binoculars but could see even less than with the naked eye. It was hard to be certain. The movement might have been a trick of the dawn light.

  The sun came up, a half-hidden cutting wheel with an orange rim. It was morning, and a white boat had already cleared the sea-wall. The dark figure in the stern was not one of the lobster fishermen, because they rarely fished alone. He was making straight for the island, the high bows now obscuring the lower half of his torso.

  She got out of Joey’s trousers and stood on the high ground waving. The crossing took ages. Sometimes she felt that the boat, far from making progress, was being driven back by a hostile wind and tide. At last it entered the inlet. She recognised Slash, his face narrow and lean under his cap. With Joey’s trousers over her arm, she ran down the slope to the slip below.

  ‘Where’s the boat?’ he called.

  It was typical of Slash. Anyone else would have asked where Joey had gone and if she herself were all right. She felt foolish and ridiculous. She hesitated before offering a reply.

  ‘Joey took it out yesterday evening. I haven’t seen him since. He left his clothes on that rock and said that he was going round the other side of the island for a swim.’

  ‘Hop in. We’d better go and look for him.’

  They puttered slowly round the island, weaving to avoid submerged rocks at which she peered over the gunwale with almost morbid fascination. Slash sat silently in the stern, confident, efficient, and perhaps somewhat critical of the inexplicable antics that had made such early demands on his day. As she glanced at him, she could understand why Gulban used to say, ‘While Slash is in charge, nothing ever goes wrong except by act of God.’

  ‘There’s not a sign of either himself or the boat,’ he said when they had come full circle.

  ‘What do you think’s happened to him?’

  ‘Did he have a pair of oars?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He may have run out of petrol. He could still be drifting. Last night the breeze was from the land.’

  ‘We’ll have to keep looking.’

  ‘I’m nearly out of petrol myself. We’ll go back and get help, it’s the sensible thing to do.’

  ‘I hope he’s all right.’

  He looked at her searchingly.

  ‘It might teach him a lesson. Only fools don’t respect the sea.’

  She didn’t reply. Now a full-scale search would begin. They might find the boat and possibly the body. There would be nodding and winking and shaking of heads. It seemed to her best if no trace of him were found. No boat. No body. A clean and absolute exit. And she would remain the repository of a truth which neither Bosco nor Cookie should be required to confront.

  Chapter 31

  The search went on for two days. Local fishermen aided by an army helicopter and divers from Undercliff Sub-Aqua Club combed the seas to the north, south and west of the island. It was only the third week of the lobster season and the local fishermen could ill afford the time, but nevertheless she could not bring herself to intervene. On the first day a French trawler reported a drifting boat due west of the island with an outboard engine and an empty fuel tank. An intensive search of the area followed. No body was found.

  The following week a funeral service was held. Cookie came down from Dublin and Father Bosco, clearly overwrought, gave an emotional address which was embarrassing in its incoherence. His voice failed twice. He ended abruptly as if words had finally lost their function. A heavy silence bound the still air in the crowded church until one of the Mass servers coughed. At least there was no body for burial. It was a blessing to be spared the pathos of Father Bosco’s graveside prayers.

  The next four weeks submerged her in a sea of compulsions. She could not bring herself to think about anything except work in progress. She spent the mornings in the shop with one of Joey’s assistants whom she had promoted to manager. In the afternoons she came back to the hotel to cram ten hours’ work into five. She might have been wearing a bridle and blinkers; she could see only whatever was set before her nose. Though industrious and painstaking in all she did, she had lost joy and satisfaction in little things. Life was work, sleep, work, and she was a stolid beast of burden.

  One morning towards the beginning of July she looked out of her bedroom window after breakfast, as a builders’ merchant was unloading some posts and wire fencing under the supervision of Slash Gildea. The sight came as a revelation. She remembered saying to Slash a month before that the fence by the river needed mending, and he said at the time that mending would not be enough, that both posts and wire needed replacing. She had thought that this was his way of wriggling out of a job he did not relish. Now the sight of the heavy posts and wire bales made her realise that necessary work could get done without any act of will on her part. Life seemed possible once again. A mantle of depression had lifted from her mind.

  She remembered that Father Bosco was coming to lunch. He came once a fortnight – with a thudding regularity that reminded her of a pile-driver.

  ‘Just looking in,’ he would announce on arrival. ‘The days when I came and stayed ad multam noctem, as we say, are gone for ever.’

  His visits had become a test of courage for them both. As he talked, he would sit sideways lo
oking out of the window at an invisible interlocutor, and from time to time he would turn abruptly and look her straight in the eye for a split second before addressing again the other presence. He seemed to consider it his duty to talk to her. He was determined to show that nothing had changed, and the greater his determination, the more obvious it became that they could never again talk as one human being to another. The waters of innocence had been muddied long ago. Now, in addition, they had been poisoned for ever.

  He came at noon in a black polo-neck sweater with his beribboned breviary under his arm. Normally, he wore a long soutane reaching to his shoes, which lent him dignity and detachment in equal proportions.

  ‘You’ve changed into something more comfortable,’ she said, as she greeted him.

  ‘Less formal, I agree. I’m a new man today. I’m going out foreign. I’ve decided to become what the faithful call “a missionary father”.’

  ‘I’ve always felt that you would do something different.’

  ‘I’m very excited. It’s like getting a new vocation. And I owe it all to an old friend of Canon Sproule’s who came to stay last week. He’d spent thirty-five years in Africa, serving a parish of fifty square miles on his own. He was full of stories; we could only listen. Stories about faith and privation and always being on the move with no luggage but a blanket for sleeping on. The people would give him food, whatever was available – bananas, elephant meat, monkey meat, sometimes a rat. Often the meat had been hanging from a tree in the heat for a month. When offered food which he knew to be tainted, he would bless it and eat it without a moment’s hesitation. He was never ill. As he says himself, “The Lord looks after His own, and so He should.” He worked himself to a shadow. He never experienced – never had time to experience – a single doubt. He overcame all sorts of obstacles, not least of them an obscure language with over a hundred irregular verbs and thirty-six tenses. Now he’s old and a little frail. He’s been sent back here to collect money for the missions, it’s the only work he’s fit for at his age. I’ve made up my mind to take his place in the field. I know I can never be tested here, not in the way I should like to be.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s yourself you’re testing? It isn’t God?’

  ‘Joey is speaking through you there,’ he said with a sad shaking of the head.

  ‘I hope you’ll be happy in Africa. It’s a long way away.’

  He turned to the window to consider, then addressed his invisible interlocutor, ‘Now you’ll be left here alone. Perhaps that’s how it should be. Perhaps that’s how you would wish it to be.’

  In the afternoon she went for a stroll along the river, where Slash was working at the new fence. He had already placed the heavy straining posts in position at each end and had anchored them with strut posts and stays. He was now digging holes for the intermediate posts which lay in a pile beside some bales of mesh and barbed wire. The mesh wire would keep sheep in without damaging their wool and two strands of barbed wire above it would make taller animals keep their distance.

  ‘Will you do it yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘Most of it. I’ll need the help of another man when I come to strain the wire.’

  Lean and weathered, he kept digging without turning to look at her, his long arms and springy back expressing a resilient stoicism.

  ‘You enjoy putting up fences?’ She thought she might tease him a little.

  He straightened his back and stood facing her with one foot on the lug of the spade. He was solid and independent; their relationship would always show wariness. As Cookie used to say, ‘There is a pleasure in the pathless woods only because they’re pathless.’

  ‘Fences are two-sided,’ he said without a smile. ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

  She left him scraping wet clay off his spade with a stone. She walked back along the river bank, past the hollow where she and Cookie used to post letters to each other, never realising that Joey knew their secret. She had lost one world and gained another. What had been lost was murky, cramped and distorted. Could she fashion what she now held into something lucid, commodious and true?

  On the bridge she paused to look down at a boulder with brown water swirling round it. The water clarified before her eyes until she could discern the clean, coarse gravel of the bottom. Father Bosco would go to Africa, Cookie to America. She would live here alone in a large house on a hill. The afternoon emptied. No cuckoo called from the holms. It was a time of silence after rasping noises.

  In the lobby of the hotel she plucked a dead leaf off her only spider plant. Lovingly, she turned the pot to admire the sunlight on the green and white stems. She went into the lounge bar and got herself a glass of Perrier water with one cube of ice and a slice of lemon. She sat by a window and gazed up at the tweed curtains which had been chosen by her, and the old agricultural implements which had been collected by Jack. In the fields the warm afternoon stood still. The sheep that had been grazing upwards on the hill since morning in search of cooling breezes had become white stones set deep in ferns and heather. Slash was resting on his spade, concealed below the waist by river reeds. In the west the island had become a fading mirage that refused to vanish.

  She sank into her chair, ensconced in an awareness of both changelessness and change. A new order had been established; l’ancien régime had found its end. Le régime nouveau, she had come to realise, would be no less a regime – an invisible chain that would bind her as surely as it would Slash Gildea and all those who would see her as the smith who forged it.

  Now the twelvemonth that had gone seemed like a prolonged contemplation of death. Gulban had been a tyrant in life, and death had not overthrown his tyranny. He was present in everything she did – in getting up and going to bed, in plans made and decisions taken – and his presence seemed as enduring as the unspectacular progress of the seasons. Summer. Autumn. Winter. Gulban. Gulban. Gulban. A narrowing road that lost itself in the middle of nowhere. She must traverse that road with something like Slash Gildea’s resilient stoicism. Perhaps the best that was open to her was to live her life so that no one could say:

  ‘The truth is in abeyance because of Pauline.’

  Discover books by Patrick McGinley published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/PatrickMcGinley

  Foggage

  Goosefoot

  The Devil’s Diary

  The Lost Soldier’s Song

  The Red Men

  The Trick of the Ga Bolga

  A Note on the Author

  PATRICK MCGINLEY was born in Donegal in 1937 and was educated at Galway University. He spent four years teaching in Ireland before taking up a career in publishing in London. He now lives in Kent with his family but regularly returns to Donegal in the Irish Midlands.

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1987 by Jonathan Cape Ltd

  Copyright © 1987 by Patrick McGinley.

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  ISBN: 9781448209613

  eISBN: 9781448209620

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  Patrick McGinley, The Red Men