The Whore-Mother

by Shaun Herron

  He did not hear the bleating horn of Major Beddoes’ van as the car leaped at the street and spun, skidding, into the road. The rear end spun left and, as his foot dug, spun right, swinging the car across the road and back. Then it shot forward.

  He sank lower in the seat, peering through the wheel. He heard the sputtering shots and the roaring of engines and the screeching of tires as his back window and windshield shattered. Glass flew about him, fell in his lap, struck his back and head. A car swung out from the curb to block his road. He waited, whipped his car right, felt the sideswipe through his spine, rode up the sidewalk and, hauling desperately at the wheel, back into the road.

  He was clear. His rear-view mirror was whole. The Salvation Army van was side-on across the street, a car backing away from it, with a bashed bonnet. Another car with its bonnet sprung open was backing off the sidewalk away from a lamp post. A man got out and rushed to struggle with the open bonnet. A police siren sounded; off to his left, he thought. A plump, uniformed man climbed out of the van and handed a woman graciously down. Major Beddoes and his wife had done what they could. It had been enough. He gave his mind to the street and the traffic. His hands were wet and slipping on the wheel, his face was pouring sweat, his neck was bleeding behind from a smarting cut. He swung on two wheels into Elmwood and down the Lisburn Road; left into Dublin Avenue. There was nobody close to him behind. They were probably running now from the police siren. He wove through the little, empty streets, heading for the Antrim Road, and unaware of any irony, turned down the lane past his father’s house and the golf course and came out to the Shore Road.

  He was clear, and cautious till he passed through Carrickfergus. Then he opened up. Lame. The empty Antrim Coast Road. Flat out. Free. Away.

  The air off the sea poured through his shattered windshield as sweet as a fresh clutch at a not very old but a damaged and vulnerable life.

  He sucked the air in like a man with a dry thirst and laughed; but from hysteria winding down much more than from mirth.

  In Carnlough he stopped at a phone booth and called the Parkers’.

  “Mr. Parker? I’m away, sir.”

  “The shooting on the street, Johnny? They didn’t touch you?”

  “Just a bit of glass. Will you tell them I’m away, sir? And thank you.”

  “Thank some fat wee Salvation Army man that completely buggered them up. We saw it.”

  “I know.” He had said all there was to say.

  “You’re away now?”

  “I’m away, sir.”

  “Away on, boy—like the hammers of bloody hell.”

  “I’m away now. You’ll tell them?”

  “I’ll tell them. Away on.” The big moments are hard to talk about.

  The moon was high and the sky clear when he turned up the narrow approach lane to Corrymeela. The camp sat on the top of the cliff, its whitewashed hutments like shining apparitions in the moon’s light.

  He parked the car at the rear of the main building, behind the kitchens. There were cars parked against the east wall, by the side entrance. Not one of those, he thought, and put his father’s gun and shells in his pocket. Everything he had asked for was in the trunk, expertly packed in his rucksack with the pup tent tied on top. His sister had remembered even his walking stick. There were sandwiches and cheese in the side pockets of the sack. His walking boots were loose in the trunk with a pair of heavy walking socks stuffed inside them. He changed into his walking boots and tied his shoes to the pack.

  It was half-past one. He felt marvelously safe in the northeastern night. What he must do now was reach the border, and reach it long before daylight. It was not possible on foot. A stolen car had its dangerous risks, but there was no way to avoid them. It was forbidden now to park cars in towns of any size and roadblocks on the outskirts sifted traffic through them. He didn’t want to pass through towns, but that was where the cars were to be found. He walked to the road and down the hill towards Ballycastle. He would take the risks that had to be taken.

  At the foot of the hill three roads joined. One turned right into Ballycastle, another hard left up over the hills. He was on the third. The roadblock was at the junction of the three.

  He climbed the stile in the wall of the old churchyard where Sorley Boy Mac Donnell is buried and walked through it to the golf course. There was no point in getting himself caught trying to sneak into the town. Even if he managed it, he couldn’t sneak out again with a car. It was wiser to cross the golf course, walk around the town, and steal what he saw outside some house or country shop on the road beyond.

  But things were going well tonight. The clubhouse was not in total darkness. There were five cars in the car park. Drinking hours were long past, but there were many ways to sustain a serious pastime so long as they didn’t involve drinking in the bar. The only question was how much farther into the night they would drink and talk.

  He rejected the Mercedes. How could a young man cumbered with camping gear explain a Mercedes? The four-cylinder Vauxhall was more like the thing. He lifted the bonnet and started the engine. The night was quiet, only the sound of the sea came across the links. The car was well tuned and no louder than the sound of the sea. He drove it across the links, through a wall gate onto the high road, and let the little car out.

  Main roads were no good to him. Secondary roads were not much better. Tertiary roads were often rough riding. But it wasn’t his car. It was his life. He took the rough roads and went west with his foot down.

  How long do drinking men drink at their golf clubs when they stay until the small hours for serious business? He was around and beyond Garvagh when the question began to worry him. There were hundreds of four-cylinder Vauxhalls on the road, but not at this time of night. By now—two hours on the third-class roads—the car had been reported missing. It hadn’t passed through any roadblocks going in any direction. For that reason the army and the police would be keeping an eye open for it. Why would a car avoid roadblocks in the middle of the night? A stolen car? The army would be keeping more than one eye open.

  He saw nothing to ease his anxiety on these roads until he reached Sixmilecross, where he exchanged the car for an Austin parked outside a crossroads shop and came at Clady through a complex of narrow lanes. In a field against the Border and close to a small farmhouse he left the Austin. It was snug behind a high hedge.

  It was almost five. The sky was lightening and in an hour it would be broad daylight. He took off his suit, cleared the pockets, packed the clothes into a water ditch, and put on the old clothes from his sack. They were paint-stained and baggy—right for a man of the roads.

  This was raiding country. The IRA sneaked over here to murder a Northern Senator and burn his house to the ground, and again to kill a policeman and leap back across the border into Donegal. They had helpers in the towns and farmhouses on the Ulster side.

  McManus had once been moved to admiring excitement by the misty ease with which acts of violence were committed and men dissolved into the faithful and covering Catholic crowd. His first disenchantment came with his first sight of how this universal loyalty was achieved. He had seen pregnant Mrs. Nolan beaten on the belly, and her husband’s shop wrecked, because he refused to pay the imposed weekly levy for Ireland One Nation. The whole street understood the word when it went out: Don’t buy from Nolan. So Nolan went bankrupt, and because he was self-employed he couldn’t draw the dole and had to go on relief. It was a lesson often repeated, and executed by little men who now ran a protection racket where formerly they had been despised petty thieves in the districts. The small-time criminals had become the enforcers of patriotic unity. Even here in the western Border backwoods, small Catholic farmers with cattle to be poisoned or children to be maimed, kept check on the movements of Protestant neighbors to be shot or burned out.

  So McManus went cautiously through the copse against the Border at the end of the field, out of the North and into the Republic, into the safe haven and lair of his former frie
nds and present enemies. He went haunted, by eyes he could not see and that might not be there, but Mrs. Beddoes and the nuns of Port Elizabeth were in his mind. In Ireland friends and enemies had a way of looking alike.

  It was broad daylight when he took the road along the Finn to Stranorlar and Ballybofey. His boots were wet with the heavy dew, the smell of burning peat was rich on the hills, and the soft morning air had a sweet taste. He was well away.

  He strode into Stranorlar at ten in the morning on the strength of two long lifts, swinging his stick in time with his striding confidence. What was he, after all? Anybody could see by his clothes. He was a man of the roads. They thought so at Kee’s Hotel and with some reasonable reluctance gave him a room, to be paid in advance. He had been up all night, walked most of the morning, and he would sleep away what was left of the day and walk through the night. From then, it was the tent in the day, and sleep, and the road after dark, till he got where he was going.

  I’m away, he thought as he waited for sleep in a good bed and wished he dared send a wire to his sister. But who would read it in the post office, here in Stranorlar or in Belfast? God, what a land of mistrust and skulking suspicion Ireland was. Who in Christ’s name could you trust? Not the ones you could see—not the ones you couldn’t see. For the first time in his life he thought he hated the place. The place? No, never that. But the people, some of the people? That was a damn sight easier.

  They’d be watching his sister. A telegram boy at the house would tell them he was clear. What Mavis McGonigal got would be only the beginning of what his sister got, if they thought she knew where he was. They would think she knew where he was. They had to hunt him. They would hunt him with the terrible Irish appetite for revenge. He remembered reading about “Pa” Murray who died in 1968 and once was sent to New York to execute an informer who escaped there. New York Irish policemen found the man for him. Murray killed him, for an offense committed in 1922.

  His last conscious thought before sleep was that they wouldn’t find him. No wire, he decided, and the odd thought drifted into his peripheral consciousness that almost all Irishmen loved Ireland and despised the Irish.

  Then merciful sleep took him over.

  SEVEN

  POWERS’ confidence declined and his rage mounted.

  Was he goin to spend the rest of his fuckin life standin in front of some bloody kitchen table in the Falls listenin to that Holy Trinity of flappin bacon-mouths, Clune, McCann, and McCandless?

  They were on about Mavis McGonigal again, about losin Kelly the useless wee bastard that never held a job in his life and never looked for one; and about the Chemicals and McManus. And Clune was sittin there with an eye patch over his left eye, tryin to look like that Jew-soldier from Israel! He tried to make a bomb last night, for Christ’s sake, and it blew up on him and only made a wee poop that burned one of his eyes—singed his eyebrow, very likely, but he wants that patch for the telly—the wounded fuckin hero— “We wanted McManus found dead in there,” Clune was goin on “. . . middle-class Catholic joinin the Catholic workers in their fight for a free Ireland . . . all Catholics united in the Historic Struggle . . . you lost him. . . .”

  Powers’ narrow, urbanized peasant mind saw them all vaguely, but it still listened with one ear for the quick question that would put the black hood over his head and leave him in the gutter. . . . Big Willy Devlin, all of twenty-two years old, came home on leave from the British army in Germany the day before yesterday and they ordered him shot, Catholic or no Catholic; he could be an Irish spy in the pay of the English. And the Devlins howled and wailed and two hundred fat bitches marched to Clune and McCann and McCandless and said it was cold-blooded bloody murder killin a Catholic and if it happened again they’d take their families out of the Falls and let the army clean out the IRA. . . . They’d be blamin him for that too in a minute. . . .

  “You lost McManus.” That was what was comin out of Clune’s thin wee face now. “You fuckin-well find him, and when you find him, you fuckin-well kill him. . . . Start on the sister and do anythin you have to . . . that fancy wee biddy knows where he’s goin . . . take Callaghan and away on . . . the word’s out on him all over the thirty-two counties and we don’t want to see aither of youse till he’s dead. . . .”

  He didn’t talk like that when the cameras for the telly came around. It was always Clune or McCann or McCandless on the telly and they didn’t say fuckin-well to the cameras. It was all fancy and la-de-da then. They were like bloody Englishmen then. The cameras’d hear it different from me. . . . These three didn’t plant bombs, or kill soldiers or policemen. . . . Staff work, by Jasus. That was right soft work. . . . All Clune got when he tried makin a bomb was an eye patch and a singed eyebrow!

  There she was up ahead by a hundred yards going through Larne, drivin in her young man’s car with a big picnic basket in the back seat. She knew where her brother was, by Jasus. She was right easy in her mind about him, to be goin on a picnic on a day when it was goin to come down in sheets.

  “It’s a queer bloody day for a picnic,” Powers said to Callaghan. “Look at it. It’s gonta pour.”

  “Och, the picnic’s ony a blind for her oul woman. He’s takin her to some hotel for a good knock at her. They’ll ate all that grub when he’s had all he wants.”

  “Maybe.”

  Powers kept her a hundred yards ahead. The Holy Trinity of the kitchen table were out of sight. McManus was out of sight and out of reach. He concentrated his fury on Maureen McManus.

  Already in his mind he had disposed of her young man. Not by any specific act. The thought that he would kill him didn’t consciously enter his head. He had already killed him without a thought. Somewhere back on their journey from Belfast behind the car ahead, he had cleared the ground. That fellow was a nuisance. He wouldn’t be free to deal with the girl with him around and alive. The young man died in his own vague dismissal from Powers’ mind.

  Powers didn’t think about life and death, apart from his own. He had no sense of time-future. Acts were acts that ended without future effect in him. They arose out of the intensity of his emotions. They died with the emotions. When McManus asked him once whether he ever thought about “the fact of someone dying when you sight in from an upstairs window on a soldier,” Powers said, “I’m a baker.” McManus didn’t know what he meant. Neither did Powers. The question was abstract. The baker’s trade was not. Another man’s death was abstract; his own was not.

  His own death was something to be thought about. He rolled names about in his head—Wolf Tone, Robert Emmet, Patrick Pearse—a long string of them. Their names were on monuments and on the lips of schoolchildren. He didn’t know much about them except that they were rebels and fought the English and died “for Ireland,” and there were songs about them. Children learned the songs in the Separate schools. And there was a pub in Dublin where Robert Emmet used to go and the old men who drank there every day talked about him every day. That was what Powers wanted for himself.

  McManus said to him one night when Powers was talking about them, “They were hanged,” and Powers winced. That was no way to die; a disagreeable way to die. He said nothing, but the alternative, the only alternative he could face, was to die fearlessly with a gun in his hand, storming the enemy or being stormed by the enemy, in some action with the makings of a song in it.

  He understood what Clune and McCann and McCandless were at when the decision was made to lure civilians onto time bombs and kill Protestant children at play on the streets. Sooner or later it would bring civil war for sooner or later the Protestants would throw off English restraint and come storming into the Catholic districts. Then the great actions the song-makers could make songs of would take place and Pat Powers would be sung about, like Tone, and Emmet, and Pearse. . . . But hanging; that was the way a bloody rabbit died, in a snare.

  And Clune sent him chasing this girl, like a ferret down a rabbit hole. Why did he keep thinking about rabbits? If you’re used like a ferret you’l
l think like a ferret, and for that he blamed Clune. But the girl was there, a hundred yards ahead, and one thing was enough, sometimes too much, at one time. His rage burned at her like a blow-lamp.

  “I don’t like being this far from the Falls, Pat,” Callaghan said.

  “You’re coddin.”

  “I’m not. I mean, you leave a bomb in a car and walk away and there’s another car down the street to whip you back into the Falls or Ardoyne or somewhere. But Jasus—where d’ye run to here?”

  “Are you thinkin of runnin from thon wee girl?”

  “Y’know what I mean.”

  “Aye. Y’mean you’ve got the wind up. Jasus, Michael Collins run rings round them all over Ireland. . . .”

  “He got killed in an ambush. . . .”

  “Och, shut your gub.”

  “That’s all right, but I’m no Michael Collins.”

  Powers wanted to say, “Well, I am,” but Callaghan was an ignorant wee bugger. He’s the kind who wouldn’t know you were just talkin the God’s honest truth if you said you were another Michael Collins; he’d think you had a swelled head. He wasn’t goin to explain himself to bloody Callaghan.

  The car ahead stopped outside an ice-cream shop in Carnlough and Powers parked behind it. The girl and her young man went into the shop.