by Shaun Herron
They were no better than the English; just busier, but it was the English who brought the cash and spent it. The Americans brought the pink slips of their package tours and spent very little hard cash. Still, they came.
Another coach passed. Three since this morning. They probably went up the Foyle Estuary and down the west coast to Bundoran, maybe back as far as Sligo. He lay thinking about that. An old man came up the slope across the road and stood by the roadside. He seemed to stand without purpose, looking at nothing. A bus came over the Gap and the old man waved it down. There was no bus stop. Another coach came up from Donegal town and went over the Gap. He thought for a long time about buses and coaches half-full of American tourists. He packed up, went down to the road, and waited for a bus to come. There was an easy solution to his problem, if he could make it work.
The bus came and he slept most of the way to Sligo. I’m well away, he told himself till it bored him. There was a way to lose himself. He bought a cheap tweed suit in a shop in Sligo and stuffed his old paint-plastered clothes in his pack. At Sligo’s Great Southern Hotel there were no questions, no doubts. He had the look of a young gentleman with his pack on his back, tired of the wind and the rain’s way, wanting a soft bed for a night and a shave with hot water, and a bath.
He came down to the bar and bought the barman a drink. The two days’ growth was still on his face. It was thin, unimpressive, and untidy, and it made him look immature. “Do you put up American coach parties?” he asked the barman.
The man was small, plump, and busy. He ran his professional eye over McManus. “What else these days?” he said. “The English took their bats home.”
“What are the chances of joining an American coach tour here?”
The barman poured drinks, filled his tray, went out to the lounge to serve his customers, and said when he came back, “You were askin me, sir?”
“Could I join an American coach tour here?”
“Tired walkin?”
“I’m tired of sleeping out and walking.”
“That’s a bad cough you’ve got.”
“I want rid of the cough. What are my chances of a seat?”
“It depends.” The bartender priced the tweed suit. New and cheap. “Some drivers are a bit pricey.”
“That’s not a problem.” McManus pushed a pound note across the bar. The man ignored it. He pushed another one after it. “You know the drivers?”
“The lot. There’s always empty seats these days, but it’s against the law—pickin up, y’know. Where d’you want to go?”
“Bantry.”
“Charley Murphy’s your man. He’s not greedy. He’s due in an hour.” He pocketed the two pounds without acknowledgment. “I’ll see what I can do. What’s your room?”
McManus told him and went upstairs. He lay down, got up, tried the radio and found it irritating, paced the room and found it too small. He lay down again.
There was no reason to be nervous now, but he was shaking and sweating heavily and suddenly aware of loneliness and isolation. He was a fugitive, and sick. He was twenty-two and a badly trained gunman (three days in a camp in Donegal) and a little boy who needed his father and mother; six feet tall and very small, with pains in his chest. It was all well and good to decide to run to the southwest. It was empty and lonely. But when he got to the southwest? He hadn’t given that a thought; all he had done was run.
Father, father, father. The image was in his closed eyes; his father’s pale gentle face. When he was a child and they had walked past corner-boys on Belfast’s streets and he was afraid of them, the quiet voice said, “Don’t worry, Johnny. I’ll take care of them.”
They shouted “oul four-eyes” at his father because he wore eyeglasses, and “bible feet” at his mother because she turned out her toes when she walked, and “bacon mouth” at his father because his lips were heavy. Then what in God’s name made him go among them when he was grown? He didn’t know; some Irish illusion; he couldn’t think.
The phone was at his elbow.
He could risk using it now. He needed desperately to use it, just to hear a voice he could trust. They couldn’t watch a phone call reach the house the way they could watch a telegram arriving. He asked for his father’s number. It brought a momentary sense of sweet easement that crept through him and went quickly stale. He waited impatiently through cracklings and clickings that sounded conspiratorial, hostile obstructions between him and the comfort of his father’s voice.
A voice he didn’t know said, “Yes? Who is speaking, please?”
“Who is that?”
“Who is speaking, please?” It was a heavy voice, careful, repulsing, unyielding.
“Have I got the right number? McManus?”
“Yes, sir. Who is speaking?”
“Will you stop that and get my father, please.”
“You are John McManus?”
“Yes. Who are you? Will you get my father, please?”
“Will you hold on, please?”
He heard the voices in the background, a woman and several men talking, and a kind of wailing. Then the receiver banged on its little table.
“Johnny? Johnny? Oh, Johnny, my darlin boy . . .” and his father sobbing.
“Daddy!” It came out of him as if he were still a frightened child. “What’s up, Daddy? What’s up?”
“Maureen . . . oh, Maureen. . . . They killed my wee Maureen . . . Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, run my darlin boy, run, run, run. . . .”
“Daddy! Daddy!” But the phone was taken from his father.
There were more voices, more confusion, and his mother spoke. The strong one. “It’s true, Johnny. They murdered her. Your daddy’s goin out of his head. Go away, Johnny. Don’t come back, my baby. I’ll take care of him, Johnny. You run. Don’t let them catch you. . . .” She was breaking too.
“Mammy!”
The man who answered the phone said, “Hullo? They can’t go on, Johnny. I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry.”
McManus could hear only his father’s desolate wailing somewhere in the house.
“Johnny? Are you there?”
“Yes.” It was only a sound.
“Who did it?”
“Powers. Callaghan, Clune. Anybody. Who’re you?”
“Police. Inspector Macmillan.”
“Joy Street. . . .” He rhymed them off without thinking about them. Streets, numbers, names. Bomb factories. Transit houses.
“Wait a minute. Give me that again. . . .”
“She’s dead?” he said.
“Yes.”
That was only a fact. How? Questions were almost asked and drifted uselessly away. She was dead, that was the fact that mattered. “The Chemicals’ bomb,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I drove the van. Wee Jimmy, the Marsh’s driver, was in on it. We didn’t steal Dr. McDermott’s car. He left it for us, with the key in it.” It was all spilling out without thought. “She’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Tell my mother and father I love them.”
“Yes, Johnny.”
McManus put the phone on its cradle slowly, as if it didn’t matter. And as if putting it back would cut his links with life and death. So it fell very slowly into place, held up by doubt, or air, or irresolution.
Maureen was dead. The full impact came slowly, then it erupted suddenly. He wrapped his face in his pillow and let it come. It tore him, turned to brief rage and revenge, and degenerated into fear and despair.
The barman’s knocking turned to banging, and McManus came out of the pillowcase and opened the door. The man’s homely-charm smile died.
“There somethin wrong, sir?” Any fool knows a face wracked by weeping. Who knows what to say to it?
“What do you want?”
“I got a seat for you, sir. Is there somethin I can do for you, sir?” It was not part of his barroom performance.
“My sister. I just phoned borne. She’s dead.” McManus shut his teeth to cut off anguis
hed chatter.
After a silent while, “You’ll not want the seat then. You’ll be gain home?”
“I want it.”
That was the queer thing, now. Your sister dies. You swamp your face cryin but you don’t go home? “It’s entirely up to you, sir. He says he’ll carry you by the day for a couple of pounds a day—you buy your own food and beds. O’course—I don’t need to tell you, a wee bit of front money would make the man feel nice. . . .”
“How much?”
“Och—three quid, say.” Two for me, one for him, you might say but won’t. “Remember the name now—Charley Murphy. They’re leavin at nine in the mornin.”
McManus paid him.
“Can I get you somethin now, sir? Before I go off duty? You’re sweatin awful hard. There’s a doctor on call, sir. That’s the fearful cough you have, now. Any thin I can. . . .”
“No.” Go away now.
“I’m sorry about your sister, sir.” He went away, mourning.
McManus didn’t want to eat, but he drank a bottle of wine, and ordered a second, and a third, and slept a drunken and unrestful sleep, and wailed in it, lamenting his guilt.
He got the back seat in the coach. Nobody wanted to sit there. He crouched numb in his seat waiting out the miles, nursing his guilt. Maureen’s death was his fault. He joined the Provos in spite of Bull Baillie’s warning. He led his sister to her death and his parents to their heartbreak.
He did not see the landscape. He did not see the American girl with the long brown legs who came and sat beside him and spoke to him. He did not hear her and she went back to her seat, only a little discouraged.
They spent the night in Limerick and he went through the motions of getting a room in a fog of sunken indifference.
The next morning he took his place and was alive enough to notice the curious stares and the tentative smiles. The old American couples were cover. That was all he wanted. The American girl came again and spoke to him.
“I don’t want to disturb your thoughts, but you’re Irish, I know. I heard your voice when you spoke to the driver. Are you a writer?” It was an important question. In her English classes at Boston University they’d done the Irish writers: Yeats, Gregory, O’Casey, Joyce—very difficult, but there were good notes you could buy—and Behan.
McManus said, “Good morning,” and ignored her and felt miserably ill. At Bantry, he would find a doctor. A bottle of something would fix his cough, and the sweating, and the shivering, and the pains in his chest.
The girl came down the bus and said, “Sometime can we talk?” He said, “Sometime,” and wasn’t really aware of her. When she went back to her place, old ladies whispered to her and jerked their heads at the back of the bus, and glanced around quickly, looking concerned. He was staring out the window and didn’t see them. He didn’t see anything.
In the afternoon McManus decided not to crouch in his place in the bus during a stop at a point chosen, the driver said, “. . . for its scenic beauty and its proximity to modern plumbing.” God, that smiling-voiced courier Murphy—is that what the tours called them?—making his jokes, rhyming off his pat spiel on the loudspeaker as pious as a priest . . . was there one Irishman who wouldn’t make a commercial traveler? He went for a walk.
The young American girl with the brown gangling legs went after him. She did it in spite of counsel from the driver and the old ladies that he was much too strange and she was much too young and alone and far from home. She wanted to speak to this withdrawn and almost bearded creature. She seized her chance while the old ladies eased their bladders and bowels in the immobile washroom of an afternoon tea shop, and while the driver put fresh strain on his, in the bar.
McManus was sitting on the shore. All his life he had walked the Irish landscape, and looked on it with a strange intoxication. It was a personal landscape, as everything in Ireland was personal. Like a woman? He knew nothing about women. He had never had one; he was afraid of women. That didn’t stifle thought; indeed, it intensified thought. Yes, like a woman. Like a mistress.
He had not looked at her on this journey. Fields were green and distant hills were blue. The sea was gray. So? He sweated and shivered and huddled, and his mistress went by in a blur, not as a lost mistress but as a blur. So he sat on the shore and did not see the sea; he heard it not as a familiar sound but as a harsh distraction. It annoyed him.
“Hello,” the American girl said shyly. “May I stay?”
He turned his head indifferently. “It’s not my shore.”
She was traveling for the mind. Not to be put off. His face was pale and gaunt, bearded or unshaven—he wasn’t sure which—and he was a brooder. She had watched him since he got on the coach. He was a writer, she was certain without asking herself why; an Irish writer. She had seen American writers who came as exhibits to their English classes. They looked like counter salesmen. McManus was the real thing. He looked the real thing. He was, she was sure, in the agony of some creative spasm. He was what she was looking for. She didn’t know his name. Neither did the driver. That in itself was significant; it meant something. He was incognito and she was twenty and had been a year late getting out of high school. Somewhere—was it in Ireland of the Welcome? she had read that in Ireland you could rent a poet. Maybe it said only that you could meet a poet if you wrote beforehand? “I think you’re an Irish writer,” she said.
He was weak, with an odd feeling of instability in his arms and legs. Gentle but alarming little tremors like giggles ran through his stomach. They frightened him and forced nervous and involuntary smiles to his lips. He wanted to lie down. He had walked too far—Christ, only about a quarter of a mile—just to feel the wind off the sea on his hot face. Go away, he thought.
He said, “Isn’t every Irishman who’s sober enough to sit up and hold a pen?” It was more than he expected to say. He wasn’t sure he’d said it.
“I think you’re a real one. We did Irish writers this past year.”
He made a weary sound.
She translated it and pushed on. “Yes. Lady Gregory. W. B. Yeats . . . you know . . . their marvelous fight for Irish freedom. . . .”
“Christ . . . debased currency,” he said. An irrational excitement stirred in his belly. He wanted to shout something and had nothing to shout. It came from his belly, he knew that: not from his head.
“What did you say?”
He fell back in the sand, laughing, his head propped up on a tump of salt grass. Laughing at nothing. No, not at nothing. Laughing at their marvelous fight for Irish freedom. His hair was wet with sweat. Sweat poured down his temples, making them itch, and down his forehead into his eyes, making them sting. He brushed the wet away, laughing in little spasms, full of a sensation of frivolous delight.
“About ‘debased currency’? What did you say?”
He didn’t care what he said or would say. He felt disassociated. That was what the look and the feel of Ireland did to Irishmen. It made you feel disassociated—from any kind of responsibility, from anything tangible, from the rest of the world. The world was so very far away from Ireland—at a great distance over the hills and through the mists and far far away. It was far off in the present. That’s why God’s important to us, he thought, and tried to dig his head into the tumped grass; and laughed a good fat laugh. God is an Irish mist, he thought: now you see it, now you don’t. God is great—except when He is inconvenient. “Old bitch,” he said, and listened to himself.
“Who? Lady Gregory?”
“Lady Gregory? How did she get in here? What’s your name?”
“Brendine.”
“What?” What sort of name was that? Some Irish-American concoction?
“Brendine Healy. I’m from Boston.”
He felt bold, he didn’t give a damn, he was too weak to give a damn; he was phantasmagorical. That was a good word! He said it aloud. What was there to care about or be afraid of? “Are you a virgin, Brendine Healy of Boston?” He hadn’t said anything so funny or so daring
for nine months.
“What?”
He stretched his legs and drifted into a shallow doze.
“What was that about Lady Gregory and Yeats?” He opened his eyes. The sun was a sheet of light off the sea. He could see nothing but a sheet of light.
“Yes. I was talking about Lady Gregory, Yeats, and their marvelous fight for Irish freedom.” As if she’d learned the form of words from a favorite professor.
“Were you, by God.”
He was struggling to sit up and face the girl. “Their marvelous fight for Irish freedom, is it?” He struggled harder to stand up. His sight was like the sight of a man just awakened into the glare of a bright light. “Have you ever heard of the quarter-acre clause?”
“No. What’s that?”
“That,” he said, swaying on his feet, “was a clause in the relief law of 1847 which said that before a starving farmer and his family could draw relief he had to divest himself of all tenant holdings over one-quarter of an acre.” He wasn’t sure the voice he heard was his own.
“Oh?” It wasn’t the sort of thing she cared about, but if she had to for the moment, she would.
“It was called the Gregory clause. Do you know who Gregory was?”
“No.”
“He was Lady Gregory’s old husband. Do you know what she thought of her husband’s legal gimmick for getting the farmers’ land back into the hands of the landlord?”
“No.”
“She thought it was a bloody good idea. How’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
He couldn’t see at all now. Where the hell was she? “You’re a virgin, did you say? Where are you, girl?”
“I’m here.”
“Where?” He was falling. The pains were back in his chest. She had him under the armpits, trying to hold him up, her feet braced apart. He liked the falling feeling. For . . . ward. He landed lightly, going down by stages, talking, cushioned.