The Whore-Mother

by Shaun Herron

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not the kind.”

  “No.” Bull Baillie saw it. She saw it. Powers and Clune saw it. Everybody saw it but him. Maureen would be alive if he’d seen it.

  “Did you turn informer?”

  That was the life-and-death question. The way she spoke, though? About Clune and McCann and the law?

  “Not till they killed my sister.”

  She was about to say something and closed her mouth. “How old are you?” she said instead. He knew she’d been going to say something else, something more important.

  “Twenty-two. “

  “Do you know what’s going on in the North this past week?”

  “No.”

  “There’s been nothing else in the papers or on the air for a week. The army got a big haul of Provos, bomb factories, a Catholic doctor by the name of McDermott and a lot of guns and ammunition. The same night twelve Officials were shot, including their top man in Belfast. The Provos issued a statement. They claimed they did it. They said the Officials informed on them and they gave them twenty-four hours to get out of the North. They’ve been killing one another for a week. The civil war the Provos wanted to start has started—but it’s between Catholics. Again.” She stared at him steadily, from a cold, thin face.

  His head was heavy. He could barely hold it up. He didn’t want to hold it up. What was it he told the policeman when he phoned home? Houses, factories? Jesus, when they understood there’d be hundreds of them after him.

  “Maybe you’re wrong,” she said. “Maybe they’re not hunting you. It’s the Officials they’re after.”

  “No. They decided to give me the black cap before any of that. I was quitting. They tried for me and it went wrong. They killed my sister ... they’ll keep after me. They never stop.”

  “You’re for England?”

  “If I ever reach it.”

  “Your gun’s in the dresser. Top right-hand drawer. With your money.”

  She was in a great hurry now, giving the room a last look over for anything out of place. “I’m making trouble for you,” he said.

  “That’s enough,” she said sharply, and put her big hands on her big hips, bracing her shoulders as if to ease her back. “Lie down.” She had made up her mind about something. She punched his pillows. “Give the doctor no more than the time of day,” she said brusquely. “Just yes and no. No talk.” She covered his shoulders. “I’m Mrs. Burke.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, I told you that. He’s Sullivan. Dr. Seamus Sullivan. He married my sister. She’ll be here too, but you won’t see her. Nobody else in Ireland knows you’re here. The three of us listened to you raving.” She was nervous, building something inside herself. “She’ll be here because Seamus comes almost every day.” She looked at him cannily. “You see what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “If a brother-in-law who’s a doctor visits his sister-in-law almost every day, either she’s sick or she has somebody in the house that’s sick—or he’s going to bed with her. Anybody who saw him would take the third choice. So my sister comes too.” She rushed away from that. “You were reading one of Thomas Burke’s books.” He grasped at a change of thought like a change of step.

  “Yes. I was re-reading it.”

  “Good,” she said, and the corners of her mouth creased a little. She bent suddenly and kissed his head. “That’s a good child. I’m Thomas Burke’s widow.”

  Then the doctor’s car came and with it, he feared, hostility. So he braced for the strain, burning up energy, and Mrs. Burke went out to meet them.

  There was talk in the next room among the three of them. It made him feel like a specimen.

  “How is he, Kate?” A big deep voice. Not unpleasant.

  “Sleeping. A bit better, poor child.”

  “Child? He’s a full-grown man.” A woman’s voice, not far from Mrs. Burke’S, but harsher. “Some child!” That had overtones, and he thought with guilt and pleasure of his erection in Mrs. Burke’s hard fingers.

  “I’ll get him into the Schull Hospital,” the doctor said firmly, making decisions for Mrs. Burke

  “Am I a useless old woman? Is that it, Seamus?”

  “That’s the bloody point. You’re not an old woman at all. That’s what has your sister worried. That ‘child’ you’re talking about has all his parts, full size.”

  “Watch your tongue,” Mrs. Burke said, but it wasn’t a rebuke.

  “Where do you sleep, Kate?” the sister asked sharply.

  “You’ve got the mind of a horny curate,” Mrs. Burke said, as if her sister amused her.

  “Kate!”

  “By God, I think you need an invalid in the house, Kate,” the doctor said. “Can’t you do without a patient?”

  “Go and see the child, Seamus.”

  McManus closed his eyes and waited for the doctor.

  He was a hefty man with a weathered face. He probably spent as much time with a rod in his hand as he did at bedsides. “You’re the great sleeper,” he said to McManus, and took his wrist and stuffed a thermometer in his mouth. “And you have the constitution of a horse.”

  McManus did as Mrs. Burke had told him to do. “You talked a lot,” the doctor said.

  “Sir?”

  “Why did you run to here?”

  “It was far.”

  “Nowhere’s far in Ireland. It’s a big saucer. Didn’t they teach you that in school?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The Civil War was over fifty years ago. The last revenge killing that came out of it was only done a few years ago.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get the point I’m about to make. The Irish have a lot of unlovely things in their heads and hearts. So as soon as you’re ready to move, I’m going to move you. Out of here. I’m not referring to Mrs. Burke’s house, boy. I’m referring to the whole of West Cork. Right out. I’ll smuggle you to the Cork Airport, and I’ll leave you there. After that it’s sink or swim. Do you follow me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fair enough?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We don’t want them around here. They are here. But their guns aren’t going and we don’t want them going. We don’t want executions, black caps—none of that stuff here. Keep it in the North. Have you got me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t labor the point.” But he labored it. “The minute you can move, I move you. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Seamus,” Mrs. Burke said from the bedroom door, “there’s plenty of sick people in Schull.”

  “Do you want that fuzz off your jaw?” the doctor asked him.

  “No, sir.”

  “Holy God, d’you think that’ll hide you?”

  “Schull, Seamus!” said Mrs. Burke.

  “What the hell got into you, boyo? You’re not a back-street gunman....”

  “Seamus!”

  McManus watched her at the door with them. She waved them away with thanks and closed the half-door and shut the snib on the incongruous Yale lock. There was the first and odd little smile on her face. It was like the little smile he used to see on his father’s face when evening came and he locked up the house and came to them and said with a great sweetness and contentment in his voice, “Well, the world’s shut out.” The family’s private world was waiting and secure.

  A rich sense of safety and of home flowed in him.

  She came again into the room, her narrow face softened and private and warm, as if from some small victory. “We—ll,” she said, and brought him a woolen dressing gown. “Come and rock by a nice turf fire and we’ll talk a bit, child.”

  And he thought, I like the way she calls me child.

  She was excited in a quiet fashion. The sign wasn’t on her face; faintly in her voice, maybe; mostly in her talk. She chattered as she whipped eggs in a bowl; the chatter was idle in a way, but it all turned on one subject, purposefully he thought: Thomas Burk
e. She didn’t call him Tom, or my late husband. It was always Thomas Burke.

  Thomas Burke was a Name when McManus was fifteen and wandering the summer hills with more books than clothes in his pack. Burke was a Bad Name. His books were banned in Dublin, acclaimed everywhere else, and fought over in the Dublin press, “like mongrels at a meat bone,” she said.

  The banning started with Thomas Burke’s first book, Judas. It was a book about political and social obscurantism, Catholic Nationalism masquerading as patriotic Republicanism, about devious Irish treachery, about politicians “whose only talent through the years of independence has been for talking out of both sides of their mouths,” about malignant parochialism, malice and hungry sex. The book was a rejected lover’s iconoclasm.

  “Thomas Burke took me to America,” she said, as if he had been a lover and not a husband. “He got to be a professor of English at New York University and I taught school. He wrote all his books in America. But he always wanted home to change Ireland and when the books made money, we bought this place and altered it, put in the electric, built on the bathroom and a pump and plumbing from the well. The little end room is his study.” Is, she said.

  The cottage had three rooms, the room with the bed, the electric kitchen, and the little end room full of books, a desk, a chair, and a cupboard. There was only one bed.

  Where did she sleep? His sleeping bag was rolled up in a corner of the kitchen. His heart warmed to the lonely, generous woman. He slept in the good bed they brought back from America—Colonial, they called it?—and she slept on the floor in his bedroll. And didn’t explain where she slept to the vigilant sister.

  “He never wrote a good word in the end room,” she said, and served scrambled eggs. “They killed him. It took him five years to die.” She poured weak tea for McManus. “I nursed him,” she said with peculiar tenderness.

  That explained Dr. Sullivan’s accusation that she needed an invalid of her own. It was almost funny in a sad sort of way: McManus and Mrs. Burke were being useful to one another. He heard himself say, “You loved Thomas Burke very much.” She ate, her head down. He wondered whether Thomas Burke loved this narrow-faced, cold-faced, severe-faced woman. Was it with her that he learned the explicit things about sex they used to mark in his books and pass around? With her? No. She looked sexless. She was sexless.

  “He cried himself to death,” she said, and the phrase sat on his mind like a crow. “They screamed him to his grave. He couldn’t think their thoughts or tell their lies. If you love Ireland your own way, it’s treason, and if you’re the wrong sort of Catholic, you’re not an Irishman.”

  She cleared away. Her face was bleak.

  “I want to thank you, Mrs. Burke,” he said from the rocker and wondered at once why he had chosen this moment to say it.

  “None of that,” she said sharply. “Time for another pill.” She gave it to him, with warm milk, and her hand brushed his hair. “You’ll be fine, child,” she said, and washed the dishes. She had her invalid.

  He felt better by the hour, hungrier, stronger. Dressed, he sat in a canvas chair in the fuchsia-walled garden and re-read the works of Thomas Burke. She fussed him, coddled him, shielded him from the doctor’s fears and the sister’s moral anxieties; gave him jobs to do, stretching his strength.

  She pressed aside the fuchsia bushes to show him the land. Behind the hedge, a field of cut hay, and beyond it a mass of rock that rose four hundred feet, colored orange and mauve and violet and blue and yellow from the lichen and heather and rock flowers and gorse that grew from every crack and pocket of earth on its surface. At its foot were banks of fuchsia, honeysuckle, Michaelmas daisy, hawthorne, and buckey rose. There was a tiny copse of stunted oak. He could smell the honeysuckle across the width of the field, mingled with the scent of sweet new hay. The rock ridges rose beyond into rust and violet mountains and surrounded the house and its little afghan fields. And in front, through the green and crimson hedge, the glittering cove and a wider bay beyond it, and then the sea and a lighthouse, far out on a massive rock.

  “That’s Fastnet Light,” he said.

  “You know it?”

  “Your cottage is in Toormore Bay,” he said.

  “You know it?”

  “We used to take a house for the summer at Goleen, four miles west.”

  “You’re at home,” she said, and the gentleness in her voice made him look at her. The face was sharp and cold.

  The road to Goleen to the west and Schull to the east, and Skibereen, and Cork must be behind the house and beyond the little fields, and beyond the first big ridge. He knew where he was. He was aware of the land again, of the mistress who was stream and hill and meadow and the spread limbs of the derry oak. They would never find him in this moon landscape of rock and gullies and green hollows and fern and thorn forests.

  The warm air flowed through the flowering bushes. When she closed the hedge and shut off the moving air, the lawn was an enveloping warm cocoon. He was strong, he was safe. Time was in suspense. The world was very far and irrelevant. He drowsed in the little garden in hypnotic contentment and indolence lay on him like a layer of a dream, and in the evening she gave him his pills and they made him sleep deeply.

  How old was she? Forty? Forty-five? Fifty? It varied by the day. He was a mother’s boy and the mother cradled his head and put her braless nipple to his hungry mouth. Child, she called him.

  Did he dream it in the sleep before sleep? The days slept also. Reality was a welcome distance away. The dream was real.

  It was the first time he had wakened in the night. The pills were losing their power.

  It was raining. Pouring. The wind was high, coming off the sea, beating the rain against the little, closed, front window. The big back window was open and the cool night air backed in and across the bed like a cool hand.

  He was deeply rested, refreshed, life running in him, all his thought on his abundant good feeling. He stretched his legs, reached, and dragged on the head of the bed. It was a glorious feeling to extend a stronger body and feel the life in it.

  It was the first rain for several days. The rains he had walked in in his sickness were vague or forgotten. He turned on his side and curled, contented as a cat, and reached his right arm across the wide bed, to sprawl, to sleep again.

  Flesh. Warm human flesh. Round human flesh. He was disabled in body and mind and could not withdraw the hand. It was on a hip. She was lying half on her face, her legs stretched at length, the fullness of her hip under his palm. A large, firm, high hip. Slowly, the hand obeyed the head and came back to him.

  He lay fearful of the sound of his rasping breath. She was naked in his bed. The sleeping bag on the hard floor must have done for her. Or had she used it? The pills that gave him deep sleep might have given her the chance for some sort of rest? She had to be a sexless middle-aged woman to lie in a man’s bed—if she had been doing that? It was hard to believe. “Where do you sleep?” the sister kept asking, and he’d never heard her get an answer. Could a woman sleep beside a man and not ... ? What did he knew about women? “God made you whole, child. Thank Him,” she said to his erection and went on with her washing as if a hard penis was about the same as a piece of garden hose.

  If he got up and sat in the rocking chair she’d know he knew. Then he’d have to go and he didn’t want to. Was she naked? He reached cautiously for her back. Cloth. Her nightgown was gathered up about her waist. Frigid. A sexless widow in bed with a drugged child.

  She always called him child.

  Gently, as if the bed was rocking from his careful exertions, he perched his rigid body on the edge of the mattress, his back to her. He was erect again. Her hip was still warm in his hand as if he hadn’t withdrawn it. The thought of it murdered him. Forty or fifty, she was a woman and he had never before had his hand on a woman’s hip. If he turned in his sleep, hard and burning, he might press it against her and ... by God, he couldn’t allow himself even to think about that. He daren’t go to sleep
again in case....

  But he went to sleep again, and woke, still rigid in every limb, and aching in every muscle.

  She was not there. There was no bruise on the pillow where her head must have been.

  And the day was normal. She looked as severe as she had done all the days before. He began to doubt his senses and his recovery. She mothered him, gave him harder work to do, sent him to bed much later than usual, with his glass of warm milk and his pill.

  It was still raining off the sea. He drank his milk by the big open window and shot his pill out into the rain. It would dissolve there just as readily as in his stomach. He wanted to wake in the night. He had been dreaming last night; some sort of relapse? Another sort of shroud?

  It rained for three days. He had not been dreaming. There was no relapse. But maybe a new sort of shroud? She was there every night and gone early every morning. Sexless. He learned to sleep on the edge of the bed, his erections, sleeping or waking, pointed away from any cause of offense. And each day she was as she had been before. Kind. Severe.

  The day the wind dried the ground she said, “It’s time for you to walk beyond the garden. When it’s dark....”

  They walked in the moonlight out over the little fields and up the narrow road to the first rock ridge. The moon flew in the sky and sailed on the sea. Far dogs bayed like women in childbirth.

  “There, child, you’re strong,” she said, and he filled his lungs with the turf-scented air and loved the life in his limbs and the shadowed landscape of the mistress with hills like breasts and little fields like a soft, flat belly. How long was it, he asked himself, since he had seen her, really seen her? All his old emotions for her were alive.

  “You’re smiling,” Mrs. Burke said. “Are you thinking about somebody?”

  “Herself,” he said, and swept his arm across the landscape. The clouds were banked like dark mountain ranges and between them light came from the molten pewter brilliance of the shining sky. “Look at her sky,” he said, “it’s like a furnace or an ice field.”