The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘We’ve had enough of this,’ says Jeremiah Donovan, cocking his revolver. ‘Is there any message you want to send before I fire?’ ‘No, there isn’t, but …’ ‘Do you want to say your prayers?’ ’Awkins came out with a cold-blooded remark that shocked even me and turned to Noble again. ‘Listen to me, Noble,’ he said. ‘You and me are chums. You won’t come over to my side, so I’ll come over to your side. Is that fair? Just you give me a rifle and I’ll go with you wherever you want.’

  Nobody answered him.

  ‘Do you understand?’ he said. ‘I’m through with it all. I’m a deserter or anything else you like, but from this on I’m one of you. Does that prove to you that I mean what I say?’ Noble raised his head, but as Donovan began to speak he lowered it again without answering. ‘For the last time have you any messages to send?’ says Donovan in a cold and excited voice.

  ‘Ah, shut up, you, Donovan; you don’t understand me, but these fellows do. They’re my chums; they stand by me and I stand by them. We’re not the capitalist tools you seem to think us.’

  I alone of the crowd saw Donovan raise his Webley to the back of ’Awkins’s neck, and as he did so I shut my eyes and tried to say a prayer. ’Awkins had begun to say something else when Donovan let fly, and, as I opened my eyes at the bang, I saw him stagger at the knees and lie out flat at Noble’s feet, slowly, and as quiet as a child, with the lantern light falling sadly upon his lean legs and bright farmer’s boots. We all stood very still for a while watching him settle out in the last agony.

  Then Belcher quietly takes out a handkerchief, and begins to tie it about his own eyes (for in our excitement we had forgotten to offer the same to ’Awkins), and, seeing it is not big enough, turns and asks for a loan of mine. I give it to him and as he knots the two together he points with his foot at ’Awkins. ‘ ’E’s not quite dead,’ he says, ‘better give ’im another.’ Sure enough ’Awkins’s left knee as we see it under the lantern is rising again. I bend down and put my gun to his ear; then, recollecting myself and the company of Belcher, I stand up again with a few hasty words. Belcher understands what is in my mind. ‘Give ’im ’is first,’ he says. ‘I don’t mind. Poor bastard, we dunno what’s ’appening to ’im now.’ As by this time I am beyond all feeling I kneel down again and skilfully give ’Awkins the last shot so as to put him forever out of pain.

  Belcher who is fumbling a bit awkwardly with the handkerchiefs comes out with a laugh when he hears the shot. It is the first time I have heard him laugh, and it sends a shiver down my spine, coming as it does so inappropriately upon the tragic death of his old friend. ‘Poor blighter,’ he says quietly, ‘and last night he was so curious abaout it all. It’s very queer, chums, I always think. Naow; ’e knows as much abaout it as they’ll ever let ’im know, and last night ’e was all in the dark.’

  Donovan helps him to tie the handkerchiefs about his eyes. ‘Thanks, chum,’ he says. Donovan asks him if there are any messages he would like to send. ‘Naow, chum,’ he says, ‘none for me. If any of you likes to write to ’Awkins’s mother you’ll find a letter from ’er in ’is pocket. But my missus left me eight years ago. Went away with another fellow and took the kid with her. I likes the feelin’ of a ’ome (as you may ’ave noticed) but I couldn’t start again after that.’

  We stand around like fools now that he can no longer see us. Donovan looks at Noble and Noble shakes his head. Then Donovan raises his Webley again and just at that moment Belcher laughs his queer nervous laugh again. He must think we are talking of him; anyway, Donovan lowers his gun. ‘ ’Scuse me, chums,’ says Belcher, ‘I feel I’m talking the ’ell of a lot … and so silly … abaout me being so ’andy abaout a ’ouse. But this thing come on me so sudden. You’ll forgive me, I’m sure.’ ‘You don’t want to say a prayer?’ asks Jeremiah Donovan, ‘No, chum,’ he replies, ‘I don’t think that’d ’elp. I’m ready if you want to get it over.’ ‘You understand,’ says Jeremiah Donovan, ‘it’s not so much our doing. It’s our duty, so to speak.’ Belcher’s head is raised like a real blind man’s, so that you can only see his nose and chin in the lamplight. ‘I never could make out what duty was myself,’ he said, ‘but I think you’re all good lads, if that’s what you mean. I’m not complaining.’ Noble, with a look of desperation, signals to Donovan, and in a flash Donovan raises his gun and fires. The big man goes over like a sack of meal, and this time there is no need of a second shot.

  I don’t remember much about the burying, but that it was worse than all the rest, because we had to carry the warm corpses a few yards before we sunk them in the windy bog. It was all mad lonely, with only a bit of lantern between ourselves and the pitch blackness, and birds hooting and screeching all round disturbed by the guns. Noble had to search ’Awkins first to get the letter from his mother. Then having smoothed all signs of the grave away, Noble and I collected our tools, said good-bye to the others, and went back along the desolate edge of the treacherous bog without a word. We put the tools in the houseen and went into the house. The kitchen was pitch black and cold, just as we left it, and the old woman was sitting over the hearth telling her beads. We walked past her into the room, and Noble struck a match to light the lamp. Just then she rose quietly and came to the doorway, being not at all so bold or crabbed as usual.

  ‘What did ye do with them?’ she says in a sort of whisper, and Noble took such a mortal start the match quenched in his trembling hand. ‘What’s that?’ he asks without turning round. ‘I heard ye,’ she said. ‘What did you hear?’ asks Noble, but sure he wouldn’t deceive a child the way he said it. ‘I heard ye. Do you think I wasn’t listening to ye putting the things back in the houseen?’ Noble struck another match and this time the lamp lit for him. ‘Was that what ye did with them?’ she said, and Noble said nothing – after all what could he say?

  So then, by God, she fell on her two knees by the door, and began telling her beads, and after a minute or two Noble went on his knees by the fireplace, so I pushed my way out past her, and stood at the door, watching the stars and listening to the damned shrieking of the birds. It is so strange what you feel at such moments, and not to be written afterwards. Noble says he felt he seen everything ten times as big, perceiving nothing around him but the little patch of black bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it; but with me it was the other way, as though the patch of bog where the two Englishmen were was a thousand miles away from me, and even Noble mumbling just behind me and the old woman and the birds and the bloody stars were all far away, and I was somehow very small and very lonely. And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again.

  ATTACK

  LOMASNEY AND I came through the wood after dark, and at the stepping-stones over the little stream we were joined by another man who carried a carbine in the crook of his arm. We went on in silence, Lomasney leading the way across the sodden, slippery ground.

  The attack on the barrack was timed to begin at two hours after midnight, and as yet it was only nine o’clock. Beneath us, through the trees, we could see a solitary light burning in one of the barrack bedrooms where some thoughtless policeman had forgotten to close the shutters. Surrounded by barbed wire, its windows shuttered with steel, the old building stood on the outskirts of the village, a formidable nut to crack.

  But for a long time now this attack of ours was being promised to the garrison, whose sense of duty had outrun their common sense. Policemen are like that. A soldier never does more than he need do, and so far as possible he keeps on good terms with his enemy: for him the ideal is the least amount of disorder; he only asks not to be taken prisoner or ambushed or blown up too often. But for the policeman there is only one ideal, Order, hushed and entire; to his well-drilled mind a stray shot at a rabbit and a stray shot at a general are one and the same thing, so that in civil commotion he loses all sense of proportion and becomes a helpless, hopeless, gibbering maniac whom in everybody’s interests it is better to remove. That at least was how we thought in those days,
and the garrison I speak of had been a bad lot, saucy to the villagers and a nuisance to our men for miles around. Oh, it was coming to them – everybody knew that. In the evenings when the policemen were standing outside their door, sunning themselves and enjoying a smoke, some child’s voice would be raised from a distance, singing:

  Do you want your old barracks blown down,

  blown down?

  Do you want your old barracks blown down?

  And blown down it would be if Lomasney’s new-fangled explosive that was to put TNT in the shade proved a success.

  We jumped the fence above the wood and landed in a meadow whose long, wet grass spread a summery fragrance about us. A star or two shone out above the hill, but night was not yet complete. Lomasney let the other man take the lead and waited for me.

  ‘There’s something I wanted to say to you, Owen,’ he said. ‘This house we’re going to – there’s only an old couple in it. They’ve had a deal of trouble already, and I’d be sorry to frighten them. So I’ll let on we’re only sheltering for a few hours, and do you make a joke of it if you can.’

  I agreed, and went on with him in silence, waiting for the explanation that I knew was coming. Lomasney was intense and slow, and you could feel a story or a retort springing up in him long before it passed his lips.

  ‘I’ve known those people since I was a kid,’ he went on. ‘I used to be friendly with the son of the house one time – he was a deal older than I was, but we hit it off well together. He was a big, handsome, devil-may-care fellow, a great favourite with the girls and a fright to hurl. Everyone was fond of him. He was kept down at home by his father, and so he used to spend his evenings anywhere but at home. He’d walk in on top of you, and sit by the fire as if he was one of the family, and, as soon as not, if you’d a bed to spare he’d spend the night with you.

  ‘Five years ago, he got into trouble. He was keen on a girl in the village. She was married to a waster who used to beat her. One night her husband was knocked out in a row and didn’t over it. Paddy hit him, of course, but it was his head cracking off the floor that did for him. Nobody was very sorry for him, but everybody was sorry for Paddy and the girl.

  ‘That night some of Paddy’s friends drove him into the city. The people around were very decent; they made up enough money to take him to the States, and he cleared out. It was a stupid thing to do – I know that now – but we were frightened of the law in those days.

  ‘Well, since that night there hasn’t been tale nor tiding of him. For a while the old father – he has the devil’s own pride – was pretending he got letters through boys that had been with Paddy in New York. Maybe he did, in the beginning, but that was asmuch as he got. To my own knowledge, Paddy never wrote as much as one line home, and the best we can hope for is that he didn’t go the same way as some of the others go. I think he must be dead, and things being as they are, I’d rather he was dead. But you can’t convince his father of that. He’s as certain as the day that Paddy’s alive and flourishing, and it would be as much as your life was worth to contradict him.’

  I was strangely moved by this little tale, mostly I think because it came to divert my thoughts from the dark building below to the cottage up the hill.

  The man who accompanied us lifted a heavy branch out of a gateway, we pushed it home again, skirted a field of potatoes, and approached the house from the back. Lomasney knocked, and the door was opened by a sharp-eyed, ragged old man whose body was twisted like an apple-tree. He started back when he saw the three of us standing there with our rifles, and let the latch drop with a clatter. Lomasney immediately hailed him in a purposely boisterous tone – too boisterous, I thought, considering our errand – but it had its effect. With a curious gesture he bent forward and drew us in one by one by the hand, giving us as he did so a piercing look that made me wonder if there wasn’t a streak of insanity in him. When he took my hand in one of his own old rocky hands and rested the other on my shoulder I felt I understood Lomasney’s phrase about contradicting him. There was danger there.

  We took our places on a settle beside the fire, opposite an old woman who called out a cracked greeting, but kept her eyes turned away. She wore a black shawl about her shoulders and hair, and her profile was taut in the firelight. The old man lit the lamp. There was a ladder leading to an attic in the centre of the floor, and he took his stand against this, with hands in the pockets of his trousers. He stared at us all in turn, but I came in for the most careful survey. Lomasney made up some legend about me to content the boundless countryman’s curiosity in him, and meanwhile, without raising my eyes, I studied him. He was much taller than I had thought him bent beneath the shadow of the doorway, taller and more powerful, with a stubborn and avaricious mouth. His trousers, without as much as a button down the front of it, was in rags, and he hitched it up about his belly with a shrug that displayed the great shoulder-blades and thetwisted muscles of his neck. He had a little yellow goat’s beard that grew outwards from his chin and made his head appear to be tilted up.

  After he had looked his fill at us, he spat out, heaved a chair across to the fire and sat down, spreading his dung-caked legs wide across the hearth.

  ‘ ’Tis late ye’re stopping from yeer homes,’ he said sourly.

  ‘We’ve no choice in that,’ replied Lomasney.

  ‘ ’Tis late – and foolish.’

  ‘Maybe ’tis.’

  ‘ ’Tis.’

  ‘We’ve our work to do,’ added Lomasney cheerfully.

  ‘Work?’ The old man looked at him in pretended wonder. ‘Work? Oh, ay.’ He slowly quoted two lines of an Irish song. I saw the old woman’s shawled head go up with a little jerk. It was her way of smiling at the aptness of it. But Lomasney and the other man looked blank. The old man bent across and laid a stony hand heavily on Lomasney’s knee.

  Tramping the dews in the morning airley,

  And gethering chills for a quarter.…

  he translated.

  ‘If we are, there’s more like us,’ said Lomasney, trying to steer the conversation round to politics.

  ‘Wisha, is there?’

  ‘There is, and no one knows that better than yourself, Mike.’

  I was amused to see the old man dodging him with a very cleverly assumed ignorance or indifference. After a time I saw that he had long since taken the measure of Lomasney’s very earnest and passionate but simple mind, and was getting great enjoyment out of the battle of wits. He dropped his air of boorishness, and a glint of sour amusement flickered in his eyes. A bitter remark or two in Irish flung at his wife showed me the measure of his contempt for the younger man. I let him continue this country sport for a while until I saw Lomasney grow confused. Then I threw in a phrase of my own in Irish to show the old rascal that I understood. At this he looked me up and down wonderingly for a moment, broke into a loud, tempestuous laugh, and shoved back his seat to the table.

  ‘Come, woman!’ he shouted. ‘Supper! Supper! The young cock is crowing.’

  I felt in my heart that he despised me for an interfering young fool.

  The old woman filled us out each a jam-crock of milk and cut us a slice of cake. We talked no more during the meal, and when it was over old Kieran produced his beads and knelt beside a chair, touching his forehead with the crucifix. We knelt likewise, all but the old woman, ‘whose kneecaps were wake,’ she said. Kieran gave out the rosary.

  When the prayers proper were finished Lomasney blessed himself hurriedly and half rose, but the old man’s voice, angry and strident, broke in to stop him.

  ‘… And for my son, Patrick Kieran, who is in the States these five years, Our Father who art in heaven …’

  And he led us through seven Our Fathers and Hail Marys before he raised the cross on his beads to bless himself.

  When he rose his face was flushed, and the same angry, resentful look was on it that it had worn when he opened the door to us.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lomasney mildly. ‘I forgot about Pat
rick.’

  ‘Remember him in future,’ Kieran said churlishly.

  ‘Have you heard from him lately?’ Lomasney asked in the same tone.

  ‘What’s that to you, young man?’ Kieran shouted with sudden fury, showing his bare yellow gums.

  ‘Oh, nothing, nothing. Don’t eat us! I only wondered how he was getting on.’

  ‘He’s getting on – he’s getting on all right, never fear. He’s in Butte, Montana, now in case you want to know.’

  ‘Oh, very well!’

  ‘Why did you ask?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I ask? Wasn’t he a friend of mine, man?’

  ‘He have the Son of God to look after him!’

  The cry sounded impious, more a challenge than an act of faith.

  ‘Tttttttt!’ the old woman sighed moodily into the fire, and Lomasney said no more. Kieran lit a candle and opened the door of a room off the kitchen.

  ‘Stop in there, will ye?’

  ‘We’ll be going before morning. We may as well stay in the kitchen.’

  ‘Do what ye’re toult, man. There’s a fine big bed in there ye can all lie on.’

  There was no mistaking the resentment in his tone, and I nudged Lomasney to let him have his way. Having warned him to leave the front door unbolted, we said good night and went into the room. The third man and I removed our boots and lay down, while Lomasney, who had opened the window, sat on a chair beside us and lit a cigarette. The night was calm and clear. Lomasney looked at his watch.