by Colin Murphy
‘Get down.’
‘What now, Thomas?’ Owen said hoarsely as he clambered down, clutching his ribs.
Thomas shook his head. ‘I feel like killing ye meself. Do ye know what you’ve fucking done? The chance we missed? You’re a misguided fool. For all your brains, you’ve still no idea how the world works.’
‘You know who you remind me of, Thomas?’
‘Who?’
‘Boycott.’
Thomas gestured with the pistol. ‘Around the front. Inside.’
They entered to find Walsh and McGurk, but no sign of Doherty. Both men were drinking whiskey, McGurk from the neck of the bottle, a trembling cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Where’s Doherty?’
Bull Walsh, who was sitting on a stool behind the door, gun on his lap, shrugged. ‘Didn’t make it back yet.’ The man seemed perfectly calm.
Thomas pushed Owen into a seat in a corner and snatched the bottle from McGurk’s grip, then poured a drink and sat. McGurk sat by the hearth.
‘How did he know?’ Walsh asked.
Thomas looked at Owen, who made no reply, then turned to McGurk. ‘Have you been blabbing your fucking mouth?’
‘Don’t blame me, ye bastard!’ McGurk roared indignantly, his fear palpable.
‘It wasn’t him,’ Owen said. ‘You were seen scouting the spot near Holy Well. When I heard Boycott wasn’t leaving until this morning, it was easy to figure out the rest.’
‘Who saw us?’
‘One of the tenants. Can I have a drink?’
Thomas studied his brother’s face for a long interval. Then he half-turned to McGurk. ‘Give him a drink and give me a cigarette.’
McGurk did as ordered. Silence descended as Owen sipped from the mug they’d given him. What he really needed more than anything was water, but the burning whiskey was a happy alternative, soothing his quivering nerves a little.
‘You fool, Owen. You and your stupid boycott. You think it’s going te change anything? And then ye had the chance te kill me and get clean away and ye couldn’t even do that. What is it? Are ye trying to atone for the guilt you’ve been carrying around all your life? Is that what this is all about?’
‘What guilt?’
‘Don’t give me that bullshit. Like I told ye before, the only reason you’re here is because of me. You’d have never even reached your seventeenth birthday if I hadn’t done what I did.’ Thomas dragged on the cigarette.
Owen laughed mirthlessly. ‘Christ, you saved my life thirty years ago. How long do you expect me to keep thanking you?’
‘Oh it’s more than that, Owen, and you know it. It’s the way ye survived, where the food came from when ye were just a skeleton held together by skin. Ye know full well that I didn’t steal it from any British Army convoy. Do ye think I’m stupid enough to try that? You chose to believe it because it suited ye. But ye knew all along really, you knew there was something…tainted…about the food. But it suited ye te eat it because if ye hadn’t you’d have died. In fact, ye didn’t bother questioning at all, because ye didn’t want to hear the answer. That way ye could keep your conscience clean. Let me do the dirty work, let my soul blot up all the sins, keep your jotter spotless.’
‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Owen said, but knew he wasn’t being entirely honest. Something rang true about what Thomas was telling him. He could recall a suspicion that something had been amiss, an unsettling sensation, like a rumble in the gut when you’ve eaten food that’s turned. But he hadn’t pressed it. He’d told himself that it would do no good, his brother would simply have rounded on him, caused a row, the last thing they’d need on that journey to Westport.
‘Huh. I can see it in your face. You’re betraying yourself,’ Thomas laughed.
‘What the fuck is this?’ McGurk suddenly blurted. ‘Who cares about thirty fuckin’ years ago? What about thirty minutes ago? Boycott got away – or have you forgotten?’
Thomas didn’t even turn his head. ‘Shut up, McGurk. What’s done is done. And until Doherty turns up, we wait. They’re the orders. Or have you something better to do?’
McGurk didn’t reply. Walsh sat in his customary silence, staring vacantly into space.
‘So tell me. Tell me what happened,’ Owen said.
Thomas was suddenly grim. ‘It’s not a story I like. There are…elements…I’m not proud of. But I did what I had te do te survive, so you’d survive, just as I’d sworn to our father I would. Are you sure ye want te hear?’
Owen didn’t answer.
‘Do ye remember a girl called Etain O’Casey?’
The name had a vague familiarity, but that was all. He shook his head.
‘I do. I’ll never forget her, even though I barely knew her. She was in school with us. Ye had a grá for her, if I remember right. She would have been about fourteen.’
Now his memory stirred. Dark curly hair, round face, bright; the teacher had picked her as one of the children worthy of closer attention. She’d been one of the first girls his eye had fallen upon, one of the first girls to rouse his nascent male urges. Then the famine had come and such instincts were abandoned to the more urgent ones of survival. He hadn’t thought about her for thirty years. He nodded at his brother, his curiosity stirred.
‘That night I went looking for food I came to a cottage on the mountain facing Oughty Hill. Inside I found a man eating meat…’ he paused and exhaled a slow, tremulous breath, ‘except as I found out, it wasn’t mutton or beef…’
He looked directly at Owen, allowing the words to hang in the air, allowing him to complete the picture himself. Owen’s lips parted slightly as the realisation dawned.
‘The man, probably her father…he said he hadn’t killed her, she’d died of starvation. What was left of Etain was behind a curtain, just skin and bones, couldn’t have been more than a pick on her. Barely worth his trouble for all the meat he got from her.’
‘Stop.’
‘What? Ye think I’m enjoying this? Besides, you only have to listen, I had te witness it. Anyway, the man hanged himself, couldn’t live with what he’d done. With what he’d been forced te do. I witnessed that too. So there I was, in a house of death, starving, you even worse. I thought, if Owen is to live, I’ve only one choice…’
Owen shook his head in denial of what he believed he was about to hear.
‘They’d reduced Ireland to that, the English, the landlords. Reduced us to cannibalism,’ Thomas said bitterly. ‘They got everything they deserved, in my book.’
‘Who? Who are you talking about?’
‘You’ve no idea what that experience was like. Seeing that. It changed me. Forever. But it also set a lot of things straight in my head. It was the first time I saw the world as it really was. And I did what I had te do, the only thing I could do.’
‘You’re talking in riddles.’
‘Let me explain it for ye, then.’
CHAPTER 37
I was so maddened by the sights of hunger and misery…that I wanted to take the gun from behind my door and shoot the first landlord I met.
–Reflection of Capt. Arthur Kennedy, Poor Law Inspector in County Clare, from Sir William Francis Butler: An Autobiography, 1848
Britain has permitted, in Ireland, a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race.
–The Times, 24 March 1847
OCTOBER 1848
Thomas rose to his feet and turned to face the cottage. Through the open door the dead man’s shadow moved back and forth ever so gently, accompanied by the slow creaking of the rope on the beam, like the sound of a boat on a lough surface straining on its line.
Still gripping the bloodstained knife, he walked back inside and looked at the emaciated man dangling from the roof beam, eyes popping but unseeing, mouth open, bony limbs hanging limply. He righted the stool, stepped up and cut the rope, allowin
g the shrivelled body to fall, the sound eerily quiet, as though he’d merely tossed a few sacks on the ground. He climbed down and closed the dead man’s eyes, as if he believed that even the unseeing eyes of the dead should not bear witness to the act he was about to commit.
He turned once again towards the ragged curtain and began to take slow, faltering steps until the filthy fabric was almost pressed against his face, and there he stood, blind to the world, as his breaths deepened and grew in rapidity while he sought to steel himself for the savagery of what he must do. Finally he reached out, grasped the curtain and flung it aside, revealing once again the brutal, blood-drenched sight of Etain O’Casey’s butchered corpse. He uttered a barely audible sob, but one that had been born in the darkest recesses of his soul, for its quivering timbre betrayed not just his horror, but his own self-loathing. Thomas fell to his knees and reached out towards the dead girl’s dress. One leg had been completely hacked free, the other partially, and he shoved the dress upwards until what remained of her wasted upper thigh was revealed. Although her body had already been pitilessly desecrated, he still suffered a bout of shame at exposing her intimate parts; it was but another terrible sin he would have to bear, another layer of guilt.
‘Oh Jesus,’ Thomas uttered in a wretched whisper, as he reached out with his left hand and grasped the cold, greying flesh above the girl’s knee. He tried to summon the image of his dying brother, telling himself he had to do what he was about to do, searching for any scrap of justification, until at last he tightened his grip on the girl’s leg, closed his eyes tightly and plunged the knife into the wasted layer of flesh on the underside of her thigh. The sound and feel of the knife driving into the emaciated muscle was sickening, yet he persisted, daring, finally, to look at the wound he’d made, while desperately trying to keep his eyes from drifting to her face. Although she surely had died in the last day or so, very little blood seeped from the gash as it had mostly settled in the lifeless veins on the underside of her body. He twisted the knife and was aware how easily it slid through the flesh. It occurred to him that in better times this knife had probably been used by the cottier for slaughtering sheep or gutting chickens, and here now he had reduced this young girl to the level of those beasts, merely a piece of slaughtered livestock.
A ragged chunk of human flesh fell free from the girl’s body, no larger than a human thumb, and he paused and stared at it, as it lay on the hard-packed mud floor, its colour a faded pink, a hint of moisture glistening on its surface, a sliver of mottled skin just visible on its underside. Once again he braced himself, gritted his teeth, briefly allowed his eyes to flicker closed a moment or two, before he reached down and picked it up. He lifted it to his face and stared at it as though he held in his grip the essence of evil, a morsel of Satan’s own flesh, which when consumed would forever damn him.
He felt that madness was taking hold of him, pulling him deeper and deeper into its insidious grip, and yet he felt powerless to take any other course. An involuntary shudder passed the length of his body as he raised the flesh to his lips, and he suddenly found himself engulfed in convulsive sobbing, akin to the wails of the bereaved. But these sobs were not for the girl, or her father, or any of those who had been claimed by the famine. Thomas was grieving for the death of his own humanity.
He face washed by tears, he finally opened his mouth and pressed the piece of human flesh between his lips, slowly bringing his teeth down on the raw meat, sensing its sinewy texture as he bit through it. But it was when he perceived the first, infinitesimally tiny hint of the taste, vaguely sweet, that finally his will was broken and the enormity of what he was about to do exploded in his brain.
Thomas yanked the flesh from between his lips and emitted a howl of revulsion and rage. He flung it beyond his sight, then planted his hands on the floor and spat repeatedly until his mouth ran dry. He gagged for a full minute ’til he felt only bile rise in his throat, for his gut was empty of all else.
He sat back on his haunches, and stared up at the thatch, gasping for breath. ‘God forgive me,’ he sobbed, conscious that he’d questioned God’s very existence just days beforehand. He’d reached a line he couldn’t cross. The dead man just ten feet from him had been forced to step over that line, reduce himself to animal savagery, Thomas would not, could not. And not because of some sense of outraged morality, but because the thought was forming that if he consumed that flesh it would be an admission of defeat. The British had reduced them to this state. No one else. They’d driven his countrymen to the edge of extinction. And God alone knew how many the length and breadth of Ireland had succumbed as had those who now lay dead in this cottage. But not him. Never. Death offered a more welcome path. Or revenge. Because he suddenly realised he did have another choice.
He rose to his feet and wiped his face free of tears and spittle. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to the lifeless remains of Etain O’Casey, before pulling down the ragged curtain and throwing it across what was left of her body. Others would have to bury her. He had work to do. He turned towards the dead man lying in the centre of the room and stared down at him.
‘You’re forgiven, mister,’ he said aloud, then turned with purpose toward the open door.
Thomas set off directly down the slope through the heather. Across the valley he could still see the lights burning in the windows of Oughty House, the home of the land agent Harris and his lackey Burrell, the bastards who had been threatening to evict them. He stumbled through the dark, down the uneven ground for thirty minutes before he reached the track that ran up the centre of the valley. As he continued on, he remembered the conversation of the men he’d encountered earlier that evening. They’d been hatching a plan to do away with Harris and Burrell. He recalled thinking that they were mad, so desperate they were prepared to risk ending up at the end of an English rope. But he knew differently now. Theirs was the only way to deal with the likes of Harris. Except he was going to beat them to it.
He’d overheard the men planning to meet in two hours. There had been two of them and a youth, but he had been sent away. They intended to meet up with another man to carry out their attack. Three of them in all. And he was merely one. Barely a man himself, and so weak from the hunger he was finding it harder and harder to order his thoughts, the trek across the rough, open countryside draining his last reserves, bringing spells of dizziness, inducing pains that felt like steel pins being driven into his legs. Yet Oughty House lay just ahead, lit like a beacon, beckoning him on. It was set a little up the slope of Oughty Hill, a low, twin-capped rise of less than a thousand feet. He came to a small brook, babbling white where it tumbled over rocks just visible in the moonlight. He rested and took his fill before commencing the final struggle up the slope to what appeared to Thomas like a palatial mansion. At least an hour and a half had passed since he’d first heard the men hatching their plot and unless the hunger was playing tricks with his mind, he reasoned he had thirty minutes to beat them to the kill. As he drew nearer the building he was suddenly, strangely exhilarated at what lay in prospect, enlivened by the fear that danced in his otherwise empty gut.
And there it was just yards ahead, a structure of two floors, five windows across the top, just one of them lit now. On the ground floor were two tall windows at either side of an entrance, framed by thick stone columns. All of the downstairs windows glowed with lamplight. To the left of the main house was a less impressive building – older, moss clinging to the gaps between its stonework, with a large wooden door whose timbers had seen better days. And as he crept closer to this structure, the unmistakable odour of animals confirmed it to be, as expected, the stables.
Thomas, bent low, crouching behind walls and shrubs, moved towards the doors, then skittered across an open space and pressed his back to the wall. He waited there while his breathing receded, trying to master the welling fear in his stomach, trying to still his trembling hands. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and listened. He could hear the faint shuffling about of the an
imals, hear their breaths seeping through their wet nostrils, smell their beastly sweat. He could discern a faint light at the gap just below the door. Somewhere inside a lamp burned, and he could now make out the muffled sound of a man whistling. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out the knife, the same blade that had already cut through human flesh. Thomas took a deep breath and pulled gently at the door handle, felt it resist and silently cursed. The old timbers gave just a fraction of an inch, but sufficient to allow him to peek through and see that all that secured the door was a simple hook-and-loop mechanism. Unhooking the catch was simplicity itself with the aid of the knife and he was inside and pulling the door shut behind him in seconds.
He found himself between two rows of four stable boxes and could make out the forms of five horses resting in near silence, but for an occasional soft snort. He began to creep past the boxes towards the far end of the building and the whistling, which seemed formless, random notes tripping over each other. As he reached the end of the row, the structure opened out into a tall loft on two levels, the upper part reached by a ladder, and beneath that was an area littered with the tools of the farrier. Fifty horseshoes hung on nails on the walls like ornaments, wooden racks were stacked with hammers and pliers and boxes piled high with horseshoe nails. And in front of all of these, on a rickety, three-legged stool, sat the whistler. It was an old man, half-turned away from Thomas, poking at a horseshoe with a small metal tool, working away contentedly by lamplight, oblivious to the danger that inched up behind him. Thomas tried desperately to still his quivering breaths, but he need not have troubled himself, for the man’s hearing was as worn as his face and even though his attacker came to within inches of his back, he revealed no awareness of his peril. It was only when the hand grasped at his head of grey hair and he saw the knife glint in the lamplight as it came towards his throat, that he gasped aloud and dropped the shoe and tool, both of which clanged against the cobbled floor.