She did not talk to the man. “This is my father,” she said.
The man was bald and had watery eyes and worn shoulders. When Dermot said some sort of hello to him, he said, “The four sins of earth cryin’ out to Heaven for vengeance. Oppression of the poor. Withholding the wages of a workingman. Willfully taking the life of another human being, and sodomy.” He kept staring at the television.
Deirdre went through a door behind him. She opened it a little bit and slid through, closing it after her. The door stuck a little. She slammed it. Dermot sat down at a table with oilcloth covering it. Against a wall was a small stove with thick black crusts on the burners and yellow burn marks on the white enamel. Next to the chair the old man sat in was a couch with a ripped covering. The one window in the room faced the side of another building. Deirdre came back out of the door sideways, holding the door only a little bit open, shutting it behind her quickly. She went to the stove and put on a kettle of water.
An older woman came in from the stairs. She was wearing a blue smock. She carried a bag of rolls with powdered tops. Deirdre brought cups of tea over to the table. “My mother,” she said. Dermot said hello and the mother gave him a half-smile and moved her chin. Dermot’s hands were smeared with ink from touching the broadsheets. He started for the door they had used. “Is it in here?” The mother, who was nearest him, was trying to pull herself out of her chair and stop him with her hands. “No, no, over here,” Deirdre said, almost in a yell. She pointed to a door alongside the stove. The bathroom was a closet with a high ceiling. There was a toilet and sink but no bath or shower.
The mother drank her tea in large gulps. She went into the other room, and came out of it, the same way Deirdre did, sliding through a narrow opening and slamming the door quickly. She said she had to go back to work. She walked heavily to the door. Deirdre and Dermot left right after her.
“I’ll see you,” Dermot said to the man.
“Four sins are cryin’ to Heaven for vengeance,” he said. “Oppression of the poor. Withholding the wages of a workingman. Willfully taking the life of another human being, and sodomy.”
Out on the street Dermot asked if sodomy was considered as bad a crime in Ireland as murder. She began to laugh. Across the street, her mother stood in the window of a bakery with her arms full of bread. “There’s mother,” she said.
At the archway directly in front of them there was a fence of barbed wire with soldiers watching the people going through an opening at one end of the wire coils. “That’s where you go into the Bogside,” she said. “Butcher’s Gate. They call it that because the blood ran through it.”
13
THEY SQUEEZED PAST THE soldiers and went through the arch. They came out on top of a hill. There was a cluster of apartment-house towers. They came out of the street at the bottom of the hill. They were fourteen-story buildings. Through the windows you could see scarred hallways. The rest of the ground at the bottom of the hall was a sprawl of one-story huts, coal smoke clinging to the wet slate roofs. The streets in front of the huts were broken up and the paving blocks stacked for barricades. The ground was covered with old bedsprings, broken bottles, and newspapers. A brown sky dripped continually. The little houses spread far to the left. Straight ahead, the houses became two stories high, crammed together on little streets going sharply up a hill. Then it all dissolved into a development of gray houses in wavery, circular lines. The gray houses disappeared over the top of the hill, the brown sky dripping on everything.
At the foot of the hill was a burned truck and piles of paving blocks and barrels and bedsprings. The bare wall at the end house of the first row of huts had a sign painted on it which said YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY.
“All this is what is known as the Bogside,” Deirdre said. “This little bit right in front of us here, where the river used to be, that was all the Bogside ever was. Nobody ever called it the Bogside. But when the riotin’ started last time, last year, nineteen-sixty-nine, we all started telling the journalists and telly people that this was the Bogside. Christ, but it’s a wonderful name, isn’t it? It sounds like all of Ireland fighting through all of history. The people got to love the name, you know. In actual fact, the small houses starting right by the Free Derry Corner, that’s the start of the Brandywell section. The council houses up on the hill. That’s the Creggan Estates. Ye’ve eighteen thousand people living there. Once they heard the announcers on the news program saying, ‘The rebels of the Bogside,’ that was the last time anybody wanted to say, ‘I live in Creggan.’ Maybe the best thing we did in two years of riotin’ came up with a name like that. ‘Up the Bogside!’ ”
On the corner, men with wet hair stood in the brown mist. Another group stood on the corner across from them. They kept space cleared around the entrance to a book-making shop. Just enough space so that anybody coming in or going out could fit by turning sideways and shoulder-bumping through. A ripple went along the men as somebody went into the bookmaking shop. Another ripple going in the opposite direction as somebody came out. Everywhere you looked on the street, men walked in the wet half-light of the brown day wearing old suit jackets with the collars turned up.
Deirdre took Dermot up Wellington Street past the bookmaking shop. She pushed in the door of one of the cement huts. His Uncle Finbar was in the kitchen peeling potatoes. Dermot would have gone up to Finbar anyplace in the world and asked him if they could be related. Finbar had black hair and thick eyebrows and long, sad eyes. When Deirdre announced who Dermot was, the man squinted while he figured out who Dermot could be. “Ye be Jimmy’s son,” he said. “Jimmy didn’t tell me he was expectin’ anybody.”
Dermot didn’t answer.
“Did he just send you down?”
“I haven’t been to Bundoran yet.”
“Bundoran? Just up the road he is.”
“Where?”
“Fook’s sake, he’s in McCann’s place.”
“Where’s that?”
“Brandywell, for fook’s sake. Right down the wee road here.”
Deirdre pushed him away from the table and began peeling the potatoes. Finbar was in bare feet. He sat on a chair in the front room and began putting on work boots. Two kids, too young for school, sat on a worn couch watching television. A baby in a dirty diaper played on the floor. Nobody noticed them.
“Are you the bloke that’s a copper?” Finbar said. “Jesus, they’re awful devils, aren’t they? They tried to murder the lot of us, you know. We have no police in the Bogside any more. They fookin’ well know they’d be shot fookin’ dead if they put a foot inside the Bogside. Do you not think that’s the way to handle policemen? Christ, but they’re awful devils.” Finbar’s face became red.
“You got all Protestants on the force here, don’t you?” Dermot said. “It’s no good havin’ all one kind policing another kind. New York is different.”
“They’re the fookin’ same the fookin’ world over. Ye intimidate the fookin’ blacks, do ye not? Same thing with us here. We hadda take a stand you know. There’s a couple of ’em be bothering nobody any more.”
“Well, I don’t know what that settles,” Dermot said.
“It settled their fookin’ lives, that’s what it did.”
“Policemen are just fellas doing a job. Same as I do. I can see you taking on the Army. I mean, I had it with these bastards. But what has a poor cop got to do with it?”
“He’s got everything to do with it.”
“Well, I could be one of the cops who was told to come in here. I would only be doing what I was told to do.”
“And we’d only be fookin’ killing you then.”
They went out into the mist, now almost a drizzle.
The street was filled now with children coming home from school. Two older girls came walking toward them. Two smaller girls followed. The older girls walked by Finbar without saying anything and went into the house. Both of the little ones deliberately stepped into a puddle of water.
“Look at
the wee bastards,” Finbar said.
Women carrying small wax-paper packages came past the crowd in front of the bookmaking shop. Each woman caused one or two men to leave the crowd. Now, a gray-haired woman in a black raincoat came out of the crowd. The little girls in the puddle ran to her.
“Here’s the wifey,” Finbar said.
“Out shopping?” Dermot said.
“Out fookin’ workin’,” Finbar said.
When the woman came up to them, Finbar said, “This is Jimmy’s son from America.”
“Aye,” the woman said. She kept going into the house.
Finbar took out a squashed pack of cigarettes. He jammed the pack back into a pocket as Deirdre came out of the house.
“Do ye have a fag?” she asked.
Finbar patted his pockets. Dermot pulled out a pack and held it out.
A few minutes later, Finbar’s wife walked out, rolling, as if she were much heavier than she was. She said she had to go back to work. She nodded to Dermot and kept going.
Finbar went inside. He stood looking at the wash hanging and the dirty dishes in the kitchen. The baby was crawling on the floor. The four girls went out in front of the house. A couple of the small kids were out in the back of the house yelling. “Ye think she’d a taken care of the wee baby,” Finbar said.
He picked up the baby and carried him inside. The baby started to howl. “Let him rock himself to sleep with the sound of his own voice,” Finbar said. Deirdre went in and told him to get out of the house. She started to pick up things.
Finbar and Dermot walked down to the Free Derry Corner. The men on the corner watched every step as Dermot came toward them.
“From New York,” Finbar said. “Your fookin’ cousin, you know.”
“Jesus Christ!” one of them said. He had the collar of a blue plaid jacket around his face. Damp black hair lapped onto the collar. The left eye strayed into the nose, then went back out again.
“I’m J.J.,” he said.
“He’s my oldest,” Finbar said.
“I didn’t see you at the house,” Dermot said.
“I wasn’t there,” J.J. said.
“Where were you?” Dermot said.
“Here,” J.J. said.
“Where do you work?” Dermot said.
J.J. laughed. “Haven’t worked in me fookin’ life.”
“Come on,” Dermot said.
“Ask him when he worked,” J.J. said, pointing to his father.
“I worked,” Finbar said.
“That’s good,” Dermot said.
“Worked once in nineteen-forty-three. At Ballykelly. I dug ditches for them to put in the pipes for the fookin’ RAF base.”
“What’d you do after that?” Dermot said.
“Fook all,” one of the men in the crowd said.
“What do ye want to talk about?” J.J. said to Dermot.
“What’s your position?” another one of them said.
“I’m standing up,” Dermot said.
“What are ye advocatin’?” another in the crowd said.
“A drink,” Dermot said.
“Talk about somethin’,” another one of them said.
“What’s your birthday?” J.J. said.
“October seventeenth.”
“What year.”
“I was born October seventeenth, nineteen-forty-one.”
“Ye born on a Thursday,” J.J. said.
“How do you know that?”
“I know. What year was the Statue of Liberty built?” J.J. asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Eighteen-eighty-six. What year did the War of Independence end?”
“Seventeen-seventy-six.”
“Seventeen-eighty-two it ended. What was a great American race horse died in France?”
“I don’t know, Man o’ War? No, they got a big grave for him in Kentucky someplace. Oh, I don’t know. Could be any one of them.”
“Any one of them? Whirlaway. What about Whirlaway? Don’t you think he was a fantastic horse?”
“I guess he was.”
While J.J. was rattling on, Dermot looked up at the wall. It was a hundred yards away, up on top of the hill. Two soldiers leaned on their elbows and watched through field glasses.
“Do you not know Tony Bennett?” J.J. said.
“I heard of him, but I mean I don’t know him.”
“You live in New York. He’s from New York.”
“It’s a very big city.”
“You’re a policeman, you should know Tony Bennett.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Fook’s sake, go to any fookin’ RUC in Derry City and ask them if they know J.J. from Free Derry Corner. They fookin’ well do. Ye be a Yank policeman, would ye not know Tony Bennett?”
“What do I have to know him for?”
“I wrote a song that’s dead simple, a perfect song for Tony Bennett.”
“And you want me to have him sing it?”
“Notatall. Just have him take a wee minute and listen to it. I had the song recorded in London. But they didn’t do it right. The record have only an organ playin’. In actual fact, you need a great big band. A Tony Bennett arrangement.”
“Where’s the record?”
“In me house.”
“Let’s get it.”
“Oh, I can’t go home now. I never go home between dinner and tea.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t.”
“Well, what do you do, just stand here?”
“Stand here and be horny. I’m so horny right now I wish I could shag anybody. I’d go home and shag me own mother. I can’t. The ole bitch is out workin’.”
Deirdre came up to them.
“All right, let’s get on with it,” Finbar said.
“How long will it take us to get there?” Dermot said.
“Fook’s sake, be five minutes.”
“I thought it was a trip.”
“In the fookin’ Brandywell, I told you.”
“And that’s where?”
“Right fookin’ two steps from you is the start of the Brandywell.”
“Oh well, then let me go get Johno.”
“Jesus Christ, but leave him where he is,” Deirdre said.
Finbar started walking.
“The brother’s been over here four day now. No, five day. Cousin of ours owns the place. A wee pub, you know. First time in five year he got a chance to go away someplace. Bloody fooker got a few quid together. But he couldn’t fookin’ afford anybody to stay in his place all the time. So Jimmy said he’d come over from Bundoran, he’s with his sister over there, you know. He come over here to help out a couple of days. I tell him, five million fookers left Derry to work in pubs in New York. Jimmy’s the first fook I ever heard of comin’ from New York and workin’ in a pub in Derry.”
They walked down the street leading into the Brandywell. A narrow street of smoke and doorways of houses that were huts opening directly against the sidewalk. On the right-hand side was an old green fence from the Brandywell dog-racing track. The street ran out of huts and now it turned into an empty road. On one side was a field running down to the River Foyle. The river was wide and slate-gray and you could see that it moved quickly. The river runs into a lough that goes to the ocean. On the other side of the Foyle, deep-green river moss climbed up from the water and covered rocks and spread into low hills. White houses sat on the deep green. Behind the houses, light-green hills climbed high up, to Donegal.
On the left was a whitewashed saloon. Alongside the white-washed saloon was a hill of dirt covered with garbage.
“Here ye are,” Finbar said.
“Wait a minute,” Dermot said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I just want to wait.”
He looked out at the river. The river seemed to be running faster.
“Come on, do ye want to see the fooker or don’t ye?”
Dermot watched the river water run faster.
“What’s botherin’ ye?” Deirdre said.
“Nothing.”
“Oh. Well then, well have a drink.”
Finbar said, “Ye can fookin’ well do what ye want to do, I’m goin’ inside.”
Finbar and Deirdre went for the saloon door and Dermot followed them, and he had wanted it to be a lot of ways but instead he just stepped into a saloon after Finbar and Finbar was calling out, “Oh, Jimmy, look ye what’s come!”
Dermot remembered his father as a big man. A small old man was behind the bar, shoulders hunched inside a dark-blue button sweater, smoking a cigarette with yellow-stained fingers. A small old man sitting hunched over on a high stool behind the bar.
He stood up as Dermot came in. Now he was at least of normal height. He had black hair over a sharp, long face. The face had gray in it. Gray running into a heavy black stubble. His eyebrows and his forehead came up. But it took none of the sadness out of the face.
“A drink!” Finbar was against the bar.
“Scotch,” Deirdre said.
Dermot did not remember getting from the door to the bar. He was looking directly at the man and he could not think about what he was looking at.
“What do you want?” his father said to Finbar.
“Pint.”
The father looked at Dermot. “You?”
“A pint.”
The man wrapped yellow-stained fingers around the wooden handle and pulled the pints.
“When did you get here?” he said. He said it to Dermot, but he was looking down at the pints.
“Two days ago, three days ago, I don’t know. Seems like a week.”
“You been in town here that long?”
“No, I just got here today.”
“Uh huh.”
“Yer fookin’ progeny!” Finbar said. Dermot’s father smiled.
“What?” Dermot said.
“Progeny, ye fookin’ dope. You’re the progeny, here’s the great—what the fook do ye say now—prognosis? No. It’s somethin’ like that.”
“Progenitor,” Deirdre said.
“No mind, let’s have the pint, Jimmy,” Finbar said.
Dermot’s father put the two pints down. Then he went over to the stool and sat down on it. The yellow-stained fingers brought the cigarette up to his mouth.
World Without End, Amen Page 27