Drown All the Dogs

by Thomas Adcock

  Uncovered by linen were the dead men’s veiny hands folded over their still chests, clutching crucifixes carved from stone—and their big toes, which were bare and tied together to prevent them from wandering through the ages as ghosts instead of joining Jesus and the Holy Mother in heaven. There were racks of candles burning around their covered heads, the only light in the smoky low-ceilinged room. At their feet were new pairs of boots needed for the trek through purgatory. Outside, their beds were smoldering in pit fires dug into the ground, this to ward off unseen troubles with the færies. The smoke and the night fog from outside curled into the doorless sheepeen.

  The mourners had eaten huge bowls of mutton stew and many brown loaves of fadge, the bread of potatoes. They had washed this down with rivers of stout and whiskey. Death made for hearty appetites and thirsty throats.

  The meal over, they sat about as each man stood in turn between the bodies to have his say, now being Davy Mogaill’s time. The mourners were raucous listeners, fueled by the liquor. And they smoked clay pipes, the tobacco dampened with holy water. A plate of snuff was passed around, too, for the purpose of expediting the resurrection of their precious friends. And it was understood through hundreds of years of sheepeen custom that it was perfectly proper at such occasions to argue about any arguable subject, and interrupt at any interruptable moment.

  “So look at them here as they are, lads,” Mogaill continued, raising his voice against growlers in the crowd. “Recognize at least this one sorry fact of life they’ve taught us: you see before you proof that learned men, highly intelligent men may still be fools.”

  “Well said, well said!” crowed a man in a far, darkened corner.

  “Nae,’tis not!” shouted another. Then, laughing and poking elbows into his pals beside him, he said, “Davy Mogaill, I say you’re like a noisy great windbag!”

  “Here now—I say none of us should be listening to you anyways, Mogaill, for you’re one of them that run away!” cried yet another, his angry spittle flying from a toothless mouth. “When it got impossible here, you and yours run off to America. We stayed! By God Almighty, we stayed—and battled the impossible.”

  “A very great battler you are, sir,” Mogaill responded. He jabbed fingers in the air, pointing to all around him. “You men, you’re all great battlers, you know I admire what you done. But don’t you see by now … by Christ, don’t you see—?”

  “Aye—we see you come back here, Mogaill, all high and mighty like from New York, telling us we should just go quiet about the business of burying the sweat and the blood of these two loveliest fighters of us all. And here you be at their wake, calling them fool besides!”

  The crowd, slugging down whiskey as the roaring sentiment against Davy Mogaill rose, stamped their feet and waved free fists in the thick air. And somebody shouted, “What right’ve you to be disparaging a man’s sacrifice, being a man unwilling to sacrifice yourself?”

  Bristling silence followed. A gauntlet had been thrown down.

  Mogaill, eyes glassy with drink and exhaustion, threw back his shoulders. “True, I was unwilling,” he said quietly, his calm inspiring the men to hear him out. “But you cannot say I’m one that never sacrificed. Nae, that you cannot! What man will stand up to me, right here and now, to claim he’d be willing to lose what I did…? Oh!” Mogaill choked. “My darling, with her hair like the October leaves of Galty—”

  Tears broke. He let them run, unashamed. The men of the sheepeen respected this as the guileless display of dignity it was; not a few of Davy Mogaill’s detractors wept along with him over their own personal regrets.

  “Don’t you see…?” Mogaill’s voice was nearly a whisper. “By all that’s holy, don’t you see it’s so bloody damn unamusing to live in a country where everybody acts, where nobody is satisfied with thought?”

  A supporter rose from his chair to add, “Davy’s right. Here we be at yet another wake, bragging about our manhood, glorifying deeds never done quite as glorious in actual fact as we stand here lying sweetly about them; filling ourselves with whiskey, and what we think is courage. Then somebody comes along to this mushing of ours, he drops in a thought not meant to comfort. And what do we do? We yelp and yelp, like a pack of frightened dogs!”

  Mogaill said, “Dogs who cannot think but only snarl—or men? If it’s dogs, I’d sooner drown you all …”

  He was through with what he had to say, and wobbly on his legs besides. Mogaill stepped away from the laid-out bodies. He filled his mug with more whiskey, and his clay pipe with more of the consecrated tobacco. He walked past the first row of men, then the second and the third. On past them all, and out the open space left from the borrowed doors; out where he could gulp down the dark, clean air. His legs gained strength. But tears came again.

  Slowly he walked, his feet squishing through a maze of puddles left by the earlier rains. He did not go far, but far enough to still see the shabby outline of the sheepeen as he turned, and beyond it the great graystone manor house on the hill, its smooth walls and colored glass windows glowing in dewy moonlight hanging above clouds of fog.

  He stood now at the bank of a crooked stream. There were boulders covered in patches of whitened grass, like the lace shawls on pianos. He found a ledge of rock where he could sit down. He lit his pipe, and said to the wreath of smoke, “Could it be you there, Brenda, floating like a sweet ghost on this dank night?”

  But no answer came. Davy Mogaill, who believed himself a fool, cried softly. He lifted his mug to his lips. But the taste for whiskey was gone for this night.

  He flung the mug over his shoulder, and it crashed into bits against the rocks. Then he walked back to the sheepeen.

  A priest in black vestments, and a cowl that obscured his face, now stood between the two bodies draped on the death planks. He raised his arms slowly up from his sides, extending them at right angles from his shoulders, as if he were hanging on a cross. Each hand held a rosary. The crowd was hushed. From the blackness where the mouth would be, the priest murmured, “Mourn, and then onward, there’s no returning … he guides ye from the tomb … his memory now is a tall pillar, burning before us in the gloom.”

  The priest nodded to a man sitting in a chair in front of him. The man stood up, wordlessly, to perform as an acolyte. First, he pushed back the cowl to reveal the face of Father Timothy Kelly …

  Then the acolyte pulled back the linen sheet of one of the dead men, revealing Liam Hockaday. He used his thumbs to seal Liam’s eyes. The priest laid a rosary over the shuttered eyes.

  The acolyte moved to the next body. He pulled back the sheet.

  And there lay Aidan Hockaday, so much older than the photograph owned by his son. The acolyte applied his thumbs. The priest dropped the rosary over Aidan’s eyes …

  But Aidan’s corpse rose, slowly from the waist. Aidan sat up, and turned to the terrified men gathered around him. His angry dead voice shouted at them, “Whirl your liquor’round like blazes, boyos! … Thanam o’n dhoul, do ye think I’m dead?”

  Ruby shook me. “It’s all right, Hock. Tell me what happened.”

  I sat up in bed. “God, I don’t know, I—”

  My breath gave out. My heart was running like a mailman with a pack of rottweilers after him. My face and hands were flowing with sweat. I tried to speak.

  There was sunlight streaming through the windows over Lad-broke Street, still a strong early light. We had slept through the night.

  “No, don’t say a word,” Ruby said.

  She threw back the covers and crossed the rose-patterned rug to the dresser, for the towels and water in the pitcher and glasses. She brought me a drink. I took it down while she wiped my face with the corner of a dampened towel. Ruby wiped her own face, too, and as I collected myself, I saw how frightened she was.

  “This is the worst I’ve seen,” she said. “You were dreaming of him again, weren’t you?”

  I tried answering, but choked.

  “Take your time.”

 
I took a breath. “Aidan was in the dream. No, the nightmare. It wasn’t like anything else before. It wasn’t just my father telling me things this time, it was others, too. Davy Mogaill was there. It was really mostly about him—and the place he was …”

  My heart raced again, as if I was still in the nightmare.

  “Where was he, Hock?” Ruby asked. “Where was Mogaill?”

  “Here, someplace in Ireland. At a country tavern … not an actual tavern, really, but someplace where men were drinking. Somewhere near a stream and a place on a hill that looked almost like a castle …”

  I stopped, and took more water. My body shook, as if I had just come in from the cold outdoors.

  “And that’s when you saw your father?” Ruby asked.

  “I saw him, and more.”

  “In your detective’s dream?”

  Chapter 22

  We decided to split up for the day. Ruby did most of the deciding.

  “I want a chance to pump Moira—alone,” she said. “She knows something about this house. I can feel it. Can’t you?”

  “Maybe, yes …”

  “So I want to get her out marketing, something like that. Just the two of us out somewhere so she’s free to talk.”

  “What makes you think she’ll crack for you?”

  “I explained that to you boys last night—I’ll listen to her is why. The lady’s a big talker, and she’s starved for listeners. And, something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “Something that tells me this house never had to be a lonely one. That’s only intuition. So we’ll see. Anyway, I’ll be listening carefully. It could be the first time anybody’s really listened to her. Apart from her Bible crowd—which if it’s anything like American thumpers, there isn’t an honest ear to be bent—who’s poor Moira got?”

  “Liam, Snoody—”

  “Hah! Your uncle will only tolerate her until she can’t cook anymore, or he can’t eat anymore, whichever comes first. Then there’s that arrogant creep of an ex-priest, Snoody. And you, Hock—you’re only in the way.”

  “Why, because I’m a man?”

  “If you were a woman you’d know what a jerk question that is.”

  “You think women are any better at asking questions?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever women do, they have to do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”

  Thus spake Ruby Flagg.

  Deciding that I myself needed time and distance from Liam’s house, I told her, “Okay then, maybe I’ll just strike off on my own to Dublin and poke around in any public records available on Mairead and Aidan Hockaday.” Ruby climbed into bed again and buried herself in the covers, yawned and said, “So go, at this hour you’ll beat the rush,” she said.

  I bathed and dressed, and went downstairs. All was quiet, save for the kitchen.

  At only a few minutes past six it was still quite early for the house, but Moira, her curly salt-and-pepper hair flattened with a net and her body wrapped form neck to knees in a baker’s apron big enough to sail a ship, was already hard at it. Clouds of sweetsmelling steam poured from a double-door oven. At a nearby counter, Moira pounded out piles of dough on two different boards, shaped them with her flour-drenched hands and smoothed them out with a roller. I thought briefly of the nightmare—Liam and my father in the sheepeen, laid out dead on those doors in shrouds white as Moira’s flour.

  She had a radio on, tuned to one of those charismatics on a tear about perdition and repentance: “He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber! … I tell you—repent, or ye shall likewise perish!” This was an Irish voice imitating the standard thumper twang of a Mississippi illiterate with a catfish caught sideways in his mouth. Which embarrassed me, both as a Catholic and an American.

  I tripped on a stair step leading down to the kitchen, making a noise that startled Moira. Big as she is, roughly one-eighth the size of a Volvo, she hopped several inches into the air, as if a mouse was running up her leg, and squealed, “Hell’s bells and Oriental smells!” She turned and saw me, slapped a floured hand across her impressive bosoms, and greeted me with, “My Gawd—you give me a fright!”

  “Sorry, I—”

  “You great blasphemin’ ox! Can you have no respect for those payin’ mind to the holy Gospel?”

  “I said I was sorry.” Then I put on the lopsided smile I use for brawlers with big mouths and small brains. This always seems to confuse them. I took a few tentative steps toward Moira. “Look here, Ms. Booley, I hope I can soften your opinion of me.”

  “Don’t come near me, sinner man!” The Bible whacker on the radio had started carrying on about sending deliverance with a two-edged sword. Moira picked up a knife that could kill a pig. “Get out of my kitchen!”

  Retreating quickly, I said, “That was a beautiful supper you made last night, Ms. Booley.”

  “Thank you,” she snarled.

  If I could sound like the thumper, I wondered, would our little kitchen chat be more cordial? “Like I told Ruby,” I said, “there was the hand of God in that meal.”

  Moira lowered the knife a bit. “You told her that?”

  “Goodness, yes. I ate every bite. And I’m now the changed man you see before you …”

  I paused. Moira cocked her head at me, like she was a puzzled cocker spaniel.

  “That heavenly food on my tongue started me thinking in a most peculiar way. I am a great sinner, as you say—but I suddenly realized that I am a child of God. And that I am capable of being saved, by the sweet blood of Jesus. You do understand, don’t you?”

  Moira looked back and forth between the radio and me, the wary hostility in her face giving way to idiotic sweetness. People who are not cops might have laughed at her. I have seen enough people racing around their emotional edges to know that life’s jokes are sometimes not so funny.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, “the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “He does. Oh, yes—yes!”

  “And it’s you I have to thank for showing me His way, Ms. Booley.”

  “Please now, won’t you call me Moira?” There was almost a shyness in her voice now. She put down the pig killer.

  “Moira, then.” I took a step.

  She smiled. An easy thing for most of us, but not for Moira Catherine Bernadette Booley. We smile as infants not because of any goo-gooing efforts to amuse us, but because the expression is a natural arrangement of lips and gums. Life’s events become far less amusing as time goes by, but the smile remains a reflex for most of us. Some, like poor Moira standing in front of me with her stiff shy grin and her cow brown eyes about to burst into tears that might mean joy as much as grief, show a kind of bravery by smiling in spite of it all.

  “Cup of tea?” she asked, pronouncing it tay.

  “I’d rather coffee.”

  “You think my tea’s too weak for your breakfast?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Why, a rat’d sink his foot in’t.”

  “How can I resist?”

  I was soon sitting at a butcher block table in Moira’s fragrant kitchen with a pot of thick black tea in front of me, along with a bowl of sliced bananas and a plate of soda bread straight from the oven, with salty butter and marmalade. If only Ruby could see me getting along so well with Moira. In the way indeed. Here now was Moira, fussing over me like I was her long-lost brother.

  “How long have you been here with my uncle?” I asked her.

  “If you’re meanin’ as his cook,’tis only since Mr. Liam took this house.”

  “You knew him before then?”

  “Known him all me life. He was the boy next door, what you call—when we was kids.”

  “I see.” I tried picturing Moira as a girl, but I could not get past the brave sadness of her smile. I asked, “Then you’re from County Carlow, too?”

  “Aye …” Apprehension crept back into her tone.
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  “And just when did my uncle move here to this grand place?”

  Moira looked up, silently going through the years. Her fingers moved as she thought, counting the decades. “Well, it’d be not long after he come back home from London,” she said, “all young and educated and looking about like a man does.”

  “The war would have been on then?”

  “Aye, and a good time for a man to be takin’ his opportunities.”

  “Especially in Ireland, which was neutral.”

  “Aye …” There was the apprehension again.

  “Well, it’s good to see that an Irishman profited from England’s troubles.”

  Moira’s face brightened. She might have been more revealing had I prompted her. Then again, she might have closed up on me. I decided I had asked enough direct questions, that I should go easy now, especially about politics. Better for Ruby to go at her sideways on that subject.

  “You must enjoy your job here, being at it so long,” I said.

  “It’s nae a job to me. It’s me mission bein’ with Mr. Liam.”

  “How wonderful for you.”

  “Oh,’tis.” Moira used her apron to wipe hands that did not need wiping, and sighed. Maybe she wanted to say more. Instead, she went back to the counter and rolled dough.

  “Would there be somewhere in the neighborhood I could catch a bus or a train to Dublin?” I asked, addressing her wide back.

  “If you’re wanting to go to the city, Snoody’ll get a driver for you—”

  Moira stopped then, and turned to me. There was fright in her face, more serious than when I startled her by stumbling on the stair. She said, “Nae, you’ll not want to risk survivin’ another automobile ride!”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” Also I said to myself, It might be a good idea to leave the house as soon as possible, before Snoody or Uncle Liam had anything to do with the day’s agenda.

  Moira told me where to find the commuter station down in the village, a short walk from the house. I finished eating my soda bread and emptied my cup.