“That you got to tell me.”
“I’m staying in the Bronx with a bunch of old men, one to a window.”
Chapter 44
We took dinner downstairs in the tomb that doubles as a bar and Tullow’s only restaurant, so Ned Roarty informed us when we asked at the desk. So we had the leek soup, mutton, potatoes and bread, in contrasting shades of beige. There was no choice in the matter. It was Saturday night, which meant mutton and so forth on the only menu of the only restaurant in town. We had little choice of seating, either. Annie Roarty installed us at an unpopular table in the middle of the room, and she did not look much in the mood for an argument.
A few of the old folks we saw earlier were seated at tables along the wall, or against windows, ladies and gents together now and all in great seriousness. Ned or Annie would approach their tables and they would order their drinks, and the exchanges were so familiar it looked as if everyone was performing lines in a play. Anyone to the point of eating their beige dinner appeared to be asleep.
The bar itself did a slightly livelier business. There was muffled conversation and glasses clinking. A middle-aged couple argued softly; whatever the grievance, it was not difficult to see habit and regret at the root of it. A small group of suited men, business types, were drinking martinis and trying to impress one another. A bored prostitute drinking sherry gazed at a man in a black suit and hat sitting by himself.
“When you come in, you never told me your name was Hockaday,” Ned Roarty said when he reached our table to take drink orders.
He did not say this loudly. Nonetheless, there was a stir. Everyone woke up and stared at us when my name was spoken. We were easy to see right there in the middle of the room.
“What if I had?” I asked him.
“It’s surprisin’ is all, the name’s an old one hereabouts.”
“So I understand.” I looked over to the nearest table where there were old folks staring at me. One of the old girls took thick spectacles from a beaded purse and wiped them down with a napkin. I said, loud enough for the eavesdroppers, “I’ve come to Tullow looking for people who can tell me something about my father—Aidan Hockaday.”
There was now a definite current circulating through the room. I had no way of knowing then whether it was good or bad. Certainly there was curiosity in the crowd, natural and innocent enough given the fact that few if any black women had ever visited the place. In the case of three geezers down at the end of the bar, I imagined the worst. They put on their caps and scowled at me as they left. Two walked out the door, the third came up and whispered something in Roarty’s ear before leaving himself.
“Looks like I drove out the old boys somehow,” I said to Roarty when he was back attending to us.
“Nae, they’re only clearing out down to the sheepeen,” he said. “Days up here on the hill, nights down below. It gives variety to life.”
“Some life,” Ruby said.
“I’ll admit it ain’t New York, but they like’t here well enough, ma’am,” Roarty said.
“The old guy whispered something to you, Mr. Roarty,” I said. “What was it?”
“He said, sir, that you was to come down to the sheepeen yourself in one hour’s time.”
“Really.”
“We’ll be there,” Ruby said.
“Oh—but no, ma’am!” Roarty was shaken. There was laughter rippling around tables within earshot. “It’s the sheepeen, y’know. For the men folks only.”
“Isn’t that the wonderful thing about travel, though?” I said to Ruby. “No matter where you go, things have a way of staying the same. Like the sheepeen here, and that Park Avenue joint with the maître d’ … What’s his name?”
“Pierre,” Ruby said, smiling.
“There’s this place in New York,” I said to Roarty, “where the men don’t care for the women—” I was about to say more, but Ruby stopped me.
“Don’t bother, Hock,” Ruby warned. “I really don’t mind staying in while you go on down to your smelly men’s bar.”
The old girls around us laughed. The old boys did not.
“Well now, Mr. Roarty, let’s have a bottle of your best claret,” Ruby said. “Then you may bring on the filth.”
Ruby then turned on me. “As for you, Mr. Hockaday, let’s have your answer. What do you mean, he’s here … ?”
“I mean it all fits together now. I don’t have a hollow place anymore.”
“That’s good?”
“It’s a good question. So was the one I asked this afternoon for the third time. How about your answer?”
“Dear charming man, it can keep’til the morning, can’t it?”
One hour later, I was heavy with my dinner of mutton and I had run my case past Ruby. She walked me out to the veranda, and stood there watching as I made my way down the lane and off the hill toward the sheepeen.
I turned, and looked at her there in the moonlight. Her slim figure was softly backlit by the inn’s open doorway. She waved, and I heard her voice floating down through the wet air. “Be careful, Hock …”
No, I would never lose her, I promised myself.
I then walked through a darkness so thick I could not see my feet sloshing through the grass, nor my hands swinging at my sides. But I heard the noise of the sheepeen, and even the rushing stream beyond. And from my dreams, I knew the way.
It was just as I knew it would be, the image planted in my head as a boy by Uncle Liam’s tales. The men of the village sitting around tables, smoking and drinking and making supper of fadge and stew. Dressed in their farmer’s tweeds, all save a priest in his suit and collar. All of them arguing about any arguable subject.
But as I entered the door, all fell quiet. As if a funeral were about to be held.
“Jaysus, Mary and Joseph—it’s him!” someone shouted. “Young Aidan himself come back from the past! Saints help us all!”
“Looks even a wee bit like his grampus,” another man said. There was much laughter at this. Then someone else shouted “What d’you say about it, Father?”
The question was asked of the elderly priest seated at a table in the middle of the cramped room, a pint of stout and a jigger of whiskey in front of him. The priest did not answer directly. Instead, he looked me up and down, then raised a cupped hand, and said, “Come, son—let’s see you close.”
The men made way for me. When I reached the priest’s table, I held out my hand, and said, “Neil Hockaday, Father.” The priest was older than he looked from the doorway, maybe ninety or more. The years had corrupted what was once a darkly handsome face. His hair was still thick, combed straight back in steel gray quills, and this is mainly what made him younger from a distance. His eyes were bright and blue, sunk into his spotted face. His jaw was still youthfully square, but full of an old man’s shakes and tics now.
A man to my left said, “‘Tis Father McGing you’re addressin’.”
“Father McGing,” I said. The priest took my hand. It was large, and surprisingly rough for a priest’s hand.
“You do look strongly like Aidan,” McGing said. “And there’s a touch of your grandmother Finola I can see in you, too. And aye, I’ll admit you’re generally possessed of your grampus’s face.”
Someone put a pint of stout in my hand. Someone else shouted from the back of the room, “What about the prayer now, Father?” And this request became a thumping demand, the men pounding pints and glasses and fists on the tabletops, chanting, “The prayer, the prayer, the prayer …”
Father McGing stood up and raised his hands high over his head, silencing the smoky room. And when he had order, he said what I had heard in Liam’s house:
“Dear God, tonight as we partake of thy kindest bounty, know that we’ll be eating and drinking to the glorious, pious and immortal memories of thy own Sainted Patrick and our great good brother Brian Boru—who assisted, each in his respective way, in redeeming us Irish folk from toffee-snouted Englishmen and their ilk. We ask a blessing, if you ple
ase, on the Holy Father of Rome—and a shit for the Bishop of Canterbury. And to those at this table unwilling to drink to this, may he have a dark night, a lee shore, a rank storm and a leaky vessel to carry him over the River Styx. May the dog Cerberus make a meal of his rump, and Pluto a snuffbox of his skull, and may the Devil jump down his throat with a red hot harrow, and with every pin tear out a gut and blow him with a clean carcass to hell. Amen.”
There was an explosion of laughter, followed by several seconds of silence. Then Father McGing picked up his glass and solemnly raised it, and said, “Do schláinte, a chailleach!” To which the men replied in unison, with their own glasses raised, “Sláinte na bhfear agus go ndoiridh tú bean roimh oiche!”
Father McGing held out his glass to me. I lifted my own, and we clinked.
“What did the Gaelic mean?” I asked.
“It means a number of important things,” Father McGing said. “Good health to you. Welcome to the soil of great Irish patriots …”
Father McGing paused, and leaned forward to poke my chest with a finger. I felt his hot breath in my face as he said, “And may your good new blood replace the old.”
Tears rolled from Father McGing’s eyes, sudden and free. Then he was surrounded by his table mates, who patted his shoulders, pulling him gently away from me. I heard one of the men say, “It’s enough for now, Cor … rest yourself.”
Cor.
… the randy priest who mum was carrying on with for all the years. The priest’s name was Cor …
“No!” said Father McGing. He broke free of his mates, stepping back to me. He put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me into an embrace. And he whispered, “Would you like seeing him now, boy?”
“I found my way, didn’t I?”
His arm linked in mine for support and guidance in the dark, Father Cor McGing and I then walked back up the hill to Roarty’s inn. And all he said to me was, “You found us, all right, you might as well know.”
Chapter 45
“I hate it! Please God, I hate it.”
Having said this, he was at peace with all he had told me this night of treachery and war, murder and remorse. And a secret love I had already guessed …
“I was the perfect one to lead it, so Cor had me convinced. Me being in New York and all. So it’s what I did for the cause. In those days, any Irishman active in politics was suspect. But it was nothing for an American soldier to be in London, see. It’s how I managed to land there, after first getting myself detached in battle and presumed dead or captured.
“This next part, I give to you straight and quick, Neil. Time and war’s made it quite incidental to the story, you might come to agree. It’s just this: Liam and me, we’re only brothers by half. Same mother, two different dads. You see? Myles Hockaday, he sired Liam, but that’s all he done. Father Cor McGing, may God and the church forgive him for his love of a woman’s flesh, he’s my own real da.
“Anyway, there was waiting for me in London this true certificate of my Irish birth, with my true dad’s name signed at the bottom—Cor McGing. And now I am no longer Aidan Hockaday, I am one Aidan McGing, who has no past by his bastard name. Never would I know this—nor Liam, nor now you—if not for the needs of the cause. If not for the cause, old Cor would’ve taken the secret of his love to his grave, just as Myles and Finola done.
“Mine may well be one of a million tawdry tales. For one reason or the next, for one trouble or another, there was lots like me in that war—men with getting lost and forgotten uppermost in mind. All the wars of history have given troubled men such escape. Most had no cause, and led their secret lives until death. Others, like me, used this gift of anonymity as a tool for what we enjoyed believing was far greater good.
“My comrades and I in England, we done what we could by an ally in common, that being Germany. Some were saboteurs, some murderers, some inspiration to these actions. Some took jobs on the docks of London, and in the telephone exchange, and up in the mills of Birmingham and Coventry. All that was learned at such sensitive places was passed along to Berlin.
“I myself did all these things. And paid dear for it, too. I lost my sight to a blasting cap I once strung up to a London tram.
“This was my life, Neil. I had no other, save trusting for Liam’s word through the years of the wife and baby son I had sacrificed.
“We done it for the German weapons we needed, and for German gold, and to bloody hell with England. And don’t you look at me that way, boy! Listen!
“There is Ireland, and there is England. The histories we have built are the mirror opposites of each other. What the Englishman sees as glory, victory and the pursuit of happiness, as the Americans say, the Irishman knows as degradation, misery, ruin—and famine. England’s freedom is Ireland’s slavery. It was so for eight centuries before the republic, it is so today—in Ulster. And so it is we say, Nevermore.
“Long before I, there were Irishmen providing refuge and giving succor to England’s enemies. The patriot’s motto is, England’s crisis is Ireland’s opportunity. And in every moment of weakness, a patriot’s duty is to stab his enemy in the back. As I did, one man in the long, mad history of my country.
“Well might you ask if I’m proud of what we done. I would admit to you first that I am not a good man. A good man commits no crime, nor does he fail to speak out against crimes he sees. Thus the good man lives without remorse. But I am bad, and have committed many crimes, and have not spoken out. Until now, boy, to you. To tell you that in order to live, I have invented my own ultimate forgiveness.
“I have thought carefully on my life of crime. And it comes to me I must atone, and that the only means of it is by heeding the spirit of a verse written on a long-ago photograph of myself, written by a great poet and patriot before he died—Yeats himself. That photograph I gave to your mother, Neil.
“‘Drown all the dogs!’ says the verse. It comes to me this means the killing and the hating—the warring—has got to stop somewheres in the line of history, and that it rightly falls to one who committed the most crimes to drown it all. You see?
“I must drown the very dogs of war I made, the old and the new. The whole bloody lot of them sleeping dogs—among the police and the clergy and the counting houses, here in Ireland and everywhere else we are. Drown them all! It’s the only way. You see?
“There’s not much time left to me now, Neil. I’m near my last, and there’s evil forces against me. My own brother, Liam, being most important among these
He turned his head toward the wall now, as if to feel a morning’s warmth at the unseen window.
It was well past midnight, into black Sunday, but the time of day had no meaning for him. A smile played carefully across his face as he lay in his bed, a bed too big for him alone. I put my hand on his. He let it lie there atop his paper skin.
I asked, “What is it you hate?”
He drew a deep breath and his blind blue eyes closed. Then he quoted again, from what his mind still pictured of pages he used to read, time and again: “Out of Ireland have we come; great hatred, little room, maimed at the start … I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart.”
There was silence when I should have offered reaction, the kind of embarrassed quietude that tells an old man he has not been understood by a younger man. His useless eyes fluttered open and he said, with some exasperation, “It’s the root of this madness I’ve grown to hate, it’s old men at their windows I hate even more.” Then he lifted my hand away and said, “Now get you off.” That would be all for now, whether or not I understood. He needed rest.
I walked to the door and opened it, but turned to look at him once more before leaving. He sensed this. His head rose slightly over the mound of blankets. He said, “When I’m gone, I want you to remember me.”
I said, “Haven’t I always?”
I stepped into the tiny hall outside my father’s attic room, to where my grandfather, Cor McGing, stood waiting, a rosary in his hand.
From
the bottom of the stairs came the pop of a small gun fired.
And the sound of a falling man.
Then someone crashing his way upstairs toward McGing and me.
A man in a black suit and hat, a pistol in his hand.
Chapter 46
“Out of the way, boy!”
He shoved past me, jamming the heated barrel of the pistol he had just fired into my ribs. This was not the most powerful force I have met in my time, but I fell, helpless in the shock of seeing my Uncle Liam on his feet.
It could have been worse. Down at the bottom of the stairs, there was Ned Roarty pinwheeling on the floor, roaring in pain, his hand masking a bullet hole in his shoulder, blood streaming through his tight fingers. I could hear Annie Roarty screaming for him now, “Da, I’m comin’ … What’s happened, da—?”
McGing grabbed at Liam’s black coat as he pushed by him, too. But the old priest was no use in stopping a man with terrible intent. McGing staggered on his frail legs, then collapsed, striking his head on the floor. Liam flung open the door to Aidan’s room, pulled back the hammer of his gun and stepped inside.
“Bastard!” he cried, bounding toward the bed. “I found you!”
I heard another shot, the same small-caliber pop as seconds before. Then a second shot, this one powerful. On my belly, I scrambled toward the door to my father’s room.
Liam lay very still and very dead on his back, on the floor at the side of my father’s bed. His chest had a hole in it the size of a baseball. The blood-flecked black hat he wore rolled from his body, coming to a stop at a table leg. His black coat was now sopped with red, his startled face and open eyes streaked with blood. And still the blood flowed, making soft sucking sounds as it spurted from the gaping wound. He had been shot square in the heart.
I took a small German-made pistol from Liam’s right hand. There were three slugs missing from the magazine.
In my father’s hand was a double-barrel shotgun, sawed off at the front and back. He was sitting up in the bed, ugly and straight as his weapon, his blind blue eyes seeing nothing. There was a small bloody hole at the top of his chest, just under the collarbone.
Drown All the Dogs Page 33