Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “What do ye mean they’re burnin’ the Ardoyne out?” Dacy flinched visibly as Casey grabbed his arms and shook him.

  “Mobs of Loyalists, pullin’ people out of their homes an’ then settin’ fire to the houses. They’re destroyin’ everything.”

  “An’ the police?”

  “Are lettin’ them do it. Sean said he even saw a few police in civilian overcoats millin’ around with the crowds. They’ve brought in tanks, fockin’ Shorlands, an’ they’ve got machine guns shootin’ right through the walls of houses. Was an old lady cryin’ in the street said they killed her grandson, only nine an’ layin’ in his bed, goddamn bullet went right through the wall an’ into his head.”

  “Did ye go to my home?” Casey asked and Dacy looked into his face and saw an awful and terrible stillness in the man’s eyes.

  “Aye. ‘Twas on fire Casey.”

  “My wife?” Casey asked, his voice low and trembling.

  Dacy wanted nothing more than to look away from the man, but found himself paralyzed by the dark unflinching eyes.

  “I don’t know Casey; the fire was out of control I couldn’t get near to the door.”

  “Was the door open?”

  “No ‘twas closed. Casey if she’d been inside—” He hissed involuntarily as the hands on his arms clenched harder.

  “Don’t ye say it Dacy, don’t ye goddamn say it.”

  “Casey, I asked the neighbors an’ they saw no one come out or go in.”

  The hands on his arms released and pulled back. Then Dacy felt the smooth heft of a gun placed into his hand.

  “Ye’ll need the gun,” he said as Casey stood and walked toward the door, “it’s pure madness out there.”

  Casey turned in the doorway, “I am goin’ to find my wife, an’ if I find her hurt or worse I shall find the bastards who did it an’ kill them with my bare hands an’ then,” his voice faltered for a moment and resumed in a softer tone, “an’ then I really don’t care much what happens to me. Either way I’ve no more need of the gun this night.” He nodded and moved out into the darkness beyond the door.

  “D’ye think we should stop him?” Dacy asked Seamus.

  “Wouldn’t do any good to try,” Seamus sighed, reaching in his pocket for his last three bullets, “either way he’ll have to see for himself.”

  Dacy looked down at the gun in his hand, “Where’s the bullets for this thing?”

  Seamus eyed him mildly in the flickering light, “Ye’ve only the one shot left.”

  “One bullet?” Dacy said disbelievingly.

  “Aye,” Seamus nodded, “best make it count, boy.”

  The worst of the fighting, which had broken across Belfast like a wave, was over near morning. Here and there fires still raged, parked cars small infernos on the roadside, a great thick pall of smoke hanging over the city, cloaking it off from the sky.

  Dawn filtered down over a scene of absolute devastation. Gutted houses, torched vehicles, entire streets laid to waste. The small enclosed communities gone, forever. A way of life for hundreds of years vanished in a puff of smoke. Lives, memories, moments, now hardly more than rubble in the streets.

  Dawn drifted into morning and people began to pick their way through the ashes, sifting through the rubble for any bit of familiarity, something solid to rebuild their lives upon. An old photograph miraculously untouched, a necklace, a saucepan, anything that might serve as a reminder of their life before.

  The Falls and the Ardoyne were the areas hardest hit. One hundred and fifty houses had burned down and people, homeless and set adrift on a sea of misfortune, wandered blankly through streets they’d known all their lives and saw nothing they could recognize. And some unfortunate few found their dead and carried them unseeing out into the gray morning light. Five Catholics and one Protestant had not survived the streets of Belfast that night.

  Casey found his own home roofless, half collapsed but with the red door strangely unmarred and closed firmly. The brass knob was still hot to the touch when he put his hand around it. He stood against the door for a moment, the knob slowly turning in his hand, a quarter turn, a half-turn and he without the courage to face what lay inside. Three-quarters and he turned his face up to the sky, asking a God he no longer trusted to give him the strength to do what he must. A full turn and the door fell away into ashes.

  Everything gone, kitchen table burnt to cinders, the tub half melted, its enamel stripped away. The wallpaper no more than curling wisps in the air, ashes of forgotten roses. Shards of pottery on the ground, splintering as he walked across them.

  The staircase stood in a void, some steps entirely gone and he had a sudden vision of her walking up them ahead of him, a white nightgown billowing out around her and a glance over her shoulder, her eyes soft in the dim light, her hair a spill of furled black ribbon against the white of her nightgown. He wanted more than anything to follow her up those stairs. Two nights ago, an eternity now.

  Some stairs held but others gave under his weight. There was a two-foot gap at the top before the floor resumed itself. Pat’s old room now nothing more than smoking blackened brick and a view of the ravaged street. He turned right, made his way across half-crumbled beams and boards to the door of their bedroom.

  It was open, smoke still drifting across it in the quiet morning air.

  The bed was intact, the sheets starkly white against the black smoldering interior of the room. And it was there that he found his dead. Three steps to cross the room, not caring now if the floor held. Three steps to look down upon a still figure, sheared by fire of all its distinguishing features. He reached out a trembling hand and the flesh felt like leather under his fingers, hard, yet it gave and fell away with a soft sigh down between bones that shone like polished ivory in the gray light.

  Black and white, bone and flesh that flaked away at the slightest stir. The wrists held tightly together, the ankles as well, as if she’d sought shelter within her own frame at the end.

  An arm under knees, a hand under neck. He lifted her, the heat of her body making him gasp and he thought for a moment that he could feel the silken sweep of her hair fall down across his arm. He felt oddly weightless now, as if he had no more substance than the smoke, as if all the world were suspended, holding its breath.

  Down the stairs then, carefully, one foot after the next. He didn’t want to stumble, didn’t want to jar her in the least. It was the last gift he could give her, the one of dignity.

  Out through the door, over the threshold, the same one she’d walked over so trustingly as a girl, as a lover, as a wife.

  On the paving stones, his face stark against its bones in the strange smoky twilight of morning, stood Jamie.

  He opened his mouth as if to speak, saw the bundle in Casey’s arms and closed it again.

  Casey took a step, felt a terrible weakness take him in the legs just as a knife blade of pain caught him hard in the stomach.

  He stumbled and sank to his knees, the sky above him blossoming a soft, warm red and knew with a hazy relief that he’d been shot. He passed his dead up into the arms of Jamie just before hitting the ground on his face.

  The last thing he was aware of was the taste of ashes in his mouth.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Except Thou Bless Me

  “And so as you can see,” Pamela said from over the top of a currant scone, “the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  “What did Casey say when he saw ye?” Pat asked from across the scrubbed oak table, sopping up the remains of his eggs with a bit of toast.

  “He opened his eyes for all of two seconds, looked up at me, smiled and said ‘it’s good to see we both made it to the other side, darlin’’ though he seemed a little confused that he wasn’t in purgatory. And then he went right back to sleep.”

  “Poor laddy’s still drugged up. I tell you i
t’s a miracle he’s with us this morning, if that bullet had been even another millimeter to the left...” Father Joe left the thought hanging in the air as he helped himself to a third of Maggie’s delectable scones.

  “He might still be here,” Jamie put in dryly, “but he’d not be fathering any children.”

  “Take some more tea, James,” Father Joe said, pouring himself a cup, “there’s brandy on the sideboard if you need extra fortification. And how,” he turned his genial countenance on Pamela, still in her nightgown and reeking of smoke, “is your head m’dear?”

  “A bit sore, but considering the alternative I’m not complaining.”

  “Indeed, that’s the spirit child,” Father Joe said. Everyone was silent for a moment, considering the alternative. It was a little too firmly imprinted on their collective consciousness just what the alternative was. The alternative was at present wrapped in a sheet and lying in an unused monk’s cell. Just who was the recipient of Pamela’s intended fate wasn’t yet quite clear. And if anyone knew, they weren’t telling. It had been the least of their worries in the early morning when first Jamie had shown up dragging a bleeding and incoherent Casey and then, only moments later, Pamela had appeared on the doorstep wrapped in a blanket, a large bump on her head with no idea of how she’d gotten there. And then Pat had run in after an absence of several hours, soot smeared and frantic, having been unable to locate either his brother or Pamela. In the hours since, everyone had had their hands full, for the church had been filled with milling anxious people, fleeing fire, guns and the wrath of angry mobs.

  Father Terry, who’d anointed five heads the previous night and held countless hands, thought that he could very well do with a shot of Father Joe’s medicinal brandy himself. He surveyed the faces around the table and silently thanked God for the small mercies He’d seen fit to extend over the last twenty-four hours.

  The kitchen was a scene of cozy domesticity, smelling vaguely of the bleach Maggie had scrubbed it down with that morning, pleasantly overlaid with bacon and freshly baked scones. Maggie stood at the stove, stirring a vast pot of porridge with one hand while cracking eggs into smoking hot bacon fat with the other. The stomach did indeed prevail through emergencies of all sorts.

  The talk at the table had been deliberately careful, though inevitably the events of last night had been hashed and re-hashed. No one had been particularly forthcoming about their individual adventures though and therein lay rather a lot of mystery and many questions no one was asking.

  Pat, now polishing off a glass of milk like any perfectly ordinary boy, had been vague about the hours he’d been gone. From three o’clock until six o’clock he’d been unaccounted for and had said, upon returning, that he’d gone to the Ardoyne, found the house burned and had combed the streets after that looking for his brother and Pamela. Father Terry had merely bandaged his burned hands, applied salve to the blisters on one side of his face and said nothing.

  Pamela said the last thing she remembered was the tanks coming up the street, the smell of smoke and then being hit over the head with something large and heavy. For her Father Terry had avoided looking too long at the long, thin cut on her neck that wasn’t deep enough to warrant special attention and again, said nothing.

  Terry’s eyes moved from the disheveled form of Pamela to the man at her right elbow. Even in the strange ashy light of the day, the man seemed lit by full sun. His face, after a sleepless, anxious night was perfectly attuned to his bones, revealing nothing. Occasionally he would cast a shrewd look at Pamela, or eye Pat speculatively, as if he suspected, much as Terry himself did, that each of them held pieces to the puzzle of last night, that for some reason they wouldn’t or perhaps couldn’t reveal.

  Terry had recognized him, even in the confusion of Casey being brought in and having to dig a bullet out of the boy’s thigh, even in the shock of the man then calmly going out and bringing in a wrapped body and saying that though he’d no idea of the identity of the corpse, it would seem that Casey was thoroughly convinced that it was Pamela. However, the man had been so cool and businesslike that Terry saw at once he’d no such fears himself. So he’d known the girl was safe. For him Terry had merely poured a glass of whiskey and left him alone with his secrets. He’d an uneasy feeling that all three of his suspects were perfectly aware of the identity of the heap of bone and charred flesh that reposed in its cell.

  Late breakfast concluded, Father Joe announced he must get ready for mass, today would require a special one, for the comfort and sustenance of an entire neighborhood, which was at present shattered and bleeding in both body and mind.

  Pamela declared her intention of finding a tub and soaking in it. Pat was off out the door to check on the situation in the neighborhoods, see who needed help finding safe houses as a stopgap and generally to avoid the questioning stares at the table. Maggie was humming to herself while setting a batch of bread to rise, which left only Jamie and Father Terry at the table.

  “The British Army moved into Derry last night,” Terry said by way of conversational preamble.

  “They’ll be in the streets of Belfast by tonight,” Jamie replied.

  “How do ye know that?” Terry asked, stirring the tepid depths of his tea with a fork handle.

  “Hardly takes foresight to leap to an obvious conclusion. There’s no choice really, someone has to restore order on the streets.”

  “And you think the British are the ones to do it?”

  “There isn’t anyone else, is there?” The green eyes met his own, clear and unblinking. “The United Nations won’t send anyone, the Taoiseach already opened up that call and no one answered. The Republic has no money to lend, no army to deploy and no friends in London. Stormont’s already declared Lynch a traitor.” He took a last drink of tea and stood up from the table, “Neglected patriotism is a bitter cup and one can hardly blame the South if they don’t wish to drink from it. We are another country here, a world apart from the Republic, we just won’t admit to it.”

  “So the Irish question has been re-opened with the British has it?”

  “It would seem so,” Jamie flexed his long fingers against the table and politely stifled a yawn, “and God help the man who tries to find the answer to it.”

  “I tend to hope that God does help the man who tries to find an answer to peace,” Father Terry said quietly, his eyes holding the other man’s.

  Nothing moved in the room, even Maggie was still, her back to them. Green flame sparked lightly in Jamie’s eyes, simmered and died within the second.

  “You’ll forgive me Father but I tend to think God has rather convenient hearing. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must leave. Will you tell them I’ll be back later? My home,” he said with a charming smile, “has many empty rooms and they will, I believe, need a place to stay.”

  “And many locked doors, I suspect,” Terry muttered to himself as Jamie turned and after a quick word with Maggie, left the room.

  A bowl of porridge, thick with cream and sprinkled with brown sugar was placed with a thump beneath his nose.

  “I’ve always said that thin men ask too many questions.” Terry looked up and met the ferocious gaze of Maggie, who reminded him of a mother bear whose cub has just been threatened. She cocked her head and pointed at the bowl, “An’ as I’ve never seen one so thin as yerself, I’d advise ye to eat.”

  Terry, with the wisdom of a man who’d grown up under the tutelage of five older sisters, ate his porridge and kept his questions to himself.

  Someone had lit candles in the room, a bit of flame and warmth to light and ease the way through the darkness of death. Ironic that the man’s last stop before the road to eternity should be in the sanctuary of the Roman Catholic Church.

  He still lay wrapped in the sheet, folded carefully now, ends tucked in snugly as if to prevent the soul from escape. Was he beyond the flames now, the burning, the hatred? Or had he, b
y his actions, condemned himself to an eternity of those very things? She wasn’t certain which she would prefer.

  She touched a cool hand to her throat and felt it constrict under her fingers, tensing as it had under the knife. She could still feel the searing heat of the fire, even if he was now beyond it. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, stepping back from the bed, where the miasma of charred flesh cluttered her senses. Behind her eyes, she could still see the fire—long, grasping fingers of it. She could hear the pandemonium in the streets, the sound of tanks and people screaming...

  Sleep had been unthinkable that night. She was jumpy, nerve-ridden, the ringing crack of gunshot like an electric shock laid on bare nerves. Near frantic with worry. Casey had promised to come home before nightfall, but dark had come without the reassuring sound of his footstep over the threshold.

  She’d known trouble was inevitable, the streets had smelled of it for days. A sharp, rank scent like an animal soaked in its own fear. She’d stayed inside, door locked, wanting to burrow away from the trouble, to put her head down and keep it down until it was over. She ought to have known better, from past experience if nothing else, trouble didn’t care whether you looked it straight in the face or not, it just kept on coming.

  Just before midnight, she’d smelled smoke, heavy and invasive, and then heard a hard banging on the wall between their home and that of their only neighbor. Mr. Delaney, a widower on his own, partially crippled and confined to his tiny home, its four tiny rooms the entire expanse of his world. He was a quiet man, bothering no one, passing the time of day with her as he leaned out his window to water the window box geraniums that were a bright spot in the dingy street. He must be in trouble or he wouldn’t bang.

  She girded up her courage, unlatched the back door and run across the meager patch of dew-soaked grass they shared with him. His back door was unlocked thankfully and she’d stepped into Mr. Delaney’s tiny kitchen, the smoke choking her instantly. It was everywhere, obscuring vision, disorienting her. She dropped to her knees, crawled to where the sink should be and bumped her head hard into the table and then remembered that everything in his house would be backwards to their own and crawled back in the other direction. She’d found the cupboard, felt her way up and turned the tap on by feel alone. A shriveled rag lay to the side of the sink and she wet it thoroughly under the stream of water and clapped it quickly over her mouth and nose. The smell of sour milk almost made her throw up, but she’d swallowed over the nausea and forced herself to breathe through the filthy rag.