In the Forest

by Edna O'Brien

  He can just see Geraldine, one hand in her apron pocket, wagging a finger, fuming, “Go to the guards,” and him saying, “The guards are no friend of mine and never were,” and not telling her, because it would scare her, of O’Kane’s parting shot, “You go to the guards and you’re a dead man.” He can’t tell that to the guards, can’t tell it to Helena, can’t tell it, has to keep it to himself, alone in his room, his faithful weapon gone.

  Chase

  IT IS DARK as the patrol car comes tearing down the lane and swings into Cooney’s back yard, stones hopping off the kitchen window and Kim, their little terrier, yapping. They storm into the kitchen shouting abuse at Jim Cooney and his wife for harbouring a felon. Children who have been around the table back off and huddle on the stairs, nervous at the sight of two men in uniform.

  “Bring him down,” Corbett, the senior guard, says.

  “The hell I will. You come in here like cowboys, scare the wits out of my kids …”

  “We know he was here … we have proof.”

  “Look, Rambo … I’d agreed with Guard Tully that if O’Kane came in here again I’d feed him, talk to him, and Rita, my wife, would telephone the barracks and ye’d park the car up on the road and walk in the back door and I’d express surprise. Instead of that ye burst in …”

  “So why didn’t you telephone the barracks when he got here?”

  “He stayed two minutes. … He wanted a sleeping bag that he left here before he went to England … and at this very moment he could be on the other side of that ditch resolving to kill me and my family for talking to scumbags like you.”

  “We have to bring him in,” Corbett says.

  “Ye took your time over it,” Cooney says with a sneer.

  “We had nothing on him until Cissy’s car was found.”

  “A pile of ash … You won’t get his dabs on it.”

  “Is he armed?”

  “He says he has an axe and an iron bar.”

  “Where did he go?” Guard Corbett does not so much ask as fling the question from the doorway.

  “Off.”

  “For feck’s sake, cut out the fascism, Jim.”

  “Look, cut out your own fascism. He goes one direction, then he turns round and comes back the same way. There is no method … there’s only chaos, madness.”

  “What’s his mental state?” O’Herlihy asks.

  “Hyper.”

  “So where might he be?”

  “I’d try the Congo … he often calls to Minogue in a caravan up there.”

  “You hide him on us again and you’re done,” Corbett says, and goes out.

  * * *

  They are on the mountain road by the cow walk where Moira Tuohey had reported dropping him off. Desolate country. The odd light from a window only emphasising the long and tedious distances, neither dog nor man in sight. Sometimes they slow down to peer out at a bit of plastic or a torn coat on the wayside, both hoping and not hoping that they will find traces of him.

  “I wonder what brought him back.”

  “To hurt the father … nothing more and nothing less.”

  As they veer off the road over a bed of rocks into a field, O’Herlihy whistles to give himself pluck. In the thick, sightless, mountain darkness the weak light from the caravan gives the appearance of a ship far out at sea, receding from them. Next to it is a second caravan, sunk into the ground, saplings forking out of the roof.

  “Oh, state of the art,” O’Herlihy says, then, “We’ll park the car so that the headlights shine directly on the door.”

  They trip and stumble on stones and various bits of machinery, greeted by a growling dog and hens huddled under the adjoining caravan.

  “Do we knock or do we call?”

  “We shout.”

  Minogue opens the door of the caravan and extends his arms in mock crucifixion. He is in his shirtsleeves and wearing rubber waders up to his thighs.

  “Have you seen O’Kane?”

  “As a matter of fact I have.”

  “Bring him out.”

  “Come in yourselves and get him.”

  Then O’Kane appears. It is as if he didn’t walk out of the back room but flew, abrupt and raving, holding something and shouting, “Get back or I’ll blow your fucking heads away.”

  The light from inside the caravan gives a puny feeble glare so that it is impossible to say what he is holding, whether it is a gun, a hurley stick, or an iron bar.

  “Put that weapon down,” O’Herlihy says, edging forward in a youthful show of bravura.

  “You young eejit, I’ll put you in a bog hole,” O’Kane says, leaping in a transport of joy and fury, wielding the thing with long, swinging thrusts.

  “Come back … we’re not going to die for that fucker,” Corbett says, and the two of them take cover behind the car, watching as he races back and forth, the caravan bouncing, calling them cowards, assholes, threatening them and all those belonging to them. Then, as if he has wings, he floats from the caravan over barbed wire and into and beyond a copse of young evergreen trees. They move from where they have been crouching, vexed and confounded, listening for but not hearing the sound of his feet running through the dark. Corbett massages his stiff knee with a kind of weary fatalism. He is still going through the motions of following the fucker, of catching him, but he is not following. Instead, he yells at Minogue to come out and account for himself.

  “You are harbouring a criminal, you pup.”

  “He called for a cup of tea … I was pouring it when you boys dropped by.”

  “We could arrest you, you know.”

  “You weren’t fuck able to arrest him.”

  “There was a serious danger to Guard O’Herlihy and myself … his language, his movements, his stance were all threatening.”

  “That wasn’t a gun, that was a broomstick,” Minogue says, and he picks it up and rides it and starts crooning: “Gee up, old gal, for we’ve got to get home … to … night.”

  In the car they do everything to reassure each other.

  “To have run after him would have been craziness.”

  “Oh, mad. The fight in him,” O’Herlihy says.

  “It looked like a gun, did it not?”

  “You’d need to be a genius in that light to say it wasn’t.”

  “We won’t find him tonight … he’s in some hole … but find him we will … the rat.”

  As they get back towards the town they are quiet, constrained. Outside the station they stand to stretch their legs. The same stars, a few dogs, the quenched string of fairy lights around the pub, not a sound and yet an unease. He could be anywhere, behind the stack of porter barrels, beyond the high wall of the youth hostel, up in the ash tree, anywhere and fucking nowhere.

  “I feel kinda bad,” O’Herlihy says.

  Corbett does not answer. A sentence seems to grind repeatedly inside his head: We let him go … we let the little fugitive go.

  A Letter

  “QUEASY IN THE HEAD, queasy in the tum-tums, too much diddly-diddly-dee … queasy in the head, queasy in the tum-tums, too much diddly-diddly-dee.”

  Maddie goes around the kitchen, half singing it, then opens the door and shouts it out to the cows and the stocky red bull. Eily sits on the stairs drinking a mug of coffee, summoning the strength to go to the village. There will be a letter from Sven. She is sure of it. Her hair is all knotted from the reckless midnight swim and she has not the will to draw a comb through it. Snatches of the previous evening make her laugh, make her groan. The singing, the barbecue with Otto as head bottlewasher, and too much diddly-diddly-dee. Her head is splitting. She takes a scarf off the back of a chair and winds it around until she is slathered in it like a mummy.

  “Eily’s a mummy,” she says wanly.

  “Eily’s a mummy,” he says, and opens the door again to announce it to the herd, then slams it shut. He is jocular because there are no lessons. Every morning there is a lesson. He puts dots on a word in his colouring book and writ
es a name in English and in French. The French is on account of Elmer the elephant’s being a French boy. Elmer is watching from the dresser, Elmer with his harlequin suit and his cloth eyes, who doesn’t miss a trick, making sure that they don’t go without him. Elmer is no fool. His droopy ears are all agog. He has a squeak box inside his belly. Eily loves bellies. Eily paints women with bellies. Bellies bellies bellies. He came out of Eily’s belly and he was a giant.

  Since she feels too queasy to carry him, he takes one of the big sticks from behind the door and they set out across the mud field, him jabbering nonstop. If only he would shut up. If only the birds would stop singing. If only a cold breeze would circulate through her head. Bits of the previous evening keep coming back, the excitement, the banter, the jokes the men made, the ice cold swim, the way it felt like getting born down there, then the warmth from the barbecue, their heated faces, a young boy singing a love song, keening it out to the lonely fields and the distant lilac mountain. Too much diddly-diddly-dee, like there was no tomorrow. Tommy, the soberest of the group, landing the van in a ditch and their having to walk to the house of the young accountant, and his coming out in his striped underpants and everyone getting the giggles. Much cajoling to get admitted, and then seven of them packed into a room, like children, unable to restrain themselves, still laughing, still intoxicated. The young accountant coming back every few minutes and threatening to turf them out on the road if they didn’t stop their malarking. No tomorrow.

  When she held the letter up, her eyes brimmed with emotion. She knew it would be there and it was. But for her own stubbornness he could be there himself, talking away, and they would be crossing the road to Ownies for toasties and coffee, Maddie plying Sven with pompous little questions about farming. It was a pale blue envelope with wavelets of paler blue, and it had a lot of stamps. She walked to the bench under the tree, saw how damp it was, but sat there anyhow.

  “Can Elmer and me go for a walk?”

  “Don’t go far.”

  It was as if Sven were there talking to her, she could hear his voice, that soft bedtime voice reassuring her:

  So I am back in my old room in my parents’ house in the eastern part of the country, close to the German border. From my window I have a view of a church steeple and a watercolour sky. It has been raining the whole week. Because I got to know you so much through our listening to music together, it is now very important to me. There was an old keyboard in the room here that I got tuned and I play on it, songs we played, if you remember. I am also getting on with my studies. I plan to be a bit more intensive in that part of my life, as it’s a good way of forgetting. How is your place coming along? Does the roof still leak? Maybe not, maybe Declan came. My strongest memory is our going out that night just to make certain no one had squatted in it and playing the car tape very loud and the music went off outside and down to the lake and we made us a dance in the dark under the stars: You can get it if you really want, you can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try, try and try.

  I meet vibrant, red-haired, attractive, husky-voiced women every time I go down the street. Hahaha. That’s not true. It’s a shame people can’t express themselves better. Listen to the tapes, I guess. Of course I’m thinking about all things small and big.

  She decides to write two letters, the safe and the unsafe, and would ponder over which one she should send:

  The other morning I went up the track to give an eye to the ewes in Dessie’s field because they are about to lamb. There was a fox coming across the opposite field, lifting its leg every other minute, and then it crossed a stream and I wondered if it saw me or if it would attack the ewes. Smokey, our stray dog, spotted it and chased it, the two of them flying like mad over the fields, barking, their coats a mirage of red and grey, rounding on each other, and then the fox disappearing into a hole and Smokey hurrying back, panting, waiting for his reward, the big, dozy, pregnant ewes oblivious of his valour …

  She put it down and began her second letter:

  Believe me, I did not want wedding bells. I hoped for something to happen between us that would be permanent, and maybe it has. Life is a roller coaster and we never know, do we?

  A scream broke in on her thoughts and then the crunch of brakes and someone running and her turning to look. What she saw was a car veering onto the pavement to avoid an oncoming Jeep and Maddie thrown up into the air like a ball, then coming down again and dropping under the Jeep, then a deathly silence, and as she runs, the driver of the Jeep, a woman wearing a man’s hat, has her head out the window perplexed. Fred from the garage comes running, shouting, “Don’t move the car … don’t move it … the fan is under there … it’ll cut the hands off him,” and as he grips the front wheels, he mimes to the woman that he is going to push them back slowly, slowly. Eily and those who have foregathered watch, aghast.

  “Hello there … hello there,” they hear Fred say as he stoops down.

  “Is he alive … is he alive?” the women shout, and Eily drops to her knees, her hands reaching in to him.

  As the Jeep is pushed back she sees Maddie like a trapped animal, curled up, his knees to his chest, his face a stark white, and then as he opens his eyes and blinks and reblinks, a wail of thanksgiving goes up: “It’s a miracle … it’s a miracle … he’s alive.”

  As she reaches in, he begins to shake, his whole body convulsing. When she lifts him out he feels broken, like a vessel on the point of falling apart. The onlookers say that he must be left there, that she must not pick him up, that she could injure him even more.

  “Leave me alone … leave me alone,” she says, gathering him up in her arms, feeling his bones through his clothes, holding him tight, tighter, the onlookers urging her to bring him to the doctor and she refusing and just staring down at him, incredulous, her little mite, her parcel of infinity.

  “It’s all Elmer’s fault … he ran out,” Maddie says, basking in the sympathy all around him, and there in the middle of the road is Elmer, unscathed, strangely comic and plucky in his harlequin outfit.

  A Will

  IN THE OUTER OFFICE of the solicitor, Eily can hear him having an argument over the phone, saying intemperate things, then laughing at his own gall. His secretary, who is typing at the nearby desk, seems to ignore it, and a couple seated on a stool are so shy and so fearful they do not even look up, the young woman just staring down at the tattered magazines on the glass-top table.

  Edward, the solicitor, comes out, laughing, rubbing his hands as if all the invective has cheered him up.

  “I want you to act for Colm as well as me,” the shy woman says, half standing.

  “How the feck can I act for Colm if I’m defending you, Cora?”

  “He says he won’t do it again … he won’t harm me.”

  “I want to hear it from his own lips,” Edward says, turning to Colm, who is wringing the sleeve of his jacket, bashful, unable to speak.

  “All right, then … whisper it … imagine you’re in the confessional and making an act of perfect contrition … if that’s not too hard for you to imagine … and you’re saying, ‘I will not go with that painted Dublin woman in her Mercedes again … I will not be her odd-job man… and I will not come home four nights a week dead drunk and I will not beat up Cora.’”

  “He means it … he bought me this ring,” and she holds up a silver ring with lovers entwined. Edward glances at it, then at her, then shakes his head. “There’s a stone seat under the bridge where the pair of you can sit and watch the ducks going quack quack quack and stop wasting my fucking time.”

  The first thing Eily notices is a vast unfinished jigsaw, occupying most of the table, his papers and documents on the floor.

  “For the ulcer,” he says ruefully.

  “I’d like to make a will,” she says, a little constrained.

  “Are you single?”

  “Sort of … I have a child. There is a daddy, but I’m by myself now.”

  “Fancy free,” he says,
and then less jocularly, “Are you worried about something?”

  “I’m probably imagining things …”

  “Well, whatever … you’re doing the sensible thing. I’m always recommending it to people … the trouble I’ve had about wills … fisticuffs. You see that door there? Well, they broke it down one night … the sons or daughters of a certain farmer … I know it was them, but I could never prove it. They got the door down, ransacked the files … they didn’t touch the kitty money … All they wanted was to get their hands on that document.”

  * * *

  “I wonder what made her make a will … usually it’s when people have the wind up,” Edward says to Maeve, who is still typing.

  “She left this,” she says, holding up a diary with a cloth cover patterned with dainty rosebuds.

  “Oh, we can’t read her diary.”

  “I have,” she says, and unprompted begins to read aloud:

  When they are all here, Declan and Cassandra and Ming and Otto and the others, and we are smoking and drinking and propounding our tinpot ideas, I am full of fun and even showing off a bit, and then after a few hours a shutter comes down inside me and I want them to be gone. I want my life back, my aloneness. It is the same when I fall in love. I fall in love and I become the creature that the man requires. I allow myself to be overruled, but already the love has cracks in it like cracks in a mirror. The hard experience of married life has made me afraid. Yet I tell myself that it will be different with Sven, free love, free thinkers, free everything.