In the Forest

by Edna O'Brien

  “Where are we?” she asks.

  “God’s country,” he says boastfully.

  To one side is woodland, a sombre-green gloom stretching as far as the eye can see, the village, the showery apple orchards of home far behind them, an emptiness that is ghastly. She listens in vain for the thud of a hammer or the revving of a chain saw, but there is none, only him starting up a yodel as he runs around coiling and uncoiling an imaginary lasso.

  “Wayyupwayyupwayyupwayyupwayyupwayyup,” he keeps saying, and it takes her seconds to interpret it as “way up.”

  “That’s how gamesmen lift the birds,” he tells her, except that there are no birds, no birdsong, no evidence of life except a tub-shaped black barrel with POISON scrawled on its surface and a wooden toolshed, the very new wood syrup-coloured in the sunlight. Perhaps it meant that workmen came and went, and presently she expects to see a forester materialise out of that wilderness of green. On a nearby tree at the entrance to a shaded path is a round mirror with a rubber rim, his spyglass, and that along with the strewn branches over the grid tells her that he has planned this escapade. She jumps as a forked twig drops onto her jacket and he flicks it off.

  “Is that kelly green?” he asks, fingering the collar.

  “It’s royal blue, actually,” she says tersely.

  “Okay Okay … wrong script … erase … erase … wipeout.”

  “People saw us, you know,” she says, the calm of her voice in contrast with the pelting of her heart.

  “There’s no one out there for you … or me, sunshine,” he says.

  “I have friends … I do community work. I teach … They’ll be on our trail,” she says.

  “Lonesome trail,” he says. He is staring at her, his eyes both penetrating and dead-looking, like worn leather.

  “Why don’t we have a smoke,” she says.

  “Your shout,” he says, and they sit on a log, their backs to the wood, facing a wasteland of tree stumps and ash-heaped earth. He watches her take the brown cigarette paper from its folder, make a trough, then flake some tobacco into it and roll it.

  “Lick it … lick it,” he says, and watches her moisten it, then tells her to light up.

  “Top o’ the world, ma,” he says, grinning, then throwing off his jacket, and he leans back along a log, smoke wreathing across his young face and his mad chuckling eyes. He is not yet twenty, she reckons, his Adam’s apple supple, like a yo-yo, his arm muscles thick and corded. The short hairs of his moustache, reddish brown in that light, have the bristle of a cornered hedgehog. Maddie has not said a word, his face buried in her lap, peering out at moments through the lattice of his outspread fingers.

  “Ever see White Heat?” O’Kane asks.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Top film … Cody’s mother thought he was the little lamb of God.”

  “Every mother thinks that.”

  “Bollocks. Town bicycle, every mother.”

  “You’d want to watch your language,” she says, and as she gets up and crosses to the car, he grabs hold of her ankle and squeezes it.

  “Yonder,” he says, pointing to the wood.

  “I don’t want to go in there … it’s dark … it’s dismal,” she says, in a voice a little quiet, a little placatory.

  “That’s where you’re going, goat girl … that’s the deal.”

  He waits until they have crossed to the narrow entrance between a line of trees and then he follows, calling “So long” to the ash-heaped wasteland behind them.

  * * *

  How engulfing the darkness, how useless their tracks in the rust-brown carnage of old dead leaves. Pines and spruces close together, their tall solid trunks like an army going on and on, in unending sequence, furrows of muddy brown water and no birds and no sound other than that of a wind, unceasing, like the sound of a distant sea. But it is not sea, it is Cloosh Wood, and they are being marched through it. The ground is soggy underfoot, with here and there shelving rock sheathed in slippery moss. Not even an empty cigarette carton or a trodden plastic bottle, nothing: emptiness, him, them, insects like motes of dust suspended in the air, yet crawling onto her and onto Maddie, who is scratching and whimpering to go home. She is carrying him and hums to simulate some normality. She thinks before she turns, then asks, “What is this for?”

  “They’re after me.”

  “Who’s after you?”

  “Dublin gang … knackers.”

  “They’ll find you here anyhow.”

  “No way … they’re afraid of the banshees.”

  “Look, I’ll drive you wherever you want … I’ll drive you to the boat … I’ll give you money.”

  “You’ve no money.”

  “I’m getting a loan from the bank on my house … we can go there and draw some.”

  “To the branch?” he says, puzzled, then a flying smile.

  “To the branch,” she says matter-of-factly.

  “By the way, that’s my house you’re in … I dossed there … I left that bracelet in the coal bucket.”

  “You can have it back … you can have it all back … the house, the bracelet, the land, the lot.”

  “Trying to bamboozle me?”

  “I’m not bamboozling you … this child is delicate … he has to have medicines every four hours … he suffers with palpitations. We were to drop you in the village, that was the deal.”

  “Your man stayed all night … under the sheets. Did you walk up his leg or down his leg … make any babies?”

  “He is a friend … a platonic friend. He’s helping me to sort the house out.”

  “Fucking prostitute.”

  * * *

  Mick Rafferty is on the phone to his wife, in the shop where she does part-time work. He talks in a hushed, urgent voice and she talks back in the same way, not wanting to be heard.

  “I think I saw the Kinderschreck.”

  “Oh Jesus, was he in our barn again?”

  “No … in the back of a car … with the newcomer, the redhead … laughing like mad.”

  “Michael, are you sure?”

  “I’m sixty per cent sure.”

  “Oh God, protect us.”

  “You’re going to your mother’s tonight … you and the children … you’re to come now and pack the bags.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I can tackle him … I have a gun … but if everyone is here yelling, I’m powerless.”

  “Why would he be laughing, Michael?”

  “I don’t know … maybe he was telling her a horror story.”

  “Maybe he was … maybe she’ll fall for him … maybe she’ll take him off our hands.”

  “I doubt it,” he says, and slowly puts down the phone. He recalls the desperate look on the woman’s face and the Kinderschreck laughing so bad that his back teeth were showing. He knows that laugh. He and his wife and children have heard it and trembled to it in the nights that the Kinderschreck slept in their hay shed and he had been too afraid to go out and order him off. The only traces of him in the morning being lavatory paper and empty biscuit packets.

  * * *

  They are standing arguing. O’Kane takes a round tin box from his pocket, a box that held floor polish once, and he rattles it jubilantly. Maddie listens with his eyes, with his ears, with all of him, as the lid is slowly turned. She jumps several paces back, staggers, and gasps at the sight of the cluster of bullets, brass-coated, their snouts close together. He picks up the rifle, takes out the magazine, puts the bullet in, closes it, then pushes the catch forward and holds it with his index finger, studying them.

  “Please … please don’t fire that gun … talk to me.”

  “Boom boom boom,” he says, and as he pulls the trigger a sharp brittle clatter breaks the immense silence, the lead slug cutting through the treetops, the leaves swirling in its aftermath, and a burning smell.

  “Imagine if you were a child hearing that,” she says.

  “Don’t touch them … don’t touch
one of them, they’re mine,” he is yelling, bent over Maddie, who has crouched by the tray of bullets, studying them.

  “Leave him alone … he doesn’t know what they are … he’s a child,” she shouts.

  “You will behave yourself whilst here,” he says, and lifts Maddie by the collar of his jacket, and she stands between them, daring him to strike her, brave cowboy that he is.

  He seems amused by her flaring up. “Relax, goat girl.”

  “Look … listen … put yourself in our shoes … our predicament.”

  “You know what your problem is?”

  “What?”

  “Your problem is, you don’t trust.”

  “And what’s your problem?”

  “My fucking head isn’t right … My heart is right, but they fucked my head up.”

  “All right, then … let’s talk to your heart.”

  “Give us a snog.”

  “Don’t be cheeky.”

  “We’re not talking heart-to-heart, are we … we’re talking shit … Are you wired?”

  “Where are your family?”

  “Family … that’s funny. They killed my ma … the way they killed Cody’s ma.”

  “There must be somebody.”

  “Only my granny and my sister.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Loughrea.”

  “I know Loughrea. I have friends there … Why don’t we go and we can call on your granny?”

  “Too risky.”

  “What are you wanted for?”

  “Larceny, robbery, possession of firearms … devil’s work … Bastards want to put lead in me.”

  “But it’s not fair to punish us … we’re not your enemy … we don’t want to put lead into you.”

  “You’re the one,” he says, and takes a folded brown envelope from his pocket and hands it to her. Her name is scrawled in pencil inside a crude drawing of a pumpkin. “Read it.” She looks down at the daubed ruled page, the laboured childish handwriting she recognises as from the note that was left on her car seat outside the caravan site. She reads rapidly:

  I am asking you to go with me I know you might not understand what it means, but I would like if you say yes please say yes do not show this letter to anybody or tell anybody because they would tease us don’t tell anyone please understand if your answer is yes we will start now please say yes don’t be embarrassed signed Michen.

  “It’s for you,” he says as she hands it back.

  “It’s an old letter and it says Veronica, Dear Veronica.”

  “She fucking pulled back … she’s for it … should’ve given her lead.”

  “I’m not Veronica … you know that.”

  Furious now he snatches the letter back and shouts, “Giveusthephone giveusthephone giveusthephone.” He bellows his orders into it: “Reported on sick parade … metal in Vomitus. Released from medical centre. Reunited with family at front gates. Energy level terrific. Chlorophyll feed. C and D not necessary. Proceeding northwest as per coda. Over. Over.” He is looking at them but not seeing them, arguing furiously with a host of voices, his answers clotted, indeterminate.

  * * *

  Mick Rafferty is bundling his wife and children into the car. Aoise, the youngest, is crying because the boogie man that slept in their hay shed is back. His father says that he is not in their hay shed now and never will be.

  “Are you sure it was the Kinderschreck?” his wife, Tilly, asks.

  “I’m seventy per cent sure.”

  “You were only sixty per cent sure an hour ago.”

  “I’m sure for definite.”

  “Maybe you should go to the guards.”

  “If I go to the guards it’ll only bring him back on us … The guards are as afraid of him as you or me.”

  “You said he was laughing.”

  “The girl wasn’t laughing. She looked scared … dead scared.”

  “Oh, God grant someone will tie him up soon.”

  * * *

  They are walking again, Eily’s face caked with mud and scratched because twice she has tripped and fallen. At moments her eyes seem to go blurry. Endless line of trees, tree trunks, thin branches jutting out like spikes. Maddie keeps slipping down onto her hip and gently she hauls him back, trying to fold him in sleep, because asleep he is not crying, not fretting, he is dreaming, dreaming of home maybe, of Elmer and his blackthorn stick for thwacking the cows. At moments the needles and branches appear to her to have gone inside her mind and inside her mouth. Tiny insects crawl in the corners of her eyes and nest under her clothes. The air is stifling. “Hold on … hold on tight,” she whispers to Maddie each time he begins to slip. At moments she is weirdly calm, telling herself there is a particular place, a point they have to reach, for some bizarre reason, which will be the turning point, and they will be going back home. She even asks herself why it had to be, why her, some lesson to be learnt, some truth, some indelible truth. Other moments she begins to hallucinate, sees the apple blossom blowing through their garden, sees Declan and Cassandra and Sven, all waving to her, holding up a burned kettle. She remembers the harried drive along the road, the gorse coming into bloom, the postmistress in her van, the tall man at the gate ignoring her. As for the time, she has no idea. This is all time and no time. Her twenty-odd years condensed into this lunatic present. So it is the next step and the next and the next half step, and Maddie beginning to pee and taking him behind a tree, the steam, warm and sweet-smelling, his face stark white but his cheeks red as tomatoes.

  “Mama.” He has not called her by that name since he was tiny; it has come back to him in this extremity.

  “I’m here … I’m here,” she says, smoothing his sweating hair.

  “Will Cass and Sven and Declan and everybody come?”

  “Yes, they will.”

  “And tie the robber up?”

  “They will,” she says, holding him tight, tighter, willing him back into her, into safety. He looks so little, so helpless, with his dungarees down around his ankles, both knowing and not knowing what is going on.

  “Up up up,” she says, hoisting him over her shoulder. She thinks that if they can come through the darkness and out into a clearing that the worst will have transpired. Not yet thinking the unthinkable. She stops all of a sudden, falters, then her legs buckle, refusing to carry her any farther. Sunk to the ground and looking up at O’Kane, she pleads with him, “You wouldn’t put your granny through this.”

  “I would if I had to … I nearly killed my granny. My voices were telling me, egging me on: ‘Do her, do her.’”

  “What voices?”

  “Big tall man with horns … over in England after I got out of jail, I went to my cousin’s … He wanted me to pick up a carving knife and cut my cousin Anthony up in bits … I went into the toilet to fool him … I counted … I counted to a hundred.”

  “Come on … that’s what we’ll do … we’ll count to a hundred,” she says, standing again. She starts counting, as if she is on a stage, then Maddie joins in, and so does he, a rousing trio, a choir of voices, ringing out in the emptiness of the vast, drowsing, unheeding, noonday wood. When they have reached several hundred they are panting and he stops and leans against a tree, a baleful look on his face. She knows she has broken through to him, to that human kernel in him and, as she believes, in all mankind. Even his eyes seem less threatening, bewilderment in them. He is trembling and she thinks that the fear which had run in her blood and run in her thinking runs in him too, and that it is a matter now of reaching to the child in him, the child cut off from the outraged youth.

  “I was in the fear zone back there,” he says, wiping the sweat from his face, from his palms, with a filthy handkerchief.

  “We were all in the fear zone back there … but we’re better now.”

  “I was seeing hazes. I was cracking up,” he says, and looking up at the sky, laughs and says, “Doctor cunt rode his horse down the mountain in the snow, got a bag of messages and hung them on the
side of the saddle … You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I do believe you.”

  “He wanted attention. Do you want attention?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Near thing with my cousin Anthony …”

  “You’re fine now,” she says gently.

  “Send that kid tobogganing,” he says, the toe of his boot squashing hers.

  “There’s nothing for him to toboggan on, and anyhow, he’s exhausted.”

  He draws her towards him, an urgency in his voice: “We really didn’t know, did we, how good it could be … them times rolling around up here in the leaves and the muck … knackered … stuffing the food into my mouth like a mother … like a mother. I must admit I don’t often fall in love, but you got under my skin … animal magnetism.”

  “Tell you what … let’s go back to the town and I’ll buy you a pint.”

  “What do you teach them kids in that school?”

  “Games. Rhymes.”

  “Up came the blackbird and bit off her nose,” he says.

  “One two three four five, once I caught a fish alive. Six seven eight nine ten, then I let it go again,” Maddie pipes up to surpass him.

  “Bogger … behave yourself whilst here.”

  “Darling, tell him the poem you learnt … go on,” she says, coaxing Maddie, trying to mediate. Maddie mutters it and she repeats it with a studied calm.

  I went out to the hazel wood

  Because a fire was in my head,

  And cut and peeled a hazel wand

  And hooked a berry to a thread.

  “I’d like to learn that … The teacher learnt us a story about a princess that pricked her finger on a spinning wheel and was put away, and the prince had to come and beat down the brambles to rescue her.”

  “We have that story … we’ll loan it to you when we get back.”

  “Who says we’re going back?”

  “I do, because I’m the boss … I’m the mother.”

  “Okay … free kick to you,” and he goes into peals of laughter, and Maddie stares at him, quite still, still and white like a little snowman.