In the Forest

by Edna O'Brien

  “Of course you’re entitled to a solicitor … no one’s stopping you … but if you take my advice, we’ll work it out here between the three of us. A solicitor will complicate matters at this juncture. Look, we have no papers, no pens, no notetaking … It’s a nice easy friendly atmosphere … You and Frank and me,” Gerry says.

  “Where’s Father John?” Frank asks.

  “Precisely, we start with Father John … The whole diocese has gone hysterical … Masses offered for him every morning … very popular man,” Gerry says.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “We’re talking about three missing people, a woman and a child and a priest.”

  “They must be joyriding,” O’Kane says, and sneers.

  “Don’t give us that shit,” Frank says.

  “Easy now, Frank … Michen here has had a tough life … packed off to a home at ten or eleven … your poor mother dying. Do you want to talk about your poor mother. It’ll help. They say a grief like that, bottled up, is a bad thing for a child … What age were you?”

  “She was smothered in her coffin and I know who did it.”

  “Where’s the priest?” Frank asks, leaning in close to him.

  “You have the wrong man,” O’Kane tells him.

  “But you know they’re missing.”

  “You fuckers set me up … I’ve never heard of these people.”

  “A gun was taken off you at approximately nine-thirty-five this morning … it had been fired a few times. What were you shooting?”

  “A hit from a bullet doesn’t always mean that people die … it can be a shot in the air.”

  “Mich … what’s the story. The sooner you get it off your chest, the sooner you will be out of here. The superintendent in this unit is as decent a man as you could find … a family man … if you cooperate so will he … he’s no sadist,” Gerry says.

  “I was shooting vermin.”

  “What kind of vermin?” Frank at his most sarcastic.

  “So you were in the woods … Maybe you came across people in the woods … or you might have heard them crying out for help.” Gerry, still solicitous.

  “I want cigarettes.”

  “You’ll get your fucking cigarettes when you answer these questions. Where are the missing people?”

  “You won’t get my dabs on them and you can’t keep me here much longer. I know the law … I’m here under Section 30.”

  “Section 30, my arse … Where are they? Either you tell us or we’ll drag it out of you.”

  “Now now, Frank … we’re all a bit het up. You see, Michen, there’s a fierce responsibility on our heads. The whole country is asking, not just two men in uniform. These people have to be somewhere in this locality and you’re the one that knows where … you were seen with the woman and the child … people saw you in the back of her car, crouched down.”

  “She gave me a lift a few miles up the road … Then I got out, because I don’t go near towns.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Ask the assholes in the town. She was a mover and shaker … ye should have found her by now. Get me my fucking cigarettes.”

  “Look, if you don’t level with us, the boys from Dublin will handle this and they’ll put the squeeze on you … up in the upstairs room, if you get my drift.”

  “Knackers have them.”

  “What knackers?”

  “I’m not telling you. If I tell, I’ll be framed.”

  “Are they alive?”

  “The woman and the child are alive. I saw them Wednesday … They had food, they were watching TV.”

  “So they’re in a house.”

  “I’m not saying.”

  “Are they in this locality?”

  “No … they’re hundreds of miles away.”

  “And they’re hostages?”

  “I told you all I’m fucking going to tell you.”

  “Is the priest alive?”

  “It was a robbery that went wrong. The bathroom window was open, and Joe and I waited inside … Joe conked him with an iron bar …”

  “Who’s Joe?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Cunt. You’ll go down one way or another … You saw that crowd waiting outside when you were brought in. There are men who will be more than happy to take you for a ride.”

  “I’ll get your wife and your kids, scumbag.”

  “You’ll be behind bars for thirty years, scumbag.”

  “Look, Frank, why don’t you go and get a cup of coffee and Michen and myself will sort this out … Oh, and ask one of the lads to go get cigarettes.”

  “Bastard,” O’Kane says.

  “He’s a tough man, Frank, but don’t get on the wrong side of him. Anyhow, to get back to business … if Joe conked the priest, does it mean that he killed him?”

  “I saw the blood pouring out of his head … He was not afraid to die.”

  “So he’s dead?”

  “He didn’t die straightaway … They put him in a laneway in a wood and shone the lights of the car on him. He tried to run away, but he couldn’t … God’s brother.”

  “Who shot God’s brother?”

  “The knackers … If she’s not dropped outside a shop by midnight tomorrow, I’ll grass them up.”

  “In the name of Jesus, grass them now.”

  * * *

  “Off the wall … off the wall,” Gerry says as he flings his jacket down in frustration.

  “We know he’s off the wall, but what have we got?” the superintendent asks him.

  “He shot the priest. He turned the car lights on in a lane in the wood and made him kneel down …”

  “We have him … he’s admitted to it.”

  “He won’t sign it … he won’t fecking sign it.”

  “Go back in. Bring Kinsella with you, all twenty-two stone of him, hold the pen in the fecker’s hand and tell him it’s us or the Dublin crowd … the rat pack. No, on second thought, this is country business … we’re running this. He’s a country boy, he needs country muscle.”

  Absolution

  THE ELDERLY PRIEST and O’Kane shake hands and stand in the little visiting parlour, each waiting for the other to take a seat. There is a tray with cups, saucers, and a plate of biscuits. He is an old priest, Father Christopher, kind, quiet-spoken, happiest when reading his missal, spring-cleaning his soul for eternity.

  “How are you, Michen … how are you doing?”

  “Bad … they’re bastards … I met you in Killarney …”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You were at the tote window … you didn’t have your collar on.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you now, to see you’re bearing up.”

  “I have things on my mind … a lot of things.”

  “Yes, Superintendent McBride said you asked for a priest.”

  “I did … I do.”

  “Is it in a confessional sense, Michen, that you asked for a priest?”

  “What else.”

  “Now, before we continue, I want you to understand something: It would be a very onerous position for me to be put in, a position I would prefer not to be in … if … if for instance you had something of import to tell me.”

  “Is God like you?”

  “Oh no … God is God. He is above everything, everyone.”

  “Is he understanding?”

  “He is. He is also all-knowing and all-seeing, omnipotent, omniscient.”

  “I don’t like the Pope … he’s a bastard, I wrote to tell him.”

  “Do you pray, Michen?”

  “I said a prayer for them missing people. Did God see what I done?”

  “He’d see what you did and whatever you did he’d understand it.”

  “Will I be forgiven?”

  “I believe you will. Remember Jesus in His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane … how He asked forgiveness for His executioners: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

&nbs
p; “I’m not a psychopath … I’m not mad … it’s them fuckers that’s making me mad.”

  “Tell me, Michen, did you know Father John?”

  “Not well.”

  “But you called on him.”

  “He was wearing a gold watch that had writing on the back of it … it was given to him as a present. I thought of fecking it off him, but then I didn’t because I knew they’d frame me … He was a good man.”

  “As a lay person would you like me to act as a mediator between the guards and the detectives and yourself?”

  “They’re assholes … I want you to hear my confession.”

  “I would rather not.”

  But O’Kane is already kneeling, blessing himself, saying the prayer that he said as a child when he went into the confessional: “Bless me, Father, because I have sinned.” The priest takes the purple stole that he carries in case of coming on any accident and puts it around his neck and kneels and closes his eyes, dreading what will be revealed.

  “It was last Thursday. It was a gang doing a house and it went wrong … pissing rain … We found the top of the bathroom window open and the curtain pulled back. The priest drove the car into the garage and came around the side of the house … Joe hit him with an iron bar. We tied him up and put him in the back seat … I drove him to a car park. Joe followed in his car, because he wanted no shit … I had to drive the priest to my own area. We spent the night in a house … I had a sleep. The birds wakened me in the morning and I brought him out.”

  “Did he take long to die?”

  “No, he went fast.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He asked me to spare his life … The woman is dead, too.”

  “And the child, is the child dead or alive?”

  “I don’t know … with the knackers you can never assume …”

  “Where are their bodies?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “You can tell God … it’s God you’re talking to through me.”

  “You’re not to tell them out there … you can’t break the confessional oath.”

  “They must be told.”

  “You can’t … I confessed before God … I’m not confessing to them … I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.”

  “There’s a child, maybe alive. Just think of God’s rejoicing at this eleventh hour if you save a little lamb from the slaughter … just think.”

  “I don’t remember shooting him … maybe he ran away.”

  “Why did you kill the priest?”

  “I had to … he was going to baptise the devil’s child. The woman was a devil, too, a she-devil, a sinner.”

  As the priest intones the words of the absolution they seem hollow, they seem a blasphemy to God, and having finished, he gets up shakily and goes out, torn between his duty to God and his duty to mankind.

  * * *

  The superintendent and the others know that the priest knows something but that he cannot tell them; so shaken was he when he came out that a guard was sent to the public house to fetch a large brandy and ginger ale. He is sipping it slowly, twirling the glass, looking out the window at people passing by, and all he seems to see are young mothers with children and all he can think of is a child screaming over a dead mother, trying to bring her back to life. He can see the guards looking at him and respecting his plight.

  “So it’s bad,” the superintendent says.

  “It’s a shocker,” he says quietly.

  “I have only ten more hours … then I’ll have to let him go.”

  “I’d tell you everything if I could.”

  “I know that, Father. I know that. Can you tell us if you think he would take a life?”

  “I think he would, but then again it could be just fantasy … He comes out with strange remarks. For instance, he said he saw me down in Killarney at the tote window with my collar off … I’ve never been to a race meeting.”

  “That’s baloney,” Frank says. “That’s to put you off the scent. Our little twister O’Kane knows his stuff … he’s been juggling the authorities since he was eleven years. In one of the homes he was shown a piece of paper that said ‘My future,’ and asked to finish the sentence, he wrote ‘is very bad.’ Send him out to the street corners of any slum in any city and he’ll see kids whose future is very bad and they haven’t turned criminal.”

  “What is it that warps a child … what is it that changes a child from being a child?” the priest asks.

  “I can’t answer that, Father. But if somebody had taken that pup, his father or an uncle, and given him the hammering of a lifetime … we wouldn’t be crawling on our knees begging him to tell us where missing people are. The state spoils them … all this pussyfooting, all this hand-wringing … his childhood, his loneliness, his mother … lots of kids with no mothers who don’t steal cars and don’t burn cars and don’t take women at gunpoint … Little creep, little coward.”

  “Time, gentlemen, time,” the superintendent says, holding up the watch he has had to remove from his wrist on account of a rash he has developed. His insides are scalding.

  “There’s something I feel I want to say,” the priest says, rising, lifting his hands helplessly. “The day I was ordained, there were five of us, and afterwards we were all told to hold hands and so we did. We held hands, and then there was a white linen cloth wound around each of our hands, like a bandage, and we were told to take it and keep it and give it to someone very special when the need arose. My mother died last autumn and I put that cloth in her hands in the coffin. If I had it now I would put it into that boy’s hands, but I don’t have it, I don’t have it … and I am telling you in the only language that is permitted to me.”

  “I see … I do see,” the superintendent says grimly.

  Then laughter started up, loud peals, a baying, and their heads turned to the door.

  “It’s your man … it’s one of his stunts,” Frank says, and they wait, expecting it to stop, except that it doesn’t; it mounts, it magnifies, growing more macabre, more threatening with each bout, and they look from one to the other in dismay.

  “He has been laughing now seventeen minutes,” the superintendent says, holding up his watch.

  “I make it eighteen, sir.”

  “Eighteen minutes of animal laughter.”

  “Bizarre.”

  The laughter went on unabated, and there was something terrible, something eerie in it, as if it would never end and they would never stop hearing it, and even when it did die down, it would be like a poltergeist along those corridors, O’Kane’s curse on them.

  A Plea

  HE IS with his grandmother. Through the observation hole they see them kissing, embracing, crying, and then sitting close as the grandmother takes clean socks and underpants from a pillow slip and lays them tenderly on his lap as if they are gifts.

  “How are you, son?”

  “Not so bad,” he says, and suddenly starts to laugh, and the laugh frightens her because it is as if his insides are being laughed out of him. She holds him to contain it, to calm him in some way, and eventually does.

  “Why do you laugh, Michen … is it because you haven’t slept?”

  “I fucked up bad with that gun … it wasn’t worth a fuck.”

  “You’ll tell me, won’t you … you’ll tell me what you’ve done.”

  “I’ve done nothing.”

  “Don’t lie to me. It’s known that you took the woman and the child in a car.”

  “There’s another man involved … why don’t they find him?”

  “Look, you can deny it to them, but not to me. It’s written all over your face.”

  “They’re cunts … if I go down I’ll bring them down with me.”

  “But where are the people?”

  “I don’t want to talk about them people …”

  “You don’t have to talk about them. You just have to say, they’re in Meelic … they’re in Mohara, they’re in Derrygoolin or in Derrycon, Clonoila, Clonru
sh, Coose, Allendara …”

  “They would be places where they might be.”

  “Are they alive, son?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because a gang have them and they’ve put a price on their heads.”

  “What gang?”

  “A hardened gang … Dublin, England …”

  “Tell me more. If you can’t talk to me, you can’t talk to anyone …”

  “I’ve no one in the world.”

  “You have me, son, and your sister and your poor mother looking down from heaven on her little boy.”

  “My mind is gone, Gran.”

  “In what way … Like, can you see me … can you tell the colour of my eyes … Can you tell the day of the week?”

  “Why didn’t you come sooner?”

  “I did come sooner … I came the moment I heard. I wanted to be near you … I asked them to put a bed in here beside you, but they wouldn’t. I was awake all night with the bells ringing … did you hear them?”

  “I did.”

  “They’re from the abbey. The poor nuns get up two and three times a night to pray … three hundred years of prayers and penance. They’re praying for you now, love, and I’m asking you as your truest friend, Where are the three people?”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  “You can tell me, you can. Get it off your chest. I know you’re in pain … I see it in your eyes, in the way you’re smoking, in the way you’re fiddling, in the way you eat the cigarettes.”

  “They think they’ll break me … they’ll never break me.”

  “We’re all broken, son. We’re all of us broken by this and we won’t mend … we won’t ever mend.”

  “Fuck you … they’ve twisted you against me,” and jumping up, he pulls open the door that is already ajar and flings her out, telling her to fuck off home, traitor that she is. She shakes her head at the two guards that have been standing outside. She doesn’t have to tell them what they already overheard.

  Old Times

  THE TOWN was dark and dormant, the drawn blinds smack up against the tiny windowpanes above the shops and public houses. The limestone fortress of the convent solid as a mountain range. Dogs slept and snarled under the gates of the side yards and little streams came rushing down out of nowhere.