In the Forest

by Edna O'Brien

  A long, cylindrical globe of cold blue light shone above the barracks door, and inside, a team of guards and detectives from across the country paced and mulled and argued, waiting for O’Kane to break. Thirty of the thirty-six hours had passed and nerves were beginning to feel rattled. They took turns to go in pairs, even twice going into the cell to waken him with just that one question: “Where are the missing people … just tell us where they are.” At times he has roared back at them, other times threatened them, and still others laughed, those bouts that sent shivers through them and made them fear for their wives and children at home alone. Their hopes now are pinned on O’Mara, one of the guards that tried to help him in his young days.

  “You must excuse my attire,” Guard O’Mara says, shaking hands with several of them who welcome him like a prophet. His pyjamas dip down under his trousers and he is wearing no collar or tie. Hs is excited. He’s been retired for a few years, his days spent looking at television, looking into the fire, eating too much, especially cream buns, and now he is wanted again, intermediary and hero. Superintendent McBride briefs him on the events so far: the priest’s visit, the grandmother’s visit, admissions, countered a minute later with denials, with “bullshit” threats.

  “I can handle him, sure I know him since he was a child, a gorsoun.”

  “One of the lads will go in with you.”

  “Christ no.”

  “Christ yes … he could knock you out in a split second.”

  “Let me do it my way … Me and him go way back,” and he drinks a mug of coffee before he goes in.

  “You remember me?” he says to O’Kane, who is on the floor hunched, talking to himself. Getting no reply, Guard O’Mara sits, rocks his body back and forth, and commences on the reverie that he has told to himself in the twenty-five-mile drive along the dark roads, past houses with frightened people, their lights left on. He talks in a soft fatherly drawl. “You remember you took a bicycle from the doctor’s shed, a lady’s bicycle, you didn’t do it for gain, you never did anything for gain, I’ll say that for you; it was more like a game, a prank. Next thing you broke into the holiday home of a Dutch woman and you found tins of paint and poured them onto the floor and onto the chairs and the sofa. That’s how I got your first fingerprint. It was on the bottom of a tin, and I lifted it off with a bit of cellotape and sent it up to Dublin to headquarters. You broke into houses and took cushions and pillows that you hid up in the woods. You were going to live there, that’s what you said. Your father asked me to talk to you, to caution you, and I did, but you went on with your blackguarding. There was no holding you. I could have arrested you the time you broke windows, but I didn’t, I let you off, I said there would be no summons if you agreed to stop running wild and to go back home, back to your father. I drove you down there and I watched you go up the path and you were a grand little lad with your curls, a bit afraid but a grand little lad. I drove on back home and it was pouring rain and a fierce gale. There were trees down. ’Twas one of them stormy nights. I can see it now, every second of it, the wipers getting stuck on the windscreen of the car. I declare to God, I’m at home in my own kitchen in front of the stove drying myself when my wife, Mary, goes to let the dog out and there you are under our ash tree like a drowned cat, not saying anything, not asking anything, just looking into our lit house. She comes back in and says, “That youngster is out there and he’ll catch pneumonia,” and I give her the nod and she brings you in. She sends you into the bathroom and hands you a bath towel. Later she dries your hair and stands you in front of the stove next to me, the two of us with towels around us like Roman senators, like Nero, my wife, Mary, not able to do enough for you, making you cocoa, heating scones, and imploring you to speak. You wouldn’t speak. You wouldn’t tell us why you came to us. Maybe you thought you could stay with us, my wife and me. Is that it, Michen, is that it, is that what you thought then?”

  “They’re bastards, they’re pigs, they’re jumping on me.”

  “They’re not bastards … they’re just doing their job … They’re very anxious to find these people.”

  “Their time is up … I won’t be long more here … they can’t keep me.”

  “You know me, and if you trust me, I’ll make a deal with you. You and I will go back out into the woods and we’ll find the three people and we’ll restore them to their poor heartbroken families. It’s days now and these people are gasping with hunger and thirst … Hostages, as I presume … The young priest trying to give them whatever comfort he can, the child yelling. You’ve proved you can scare us, now it’s time to unscare us, Mich.”

  “They’ll never be found … never … none of them.”

  “Why not, son?”

  “I can’t tell you. I’m not going down for what I didn’t do.”

  “But if you didn’t do it, you won’t be going down at all. Your only crime will be the unlawful possession of firearms and abducting Kitty Boland. They’re not heinous crimes … you’ll be out on bail … local people will go bail for you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You’ve built up a lot of rage since you were a youngster, but just think — that woman, that child, and that priest never did you any wrong.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say so. How ‘bout me arranging for you to get boots and clothes and the two of us go out?”

  “I’ll go if it’s only us.”

  “Jesus, Mich, it can’t be only us … there’s forty men on this case.”

  “You fucker … it’s only a stunt.”

  “It’s not a stunt. I’ll see to it that you’re sitting in my car next to me and you’re not cuffed.”

  “I’ll come tomorrow, not tonight.”

  “Tomorrow could be too late.”

  “The priest is dead … he’s buried three feet down … I took a leather jacket out of his car …”

  “Oh God Almighty, where is he buried?”

  “I can’t tell you … they’ll link me to the killing. Will the ballistics show that the bullet came from the same gun as I had?”

  “Where is he buried?”

  “Awful thing to see blood flowing from a man’s neck … spouting.”

  “Are the woman and the child alive?”

  “They should be.”

  “I’ll put it to you hypothetically.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Say you’re not you, you’re an observer. If a person was going to dump a body in that wood, give me a clue where would be the best place …”

  O’Kane thought about the question and for the first time seemed to show some interest, then asked for the door to be closed.

  He whispers it: “You go up from the crossroads, towards Derrygoolin. You pass the first two barriers and you come to a third one and in a bit there’s an old hut that had a dead goat in it … There’s drains there … That would be a good place to dump a body.”

  Evil

  THEY HAVE SET OUT early, to preempt the crowds, five men squeezed into a small unmarked police car, the air stifling because the windows have to be kept shut, the two detectives on either side of O’Kane recoiling from him.

  “Feeling better … feeling a bit more relaxed?” Detective Morgan says, turning to O’Kane, but he does not answer. Solon, the driver, keeps looking in his mirror at the weirdo, slumped, his paws on his lap, like someone in a daze. Morgan has agreed not to cuff him. At unexpected moments he comes awake, and taking note of a shopfront or a tin sign flapping over a filling station, or a field with gorse bushes, he says, “I bought sardines there … I bought buns there … I had a good shit there,” and then reverts to his torpor.

  “You were a great hurley player … won the O’Donohoe shield for your school … scored the two goals … great stuff,” Morgan says, and again O’Kane is listless.

  Passing a glass shrine with a statue of the Virgin and a crown of artificial red roses, Detective Lahiffe, attempting to diffuse the tension, says, “Who puts them up, I
wonder … is it the state?”

  “Not the state … the locals. That spot is where there was a terrible accident … five people killed … tragic altogether,” Brophy says, proud of his knowledge of the area and familiar with every house, every hay shed, every car or tractor.

  “Is it the Blessed Virgin that’s always in the glass case?” Lahiffe asks.

  “Oh no … if you go towards Mayo you’ll find they have St. Patrick,” Solon says.

  “Is that a fact, Joe?”

  “Beautiful … especially at night … lights around him like a halo.”

  “Of all the vandalism that’s around, these shrines are never harmed … Isn’t that a marvellous thing?” Detective Morgan says.

  “Marvellous.”

  “I want to go to my mother’s grave,” O’Kane says sharply.

  “You can go later … we have our bit of business first,” Morgan says, overfriendly.

  “I want to go now … I have to talk to her up in heaven … she has a message for me … she whispered to me.”

  “Listen … we go to the wood first and then we go to the grave.”

  They drive on, in a taut silence, until they come to the crossroads with a sign that leads to Cloosh Wood and Morgan lets loose a stream of heated curses at the sight of so many cars, cameras, droves of people, and a helicopter landing in a nearby field.

  “Ye bastards … ye fucking bastards … ye said no press, no cameras,” O’Kane shouts.

  “They won’t see you. I’ll go up and talk to the super on duty and have the area closed off … You lie low here with the men,” Morgan tells him.

  “Cunts … I’ll bring ye down … I’ll bring the whole fucking lot of ye down with me,” and he whirls and punches Lahiffe, knocking him sideways, then kicks on the door to make his escape. Brophy pulls him back by the coat, then by the torso, and while O’Kane is head-butting him with quick rolling thrusts, the shrill pips preceding the morning radio news, then a woman’s voice, strangled, emotional, says, “Word has just come in that the body of a female has been found in a shallow grave in …” Then the reception is gone, because they have entered the wooded region, and Solon searches frantically, twiddling the knobs, the others craning, hearing only static and their own shocked exhalations. O’Kane begins to cry, quiet at first, then less quiet, sobbing, a seepage of tears, as if now he is only his tears; his flesh, his fury, his bellowing, all gone, only tears as he puts his hand out for one of them to hold it. No one does.

  “We’d better go back, lads,” Morgan says, and as Solon starts to turn the car, a guard on a motorbike comes rushing down, flashing them to wait.

  “What is it, Pakie?” Morgan says, winding the window down.

  “They’re after finding the girl in a furrow between the trees, with twigs and brush over her,” he says, his voice hasty and breathless.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” Brophy says in a choked cry, recalling his brother telling him about delivering stones to her from a quarry and her getting upset because of the way the ground swallowed them up.

  “Who found her—one of our lads?”

  “No, a forester … he went up a few hundred yards and jumped the security wire … by himself.”

  “And the child?”

  “No sign … they’re intensifying the search,” Pakie says.

  “Take me to my mother’s grave,” O’Kane shouts.

  “You sonofabitch … you thought you’d get away with it … you thought a couple of months and animals and insects would have eaten her … missing forever.”

  “Let me out … let me out … I want to go to my mother … she knows I’m innocent.”

  “Cuff him,” Morgan says.

  “We can’t cuff him unless we get him on the ground. And if we open that door he’s gone … he’s back in them woods, period,” Lahiffe tells him.

  “Put your foot down, Joe,” Morgan says to Solon, and as the car is turned, Cleary, a second guard, has arrived at the other window, his face streaming and red: “They just found the child, it was under the woman when they lifted her up.”

  “A fucking animal,” Solon says.

  “You’re looking into the personification of evil.”

  “Get him out of the area fast. There’s people up there baying for him … people that knew him … that fed him,” Cleary says.

  “I’d like to throw him to them … to the gladiators … it’s what should be done,” Pakie says.

  “Now, lads … we keep the cool, we play this by the book … otherwise it could affect the trial,” Morgan reminds them.

  “You realise what he’s done … a woman, a child,” Lahiffe says.

  “I do and I shrink from him … ‘Touch not the murderer lest thou too be touched,’” Morgan says solemnly.

  “Unreal … unreal,” Brophy keeps saying.

  “Fecking not unreal … real,” Cleary says, gripping the handles of his motorcycle, shouting to include the warm day, the soft countryside, young buds, hawthorn blossoms, and, a few hundred yards away, a scene so gruesome that he vomited.

  “You saw her,” Solon says helplessly.

  “I saw her.”

  “What state are they in?” Morgan asks.

  “They smell. They smell.”

  “Picture it … and picture him. He killed the girl, he reloaded the chamber and he shot the child … an animal …”

  “No animal would do such a thing … an animal kills for survival … this is bloodlust …”

  “I want my mother,” O’Kane says, throwing himself across Lahiffe.

  “You sonofabitch … your mother won’t help you now or ever … you’re zeroed.”

  “Take a back road, Joe … the word will be out,” Morgan says, and thanks the two messengers with a grim nod.

  It is a narrow road, rutted and grassy from disuse, the drive so frantic it is like a hallucination — dust spattering up, the fleeing countryside, the occasional cottage garden, horses, a television mast, O’Kane immersed in himself, in some bottomless cavity, like a grieving animal. Soon now they would enter bedlam, but they did not know it, and perhaps he did not know it either, because he was sitting with his head down, sobs reaching up out of his gut, when suddenly the car starts to veer from one side of the road to the other, Solon not yet realising what it is and then feeling that he is being choked as O’Kane has caught his tie and is jerking it violently. The car comes to a skidding halt and lurches up onto a bank where there are geese and goslings pecking. The cramped car, filled now with shouts, urgent, harried, afraid; the two detectives in the back locked in a clinch with him, like wrestlers in a pit, his strength prodigal, their fists not even denting him, as if they are hitting leather.

  “Lie on him.”

  “Restrain him.”

  “Get him to the floor.”

  “Cuff him.”

  “We can’t cuff him.”

  “Get him off me … he’s biting my ear,” Brophy roars.

  “Jesus, as if one madman isn’t enough,” Morgan says, hoists himself over the front seat, grips O’Kane by the hair, pulling it with a long, practised traction until the teeth are loosed from the bloodied ear, and O’Kane’s face getting whiter and whiter: “You’re breaking my fucking neck.”

  “No one cares if we break every bone in your body,” Morgan tells him as Lahiffe pulls his arms behind his back and handcuffs him, still butting, still vowing that he will bring them down.

  The car rocks from side to side, with Solon struggling to get a grip on the wheels as they slurp on the mossy bank, and beyond, the geese in a wild consternation because their young have been slaughtered, bits of yellow lifeless furry rag slung there.

  O’Kane sits between them, a lethal presence; the only weapons left to him are his fingers, his thumb tearing the opposite thumb, dragging the flesh away, and then each finger picking the flesh of its opposite finger, the shredded flesh, spurts of blood and the grating of the cuffs as if they too are about to spring open of their own accord.

  As they near the
town, the two detectives in the back look from one to the other, comparing their slashed jackets, their bruises, their cut lips.

  “Longest eighteen miles I’ve ever driven.”

  “How’s the ear?”

  “Deadly … I can’t tell my wife he bit me.”

  “Cover him up, lads. They’ll be looking for his horns here,” Morgan says, and throws a blanket over O’Kane to hide him from the throng.

  They have gathered outside the station, milled, grave, appalled, but when he is bundled out, the voices break into an instantaneous wail of repugnance and revenge, the same words again and again: “Murderer … child murderer … butcher.”

  The likeness of the dead woman stares back at him from raised posters, stares from several points, her face with an unwonted calmness, the eyes soft as cloud, a long rope of hair under the upturned brim of a straw hat, gazing at them, at him, at the summer day. He is not seeing it, not hearing their heckles; he has gone back into himself, into a hulking frozenness.

  A legion of guards converges around him, and he is pushed forward, a bunched and damned silhouette passing into the gloom of the hallway. Then in some monstrous and antic aftermath he turns, head butts the blanket off, and he begins to laugh, a mad, mocking laugh, and they draw back, a shaft of terror passing through them, witnesses to some medieval grotesquerie: his grinning face, his loathesome eyes with a dead yet murderous glare.

  They are afraid of him now, the Kinderschreck, one of their own sons come out of their own soil, their own flesh and blood, gone amok.

  Bart Glynn

  IT WAS like I dreamed it. It was like I’ll dream it all my life. I seemed to have known where I was going, my steps led me there in an orderly, unfussy motion. I didn’t salute any of the mob around the crossroads, they were as invisible to me as I to them. I was a phantom in search of a phantom and I would find it. To call it weird is to belittle it. I even think I envisaged how the woman would be. I’d seen her once playing pool in Boyce’s bar and sensed this glow around her, amberish, possibly because of the red-gold hair. She played like a pro and the men riled her. I had known it before I wakened. To my wife I said, “Leave the dinner till evening time,” and she didn’t question me. She never does, which possibly accounts for our being together. I am described as a loner. My favourite place is a mobile home thirty miles away by the seaside. I walk and I walk and I need no one. I’ve never been one to believe in signs or portents or dreaming. I am a rationalist. After I passed the two barriers and little knots of guards stationed here and there, it seemed to me that everyone was running in different directions, somewhat clueless. Strangers to the wood. It was a warm day and in the breeze there was the smell of spring itself, a tender smell. The wood was fairly dark and I had to crawl along under the low branches and under the trees that had fallen athwart. Strands of dead moss dipped from their branches. I sensed something in the instant before I saw it. Then that rapid contraction in the chest, that onrush of adrenaline. The exposed calf of one leg was the whitest white, the coat was black, and she had thick purplish socks. She was in a furrow face down, and the pine needles had fallen on her like decoration, fine, thin needles, rust colour. I knew she was dead, the smell alone told me that. She looked so remarkably lifelike that a person might be forgiven for thinking she could be brought back to life with a touch. There were flies on her hair, moving in and out of it and lodging on the crusts of dried blood. They were merciless. Nothing else moved. Not her. Not I. It was her repose that I found the most unbearable, the wisdom of it, as if in those last moments she saw what was coming and somehow she met death. The picture just kept going in and in, a gruesome canvas inside my head, forever.