by Edna O'Brien
“Up here … up here.” I went out shouting it. I shouted like a madman, but Cornelius said that when he came towards me, my face and my beard had the pallor of a ghost.
Grief
“WHY didn’t he overpower the bastard? Why didn’t he take the gun off him? Why didn’t he run off into the woods? Why did he die like a lamb to the slaughter?”
It is Jack, a second woodsman, asking the detective who has just been winched down. Asking it relentlessly, as he has asked it from the moment at dusk when, after the searches were called off until the morrow, he came on him alone, Father John, with his head placed over a limestone slab, his hands folded for prayer, his priest’s collar unstained.
“Why, just tell me why he didn’t fight back?”
“No use in whys … because the creatures are all gone,” the detective replies, and then genuflects for a moment in lieu of a prayer, and then it is the cold grim task of identifying the body and noting every detail for his report.
The same woods, that filtered green, the constant leafy murmur, and yet not the same, no longer the harmless place it once was, marked now as a human can be marked by its violation, its wood memory, the habitation of their frightful pilgrimage, their hapless cries; three bodies soon to be wrapped in plastic and brought down to the waiting hearses.
Bluebells
THE SMALL COUNTRY CHAPEL has the smell and leafiness of field and woodland. Garlands of fern and ivy, bluebells in jugs, their bells a clouded violet blue, close together as if they might just accidentally tinkle; carpets of flowers along the aisle and by the altar steps where the two coffins are placed on either side, the larger brown coffin for Eily and the smaller white one for Maddie. The chapel is filled to overflowing; the sermons, eulogies, and songs drift out along with the smell of bluebells and woodbine, out to the grounds and the adjoining fields where hundreds of mourners stand, stunned and teary.
Cassandra spoke for her entire family when she said that their spirits should now be allowed to go free and looked at the coffins as if she was talking to the bodies beneath, bodies that had been cut and sawn and scalped and weighed and swabbed and pieced together again, dressed now in garments of eternal glory.
“Free them,” she said, and cupped her hands, and as she raised them, people looked up to the rafters believing they were witnessing the transmigration of the two souls.
An estranged father stood apart. That was his child inside the small white coffin, his feelings locked inside his own brusque and taciturn nature. Herself and the child were one, indivisible, and O’Kane, the outcast, had seen that and had wanted it and had had to destroy it in his hunger to belong. The ultimate loser. An estranged father who wanted to cry but did not cry then. There were tears to be shed, but they would be shed elsewhere, him imagining them forever in the woods, their true resting place. He thought, What can I do to prove to myself that I am that bit bigger than I was before this struck. I can’t bring them back. I can think of those last mad minutes until thinking is empty of thought, but I can’t bring them back, ever.
What he did then was to search out O’Kane’s father and shake his hand, and the man looked at him, perplexed, uncomprehending, his sunken eyes like holes in his face, two fathers outside that boundary of mother and child, their hands briefly touching, touching on things that could never be said.
Blood
“TELL ME that you didn’t rape her, Mich … just tell me that.” It is Aileen, teary and unslept and waiting since dawn to be allowed in, travelling almost a hundred miles, since he has been moved to a prison halfway between home and the city. She has brought him the clean clothes, bar of soap, and bananas he asked for. The guard outside has explained to her that he has refused to give blood and asked her to tell him, as they have told him, that it can be taken forcibly. Her brother looks at her as if he might kill her.
“Tell me,” she says, beseeching.
“They set you up … They want to blacken me with every crime in the book.”
“Then tell me that you did not rape the woman, simple, simple, Mich.”
“Fucking voices … won’t shut the fuck up … Get me a radio … get me anything … get me a gun … get me out of here.”
“Mich … Michen.”
“She loved me … she was my girlfriend … she sucked my cock in the woods … we had a tent up there … mad for me.”
“She was not your girlfriend. It’s all in your mind, and there’s only you and your mind for the rest of your fucked life … Jesus.”
It is as they are arguing that a young prison officer with pale, almost albino colouring comes in; clean-shaven, a crew cut, his eyes the washed blue of cornflowers, dangling a syringe and making imaginary stabs in the air as he dances around O’Kane.
“We don’t need your blood, scumbag … we have it. You cut your bollocks on the glass door when you broke into that house … we have your DNA on our files. They flushed you out of her, above in the mortuary … She’s dead but she’s clean, and you’re unclean and you stink.”
“Is that the woman on the shore?” he asks.
“No, it’s not the woman on the shore, scumbag. It’s the woman you brought to the woods. How come you forget the most important data? You don’t forget to ask for bananas or a change of underpants, but how come you forget that? You’re a monster, but you can’t hide behind the devil’s apron strings any longer … Do you want to know why? Because you are him, hooves and horns and all … It’s been a farce, a roadshow down the country … everyone willing to help you … a bishop no less, priests, dignitaries, VIPs, wringing their hands … poor you … you never had a chance … the system failed you … we failed you … St. Michael’s, St. Joseph’s, St. Bridget’s, St. Patrick’s, St. Finian’s, St. Teresa’s, St. Anne’s, Spike Island, Clonmel Rugby, Featherstone, Wolverhampton, all failed the little coward who so loved his mother that he had to take an innocent woman and fuck her and kill her and then kill her child to complete the tableau and kill the priest that was brought to give the last rites. It’s all a blur inside that football of a head … It slipped your memory somehow. Well, I’ll tell you something, the bishops and the priests and the VIPs will run like rats from you now, repulsed … Your visitors from now on are Us … state visitors … state plate … state blanket … state funeral … Welcome to hell, O’Kane. It’s been waiting for you.”
“He’s a fucking liar, a fucking liar,” he says when they are alone.
“I think you did rape her, Mich … I think you did.”
“Do you want them to lock me up?”
“It’s the only thing … after what you done.”
“Your own brother.”
“You’re not the brother I knew … you’re an alien,” she says, fearless, despairing.
“Don’t leave me,” he says, running to her, grasping her.
“I have to … I can’t stay here a minute more.”
And he did not try to stop her, he just backed away in frozen immobility, seeing the shame that welled up in her eyes.
O’Kane
IT WAS AFTER I had sex with her I came downstairs to the kitchen. She had the kettle on. I heard the voice of the devil saying, Kill her, kill her. I said, We have to go to the woods. She tried to defy me. The gun was hid outside behind a tree. She didn’t like it, she didn’t want a gun around the child. I’m only after getting it, I intend to raid a post office, I said. I didn’t think of killing her before that. I had no reason to. She used to come up to my tent in the wood every other day and bring me food, and we had loads of sex there. She sucked my cock. She wouldn’t let me go to Tullamore. I made her drive to Cloosh Wood, and when we got there she said, Where’s your tent. I said, I burnt it, I had no more use for it. I said then, I’m going to have to kill you. She said, Don’t be raving. I brought her way in from the road at gunpoint. She was nervous, panicky. She was holding the child’s hand. I told her if she tried running away I’d shoot them both. She let go of the child’s hand and sent it to play. I brought her up into t
he horseshoe of trees and she said, You’re frightening me, you’re scaring me, give me that gun. She took it off me. She unloaded it. We were struggling. She hit the bolt and that automatically unloaded it. I tripped her. She fell on the ground and I loaded the gun. She tried to get back up. I shot her in the face. It was messy. I had a problem with the child. What was I going to do with him? He was screaming. He had no mother. I couldn’t bear to look at him. I shot him in the side of the head or somewhere around there. I forget. My mind was gone. I came out of the wood and sat in her car. The keys were missing. I went back to the wood to get the keys from her pocket. She’d gone green. The colour frightened me. I covered her with pine needles and left the wood. I slept in the car a long time, maybe a day. I burned the car somewhere and went to my grandmother’s. I was sweating. I threw up. I was hearing the devil’s voice. He said, Burn your grandmother’s iron gate, burn her hay shed. I don’t remember going out from there, but I did; I was walking along the road with the gun. I heard a voice say, Burn the lockkeeper’s house. He wasn’t there. I took a blanket. It got dark, so I went on up towards the lights in the village and saw the church. The priest’s house was beside the church. There was no light in it and I waited. When he came I kidnapped him at gunpoint. He said, Oh my God. He asked me what I wanted. I said I was in a mood to kill. He said, Relax and don’t kill me, I’ll drive you anywhere you want. I brought him to a house in the wood where I lived as a kid. I’d hid in a closet there, pissed in it. My mother thought that very funny. Someone had sunk a well there since we lived in it. The priest said, What are you going to do to me? I said I was waiting for orders. He said I was a sick man. He said that he knew my grandmother, that he went to see her sometimes, heard her confession. He had a wallet in his inside pocket. He went into the toilet and hid it in his trouser pocket. I ate cake with sugar on top. I went to sleep.
It was six in the morning and the birds were singing. I said to him, Come on, time to get up. I took his wristwatch. I gave it to some fucker in Limerick for hash. I laughed at the blood coming out of his head like a water pump. I got a great buzz, a great kick out of that. I liked the jump. I’m possessed.
Christmas
HE LAY in his own shit. He lay in his own dark, cursing and conspiring. He hated the screws. The screws hated him. He made their lives hell, refused to use the bucket that they passed in and shat on the floor to spite them. Threw his arms out as if they were oars or javelins and told the fuckers he’d be leaving very shortly, going through the roof. The “Jumping Jesus show” they called it. They were afraid of him. He roared and harangued, and they believed that even if his head came off from roaring, his lopped head would go on persecuting them. He called them Ambrose. They called him Fattie. “No hamburgers for Mr. Fattie.” “No radio for Mr. Fattie.” “No walkies for Mr. Fattie.” He’d hold four fingers up in rotation, and they knew what it meant. He’d killed three people and there would be a fourth. Sometimes he sat as if he was in a trance, sucking his thumb, staring. His laughing was a kind of roaring also. He could keep it up for hours.
The staff shot the pheasant that kept him company because they were jealous of it. He got his revenge. He had birds coming in the window whistling tunes and he whistled back. Then one day six or seven red hens from home came and he talked to them and asked them if they were laying well. He had great times with them. He learned the chookchookchookchookchookchook that they did after they laid. One morning they didn’t come and he cried. Pigs came, but they got stuck, they got wedged between the bars, their pink hairy rumps not able to get in and not able to get out. They taught him grunts, and the screws listened outside the cell and looked through the spyhole, made bets whether he was or was not a pig. Instead of Fattie they called him Piggy and he still called them all Ambrose.
He was brought for a walk each day, around a closed yard with a high wall and one tree with dead, papery leaves. There was a lavatory bowl in the corner with no chain and no handle and he shat in it, even though he was not supposed to. He saved his shit for there so that they would come with bucket and broom, cursing him and making him clean it up. One day there was a new nurse who gave him a funny look and he struck at him in a long lunge, got him to the ground, and then started hitting his skull on the edge of the bowl, his face mired in the shit. It was the padded cell after that. He’d hurl himself against the leather wall and be thrown back and rehurl himself, because nothing would convince him that it was not going to give in to him.
That’s when Dr. Macready was called. Dr. Macready had the distinction of being the only one that was not afraid of these nutters, afraid of no one. He agreed with the governor to see him, but only on one condition, face-to-face. He did not want to be in one room and looking at O’Kane through glass in an adjoining room. “I want to get to the real person,” he said, and the governor smiled the smile of the disenchanted. It took five visits to break the ice. He was late for his visit and sat down, took out his handkerchief, began to clean his spectacles, and said, “There was a drunk Scotsman on the bus and he kept saying, ‘No sweat, John, no sweat, John,’ and he walked up and down the aisle and looked into people’s faces and said, ‘Peasants,’ and then he came and sat beside me and said, ‘Peasant.’”
“Are you in America a lot?”
“No … why?”
“I don’t want a trial here … they’ll be laughing at me … They’ll make fun of me and fun of my mother. Could you get me out of here. Could you get me out a back door? I’ll harm no one … I won’t get a gun.”
“Not a chance in hell, Michen. The only way I can help you is to come in here and see you.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yes, and let you bullshit me.”
“I throw food on the floor … I go to the toilet on the floor.”
“I know, I’ve seen it.”
“I’m a sick man … aren’t I?”
“Yes, you’re a sick man.”
“And what will you do for me?”
“Not much, but something. We’ll try … together.”
* * *
Dr. Macready is with him in the hospital; he has been sitting for well over an hour listening to him as he dozed and rambled: “There’s a little gun in your exhaust, I was a colicky baby, I smiled at three months … I twitched at six”—his sighs getting fainter and fainter, a film over the eyes, and sudden jerking as his brain seems to fuse out, then another little garbled sentence, then a smile.
The light from the corridor is mellow, in contrast with the harsher light in the hospital ward, O’Kane’s face gaunt, his skin yellow, his head lifted back against the iron rungs, his wrist no longer chafing, slack inside the handcuff, the guard cuffed to him dozing with tedium. Two other guards stand at the end of the bed and one at the door, their squat revolvers slightly obscene-looking, their hips waddling as they walk around to kill time.
Dr. Macready has a gift for him because it is Christmas. O’Kane has been on a hunger strike for over twenty days, no longer warring, quiet, shivery, talking of being lifted up into the sky, and at other times seeing orange men dancing on his bed. He is saying that he wants his sins on his tombstone, wants the world to know he is sorry. He insists that it was when the box of Holy Communion wafers was found in Father John’s car that his luck changed, and that it was a good thing, because it meant he got captured. He said she was a beautiful woman, his dream woman in his dream world, and that was why he fell in love with her. He asked the doctor to say goodbye to home for him, because home was the most important place in a boy’s life, a boy carried the woods into the world. He said his father should have come and forgiven him, and he should have forgiven his father, because a son had to be a father, too. But always back to the woman, still alive in some part of him, still alive in Cloosh Wood, animals attacking her and him trying to save her and turning her over and picking her up. And picking her up.