by Edna O'Brien
“He is not fit to plead, your honour,” he said, and the judge deliberated and called for an adjournment to give him time to consider the matter.
Crossing the floor, the judge stopped and said that he hoped in his heart that the case would not drag on as it had done; it had opened wounds that were too deep, too shocking, too hurtful; it had been a human haemorrhaging and the country was depleted from it.
* * *
He appeared in court weeks later as his life sentence was read out, but he sat, dead to it, dead to the woman in the jury who sobbed openly at the verdicts, dead to the mother who for fifty-two days had sat with the stillness of an archetype, in her brown clothes, her brown hair tied back in a bun, and who simply said to those comforting her, “I can go home now and be alone.”
Aileen
SURE IT WAS a Thursday on account of my being late going to bed after the bingo night. Ben was playing with his Lego when the doorbell rings and Queenie, the landlady, calls up, “The guards are down here in the hall for you.” I knew she was raging at having the guards around again, thinking all that was over and done with and that we were nice respectable people now. I jump up and put a few clothes on and Ben follows me out onto the landing.
“Has that child toys to play with?” the guard calls out. He’s sheepish-looking, a new recruit.
“Of course he has toys to play with,” I say.
“You might want to give them to him,” he says, and I take the hint and push Ben back into the bedroom and close the door.
He is wringing his hands to get it out: “I have bad news for you. We heard it over the nine o’clock news, but we thought it was a hoax … They found your brother, dead, in the early hours of the morning. You have to come down to the sergeant.”
“Don’t be raving … I saw him less than a week ago and he looked okay except that he had gone from a size sixteen to a size twenty-two …”
“It was a peaceful death.”
“Did he get his hand on tablets, or did he cut his arms trying to get out a window?”
“He died in his sleep … They changed his medication and it seems he reacted to it … It was one chance in a million.”
“So he’s out of their way now,” I said.
“It seems it was a very rare phenomenon,” he droned on.
“They doped him up, that’s what.”
“His heart stopped … miss … they tried resuscitation.”
As they crossed the green, the busybodies began peering out from between their curtains; the two terriers that sparred all day were at it and that Minnie on her new bicycle scooting up close to us so as to hear what he was saying. Him repeating the same rubbish about a peaceful death and the very rare phenomenon of my brother’s heart.
When I got to the hospital they didn’t want me to see him in the morgue. I insisted. A warder held my arm. “Let go of me … let go of me,” I said. My brother’s hands and everything else were tucked in, and all I could see was his bloated face. I leant in over him and talked to him: “Have you legs, have you arms, did they dope you up?” The warder was right behind me in case I did anything extreme.
When I came out I told the doctor that my brother’s last wish was to be cremated. The doctor said cremation was okay by them. I waited and waited for the ashes, and when they didn’t come, I rang up and was told that there was some confusion. I rang and I rang, and eventually I was told that our father wanted the ashes. I shouted down the phone, I said, “I’m the one that was close to him, him and his father were daggers drawn for years.” They said they’d have to think about it. In the end I had to go up there again to get them. They were in a little box. They’d halved it. That was my brother’s lot, halved in life and halved in death.
Grotto
THE SUN broke into the showers and lit them with a rainbowed radiance, and the showers carried on, festive, larky, bluing the road and spattering watery diamonds on the plastic bags around the silage and on the top bars of iron gateways. The sky was pink and lilac and powder blue; stone walls and patchwork fields, then more ragged undulating country, hazels, poplars, forts of oaks, hilly mounds. O’Kane country.
Dr. Macready had been thinking of him since he came west a week before for a court hearing. O’Kane, the lost prodigal son that he believed he could have saved if he had been given time. He thought of him often, the ravelled mind that hopped around as if it were on a hot spit, running from hate to love, to murder to repentance, fantasy and truth all one. Once, in a moment of searing clarity, asking for his brain to be taken out and washed and then buried thousands of feet in some bog where neither man nor machine could dislodge it.
“But you’d have nothing then,” he had said to him.
“I’d rather nothing … I want to be out of my skull … I want to be empty,” he had said, and repeated during those endless hours when they tried to pick out the pieces of his life, the milestones large and small that culminated in the abyss. In less furious moments he would talk of the places with their funny little names and the piers where local people who didn’t hate him would fear to let him indoors, left tea and bread for him. Dr. Macready remembers him reenacting walking backwards in his cell, remembering the winds he walked in, backwards, on account of their being so strong, so cutting. Now he was in that territory that he knew only from O’Kane’s lips and reams of evidence.
It was Friday and he was heading home. He realised that he had taken a wrong turning but didn’t bother to turn around, believing that eventually he would come onto the dual carriageway and the city.
As he was coming up to a crossroads, the name sprung out at him — Cloosh Wood. His absentmindedness had brought him there. Parking the car by the entrance barrier, he felt not fear but a city man’s confoundedness at the stoicism of those living by and trothed to such a friendless place. The path was easy to follow, mementos all along the way like stations to a sepulchre. There were bits of mirror, ribbon, broken rosaries, seashells all whispering their whisper: “This way, this way, ladies and gentlemen.”
When he got there, he found to his surprise that he was not alone. A woman kneeling in prayer, her body bent over, then at moments stooping to kiss the earth. He coughed so as not to frighten her and waved his hand in a reassuring gesture. It was obviously where the woman and child were slain, quite different from the rest of the forest, and the sight of it moved him. A garden had been planted, rosebushes, dwarf trees, wildflowers, and their little belongings — a gnome, a tortoiseshell comb, a vintage toy car, and a nailbrush with the likeness of a frog on its handle. Two tiny white crosses with their names painted on them seemed so childlike and belonged not to death but to moonlight and enchantment. On a lintel of stone a bog oak carving. Pine trees in a half circle, their branches soft and empathising in a semi-sway. From one branch there hung a set of chimes.
Eventually the woman turned and looked in his direction, and he whispered if by any chance she was a relative. She shook her head. She was wearing a headscarf which she had drawn over her face and a country coat, like a man’s coat. Her eyes had that startled, highly strung look that he had often seen in patients.
“A sad place,” he said.
“The women of Ireland want his blood,” she said quite quickly, and repeated it with such force, such emphasis, that he thought, as she stood, that she was about to strike him.
“And what will they do with his blood … baptise it … bottle it … sprinkle it … put it in the tabernacle?” he asked, overcalm.
“Who are you — some do-gooder?”
“No … I treated O’Kane … I was one of the doctors during his trial … I was one of the few people at his funeral.”
“His death was too good for him … he should have been hanged from these trees.”
“You will not believe me, but I heard him once express great sorrow … great guilt … about everything that happened here.”
“Sorrow,” she shrieks, and she is above him now, her arms dangling, her piercing eyes, asking him to recall the wom
an’s bruised limbs, her torn undergarments, her defilement before death, before meeting her God, and a hundred yards away a priest, his head on a stone slab, a butcher’s block.
“I do recall … but I want you to know that he did repent one time … He had had no food or liquid for over twenty days … he was a changed man.”
“Tripe.” She shrieks it.
“Madam, is it not better that he showed repentance than that he never showed it at all? Better to atone for one minute than live in a vortex of despair?”
She turned away and muttered, her breath rapid and rasping. It was in that taut silence that a breeze started up and dislodged a piece of paper from the wedge of the joined crosses. It blew this way and that, as if deciding where it might land. Eventually it fell close to him, and he unfolded it and read it. Then he offered it to her to read, but she refused. He read aloud, he wanted her to hear it: “Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.”
He looked to see if there was any softening in her features, in her stance, but there was none. The silence was killing. He could feel it magnifying and confirming itself in their separate beings, their irreconcilable natures. Suddenly she put her hand out and she was swaying and he thought that she was about to fall. “I picture her when I come up here as if she is still alive … as if she is within calling distance,” she said, her voice muted.
“I know … I do know that,” he said, and reached to steady her but without touching, knowing that she was aching for some kind of consolation, like desert earth empty of rain. Then the chimes started up, brazen, arbitrary, their strikes hitting and grazing one another, sudden jubilance in that hallowed place.
He led the way down, splotches of light and shadow from a harvest moon that seemed to follow them. It would be winter soon, that ground far too soggy, the steep track sheer with ice and snow, and no mourners would venture up there for months to come.
After that it would be spring.
Scallywag
THERE WAS a boy and he was around four and he made a plan that he told no one, not even his friend Elmer. A big adventure. He was an only child and played by himself with sticks. He went that bit farther from home each day, and then one day he could only see just the slates and then the next day the copper beech tree brushing them, and then he came on a fort and there were purple flowers nearly as tall as himself and he picked them and played war with them, but they broke because they were not that strong.
The night he stole out there were thousands of stars and he crossed the fields and climbed over the town gate and walked and walked until he came to a big wood where there was all sorts of activity. It was buzzing. There were bats and game birds and badgers all doing the things they could do only at night: scaring each other and fighting and eating their suppers and rolling around in the leaves, basking and having fun. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to play we go.
When it was time to sleep, he got into a big bed of pine needles and thought, I’ll be a potato, I’ll be a spud and snooze down here. He slept a beautiful sleep and there was no telling how long he slept and it didn’t matter.
Meanwhile, there was major Sosesses at home: his mother, his father, the guards, the whole country out looking for him. They called in water divers because he loved going to the lake for picnics but he could only swim with armbands. They were demented.
He came out of the wood, his clothes all crumpled and pine needles in his thick mop of brown hair. He could see a house with the roof gone, nettles and cows in the front garden grazing between the broken statues. Fawn cows and spotted cows. They just went on grazing, they didn’t pay any attention to him. Sometimes cows look cross and have glum faces, but these didn’t. He walked in and out between them. They were far taller than he was, their coats were silky and they had big soft pink diddies. It was amazing the amount of grass they could take in their mouths, but of course they spilt a lot of it. Their tongues were rubbery. A farmer came and said, “Are you the boy that’s missing?”
“I dunno.”
“Yes, you are, you scallywag.”
When his mother and father arrived with a guard and a man, there was a big reunion, kissing and crying and his mother wrapping a tartan rug around him in case he caught cold. “Where were you?” “Brazil.” “Weren’t you afraid?” “No.” “Did you miss us?” “No.” “Just say you missed us a teeny little bit.” “A teeny bit.”
They’d never know, they’d never get to the bottom of it, and they shouldn’t.
Magic follows only the few.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In April 1994, Imelda Riney, aged twenty-nine, and her son Liam, aged three, went missing from her isolated cottage in County Clare. Father Joe Walshe, a curate in County Galway, disappeared a few days later, and when their burnt-out cars were found, suspicion pointed to Brendan O’Donnell, a local youth, home from England, on remand from prison. O’Donnell was captured after six days, having abducted another young girl, Fiona Sampson. Later, the bodies of the three missing people were found in nearby Cregg Wood; all had been shot at close range. Brendan O’Donnell was charged with their murders and in 1996 tried in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin. He was jailed for life. In July 1997, he was found dead by nursing staff in the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin.
Praise for In the Forest
“[In the Forest,] with its economy of style, its lyrical moments and inexorable drift, achieves what no journalistic lamentation or public outcry could hope to do. It adds up to a memorial to innocence and beauty wantonly destroyed, whether the innocence of the murdered young woman and child, or that of the woodland itself, contaminated beyond recovery by the horrors it encompassed.”
—Patricia Craig, The Independent
“In the Forest has all the ingredients of an ancient folktale … O’Brien allows herself an imaginative freedom which gives the story a new life, sharpening the sense of horror and the lost opportunity, while at no point allowing us to forget its truth.”
—The Economist
“A rather extraordinary transformation of cold fact into lyric fiction.”
—Melanie Rehak, Vogue
“O’Brien’s work is deft, with subtle foreshadowing; an eerie, premonitory tone; edgy scenes; and taut narrative suspense … O’Brien is nimble and bold as she reaches into the belly of agony. Like her literary models/muses, James Joyce and William Faulkner, she is unblinking in the face of daily bigotries and cultural terrors. Her imposing novel laments the afflictions of an incestuous island colonized by Catholicism and the British empire, a place where national identity is authenticated by scars of suffering.”
—Valerie Miner, Chicago Tribune
Also by Edna O’Brien
FICTION
Girl
August Is a Wicked Month
Casualties of Peace
A Pagan Place
Zee & Co.
Night
A Scandalous Woman
Johnny I Hardly Knew You
A Rose in the Heart
Mrs. Reinhardt
Some Irish Loving
Returning
A Fanatic Heart
The High Road
On the Bone
Lantern Slides
Time and Tide
House of Splendid Isolation
Down by the River
Wild Decembers
The Light of Evening
Saints and Sinners
The Love Object
The Little Red Chairs
The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue
NONFICTION
Mother Ireland
James Joyce
Byron in Love
Country Girl
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDNA O’BRIEN has written more than twenty works of fiction, most recently Girl. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix Femina, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, the Irish PEN Lifetim
e Achievement Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the Ulysses Medal. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she has lived in London for many years. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Cloosh Wood
Kinderschreck
Eily Ryan
Homecoming
Druidess
Dusk
Stones
Father
Aileen
Froideur
Parting
The Tavern
Joy Ride
Hoodlums
Playtime
Watching
Easter
Cassandra
Blow, Lady, Blow …