by Seamus Deane
‘Well, can’t you write to him?’
Write to him. How could you write to a policeman? I had never written a letter in my life. Only my mother wrote letters – no, notes, to the grocer or to the rent office asking if we could have more time to pay, and would this sum of money serve in the meantime? I really liked that ‘serve’ and wondered where she had got it. It made handing the note over, and waiting for the man reading it, much easier. It was better language than theirs, but they would recognise it. Anyway, Liam had thought of this possibility too.
‘But I would like the apology to be as public as the wrong. I feel I owe it to him and to my own conscience.’
‘I see.’ He drummed on the table with his fingers. There was a ghost of a smile on his face for a second.
‘I must say the sergeant’s idea of justice in this instance is not what I might call entirely Catholic. It’s what we might call state justice. And your family has had its troubles before now. But these are delicate matters, better not gone into.’
I nodded mild assent.
‘Haven’t I seen you at Mass these last weeks?’
‘Yes, Your Lordship. I go every day.’
‘You are, I gather, doing excellently at school too.’
‘As well as I can, Your Lordship.’
‘All very recent, though, is it not?’
Liam had prepared me carefully for this.
‘Two months and one week exactly, Your Lordship, since that incident with Bur … with the sergeant. I found myself very much cut off, by myself …’
Here I faltered. Liam had advised me to get tearful at this bit, but there was no problem. I was tearful. My sorrow for myself was overwhelming.
‘… and I found myself on my own, and no one would talk to me, and it was in the church, only there, that I could be safe and it was there that I found myself able to talk.’
‘Talk?’
‘Yes, Your Lordship, to talk to God.’
He gazed at me for a moment. Although I had tears in my eyes, I wondered about that last sentence. Too corny?
‘And has there been any, shall we say, consequence, notable consequence, of this talking to God?’
Consequence? I had to dither.
‘I’m not sure, Your Lordship. All I know is that I want to, I feel at times I’d like to … ’
‘Yes, my child?’
‘Devote myself, you know, think of devoting myself to the religious life.’
‘You feel you have a vocation, is that it?’
‘Yes, Your Lordship. I know I’m too young to think about this, but the … ’
‘You are young indeed. Still, vocations are deeply rooted. You must nurture this. But make no decisions as yet. When you’re older, you’ll know. The conviction, when it comes, is implacable.’
There was a pause.
‘Leave this to me. I’ll think about it. See me again, say a year from now. I shall watch your progress at school with interest. This cloud will lift.’
He held out his hand. I went down on one knee and kissed his ring again.
‘Go in peace. And pray for me.’
I bowed and left. A year from now? A year? Could it go on for a year? I shut my eyes in disbelief.
It was almost two weeks later when the parish Administrator, Father O’Neill, the Bishop’s right-hand man, called to the door. My mother was at the shops and my father was at work. O’Neill was always in a hurry, always brutal. When I opened the door he pointed at me and said,
‘Right, you’re the boyo. You’re coming with me this minute to the barracks to make an apology to Sergeant Burke. Put on your coat, if you have one. Did you never hear of a hairbrush? Never mind. Hurry. Where’s your mother?’
‘At the shops. She’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Can’t wait, can’t wait. Tell her afterwards. Come on now. Forget the coat.’
Liam was in the hallway behind me. He winked as I closed the door. Down the street, along the field, hurrying to keep up with O’Neill’s long stride, looking back over my shoulder to see if my mother had appeared yet, to see if she was seeing this, watching Liam and a few others emerge into the back lane, looking straight at the men on the Blucher Street corner as they eyed me going past and saluted the priest, wishing there had been a football game going on so that more people could see this, reaching the barracks at the end of the lower field where the Lecky Road met our road, round the vegetable plot at the side, up the gravelled path, in the open door. A constable was leaning on the counter, talking to a plain-clothes man who had a cigarette hanging from his lip. He looked narrowly through the smoke.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the Roman Catholic clergy. We’re honoured.’
O’Neill glared at him.
‘For your information, there’s no other kind of Catholic clergy but the Roman Catholic. And I didn’t come here to talk to the likes of you. Get the sergeant!’
He addressed this command to the constable, but Burke had already come out of an inner room, his face set and surprised.
‘Father. Good day to you. Come on in.’
The plain-clothes man dropped his cigarette on the floor and swivelled his heel on it, eyeing O’Neill all the while. In Burke’s office, O’Neill sat down promptly on a chair in front of Burke’s desk, grabbed me by the elbow and held me standing alongside him. His grip was tight, and he shook me every so often as he talked. Burke, too, sat down.
‘What’s brought you here, Father?’
He had not looked at me so far, but he was seeing me and his mind was racing. I decided he had a knot in his stomach and that made me feel calm.
‘What’s brought me here, Sergeant, is a request from His Lordship, the Bishop, that this boyo here should be brought to apologise to you, and that I should hear if his apology is acceptable, or if there is anything else you should want us to know. So, if you’ll be good enough to listen, he’ll make his apology now.’
He shook me.
‘Speak up. Apologise to the sergeant.’
Burke’s eyes switched to me. His face was expressionless.
‘I’m sorry, Sir, for throwing a stone at your car and damaging it. It was a wrong thing to do.’
‘And you won’t do it again,’ prompted O’Neill, shaking me again, ‘no more hooligan behaviour.’
‘And I won’t do it again.’
‘Or anything like it,’ declared O’Neill, jogging me. He was unsatisfied.
‘Or anything like it.’
I could say no more. I hoped he would ask for nothing else. Or at least, nothing else before Burke said something.
Burke smiled sardonically. ‘The trouble we have with that Limewood Street lot, Father. This fella, his older brother, and Barr, Moran, Harkin, Toner … You wouldn’t believe it.’
‘Indeed and I can imagine it. There’s some bad boys there. But this one’s not the worst of them, I’m told.’
Finally, he let go of my arm. I rubbed my elbow and stood there, not letting anything happen inside me.
‘It’s more than good of you, Father, to take up your valuable time for a scamp like this one. I’m sure you have other and more important things to do.’
Mistake, Burke, I said to myself: Don’t tell O’Neill what he should be doing. Sure enough, O’Neill responded,
‘I’ve plenty to do, Sergeant, as I’m sure you have yourself. And I’m not privy to all that went on. But His Lordship asked me to come here and listen to this boy’s apology for reasons which he said you would well understand but which, in his wisdom, he felt no need to explain to me. So I’m sure it’s a minor matter to you, but I don’t have more important things to do than serving my Bishop.’
‘Indeed, Father, indeed,’ Burke murmured. ‘Well, would you let His Lordship know that I’m sorry too that he should have been inconvenienced by this matter and that he can rest assured the incident’s closed as far as we are concerned.’
‘I’ll do that. And I can take it you’re accepting this boy’s apology?’
Burke h
ated this. But he had nowhere to go.
‘Yes. I accept it. Of course, I do. On condition he does nothing like that again.’
That was his silky voice. He looked at me again, and I quailed inwardly at the force of his glance, but held my face sombre.
O’Neill and I walked out of the station and parted at the vegetable patch. He wagged his finger at me, told me to stay clear of the riff-raff around the street corner; that I was lucky His Lordship had taken an interest in me; that he hoped I would repay it by behaving myself and becoming a decent upstanding citizen. I nodded humbly and dumbly, dying to get away, especially as a crowd of the same riff-raff had collected up the field to watch what was going on. O’Neill strode off, and I walked up towards them. They walked slowly towards me, Barr among them. They crowded round.
‘What was all that about? Why was the priest in with the cops?’
‘The Bishop sent O’Neill in to tell Burke off for all his lies about me. I think Burke’s going to be excommunicated. The Bishop’s thinking about it. Either that, or he’ll have to be transferred down the country. The Bishop’s written to the government about it.’
They looked at me in silence.
‘Tell us what he said. What did Burke say?’
They streeled along behind me.
‘O’Neill told me I wasn’t to say anything more. He made Burke apologise and told me to leave it at that. Him an’ the Bishop, they’ll see to it from here in.’
Liam beamed at me. ‘What rumours? You were asking me? Maybe you’ve caught on at last.’
Later, in the backyard of our own house, he said,
‘Next time, Burke’ll flatten you. Just stay out of his way an’ out of trouble. Maybe you should become a priest. Give us all peace.’
I shrugged him off, laughing, and cartwheeled down the yard. Tonight, I would play football.
GRANDFATHER
October 1952
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had died when I was so small that I had to be lifted up by the side of the coffin to kiss her cold-ennobled brow. A huge pair of rosary beads was wound about her hands, and her mouth was a purple line receding under her nose. But I scarcely remembered her, except as a kind woman in black, who pulled a shawl around her shoulders in a sawing motion before she sat down and revealed a pair of laced boots under her heavy dress.
Now Grandfather was sick. Propped up in a bed that seemed to enlarge as he got smaller, he seemed always to have been crying, so red and sore were his eyes, although his skin was papery dry. I was sent to live in the house, three streets away, to help Aunt Katie who had left her own house to look after him. I resented this. It was a punishment, I knew, for all the trouble I had caused. Katie didn’t mind. She was out of work permanently now. Yet she never seemed to me at ease with her father, nor he with her. There was a nervousness, even a trace of anger, in their address.
At first, I hated having to sit with Grandfather.
‘Just talk about football,’ Liam advised. ‘He used to run the Derry and District League. Or the priests. He’s good value on them, but now he’s getting nervous, so he mightn’t be as good as he used to be. Like Constantine.’
Great-uncle Constantine, on my mother’s side, was the sole family heretic. He had been a know-all, we were told, a man who read too many books and disagreed with everybody, especially the priests. In his thirties, he started to read a notorious French writer called Voltaire, who was on the Catholic index of forbidden authors, and soon after he hung a placard on the wall of his living room, with the slogan CRUSH THE INFAMOUS ONE painted in red on a black background; he said that was his and Voltaire’s Declaration of Faith. Then he went blind, became ill and caved in by being restored to the bosom of the Church before he died. The blindness was a judgement and a warning, we were told. Thank God he had heeded it, but no wonder, for his sainted mother, Isabella – or Bella, for short – had worn out her knees praying for his soul. Lord, she was the happy woman when he died, escorted into heaven by the Last Sacraments and wee Father Gallagher from the Long Tower parish, who had personally burnt the Voltaire book page by page in the kitchen fire, saying better far that these pages should burn, like Voltaire himself, rather than the soul of the man who had read them and been blinded body and soul by their evil glare. I never saw Constantine, but he was a great name to us, the only admitted heretic, whose final collapse was a melancholy propaganda victory for the priests, who now were my teachers.
But it was Grandfather who put me right on this. I used sit at a table in his bedroom, doing homework, while he sat there against his pillows, busily dying of boredom, as far as I could see. He rarely spoke; but once he asked me what I was doing.
‘Just some French exercises.’
‘French! What do you want to be bothered with French for? Sure who speaks French round here? Waste of time. Fit you better to be studying Irish, your own language.’
‘An’ who speaks Irish round here?’
‘Frankie Meenan, Johnny Harkin. That’s two. And plenty more. And look at what the French did to Constantine. Lost him his sight, then, they say, his soul.’
‘Constantine? Sure he died a Catholic.’
‘He did not. He didn’t. He died a heretic. Refused to see the priest and died holding that French book across his chest that they tried to get off him.’
‘I heard diff…’
‘Of course you did. They cooked up the story so’s not to give a bad example. But old Con, he’s down there roasting with all the other atheists. God rest him.’
At that he laughed suddenly, and so did I.
‘Aye, God rest him in his wee suit of fire, reading his fancy French book.’
And he laughed again, in a series of hiccups and snorts. I was so pleased for Constantine that I was shocked at myself. Then I wanted to ask Grandfather, ‘What about you? Are you going to hold out?’ but couldn’t bring myself to it. Besides, he had suddenly gone sombre again.
‘What else do they teach you up there?’
‘Oh, Irish, Latin, Greek, maths, history …’
‘History What history?’
‘Ancient history the Romans and …’
‘I’ll be bound, it couldn’t be ancient enough for that lot. There’s a lot of ancient history in this town they couldn’t teach and wouldn’t if they could.’
‘Like what?’ I thrilled for a moment. Was he going to tell me something direct? Now that he was sinking, was he going to pay some attention and say something about his past, instead of standing around looking stern and looking through me, as he had always done? Was I going to hear the Billy Mahon story again now, from the mouth of the man who did him in?
‘You’re better not knowing.’
He jutted his lower lip out a little and glared at the blankets. I could have hit him.
‘Well, that’s maybe why they don’t teach it at school, then.’
‘Oh aye, smart boy, maybe indeed.’
He fell silent. I waited but he stayed quiet. I went back to my French grammar.
My mother came up regularly to see him, as did her brothers, Dan, Tom, Manus, John. She spent long times in the bedroom with him, while I lay on the sofa downstairs, reading, wondering how long he would take to die and when I could get back to my own house. She came down one day, pale, and sat heavily in the armchair opposite. I looked sideways at her. Her face looked broken and her hands gripped one another in her lap. I asked her, was anything wrong, but she shook her head and tightened her lips in a way that reminded me of Grandmother’s dead mouth. It was easy to know that something had been said upstairs between her and her father but I was reluctant to leave it at that. I pretended to read for a minute or two but then she began to shake and cry and I got up to put my arm round her and soothe her. She cried and cried, the whole top half of her body shuddering. I wanted to say something about her father really wanting to die, to join his wife in the other world, and all that guff the older people went in for, but I knew that was not where her grief lay. She groaned, bent ove
r as though her stomach ached, straightened up and looked me straight in the face, her tears streaming.
‘Eddie,’ she said, ‘dear God, Eddie. This will kill us all.’
His name boomed in my ears and my whole nervous system jumped and stood out before me like a constellation.
‘Eddie?’
‘Shhshhshh,’ she whispered, shaking her head. ‘Not a word, not a word. Don’t listen to me. I’m just upset at Grandfather’s dying up there.’
After a bit, she straightened up, went out to the scullery and bathed her face, though her eyes were still red, and told me I wouldn’t have to stay much longer, that they’d soon take him into the hospital for treatment and that he’d never come out of it alive, and I’d soon be home again with everybody else.
‘He’s beginning to wander a bit in his mind. Pay no attention to what he says and don’t, whatever you do, don’t repeat it. Not even to me.’
She went off. That was the beginning of her long trouble. I stayed there, Grandfather upstairs, the house darkening, Aunt Katie not yet returned, my heart haunted by tremors.
DEATHBED
November 1952
Grandfather wanted me to read the newspaper to him, page by page, starting with the sport. Even the horse-racing seemed to interest him, although he had never been a gambler himself. Then the news. Then the death notices. When we had exhausted the paper he asked me to talk to him about what I was doing, about school, my friends, life on the street, home. I asked him about what it had been like working for the Derry Journal in the twenties and thirties as a linotype operator, about his fight to get the workers unionised, about the troubles of the twenties, about professional football and boxing. I wanted him to tell me the story I had heard in fragments from the stairs, when I was a youngster, and from Brother Regan’s sermon. But he would not yield on the Billy Mahon episode; he’d just say those were bad times and some things were best forgotten except that we had to keep up the fight against the government, always, always.