by Seamus Deane
This man’s father was a Papal Knight. He was Sir Roy Creedon. Sir. I was enraged, but my rage made me smile. He was right, this was education.
His Roman collar glistened white around his plump throat. He was much given to sighing, expanding his soutane above his cummerbund. Sir Roy drove a Rover car. Roy of the Rover. Only Sir Roy and the police had cars. Knights in shining armour. Papal and anti-Papal Knights.
‘If your geography teacher told you faith could move mountains, you might evince some surprise. If your mathematics teacher told you that in any given series, the first would be last, and the last would be first, you might think him inebriated. But I can tell you these things in sobriety and you shall believe them. All I ask is that you learn to do so without attempting to understand them. Once we had here, in Ireland, the simple faith of the peasant. Now, thanks to free education and godless socialism, we shall have the simple faith of the proletariat. There is no need to exhort you people to be simple. You achieve that condition effortlessly. But I shall, in this and in succeeding years, exhort you to believe that education can be conducted in such manner as to confirm that simplicity rather than disturb it. It is, of course, a gratuitous exercise, but one demanded by the society of which you form such a happily disenfranchised part. Now I wish to be silent and so must you be until the class bell relieves us of the burden of one another’s presence.’
And we sat silent while he stood with his back to us, gazing out of the window, perfectly still.
ALL OF IT?
November 1954
A choice, an election, was to be made between what actually happened and what I imagined, what I had heard, what I kept hearing. There was a story about one of the IRA men in the distillery strapping himself to an upright iron girder at the corner of the building as it caught fire. He had a machine-gun, probably a Thompson, and he blazed away with that as the police came shadowing across the street below to the base of the building. He was about twenty feet up and the bullets sprayed from the Thompson as from a hose with a filter nozzle, all over the place. But the gunman was such a target, silhouetted by the fire, stock-still in one place. He must have been hit twenty or thirty times, and his figure stood there, drooped on the girder, glittering when the flames shone on the blood that soaked his front, his arms straight down before him. I didn’t remember his name. His body disappeared when the whiskey vats exploded, and the whole building began to buckle and fall in on itself.
Still, that was just a detail. Maybe I had imagined and should try to forget it. While that was going on, if it was going on, what else was happening? Some of the men inside the building had got out before the cordon was completed, running – maybe even walking casually – through the network of backstreets, heading for a safe house. Eddie had kept his gun throughout that escape – a First-World-War rifle that had belonged to a Black-and-Tan soldier killed in the War of Independence, three years before, in County Tipperary Was it Dan who had said this? Or Katie? Or Grandfather? I didn’t know. I could hear all their voices in the kitchen but I couldn’t match a voice to a detail. This made it hard to think it through. Much of it must have been ornament, people making strange little alliances in their heads between things they had heard or read about, seeking to assert themselves in those endless conversations, implying they were in the know, there was much else they could tell but …
The year was 1922. Late spring. That was for sure. Eddie’s parents, my father’s parents, had died in December 1921. Billy Mahon had gone over the bridge in November 1921. My father’s sisters had been eight months in that farmhouse; they had been sent there about February 1922, got out of there in November. That’s when they told my father about Eddie and the hooded men who came with him that night. So he had known all that length of time what he thought was the whole story And my mother had known McIlhenny about that time; had been out with him. Then he had dropped her for Katie, whom he married in 1926. She got pregnant soon afterwards. And Sergeant Burke, or someone in the police, had got him out to Chicago in July that same year, after a tip-off – to my grandfather? By whom? My mother met my father some years later – about 1930. They didn’t get married for a long time – they had no money, no prospects. He’s still boxing. They married in 1935. What did she know when they met, when they married? Did she know about Eddie then? Did she know about McIlhenny? I was fairly sure not; she couldn’t have known anything, otherwise she wouldn’t have been so shocked that day she came down from Grandfather’s bedroom, saying Eddie’s name and crying. But I didn’t know what she knew when she married my father. I wondered if I wanted to know. Still, I’d reserve that and work out the rest first.
So they got to the safe house – how many of them? Grandfather, Larry Eddie and maybe the traitor himself, McIlhenny. Perhaps others. There was a meeting of some kind, an inquiry. There was a stool-pigeon somewhere, yes, someone had passed information. They moved from the house and went out to Donegal, through the new border country. They had to get over the border quickly. Had they a car? Did they go in some kind of cart? Were there horses? But I knew where they went. To the feud-farm, the one family home Eddie had left. That’s where he was interrogated. That was at the heart of the feud. For when his aunt and uncle were told to take Eddie’s young sisters and themselves out to the shed beside the hen-house and to stay there until they were told to come out, and when they heard, for they must have heard, the shouting and screaming, they turned cold on Eddie and Eddie’s family. Perhaps they had seen him being taken away. Ena and Bernadette were whimpering and terrified. The aunt and uncle were terrified. They were told to say nothing. If they reported anything, they’d be seen to, as their traitorous nephew was going to be seen to. Bernadette and Ena had heard that, or something to that effect. They knew they weren’t going to see Eddie again. Anyway, the aunt and uncle had repeated it to them, called them republican gets, informers’ spawn, all sorts of things. It was some time after that, I guess, they banished the two young sisters to the shed and treated them as skivvies. And it was this that my father had discovered months later. His sisters were almost stupefied by then, by shock, fright, tyranny. Eight months of it. It was Bernadette who brought her sister Ena to Derry one night, asking him for refuge, and told him the truth about their existence there and the truth about Eddie. And the row I remembered from childhood in that same farmhouse – that was twenty-three years later when the aunt had died, and a solicitor had informed my father that she had left some possessions of his parents to him in her will, possessions she had taken from their house the week they died and had kept since. But he never got them. The uncle – he was only an uncle by marriage – refused to hand anything over and declared my father could see him in court where he would publicly expose Eddie, whose name was still good in most people’s minds. Not that my father would have had the money to go to law anyway. Nor could he have faced the public exposure of his brother. So he had swept us up and out. And then, years later, brought Liam and me close to it and told us about the Field of the Disappeared. And I had jeered at him.
And in the farmhouse that night? Eddie must have known he was in trouble. He had known more than anyone else who was directly involved. He had somehow got away. Who else could have told the police? My grandfather? One of the senior men? Impossible. Had Eddie told anyone else? No. They must all have had their alibis, their confidence, their suspicions. Did they beat him? Tie him up? Burn him with cigarettes? Keep hitting him on the head with a limp, heavy book? That was a way of banging someone around but keeping him conscious. Was that one of the books I had seen on those shelves? Even so, Eddie couldn’t have confessed, not when he was innocent and not when he knew that someone else, maybe one of his interrogators, was the real informer. So they took him out of the farmhouse and they moved across the countryside to Grianan, reaching it when dark had fallen. They put him in the secret passage inside the walls, rolled the stone across the entrance and sat there on the grass floor, smoking and discussing what they would do. Then, maybe, Grandfather took out a revol
ver and handed it to Larry and told him to go in and do it. And Larry crawled down the passageway to the space where Eddie sat on the wishing-chair, and he hunkered before Eddie and he looked at him and, maybe, said something, maybe, told him to say his prayers and then he shot him, several times or maybe just once, and the fort boomed as though it were hollow. How did the others hear it, sitting or standing out there on the grassy floor of the fort? Maybe it was just a crack, or several cracks, in the air. Maybe they heard Eddie’s voice before the shot. Did they leave his body there overnight? Did Larry make him kneel and shoot him in the brainstem from behind? Did Larry tell him it was all right, he could go now, and let him go on ahead and then shoot Eddie as he bent down to crawl out the passage? No one would ever know because that was the night Larry met the devil-woman and stopped speaking. He had just handed the gun to Grandfather without a word and gone off down the dark path to make his way home while the others went back to Donegal.
It was hard to believe that Larry had never talked. When he left his post at the Lone Moor corner and went home for his tea, he must have talked then, inside his own house, to his ancient mother, to his unmarried brother, Willie, who worked in the slaughterhouse. But no, the word was that he never talked. His brother wasn’t much better. He’d talk about the weather or the price of meat or greyhound racing, but beyond that, nothing. You could stand in front of Larry and talk into his face for ten minutes and all you’d get would be a shifting of his eyes from your face down to his shoes and back up again. The man who had had sex with the devil. The man who had killed my father’s brother. All on the same night. There he stood, dark in his shiny suit, his neat shirt, buttoned at the neck, the same greasy tie twisted like a tongue inside his V-necked pullover, his small feet in black shoes with polished toecaps, his hands in his pockets, his sharp face grey and odourless under his peaked cap. You could look at Larry a thousand times, envisage him a thousand times, and still you had to look at him again the next time you passed to assure yourself that he was there, alive and inanimate, buried upright in the dead air that encased him.
What did the others do with the body? Bury it near there, carry it all the way back and dump it into the river, over the bridge? That seemed unlikely. Grandfather hadn’t told me, and I had forgotten to ask. Was there anyone left alive who knew where the body was? And all the time Mcllhenny maybe was at home; maybe he was out for a walk with my mother or sitting in her house, yarning away with her, putting everyone on notice that he had come to call for her. And all that time Burke was in his barracks, knowing what might happen, hoping it would, remembering Billy Mahon. And the distillery smouldered into the dawn, surprising the seagulls who came in from the docks to soar around it and cry away from its heat and smell.
My mother’s father had my father’s brother killed. She had known that now, since just before Grandfather died. My father didn’t know it at all. My mother had gone out with McIlhenny, the traitor who had set Eddie up for execution. My father did not know that. And McIlhenny had dropped her and married Katie, her sister. Then he had been tipped off and fled to Chicago. Katie didn’t know that. Nor did my father. My mother had always known that McIlhenny had fled, had known he was an informer. Her father must have told her that; what he hadn’t told her, not until just before he died, was the truth about what had happened to Eddie. She knew it all now. She knew I knew it too. And she wasn’t going to tell any of it. Nor was I. But she didn’t like me for knowing it. And my father thought he had told me everything. I could tell him nothing, though I hated him not knowing. But only my mother could tell him. No one else. Was it her way of loving him, not telling him? It was my way of loving them both, not telling either. But knowing what I did separated me from them both.
CRAZY JOE
January 1955
It was Crazy Joe who almost completed the story for me. He was regularly consigned for periods to Gransha, the local asylum. Yet when he came out again, he always seemed more disturbed, more upset.
‘God’s only excuse is that he does not exist,’ Joe announced to me, banging his stick on the railings outside the Public Library. ‘Isn’t that a good one, young Caliban, eh?’
He had a long egg-stain plunged down his shirt. His eyes foamed. The woman in charge of the library had had him removed by two of the park-keepers because of the noise he was making and because he had once more started to pull books from the shelves and throw them on the floor, shouting that they were rubbish, tosh, garbage. I had followed him outside and watched him stomping up and down on the cinder path in a fury, whacking the rhododendron bushes with his stick in a manic rage, roaring curses into the air. When he finally noticed me, he beamed and came rushing forward, dragging at my shirt-sleeve, cupping his hand round the back of my neck, dragging me down towards his disoriented face.
‘Who do you think wrote that, now? Not in one of your stupid poets, I can tell you that. Will you ever grow up? You’re taller than you were and still you’re so, so stupid. No sign of improvement anywhere. You fancy the women, I bet? Sweet Christ! By the sufferings of the Desert Fathers, by the anguish of Judas, will you ever learn anything, shall ye be redeemed in this our bollocks of an existence, you futile creature?’
His small shoulders heaved up and down, and his face ballooned with anger. He stared at me but his eyes were so flickery and disturbed I guessed he could see little clearly.
‘As for that bitch who had me thrown out again, by Jesus I’ll see her in hell, I’ll burn the whole damned library down one of these days, on the illiterate, ignorant, sexless whore! Pagan! Pagan fanatic!’
Then, composing himself, he lifted a finger and intoned, ‘The valuable library of Alexandria was pillaged or destroyed; and, near twenty years afterwards, the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice.’
Then he shook his head and stopped. ‘That’s a good one, religious prejudice. He should have lived here, then he’d have seen …’
With another shake of the head, he turned away.
‘Waste of time!’ he snarled.
Then he faced me again, his breath winding down, leaning on his stick, pushing his false teeth in and out, his face calming and paling.
‘Do you know what?’ He smiled. ‘I’d like nothing better than a walk around the lily pond, if you’d let me lean on your arm. Then we’ll be right as rain.’
We went round, slowly, his breathing still rancorous in his chest, but easing.
‘The mere proximity of the past ruins my indigestion, young fella. I hope you can understand that. I think you do; it ruins your own, I know to look at you. Spiritual constipation. I want to teach you something. But do me one favour. Repay me by not always being such a young idiot. Don’t spend your life as a pupil. It’s insulting. You’re always running around like a dog, sniffing at the arse of every secret, a dirty habit. Copulate if you must. Get it over and done with. Then grow up. Now, let my arm go. I want a rest.’
He gazed at the water lilies as he leaned on the railing.
‘Lilies that fester. O Shenandoah! Your wee sister, dead. I loved your daughter, Mister. Orange lilies. Liliesbullero! … You never say anything to me worth hearing but you hear lots from me that’s worth saying. All a waste. And now, after this, when they report I was thrown out of the library again, what’ll they do, my lovely family? They’ll put me away again, with all the wrecks, and they’ll beat the living daylights out of me in there, those male nurses. May they slow-burn in hell!’
I knew he had spent long periods in the local asylum, which had a cruel reputation. The only difference between the nurses and the inmates, they said, was the uniform. He was right. I had nothing to say to him. He always left me stranded, my head excited, my heart slow.
‘And what,’ he asked me, turning his large head sideways on his small body, winching it round like a clockwork toy, ‘and what now do you know that you didn’t know when I first took you into the art room in there
? You needn’t answer. I know Who was it first told you about Larry? Who was it pointed you in the right direction? No need to answer. You know. Where did it happen? Boom-boom. Its vast outrollings, forever and ever amen. Up the aery mountain, rushing down again, they said he saw the devil, pathetic little men. Eh?’
He was talking about Larry. I knew that instantly. If I say nothing, I thought, he might go on. But then, equally, he might fling up his arms, drop his stick, tell me to retrieve it for him, take it and stomp off. He was beginning to get excited again. One of the park attendants who had helped remove Joe from the library was passing at the other side of the pond, glancing sidelong at us. He was ready to intervene if Joe should try to go back in. Joe saw him too.
‘Henry Patterson,’ he said, ‘that’s who that is. Forty years of age and he has reached the peak of his career, throwing an old man like me out of a library. A strong bastard. He has hands like tree roots. When he caught me by the shoulder in there, he near took the bones out in his claw. May arthritis blight him and leave him with hands like door-knobs.’
We watched Patterson stroll on, continuing his wide circuit around us. We began to walk again, Joe balancing one hand on my arm. He wanted to sit by the rose-beds, so we headed for the park bench nearby. He sat there, mopping his face with a large white handkerchief, although it was a cloudy and not especially warm day.
‘I’d cry if I could,’ he said. ‘The hanky helps sometimes to bring it on. But not today, not today. Console me with a story or even a song. Yes, that’d be better. You know no stories worth hearing. Sing instead. A nice, low song. Don’t scare the birds, mind.’
We leaned in together, and I sang him ‘Sweet Afton’. At the second verse, he began to cry but shook my arm, nodding at me to go on.