by Seamus Deane
There has to be an end to it, Burke had said, a complete end, a real finish. What was he meaning to say? she had asked him. Oh, Burke had replied, a separation from all that grief, a walking away from it, a settling. Look at your father, he told her, dying with two deaths on his conscience and both of them the wrong man. Look at Katie and her shattered marriage, and her child left without a father and the father living a double life out there in exile. Look at Frank, your husband, living in silence, believing his family disgraced by an informer and unwilling to talk about what he had had to suffer all those years with his children around him asking questions and other people wondering about him – wondering why he had been let go that night the young fella found the gun. He had fixed that himself, Burke claimed, for he didn’t want to see Frank take any more, and he knew he was not involved in anything. Is that why you beat my wee’uns in front of him? she asked him in outrage. Is that why you left him black and blue to the waist? Sure he had to do that in front of the others, he said, the Special Branch from Belfast, else it would have looked strange, and if they had taken over, Frank would have been a long time in gaol. It took some effort on his part to persuade them Frank was harmless. But he was telling her now that he was sorry about it and sorry about that other incident when he got the young lad in trouble over the stone-throwing. But sure didn’t the young fella come back at him through the Bishop? A clever wee lad that. But the poison was spreading to him and his sisters and brothers as well. Isn’t it about time it was all stopped? Did nobody want free of it? Why had it to go on and on and on?
Well, she told me, she let him know in quick order why. Injustice. The police themselves. Dirty politics. It’s grand to say let it stop to people who have been the victims of it. What were they supposed to do? Say they’re sorry they ever protested and go back to being unemployed, gerrymandered, beaten up by every policeman who took the notion, gaoled by magistrates and judges who were so vicious that it was they who should be gaoled, and for life, for all the harm they did and all the lives they ruined? He had no answer to that. Just sat there with his head down, sighing every so often. And then he asked her if Frank knew, and was she going to tell him? And she told him that was between her and her husband, and if anyone else intervened, there’d be more trouble on that account than there ever was before.
What trouble? I asked her. What would she do? Christ in heaven knew what she could do, for what power had she, but she’d let them think she could do something or would do something. She was bluffing, like we learned to do at poker, I realised, and admired her but wondered how she could keep it up. Everybody was caged in. It was almost tidy.
At first, she hardly moved, she said, but she was terrified. There was Burke, standing in the kitchen, his peaked cap in his hand, his uniform black, black, with its shine of leather belt and holster, his gun strapped in by a thong, his baton adjusted at an angle. Did she mind if he removed his cap? If he sat down? There were one or two things on his mind he had to tell her, ask her about and thought it better to do it during the day when Frank was at work. All right, Ma’am? He did take off his cap and sat down, placing the cap on his knee, swinging the baton around a little until he was comfortable. He was so big he blocked most of the light from the window behind him. Nor could she see his face properly, for it was in half-darkness.
The door had been open and she had heard the quiet knock and had called on whomever it was to come in and there he was. Her immediate impulse was to shout at him to leave, but she had no voice. For a moment she thought there might have been an accident, someone dead or maimed, your father drowned at work, for he was in the water these days, pulling on hawsers attached to the ships, or working high on the dry dock and balancing on gangplanks that he thought were too narrow and too frail and gave him vertigo. They were stripping down one of the battleships from the mothball fleet that was left over from the war. Then she thought it might be one of us, run over by a coal lorry or kicked by one of those loose horses the tinkers left to wander in the back field. But the minute he spoke, she knew it was none of that. Even then, she was left looking for her voice, trying to wet her mouth with her spittle so that she could ease the soreness of her suddenly-dry throat.
Burke said he knew about Katie’s daughter, Maeve, that she had married and had had a child over there in England. It had set him thinking, he claimed, of all that had happened since the days Katie had been married herself. It was a terrible pity the way things turned out sometimes, for that could have been a happy marriage, and neither Katie nor Maeve would have been left without a husband on the one hand, and without a father on the other, if all that old trouble had not come up again. Politics destroyed people’s lives in this place, he said. People were better not knowing some things, especially the younger people, for all that bother dragged on them all their lives, and what was the point? He said, she told me, that he wanted to retire soon and he had had enough of it himself. Wanted to make his peace with it, but it was hard for him too. He still remembered his friend Billy Mahon, who had started out with him all those decades ago in the police force in the days of the shootings after the Treaty. Those were bad years, he said, the early twenties. Northern Ireland had had a cruel birth. And Billy Mahon had had a cruel death, and he wasn’t the man responsible for the death of her father’s friend that night outside the newspaper office. Your father, he told her, was a hard man and a clever man. He had got off for that killing and they couldn’t get him on anything after that, he was so careful. My mother said her voice had come back at that; she told him, she said, that it wasn’t for want of trying, and Sergeant Burke had just nodded and said all right, they had got back at him by using McIlhenny, Katie’s husband, as he was later to be. McIlhenny was their man. He had given them the tip-off. But it was too dangerous to have him brand Eddie directly with that, so they had found a way to let it leak, as if by accident, that Eddie had done it. Larry McLaughlin was the fall guy for that; he thought he had picked up incriminating evidence against Eddie from a friendly source within the police. It was double-cross on double-cross; and it had worked. So when Eddie was shot, they were going to let her father know the mistake he had made but instead they had been told to keep their man, McIlhenny, in place, as a kind of sleeper and they had done that until the time, after he had married Katie, someone had found out and told. He often wondered who that was; for he had had to get McIlhenny out and the man was in a terrible state, for he knew he’d never be able to come back and he didn’t want to leave his young wife and didn’t know if she’d be allowed to come out after him, if they’d tell her. Was it your father, he asked, that forbade her to go out to Chicago? Pregnant as she was, only a few months married? Was McIlhenny still alive? And was it true, as he had heard it, that he had married again and was still living there and never had any contact with anyone?
I wanted to tell her it was all right now, that it was all over. But it wasn’t. She hadn’t told me about McIlhenny and her; she hadn’t told me how much she knew, or my father knew, when they got married. I know you went out with McIlhenny, Mother. I know you kept that from my father.
I imagined talking to her like this, rehearsing conversations I would never have. ‘What you don’t know doesn’t hurt you,’ I would say. ‘What I don’t know and you won’t tell, that does hurt me. That’s what’s happening here. If you loved me more or knew how much I loved you and him, then you would say everything. How can you not know? I’d do anything, anything, to help you if you’d let me.’ But was that true, that she would tell everything if she loved me more? If she knew there was something more, but didn’t know what it was, wasn’t that worse for her, wasn’t that what would stop her saying anything more to me? Imagining something, like the way Eddie died, like who was there, like what exactly had happened, that was maybe worse than having just the one set of facts, the one story that cancelled all the others, the one truth she could tell. But everyone who had been there was dead or in exile or silenced one way or the other. And how did I know I had been told
the truth? Shouldn’t I just ask her? What did you know, Mother, when you married my father? What did he know? When did you tell each other? Why did you silence me, over and over? Don’t you remember the roses? You knew what that was about; so did he. Why didn’t you tell me? If you had really cared, you would have. Can’t you see what you are doing, even now, telling me all that Burke said and still not telling me anything I didn’t find out for myself, not telling me about you and my father, you and McIlhenny, but letting me know about everything else?
She was looking at me. I smiled at her.
CHAPTER SIX
PEOPLE IN SMALL PLACES
June 1958
Once, I said to my mother, Katie had told me a strange story that her husband, McIlhenny, had told her. It was soon after she got pregnant with Maeve. It was when McIlhenny got a summer job as a conductor on the Lough Swilly buses that plied between Derry and Donegal on the Inishowen route – Derry, Burnfoot, Fahan, Buncrana, Malin, Carndonagh, Gleneely, Moville, Derry – with lots of stops in between at houses, cottages, by-ways. Did she know that story? Did she remember it?
‘I remember the moral of the story,’ she said, ‘as he told it. Pity he didn’t remember it himself.’
I told it to her again, probing for a reaction. She sat there very calmly, letting me do it.
One of McIlhenny’s regular passengers, every Wednesday, was a man from Malin town, right at the tip of the Inishowen peninsula. He was called Sean. He’d come on the bus always carrying a small, brown attaché case, much bruised, in his huge hand. He kept it on his knee all during the bus-ride, in and out. There was nothing in it but one baby sock. McIlhenny had nodded to himself, Katie had said, in the satisfied way he had, when he announced this, and carefully lifted a strand of his black hair that always fell over his face when he nodded, and placed it back. Oh, he had a helmet of real black hair, she told me. As for Sean, that was it. Nothing else. One baby sock. When McIlhenny was asked how he knew that, he had said that Sean had opened the case once and shown him the sock, saying, ‘Take a look at that. The day I find its match, I stop all this travelling.’
Well, it seemed that Sean had lost his infant daughter, years before. She had died in the fever hospital in Derry. Was brought in of an afternoon and was dead by teatime. Sean had collected all her belongings that evening, but one sock went missing. He was still trying to find it. He went to the hospital every day and sat in the waiting room and the nurses would come in and tell him they were sorry, they had looked, but could not find it. They humoured him. There was no point in pretending they had found its match because, first, they had never seen the one in the suitcase and, second, Sean would have said no anyway, to any sock, that it wasn’t the match. And there are lots like him, McIlhenny had said. If you saw what was in the luggage that’s carried on that bus, you’d wonder what world you lived in. Country people are strange, he had said. They take everything personally, even accidents. If there’s been a disaster, they always find some blame somewhere, in someone, often enough in themselves. Sean from Malin believed his child could not enter Paradise until he, Sean, had collected everything belonging to it. It was a way of blaming himself for the child’s death. McIlhenny was asked what colour the sock was. Yellow, with a red stripe around the rim of it. He had said that the worst punishment of all was the one Sean of Malin had created for his child – not being able to let it die properly, getting it caught between this world and the next. The air of Donegal, of all Ireland, was full of such people, he had claimed, because of our bad history. Look at Lord Leitrim over in the valley of Glenveagh. An evil bastard, who cleared the valley of its people and got shot for it. Be sure, he had no rest. He still rode that road every night as dusk was falling, up to the hedge where they shot him from, a figure on a horse, like a silhouette, with a broad-brimmed hat and a cloak. The horse itself made no noise. It galloped along until it neared the spot in the hedge, and, then, for a second or two, you could hear its hoofbeats drumming. As you heard these, the figure on the horse vanished for an instant; then when you looked up the road, there it was again, gliding away into the darkness in absolute silence. And Lord Leitrim and his kind would be like that until the Day of Judgement: never alive, never dead, just shadows in the air.
I imagined McIlhenny standing at the door, across from the driver, as the bus bucketed along the road outside Moville and the lough spreading open below Greencastle, Redcastle, Quigley’s Point, up to the silent reaches of Culmore where my father had rowed Liam and me across the river. My mother said she remembered him singing an emigrant’s song about Creeslough, a small town I had never seen, tucked into the coast of North Donegal, on the road that led into the Irish-speaking districts of Ranafast and Loughanure, where I wished I could go and learn to speak properly the language I had mutilated before my mother and father.
So what was the moral of the story? I asked her.
Oh, she answered, it was that people in small places make big mistakes. Not bigger than the mistakes of other people. But that there is less room for big mistakes in small places. She smiled ironically.
‘As he knows now,’ she said, ‘as we all do.’
CRAZY JOE AND MOTHER
October 1958
Joe took to visiting my mother regularly after his release from the asylum. My father, when he came in from work, would swear under his breath if Joe was there, nattering on, his appearance still unchanged, grotesque and fresh at the same time. She was the only one Joe would now talk to at any length. What does she find to say to him? my father would wonder aloud to us. How can she stand that jabbering, all that nonsense he talks? Joe would not stay long after my father appeared. He’d stand up, put on his hat, doff it again in a sweep to my mother and declare, ‘Tempus is fugiting, my dear. I must be off.’
But he was there quite often in the afternoons when I came in from school, sitting there on the sofa, talking into the air, rising up every so often to gesticulate or adopt a pose, while my mother leaned back in the armchair, seemingly attentive to the multi-voiced drama Joe was enacting before her, full of memories or fantasies from his stay in the asylum. Two or three of us would stay in to watch and listen, our schoolbags thrown under the table, as Joe cavorted and performed.
His abiding memory of his time in the asylum was of beatings from male nurses, of being plunged in baths of freezing water if he irritated them in any way. To live with this condition of his was, he said, the great connubium of his infelicity – the condition of being sane married to the condition of being mad; the knowledge that he was mad married to the knowledge that he was sane; knowing that he was harmless but that his condition made others harmful. And people thought he wasn’t married! He was as unhappily married as anyone he knew. It was a favour, he said, to any couple to put an end to that condition. Wasn’t that so? When he tipped the wink, he told my mother, tipped the wink to you-know-who about the other you-know-who, look at the trouble that got him into, but look at the trouble it got him and her out of, and wasn’t he right? Wasn’t he right? Wasn’t that so, missis? He wasn’t mad.
Then he would weep, and my mother would rouse herself to tell him it was all right now, he was out of there, he wouldn’t be going back; it was all over. But Joe would shake his head and say it wasn’t, his relations would put him back, no one could stand him around, he was too hard to live with, but why was it so, what had he done?
But soon he would be smiling again and nodding at us as we moved about. I felt sorry for him too, but her sympathy for him angered me. Why couldn’t she show the same interest in us? In my father?
One day, as my father came in and was washing his hands at the scullery sink, Joe stood up, swept his hat on and off in the usual way, and said in front of us all, ‘But for all that, missis, for all that, I never told them your story. Family secrets are family secrets. Sure they might have come down here and told himself out there.’ The noise of the water running in the scullery stopped. My mother put a finger to her lips.
‘Now, Joe,’ she sai
d.
‘On my oath, missis. The crown jewels are safe with me. No point in telling a secret, is there? What good’s a secret if too many people know it?’
My father came in, rubbing his arms and hands on a towel, an inquiring look on his face. Joe fled, almost bowing as he backed down the hall.
‘What was he talking about?’ my father asked.
My mother dismissed it. Joe, raving as ever. His head was scrambled worse every time he came out of the asylum. Perhaps it was the way she put her head down as she answered my father, perhaps it was just the accumulation of all that Joe had said – but I suddenly knew.
Ah, God. Now I knew. All of it, the final melancholy. Your last secret was with Joe, Mother. In Crazy Joe’s loose keeping, locked and unlocked in the asylum at Gransha.
MOTHER
November 1958
My mother, as if she knew what Crazy Joe had made known to me, became hostile. She kept up a low-intensity warfare. No, Gerard would bring in the coal. No, Eamon would go to the butcher’s. No, Deirdre would make her a cup of tea. No, she didn’t think I should go to the pictures and anyway she didn’t have the threepence I needed. Above all, no, I wasn’t to go over to Katie’s to get messages for her; one of the others would do that. Katie had told her Liam was quicker at it anyway. I’d be better occupied if I did some school work, I’d been slacking a lot lately. I’d the Junior Certificate examination this year, and she expected distinctions in every subject. Ten distinctions? Irish, English, History, French, Greek, Latin, Geography, Geometry, Mathematics, Art. She counted them off on her fingers. And then there was the All-Ireland Religious Knowledge examination after that. Liturgy, Doctrine, Bible. I had to do well in that too. She kept her face very severe as she ticked all these off.