The White Plague (49 page)

“Now where did you find that lot?” Father Michael asked.

Herity grinned. “Provender for those on the run. We’ve buried caches of it all over Ireland.”

“You’ve been this way before, then,” Father Michael said.

“That I have.” He hung his poncho on a peg beside the door and plopped the string bag onto the table, sending it teetering precariously on its propped leg. “Gannon’s cheese,” he said, looking at the table. “A good supper that’ll make but the meat’s high. Would you be making us all sick, Priest?”

“I don’t like to throw away food.”

“Ahhh, we still remember the starvation times, don’t we?” Herity said. He picked up the packet of meat in its plastic wrapping and dropped it onto the fire. The grease flared briefly, sending an acrid smell of rancid pork and burned plastic through the room. Herity peered across the room at John standing near a window. “You know what pork smells like burning, John? Same as we would.”

John remained silent.

Herity took up a slab of hearth bread and covered it with cheese.

The priest and the boy came up to the table and followed Herity’s example. Father Michael passed a slab of bread and cheese to John, saying: “Bless this food, Lord, for the keeping of our flesh.”

John ate beside the window staring outside. The storm had moved across the hills taking the rain with it. The eaves still dripped glistening pellets of water visible briefly as they passed the firelight shining out the window. The cheese had a faint tobacco smell and it tasted sour. John felt rather than heard Herity come up beside him. Herity’s breath smelled of the sour cheese and something else. John sniffed. Whiskey! John looked squarely at the man in the orange firelight. Herity’s eyes were steady, no faltering in his movements.

“I’ve noticed, John, that you don’t reminisce,” Herity said, his voice even.

“Nor do you.”

“You’ve noticed that, have you?”

“Is it something you’re hiding?” John asked. He felt bold in this question, safe because O’Neill-Within would never show himself in this man’s presence.

A lopsided smile twisted Herity’s mouth. “The very question in me mind!”

Father Michael turned his back to the fire and stared across the room, his eyes in shadows. The boy returned to his position seated on the hearth.

“I’ve been wondering,” Herity said, “how you come by your knowledge of Ireland?”

“A grandfather.”

“Born here?”

“His father.”

“Where?”

“Cork.”

John stopped himself on the point of repeating Grampa Jack’s story of the seven hundred rifles. That might already have surfaced as part of the O’Neill background. A stillness came over his entire body as he thought about this. He knew there was a certain crazy prudence in his behavior. The reasoning evaded him, though. There was a connection between O’Donnell and O’Neill.

I know the things O’Neill knew.

They were related, he decided. It was a troublesome relationship whose connections were to be avoided.

“So your ancestors were half Irish,” Herity said.

“Full Irish.”

“Both sides. Isn’t that a marvel!”

“Why all these questions, Joseph?”

“Call it me natural curiosity, John. I’ve been wondering, I have, where it was you did all your fiddling with microscopes and test tubes and the wonderful instruments of science?”

John looked at the firelight glowing around Father Michael’s dark figure, the boy a motionless mound by his feet. They were like posed silhouettes.

“Well now, he’s not answering,” Herity said.

“It was the University of Washington,” John said. That was safe enough. The region had been hit by the Panic Fire even before he had left France.

“And I’ll wager you were an important man,” Herity said.

“Very minor.”

“How is it you escaped the troubles there?”

“Vacation.”

Herity favored him with a long, measuring stare. “Then you’re one of the lucky ones.”

“Like you,” John said.

“Have you personal reasons for coming here to help?”

“My reasons are none of your business!”

Herity turned to stare out the window beside them. His voice carried a reflexive undertone when he spoke. “You’re right, Mister John O’Donnell.” He aimed a twisted grin at the priest, a satanic look in the underlight from the fire. “Isn’t that the Eleventh Commandment, Father? Thou shalt not pry!”

Father Michael remained silent.

“Will you be forgiving the poor country manners of an Irishman?” Herity asked.

John stared at Herity. Jock had as much as said Herity had been in the Provos. “There’re all sorts of manners in our world,” John said. “As Father Michael would say, you can forgive anything that doesn’t cut the life out of you.”

“A man of wit,” Herity said, but his voice was bitter.

Father Michael shifted position, rubbing his hands in front of him. He looked first at Herity and then at John. “You don’t know about our Joseph Herity, John.”

“Be still, Priest,” Herity said.

“I’ll not be still, Joseph.” Father Michael shook his head. “Our Joseph was going to be an important man in this land. He studied the law, did Joseph Herity. There was them that said he might be first among us someday.”

“That was a long time ago and it came to nothing,” Herity said.

“What changed you, Joseph?” Father Michael asked.

“All the lying and the cheating! And you there with the worst of ’em, Michael Flannery.” Herity put a companionable hand on John’s arm. “It’s a cold floor but a dry one, John. I’ll watch until midnight and then you can stand awake until dawn. Best we start early and go overland instead of the road. There’s trails, y’ know.”

“Hunted men always learn where the trails are,” Father Michael said.

“And they learn to avoid men who talk too much,” Herity said. He took up his machine gun, slipped his poncho over his head and looked distastefully at the wet cap on the floor. Rain no longer beat against the roof. He put the cap on the hearth near the fire and straightened, stretching. The machine gun made a sharp outline under the poncho as he moved. “Keep the fire,” he said. “I’ll do me watching from outside.” With that, he crossed to the door and let himself out.

“We had grand hopes for him once,” Father Michael said. Using his pack as a pillow, he lay down with his feet toward the orange glow of the peat fire.

The boy lay curled up like a hedgehog, his head in the anorak, a dark mound at a corner of the fireplace.

John followed the priest’s example, his thoughts filled with Herity’s sharp questioning.
You don’t reminisce.
The man was carefully observant. John began reviewing their conversations, the things they said as they walked. Nothing casual came from Herity. John realized belatedly that the man was a trained interrogator, getting his answers from the reactions he saw as much as from the words he heard.
He studied the law.
The rough manners, the country accent – part of an elaborate pose. Herity went deep. John fell asleep wondering what he might have revealed to that watchful man.

Much later, John awoke thinking he had heard a strange sound. He groped for the machine gun on the floor beside his pack, felt the cold metal. He took a deep breath, smelling the close odors of themselves in the confined space – an attar of human sweat distilled from their long tramp and the fatigue that sent them sprawling into sleep whenever they could. He sat up in the darkness and shifted the machine gun to his lap.

A snort nearby. Snoring.

The fire was out.

The room was a black confinement that focused on a sudden sound of scratching. A match flared and John looked into Herity’s face less than a meter away.

“You’re awake,” Herity said. The match went out. “You can keep watch from inside, John, should you prefer. There’s not a sign of pursuit for more than a mile out.”

John stood. There was starlight visible out the window.

“It’s turned cold, it has,” Herity whispered.

John heard him stretching out on the floor, the little movements of trying to find a comfortable position. Herity’s breathing deepened, became slow and even.

The machine gun was a cold weight in John’s hands. Why had Herity let him have this dangerous weapon? It could kill the three sleeping figures in seconds.

John went to a window and stared out into the starlit night, the pale silver of a winter meadow laid out against the dark backdrop of trees. He stood there, shifting occasionally from one foot to the other, thinking about this strange man, Joseph Herity.

The lying and the cheating.

Herity had been an idealist. He no longer was an idealist. Father Michael’s question lay in John’s awareness:
What changed you, Joseph? Change… change…

John Roe O’Neill had been changed. No question about what did it.

Circumstances.

In time, the sky lightened to the east and a red-orange sun came over the treetops. It was a perfect Japanese Rising Sun for a moment, spokes radiating upward through a mist. Bird sounds came from the ring of trees beyond the meadow. The growing light cast a flush over the landscape, throwing into relief a dark track of crushed grass leading off through the overgrown meadow.

Herity spoke from the floor behind him. “There’s no church bells to waken us anymore.”

Father Michael coughed and there was a stirring from him as he sat up. “There’ll be bells again, Joseph.”

“Only to send their alarms over the towns and the countryside. Your Church is dead, Priest, just as dead as all the women.”

In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other. That was the end of holiness for both churches. After that, they became instruments of Satan. I’m convinced of it.

– Joseph Herity

O
N THE
narrow trails and the back roads, across the bogs and through dank tree-filled hills, twisting and turning over the heights, sometimes camping cold, sometimes snug in abandoned cottages, Herity led his party toward Dublin. They were eighteen days reaching the Wicklow foothills, another nine days circling around to come in from the northeast where they were not expected. And hardly a soul to be seen in the entire passage.

To John, the trip became a constant careful sparring with Herity. The most casual conversation could be dangerous. One afternoon, they had passed a leaning signboard with one word on it:
Garretstown
. It had been cold with a wet wind whipping over the hills, and John had longed for something warmer than the sweater.

“There’s things done for no reason in this land,” Herity said suddenly, glancing sidelong at John. Both of them were heavily whiskered now, John’s bald head a veined contrast.

“What things?” John asked.

“Like slaughtering the hounds of the Kildare Hunt. It was a mean thing, taking out on dumb animals the misery caused by irresponsible humans.”

Father Michael spoke from behind them. “The Hunt was an English thing.”

“I was there,” Herity said. “And maybe there was a reason as you say, Priest. Provocation – the Hunt crowd not understanding how easy it is to expose the devil in your neighbor.”

John nodded, submitting to an urge to prod at Herity. “The way someone provoked O’Neill?”

Herity did not rise to this bait, but he walked silently for a time. Father Michael moved up beside them as they came out onto a narrow farm road of unpaved dirt. The boy could be heard trailing along behind.

“I’ve thought the same thing!” Father Michael said. He looked full at John with an expression of amazement on his long face. “The foolishness of people is beyond understanding.”

“Like wanting to resume the Dublin Horse Show?” Herity asked, his voice rilled with slyness. He, too, looked at John, the men walking along, one on each side of John, both looking at him.

“That was trying to bring back the good things,” Father Michael said, but he kept his attention on John.

“Business as usual!” Herity said, looking ahead. “As though nothing had happened to make it obscene. Tell us about it, Father. You was there.”

They plodded along in silence for almost fifty paces before Father Michael responded. In that time, he took his gaze off John and stared at the ground in front of him.

“It was raining a bit,” Father Michael said. “We came on it after the mob had mostly gone. I saw some of the last of them coming away. Carrying boots, some of them were. And bits of clothing. I saw one man with a fine coat over one arm and bloody jodhpurs over the other, a great grin on his face.”

Father Michael’s voice was low and remote, as though he recounted something seen in a foreign land, a wonder from some heathen place and not an event from civilized Ireland.

The four walkers were in a dip in the road now, a short bridge visible at the bottom and a boggy stream winding its way through reeds under the bridge.

“That mob, they didn’t seem ashamed of what they’d done,” Father Michael said.

“Ahhh,” Herity said, “there’s anger here just waiting for something to strike.”

“There was bodies all over the grounds,” Father Michael said. “Men… dead horses… gore. No way to tell Catholic from another. They’d taken away all the crosses for their metal. Not even a ring left. Fingers cut off to get them. I knelt in the mud and prayed.”

“But who did it?” John asked.

“A mob,” Herity said.

John looked at Father Michael, fascinated. He pictured the priest coming on that scene, staring down at bodies of Horse Show officials and audience. Father Michael’s simple words conjured a vision.

“They even took most of the boots and stockings,” Father Michael said. “Boots and stockings. Why did they do that?”

The vision of bare feet outstretched in that muddy carnage like a final gesture of lost humanity stirred John oddly. He felt deeply moved, far beyond the brutal facts being recounted in Father Michael’s dull voice. Something besides life had gone out of Ireland with those deaths, John thought. He even felt an absence of glee from O’Neill-Within. Interest, yes – fascinated interest, but no particular joy. Perhaps it was satisfaction, O’Neill-Within felt… a feeling of contentment.