The White Plague (50 page)

John realized then that there was a deep and telling difference between happiness and contentment. O’Neill-Within might be content with what had been wrought even while it brought him no happiness.

“How do you feel about this, John?” Herity asked.

“It brings me no joy,” John said.

“A black day,” Father Michael said.

“Would you listen to him now?” Herity asked. “The only Catholics there was the hostlers and the grooms, the hard-working folk. A pack of Protestant landlords answered for their misdeeds and the priest is upset.”

Father Michael spoke more strongly. “They were murdered! Slaughtered like animals – with knives, clubs, pitchforks and bare hands. There wasn’t a shot fired.”

Herity looked at John. “Does this give you any idea atall, atall, what might happen should the Madman O’Neill appear in our midst?”

John sensed O’Neill-Within, silently watchful.

“All those deaths and no good reason,” Herity said. “Oh, there was reason, but I’ll agree with the priest that it was better not done.” Herity leaned across John to address Father Michael. “But you were fascinated by all that death, weren’t you, Priest? A good reason to pray with your knees in the mud.”

Father Michael plodded along with his gaze directed downward. He shuddered.

John glanced at the priest, sensing the darting accuracy of Herity’s remark. Yes, Father Michael shared his Church’s love-hate relationship with death. It was his source of power as a priest, but the man-within could not be denied, either. No more could O’Neill-Within. Death was the ultimate failure, the human weakness that went beyond illusion into illusion, that intervention whose absolute sway could not be avoided.

Herity saw concealed things!

“It’s educational it is,” Herity said, “listening to the voice of a man when you cannot see his face.” Again, he leaned forward to peer across John at the priest. “I listened to you, Michael Flannery. You telling about that slaughter and not a sign to say you see at last why I spit on your Church!”

Father Michael did not respond.

Herity grinned and returned his attention to the road ahead of them. The boy could be heard behind them throwing a rock into the bushes. They had topped the rise beyond the stream now and looked down a long hill where the road entered a thick barrier of evergreens.

“You see, Priest,” Herity said, “what is most difficult is to be abandoned by God. He left me. I did not leave Him. They have taken away my religion!”

Father Michael’s eyes glistened with unshed tears. He thought:
Oh, yes, Joseph Herity, I understand about that. I know all the psychological things they taught in the seminary. You would say the Church is my substitute for sex. It’s the love I could never find from a woman. Oh, yes, I understand you. It’s a new Church you think we have and not a woman for any of us
.

Without knowing why, Father Michael felt strength entering him from Herity’s words.

“Thank you, Joseph,” he said.

“Thank me? What is this you’re saying?” Herity’s voice was filled with outrage.

“I thought I was alone,” Father Michael said. “I see that I’m not. For that, I thank you.”

“Crab the man!” Herity said. He fell into angry silence, replaced presently by a sly smile. “You’re confused, Priest,” he said. “There’s none of us together.”

John saw the look of amusement on Herity’s face. And Father Michael… confusion? Herity obviously took malicious enjoyment from another’s confusion. Did he enjoy Ireland’s confusion as well? No… that went contrary to Herity’s Cause. The plague had upset the untouchable. Recognizing this, John realized with an abrupt shock of awareness that he had the key to Herity, the thing that would undo the man.

Destroy his belief in his Cause!

But that was the very thing Herity was trying to do to Father Michael. How could that be a weakness in Herity and… yes, a strength in Father Michael?

“What’re your politics, Joseph?” John asked.

“Me politics?” He grinned. “I’m a liberal, I am. Always was.”

“He’s a godless Marxist,” Father Michael said.

“Better than a godless priest,” Herity said.

“John, d’you know about the war of indefinite duration?” Father Michael asked.

“Close your fly trap, Michael Flannery,” Herity said, his voice even and venomous.

“Never heard of it,” John said. He sensed a poised stillness in Herity.

“That’s the Proves,” Father Michael said. He returned Herity’s black look with a smile. “Prevent any settlement, kill the ones who’d compromise, terrify the peacemakers, prevent any solution. Give the people only war and violence, death and terror until they’re so sick of it they’ll accept anything in its place, even the godless Marxists.”

“You’ll recall,” Herity said, “that this priest mourned the Prod landlords at the Dublin Horse Show. The greedy capitalists!”

“They were greedy, right enough,” Father Michael said. “I’ll grant you that. It’s greed that drives the conservatives. But it’s envy driving the liberals. And these Marxists…” he hooked a disdainful thumb at Herity “. . . all they want is to sit in the seats of the mighty and lord it over everyone else. The intellectual aristocrats!”

John heard a new strength in Father Michael’s voice. The man apparently possessed powerful roots and he had found them. He might be beset by doubts, but the strength he gained by struggling against his doubts accumulated. It grew day by day.

“Now that I know how to pray for you, I shall pray for you, Joseph Herity,” Father Michael said.

John looked from one man to the other, sensing the deep currents between them.

A malicious grin came over Herity’s mouth but did not touch his eyes. He patted the machine gun on its strap at his chest. “Here’s me soul, Priest. Pray for this.”

“There’s a demon loose in our land, Joseph,” Father Michael said.

Herity sobered. A wild look entered his eyes. “A demon is it?”

“A demon,” Father Michael repeated.

Still with that sober look, Herity said: “Mercie secure ye all, and keep the Goblin from ye, while ye sleep.” His wolfish grin returned. “The words of Robert Herrick, Priest. Y’ see the advantages in a classical education?”

“There’s advantages in fearing God as well.” Father Michael’s voice was calm and assured.

“Some things we fear because they’re real, Priest,” Herity said. “Some things’re only illusion. Like your precious Church and its pretty words and its fancy rituals. A poor substitute for living as a free man.”

“Are you a free man, Joseph?” Father Michael asked.

Herity paled and looked away. He spoke with his gaze directed at the side of the road. “I’m freer than any man present.” He whipped his gaze around to focus on John. “I’m freer than this John Garrech O’Donnell and him with something terrible hidden deep inside him!”

John’s mouth clamped shut. He felt a jaw muscle twitching.
Damn the man!

“There’s illusions and there’s illusions,” Herity said. “Sure and we all know it.”

John kept his attention directed straight ahead. He could feel the pressure of attention upon him from both sides. Was it only illusion after all?

“A substitute for life,” Herity said, a terrible pressure in his voice.

John looked to his right, seeking help from Father Michael, but the priest kept his gaze on the road at his feet.

“D’you find your illusions comforting, John?” Herity asked. “As comforting as the illusions of the priest there?”

John felt the stirring of O’Neill-Within.
How did I come by this thing?
he wondered. Was there ever a place where it could be identified? He felt that the acquisition had been slow… like a growth, perhaps, or a new skin. Steadily constant, casually demanding but never importunate. It was the self intrinsic and the memories were real.

Father Michael wrestled with his own demon, feeling it aroused by Herity’s words even though he knew these words were not directed at him but at the poor soul walking with them. Was it truly the Madman in this quiet American?

How do we come by what we are?
Father Michael wondered. He remembered a basement room in his village church. Ballinspittle, a name the Yankees made joke of, but it was his own. The church with its plaster neatly applied by a local artisan as a service to God.

Remembering gave Father Michael an anchor in his past.

Clean and white the plaster had been. Framed pictures spaced along it – Sacred Heart of Jesus… Holy Mary, Mother of God… a whole row of popes, a blessed medal draped on its chain against red velvet, all in a heavy frame under glass and with a brass plate underneath telling whoever looked that it had been blessed by Pope Pius himself. There were benches in the basement room. Father Michael remembered sitting on a bench, his legs too short to reach the floor, his eyes fixed on a plaque nailed to the back of the bench ahead of him:

“To the sacred memory of Aileen Matthews (1896-1931). Presented by her loving children.”

How remote it all felt now.

John felt tormented by the silence of his companions and by their very presence. He wanted to run away, to dash off into the fields and bury his face in concealing grass, never to rise again.

But Herity was too dangerous!

Anything I do, he can see it and see through it,

“Well, perhaps I shouldn’t pry,” Herity said, his voice light, “that being a commandment of these times.”

John’s throat felt parched. He longed for a drink of water… or something stronger. What was it Herity carried in those small plastic jugs? He often had the smell of whiskey on his breath, but he wasn’t sharing it. John looked off to his right – a hill there, the barren silhouette of a dead pine on its flank with ivy climbing the wooden corpse. The ivy was a winding cloth on the stark witch-shape.

“We’ll be stopping here,” Herity said.

Obediently, they all stopped.

Herity was looking off to his left, a tiny cottage there only a few meters from the dirt road. There was a plaque on its closed door: “Donkey House.” A small stream ran past the door, no more than a handspan wide, flowing silently over black rocks.

“Donkey House,” Herity said. He shifted his gun to the ready. “Now wouldn’t that be a fine place for the likes of us to stop and rest? It being unoccupied of course.” He hopped the stream and peered in a corner of the one window beside the door.

“Dirty but empty,” he said. “And doesn’t that sound like a fitting description of some who’re known to us?”

The mothers are gone, for Crissakes! Like the man says, “The primal center of the family is no more in those regions. The keepers of the faith are gone.” It’s the end of the Romish Church in Ireland and a helluva lot of other places. Let ’em die off on their own, I say.

– Charles Turkwood

K
ATE HAD
developed a mental game of her own for the times when she felt that Stephen wanted no more of her, those times when his attention submerged into his books and he refused to answer her simplest question.

She played it now in the morning quiet of their confinement, her eyes closed, her feet tucked under her on the chair. Stephen could be heard where he sat across from her, the pages of his book turning with an irritating rhythm.

Only a few minutes ago she had said: “My back aches, Stephen. Will you rub it, please?”

Stephen had grunted.

She hated that grunt. It said: “Don’t bother me. Get away from me.”

And she had no place to go except into her own mind.

It was a fascinating imaginative game.

What I will do when we have come through these times.

Safely into her own imagination, she could live without any doubts of her personal survival. The rest of the world might be reduced to rubble. One hand would emerge from that rubble, pulling a survivor out of the ruin. She would be that survivor.

They were changing the guard and servicing one of the compressors outside the pressure chamber. Metal clanged occasionally on metal. Voices exchanged bits of trivia. She tuned it all out of her awareness, sinking deeper and deeper into the world of her own creation.

I will wear fine jewels
, she thought.

This avenue did not attract her now. She had played the possession game too many times: jewels, designer clothing, a beautiful home… Sooner or later, the retreat into future possessions found her in her own dream home but that was frustrating. She could not truly fill out such a home, not even furnish it in the way she knew it might be furnished. Her image of a perfect home had been fixed on Peard’s cottage at the lake. She knew there were grander homes. Films had let her glimpse mansions. She had visited the magnificent residence of a retired doctor near Cork once, going there with her mother to visit the housekeeper, who was an old friend. The friend had led them through quiet, unoccupied rooms – a library, a music room, a solarium… a great cavern of a kitchen with a massive peat stove.

The peat stove definitely would not do. It would have to be gas… just as in Peard’s cottage.

Poof! There went the entire dream fabric. She did not have enough experience upon which to construct an acceptable fantasy.

Whatever, it would be a home with Stephen, of course, because they were bound together now as surely as man and woman could be united.

Our children will be with us
, she thought.
And Stephen will
…

No! She did not want that dream. Stephen was always there somewhere and she was angry with him now. He might die, though. That shocked her, but she held to it, feeling guilty and suddenly without roots. Stephen could be killed protecting her. She did not doubt that Stephen would give his life for her. How sad that would be, living with the memory of such a sacrifice.

I would be a lonely widow
.

Nagging awareness interrupted:
“A lonely widow? In a world with thousands of men for every woman?”

It was an exciting thought, making her gasp. Sad it might be… but the power in it! Who might she take as a second husband? Somebody important, certainly. She knew herself as no raving beauty, but still…