The Whore-Mother (11 page)

Powers' narrow, urbanized peasant mind saw them all vaguely, but it still listened with one ear for the quick question that would put the black hood over his head and leave him in the gutter. . . . Big Willy Devlin, all of twenty-two years old, came home on leave from the British army in Germany the day before yesterday and they ordered him shot, Catholic or no Catholic; he could be an Irish spy in the pay of the English. And the Devlins howled and wailed and two hundred fat bitches marched to Clune and McCann and McCandless and said it was cold-blooded bloody murder killin a Catholic and if it happened again they'd take their families out of the Falls and let the army clean out the IRA. . . . They'd be blamin him for that too in a minute. . . .

“You lost McManus.” That was what was comin out of Clune's thin wee face now. “You fuckin-well find him, and when you find him, you fuckin-well kill him. . . . Start on the sister and do anythin you have to . . . that fancy wee biddy knows where he's goin . . . take Callaghan and away on . . . the word's out on him all over the thirty-two counties and we don't want to see aither of youse till he's dead. . . .”

He didn't talk like that when the cameras for the telly came around. It was always Clune or McCann or McCandless on the telly and they didn't say fuckin-well to the cameras. It was all fancy and la-de-da then. They were like bloody Englishmen then. The cameras'd hear it different from me. . . . These three didn't plant bombs, or kill soldiers or policemen. . . . Staff work, by Jasus. That was right soft work. . . . All Clune got when he tried makin a bomb was an eye patch and a singed eyebrow!

There she was up ahead by a hundred yards going through Larne, drivin in her young man's car with a big picnic basket in the back seat.
She
knew where her brother was, by Jasus. She was right easy in her mind about him, to be goin on a picnic on a day when it was goin to come down in sheets.

“It's a queer bloody day for a picnic,” Powers said to Callaghan. “Look at it. It's gonta pour.”

“Och, the picnic's ony a blind for her oul woman. He's takin her to some hotel for a good knock at her. They'll ate all that grub when he's had all he wants.”

“Maybe.”

Powers kept her a hundred yards ahead. The Holy Trinity of the kitchen table were out of sight. McManus was out of sight and out of reach. He concentrated his fury on Maureen McManus.

Already in his mind he had disposed of her young man. Not by any specific act. The thought that he would kill him didn't consciously enter his head. He had already killed him without a thought. Somewhere back on their journey from Belfast behind the car ahead, he had cleared the ground. That fellow was a nuisance. He wouldn't be free to deal with the girl with him around and alive. The young man died in his own vague dismissal from Powers' mind.

Powers didn't think about life and death, apart from his own. He had no sense of time-future. Acts were acts that ended without future effect in him. They arose out of the intensity of his emotions. They died with the emotions. When McManus asked him once whether he ever thought about “the fact of someone dying when you sight in from an upstairs window on a soldier,” Powers said, “I'm a baker.” McManus didn't know what he meant. Neither did Powers. The question was abstract. The baker's trade was not. Another man's death was abstract; his own was not.

His own death was something to be thought about. He rolled names about in his head—Wolf Tone, Robert Emmet, Patrick Pearse—a long string of them. Their names were on monuments and on the lips of schoolchildren. He didn't know much about them except that they were rebels and fought the English and died “for Ireland,” and there were songs about them. Children learned the songs in the Separate schools. And there was a pub in Dublin where Robert Emmet used to go and the old men who drank there every day talked about him every day. That was what Powers wanted for himself.

McManus said to him one night when Powers was talking about them, “They were hanged,” and Powers winced. That was no way to die; a disagreeable way to die. He said nothing, but the alternative, the only alternative he could face, was to die fearlessly with a gun in his hand, storming the enemy or being stormed by the enemy, in some action with the makings of a song in it.

He understood what Clune and McCann and McCandless were at when the decision was made to lure civilians onto time bombs and kill Protestant children at play on the streets. Sooner or later it would bring civil war for sooner or later the Protestants would throw off English restraint and come storming into the Catholic districts. Then the great actions the song-makers could make songs of would take place and Pat Powers would be sung about, like Tone, and Emmet, and Pearse. . . . But hanging; that was the way a bloody rabbit died, in a snare.

And Clune sent him chasing this girl, like a ferret down a rabbit hole. Why did he keep thinking about rabbits? If you're used like a ferret you'll think like a ferret, and for that he blamed Clune. But the girl was there, a hundred yards ahead, and one thing was enough, sometimes too much, at one time. His rage burned at her like a blow-lamp.

“I don't like being this far from the Falls, Pat,” Callaghan said.

“You're coddin.”

“I'm not. I mean, you leave a bomb in a car and walk away and there's another car down the street to whip you back into the Falls or Ardoyne or somewhere. But Jasus—where d'ye run to here?”

“Are you thinkin of runnin from thon wee girl?”

“Y'know what I mean.”

“Aye. Y'mean you've got the wind up. Jasus, Michael Collins run rings round them all over Ireland. . . .”

“He got killed in an ambush. . . .”

“Och, shut your gub.”

“That's all right, but I'm no Michael Collins.”

Powers wanted to say, “Well, I am,” but Callaghan was an ignorant wee bugger. He's the kind who wouldn't know you were just talkin the God's honest truth if you said you were another Michael Collins; he'd think you had a swelled head. He wasn't goin to explain himself to bloody Callaghan.

The car ahead stopped outside an ice-cream shop in Carnlough and Powers parked behind it. The girl and her young man went into the shop.

“You're a wee bit near them,” Callaghan said.

“You watch this. Come on in.”

They went into the ice-cream shop. It was a tiny place and four adults crowded it. Maureen McManus ordered a vanilla cone with a Cadbury's Milk Flake bar stuck in the ice cream. The young man ordered the same. Powers turned his back to the girl and ran the palm of his hand quickly over her hips. She jumped and spun. Powers turned to her and said mournfully, “I beg your pardon, miss. There's not much room in this wee place.” To her young man he said, “It's a grand day for a spin round the coast.”

“Yes.” He was slender and not made for angry reprisals.

Powers tried the Irish smile. “Are youse gain all the way round?” “No.” It was curtly dismissive of a working-class intrusion on a middle-class right to privacy.

Callaghan ordered the same for Powers and himself and while they waited they watched Maureen and her friend get their raincoats from their car, juggle the cones while they put on the coats, and cross the road to sit on the seawall.

In the car again, Powers sucked his cone and munched on his Milk Flake and said like a greedy boy, “Jasus, this is nice.” Then, waving his cone towards the shop, and grinning like a naughty boy, “Did you see what I did in there?”

“No. What?”

“She has a nice soft arse. I had a wee feel at it.”

Michael Collins could have done that. When Powers did it, he felt like Michael Collins standing by his bicycle on the edge of a Dublin crowd that watched the police searching the house from which Collins had just escaped. Powers' Irish history was learned in the streets, in the songs, and in the paperback editions of Irish exploits like Dan Breen's
“My
Fight for Irish Freedom” or Bernadette Devlin's “The Price of
My
Soul,” though he didn't understand much of what Bernadette wrote in that one. A month ago when Powers was talking about these books McManus said the best book by an Irish hero was
“My
Big Ego in the Fight for Ireland's Freedom.” Powers felt there was something wrong with that, but he didn't know what it was. He said that if he could write a book he would call it
“My
Fight for Ireland One Nation.”

Callaghan liked the joke about Maureen's bottom. “Maybe that fella'll give her another wee feel up the Glen,” he said.

“A wee feel up the what?” That was another good joke. So good that Maureen's young man looked quickly from the wall to locate the laughter, looked quickly out to sea, said something, and hurried the girl back to his car.

Powers and Callaghan went after them, a hundred yards behind. The road was serpentine. As often as not their prey was out of sight. That didn't matter. In less than half a minute they were in sight again around the bend the same hundred yards ahead. So Powers brooded on a dull drive.

The road wound. The rain threatened but did not fall. The rising wind blew off the gray dreach sea shaking the car. The expression on the face of Maureen McManus's young man as he hurried her to his car had suddenly fixed itself in Powers' brooding mind. His hands were tight on the wheel, his foot heavy on the pedal. He came round bends and found himself within twenty-five yards of the car in front. “Stupid shit. Can't drive. Can't keep the same speed. . . .”

“It's you, Pat. You keep puttin your foot down. . . .”

“What the fuckin hell d'ya mean, it's me?” A screeching anger sawed in his head. He held the wheel hard to keep himself from backhanding Callaghan's face. “You saw his face when he shoved her into the car. You'da thought he was gonta vomit, lookin at me . . . lookin down his fuckin nose at me. . . . By Jasus, he'll learn. . . .”

“Slow down or you'll climb up his back!”

“Shut your fuckin gub!”

Callaghan sat hard against the car door making his small frame smaller, telling himself not to speak not to speak not to speak. He had seen Powers leap from morose silence to almost hysterical geniality to screeching rage. Sometimes he thought he had a sorta softenin of the brain. Sometimes, though, he was very stiff, very soldierly, very stern, the oul head up and the shoulders back and the chest out. Secretly, Callaghan thought sometimes that Powers would have liked to be in the Paratroop Brigade and worn their berets and their mottled camouflaged uniforms and their military boots, but he was careful never to say so. Secretly, he thought sometimes that Powers would have liked to be the Major he shot a couple of months ago leading a sweep through the Falls. He'd said afterwards, when they talked about the ambush: Now if he'd done this and this and this and come up here and went down there he coulda . . . and there were things you had to be careful about, with Powers. Callaghan looked out to sea to keep from looking at Powers, and remembered the night in one of the pubs in Dublin when they were down there for a rest—it was a long narrow pub where the musicians came to play—and Powers sat back on his stool, blocking the narrow aisle and keeping it blocked till every man who tried to push past him read the smile on his face and said, “Excuse me, please,” in a nice voice. And then the well-dressed business-lookin fellow came down the aisle and wouldn't say it. He said, “Sit forward a bit and let people pass.” “Och, just stay there for a while. I'll be leavin myself in another hour,” Powers said, and the man shoved him. It was funny. He was in great form after he smashed the fellow's face in . . . laughin, jokin. . . . He hadn't realized the memory made him laugh.

“What're ya laughin at?” said Powers.

“I was thinkin about the night in Dublin thon fella wouldn't say please.”

“Aye. I'll bet you his oul mother still doesn't know him.”

They came round Garron Point into the long sweep of Red Bay and the road was empty. No car. No girl. No girl's young man.
“Jasus Christ!”
Powers lifted the car and went round the bay and through Waterfoot flat out, screeching the tires on the cold summer road at the sharp right turn out of the village. But the road was still empty when they reached Cushendall and Powers was sure they hadn't traveled at his speed: they were up Glenariff. He went back, still roaring over the road, and turned up the Glen. And his anger was different anger now. It was cold, level, and malignant. “He tried t'make an arse-hole outa me,” he said. “He musta went like buggery t'get to the Glen Road before I turned Garron Point.
Right y'are! Right y'are! Right y'are!”

The young couple's car was parked across the road from the official entrance to the Glen. Powers turned in the lay-by and went back a quarter of a mile. He parked his car hard against the bank.

Glenariff is a beautiful wooded fairy-gorge through which the Glenariff River tumbles and twists to the open fields below. Its rough descent to the sea has been tamed by a complex of rustic stairs and bridges and rails that confine the public to a narrow path. The sun, when it shines, is filtered through the foliage, and there is a magic about the place that is compounded by the sound of little waterfalls and the chatter of the stream. The sound makes talk impossible. Roger Casement used to walk here because the sound shut out the voices of men and left him free to brood on their iniquities, or to weave fantasies of his own.

Powers and Callaghan came into the Glen down the steep bank of trees and bushes and ferns above the stream. They found a rock ledge above a noisy little waterfall. The path down to the next level was a series of twisting steps that passed directly below the ledge. They sat down to wait, unable to see or hear the approach of their prey. They watched, instead, the rustic steps immediately below them. Maureen and her young man would simply appear there. Presently Powers stood up. He had decided how to handle this thing. The drop below was, he thought, about twelve feet, and he weighed more than twelve stone, bone and muscle.