The Whore-Mother (25 page)

But when he reached Powers the man was not there. His great right hand dug into Colum just above the groin and the huge boy went over, double, crying out in agony. He went down on his face like a sack of dropped potatoes from a swinging thump on the back of his falling head. He felt the boot in his side, felt himself lifted and propped against the wall, and briefly but distantly felt the sledgehammers that beat his face, and he fell, feeling nothing, his face in the grass. Powers didn't want to shoot him. He wanted to beat him, see him bleed, feel flesh giving under his knuckles, feel the shrill joy that shrieked in him when his hands dug into the belly and his bone cracked on splitting skin over bone. He threw Colum up onto the wall and flailed away....

Then suddenly he stopped and turned slowly and looked around the circle of huddling young men with fear in their faces. His power leapt in his head. He was a foot off the ground, levitating on a cushion of supporting air. He screamed,
“You'll take orders!”
and turned like a figure on a turntable, to see all their faces and taste their young fear.

His eyes came to the ridiculous and scanty little figure of Kiernan, who stood in the center of the circle, his gun pointing at Powers' stomach. “What the fuckin hell d'you think you are?” Powers screamed at him.

Kiernan's voice was as soft as the rain. “Pick up the dog, Mr. Powers,” he said, “and carry it back to the farmer, and pay him his price. Or I'll put you down beside it.”

Powers saw the face he had seen in the car when he made the little man angry on the way down. This was not the time and this poor little shit was not the man. There was no glory, no ballad in this scrawny weed's gun. His head cooled. He tried to remember what he had said to Kiernan in the car, to make him so angry. He couldn't remember. He said to himself with detachment, “Thon wee man's a fuckin killer,” and picked up the dog and walked before Kiernan to the little farmhouse in the next field.

The farmer stood in his doorway and stared without expression at the dead dog in the big man's arms, and at the little man with a gun that looked far too big for him. He said nothing.

“He shot your dog,” Kiernan said. “He'll pay you what it's worth.”

Powers laid the dog carefully on the ground, wiped his bloodied hands on his clothes, and dug his money from his trouser pocket.

The farmer stated the price, Powers paid it, and went before Kiernan back over the field.

The farmer did not watch them go. He left the dead dog on the ground, stepped back quickly into his house, closed the door, and laid the bar in its slots. Then he stood in the middle of his kitchen, silent, staring into the slow-burning turf in his fire.

Daniel Sorahan leaned on his car and watched Kiernan and Powers approaching across the field. “I want to ask you a question,” he said to his young men, thinking like a schoolmaster. “Have any of you ever raped a woman?”

“In the name of God, Dan,” one of them said, “has that bloody madman put you out of your head?”

“I want to ask you another question. What would you feel like doin if I raped your sister or your wife?”

“I'd shoot you the way that black bastard shot the poor bloody dog,” one of them said.

“In that case,” Sorahan said, “we'll go on home and get into dry clothes and meet at Father Heenan's house at four—without these two liberators from the North. There's things I'm goin to tell you. Then we'll talk.”

When Kiernan came back to the quiet circle, he said, “McManus is not here. We'll join the Skibereen men tomorrow and work our way all the way down to Mizen Head if we have to. Away on home and get dry.”

Then he got carefully into the back seat of the StranorIar car, with his gun in his hand. He said, his face in the window, “I am very sorry indeed, Mr. Sorahan, about this incident.” It was stiff, formal, an official apology. “I am very fond of dogs myself.” The young men were folding Colum onto the back seat of Daniel Sorahan's car.

Kiernan said sternly in a loud voice to the back of Powers' head, “Drive on!” and flashed his gun so that he could be seen to be ready, willing, and able to handle dangerous situations till they cooled.

M
c MANUS
was safe. He felt safe. They walked in the twilight, down between the rock ridges and over the lower ones, to the little bay. Mrs. Burke always determined the routes they took. When he tried to choose the paths, climbing to the higher ridges, she said no, too high, and she knew best. He was content. She pointed to a tall thin rock standing alone on a ridge. It looked like a man. It stood out in the twilight in a harsh silhouette. That's what we'd look like, she said, and he knew she was wise. The rocks and ridges and the mountains behind them closed in, the little fields closed in, the sea closed in. He was safe. England was almost forgotten; the run from Ballycastle was almost forgotten; the American girl on the coach—what was her name?—was almost forgotten. Powers and the Provos lurked, but they were in the North and he was in this fortress and the longer he stayed here the more baffled they would be—then England. But not yet. When the thought that he should go crossed his mind, he put it away; nervously. It disarmed him.

The first night they sat on the shore, listening to the retreating tide, he saw the sailing dinghy lashed to its moorings, high and dry on the wet sand. “It's mine,” she told him. “The mackerel run just outside the bay. Sometimes I fish. When it's safe, we can fish.” We. She said we a lot now. They were together day and night.

In the day he thought more and more of the night. It was never spoken of. He called her Mrs. Burke. She called him child. Mother in the day, mistress in the night. But he thought more and more of the night and his lust for her grew. He closed his eyes and could not see her, but he felt her, soft and warm and lustfully inciting. It was his first fulfilled lust. It made him dependent. He wished the days away.

The doctor and his wife brought their groceries. The doctor hinted, his wife nagged, and Mrs. Burke sent McManus to the garden while they argued. He could hear them. He heard them the day the doctor's wife said they would bring no more groceries. “Get rid of him! How'll you explain your double rations to Jim O'Keeffe at the shop?” she asked as if she had played her joker.

“There's more than one shop in Schull.”

It upset McManus, but only till they left. Mrs. Burke always wore her little smile when they left. It was the flag she flew to celebrate small victories, and his cocoon rewove itself. Sometimes, the notion that it was all unreal crept into his head and he put it away. The real was cold; this was warm.

The morning after the doctor's wife said there would be no more groceries, Mrs. Burke took the bus to Schull “to lay in supplies,” she said.

“You should have a car,” McManus said, thinking of being alone. “You'd be quicker.”

“The bus is fine.”

“Don't be long.” He felt feebly dependent.

She laid a long rough forefinger on the back of his hand. “Why, child?” The face was severe, the voice a little above a whisper. It was her approach to tenderness in the daylight.

“I want you back,” he said, and because it was more than he meant to say he said more. “You'll be seeing the doctor and your sister.”

“Oh, yes.” She picked up her handbag, a worn old thing scuffed at the edges.

“She'll ask you where you. . . .” It was not a daylight question. “Yes, she will.” She shrugged awkwardly and took his hand and turned the thing away. “Walk me to the hedge.” At the gate she said, “Don't be seen now. Don't answer the door.” In the time he had been in the house nobody but the doctor and his wife had come to the door.

“No,” he assured her. She was away, striding down the lane. He watched her to the corner where the lane turned between honeysuckle hedges and in another hundred yards reached the road. She was out of sight. He went back to the house and closed the door. It was the first time he had been alone since he came to the house and a lost uneasiness nagged him. The clock slowed down. He wandered the little house and the little garden, tried to read, to lie still on the bed, to see Mrs. Burke on it in the light of day, and all he could realize was her absence. He expected her back long before it was possible; not hungry, for something to occupy his time he ate the stew she left for him in the oven, washed the dishes, made tea, was too impatient for her return to make more tea when the notion occurred to him. He went again and again to the gate to stare up the lane.

Then she was late, well past the reasonable time for her return and uneasiness turned to anxiety, and anxiety to irritation, and irritation to anger. She had no right. He was alone. She was the only human connection he had. The doctor and his wife brought groceries yesterday; why the hell did she need to go into Schull for more today? What was she doing anyway? Making it up with her sister and brother-in-law? They were more important to her than he was. What was he to her anyway? Little more than a schoolboy, with a woman of . . . what, fifty? What did she want with him? Why did her in-laws nag about him? Why did the doctor keep telling her she needed an invalid of her own? Why did the sister go on about where she slept? They knew something he didn't? That maybe she did things that frightened them? Maybe behind the severe, secret face of the widow of Thomas Burke was a middle-aged woman sick with lust and she saw him as the relief she wanted? Resentful son and jealous lover, when twilight came and there was no sign of her, “To hell with her,” he said, “if she can go out for the day then by God I can look over the wall.”

He went out and walked to the rock ridge across the fields behind the house. They called it The Hill. He had never been on top of it. She had never allowed him. He scrambled up now, through gorse and heather and lichen and bramble and the shock of what he saw brought him to his knees in a bed of ferns.

His isolation was an illusion.

He traced the course of their land to where it disappeared between the honeysuckle hedges and emerged at the road. At their junction were three houses, one of them a grocer's shop. To the left, below the road and concealed from ground level by the ridges between, was another little house, and up on the slope of the mountain that rose like a great brown rock half a mile to the north was a cluster of green and yellow fields and, on their edge, a white cabin. A man appeared from nowhere on the bus road. He had a pack on his back and wore a tweed suit and a tweed hat and as he walked he swung a thorn stick. His head was down as if his thoughts were far off. McManus crept back among the ferns and scrambled halfway down the slope of the hill.

The woman had neighbors. Why did they not pass, or call? There was a crossroads grocer's shop less than a quarter of a mile from the house. Why did she not buy there? How did he reach her house? By the road? Stumbling over the ridges? Who saw him? Why did he not break his neck, or a leg, or an arm? He wanted the woman back, urgently. Anger flew, dependence seeped through him. The dark seeped over him. He went up to the crest of the hill again, and sat among the ferns, watching in the sudden blackness where the road should be, for the lights of the evening bus. She had to be on that one. It was the last of the few.

He was full of apprehension. Small life moved on the hill, making him start. Field mice, he thought, or rabbits; reassuring himself.

The voice behind him said, “Don't move. I'll not hurt you.” It was a northern voice.

The silence felt very long. His heart swelled and pounded. In the dark, on the hill, unseen and sneaking, a northern voice that said “I'll not hurt you” sounded like a threat. The voice said, “I'm comin to sit down behind you.”

He heard the feet among the ferns, just above him, and the body settling. “Sit right still,” the voice said, “I can see you clear and my gun would blow a hole out through your front a foot wide.” I'll not hurt you? McManus felt ill with fear.

“You're McManus.”

What good would denials do? “Yes.” He was resigned, as if he had collapsed inside. A sort of sadness took him over. He wasn't the kind. He was too soft. He wasn't like McGuinness, the Provos' military leader in the Bogside who was his age but not his kind. McGuinness would despise him and wouldn't understand him, anymore than he could understand McGuinness, now that he had met the kind. Fear was pointless. They were here. The whole stupid escapade would be over in minutes. More grief for his father and mother. The sadness was for them, not for himself. In his deep sense of defeat he didn't care about himself, but his father and mother had only one life work, their children, and they'd soon both be dead. He was thinking of how they would survive this second stage of what he had brought on them when the man spoke again.

“I mean you no harm, son.”

He didn't hear. “What?”

“I said, I mean you no harm.”

“All right.”

“I have questions. Answer them up sharp. I don't want to have to make you.”

“All right.”

“Who's Mary Connors?”

“She's a widow in the Falls.”

“Was she Pat Powers' fancy woman?”

“I don't know.”

“But you think?”

“I thought that's where he was some nights.”

“Who's Val Cleery?”

“He's Danny O'Connell's number two in the Belfast Officials.”

“Ever see him?”

“On Divis Street once. Powers pointed him out to me.”

“Would you know him again?”

“Yes.” Now he was puzzled.

“What was your sister's name?”

What was? Now the man was cutting at the bone. His questions were bewildering; frightening in their pointlessness. Devious. But to what end?

“Powers killed her,” the man said.

The shock was more shattering than the first sound of his voice. Why was he talking about Maureen? “I know,” he said.