The Whore-Mother (29 page)

Defeated and with nothing to get a grip on, Kiernan said bitterly, “By Jasus, youse boys carry a heavy load. All our boys in the North have to do is die.”

He could not hear Sheehy say in his head, “Well, God rest their souls but let them do it in the North.”

And who has heard a smile? Sorahan's was behind his eyes. “Hunt two by two,” he told his young Bantry men, “and them that finds the boy, say nothin—just get him to hell out of West Cork. Let them find him somewhere else, but not here.” Death is less ghoulish out of sight and hearing and executioners are less of a bother in the North, or somewhere else far away from West Cork.... “And you, Barney,” he said, “if
we
find him, maybe you'd slip off and phone the Garda ... we'll think about that.” That was the sour one. Sweet Christ, that was informing. That one would have to be thought about. But not yet; not now; “later” is the sweet refuge from bloody decision, thanks be to God.

Sorahan was pleased with his conspiracy and for all he knew when they reached the crossroads shop at seven in the evening, two of the Bantry boys could already have McManus on a bus, running him to Cork and comfort.

It was a simple country shop, smelling of potatoes and bacon and bread and Mr. Deasy was behind his counter, tall, scholarly, and bent like a question mark, ready to close for the day.

“What can I do for you gentlemen?” he said, and speculated on their source of life.

“Half a pound of bacon,” Kiernan said. The others stood back among the lemonade cases on the floor, ordered to keep their mouths shut and leave the talk to an angry and impatient little man.

“Sliced or wrapped?”

“What?”

“Do you want it cut off the side or out of the fridge in a packet?”

“Oh. Wrapped.”

Mr. Deasy went to the fridge by the door into his living quarters. “Nice old day.”

“Fine.”

“You're not from these parts.”

“No. Do you happen t'know,” Kiernan said indifferently, “a young fellow by the name of McManus who could be stayin round here?”

Mr. Deasy looked thoughtful. “No. I don't happen to know anybody by that name. Friend of yours?”

“I'm his uncle. Tryin to find him.”

“Is he a tall one?”

“That's right. You've seen him?”

“No. Would he have a beard?”

“He has. Y've seen him.”

“No. A lot of young fellows have beards. Is he from the North?”

“He is. How would you happen to know that?”

“I don't. You're from the North. I suppose your nephew is too.”

“Jasus! Kiernan paid for his bacon and tried again. “He was walkin. W'a pack, you know.”

“They all are.”

“He might have had a girl with him.”

“Likes the flesh, aye?”

“Well, he's young.”

“McManus?”

“Aye.”

“Haven't set eyes on him.”

Kiernan turned and opened the door and rang the bell hanging from it.

“But I know where he is,” Mr. Deasy said, enjoying himself. There wasn't much to entertain you here, and Mr. Deasy liked a little joke. What do you do here in the winter, Cleery had asked him. Well, there's table tennis, Mr. Deasy said, and watched Cleery's eyes with private pleasure. Now he watched the unfolding four-figure tableau fold back into position in front of the counter and among the lemonade bottles. He had said something magical, like pushing a button on television.

“Is that right now?” Very disciplined. Not eager. Kiernan told himself he was getting to know these West Cork foreigners.

“Likes the women?” Mr. Deasy said.

“That's right. Has he picked himself one round here?”

“Picked a hot one.” Mr. Deasy wiped his counter with a cloth and then wiped the scale of his bacon-slicing machine with the same cloth. “She's not all there. But she likes young ones. He's her second.”

They're talking about a man's life, Sorahan thought, and waited, his hand on Barney's arm.

“I was afearda that,” Kiernan said. “Near here?”

“Down behind.”

“Down behind what?”

“The hill behind the shop.”

“But you've never seen him?”

“Not yet.”

“Then how d'you know?”

“Three fellas that's been round here told me. They spoke to him. They've been in the woman's house. There's only one bed in the house.” His sparkling eyes said, how's that? and isn't gossip the countryman's live theater in the head and no excise tax on it?

“These fellas? Where're they?”

“Left. They took off this mornin, early.”

“Who's the woman?”

“Thomas Burke's widow.”

“Who's he?”

“He was from here. You never heard of him?” Mr. Deasy had a rack of paperbook books behind the lemonade. Tim Pat Coogan's
The IRA
, J. Bowyer Bell's
The Secret Army
, Donald S. Connery's
The Irish
, Dan Breen's
My Fight for Irish Freedom
, Bernadette Devlin's
The Price of My Soul
, and a lot of old rubbish it is, he told his customers. But there was no Thomas Burke.

“Am I supposed t'have heard of him?”

“Ah, no. You're more for business than readin up North. Why don't you just shoot them old bombers and get on w'business?”

“How do you get to the woman's house?” There are enemies wherever you turn. This stupid oul duff was one of them. The country's full of them. Kiernan was no longer all that sure about Sorahan.

“She has a sister in Schull—that's the doctor's wife, that one. The one down here keeps them on the run, I'd say.” Don't answer terminal questions till you have to. They end the play.

“The
doctor's
wife?”

“Sullivan. Down the coast road.”

Everything Kiernan feared was being confirmed. He was in a nest of vipers. The Skibereen men were
busy
, for the love of God.
Busy!
And this doctor. Sullivan told them he hadn't seen a soul. Nobody came near him for medicine, or treatment! Bloody liars. Worse, by God. “This doctor. Does he come to the sister's ... the Burke woman's house at a1l?”

“For a while, all the time. Every day for a while lately. The wife too. With him every day down here. Well,” he winked and nodded, “a doctor has to watch it, aye? With a horny sister-in-law like the Burke woman. . . . There's always people that like a nice old gossip.”

“How do we get there?”

“He was here last night. Woke me up in the middle of the night. I got up and looked and his car was parked out front there. He woke me again in the small hours, roarin away like a motor racer....”

“Thanks.” Kiernan bustled them out of the shop. “Drive up the road,” he told Powers.

“Wait a minute. I need fags,” Sorahan shouted, and ran back into the shop, panic growing in his head. “Have you a phone here?” he asked Mr. Deasy, and then it was blind clear to him too late that all he needed to do was look for a lead-in wire from the telegraph poles. No need to create a situation. Christ! The things you had to remember.

“No. The only one round here's in the post office a quarter-mile down the road. You wanted to phone?”

“Which way down the road?”

“I'll show you.”

“No! No need. Just tell me.”

“No bother.” Mr. Deasy was coming round the counter.

“No need! Left or right?”

“No bother at all.” Mr. Deasy shoved Sorahan out through the door into Kiernan's hearing. “Down there. There's a dip in the road on a bend and the post office is in a private house on the right. You can't see it for the trees and the hedge....”

“Thank you, thank you....” Sarah an stumbled into the car.

Mr. Deasy rested his hands on the door. “There's one thing, though.”

“Thank you, thank you....”

“The postmaster's over eighty. Very crusty. Won't let anybody use the public phone after three, the poor old cripple. You're over four hours late, mister.”

“Thank you, thank you....”

“Away on,” Kiernan said. “Along the road.” He leaned towards Sorahan. “What was all that about?”

Sorahan's native talent for conspiracy was scrambling to save its face. “I was askin him about a phone. I have to call my wife when I get a chance,” he said, because he couldn't think of anything else. His mind was spinning like a fly wheel and Kiernan looked very quiet. This necessity to lie in a hurry was the bad part.

“You went in for fags. You came out lookin for a phone,” Kiernan said gently.

“Yes. I just forgot the fags when I remembered my wife.”

“But the oul postmaster's a cripple and won't let you use the phone after three?”

“That's what he said.”

“Then how'se you goin t'phone the wife?”

“I don't know.” He knew nothing now.

Kiernan handed him an open packet of cigarettes. He hadn't smoked a cigarette for fifteen years. “I never seen you with a cigarette, Mr. Sorahan.”

He lit it from Kiernan's match. “I do, sometimes,” he said.

They stopped a short way up the road on a bend from which they could see The Hill. McManus was in reach. The end of the road was in sight, for McManus; for Powers.

Kiernan said to Powers, “Are'y ready?”

“Fuckin right, I'm ready.” He had been quiet, under restraint. His time had come. He could taste McManus. It gave him great pleasure.

Kiernan took binoculars from the dashboard pocket. “We'll take a look from up that rock.”

They climbed The Hill and waded among the ferns and gorse and lay down on the crown. The little house lay white and quiet inside its fringe of fuchsia, like a cotton blouse. The white stone barn was at an angle to the gable of the house, on their left. It's one glassless window gaped out like a blind eye.

Sorahan saw the place with dismay. It was a peaceful sight. It was a killing ground. What the grocer said about Thomas Burke's widow didn't matter much to him. Once, he had thought of Thomas Burke as a prophet; now he was no more than a dead novelist still in print in paperback. The wives of living novelists mean nothing to anybody but the novelists; their widows mean nothing to anybody. Sorahan lived eighteen miles from this one, and wife or widow, he'd never known she breathed.

The grocer would know some of what he pretended to know. For the rest, gossip was the fleshing out of lean lives. Malice salted talk. Sometime or other the woman in that house had cut Deasy. His sly winking twinkle as he slid his knife in was the decoration on a cultural cake—the stage business in a living live theater. The grocer would know
who
the woman was. He would know who came and went about the place and how many beds were in the house. Who slept where in it or with whom, he would decide by what he would like to do in McManus's place. Maybe he'd tried for her himself and she's laughed at his years? Whatever it was, he would draw from it malice and humor—and drama. Life on the fringes of the island fringe of Europe was personal, drama in the mind. Missing lines improvised on the spot.

Sorahan didn't need to think about this. It was there, whole, in the mind. He was one of them.

His thoughts were of himself and his predicament. He had swung half-circle from his delight in the loved illusion of the native Irish genius for conspiracy and intrigue to alarm and despondency at his half-thought fecklessness. Conspiracy
in the mind
. It was part of the drama in the mind. Most literate Irishmen called it imagination. That's what Sorahan called it the other day. Today on this rock hill he called it fantasy. What in the name of God made him think he could find a phone easily in this landscape where he
knew
phones were five miles apart? What made him think he could call the Garda down on these men? Wasn't he, like more than half the nation, their passive but supporting bystander? What made him think he could
inform
? The gut instinct of the nation was against it. Fantasy. Wouldn't little Barney have a catatonic seizure if he tried to lift the phone? Drama in the mind it was. Irishmen young and middle-aged and old glancing forever off the shoulder of reality, never meeting it head-on. Myths; the masturbating emotions of myths; saints made out of schoolmastering windbags; martyrs made out of psychotic killers ... heroic virtue pouring out of the barrel of a gun ... we're a nation of political masturbators, he thought, and buried his sweating face in the ferns. That white quiet place down there is a killing ground and I've been playing with my political genitals like a thirteen-year-old but the real fuckers are here, beside me in this place, and when I see them open their political flies I'm sick at my stomach.

“What's eatin' you, Mr. Sorahan?” Kiernan asked him.

“I'm tired.” I'm an Irish fantasist, he wanted to say, and I've walked into a brick wall with my face stuck out in front of me.

“Aye.” It sounded contemptuous. “Not long now. It'll be over after it's dark and then y'can go away on home.” It was open disdain. Kiernan rolled on his back and looked into the sky. “Nice quiet place this.”

Powers was watching the house through the glasses. “I seen the woman,” he said. “She's in the room w'the big window, lyin on the bed.” He raised his head, grinning. “In her skin.”

“Any sign of McManus?”

“Not yet. Why's she lyin naked?”

“Y'can ask her when it's dark.”

“The oul fella in the shop's right. He's been fuckin her.”

Barney lay apart like a staying retriever. Dirty jokes among his peers were funny and didn't mean anything. Dirty talk from older men made him feel dirty. He shut off hearing and felt lost and thought about his mother and father and wanted to be at home with them. There was a man in there gain to be killed. Murdered, he tried to say in his head and his mind wouldn't accept the word. He's not much older than me, he said. Jasus, it was great lyin in the hills in the warm sun and the bees singin, thinkin about dyin for Ireland but, piteous Jasus, it never crossed your mind that that meant killin for Ireland. Softly, he moved farther away, as if that made him safer, less part of the event. He loved Mr. Sarah an surely and he'd let nothin happen Barney couldn't face ... but what could Mr. Sorahan do? He was only a schoolmaster.