Wild Decembers (14 page)

“What do you think will happen to me . . . what’s the worst that will happen to me?” Joseph asked.

“My dear man . . . not so fast. I’m trying to paint you a picture of the psychology. Bugler is summoned home because of a tragedy . . . He gets a letter off over in Australia. He’s told about his inheritance and he has to make a choice whether to engage an auctioneer to sell it or to come home and make a fist of things. I have to say that I do have a sneaking admiration for the way he has set about it single-handed . . . reclaiming whole areas of marsh, I understand.”

“He’d like to take me over.”

“But you did hit him . . . that is a plain and incontrovertible fact.”

“I did.”

“And you’ve given your statement to the Garda.”

“I had to . . . They wrung it out of me . . . that young guard.”

“So my task is how to play it to the judge.”

“Will he fine me . . . or will I go to gaol, which?”

“That reminds me of a little story. In the district court a few mornings ago two motorists are down for speeding, a lady and a gent. The gent, who had only been doing ninety miles per hour, is fined two hundred pounds, and the lady, who had been doing one hundred and ten miles per hour but had flashing eyes, gets off with a caution, because she flattered His Honour.”

“I’ll think it over,” Joseph said, rising, perspiring.

“I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Brennan . . . You’re thinking that you would be better off with Mr. O’Dea up the street. Mr. O’Dea, who trebles as undertaker, cattle jobber, and man at the Bar . . . he’s more your cup of tea.”

“I’ll think it over.”

“That will be twenty-five guineas,” Mr. Leveau said, and he stood by the oil heater, warming his hands, a frigid smile on his face as he watched Joseph take out the notes, eventually having to search in his pocket for shillings and sixpences, to make up the required sum.

H
OSTS OF SEAGULLS
circled at different altitudes, their long-drawn-out wails spiteful, as if one batch cried back to outdo another. Their shrillness coming down out of the whey-green cavity of sky onto the court building and onto the groups bunched up in coats and anoraks, summoned from their fields and their holdings, into a kingdom of judgement. The cries of the seagulls more raucous far than the crows at Cloontha.

“
Dominus illuminatio,
” Joseph said as he stood in the path and looked at the sprawling stone building with small blind panes of glass in the several windows, its vestibule pillars flaking.

To one side was a grotto made of thick knobbled stones, the white plaster Virgin, with both arms outstretched, giving audience to a kneeling girl. Breege thought that maybe it was erected there to encourage people to put aside their enmity and quash their cases. O’Dea confided to her that often cases were quashed just prior to being heard, people sobered up once they saw the gravity of things. O’Dea was her ally now, imploring her to talk sense to her cracked brother with his Greeks and Red Branch knights.

In there in those stale rooms, in the biding dust, lay all the wrongs and all the rights, worn ledgers with the backs scarred, their edges frail and frayed, yellowing page following yellowing page, histories long forgotten.

From the branches of a big tree soft damp blobs of ice fell on their heads, and she knotted her scarf tight, then pulled it tight down over her face so as not to be seen. The scarf was of georgette and smelt of camphor. It had been her mother’s. From the corner of her eye she searched for Bugler’s frame, Bugler’s shadow, her heart in jeopardy.

“You shouldn’t have drunk,” she said.

“Two Sandemans,” Joseph said, and challenged her to make him walk a straight line on the edge of the steps.

“Three Sandemans,” she said. The knot of the scarf hurt her swallow.

There was much commotion around the entrance door, people running this way and that, beckoning to each other, the barristers with a sort of suave ascendancy, strands of their wigs flying, giddily, like a young girl’s.

“There’s still time, Joseph,” she said, squeezing his arm.

“I’m no Joe Chicken,” he said, separating himself from her.

Inside it was quite dark and dingy, a tiled floor of oxblood red, with some tiles missing and windows grimed with dust and cobweb. People huddled in groups, most of them smoking and talking to each other in very low voices with expressions of doom. All of the wigs cried out for washing and combing. Two men in almost identical pullovers looked as if they were bracing for a fight as they paced and muttered oaths to each other.

“He trains lions,” O’Dea said, pointing to one and then pointing to the other, “He also trains lions, for a different circus,” then turning to Joseph remarked on his being like a boiled egg in a pot, hopping up and down. The moment the doors were opened people filed in.

It was cold as an outhouse. Green walls oozing a darker green damp and the wooden benches full of marks and scrawls like the counter of a public house. A young man in handcuffs with two guards on either side of him, already seated, kept staring at nothing, his eyes like hot coals.

At that instant Bugler came in and sat directly across from them. He had had a haircut, and his beard and his sideburns were trimmed. He sat looking down at his hands as if he was reading something on his lap, and as often with him, his real life seemed to be running on inside him and outside things seemed of no consequence at all. Breege thought he had never looked so handsome or so lean. Behind him eight or nine guards sat very close together with an air of stiffness, the brass buckles of their belts brazen as weapons in the sere light that dropped down from a skylight window.

The judge seemed in a very irritable mood, tapping his fingers at the inanities that were being said to him. From time to time he lifted his wig, scratched his head vigorously, then glancing down at the witness in the box, he wagged his finger and spoke rebukingly: “Moving cattle when you shouldn’t and where you shouldn’t is an offence . . . The Brehon laws are out, finished.”

“Yes, your honour.”

“Adjacent lands, even on a godforsaken mountain, are not your own lands.”

“Yes, your honour.”

“Is that your defence?”

“I won’t do it again . . . It was just a prank.”

“If you do it again you’ll be in gaol for your prank.”

“And no one in the whole wide world wants to be in one of those places. Dungeons.”

“My dear man, cut out your philosophies and corral your cattle.”

“Your honour . . . I know you’re a family man, as I am myself . . . To leave wife and child would be a bitter blow.”

“Family man,” Judge Dalton said, unable to repress a smile.

True they had a large house, a garden with azaleas, cups on the mantelpiece from his hunting days, but he saw as little of wife and boy as possible. Boy, mammy’s boy, already twenty-one and still considering a career. Mammy topped his eggs in the morning and asked if he had a nice sleep and nice dreams. Although retired from the chase, he was still welcome at the several dos, and life could be said to be tolerable except for the gout. Each day after sitting listening to these drones, he drove to the hotel and stayed there until he was sure that mammy and mammy’s boy were habu in their beds. The conjugal duties, frozen in an era that seemed as distant as the Flood, had left him a disenchanted man. Either his virginity or Agatha’s intercession to saints and blessed martyrs marked that night in that hotel room as a complete fiasco. That and the damage to Agatha’s insides when mammy’s boy was born. Whiskey doubled as wife and rarely did he lose his grip on the wheel. The few times that he was caught out and pulled in off the road ended happily. Ergo, a guard recognised him and either apologised or offered to drive him home. Scientifically speaking, he would describe his heart as resembling a bit of gizzard and his lower region as pickled in a similar solution in which onions and gherkins are pickled. A successful man, oh yes, a Rotarian, their first house replaced with a bigger house and still a bigger one as he progressed and buttressed his income with livestock and show horses. They were asked to lunches and dinners, met other judges, high commissioners, diplomats, receptions where Agatha was extravagant in the praise of the dresses and jewels of the other ladies, tugging at their sleeves and bemoaning her own humble wardrobe. She reckoned that these strange women had lovely houses with big clocks and antiques and bone china on their breakfast trays.

“You’re talking tosh,” he shouts to the farmer who has now re-sorted to the time-honoured subject of moiety.

“Moiety . . . What does it mean?”

“I’m not fully able to answer that, your honour, except to say that the mountain where I drove my cattle is mine as much as his. It’s commonage.”

“I’m fining you one hundred pounds, and I don’t want to see you back in this court again.”

“God bless your honour.”

There was a sudden moment of consternation as the man in the handcuffs decided to free himself and dragged his captors down some steps, followed by two of the three reporters.

Scanning his list the chief clerk decided to change the order of things. Breege hears Joseph’s name and Bugler’s name being called out and sees Bugler walk up to the witness box, calmly. Having sworn on the Bible, he spoke of a friendship which turned sour after he rented the grazing of some lands which the defendant used to rent. Prior to that, they were, as he said, friends and neighbours, they shot woodcock together, helped each other on the farm, he being available to do things with his tractor, cutting timber and removing stones from a field, something the defendant had welcomed. What he minded most was not the assault but the hurt to his dog Gypsy, who had been locked in a shed for three days while he was away in the city on business.

“He’s a no-good dog . . . He was driving our Goldie astray,” Joseph was heard to shout as local guards glared across at him to shut up and the clerk called for order. When Bugler had finished, the judge thanked him for being such a reliable witness who did not waste his words.

Next it was the turn of the guards and the witnesses. The court heard of bruising, lacerations, abrasions, fractures, and stitches. The woman who had taken Bugler in surpassed herself with a detailed description of the night in question.

“I am the wife of Malachi O’Byrne. We came to this parish less than a year ago to breed ponies for pony trekking in the summer. Our clients are mostly foreign and we don’t mix much. On the evening of the eleventh instant it was late and I was trying to get my daughter Patricia to go up to bed. My husband was off on a job. Next thing the dog began to bark like mad, and I opened the door to see what was wrong. The fright I got. Patricia began to scream, she thought it was the pookah man. He was covered in blood, soaking wet, and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I had no choice but to bring him into the house and sit him down. I called the barracks. Guard Slattery came in very good time. I learned then who the injured man was. I had never seen him before. He was very shook.”

Having given her evidence, she looked, waited, was told she could go back to her seat, and before doing it took the opportunity to bow to the three sides of the court.

The attention quickened once Guard Slattery began to speak. At last they were going to hear Joseph’s side of things. The guard read very slowly, allowing them to imagine he was Joseph; even his accent had thickened that little bit.

“I remember the night of the eleventh instant. Mick Bugler and myself were in Nelly’s Bar, though not drinking together. We had words and a scuffle broke out which was quickly quashed. I left Nelly’s at about ten o’clock and got into my van, which was parked nearby. Just after Lyon’s Cross there was a car stopped letting somebody out. I knew this car to be Mick Bugler’s. I gave him plenty of time to let the person out, it was a woman, a ladyfriend. I then blew the horn a good few times, and still he did not move. He opened the door and shouted back at me and told me to ‘fuck off’. He then closed the car door and stayed where he was on the road. I blew the horn several more times. I then got out and went over to his car. I opened the driver’s door and started punching hin) with my right fist. That is how I got the bruise and the mark on my knuckles. I was going to leave him alone, but he got nasty and started calling me things. I then went over to the wall and picked up a stone. I went back to the car and hit him with the stone across the face as he was sitting in the car. There was blood on my hand at this stage. When he got out I punched him under the jaw until he fell back. I kept hitting him with the stone as hard as I could on the face and on the head. While he was on the ground I gave him a good few kicks, anywhere and everywhere.”

It was too much for Joseph, hearing this exaggerated, trumped-up version of what he had said in his statement, and though he had sworn to Breege and to O’Dea that he would not go in the box, he had sprung up now, full of vindication. All of a sudden there was excitement, people craning to hear and to see, the sisters on the edges of their seats, Rita saying to Reena that the acoustics were fecking deadly. From the sway of Joseph’s back Breege knew that he was going to disgrace himself.