Strong Man

by H. R. F. Keating

  However I was in no position to stop him. Only Keig could have done that, and he, generally establishing himself some distance away from the rest of us, never had any idea that this was going on.

  There were however hours of respite for me when I would be summoned by Keig to help him over the details of some new attack he was planning. And sometimes when we had finished I would stay on. Keig seldom spoke, and I would have been surprised if he had. But I, with nothing now to distract me, would frequently in these circumstances plunge into the depths of gloom.

  I could see no end to our present situation. That was what depressed me most. Of course with the coming spring life would at least get easier. We would have enough to eat again. But while Mylchraine had those planes of his I saw no way out for us.

  I used to lie there and say to myself that things could get no blacker. But in this I was wrong. About the middle of January a worse blow fell for all of us, and one that was the harder to bear for coming from a clear sky.

  It happened when we made our weekly radio contact with Dublin, a routine which we painstakingly stuck to though there was little for the English or Irish papers now in what we had to tell Cormode, and such occasional cheering information as he gave us was appallingly difficult to spread in the deadened silence of Mylchraine’s Oceana. However we kept this one frail link with the world open, and it was through it that the blow fell.

  We received this time, not the usual almost meaningless transcript of Oceanan events in Dublin and generalized messages of encouragement, but a single piece of concrete and grim news, pieced out Morse letter by Morse letter.

  ‘The Revolutionary Council wishes to convey to Thomas Keig its sincerest regrets at the death of Margaret, his wife. Her final illness was brief and bravely borne. All members of the Council attended the funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery on Friday last. Ends.’

  10

  Never after the arrival of that bald message from Dublin did I see Keig perform one of those strange axe rituals of his. Certainly there had been no occasion for triumphing recently and nor was there to be for some while to come. Yet times would come later when Keig would have had every right to rejoice, but even when they did there was never any sign he was experiencing that curious urge to silent boastful celebration that I had first seen expressing itself in the moonlight by the seashore within hours of my meeting the now dead Margaret when we had succeeded in making good our escape from the Keepers on the Kernel.

  When an occasion arose for such another display of axeman-ship as I had watched only some four or five months earlier than this when Keig had led young Alan Duckan and myself to the deserted churchyard at Carnack, and when nothing happened I was at first surprised and then relieved. I saw Keig’s loss of this urge as marking the conquering of a subterranean spirit of self-admiration in him, a mysterious breaking-out that I had never been able to foretell and had always feared. Later I was to look back on this optimism of mine as facile indeed.

  But now when the news of Margaret’s death was fresh Keig seemed to ride the blow, which we had all thought of as hitting at us too, in that if Keig were to lose that drive of his our chances of lasting out on the island would be almost non-existent. For two or three weeks certainly his creaky humour failed, but bit by bit even this came back. And never, even on the day that grim message came in squeaky dot by squeaky dash, did he falter in his opposition to Mylchraine.

  So we came to think that his oaken frame had endured this blow as it had endured so many others. It was only much later that I began wondering if in fact the blow had been infinitely more telling than any of us had ever suspected.

  The trouble was that no one could ever tell with Keig. I can lay claim to knowing him better than any of the others, but I never really fathomed what went on behind those dark uncommunicative eyes. I never felt I was seeing the machinery. And that gave him, to me and to all who came in contact with him, a constant concealed unpredictability. It was not that he was changeable like some of the mountain men we had with us who were apt to swing from the extreme of despair to utter self-confidence for any reason or none. Keig was steady as a rock. And it was not only that he would sometimes come up with solutions to problems of a simplicity that positively startled. There, looking back, one felt one could see the train of thought. But it was as if there was always much more machinery in that bullet head than one ever caught a glimpse of.

  I often used to think how odd it was that the times had called out the man. Had Mylchraine remained merely one of the island’s powerful, almost independent, estate owners then Keig would have spent all his life farming a small patch of land on an islet so quiet and obscure that some of its inhabitants had never felt moved to go and see the sea which surrounded them everywhere at a distance of only a few miles. Keig a quiet small farmer: it was a curious notion.

  All that strength would then have remained inside that head unused and unknown about. And what else might be there unused still? There was no telling. A new urgent need might bring out new facets of his mind yet. And—this was a more terrible thought—new outward events might produce unguessable movements there under that dark brow.

  This was what later was to plague me about Margaret’s death. Keig had loved her. He had left her to go and fight Mylchraine. Had her death, separated from him, driven him into a more exalted loneliness than that he had come to live in since he had become our leader? Might he be gripped by the loneliness that takes men up the solitary path of power?

  But at the time Keig learnt that Margaret had died there was, as I have said, little to show how deeply he had been affected. He kept us all steadily hitting back at the Keepers. And the Keepers kept hitting at us. Mylchraine was still well astraddle his island.

  And one night, I remember it only too well, one of our couriers failed to keep their midnight rendezvous.

  I felt at first only a sense of irritation: the girl who was due to have made this final delivery of news and information was Particularly reliable, a shepherd’s daughter of about eighteen, a sturdy sensible creature, not pretty but giving off a feeling of plain wholesomeness in everything about her, her daisy-like blue eyes, the ruddiness—no euphemism possible or necessary here—of her face with its little point of a chin just breaking the complete roundness and her simple habit of standing to repeat her memorised bulletin with her feet planted apart as if she had some precious object to lift on to a high shelf.

  But when it had grown to be half past midnight and there was still no sign of her my irritation at something counted on having unexpectedly gone astray changed abruptly into a cold snicker of anxiety.

  It was three days before I learnt that the anxiety had been totally justified.

  In the meanwhile our courier system had picked up its customary routine. We had shifted our headquarters next day and that night a different courier, a little crippled old itinerant pot-repairer, had reported at midnight exactly. When he had delivered his message we asked him whether he had heard anything about the girl—her name was Maria, Maria Joughin—but he said he had not. She came from some way off his recent route and he had heard nothing.

  ‘Keepers have been mortal busy round that way, though,’ he added. ‘That new Overseer’s a devil.’

  I did not like it. The Keepers’ busyness was never of a very savoury sort, and we had already learnt a little about this new Overseer, a man named Lewie, who was plainly some sort of psychopath.

  And then, two days later, we heard. I will just state the bare facts. The man Lewie had clamped a strict curfew on the whole area through which Maria had to go to come to us. Determined not to let us down, she had tried to get through and had been caught. Lewie had had her taken to his headquarters, a little village name Kerity, a few miles from her own home, and there in the tiny village hall he had publicly interrogated her. The interrogation had taken the form of lining up a whole row of his brawniest Keepers and, each time the girl was asked to tell what she knew of us and refused, allowing one of these fellows to rape her. The whol
e business did not bear thinking about, and does not bear thinking about even now.

  I saw Keig’s face darken with rare anger when we heard. At once he began questioning the reconnaissance party that had brought in the news, and before long I saw the drift of his queries. He was planning to have Lewie himself kidnapped.

  For more than an hour he went on at the three men who had been down to the edge of Kerity village. He did not treat them any too kindly, thumping on the board he carried across his knees in lieu of a table in the primitive log hut we had made ourselves as a headquarters. Time and time again he banged out the same question at one or another of them to force from a tired brain some useful fact that had been noticed and forgotten.

  At last he stood up and all three of the men he had been questioning dropped down almost as one and lay exhausted on the crackly double-layered brushwood floor of our crude hut.

  ‘What’s the weather doing?’ Keig demanded of the rest of us.

  I squirmed my way out of the low narrow entrance to the hut to find out. It was cold, colder than I had ever known it on the island, as it had been for days, almost a fortnight. Even spending a few minutes outside the close fug of the hut chilled one to the marrow and to leave one’s bare hands outside one’s pockets for more than a second or two was torture.

  There was not a star to be seen in the early night sky and from the feel of the wind I thought another fall of snow could not be long away. Ideal weather for our purposes, especially if the snow came at the right time to obliterate tracks.

  I went gratefully back into the hut and told Keig what I had observed.

  He led the raiding party himself. Any signs of willingness to let others take charge of important operations had succumbed to the dark and brooding rage that still plainly possessed him. The group of them left an hour later and they were back at two a.m.

  Lewie was with them.

  I woke from an uneasy sleep on the brushwood floor at the back of the hut just as he was shoved in through the narrow doorway. It was not a pleasant specimen of humanity that I peered at through blearily sticky eyes.

  He must have weighed close on twenty stone, a great gross hulk of a man. And his face was the grossest part of him, cut on almost inhumanly coarse lines like a crude caricature. He had come staggering into the low-roofed hut and now pitched forward to the floor under the impetus of the shove he had been given and unable to save himself because his arms were pinioned. I saw there was a powdering of white across his big slobbery shoulders. It must have begun to snow then.

  I shivered. It seemed even more bitterly cold than before, for all that a fall of snow is meant to bring a rise in temperature.

  Two of the men who had followed Lewie in pounced quickly on him and hoisted him with difficulty to his feet. They held him against one of the low roughly built side-walls. The rest of the raiding party came in, with Keig bringing up the rear. I made a rapid count. No one missing. And the prisoner collected. A success.

  Keig shook the snow off his own shoulders impatiently and placed himself in front of the belly-sagging Lewie.

  For a moment he looked at him in silence. And then, in a voice which was angry but never rose above an ordinary conversational tone, he recited to him in full detail just what we had discovered he had done to that poor girl.

  Lewie stared down at the brushwood bundles on the floor. The snow on his boots was slowly melting and seeping away. He looked like a cornered animal—some great wild boar—who had come to his last moments, knew it, wanted viciously to take revenge and was aware he never would be able to.

  Keig finished his recital of the facts.

  ‘The girl, they tell me, is still alive,’ he said. ‘And for that reason I’m not going to have you shot.’

  He turned to the two men still holding upright the gross figure in front of him.

  ‘Take him outside,’ he said. ‘Tie him to a tree well out in the open, take the trousers off him and we’ll see what he looks like in the morning.’

  It was, of course, a brutal sentence. Brutal and crude. But I do not think a single man who heard it, and who had heard the day before what had been done to Maria Joughin, doubted for one moment its justice.

  I have had my doubts about it since. But at the time I simply felt that Keig had put into action exactly what we all wanted.

  The two men by Lewie’s side shoved him forward and half marched, half propelled him out of the hut. Several of the others followed. They came back inside about fifteen minutes later.

  Keig did not have to ask them whether his sentence had been properly carried out.

  I heard, much later, about what happened to the man Lewie after we had released him next day. A group of us took him to a place at the edge of the wolds while the rest of us were hastily packing up the headquarters where we had intended to spend some time and were moving on as fast as possible to somewhere else well out of the way. When he was found by some of his own searching Keepers he had been taken as fast as a car could drive to Lesneven and given the very best care the hospital there could provide—including the personal attention of Mr Mylchraine’s own specialist, my brother John—but of course once frostbite has done its work there is no way of putting right the major injury it has caused. Lewie was got on his feet again but within a year he had taken his own life. He did it in the traditional Lesneven way, throwing himself into the sea at the height of the flood-tide from the walls of the Old Watch-point, a picturesque semi-ruin looking out across the whirling channel between the mainland and the Kernel.

  But the savage punishment we had meted out to him was not the end of the affair locally either—as we might well have known it would not be. There came inevitably another development. We heard about it less than a week after we had, as it were, flung the maimed Lewie back into Mylchraine’s lap.

  It was about midday at our new headquarters, a deserted lodge used for that gentlemanly Oceana sport of hawking. Keig and I were the only ones there. Keig, who had been out on a reconnaissance trip the night before, was asleep and I was busy copying out with a stub of pencil on some sheets torn from an exercise book the words of a leading article in the Irish Times commenting fairly sharply on Mr Mylchraine’s rule which Cormode had sent us over the wireless. When we could we distributed such items, and we knew that these scruffy sheets of ours were passed from hand to hand over an unexpectedly large area of the island, penetrating sometimes right down to the south before they fell to pieces with much reading.

  Suddenly I heard from a distance the sound of one of our sentries giving a challenge. At once the hair rose on the back of my scalp like an animal’s. There should have been no one coming near the lodge at that hour.

  I jumped up and shook Keig.

  ‘Sentry’s challenging someone,’ I whispered.

  Keig shook himself quickly awake. I noticed, as I had done once or twice before, that his hand went first to his old axe, which lay beside him on the bracken covering the wooden bedstead in lieu of a mattress. Only when he had felt the smoothness of the axe’s time-polished haft did he then check with a quick tap his revolver.

  A few moments later we heard a low call coming from the distant sentry to the guard nearer the lodge door.

  ‘Pat Boddaugh coming with news for Mr Keig.’

  Keig and I looked at each other. Big Pat Boddaugh had been sent on a food-prospecting expedition with a side task of taking a look at the Joughins’ house, where Maria was now back with her family. He should not have been back for a couple of hours yet.

  The instant he came in to us we knew that something pretty bad had happened. Normally so aggressive, he was now entirely emptied of bounce.

  He stood there in the doorway looking at Keig and myself with his big hands dangling.

  ‘What is it, man?’ Keig said.

  ‘It—It’s the—Mr Keig, they’ve done something terrible.’

  ‘They? The Keepers?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Keig.’

  Big Pat Boddaugh’s normally noisy voice was re
duced to a half-audible mutter.

  ‘Sit down,’ Keig said sharply. ‘Go and sit there on the bed.’

  The big man obeyed without a word.

  ‘Now,’ Keig said, facing him, ‘the Keepers have done something terrible. Tell me just what.’

  ‘It’s the Joughins, Mr Keig. When I got near the house there was a dog howling. Sitting there in broad daylight and howling. I ran in. Mr Keig, it was the women. The men had been shot, Mr Keig. They were lying there, all three of them. But it was the women.’

  ‘Come on, tell me.’

  ‘Mr Keig, there’s a wooden paling there. It runs all along the back of the yard. It’s high, about five foot. They’d been fastened to it, Mr Keig. Maria, her mother and the two married sisters. I knew them all. I’d met them. In the summer. I spent a day with them. Mr Keig, they’d been stripped of every stitch of their clothing, and killed. Each one with one of those hunting knives the Keepers have. The long ones, you know. Up between their legs, Mr Keig.’

  And for the second time in little over a week I saw a dark flush of rage come up into Keig’s face.

  ‘You, Boddaugh,’ he said. ‘I want you to go down to Kerity again, right away. Be careful, mind. They’ll be expecting something from us, and they’ll be jumpy as cats. But find out for me the name of every Keeper in the force there. Every one, you understand. If you can’t get ’em all today, come back at dusk and we’ll try again tomorrow.’

  Boddaugh got up from the bed. There was a look of determination about him again. His arms no longer hung slack.

  Keig turned to me.

  ‘You know where the men are,’ he said. ‘Set about getting them back in. I want them all here. Tonight.’

  They came to the lodge in twos and threes, mostly after it had begun to get dark and movement was safer. Each group took as a matter of course the long way round, getting up into a straggle of pine trees two hundred yards or so above us on the mountainside and then dropping down through a sweep of broken rocks that brought them to the back of the little single-storey house so that the snow would seem to lie untrodden all round.