by Dermot Healy
“It’s . . . it’s inconceivable,” he replied, “that you should even consider it. You must be out of your mind.”
“We could live there during the summers,” she continued wistfully. “Lord Mountbatten does. Judges do. Why shouldn’t we?”
“I don’t believe you’re sensible.”
“We owe it to the girls.” She indicated by pursing her lips that the matter would not end at that. She stood. “And we owe it to ourselves.”
“This is blackmail,” said the Sergeant stoutly.
“Homes are going there for a song,” she answered.
“Indeed.” He gave her a stern glance. “Ye have, a’course, established this beyond doubt.”
“Yes.”
“I see.” He looked out the window above the sink. “I’m sure I’ll be med very welcome in the Free State.”
“No one will know who you are down there.”
“They’ll know soon enough.”
“By then it will be forgotten.”
“Ye underrate the Catholic mind,” replied the Sergeant. “They never forget.”
“The South has forgotten.”
“Has it?” His voice rose angrily. “Is that so!”
“We can’t go on living like this.”
“What would you have me do?”
“I’d have you take us elsewhere.” Though it never struck the Sergeant that he would ever live in the Republic, he found himself the following weekend taking the shortest route to the west, via Blacklion, Manorhamilton, Sligo, Ballina. On the road between Easkey and Ballina they ran out of petrol. Now, he said, Easkey, this is where the madness will end. But before the Sergeant had time to raise a lament a friendly man stepped out of a cottage with a can of petrol to help them on their way. Nor would he take any money.
That afternoon they entered Belmullet. The sky was a vast blue. Even nature was conniving with the women against the Sergeant. The FOR SALE sign was still there on the pier of the gate. With a neighbour who had the key the family toured the light-keepers’ house. But while the others grew excited, Jonathan Adams remained negative and condescending. He found damp where there was no damp. He pointed out that no one had lived in the house since the days of the light-keeper. But the neighbour corrected him there. A local family had lived there till the late sixties. Jonathan Adams said the stonework collected damp. It’s quite the opposite, the neighbour corrected him, these houses are built to withstand the weather. Water does not come through these stones. A new coat of plaster and you’ll be flying. Jonathan Adams found fault with the roof, with the porch. The wood in the windows was destroyed, he said. A few days’ work, said the neighbour, and you won’t know the place. What Jonathan Adams was really afraid of he did not say. But Sara and Catherine were all agog with the idea of having a house a stone’s throw from the sea.
“And there’s a gaeltacht down the road,” added the neighbour.
The Adamses went quiet.
Eventually Catherine said: “I’m sure they won’t mind us.”
“Why should they? They don’t mind people that speak English. As a matter of fact they speak a little English themselves.”
“They do?” said Jonathan Adams, astounded.
“They only speak the Irish among themselves.” The neighbour smiled. “And in time you might pick up a word or two.”
“Say something in Irish,” asked Catherine.
“Taim go maith,” said the woman.
“Taw im guh my,” repeated Catherine, “What does it mean?”
“I am good,” she replied.
“Not an appropriate beginning in a new language for you, Miss,” said her father.
Jonathan Adams marched round the house, then set off for home. But in Ballina they stopped and while Maisie and the girls went off shopping he entered a nearby bookshop. He was about to buy a local history of West Mayo when he discovered it was really a listing of local Catholic churches and the saints who had visited the area. Every history book he looked at concerned itself with Craoch Patrick, known as The Reek, a small mountain that stood in the distance on a clear day like a child’s sandcastle on a beach. Each year troops of stalwart pilgrims climbed to its summit. He studied their faces closely in the book as if he were viewing evidence of a New Guinea tribe that had stepped suddenly out of a forest. He took down from the shelves small ecclesiastical books on the story of Knock, a tiny village in Mayo where the Virgin Mary had appeared. He looked furtively through the photographs as if he were reading pornography.
He had entered Mayo – a county of graven images; pilgrimages with bagpipes, fiddles and whiskey; apparitions. The wanton songs of men and women. Images that should nowise be worshipped. There shall be no making of images, nor bowing down to them, nor to idolaters, Augustine cried.
“Can I help you?” the male assistant asked.
“Aye. Just looking,” said Jonathan Adams.
And everywhere he looked Catholicism was rampant. Davitt and the Land League. Parnell in Crossmolina. A Book of Ancient Superstitions and Cures. The Famine. 1916.
He was about to make a hasty retreat, when he found the wary eye of the shop assistant on him. He turned towards the shelves of fiction.
Eventually, out of panic and embarrassment at standing around in the shop so long, he bought a school edition of A Tale of Two Cities. It was nigh on fifty years since he’d read it, in a bedroom he shared with his brother in another older barracks under the old RIC where his father had been Sergeant. That barracks had been blown sky high in the 1920s and A Tale of Two Cities, its print small as porridge meal, went with it. Now, out of confusion, he had bought the book again. This time in very large print. He heard the opening sentence echo faintly in his head: “It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” To give his purchase some credibility he also bought a map.
“Are you going far?” asked the shop assistant without looking at him.
“Cork,” lied the Sergeant.
“You have some distance ahead of you then.” He slipped the books into a paper bag. “We have some people from home, from Bonniconlon, down there. Are you in the city?”
“That’s right.”
“A man by the name of Gillan, Paddy Gillan?”
“Well, we’ve moved recently. Further out. Kinsale, in fact.”
“I see.” The shop assistant rose his eyebrows. “You wouldn’t have come across him by any chance before that?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“I suppose it’s not likely.” The shop assistant broke out into a horrendous laugh. “Of course you wouldn’t be from there originally,” he said counting out his change coin by coin onto the counter, “not with your accent.” He smiled wickedly. “I can understand you. But it’s hard to understand the Cork man.” He stepped out from behind the small counter and accompanied the Sergeant to the door. “When I land down there and step off the train, and hear them talking. Oh Lord. To tell you the truth, I often think they are trying to fool me.”
“Oh, aye,” said Jonathan Adams.
“You’ll get that,” agreed the man as he opened the door.
Jonathan Adams escaped onto the street. What now? Where to? For a moment he could not get his bearings, so he headed off confidently in the wrong direction. It was typical of the Republic, he realized, that he should get lost in a small town, that he should be driven out of despair into telling a useless lie, and then be forced by embarrassment into buying the first work of fiction he had bought in years. He walked around Ballina and found a place to sit by the river Moy. He watched fishermen standing thigh-high in foaming waders casting flies downstream. What’s the name of the river? He opened the map of Erris. He looked at it a long time, and yet he could discover no place that would tell him he would be safe if he lived there.
“The only Protestant church on Mullet,” he said to Maisie as they drove back, “is closed.”
“You’re not thinking of opening one, are you?” she asked.
The peninsula, joined to the mai
nland only by the old bridge at Belmullet, was so isolated that it made him feel secure. It was a small, safe enclave, surrounded by huge seas. And one other extra feature made him optimistic: he heard tell there were as yet few televisions on the peninsula.
But he would not make up his mind.
Even on the long journey home he remained undecided. As they entered Leitrim and left the West behind, he began to try out the image of the house in his mind. Is it a house I would like to die in? he asked himself. They arrived back at their fortress in the North feeling disorientated, but still he would not say yes or no. That night the house in Belmullet visited him. In one dream he entered the porch and passed by a group of light-keepers playing cards in the tall kitchen. “Where’s the joker?” a clear-eyed man called out. Jonathan Adams climbed the stairs that instead of going up were going down. He found he was at a window on the second floor of the house and Matti Bonner was about to fall out, but luckily Jonathan caught him. “Keep smiling,” said Jonathan. “Don’t let on you were falling. Think what the neighbours might say.”
“You can go now, Sergeant,” said Matti. “It’s safe.”
He woke distressed, as if he had been visited by his own death. But Maisie Adams had already begun to decorate the light-keepers’ house.
“I’d carpet that living room in green. The girls could have the attic.” She would clear it of Catholic bad taste, the seamen’s Madonnas would go. She’d open up the earth – she had begun to hang curtains.
“It will be our summer home,” she said. “You’ll be able to relax there.”
The girls pleaded. That his family should seek to go South to the Republic was a situation the Sergeant was not prepared for. The house grew on him. One day he agreed. Just like that. “I want no Catholics calling – agreed?” he told Maisie. She nodded. Yet it would be him that would later invite them in. They drove down to Belmullet and handed over a deposit of five hundred pounds to the auctioneer. They signed the contract. When they reached The Dwellings that night a wind had turned the peninsula into a tornado of stinging sand and hail. They fought to open the huge door. Once inside, Jonathan Adams was surprised to find that the table in the tall kitchen was exactly as it had been in his dream, and that in its drawer was a deck of old playing cards.
13
The Outsiders
His last year as a policeman was a long one for Jonathan Adams. In Fermanagh, the occupants of every Protestant farmhouse along the border lived in dread. Once night fell, the phone calls started. They rang the barracks to say someone was seen in the barn, lights were seen back of the soilage pit. The dog was barking. The Catholics next door were moving guns. There were boats on the lake. A strange car had revved up on the lane. Pamela was not back. George had been to a dance across the border and his empty car had been seen near Melvin. Then the police would ring back to check the authenticity of the call. And even when they knew that there was a crisis out there, the police did not leave the barracks.
“You’ll have to hold on till morning,” the orderly would say.
They rang again and again, their voices filled with terror. “Come over now!” they begged. But who was to know what was waiting out there. Who was to know that the voice over the phone was who it claimed to be. Hysterical wives waiting the return of their husbands. UDR recruits sitting out the night by the bedroom window with a shotgun in their hand. They could have been the IRA setting up an ambush.
Shootings occurred within miles of the barracks and still the police did not venture out.
“Wait till the morning,” they said over the phone. And when morning came they did not know what awaited them. “You’re dead,” voices said over the phone. “You’re a dead man, Adams,” a whinnying voice said into his ear. “You hear me?” He swallowed and shivered. The threat was recorded and put with the other menacing voices that named names, named members of families. Under the fluorescent bulbs in the barracks those on duty sat idle as they awaited first light. Already marriages among the young men were coming under strain. Sick leave depleted the barracks staff. They returned white-faced and hung-over. And sometimes the Sergeant didn’t get home till morning as patrol groups, British Army Units, SAS undercover teams used his station as a central control unit.
The police had no say in what happened. They watched their authority eroded, and their relations with the people systematically destroyed. Whatever happened, happened in their name. They were blamed for leaving the people defenceless. Their informers turned to British Intelligence for higher rewards. Typewriters that no one could work were installed. Jonathan Adams lost touch. As Northern Ireland started to collapse, he began travelling around Fermanagh on school buses.
Fights had broken out in the buses that brought students into Enniskillen. He waited with his daughters at their stop, and got on. For weeks he travelled to and fro, a rifle in his hand, keeping the law between Catholic students on one side, and Protestants on the other, till eventually separate buses for each religious tribe were provided. Returning, he began to dread the moment he had to enter the barracks. What had been his Fenian ledger was now a classified document, as large as a dictionary, filled with photos, intimate descriptions of persons in frazzled print, and bizarre psychological data.
He’d turn aside. Into the hot barracks in Fermanagh came a cool breeze from the Atlantic. He dreamed of retirement, that his face might disappear from public consciousness. He saw himself digging potato drills. Setting daffodil bulbs. Going out with the fishermen. Naming birds. Naming wild flowers. Re-reading the lives of obscure martyrs in the wars of the Reformation in Scotland. He would renew his knowledge of Geneva and Berne and Bohemia.
He asked the few Catholics in the force whether they knew Belmullet.
“Belmullet? That’s the end of the earth,” Constable Morris told him. He wore an even more haunted look than did Adams himself. That year an ultimatum had gone out from the IRA that all Catholic members of the RUC should leave the force, or else should consider themselves legitimate targets. “You’re not thinking of going down there?”
“I was considering it – temporarily.”
Morris shook his head. He knew the stories of Adams’ otherworldliness but could not believe that the Sergeant had convinced himself of the possibility of some romantic nook in the South.
“I don’t know the area, Sergeant. Perhaps you should speak to some of the local Protestants down there.”
“I doubt there are any.”
“Oh,” said Morris, “In that case, you might be safer down there than you are here. In fact, you might be safer there than I would be.”
And there was some truth in that. Within the year Morris had resigned though he had four years to go till he received a full pension. But not only Catholics left the force. Protestants went, too, on half-pensions, for they saw no way they could be protected from the assassins. And Jonathan Adams began to see how lucky he was. His retirement was coming just in time. Like the rest of the old-timers he sat out his remaining term without inviting attention to himself, knowing he must not put a foot wrong. At IRA funerals he kept a discreet distance, and yet once, as the cortege of a man killed in a shoot-out passed the place where he stood behind a group of soldiers, it was said that Sergeant Adams came sharply to attention and raised a formal salute to the dead IRA man.
The mourners saw this and were astounded. They looked again to find that his hand had dropped to his side. The heels of his boots now stood apart. The face remained distant, disinterested. It was as if it had never happened. When the story was told later, it was not believed. He was only raising his hand to his head, some said. He was righting his cap. And yet the chief mourners swore they’d seen it – the last salute an RUC officer of the old guard would give to the passing coffin of an IRA man.
This image of Jonathan Adams, along with the moving pictures of him batoning defenceless Catholics, went on into the traditions. The one image was fixed forever in visual history by television. The other was hardly ever mentioned. It coul
d never be verified. It existed only in folk memory. It could only be recalled by a few of those who were there on the day.
He did it surely, the brave fucker. He did. I saw it, wi’ me own two eyes.
Like fuck he did.
That particular day was Jonathan Adams’ last in the RUC. Next morning he would be saying goodbye to nigh on forty years as a policeman. It appeared that his last act as a policeman was to salute the traditional enemy as he was borne past from this life to the other. A few days later, towing a trailer filled with yelling geese, he headed South.
The Mullet peninsula gave Jonathan Adams and his family a foothold in a new reality.
During the whole of that spring and summer, the family journeyed down to The Dwellings every third weekend. A neighbour fed the birds when they were away. It was in Corrloch that the Sergeant at last relented and allowed his daughters to wear miniskirts, something he would not have permitted in Fermanagh. They were now free to inhabit a world he and Maisie had renounced. He got the names of some families in Newport and Westport, where he called to probe the psyche of the Southern Protestant so that he might find an entrance into the sandy Gaelic-speaking catacombs of Mullet. But the members of the Erris Church of Ireland proved to be even more ambiguous and elusive than the Southern Catholics were.
That was his only contact with the outside world in the west. They moved furniture from Fermanagh to Mayo in a trailer. He replastered and painted walls. With Maisie and Catherine he set pines, fuchsia, holly. Then Sara came behind them with a watering can. They set camelias, roses, flame creepers and a single laburnum. Only to find the following spring that not one plant or tree had survived the winds. The next year, after taking advice, they set escallonia, but only two out of six plants remained alive. Lilies did not appear; crocuses put their heads above ground and died. No snowdrops came. Then they knew they were in an elementary world, of winds and weather.
