by Tom Phelan
“You could have killed him. What did you hit him with?”
Matthias was in no hurry to answer, spoke slowly as if letting the other man know he would not be rushed into speaking. “I hit him with a hammer, Mister Lacy, and I still have it in my hand.”
There was another long silence. It was like everyone, except me, knew the lines of a play, and everyone was reluctant to move the action along by reciting their part.
Johnjoe Lacy stood up and said, “He’s dead, Matt. There was no need for anyone to get killed.” I pulled closer to Kitty.
The shapes of the four men behind Lacy did not stir. “If you’d stayed at home, Mister Lacy, no one would have been killed,” Matthias said, and he did not turn to look at us as he gave his instructions. “Kitty, bring Cornelia back to the cottage. Miss Hodgkins, you go with them.”
I put pressure on Kitty’s arm to turn her, but Kitty’s arm was as firm as the sword in the rock. When we did not move, Matthias said firmly, “Kitty … Miss Hodgkins.”
Kitty said, “I’m not leaving you, Matt.”
“Kitty,” Matthias said sternly.
“No, Matt.”
I finally found my voice. “Matthias, what’s going on?” I asked.
The silence following my question was so long I got the feeling everyone knew that the next spoken lines would add to the volatility of the situation.
“Mister Lacy, why don’t you tell Miss Hodgkins what’s going on?” Matthias said.
Johnjoe Lacy didn’t say anything. The moon slid in and out through several wispy clouds, and the scene faded and brightened several times before Kitty said, “Miss Hodgkins, Mister Lacy’s not able to tell you why he’s going around in the dark with his little gang of dwarfs. Mister Lacy is a day coward and a night hero, does to people in the dark what he’s afraid to do to them in the light of day.”
“Listen here, Hatchel—” Johnjoe Lacy started, but Matthias stopped him in his tracks.
“Mister Lacy, you are talking to my wife.”
A cloud darkened the stage for a long minute, and before the moon reappeared, Kitty had begun to speak again. “Miss Hodgkins, the men behind Johnjoe Lacy are Har Rogers, Mick Gorman, Bill Egan and Ralphie Blake.” The shapes behind Lacy shifted in the moonlight. “You must remember the names, Miss Hodgkins: Johnjoe Lacy, Har Rogers, Mick Gorman, Bill Egan and Ralphie Blake. These are the men who burned down the Lamberts’ house and killed the brothers. They’re here to burn down Enderly. They want to be heroes. When the English are gone they’ll be able to claim a piece of Enderly as the reward for their heroism. Isn’t that right, Mister Lacy?”
The shape that was Johnjoe Lacy shifted from one foot to the other. The shapes behind him stirred, but still no one was willing to pull down the curtain or change the scenery for the next act. Only the moon was doing her part with the lighting, but even she was working without a script.
Kitty turned toward me and pushed Cornelia on me. “Take the baby into the cottage,” she said, with her lips to my ear. “Wrap her up, wait a few minutes, and then slip out by the back. Go across the fields and bring her down to my mother. You must stay there till the morning.”
I had no choice but to take the baby. I whispered, “I can’t leave you, Kitty.”
Then Kitty’s hand was a claw on my wrist. “There’s no use burning down Enderly if you’re left alive, Sarah. You must leave. You must bring Cornelia. Matthias and I will try to persuade them—”
“No!” I whispered. Kitty squeezed my wrist, hurt me as she spoke in her normal voice.
“Matt, Miss Hodgkins is taking Cornelia in out of the cold.”
“You go in too, Kitty,” Matt said. “I’ll take care of this myself.”
“There’s five of them,” Kitty said.
“I know there’s five, Kitty. There were six a few minutes ago. An English army once beat a French army six times as big.”
And again the moon faded and flamed and someone couldn’t remember their lines. Kitty squeezed my arm and twisted me around to the direction of the cottage. With the fingers of her other hand, she stroked Cornelia’s face.
Ralphie Blake
The five of us stumbled through the wicket gate just in time to see and hear Matthias’s weapon sinking into the top of Luke Boland’s head. The bone-crunching sound was enough to make a man scutter and vomit at the same time. I made a bit of wet in my trousers myself. I had expected Matthias would be ready and tough. But the attack on Luke was so brutal that I felt icicles shooting up my arse.
To cover my betrayal of the IRA plan, I had come with Johnjoe and his lads. “Don’t tell Miss Hodgkins,” Matt had told me. “Come with them. You won’t get hurt.” I didn’t want Matt to think I was an informer and I told him my made-up story about the old Missus Hodgkins helping my mother one time when things were bad. I even threw in a bit of religion: “Our mother taught us to pray for Missus Hodgkins every morning and night for being so good to us.”
And here we were, not three steps into the farmyard, and already one of us would be dead in a matter of minutes, would never walk, talk or go home again to his wife and children.
After informing on them, I made a huge big effort to avoid any suspicion by letting the lads know I was worried about them as well as myself. I told them that Matthias was a one-man army of two hundred. “Just the fact alone that he survived the War for four years is enough to make him more than fierce in a fight, and we know nothing at all about what he did to survive. For all we know, he may have killed hundreds of Germans with his bayonet; rammed home the big knife and twisted it in the German bellies with a terrible screech coming out of him. We’ll have to be very careful.” They told me I worried too much.
Of course if I wasn’t a coward, I would have said that what we were planning had nothing to do with the English or the Irish, that we were just common criminals, common murderers, that we had let Johnjoe Lacy bully us into what we were doing, that we should all walk away and leave Johnjoe standing by himself. My cowardly way of doing it was to sneak in the dark to warn Matthias.
Even though Matthias had told me I wouldn’t get hurt, I was shaking as I stood there watching Luke’s foot twitching like the leg of a dying rabbit. It was very frightening the way Matt had dealt with Luke Boland. There had been no hesitation at all, no half-measures, no quarter given, as they say. There was total ferociousness the way Matthias had brought the weapon down. It was like the thinking of the man and the deathliness of the hammer became one thing, that the driving force behind the hammer was Matt knowing he was right. Luke had been doing something to Miss Hodgkins and there had been only one right answer to it. And it was this quickness to see what was the right thing to do and the instant ferociousness of doing it that convinced me that more men were going to die this night. The same force that dealt with Luke Boland was standing only six feet away from me, and that force was going to protect Enderly and Sarah Hodgkins to his last breath. There was no way out of this for anyone because Johnjoe Lacy was never going to back down.
As quick as a dried pig’s bladder losing its shape on the thorn of a blackthorn bush, the little-boy bravery that had brought the lads this far fell out of them as we stood there watching Luke jerking himself into death. We had to watch his last shakes because we were too terrified to do anything else, every one of us afraid Matthias might pounce again. There wasn’t safety in numbers anymore. And if Johnjoe Lacy was ever a leader, he wasn’t a leader now. Matt was in charge here and there was no doubt about that.
When Luke Boland’s foot hadn’t moved for a while, Johnjoe stood up and made himself say something, complained to Matthias that he shouldn’t have hit Luke so hard. Matthias didn’t say he was sorry. Instead, he spoke like a teacher talking down to a small boy. He said Luke had been mauling Miss Hodgkins. And when Matthias moved the hand that held the killing hammer, Johnjoe didn’t say anything else.
It must have been the War that did this to Matthias, taught him to size up a situation while his eyes were still taking i
t in, and then to act without thinking about acting. Maybe this was what had brought him safe home from France and Belgium.
Johnjoe Lacy’s plan had been as simple as he himself was stupid: the six of us would wrestle Matthias to the ground and tie him up; Bill Egan would “take care” of Kitty if she started trouble; we’d set the house on fire; when Miss Hodgkins came running out, Johnjoe would “take care” of her. Matthias would never be able to tell anyone who had committed the crime because he’d be afraid for the lives of his wife and baby and for his own life too. A different version of this plan had worked for the burning of the Lamberts, but the Lamberts were two men in their seventies and they did not have a Matthias to stand up for them.
Looking down at the dead Luke, I knew that even if Johnjoe and the lads were able to tie up Matthias, burn the house and kill Miss Hodgkins, they would never get away with it unless they killed Matthias too. Matthias would never be afraid that the IRA would kill his wife and child or himself because the minute he’d freed himself from the ropes, he’d be coming after the lads this very night before they even got home; before the sun came up he’d have sunk his hammer into more skulls with the same ferociousness he had used on Luke Boland. It was also clear to me that the only way out of the mess we were already in was to drag Luke Boland back out through the Enderly wicket gate, snake home in the dark, and make up some story about how Luke got the hammer buried in his skull.
Then Johnjoe Lacy said, “Poor Luke shouldn’t-a got killed.”
“He should have stayed at home,” Matthias said, and his words were as hard and as cruel as splinters coming off a rock attacked by sledgehammers. Then Matthias told Miss Hodgkins and Kitty to go into the house with the child. I don’t know where the hell Kitty had come from with the baby on her hip; a baby in the middle of all this! But Kitty was suddenly there as if she’d stepped out of a ray of moonlight like a leprechaun. And Kitty wouldn’t do what Matthias told her to do. Then Miss Hodgkins spoke up and you’d think she had no notion about what the hell was happening in her own yard, like she never heard of what happened to the Lamberts and a whole lot of other Protestant farmers in the county. “What’s going on?” says she. And when nobody said a word, Kitty told her exactly what was going on. Kitty said everyone’s name twice, even told Miss Hodgkins to remember the names. When Kitty said, “Ralphie Blake,” I got very nervous; I suddenly didn’t know for certain if Matthias had told Kitty I was harmless. Maybe she was just covering up for me by saying my name in front of the others.
The two groups stood facing each other in the yellow moonlight.
Eventually, the two women did some whispering, and soon afterward Miss Hodgkins went away with the baby. The five of us faced Matthias and Kitty across Luke Boland’s corpse. It’s hard to make out the details of faces in moonlight even at a few feet.
When we heard Miss Hodgkins closing the cottage door, Matthias said, “If you want to end it right here, Mister Lacy, you can take Mister Boland home and it’ll be the end of the matter.”
Oh, God. Thank you, God, I thought to myself, and I readied my throat to encourage Johnjoe to agree.
“There’s five of us against one,” Lacy said.
“Kitty’s here. Don’t you remember how you couldn’t frighten her that time outside Mister Ward the Harness Man’s shop when there was no man around?”
I blushed with shame on the inside. Matt might as well have said, “Why didn’t you stand up for her, Ralphie Blake, you coward?”
Matt said, “There were six of you a few minutes ago and now there’s five. The other one is dead at your feet. Take him and go home, Mister Lacy. There’s nothing else to talk about.” Matt’s voice had no feeling; he might as well have been talking about a dead mouse.
There was a long, long silence. I don’t know what the other lads were doing, but I was praying that Johnjoe would say the right thing, would say what I was afraid to say in case Johnjoe could accuse me of turning the tables against him by showing there was division in the ranks.
I knew Matthias Wrenn was not going to relax or change his position until he got an answer from Lacy. And God, I almost collapsed with relief when Johnjoe said, “All right, Matt. We’ll take Luke home to his wife. We’ll make up a story.”
Neither Matthias nor Kitty spoke or moved.
The five of us stood there like we were waiting for Matthias’s permission to move. Then Johnjoe said, “We’ll have to clean him up before we let the wife see him.”
These long silences were doing a job on my nerves. Why the hell wouldn’t Johnjoe just count his blessings, drag Luke outside Enderly’s wall, and get away from Matthias before he let himself loose again? But Johnjoe had to talk, had to ask for something, couldn’t go away empty-handed.
“Can we bring Luke into the house to wash him?”
“No.”
Another terrible silence. “Matt, as the Christian thing to do, let us wash him before his wife sees him.”
“Fuck the Christian thing; there’s the horse trough at the church.”
I saw Kitty placing her hand on Matt’s arm before he had finished, and then she leaned over and whispered. Matt did not turn his face away from us for a second. “You can clean him in the Machine Shed where there’s light, for the sake of Missus Boland and her children,” he said.
Still none of us moved to lift up Luke. “You’re a hard man, Matt,” Johnjoe said, and I clenched my eyes shut and prayed, Suffering Jesus, will you wither the man’s tongue in his mouth?
“You’re a stupid man yourself, Mister Lacy. When I say so, you will lift Mister Boland and carry him to the Machine Shed. When you get to the shed, you will put him on the floor near the water pump. Everyone, except Mister Gorman, will sit on the floor in the places I will show you. No one will talk. I will give Mister Gorman some rags and he will do the cleaning.” Then Matthias whispered in his wife’s ear and she disappeared into a shaft of moon-darkness.
It was obvious from Matt’s voice that every man was expected to do exactly what he was told to do. Without mentioning it, Matt made it very clear that he still had the hammer that had killed once tonight, that he was still in the frame of mind he’d been in when he buried it deep inside Luke Boland’s skull.
Of course, Lacy still thought he was a leader, and he followed empty-handed while the four of us carried poor Luke by his arms and legs toward the Machine Shed, Luke’s head hanging down backward and his upside-down dead face pointing in the direction we were going.
When we reached the Machine Shed, the double doors were wide open and Kitty was inside lowering the glass globe on the lantern she had just lit. As we slowed in the doorway, we could hear the hissing of all three Tilley lamps hanging around the big shed.
“Walk straight across toward the far wall,” Matthias told us from behind. Then, when we nearly reached the water pump with its spout hanging over a wooden half-barrel, Matt told us to stop. “Mister Lacy, you will take care of Mister Boland’s head when the lads lower him,” he said from the door with Kitty at his side.
For the first time in his life, Johnjoe Lacy did what someone else told him to do without making a speech about it. He came to the front and put his two hands under Luke’s head, held it out straight as we lowered the body. Johnjoe said under his breath, “Grab Matt when I tell yiz.”
The stupidity of the man! Still wanting to get Matthias when everything said to get the hell out of there. I was so frightened I had a terrible urge to do my water, or worse. When Johnjoe gave the signal what was I supposed to do to hide whose side I was on?
When we straightened up after lowering Luke to the floor, Matthias told us to stay where we were until he called our names. “Mister Rogers, you go over there and sit with your back to the turnip barrow.”
Matthias was standing at the right doorjamb, and for the first time I saw the hammer that had killed Luke; it was bigger than a carpenter’s and smaller than a sledge, about the same size as the one a blacksmith uses to beat a piece of red iron into the shape of
a horseshoe. It was hanging out of Matthias’s right hand and there were bloody bits on it.
“Mister Egan, sit on the floor ten feet in front of Mister Rogers.”
Kitty was at the other jamb, eight feet from Matthias. She was dressed in a dark jumper, dark skirt halfway down her shins, leather boots to her ankles. There was a great glistening in her eyes. She was holding the long handle of a pitchfork in both hands. She wasn’t holding it the way a person holds a fork to pitch hay. Her right hand was near the end of the handle, her left hand within a couple of feet of the two curved, vicious prongs of steel at the end. There was no doubt in my mind that Kitty was holding a weapon.
“Mister Blake, come over here and sit ten feet in front of me.”
Thank you, Jesus, I breathed inside myself. Matthias was moving me away from the others.
I don’t know why he called us all Mister. Some of us had gone to school with him, and the rest of us were only a few years older than he was. Maybe it was because in the army he had to call everyone sir, or maybe he was making it very clear that he was far removed from us, that our past friendliness with him was not something to be counted on in a fight, that he was on one side and we were on the other.
“Mister Lacy, sit there in the middle.”
When Johnjoe moved, the only one left with the dead body was Mick Gorman, the one appointed by Matt to clean Luke. As Johnjoe walked over to the spot Matthias had pointed to, he suddenly turned to his left where all the hand-tools were attached to the wall.
“Now, lads!” he roared, just as he reached for the nearest tool, the one at eye level. It was a pickaxe, its two-foot-long spikes curving away from each other in opposite directions, one spike ending in a point, the other in a narrow blunt blade.
Kitty Wrenn: 1970
Why do I keep on coming here, people ask me, beating my way down through the high weeds and the bushes?
