The Death of an Irish Tradition

by Bartholomew Gill

  The door opened.

  “Who’s with her now?”

  “The grooms.”

  “Which grooms, Paddy?”

  “Will and Fritz.”

  The best of a bad lot, he thought, reaching for his pants. And he really couldn’t trust them either.

  But the man only stood there in the open bedroom door.

  “Could you help me with these?”

  “But, sir—you can walk.”

  “So I can, Paddy. But not very well, at least first off like this.” He held up the pants. “Shall we try one leg at a time?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Of course, sir.” The man rushed toward him.

  Bechel-Gore was well over six feet tall, and it seemed that his body—a barrel chest now covered with graying hair and a large but firm stomach—had been hung from shoulders that were rather too broad for his frame. With age they had become bony, and the reliance he had had to place on his arms, enlarging them, only emphasized the impression. His hair, like his mustache, was a light-brown color, almost chestnut. There was blond in the mustache but gray in the hair. His face was long and thin.

  “Does my wife know about this?”

  “No, sir. That’s why I came myself.”

  “And the other matter. Has anybody been speaking to her about that?”

  “Which other matter, sir?” The man glanced up at him. “Oh, that matter.” He looked away. “No, sir.” He helped Bechel-Gore into his socks, rolling them up from the toes.

  Deaths and wakes and funerals, all their lugubrious interest in collapse—Bechel-Gore knew these people well, but his understanding did not make him any more sympathetic to them. All the woman had been was a blackmailer and a cheat, but he said, “I realize all this secrecy is…curious, Paddy, but please try to understand that we—all of us—have our livelihoods at stake, and you know how Grainne is. She’s—” he thought for a moment, “—impulsive and uninhibited and the death would most certainly keep her from riding in the Show. Afterwards—that’s the time I’ll tell her.”

  Reaching for a boot, the man said, “But I don’t see how you’ll keep it from her.”

  Bechel-Gore did, however. Only there in Leenane was it known she was related to the dead woman, and the change of name—Caughey, wherever they had gotten that—was suitably remote. They’d be in Dublin tonight, if Kestral could be saved, and Grainne wasn’t much interested in the…world.

  “And it’s only fittin’ that she get a last look, I’d be thinking.”

  “I’m taking care of that, too, Paddy. The funeral, the wake—but in a case like this I believe a post mortem—” Bechel-Gore left off, as though the whole matter was too difficult to consider. “But I’m having it all postponed, and she’ll be buried out here. With us.”

  The man’s eyes shied.

  With us, Bechel-Gore thought. He’d never be with them, not even if he divided up his holdings amongst them and allowed them to pursue the dreary, impoverished, agrarian idyll they cherished; they’d only think it was their due, that he and his ancestors and all of his kind were interlopers, that his having wrung cash from this barren soil was a passing wonder, luck, what have you, and they’d be content to let it go back to sheep and gorse. But that was acceptable to Bechel-Gore: letting them think of themselves as discrete. It took strength to bend events to one’s will—his own ancestors had known that, perhaps too well—and in a modern world ethnicity, patriotism, and other atavistic ties were irrelevant, if not downright counterproductive. But he wondered about the child and how much she was like them.

  “Now, if you could help me down the hall and stairs, like a good fellow, I’d be most grateful.”

  In the hall the man said, “Isn’t it wonderful that you can walk, sir?”

  “Well, thanks to you I can, my friend, and it’s really not established. I’d like to keep it between you and me, if we could, sort of as a surprise for Grainne, for after the Show and after the…other matter. As a pick-me-up, so to speak.”

  “Ah—I understand. Yes, that would be perfect, sir. Grand. Not a word from me. Not one.”

  “I’m counting on you. You know how people talk.”

  “That I do. I do, sir. And I will—I mean—I won’t, and that’s a promise.”

  Across an expanse of tumbling, barren hills they could see Lough Nafooey to the south and Lough Mask to the east. There wasn’t a tree in sight, and the breeze McGarr had noted in Leenane was a gale that pushed them back and made Noreen’s skirt flap like a flag. But still, there in the blast, tiny, bright wild flowers grew with abandon, bobbing their yellow and violet crowns at a sun that thin clouds—more like a mist—only partially obscured.

  It was bright and hot and, gaining the brow of the hill, McGarr had to raise his hand to his eyes, having left his hat in the car.

  Below them, back the way they had come, was the ruin of the Keegan farm, an old, formerly thatched-roof cottage of two big rooms and several outbuildings that had fallen to rubble. As McGarr had suspected, the front door had been removed. Now sheep were using the crumbling fieldstone walls for shelter during storms. The carving on the lintel said Keegan, 1831, and McGarr had been struck by the fact that the family had managed on such poor, if beautiful, land to survive the Famine and the attendant deprivations of a century—the nineteenth—that had been perhaps the hardest of any on the Irish, only to have relinquished it out of—what had it been? He didn’t as yet know—torpor or ennui or disinterest during a period doubtless less severe.

  And indeed the wind, soughing down the flank of the hill and through the chinks of the crumbling edifice, sounded like keening to him—a steady, low moan that rose to a chilling wail and died off, as though the mourners had paused for breath.

  Noreen pointed through a gap in the ruin to a series of small stones that had been set away from the house, near a flat open space that had once been a garden. A graveyard. McGarr stepped over a low, wooden gate that a rose bush—stunted because of the wind—had obscured, and paused to help Noreen over.

  And the nineteenth century had indeed been hard on the Keegans. Child after child—nine in one generation—had died either at birth or shortly after, and McGarr speculated that if any had managed to survive past the age of ten, he or she must have been made of tough stuff indeed. But still, life had been hard, and the only Keegans buried there who had lived to a ripe old age had been born either in the eighteenth century or the last decades of the nineteenth.

  One of those had been Brieda Reid Keegan, wife of James Joseph and mother of seven, among whom were Jimmy-Joe, the oldest, and Margaret Kathleen, who had been next in line.

  “And look at this,” said Noreen.

  It was an even newer grave, by a year. Mairead Kehlen, 1960, it read, Infant, and the relief pictured a little lamb curled up and sleeping in a bed of lilies.

  “What do you think it means?” Noreen asked.

  McGarr shook his head. “A namesake perhaps.”

  “If so, they’re certainly predisposed to them—in this century. James Joseph, the father, and Jimmy-Joe, the son. Margaret Kathleen, one daughter, Mairead Kehlen, another but dead. And then the other one, the pianist, that’s her name too, isn’t it?”

  McGarr nodded. Could it have been simply a lack of imagination? He didn’t think so, and Noreen was right. It was only in the twentieth century that those names had appeared.

  McGarr squatted near the back of the largest stone, that of the most recent Keegan family, and parted the grass so he could read the final child’s name. Grainne—Bechel-Gore’s wife—was the youngest in the family, born in 1935. An old cow’s last calf, and by much. Her mother had been nearly fifty when she was born.

  The father’s inscription read, James Joseph Keegan, Patriot, Soldier, 1881–1961. Good stock, McGarr thought, perfected in a Malthusian vacuum. He only hoped that the man had indeed been a patriot and a soldier and had made the minions of the British policy of benign neglect suffer, and dearly.

  But the graveyard had been a puzzle—not
merely the names but the small, newest stone, the infant who had died in 1960. Whose child had she been? Certainly not the woman who had died the year before. She had been in her seventies; her husband in his eighties. Good stock, perhaps, but not that good.

  Now, shading his eyes to look down the other flank of the hill, McGarr caught sight of the “great house” and its sprawling complex of outbuildings, stables, corrals, tracks, riding and jumping rings. It looked more like a secret research facility or a military installation than a farm, nestled there in a bowl which the hills made and many miles from any public road.

  And McGarr knew the story of the house, having interviewed Bechel-Gore there concerning the incident that had crippled him. An elegant Georgian structure with monumental windows—an exquisite fanlight above the front door—it had been trucked (what was left of it) from Cork where, shortly after Home Rule, it had been torched. Bechel-Gore said he did not harbor any grudge against Corkmen, that he was only seeking open pastures and more land than was available there, but McGarr thought it passing strange that a man who was so outspoken in his advocacy of economic liberalism would abandon what had to be some of the finest and richest land in Ireland—deep topsoil, ideal for raising grains, and a limestone base that, some said, aided in the development of the strong bones so necessary to hunters and jumpers—for these bleak hills.

  “What do you think they’re doing with that horse?” Noreen asked.

  A group of men was down in the stable yard with a tall, chestnut-colored horse that looked little different from the mare, Kestral, that McGarr had seen on the video tape the day before and on several other occasions. A long, somewhat flexible pole had been passed between both pairs of her legs, and two of the men seemed to be raising it, one on either end, as if to apply pressure to her innards, while the others led her forward at a steady walk. Another man had carried in several buckets of some solution that had sloshed into the dirt when he set them down. The final attendant stood near Bechel-Gore, who was sitting in the electric golf cart that had been modified for his use.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “And that man, there!” Noreen pointed off, away from the stable complex toward the east where another man, lying prone on the top of a hill only somewhat lower than the one the McGarrs occupied, had lifted a pair of binoculars to his face, a lens flashing in the glare of the sun.

  Or was it binoculars?

  “The way he’s hunched over there—” Noreen began to say.

  McGarr turned to the men in the stable area. He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hello!” He pursed his lips and tried to whistle but he hadn’t done it in so long the pucker was inexact and nothing came out but air. “Hey!”

  Now Noreen began to shout, but the wind there seemed to stop their voices short and throw them back.

  Finally the whistle sounded, sharp and shrill, and the horse pricked up her ears and looked up at them. The men turned toward them and McGarr pointed off toward the east, gesticulating, wanting them to see the danger that the man with the rifle there posed.

  The man standing next to Bechel-Gore turned to see them better, and the first shot struck the cowling of the golf cart, knocking it askew.

  The horse shied, rearing up, and felled one of the men. Bechel-Gore tumbled out of the cart, using it as a blind.

  Again the report sounded, a crack that was muffled by the wind, and McGarr pulled Noreen down into the grass. “You stay here. That’s a bolt-action weapon, and he’s not much of a shot.” McGarr was thinking about the wind that had deflected the shot and the allowance the sniper should have made for it, and the way the road to the old Keegan place—just a cart path now, overgrown with brambles and gorse—had wound around the hill to the east, the one from which the fire was being delivered. And he had to have support, some car below there to get him out, since the only motor access to the Bechel-Gore property adjoined the road along Lough Nafooey to the south, and the country for miles in every other direction was open, uninhabited, and wild.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Back to the car.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ll be safer here.”

  Another shot.

  The horse had been led off, into the stables, and two of the men were crouched down behind the cart with Bechel-Gore, each one of them ahold of an arm.

  And the golf cart was smoldering now. In the shadows under the chassis sparks could be seen.

  “But I want to come.”

  “You’re not, and that’s that.” Running down the hill through the tall grass, careful not to step on a hillock or into a rut and twist his ankle, McGarr heard other shots, but rapid, as from an automatic weapon and coming from the stable yard, or so he thought from the direction. And another spurt, over the other, and several. Again and again.

  Bechel-Gore must keep his men well armed, he thought, tugging open the doors of the Cooper. And illegally armed. He remembered his conversation with McAnulty and the cartridge casings he’d found near the window of the bedroom in the Keegan/Matthews place in Drogheda.

  He jerked the Walther out from under the seat and placed it in his lap, starting the engine with the other hand.

  He glanced up at Noreen as he swung it around, a dot of white and turquoise on the hillside, her red hair like a daub of paint against the burnished silver of the bright, lowering sky.

  Get down, he thought, hurling the Cooper forward, the undercarriage grating over humps, the ruts nearly jarring the wheel out of his hands. He threw it into third and launched the car down a steep defile that then curved up around the flanks of a hill where, from the pinnacle, he saw a car or a van parked and two men running toward it, one high on the top of the hill and carrying something, the other close to the vehicle.

  McGarr plunged the Cooper down the slope, but he was at least a half mile from the van and the first person had started it—he saw a puff of black smoke billow up from the rear—, a Land Rover, a diesel. He didn’t think he’d have a chance to catch it, especially if the driver was acquainted with the area and broke out over rough ground toward the main road instead of staying on the cart path that followed the easy lay of the land.

  But the other man, the one farther up on the hill, stopped, having seen McGarr approaching. He looked down at the Land Rover then back at the Cooper, as though trying to decide. But it was plain that if the Land Rover waited, McGarr would catch it, and the decision was already made.

  The Land Rover jerked forward and then cut off the road sharply, jumping over hillocks and rocks, making toward the hills to the east that extended as far as the road to Trean and Lough Mask.

  The man on the hillside looked about wildly and then veered off to the south, where McGarr in the Cooper could not follow. Several times he stumbled and fell, looking back over his shoulder, and McGarr was again reminded of the video tape he’d seen earlier. It was either the noise of the wind, which was howling around the low car, or the treeless landscape that seemed to deny perspective, but it was as though everything had been stopped down, and the jouncing, lurching Cooper, and the stumbling man with the sniper’s rifle, moved in a kind of slow motion, agonizingly slow, a snail’s pace.

  But when the man reached the horizon, there on the flank of the hill, and turned, raising the rifle to jack a cartridge into the chamber, McGarr switched off the Cooper and jumped out, letting it roll down the cart path toward the valley below, knowing it would follow the deep ruts, not wanting to get caught in a flammable box by a man with a high-powered weapon.

  And it was McGarr’s turn to test himself against the wind, which was blowing, it seemed, from every direction and no direction, now here, now there in a random way that staggered him and threw tangled, swirling patterns over the deep grass that concealed broken ground and caused him to fall.

  And the man had seen McGarr but the shot carried wide, and he turned and fled, out of sight, down behind the flank of the hill.

  By the tim
e McGarr reached the ridge he was winded, and the man, having been availed of the easy descent, was distant, halfway at least to Lough Nafooey and headed, it seemed, toward a copse of tall conifers that clustered the bank of a stream there.

  But McGarr pressed on, trying not to fall but falling, coming down hard on his elbows and chest, sliding over the wet ground and slick grass beneath him so that it was more like a long tumbling dive down a fair, grassy hill, the sort of thing he had done out in Howth as a child, than a downhill run, the Walther crammed under his belt, his pants and jacket now slick with grass stains and mud.

  And he gained on the man, who now had boulders near the stream bank to get over. Off beyond the trees, miles in the distance, McGarr could see the glimmering, choppy waters of Lough Nafooey. If only he could get to the man before he struck the road there, he’d have a chance. In the trees he’d have the advantage with the Walther, and he was betting the man would not stop until the trees. There had been too much return fire from the stable complex for that. He had to be thinking that this pursuer had an advantage in firepower and that he was outnumbered, at bay, fleeing.

  And McGarr saw a break, a chance of cutting him off, a run of even ground on one side of the conifers where the needles had fallen and formed a soft bed over the rocks and rills. He wouldn’t have to pick his way through the boulders where he’d be an easy target, and maybe he could get behind the man, cut him off, before he reached the road.

  It was a gamble, but McGarr made the edge of the pines just as the man got beyond the boulders and raised the rifle to his shoulder. But he was puzzled and lowered it, looking around while McGarr kept himself concealed behind a wide tree.

  He wasn’t young, perhaps in his late thirties, with fine blond hair that the wind, less severe there near the trees, tossed about even more than the grass. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and an olive-drab field jacket, and with black boots he seemed almost military. McGarr wondered why the jacket—the many flap pockets—and if he was carrying other weapons. Why hadn’t he dropped the rifle—because it could be traced to him or because it was his only means of protection?