The Death of an Irish Tradition

by Bartholomew Gill

  Then the man was off again, now in the copse, on the bank of the stream and moving quickly. In order to get beyond him, McGarr had to guess—that he’d stick to the stream bank where there was probably a path made by anglers, that he’d try to reach the road.

  And so McGarr no longer kept him in sight, only rushed headlong down the fringe of the copse and, when sufficiently away from the stream, he cut in, dodging the trees—some sort of spruce; Norwegian, he thought—wishing he did not smoke, pulling air into his lungs that felt more like fire, knowing his ankles and his knees would be sore for weeks, but wanting that man who, if caught, might be the key to at least several investigations.

  The leather soles of his bluchers were slippery on the needles, and when he could see light ahead of him—the drop down to the road; the lake beyond—he angled back, going down on one hand, in toward the stream and the path, quietly now, wanting to make it clean.

  Had the man gone by? No—he didn’t think so. Birds were in the trees on the opposite bank where the water of the stream tumbled off a ledge into a dark and deep pool. There in the shadows fish were plying the quiet water, and a heavy footfall would have frightened them.

  McGarr glanced down the other way, a steep fall to the road—nobody. He looked around for the best cover but decided he had it there, in some brush on the lee side of a massive spruce. And then he heard the muffled clump of boots on the needle-strewn path.

  He crouched and looked down at the Walther, making sure the safety was off, reassuring himself of its presence. And his heart was beating wildly now; he could feel it in his throat. It would be hard to take him like this, especially if—.

  And then the man was almost upon him, limping but still moving quickly, one leg of his pants bloody, his pale cheeks red. He was winded and sweating, yet the rifle was still in his hands.

  McGarr pivoted and stepped out on the path, going down into a low crouch, both hands on the Walther, arms extended, the muzzle pointed at the man’s chest only a few feet distant. “Drop it. In the stream.”

  The man stopped, his eyes wide with fright but his hands still on the stock of the rifle, and then he looked off beyond McGarr, down the steep drop to the road.

  Behind McGarr a car door slammed, and the birds rose up, complaining, wheeling off into the trees.

  The man lashed out with the butt of the gun, striking McGarr on the side of the head, knocking him into the brush.

  McGarr had seen only the swirl of his shoulders, then a flash—vivid orange and pink—and had felt the blow of the stock on his skull. Then nothing.

  He came around slowly, his face and head in the brush and brambles.

  “Get up out of that now,” he could hear Fogarty saying to him but distantly, seemingly leagues away. “The bloody bastard stole my car.”

  McGarr tried to stand but couldn’t. It was as though his head was heavy on one side and kept pitching him down. He was dizzy, and the side of his face—his head, one eye—throbbed with pain.

  McGarr let his legs go and he slumped down, against the trunk of the tree. He was parched, but the stream was too far away. He tried to reach for the packet of Woodbines in his jacket pocket, but his hand wouldn’t or couldn’t grasp it, and he felt as though he might be sick. He was exhausted and his head—.

  His flask. It was metal and intact.

  With his teeth he prised out the cork and dropped it in his lap. As he raised the half-pint container, Fogarty turned to him, wanting to say something more, but the look in McGarr’s eyes stopped him.

  When had it started? Menahan asked himself, pausing before the door of the Monsignor’s bedroom, the discontent with his…calling. With the transfer to Ballsbridge? Perhaps, but he couldn’t be sure and he’d actually gone back to check in his diary.

  It was all there, page after page of resentment—at the Jansenist implication, pervasive throughout Ireland, that God had made an aesthetic mistake when conceiving of the reproductive functions of the human body, at the guilt one was made to feel at becoming cognizant of any “attachment,” however vague, to the flawed and repulsive body.

  And he hadn’t hesitated when he received the phone call from Jimmy-Joe. “You know, some chemist in your parish. Somebody with a…Fenian bent. He’ll understand.” It was a wound and was becoming infected.

  The body again, Menahan had thought. Festering. And of course he could help Mairead’s uncle, almost his own cousin, his former neighbor whose family had shared with his nearly—how many?—two hundred years of known history and probably more as well. Did that matter? Months ago he would have thought not—only God’s law, as proscribed in vivid “Thou shalt not’s,” would have guided his actions. But all that had changed for Menahan.

  “Be happy to. Do you need anything else?”

  A pause. “I could do with a bit of money. I’ve got a good amount in the bank, but that’s not something I could put my hands on. Now.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “A couple hundred quid, if you could manage it, Father.”

  “I think it could be arranged.”

  Keegan had been surprised. “You’re a…prince. I hope you don’t mind me sayin’ that, Johnny.”

  Not at all, not in the least.

  Menahan now girded himself with his new mantle of worldliness and rapped on the Monsignor’s door. The knock was louder than he intended, but maybe it was better like that.

  “Yes?” The voice was thick with sleep.

  That was good too. He had caught Kelly napping. “Father Menahan here. May I speak to you?”

  “About what?” He was awake now and angry. There was an edge on his words.

  “A private matter.” Menahan glanced down the hallway, noting the other doors, each the quarters of another priest. He heard a floorboard squeak. Gossips, he thought, worse than old women. “I’d prefer not to speak through a door.”

  “You would, would you now,” he heard the old man mutter as he moved to the door and tugged it open. “What is it?”

  Menahan surveyed Kelly—the full shock of white, bushy hair; the florid complexion; the thick glasses that made his eyes seem bulged and pugnacious, like headlamps on a machine—and he thought of the bit of Joyce doggerel, the lines that spoke of the militancy of the Catholic Church in Ireland. How did it go?

  O Ireland, my first and only love,

  Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove.

  And in truth the discipline imposed on priests—unknown in its severity in other Catholic countries—and the innate, reactionary bent of the Irish hierarchy was quasi-militaristic. Even the rectory here with its severe, carpetless hall reminded Menahan of a barracks—soldiers in Christ, and not merely the Jesuits, and Kelly himself the colonel, hitching up his black suspenders over his black shirt, in black pants and the shoes. Army issue.

  “I’d like to speak to you.”

  Kelly only glared at him, even allowed the maddened, goggled eyes to work down Menahan’s body, making no attempt to conceal his dislike.

  “All right—here then.”

  Kelly’s ears—large and red, like twilight sails—pulled back, but he kept his hand on the jamb.

  Menahan smiled, noting that the trepidation Kelly could instill in him and others had left him completely. In its place was a kind of contempt. The man standing over him was nothing more than a bully, plain and simple. “I have urgent personal matters to attend to, and I shan’t be able to say last Mass or give the mathematics seminar at the convent either.” It was only the latter, really, that had held Menahan’s interest throughout the long, drear months of his “priestly” submission to Kelly’s command—that and Mairead, of course. In many ways mathematics was the only sure knowledge over which one could exercise near total control, and being the basis of music, Menahan had given the field long study and thought. It pained him not to be able to attend the meeting, at which he had been scheduled to read a paper on Descartes, but he supposed the situation required some sacrifice. “As well, I might be gone for a da
y or so.”

  Another creaking floorboard in another room.

  And Kelly heard it. He stepped aside, allowing Menahan to enter the room. Kelly closed the door, but kept his hand on the knob. “Is that a request?”

  “Yes.”

  “Request denied.”

  “Well, then—.” Menahan sighed; in his own way Kelly had not treated him unfairly. He had demanded obedience, but he had dispensed assignments fairly, never giving Menahan, as the most newly arrived priest, an undue share of the early masses, even saying a few each week himself, but there was only one way to approach the man—straight on, a confrontation. “It’s my intention—”

  “To leave the priesthood?”

  Menahan chuckled. He had known it would come to this. But Kelly was vulnerable. He had a record to preserve, of taking on all the hard cases—the young and prideful priests, the intellectuals, like Menahan, or the willful, like some others—and bending them back into the fold. And that he would not jeopardize. No renouncements, not one in—how many years had Kelly told him?—thirty some, and there had been pride in his voice. It was a posture that left him much less free to match wills—or “prides,” Menahan thought ruefully—with a young priest who had no record nor any real desire for one of any kind.

  “Oh, no you don’t, Monsignor. You can’t and won’t call my bluff. If it’s going to take a renouncement for me to attend to this matter, then you’ll have it forthwith—when I return. I’ve never asked you for something like this. Others have, and I’ve filled in for them. And this is…vital.”

  “Yes, but others—”

  “Are no different from me. They’re human beings too and have needs.”

  “And yours are?”

  “Tending to a sick friend.”

  The old man walked to the desk, where he selected a pipe from the rack. “I don’t believe you.”

  “You think I’d lie?”

  Kelly looked up and cocked his head. “No, but we have a parish full of worshipers, people who need your particular services. This is Sunday, and there are doctors, nurses, hospitals for sick people.”

  Menahan wondered if he could trust the man and decided he could. “Not in this case.”

  Kelly paused in reaching the match to the pipe. “Will your actions embarrass us?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  Kelly drew in the smoke and let it out. It was thick and hung in the heavy air. He batted it away from his head. “Tell me, Father—what do you think it means to be a priest?”

  Menahan had turned to the door; Keegan had said he needed the antibiotics fast, and that had been early the day before. “It means being God’s minion, here on earth. It means—” he opened the door, “—being good. And that’s an active state too, Monsignor—doing good.”

  “And you can assure me that what you’re about to do is good?”

  If advancing those persons and things which were preeminent was good, then what Menahan was about to do was certainly good. Keegan wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination such a being, but he was Mairead’s uncle and almost the only relative and familial protector that she had. And Keegan had proved his role over the years and proved it well. Certainly it was God’s will that he should be helped and allowed to carry on the task that He had assigned him. “It is good.” Menahan opened the door.

  “It has something to do with this Caughey thing, hasn’t it?”

  Again Menahan paused. “It has.”

  “Then good luck to you, Father. God bless.”

  “Thank you, Monsignor.”

  Menahan closed the door, and walking down the dark hallway he thought of the quote he had read when leafing through his diary. Descartes again, but an aspect of his thought that was little known or else ignored.

  I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all other external things are nothing but illusions and dreams.

  I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses; yet falsely believing myself to possess all those things.

  If, by this means, it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power, namely, suspend judgment and thus avoid belief in anything false, and avoid being imposed upon by this arch deceiver, however powerful and deceptive He may be.

  Menahan paused on the stairs and said it over to himself. It was like a poem or a hauntingly modern prayer or a special sort of occasionalist mantra.

  And there Descartes was hedging his bets. What if the business of knowing was cruelly unequal? What if human beings had been presented with neither the perceptual accoutrement nor the capacity for knowing the real? Then, Renatus wouldn’t play. To hell with God and his silly little game. He’s nothing but an arch deceiver.

  Menahan shook his head and smiled to himself, before continuing down the stairs. It was a nice point, a twist, and indeed a worthy consideration.

  The library was massive, perhaps even too large, and extended across the entire back of the Bechel-Gore house. The windows were towering, wide, and elegantly paned in a proportion suited to their dimensions. But McGarr had the feeling of being in a school or a public building, and the dark wood, the books lined to the ceiling, the catwalks of pegged mahogany with a two-tiered ladder on brass rollers, the map and atlas tables and reference books, and especially the writing desk with the globe and quill pen seemed like relics from a former, more leisurely and doubtless a more totally exploitative time when the purpose of such an estate had been to support a man of letters.

  But the desk, up to which Bechel-Gore pulled the wheelchair, seemed little used, and beyond the sweet smell of old paper and leather there was the mustiness of a room that had been all but abandoned. And the man had said, directing McGarr in there, that he would prefer that they not be overheard. “Especially by my wife. She’s…sensitive, and we have the Show coming up. I want her to be relaxed and ready and not distracted.”

  They could see her from the window in back of the desk, standing in the stable yard and watching the grooms lead Kestral, the mare, around. Noreen was standing near her.

  “You don’t suppose your wife will say anything?”

  McGarr had turned to the man, only able to see him with his right eye. The other was swollen shut, and the entire side of his face was hot and aching, as though he had several severe toothaches at once.

  They had been served cold ox-tongue sandwiches with horseradish and pickles. McGarr was hungry but he hadn’t been able to eat. Lager was offered as well, but the pain had made it taste hot and insipid. He had lost the sniper, and the appendages of his body were sore from the long, difficult run over the broken ground and the fall into the brush. His suit was ruined, a soggy and torn mess, and a last in one of the bluchers had burst. McGarr was tired, exhausted, and now the man in front of him was intending to play games.

  McGarr pulled out a Woodbine and lit it. Even drawing on the cigarette hurt his face and his lips and his lungs—. “You mean, you hope my wife won’t mention to yours the fact that her sister, Margaret Kathleen, was murdered.”

  Bechel-Gore reached for the quill pen and twirled the stem in his fingers. “Well, yes…” his voice was a throaty drawl, characteristic of his class, and normally McGarr would have tried to dismiss it as natural, a part of the man’s background and nothing else, but now it seemed affected and nearly histrionic, and with everything else it taxed McGarr’s patience. “…we were hoping to inform her after the Show.”

  The Show, McGarr thought. It was everything for him and for Murray, for the horse and for the wife—he wondered how much it mattered in all of this. And then he remembered Ward’s report—that the girl, Mairead, was a rider; and he thought of the little gravestone in the next valley and of the infant who had died in 1960. “You’ll be there yourself?”

  “Yes, of course.” Bechel-Gore had a way of twitching his bushy, light mustache before speaking, like a man hiking up his pants.

  “To watch?”
/>   His brow knitted. “Yes—to watch and oversee matters. This is the most important event of the year for the farm. And this year particularly.”

  “Particularly what?” All pleasantness was gone from McGarr’s voice.

  “Well—we’re hoping that Grainne and Kestral might come away with a trophy or two.”

  To prove what? McGarr almost asked the man, but it was pointless really and he wanted to conserve whatever strength remained. It was pride, but something else too. He wanted to spite Keegan or whoever was responsible for his injury. McGarr wondered to what lengths the man had gone or would go.

  And there were many questions that McGarr could have asked—where he was at the time of the Caughey murder and during the raid on the Keegan/Matthews place; how the barnyard dirt had gotten wedged under the instep of his boots that were propped on the struts of the wheelchair, an encrustation that could have been caused only by somebody who had placed his weight on the boot; about his having purchased the copy of the R. T. E. video tape of his accident and why; about Keegan’s letter, “Sis, Get out. He’s onto me. Jimmy-Joe”; and about the Keegans themselves, to whom he was related by marriage, whose land he now owned, and how he had come by the land—the price, the circumstances, his feelings—but McGarr didn’t think those queries necessary.

  He had been staring down at his left hand, which he now opened. In it was a bright bit of metal. He tossed it toward Bechel-Gore. It bounced off the desk top, ringing like a chime, and struck Bechel-Gore in the chest. He waited.

  It was a rimless, 9mm short cartridge casing, seemingly identical to the ones McGarr had found near the bedroom window of the house in Drogheda. This one, and dozens like it, he had noticed in the stable yard, where Bechel-Gore’s grooms had fired from.

  “Well, yes, of course—I suppose the Skorpions are illegal. I was given them as a sort of gift from the Czech army. They rather fancy my horses, you see, for dress parades and the like. After my injury and the other…problems my family has experienced in this country, well, I thought they’d come in handy in case of just the sort of situation you witnessed today.