After the Lockout

by Darran McCann

  ‘Boston.’

  I scribble it down. ‘Emily?’

  ‘Manchester.’

  ‘England or New England?’

  ‘England. Mary’s in Cape Town. Anthony’s in Wellington, Thomas is in Sydney.’

  ‘Fucken empire-builders.’ I down my whiskey and pour another.

  ‘Oliver is in Buenos Aires. Maybe you should slow down, Victor.’

  ‘Bonus what?’

  ‘Buenos Aires. In the Argentine.’

  ‘Jesus. What about Patsy?’

  ‘Melbourne. Theresa, eh …’ Charlie thinks about it for a second: ‘Glasgow. Johnny is in Chicago. Agnes is in New York.’

  ‘Wee Aggie? She’s only a child.’

  ‘She’s twenty-two. She’s married over there, I think. Rosemary’s in Toronto. Who am I forgetting?’

  I tot up the numbers quickly. ‘We’re missing four.’

  ‘Including yourself.’

  ‘Three then. Brigid?’

  ‘Philadelphia. Peter went to London. He got conscripted. He’s in France now.’

  I pour another whiskey. ‘Fucken eejit.’

  ‘I met him out there. In Paris. Small world, eh? Two Madden boys meeting away on the other side of the world. Him and a few of his cockney pals were paralytic. They were asking me did I know where was the Moulin Rouge.’

  I smile. Peter’s the youngest, he was eight the last time I saw him. ‘Dirty wee bastard. I’m sure you told him off.’

  ‘Sure I was on my way there myself.’

  I laugh loudly and take a long slurp. There’s a name missing from the list. ‘What about Sarah?’

  ‘Sister Concepta. She’s been with the Dominicans in Drogheda these last five or six years.’

  ‘You must be fucking joking me?’ I’m off again, laughing like I haven’t laughed in years. Fifteen Lennons and not one single city big enough for two of them. Pius has scattered the family like I said he would. My sides hurt.

  ‘Keep it civil down there,’ Phil shouts across the room.

  ‘Is she married?’ I ask Charlie. ‘You know damn well who I mean.’

  ‘No, she’s not. She’s the schoolteacher.’

  ‘Did she send you to come and get me?’

  ‘Jesus but you’re full of yourself.’

  ‘Then who’s we? You said we wrote to all our ones.’

  ‘Bishop Benedict.’

  The name is like a nail on a blackboard to my ears. I presumed he’d be dead by now.

  ‘Pius needs help, Victor, he’ll die if he doesn’t get it. The property is gone to hell. There’s cows dying of old age, Victor.’

  I pour another drink hoping it’ll settle my head but it does no good. The room is spinning on me. I hear a voice – not Phil’s, not Alfie’s – pronounce in a stentorian Cork accent: ‘Alfred, the Irish Party is finished, Mr Shanahan and his friends have made sure of that. My little party is certainly a spent force. We must all now make our peace with Sinn Féin.’ I know the voice but can’t quite place it. I open the door of the snug to return Phil’s pencil. Phil looks up watchfully.

  ‘Just leave it on the bar there, Victor.’

  Alfie looks up and fidgets.

  ‘Ask him, Phil. Ask Alfie where was he when he heard they’d shot Connolly.’

  ‘Take it easy now, Victor,’ says Phil.

  ‘He was in the House of Commons cheering and singing God Save the fucking King when he heard, weren’t you, Alfie?’

  ‘I was on me holyers at the time,’ Alfie protests.

  Phil stands up. ‘Right, Victor, that’s enough. Alfie and Mr Healy are here to try and help me get my licence back, so sit down and calm yourself. You’re drinking too fast.’

  The third man sticks his fat head out from behind the door, his face all whiskey and sirloin and silver service and gout. Timothy Michael Healy, Member of Parliament, King’s Counsel. As Murder Murphy’s thug in the Four Courts, he was one of the bosses’ bluntest instruments during the lockout. Healy looks like dead king Edward, with his full white beard and his big, fat, balding head. ‘Healy. I’m sure you cheered the loudest when you heard.’

  ‘I wasn’t even in the House that day. Victor, whatever our differences, Connolly’s execution offended every drop of Catholic blood in me.’

  ‘Every one of your boss’s newspapers was baying for blood. Well, by God your boss got what he wanted.’

  ‘Mr Murphy isn’t my boss. I’m just a lawyer.’

  ‘Mr Healy’s trying to help me get back my licence,’ says Phil. ‘He’s representing Tom Ashe’s family at the inquest too. Leave him alone.’

  Charlie is beside me now, trying to coax me away. ‘Where did that happen?’ Healy asks him.

  ‘Messines.’

  Healy gets up and shakes Charlie’s hand. ‘My boy was in the Dardanelles. People say Irishmen shouldn’t be fighting for England, and maybe they’re right, but there are many good and patriotic Irishmen in the trenches.’

  Charlie directs me halfway back across the room but I’m still looking at Healy, standing at the door of the snug with smugness splayed across his big, blotchy face.

  ‘You were his right-hand during the lockout. I haven’t forgot what you did, you and the rest of them. I haven’t forgot the lockout,’ I cry.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, nobody gives a damn about the lockout any more,’ he says.

  I shrug Charlie off and fling a whiskey tumbler as forcefully as I can towards Healy, but I stumble and my aim is off. The tumbler crashes into the window above the bar. Shards of smoked glass fly everywhere. I move towards Healy with every intention of ramming his head into the wall but before my third step Phil is standing before me with hurl in hand. He pulls hard and I feel the warm smack of the ash against my shoulder. I topple sideways and collapse in a corner, but in a flash Phil wrenches me powerfully to my feet and pushes me towards the exit. He’s still the right side of forty and built like the athlete he is. He holds me with one arm and opens the door with the other before propelling me onto the pavement outside with a mighty push. There’s a good reason why Phil’s pub is the cleanest and safest in Monto. I crawl to the gutter and empty my guts of all the spuds and bacon and whiskey in me. Behind me, far away, a voice barks bitterly and a door slams. Lying on my back, I look up and see Charlie hovering.

  ‘All right, I’m ready to go home now,’ I say.

  It’s been so long since she last even left the house you doubt your own sight. She’s standing at the edge of the lake like a will o’ the wisp, looking like she might blow away. You reach the spot, your spot, where you and Maggie meet, and look up at her in her billowing white robes. She doesn’t seem to see you. The sun is melting like it does in autumn, and the wind gusts. You shout out and she turns to face you, an old woman at forty-five. She smiles beatifically, and you glimpse your mother, not the banshee she has become.

  ‘Victor, son: life is in the letting go,’ she says.

  She turns away and steps off the high edge of the lake. You watch her fall, serene as a snowflake.

  Stanislaus felt not a day over sixty-five as he reached the crossroads, a mile and a half’s walk from Madden, mostly uphill. Not bad for a man passed over on health grounds ten years before. He turned back and kept a good, even pace, his footsteps ticking like a metronome. Walking was always good for clearing the head. He thought about full bishops promoted since his retirement, all of whom Cardinal Logue, in his vast wisdom, had recommended. He knew of four who were not well and three more who frankly were incapacitated. Soon Madden was in sight, nestling in the gentle hollow. The street lamps flickered against the failing light. From up ahead, just outside the village, came bad singing and laughter, and Stanislaus saw two lads of perhaps eighteen horsing around. Stanislaus’s knuckles whitened on his stick. ‘John McGrath and Aidan Cavanagh,’ he cried. They stopped dead and straightened up in exaggerated protestations of sobriety. Eyes red like diseased rabbits. The stench of cheap spirit damned them. ‘It’s not even six o’clock and you boys are drunk
as lords. Have you no work to be at today?’

  ‘Everybody quit early the day, Father,’ said McGrath, the post-master’s son.

  ‘Where did you get the drink?’ Stanislaus demanded.

  ‘I don’t know, Fa’er,’ said young Cavanagh, the schoolteacher’s brother. Stanislaus slapped the blackthorn stick against the boy’s thigh. ‘Pius, we got it off Pius!’

  ‘Is this. How you. Behave. When your families. At home. Haven’t even. A spare penny. To waste?’ Stanislaus uttered bitterly, punctuating his speech with slaps to their legs. They yelped like puppies. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves.’

  This business of Pius Lennon and the poteen was getting out of hand. He was making the stuff in such prodigious quantities and selling it so cheaply that he was bringing many others to ruin with him. Nevertheless Stanislaus was troubled by the thought of the Victor fellow as the correcting influence, to Pius and to the wider problems connected to Pius’s dissolution. That such a person would be anyone’s idea of salvation! Obedience and discipline were the answers to vice, indolence and dissolution. People needed leadership from the cloth, not from radical politicals. Stanislaus had read many of the socialistic texts. Mostly screeds written by palpably troubled souls. He found most striking the universal rage and the rejection of authority – the former a consequence of the latter, he believed. Marxians said the meaning of life was struggle, but Stanislaus knew that grace required acceptance. True freedom came through surrender. Only rage was possible where grace was not. In lands where grace was banished, no depravity was unthinkable. The Russian experiment, for example, was sure to end in horror. He hung up his overcoat in the kitchen and opened the range door. As he poked at the fire and watched the flames rise higher, he wondered if he might work up his ruminations into a paper.

  ‘It’s after a quarter past six. I wish you would tell me where you’re going out and didn’t keep me late, Father,’ said Mrs Geraghty, standing behind him with her cloth coat pulled tight around her.

  ‘Your Grace,’ Stanislaus muttered, but knew it was pointless to keep correcting her. She’d never learn to address him correctly. At her age and station, she was disinclined to take in anything new. ‘Dinner smells wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘It’s been in the oven so long it’ll be dry as communion,’ she said with a bitterness he knew was affected. ‘Oh, and Father,’ she went on, softer now.

  She gently removed a letter from her coat pocket and held it up. ‘There’s a letter for you, Jeremiah McGrath brought it special delivery. It looks very official, Father.’

  Stanislaus reached for it but Mrs Geraghty seemed reluctant to let it go. She recognised the seal as well as he did.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Geraghty, I’ll be fine from here on,’ he said.

  ‘If you’re sure there’s nothing else you need,’ she said, at length letting go.

  ‘Quite sure, thank you,’ said Stanislaus, nodding to the clock.

  ‘I’ll say good evening then,’ she snorted. She raised her chin and eventually took herself out the door. Stanislaus sliced the envelope open, relishing the crisp rasp of the water-marked paper coming apart. The handwriting was unmistakable. Only close friends and colleagues got handwritten letters.

  My old friend Stanislaus,

  I have this morning returned from Rome where the Holy Father has briefed the Conclave on a crisis of the gravest urgency. In accordance with the Holy Father’s instructions I am gathering together the most senior principals of the Church in Ireland to discuss the emerging crisis. I expect to see you at the Synod Hall in Armagh this coming Sunday at three o’clock.

  I pray this letter finds you well and fully restored from your illness.

  Your Brother in Christ,

  Michael Cardinal Logue + +

  Stanislaus read and reread the letter. The most senior principals of the Church in Ireland. Ten years had passed since Stanislaus had risen from his sickbed to be told he wasn’t getting the Bishopric of Derry. It was no reflection on his abilities of course, everyone thought the world of him of course, his counsel would still be invaluable of course. But His Eminence the Cardinal, the Archbishop, the Primate, had never sought the counsel of the parish priest of Madden. Not till now. In time of crisis though, the Cardinal wanted his old friend at his side. Poor old, sick old, pensioned-off old Stanislaus Benedict. The old enforcer. The man who made enemies so Mick Logue, the Northern Star himself, didn’t have to. Father Daly came bounding down the stairs and into the kitchen. He opened the oven door and reached for the plates, then withdrew his hand quickly and waved around chastened fingers. He bit his lip so as not to swear, then made a glove of a dish cloth and lifted the hot plates from the oven.

  ‘You’re ready for your tea, Your Grace?’

  Stanislaus nodded and sat at the head of the table. The curate set out forks, knives, a jug of water and two glasses on the table and when he sat down, they bowed their heads. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Benedic, Domine, nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi per Christum Dominum nostrum, Amen. Stanislaus chewed slowly. It wasn’t quite as dry as communion wafer but it was overdone. He put some of his food onto Father Daly’s plate – it seemed that, no matter how often she was told, Mrs Geraghty would not accept that a man’s appetite shrivels with the years – and the curate nodded appreciatively. Stanislaus set the Cardinal’s letter on the table. Father Daly stopped chewing. He swallowed and picked up the letter. He read it quickly, then seemed to read it again. ‘It sounds serious, Your Grace. I can drive you to Armagh in my motorcar if you wish?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I’d appreciate that. After the last mass.’ Stanislaus paused. ‘Have you any thoughts on what it might be about?’

  ‘Well, the fact that the Holy Father called together the Conclave … it’s not a local matter. And this talk of urgency … probably a temporal issue. The war, maybe? Perhaps there’s a peace treaty in the offing.’

  ‘Or perhaps things are about to get worse.’

  Father Daly finished his dinner and Stanislaus permitted him to smoke. ‘There was something I meant to say to you,’ the curate said as he exhaled. ‘Some of the parishioners want to use the Parochial Hall tonight.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘They’re holding a homecoming dance for Victor Lennon.’

  Aidan Cavanagh and John McGrath had said everyone in Madden finished work early today. Stanislaus hadn’t thought to ask anything further, but now here was the explanation.

  ‘I thought it was an innocent enough request,’ Father Daly began falteringly, as though realising he might have overstepped his authority. ‘Everyone seems so excited about this fellow coming home.’

  ‘Who gave you the right to make that decision?’

  ‘Your Grace, I …’

  ‘What sort of man do you think this Victor Lennon is?’

  ‘Your Grace, I hardly think …’

  ‘He’s a communist and a bolshevist and he has been up to his eyes in every kind of radicalism. Tim, people idolise this Lennon fellow, and we don’t know what he’s planning.’

  ‘Will we cancel the dance?’ said Father Daly.

  Stanislaus sighed. Father Daly and young priests like him would be responsible for the future of the Faith. Stanislaus feared they lacked the necessary toughness for dealing with the threats arrayed against it. ‘It’s too late for that if you’ve already said yes. The dance may go ahead. But it must be strictly teetotal. I met youngsters on the road and they were full drunk. And I want everyone out by eleven.’

  ‘Victor and Charlie probably won’t have arrived by eleven.’

  ‘Those are the conditions. And Father: this is not to happen again. The use of parish property is in my authority and mine alone. Is that understood?’

  Pius is still apologising extravagantly as he closes the door on Benedict. You hadn’t planned it, it was an unconscious reflex. You look to your big brother Seamus but he turns his eyes to the floor. You look to Anthony, second eldest, your fav
ourite. To Mary. To Sarah. To little Agnes. They all turn their faces away. Perhaps spitting at the bishop was too much, but at least it was unequivocal. The spit will wash away but the act won’t. You look at your mother, shrouded in white on a table in the corner, unmoved. The gesture means nothing to her. Pius unbuckles his belt.

  ‘Da, please …’

  ‘Don’t you Da me,’ he hisses, pulling the belt from his waist, loop by loop. ‘You do that to a priest? You do that to a bishop?’ He wraps the belt round his knuckles, doubling the leather. Nausea rises in your nostrils, hot and horrible. The room is dark, with only the hearth’s dying embers giving light; Pius’s face is half red, half shadow, the margin flickering down the middle. You can smell his hot breath. He never drinks, but there’s poteen there, the wildness in his eyes confirms it. The belt lashes across your face. You don’t feel anything yet.

  ‘He comes over here and tells us Ma is going to hell? The bishop can go to hell and so can you,’ you cry. Defiance is all that is left to you. His fist connects with your jaw and the pain is such that for the briefest of seconds it feels like you have departed this life. You’re crumpled on the floor absorbing the blows as Pius swings and swipes and the belt leather cuts deep into your arms and back and head.

  ‘I’m going to kill you,’ Pius cries, and it sounds like the most absolutely truthful statement he’s ever made in his life. You hear women scream and they’re all telling him to stop but they’re all too spineless to make him. You peek from your foetal position and, seeing a lull, launch yourself at him. You clatter into his midriff and crash over the table. Tea and wake sandwiches go flying. Back on your feet, you see your mother through eyes bathed in blood and tears. A slice of ham has landed on her cheek. Pius puffs desperately for air, his face is purple. Your mother is dead and this yellow-belly runs away into a bottle just when you need him most.

  ‘You’re nothing but a drunken coward,’ you say as you run out the door.

  We have the compartment to ourselves. Not many heading north at this time of night. I pull down the blinds and scrape the flecks of bacon and carrot off the lapels of my suit. Charlie’s too civilised and conscientious to put his feet up on the empty chairs beside him but I’m not. I pull the trilby hat down over my face and make myself comfortable. It’s a rickety old bone shaker but I’m soon nodding off. One minute we’re between Clontarf and Sutton and Charlie is saying something about how the Madden footballers have reached the county final; the next he’s poking me with his cane and telling me to wake up, we’re near Armagh. The train is stopped. I see lights further up the line, but outside it’s darkness.