War Children

by Gerard Whelan

  ‘I’ll leave you alone.’

  ‘You’ll leave my friends alone too.’

  ‘I’ll … I’ll leave your friends alone.’

  ‘You and your men will stay away from the election meeting tomorrow. And you’ll stay out of Irishtown. If you show your face there even once before election day, we’ll blow it off of you. And the same goes for any other peeler in this town. Do you hear me, Phil Murphy?’

  ‘I do, Tom, I do.’

  Phil Murphy had suddenly realised that he wasn’t going to die. His voice bubbled with gratitude. He reached out his two big hands and grabbed one of Tom Farrell’s. He bent his wet face and, in an act that disgusted me to my stomach, he kissed it.

  ‘God bless you, Tom!’ Phil Murphy said. ‘God Bless you! May his own blessed Mother look down on you. And thank you, son. Thank you!’

  Beside me my Irishtown friends were still sniggering, but they mightn’t have existed at all for all the notice that Phil Murphy took of them. Jamesy uncocked and put up his revolver, but didn’t yet put it back inside his coat.

  ‘Get up, now,’ he said almost gently to Phil Murphy. ‘Get up, and turn around, and go away. Stay clear of us, and tell your men to do the same. If you do that, then maybe – just maybe – we won’t kill you. Do anything else and you’re a dead man. Do you understand?’

  Phil Murphy got to his feet, grovelling. In the space of a couple of minutes he seemed to have aged by twenty years. When he stood up he still towered over all three of them, but even so he seemed smaller than any of them. Even a little gun, I suppose, is bigger than any man; and Jamesy’s gun wasn’t little.

  ‘I do, sir,’ Phil Murphy said. ‘I understand you, and I’ll do everything just as you say.’

  I had never heard him sound so keen to please.

  ‘That’s my boy,’ Jamesy said. His breezy manner had hardly changed during the entire interlude.

  Phil Murphy looked as though he were about to say something else, but he didn’t. He just turned around and walked back the way he had come. At first he walked with slumped shoulders, but as he went he straightened up, and his step brightened, and by the time he disappeared around the corner he was striding purposefully along. He strode, though, without his helmet, which still lay in the roadway where it had fallen. It was a thing unknown for a police sergeant to be seen in public without his helmet; it was sure to be noticed.

  The rest of us, men and boys alike, stood staring after Phil Murphy till he disappeared. No-one said anything. Then Jamesy hefted the revolver in his hand and looked at Tom Farrell.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ he asked. ‘A gun makes all the difference.’

  But Tom Farrell had come back to the real world.

  ‘Except,’ he said, ‘that he’s gone back to the barracks now, and there’s guns there too. How do we know he won’t come back with his men and their carbines?’

  Jamesy smiled.

  ‘He won’t,’ he said.

  ‘But what if he does?’

  ‘Then we’ll shoot him. And anyone with him. And then we’ll have more guns, and that will make even more of a difference.’

  ‘And if they come to the meeting tomorrow?’

  ‘If they come to the meeting tomorrow then we’ll be ready for them. Right now we have posters to put up.’

  The third man had gone off and fetched Phil Murphy’s helmet. He brought it back and held it out to Tom.

  ‘A souvenir for you,’ he said.

  Tom spat. ‘I don’t want it,’ he said. He was almost snarling.

  The man held the helmet out towards us boys.

  ‘How about you lads? Do you fancy a game of policemen?’

  The Irishtown boys mobbed him, clamouring for the helmet. I hung back, not wanting to touch it, but not knowing why. I felt completely confused, and when I looked at the eagerness of my friends I felt more alone than I’d ever done in my whole life. The three young men went about their business, leaving us boys on the green. The others soon invented a new game, where one boy got to wear the helmet and be the policemen, while the other boys chased him and, when they caught him, beat him up. I didn’t join in: it seemed too much like a reverse version of the game that Phil Murphy and his constables had played with Tom Farrell the night he came back. My feelings were all mixed up, and I didn’t understand them. When Mickey Farrell noticed my odd mood, and asked if I was all right, I said I had a pain in my stomach, and was going home to lie down. I went off for a long walk on my own.

  I walked the town for hours before I went home. There I was so quiet and distracted that my mother thought I was sick. She felt my forehead and declared me feverish. She sent me to bed, where I lay for a long time, thinking. Later, my father came in to see me. He could see that, whatever was wrong with me, it wasn’t a physical thing. When he asked me whether anything had happened to upset me, I told him the whole story. He sat on my bed and he listened in silence, only prompting me very gently when I faltered. By the time I finished, he had his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands.

  ‘My God,’ he said after a while. ‘Has it finally come to this?’

  ‘To what, Daddy?’ I asked him. I’d turned the events of the afternoon over and over in my mind, trying to understand what had disgusted me about them so. Phil Murphy, whom I hated, had got his come-uppance. I felt that I should have been glad. But I wasn’t glad at all. Instead I felt ashamed, as though I’d seen some awful thing I shouldn’t see. But all I’d seen was the blubbering face of the ex-King of Irishtown, humbled by a young man with a gun. I had no reason to feel any sympathy for Phil Murphy – indeed, I didn’t feel any. I didn’t even pity him. But I felt no triumph either, nor even pleasure at his downfall. What I felt instead was that shame, and a kind of disgust. That was what I couldn’t understand.

  ‘What did I see today, Daddy?’ I asked my father. It was a question I’d never have asked my mother. I wouldn’t have dreamed even of saying a word to her about the events on the fairgreen. I knew, in any case, exactly how she would have interpreted them. My father, though, was different. He sat and thought about my question for a good while without saying anything. Then he reached over and put his arm around my shoulder and – eleven years old though I was, and disliking soft stuff – I burrowed gratefully into his warm, strong embrace that smelled vaguely of ink and tobacco.

  ‘I think, son,’ he said, ‘that you saw something very few people ever get to see.’

  That, of course, was perfectly true: I’d seen a pistol produced in our town, and I’d seen Phil Murphy frightened and crying. I’d hoped for something a bit more, though, from my father. I’d hoped for something that would help me understand my feelings. But when, disappointedly, I admitted as much, he hugged me even tighter.

  ‘That’s not what I meant at all, son,’ he said. ‘Not at all. I wish it was.’

  ‘What, then?’ I asked him. I desperately wanted to know. ‘What did you mean? What did I see?’

  ‘The future,’ my father said, and his voice was every bit as sad and lonesome as I’d felt all afternoon. ‘I think you saw the future.’

  I knew what he meant and I didn’t know what he meant, all at the same time. There was nothing to say. So the two of us sat on my bed, huddled and silent, and listened through the closed door to the muffled sound of my mother’s voice off in the house somewhere, giving out to the maid.

  Dead Man’s Music

  I was thirteen years old when I found the dead man in the barn, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I’d seen dead people before, of course – my grandfather, the time we got him dead in the chair, and young Murt Breen that time the horse kicked him in the head. Murt had lain in the churned-up muck of Carty’s yard and there wasn’t a mark to be seen on him, but his eyes sort of fluttered and he called out real loud for his mammy one time and then he died. When the men picked him up he was all floppy, and nearly slithered out of their arms. He was sixteen then, and he’d been a great hurler. His team did very bad the year after, missi
ng his skill.

  I’d seen a dead woman one time too, when I was ten. It was Mary Callaghan’s daughter Rose, that went missing on the hill. I was the one found her caught in the weeds at a bend in Murray’s stream. Her long hair was flowing in the water and the little fishes were darting in and out of it. The searchers found me standing there looking at her, and they thought I was too frightened to shout out. But really I’d been thinking how peaceful she looked, swaying there in the stream like she was dancing to a music the rest of us couldn’t hear – fairy music, dead men’s music – some tune, anyhow, that left her at peace. She’d been funny in her head, Rose Callaghan, and I’d never seen her looking peaceful before. There was a kind of beauty off her face there in the water, if that doesn’t sound soft. Her eyes were wide open, and they had a look in them like she was seeing something lovely and far-off, like she was after being let look at some special secret we poor live ones couldn’t see.

  I said nothing about that to anyone, though. They’d have thought I was mad. We children used to catch them little fishes in that stream – ‘minnies’, we called them. Our fathers and mothers had done the same thing, and their fathers and mothers back as far as ould god’s time. But I never felt right doing it after that. I’d look at the ones that I’d caught and wonder whether any of them had swum in Rose Callaghan’s hair. It took the good out of catching them.

  What I’d never seen – till I found the man in the barn – was a person so obviously killed on purpose by other people. The man that I found in the barn didn’t look peaceful at all. I’d never seen a dead person so bloody. And that will show you that I’d led a quiet life, because men were killing each other by the new time in Ireland then.

  It was the blood I saw first – a big slawm of it there in the dust, like someone was after dragging a slaughtered pig across the floor of the barn. But I knew there’d been no pigs slaughtered there. I followed the trail with my eyes and at the end of it I saw a man with a scarlet face, wearing a scarlet shirt, lying in the straw in the corner. I can picture it this minute. I knew straight away that his face and his shirt weren’t scarlet by nature, only dyed that way with the blood. It’s funny, I suppose, that I still call him the dead man, because of course as it turned out he wasn’t dead at all. But that’s the way I thought of him when I saw him first, because I couldn’t imagine that something so bloody could be alive. But he wasn’t dead – not in the way that Murt Breen and Rose Callaghan were dead anyhow. And now, at my age, I’d hardly even call him a man – he can’t have been more than twenty, though that was hard to see then under the mask of dirt and blood.

  Later, after he was cleaned up and when he was hiding in our hayloft till he was strong enough to travel, I still thought of him as the dead man. It was something dead in his eyes, something cold and far away. Eyes were made to look out, to look out and to look forward. But even when he was all cleaned up and getting better, the dead man’s eyes – even when they were looking straight at you – seemed to be looking inwards, and to be looking back. And what they were looking at wasn’t what Rose Callaghan had been looking at: it was nothing beautiful, and it wasn’t far away. Sometimes too when you’d talk to him he wouldn’t even hear you. It was like he was listening to something else, something inside of him. Maybe it was another kind of dead man’s music he was hearing. If so, then I’m glad I never heard it, because it surely wasn’t peaceful like Rose Callaghan’s.

  The time that I found him, anyhow, I didn’t know he wasn’t dead in the ordinary way. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and I suppose I just assumed the Tans or soldiers had shot him. There was no sign around his neck saying ‘SPIES AND TRAITORS BEWARE’, so it didn’t look like a rebel job. The rebels, in any case, left the bodies of people they killed in more public places. Not that I was any great expert – there’d been no killings yet around our way that time. But I’d listened to my father when he read the newspapers out at night around the fire. I liked to know what was going on, and what was going on in Ireland then was murder and madness. The adults would shake their heads at news of fresh burnings and ambushes and robberies and executions, but we children found it exciting. There was no television then, of course, nor even radio. There wasn’t even a picture house or anything around that we could go to. And farm life could get awful tedious sometimes, so a bit of excitement was always welcome.

  I stood looking at the dead man for a minute, that morning I found him, then I thought I should go and tell someone. I didn’t want anyone to blame me for anything. My father was in the house getting ready to go into town on some bit of business. On my way to the house I noticed bloodstains in the yard. I hadn’t seen them on the way in. They weren’t big, which meant that the dead man had still been walking or at least staggering when he’d come through there.

  When I ran into the kitchen my little brothers, Tim and Matt, were dancing around my father’s feet begging him to bring sweets back from the town. Daddy was teasing them, asking them why he should bother. His old black hat was on the back of his head, and his pipe in his hand.

  ‘What sort of childer am I rearing,’ Daddy said, ‘that would sell their souls for a bit of Peggy’s Leg?’

  Peggy’s Leg was a sort of a sweet you could get nearly anywhere then. I don’t think you can get it at all now.

  ‘Daddy!’ I said. ‘Daddy! There’s a man!’

  The three of them looked at me, standing in the middle of the floor, dancing with the thrill of my news.

  ‘What man?’ my father said.

  ‘A dead man,’ I said. ‘A dead man covered with blood in the barn.’

  I’d hardly got the words out before Tim and Matt, squealing with excitement, ran out past me to get a look. It wasn’t every day that started off with such a marvel. My father looked from me to them and back. Then he roared after them to stop, but they were already gone.

  ‘A dead man,’ he said flatly to me.

  ‘Dead,’ I said. ‘And all bloody. The floor looks like a dead pig is after being dragged across it.’

  My father said a curse-word and stalked out to look. I went after him. When we got to the barn Tim and Matt were standing with their arms around each other, staring at the man in the straw. My father said the same word again.

  ‘This is exactly what I need,’ he said then, but you could tell he meant the very opposite.

  ‘Sure he’ve nothing to do with us, Daddy,’ I said. ‘It’s not our fault he died here. We didn’t kill him.’

  My father scowled at me.

  ‘Look at his chest,’ he said.

  I looked, but all I saw was torn, bloody cloth.

  ‘You eejit,’ my father said. ‘Can’t you see that he’s breathing?’

  When I looked again carefully I saw the little rise and fall of the bloody chest. But still I didn’t see why that was bad: a live man, surely, was better than a dead one.

  ‘We’ll go for the police,’ I said. ‘They’ll sort it out.’

  I’d never thought the fighting in the country had anything to do with us. We weren’t political. We raised our animals and watched the weather in dread of a lost crop. What did it matter to us who ran things in Dublin? What had Dublin to do with us? You kept your head down and got on with your work – there was always plenty of that to keep you busy, and never enough time to do it all. That was the way that we lived around these parts then.

  But my father looked at me now like I’d sprouted a second head.

  ‘What am I rearing?’ he said. ‘Are you mad as well as stupid? There was never an informer in our family!’ He looked angrily at the bloody man. ‘It’s an unhealthy life anyhow, informing,’ he muttered. ‘Unhealthy and short.’

  ‘What informing?’ I said. ‘We found a man. We should tell the police. That’s not informing, is it?’

  ‘Talking to the peelers when you don’t have to,’ my father said, ‘is enough to get you called an informer.’

  ‘But look at the blood,’ I said. ‘If he’s not dead itself then he can’t be far off
it. If we get the police after he dies then we can’t be blamed, can we?’

  ‘Shut up,’ my father said. ‘I’m thinking.’

  He took his chin between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and rubbed it. It was a way he had, as though he was trying to rub an answer out of the blue-shadowed flesh.

  ‘This man is hurted,’ he said finally. ‘We can’t just let him die. But he’s even more trouble alive, that’s for sure.’

  Tim and Matt were standing in front of him, looking at the man, squirming with excitement. Their heads leaned close together, whispering. Da gave both of them a mild clatter on the backs of their heads.

  ‘Youse get out of here,’ he said. ‘Tell your Ma to heat some water.’

  He turned to me. ‘I’ve the horse in the yard,’ he said, ‘ready to put in the trap. You ride down to Murrays’ and tell Paddy what’s after happening. Do whatever he tells you. Say nothing to anyone else you meet, mind, apart from the Murrays – do you hear me?’

  I nearly fainted with pleasure. An adventure!

  ‘I won’t tell a sinner, Da,’ I said. ‘I swear to God. Will Paddy Murray know what to do?’

  Da looked hard at the dying man and sighed.

  ‘He’d bloody better,’ he said. ‘Because I don’t.’

  * * *

  I was a bit surprised at the man I was sent to fetch. I wouldn’t have expected Paddy Murray to know much about anything beyond dogs, horses and dances. The Murrays were our nearest neighbours. Their farmhouse was about a mile down the lane. They were a big, prosperous family of six sons. One of the sons was a priest in America, the rest lived at home and worked the farm. Paddy was the youngest, and he was known locally as a bit of a playboy. He was a handsome man of about thirty, very popular but not regarded as the steadiest of men. He seemed to live for his own enjoyment, and took nothing seriously. He had a joke for every occasion. He was the last man I’d have thought of turning to at a time like this.