Carn

by Patrick McCabe

  She looked at the red-knuckled hands on the counter, the nicotine-stained fingers. She shook her head.

  “Ah, but I know you,” said the heavily-built man. “At least I knew your father. The Buyer Keenan. Of course he was known high up and low down. Wasn’t a road in Ireland that the Buyer Keenan didn’t know.” He placed his thumbs in his lapels and said to the barman. “That’s a fact. The Buyer Keenan knew every road in this country. Anybody will tell you that. I’ll have to buy his daughter a drink now, won’t I? Fill them up again.”

  Josie drank the drinks as they were set before her. He sucked the wet tip of his cigarette and talked incessantly but Josie heard little of what he said. The music in the lounge came to an end and they stood for the national anthem. Josie took a last cigarette from the man and then stumbled to the door to get her coat. “Are you off Josie?” called the barman. “Are you not going to say goodnight to us?” She heard the tail-end of his laughter as she went out into the night. She went to the café and ate among the latenight adolescents and drunk farmers. She did not leave until well after one.

  A policeman with a torch stood at the corner, the static spurting suddenly from the two-way radio by his side. Youths loitered, a discarded cigarette sailing across the street like a firework. Cars slowed as the policeman scrutinised the interiors, then revved up and sped off towards the border. Josie set off in the direction of the railway. The policeman looked after her, tapping his foot. The railway was littered with potholes. Passing the warehouses, Josie heard her name called. At first she thought it was her imagination and quickened her pace without turning around. Then she heard footsteps behind her. She turned suddenly to see the barman signalling, the other man behind him in the warehouse doorway.

  “Josie,” called the barman, “what do you say we have a bit of a party in your house? Just a couple of us, eh?”

  Josie tensed and tried to steady the tremour in her voice. “No—I can’t. Not in my house. I have to go.” She turned from them.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with us? Is there something wrong with us? There was nothing wrong with our drink earlier on, eh? Just a couple of hours. We could have a good time. Come on Josie . . .”

  She began to run. Please Jesus please for Christ’s sake, she repeated. In the distance she heard her name called over and over. Then, carried off by the wind, she heard, “Go on then—you fucking ride!”

  She stumbled twice on the twisted tracks before she reached the cottage.

  Her heart was pounding in her chest. She closed the door behind her and barred it. Sweat broke out on her forehead. With trembling hands she lit the gas heater. She took off her wet clothes and left them to dry. The scarlet lamp burned and the Sacred Heart smiled. She pulled on a dressing gown and fell into the armchair. She shivered as the barman’s voice echoed. She drifted in and out of sleep. The lamp twinged. That’ll be your father home from the market now, daughter, her mother’s voice whispered, get on up the stairs and pray to Our Lady. Do you know what I’m going to tell you now Mrs Keenan? That husband of yours is known the length and breadth of Ireland. High up and low down, they know the Buyer Keenan. The Buyer is a well-respected man.

  She heard their voices as she stood among them all those years ago, their huge red hands dangling in front of her eyes as the Buyer stood at the bar, his stomach thrust out as he boasted, No man in this town would ever best me. The Buyer’s the roughest man in this town.

  She lay there for an hour and then there was a gentle tap on the door. She pulled the dressing gown about her and said, “Who is it?”

  There was a long pause. “It’s me . . . Pat.”

  Josie loosened. She went to the door and opened it. He looked away from her, his lank hair falling about his face. She took him inside to the dry warmth of the kitchen. He sat on the sofa, his eyes downcast. She spoke softly to him. He looked slowly upwards as if expecting to confront his executioner. She sat beside him and dried his hair briskly with a towel. When she was done, they went to the bedroom. He ranted breathlessly with his eyes closed about the priest and how he should have stood up to him. “But I can’t Josie—it’s as if they’ll find out my secret if I stand up to them. I didn’t want to do what the priest asked me. I don’t believe in it. He talked me into it. I’m fifty years of age, Josie. I’m a hypocrite and a liar. I get sick to my stomach when I think about it. I’m ashamed Josie, ashamed, ashamed . . .”

  When it was over and she had done what he wanted, she stroked his face and he blubbered to God how sorry he was about it all but Josie, he said, you like me don’t you, you don’t think I’m disgusting do you Josie do you . . .”

  His arm fell limp and he began to wheeze in a fragile sleep punctuated with sudden uneasy cries. The protection of the drink and the drugs was beginning to wear off. Josie became agitated. The length and breadth of Ireland, the voice said to her again. But this time she felt the hard leathery rasp of her father’s hand on her cheek and the smell of porter came into her nostrils. Stiff as a board she looked up at his bloodshot eyes as he stroked her hair with trembling hands.

  Not a woman about this place since our Cassie died, wee pet. It’s gone to rack and ruin. If only there was a woman would come in to see after you and me. There’s no skin on God’s sweet earth like the skin of a woman. Jesus like the skin of a woman. And as he quivered on top of Josie’s body, outside the window the sun rose and Cassie was far away and would never come again, he cried bitterly as his body jerked, I treated her bad. I treated our Cassie bad and I’ll be damned in hell for it I should never have laid a finger on you my darling wee Josie.

  Cassie stood beneath the blue of the sky and smiled down the length of the winding road at Josie Keenan. She beckoned to her. But he was not there. The Buyer Keenan was nowhere to be seen. His cries came to her and the words again bodies bodies.

  His face was not the face of the Buyer Keenan as she knew him. It was old and cracked and from his mouth issued a sort of howl as he cried, The Buyer Keenan known the length and breadth of Ireland what happened to me where are the two women I loved?

  And on that grey road were random bones and littered skulls and as he stared up helplessly at the red sky above him and the burnt grasses that stretched as far as the eye could see, the buyer Keenan knew there was nobody now but himself. Through his tears he cried a terrified laughter and fell on his knees, the sound of his voice carrying for miles beyond. You don’t know me do you I’m the Buyer Keenan they all know me here like the length and breadth of Ireland I know it if you want to know the way to this place just keep walking till you’re dead and take the first right for Paradise ha ha ha ha ha ha . . . but you’ll find no Cassie here, poor Cassie’s a long way from here . . . and me and her will never meet again . . .

  Josie tried to fight the tears coming to her eyes. It did no good, she told herself. She rose but she could not shake off the touch of Cassie’s hand on her cheek as she said, “What if it had happened another way pet—who are we to know?”

  Josie sat by the window but, brittle now after the flight of her protection, she could not halt any of it as it came at her. A small skeleton in the ground, a boy with a soft face, Culligan taking her hand as they sauntered through the streets of Dublin marvelling at the flocks of pigeons clustering around the statues of patriots. The Buyer taking her smiling through the coloured waves of people in the huge department stores.

  There is no other way for me now, thought Josie, there is only one way I can win now. I said I’d do it before and I will do it I will.

  Her hands were shaking as she took the tube of tablets from the shelf and emptied a handful of them into her mouth. She left the door open behind her and went out into the snow. She walked until she came to the bank of the lake. She stood there and brought all the voices back to her mind. She slowly waded into the water and hoped she’d faint. Three times she immersed herself but each time it became more difficult and when she saw herself as one of the bodies, with white bulging cheeks and a bloated stomach floating throu
gh the semi-opaque water, the fear took complete control of her. She could not break the surface the fourth time. She cried helplessly as she struggled back to the bank. She felt the strength going from her legs.

  When she awoke it was dark again and the cramps tore at her stomach. A water hen skitted in the reeds. The white fields stretched into the distance where a churchbell rang.

  When she got back to the house, the gas fire had burnt itself out. Pat Lacey had gone, the bedclothes still in disarray. Josie clutched at the door to steady herself. When she saw the three twenty pound notes under the saucer she felt nothing. She just stood there staring into space, her wet nightdress flapping at her heels.

  Far off in the town she heard the first rumblings of what she took to be thunder.

  XIII

  The explosion rocked the town.

  The fire engine raced up and down the main street as if it had lost its way. The waitress in the Railway Hotel was hysterical, screaming help me help me. The siren skirled out into the night. The Christmas tree had toppled over and crashed through the Hypermarket window. The tarmac had cracked open and a burst watermain sent up a fountain of water like a huge orchid. A policeman in oilskins called nervously through a loudhailer, “Please go to your homes. There is no need to panic.” But the more he appealed, the more people appeared in doorways, wandering through the streets in a daze. It was as if the place had fallen victim to an eerie mass hypnosis. They stared at the cables which criss-crossed the street with glazed eyes. The policeman became frantic and cried out, “Will you please go home! Those cables are live!”

  But nobody listened to him. A plume of smoke went up over the Vintage Bar. Flames licked at the tangled mass of metal, the tyres melting on to the kerb. The water from the burst main swirled into the gutters. “There may be more devices,” called the policeman. “Please go to your homes.” A rafter tumbled and a window caved in. Slates fell from the roofs and frightened dogs howled.

  Eventually police reinforcements began to arrive. Water hoses stretched the length of the street. The police ushered the dumbstruck people away and lined the kerbs with no-parking buoys. They cordoned off the area and stood straddle-legged at each end clutching two-way radios. The waitress in the hotel was taken away with a number of others in an ambulance. Rumours bred and run amok. A child in a bedroom in the house opposite the pub had been blinded. The chief of staff of the IRA had been in the bar. A farmer had lost his legs. Nobody knew what to believe. The crumpled wreck of the Austin 1100 was towed away. Volunteers began to sweep away the water and debris. The shattered clockface of the church looked down forlornly at the chaos on The Diamond. Stretcher bearers waited anxiously at the town hall praying there would be no work for them to do. Families checked the recent movements of their own and made frantic phone calls. The firemen went to work on the interior of the Vintage Bar. It was not long before they found the first body. Word shot through the streets like wildfire. Who was it who was it, they asked, someone local, was it was it? The face was blackened with smoke and the body charred but it did not take the fireman long to identify the dead body.

  It was Joe Noonan.

  The other man was a stranger.

  The only other casualty was the barman who had escaped with minor injuries and was now in a neighbour’s house in shock.

  The people of the town shook their heads in disbelief when they heard. They stared out of their windows trying to make sense of it all. The labourers prepared themselves for a busy night as the clip of hammers rang out and the blackened façades were boarded up. Signs were placed at either end of the street. DANGER–STAY AWAY.

  The water orchid shrunk and the firemen rolled up their hoses.

  Patrol cars cruised the whole night long.

  In the days that followed, the town filled up with journalists and visiting politicans. They packed the hotel and interviewed many of the locals. Joe Noonan was described as “one of the nicest lads about the town”. Pat Lacey appeared on national television and spoke of “the perpetrators of this dastardly deed”. It became a sort of jamboree as everyone scanned the screen hoping for a glimpse of themselves or their house.

  Then out of nowhere, it all stopped. The microphone wires were gathered up, the suitcases packed and, almost immediately, it was as if they had never been there. The lounge of the Railway Hotel emptied and the waitress was back on duty as usual. The patrol cars became less frequent. The crack in the main street was filled in and the clockface repaired. The locals slowly went back to their ordinary lives as if they were emerging from a drug-induced trance. The proprietor of the Vintage Bar nailed up a notice Business As Usual on the door.

  At Mass, the priest gave out the details of Joe Noonan’s funeral. As the dust settled, the people of the town tried to get the incident into perspective. The question that burned in their minds was, “Who had done it?”

  Certainly not the IRA who were hardly going to bomb the town where fifty years before Matt Dolan had led the raid on the railway and put Carn in the history books as a republican and nationalist town. The debate raged and new theories were advanced by the day but it all came to an abrupt end when, in a phonecall to a Belfast newspaper, a protestant paramilitary organisation claimed responsibility for the action and said that there would be repeats if the supporters of the IRA in such towns did not withdraw their support for the campaign of genocide against the protestant people along the border.

  At first the reaction to this was one of fury and indignation. It brought out the worst in many, who said that if that was their attitude, they deserved all they got. Vengeful plots against protestants living in the area were spoken of but none were taken really seriously and evaporated almost as soon as they were mentioned. They swore that they would not be frightened and intimidated by these thugs, that they had a right to walk the streets of their own town without fearing for their own safety. But as time went by and they thought more deeply about it, the more anxious they became.

  What if there was a repetition? They might not be so lucky next time. Carn was a small town. What if the bomb was even bigger next time? Any of them could wind up like Joe Noonan, hauled away in a zippered bag. They thought of their children lying dead beneath blackened masonry, trapped in burning cars.

  For the first time it dawned on them that they were no longer talking about pictures in history books and images on a television screen.

  Then the local politician went on the radio and said that the blame for the bomb could be laid fairly and squarely at the door, not of the protestant people, who were a decent and God-fearing people, but of everyone in Ireland, both north and south, who had ever promoted violence or turned a blind eye to it. He said that we should never forget that nearly a million people in the fourth green field did not see themselves as invaders or strangers at all. The architects of the terrible deed were in fact the Provisional IRA and their supporters. It was they who should be reviled and cast out from the community. It was these agents of the devil who, indirectly, had bombed Carn.

  This speech seemed to have a tremendous impact in the town. The politician was a well-respected man. When arms were found in a disused farmhouse outside the town and more police and military were drafted in, the people began to whisper that the town had seen enough trouble. They averted their eyes when the trucks rattled up and down the main street. They did not want to be implicated and did not want their town blown up again. They sought refuge now in a feigned naivity. “What’s it all about anyway?” they said, in the hope that a new found innocence would reduce the chances of violence returning to their streets.

  When Francie Mohan was arrested and beaten up in the police station for singing a republican song in the Turnpike Inn, they took no notice of it and said that, knowing Francie, there was probably two sides to it, he had probably assaulted the policeman.

  A committee which had been formed before to plan the next year’s Easter Commemorations quietly disbanded itself. They stored the tricoloured flags and bundles of proclamations of i
ndependence in a back room in the town hall and wrote to the various politicians who came every year saying that they would no longer be required to speak in Carn at Easter, that it was thought to be “indiscreet” to hold the commemoration this year.

  Whenever Matt Dolan’s raid on the railway came up accidentally in casual conversation, or was alluded to by a stranger, they cut the discussion short by saying, “That was a long time ago.”

  And when Francie Mohan drunkenly shouted the speeches of Patrick Pearse and Wolfe Tone across The Diamond every Saturday night, they steeled themselves and tried not to hear but when it became too much for them they turned and looked away redfaced, as if he were some kind of imbecilic relative who had turned up out of nowhere at an important family wedding.

  Benny had called at the Noonan house as soon as he heard the news. Joe’s sister, inconsolable, had told him how her brother had driven herself and the kids to Dublin for the day and on the way home had gone in for a drink while he waited for them to get chips in the Yankee Doodle. Her face was red-raw as she said over and over again, “It was me asked him to wait, Benny. What will we do without him? I loved our Joe so much, Benny.”

  Benny stayed with the family the whole night, reliving parts of Joe’s life as if they felt that enough emotional intensity on their part would somehow bring him back.

  When Benny felt his own tears coming, he went to the bathroom and stayed there for over an hour. By the time the gentle tap came at the door, the sorrow in him had passed and in its place there was bitterness and anger, deeper than any he had ever imagined he could contain within himself.

  XIV

  The mourners stood on the hill overlooking the town. The surplice flapped in the priest’s face as he struggled with pages of the missal. The drone was carried off by the wind. Joe’s sister broke down and threw herself on the coffin crying bastards the bastards, her mantilla falling from her face. The priest averted his eyes compassionately. They lowered the box into the ground and she clutched Benny’s arm. The fistful of clay tumbled on the wood and a lively babble began as they slowly drifted towards the gate of the cemetery. They went to the Vintage Bar which still bore traces of the explosion. Faded black streaks scored the ceiling and there was a shattered wall lamp in the corner. They began to drink frenziedly as if they feared they were now about to go the way of Joe Noonan. Benny and Sadie sat together out of the way. Clichés were exchanged with vigour. So young. We never know. Cut down in his prime. The Good Lord does His harvesting and He leaves none behind. Benny felt as if he were floating over their heads. The whole town seemed to be in the pub.