The Unquiet Grave

by David J Oldman

  ‘Things came to a head you might say when she caught the eye of a young man in the village named Willy O’Connell. And a decent boy he was too. At least that was the general opinion until it became clear that Cathleen was with child. Talk was, naturally, that Willy was the father and——despite what you might have heard to the contrary about the way we do things here——had we been able to arrange a quick marriage things would have settled down soon enough. But Kearney made it quite clear that he wasn’t ready to marry Cathleen off. She was packed off to the city and Willy moped about the village, apparently innocent of knowing what had happened but now and then not above taking a drink or two himself. When he heard the gossip about Cathleen’s condition——and him knowing he had not had knowledge of the girl, if you take my meaning——he put two and two together. He was a decent boy, as I said, and willing to take the child, but Cathleen was still under the age of consent. She needed her father’s permission, you understand, and Willy began making threats about what he’d do if Patrick Kearney didn’t give it.

  ‘Well,’ Byrne said, bringing his hands together and casting his eyes briefly towards the ceiling, ‘the matter was taken out of our hands. There were complications in the birth and the child was mercifully born dead. Cathleen only survived the infant by a few hours.’

  ‘And Patrick Kearney?’ I asked.

  ‘The paternity of the child was common knowledge by then and he knew better than to show his face in the village. Willy went off to Dublin and brought poor Cathleen’s body home. There was some talk of her not being buried in consecrated ground but the bishop saw things my way and we gave the girl a Christian burial.’

  Father Byrne fell silent. I waited, failing to see the relevance in the story and beginning to feel I’d been short-changed.

  ‘Was that the end of it?’ I finally asked.

  ‘Almost,’ said Father Byrne, ‘almost. As I said, Kearney wasn’t welcome in the village and was rarely seen. Young O’Connell left, too, after the funeral. It must have been the best part of a month before anyone had occasion to visit Patrick Kearney’s farm. There was no sign of the man except a half-eaten meal mouldering on the kitchen table. Some of his stock had been turned out to graze but his two pigs were still in their pen, hungry but not quite as starved as you might imagine. The Garda were called and after going over the place some bones and bits of material were found in the pigsty.’

  ‘Kearney?’

  ‘That’s what the Garda said. They thought he must have had a heart attack, or the like, while feeding his pigs. Fell over and...well, a pig being an opportunistic creature... General opinion was he got what he deserved. God’s justice if not man’s.’

  ‘Was he usually in the habit of letting his other stock out to graze?’ I asked.

  Father Byrne smiled but didn’t reply.

  ‘And Willy O’Connell?’

  ‘He went to Dublin. I never saw him again although they say he used to come home to visit his mother now and then. He took an interest in politics, I heard. Not what I would have expected of Willy. From what I knew of the boy he had never shown an interest in his fellow man.’ Byrne smiled again. ‘But he was always kind to animals.’

  He handed back the photograph, shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t know the woman.’

  17

  I didn’t see the bus on my way back to Ballydrum. To all intents and purposes when I finally got there the village might well have been closed for a public holiday, only there was no bunting. No people either, and walking down the street I could have been forgiven for thinking the plague had swept through in my absence. Dusk had already crept out of the bog and into the village and most of the windows I passed were either shuttered or masked behind heavy curtains. No lights betrayed the fact anyone might be home. Only the local tavern showed a light and that was as dim as the proverbial Toc H lamp. There were two or three men drinking inside when I opened the door but my sudden appearance seemed to strike them dumb and I didn’t even catch the stray word of Gaelic.

  The landlord was a round beach ball of a man with a matching bulbous nose whose broken veins suggested a thoughtful habit of sampling his merchandise before chancing it on his customers. I ordered a whiskey, downed it while he watched and told him to fill it up again. I asked him to have one with me and his glass joined mine with an alacrity that suggested he kept several beneath the bar for just such eventualities.

  ‘I think I’ve missed my bus back to Newtownmountkennedy,’ I said.

  He looked at me sympathetically. ‘Ah well, since it went through at three o’clock this afternoon, you’re probably right.’

  ‘Is there anywhere I might get a room for the night?’

  His face brightened. ‘Well you’ll be fortunate in that we have a room or two vacant just now. Nothing fancy, you understand.’

  I assured him whatever he had would be fine.

  Fine, though, might have been overstating the case. The iron bedstead and sagging mattress both had the look of having been christened long before my father had. But I’d slept on worse and there were times in North Africa when the room would have looked to me like a little piece of Irish heaven fallen to earth. The water in the stained tub down the hall was warm enough for a shallow bath and, not having eaten since breakfast, by the time I’d put on a clean shirt and underwear, I was ready for some dinner.

  Dónol Casey, my genial host, boasted that Mrs Casey’s stew and spuds was renowned the length of the Wicklow Mountains, although he didn’t specify for what. In the event I wasn’t disappointed. I took a pint of Guinness with it——Dónol informing me that the waters of the River Liffey, which the Dublin brewery claimed went into the stout, rose in the nearby mountains. And seeing his eyes twinkling as he banged the glass down onto the scrubbed table at which I ate——the famous Guinness head barely shuddering at the jar——I wouldn’t have put it past him to have nipped out the back and added some from upstream to the barrel so as not to give the lie to the brewery.

  ‘And to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit to these parts, Mr Tennant?’ he asked as I wiped away my foam moustache.

  ‘I’ve been visiting Father Byrne at the seminary,’ I told him.

  ‘Have you now? And how did you find the good father?’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘And missed around here, I’m sure.’

  His other patrons had left and just the two of us remained in the bar. Casey helped himself to a glass of spirit from a bottle on the shelf and rejoined me at the table.

  ‘Father Byrne wasn’t above taking a drink himself now and again when the need arose,’ he said.

  ‘Oh? I thought perhaps he might have been teetotal. The evils of hard liquor and all that...’

  ‘It’s true he wasn’t above preaching the occasional sermon on the demon drink, but there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip as the saying goes,’ and he raised his glass as if to demonstrate that he wasn’t in the habit of making many.

  ‘Father O’Dowd, though, now he’s a different kettle of fish. Smokes like a trooper but has never crossed this threshold.’

  The phrase brought back something Father Byrne said to me.

  ‘I’m told a farmer named Kearney was once a good customer of yours.’

  ‘Kearney?’

  ‘Patrick was his first name, I believe.’

  ‘Well, he would have been more my father’s customer than mine but I recall him well enough.’

  ‘And his daughter, Cathleen?’

  ‘Now what’s your interest in the Kearney family, Mr Tennant?’ Casey asked, suddenly suspicious.

  So I told him that I’d come looking for a man named William Kearney only to have Father Byrne identify the man I wanted as Willy O’Connell. I showed him the photograph.

  ‘That’s Willy O’Connell all right,’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s probably dead,’ I told him. ‘I’m just tying up loose ends.’

  ‘And what ends might they be?’

  ‘A woman claimi
ng to be his sister, Rose, came to London looking for him.’

  ‘Rose O’Connell?’

  ‘She called herself Rose Kearney.’

  ‘Now Willy had no sister. He was an only child.’

  ‘You’re certain of that?’

  ‘Didn’t I go to school with him?’

  ‘The girl in the photo, then? Would that be Cathleen?’

  Casey peered at the photograph again. ‘No. Too old. Cathleen was just a slip of a girl when she died.’

  ‘What about O’Connell’s mother, when did she die?’

  ‘Well, let me think,’ he said, draining his glass and pondering upon the question.

  ‘Take one with me,’ I suggested. ‘Put it on my bill.’

  Dónol skipped behind the bar once more and came back with two glasses and the bottle of whiskey. I took a nip, finding the barley in Irish whiskey more to my taste than Scotch.

  ‘That’ll have been just before your last war. Willy came back for the funeral. We had a few drinks together for old time’s sake and he let on he was joining the British Army.’

  ‘And how did that go down around here?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, between you and me, I didn’t blab the news about. Although, given Willy’s history there weren’t too many in these parts that could have thought any the worse of him. I take it Father Byrne told you about Cathleen and the child?’

  ‘Yes. So some didn’t believe the father of the child was Cathleen’s own father then?’

  Dónol pulled at his bulbous nose with his thumb and forefinger. ‘There were one or two who found it difficult to accept. But Patrick Kearney was an unpleasant man, in drink and out of it. It was no stretch of the imagination to believe him capable of that. It was more the pigs they held against Willy. Father Byrne told you about the pigs?’

  ‘Yes. But he thought Kearney got what he deserved.’

  Dónol arched his eyebrows wryly ‘And so did everyone else. It’s just that the man who went up to the farm that day was the local butcher. He’d been booked to slaughter the beasts and though he didn’t find much meat on them that’s what he did. It was him who called the Garda. He began to have suspicions, you see, when Kearney didn’t come round chasing him for his money. The trouble was, it was a day or two before the story got around and by then most of us would have eaten the pork.’ He laughed and raised his glass.

  ‘I can’t imagine what the gossips made of that,’ I said.

  ‘Now there’s two sorts of gossip in a place like Ballydrum,’ said Dónol. ‘There’s the gossip that comes across my bar and which I have pay for by loosening the tongue with the odd free drink. And then there’s the sort that Father Byrne used to get for nothing, just sitting in that little box of his in the church. Of course, that sort never went further than the confessional, although those versed in these things——like Mrs Casey, I have to admit——can often infer the content by the nature of the lesson at Mass. Willy, though, not being a confessional man, left us all to work out for ourselves how he’d got even with Patrick Kearney.’

  ‘Father Byrne told me he developed an interest in politics while he was in Dublin,’ I said.

  Dónol Casey pulled a face. ‘Well maybe he did but you can’t grow up around here without picking up a little of the history, not in these mountains. And with a teacher like Sean MacBride there was no getting away from it.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘He taught in our local school. Some say he came here to keep his head down——he’d been a Volunteer before the Easter Rising, he said, but he wasn’t involved in that. He always maintained he was a cousin of John MacBride who was in the GPO and shot for his trouble afterwards. But then Ireland is full of men who claim blood kinship to the Easter martyrs. Though I’ve noticed there aren’t many who’ll claim Roger Casement as family. Now I wonder why that might be?’

  Dónol Casey gave me a sardonic wink and knocked back his drink. My knowledge of Irish history was as sparse as the Wicklow Mountains and I’d only known of Wolfe Tone and his dictum that “England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity” from my brief visit to the Dublin bookshop. A view like that had made me wonder if Tone’s hatred of England would have been enough for him to have overlooked some of the Nazi excesses. Like their extermination camps. But then I assumed William Joyce——Lord Haw Haw——had. We’d executed him too, I recalled, despite his being an Irish subject and technically beyond British jurisdiction. Not that I’d heard anyone complain at the time. It was always possible though that De Valera had raised an objection.

  ‘He was one of those rifle-carrying poets, if you know the kind I mean,’ Casey was saying and still talking, I assumed, about his schoolmaster, MacBride. ‘Could never quite see through the flowery verse clearly enough to make out the colour of the blood being spilt. Forever quoting Padraig Pease, he was, a particular hero of his. And Yeats, of course. Claimed to have met Maude Gonne herself. Water off a duck’s back as far as I was concerned, but he hammered the verse into us like the catechism.’

  Casey threw back his head and began to recite:

  ‘To know they dreamed and are dead.

  And what if excess of love

  Bewildered them till they died?

  I write it out in a verse –

  MacDonagh and MacBride

  And Connolly and Pearse

  Now and in time to be,

  Wherever green is worn,

  Are changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.’

  ‘It’s still there, you see,’ he finished. ‘I suppose I’ll take it to my grave.’

  I turned the photograph over and pointed to the inscription on the back——For Billy: A terrible beauty.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘maybe Willy took it to his grave, too.’ His eyes turned a little wistful. ‘He lapped it up when we were boys, Willy and our pal Dermot Kavanaugh. The Three Musketeers we called ourselves and we’d play out on the bog all day, acting out the Rising. Only I’d have to be the bloody Englishmen, of course, as Dermot would never sully his hands and Willy being his best pal would always do what Dermot did. It was Dermot that Willy went to stay with in Dublin——after Kearney told him he wasn’t to see his Cathleen again.’

  ‘Father Byrne told me he had a friend in Dublin,’ I said.

  ‘That’ll be Dermot, all right. He might have been Sean MacBride’s best scholar but he was no favourite of Father Byrne.’

  ‘Didn’t like his politics?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t Dermot’s taking the same anti-clerical line as the old rebels that Father Byrne had against him. Like a lot of Irish priests the good father was never convinced of the efficacy of turning the other cheek when it was an Englishman who’d slapped you. No, it was something else altogether. You see, Dermot was something of a poet himself. No Yeats, of course. More Pearse, perhaps. I didn’t think much of his poetry myself. Though Dermot did get one of his verses published in one of those small Dublin papers. But that was Sean MacBride’s doing and I always thought MacBride might have been of Dermot’s persuasion...’

  He looked at me slyly and quoted again:

  ‘Like a god as nature dressed,

  Made mortal by Great Ceasar’s mark

  On mounds divine and heaven blessed,

  Proud David bears old Ériu’s harp.’

  I didn’t understand what he was getting at and I suppose Dónol Casey could see from my expression that I didn’t because he explained:

  ‘It was about Willy O’Connell, you see——the poem. Father Byrne took its meaning right away and from then on he regarded Dermot as the devil incarnate.

  ‘He was the smart one of us three, was Dermot. Our Aramis, which is odd in some ways if you know your Musketeers and take my meaning.’

  I didn’t but it hardly mattered to Casey who was filling our glasses again.

  ‘There was always something Jesuitical about Dermot, to my mind. Single-mindedness, maybe. Or it might have been the obedience. He won a scholarship to the universit
y in Dublin to study Irish literature.’

  Casey winked at me. ‘Sean MacBride’s one success. You see we’re an ignorant lot here in Ballydrum,’ going on without giving me the chance for demurral, ‘only the trouble was he’d been too successful. Along with the literature, Dermot swallowed all MacBride’s politics too. That’s when he started calling himself Diamaid Caomhánach, the Gaelic form of his name.’

  As Casey pronounced it, it sounded much the same as Dermot Kavanaugh to me, except with a thicker tongue in his mouth which might just have been the whiskey.

  Casey repeated it and laughed. ‘He’ll always be Dermot Kavanaugh to me, though.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ I asked, wondering if it might be worth talking to him about O’Connell.

  Dónol Casey shrugged. ‘He turned up, six months ago perhaps it was. Had a bit of trouble up north, I heard. I was wondering at the time if he hadn’t come back home to keep his head down. Like old Sean MacBride. Too late for Sean, though. He’d died with the cancer a year or two before. Dermot put some flowers on the old fella’s grave, though.’

  ‘Did he say if he was still in touch with Willy O’Connell?’

  ‘No, Dermot hadn’t heard from Willy for some time. I told him I’d seen him back in about thirty-eight when he’d buried his mam. And that Willy said he was going to join the British Army. Just to see the expression on Dermot’s face, you understand. Didn’t turn a hair, though. Just smiled as if he could have guessed as much. Mellowed, I suppose. But isn’t that the way of it? A lot’s happened since King Billy met Seamus a Caca at the Boyne but it’s the grave that takes us all in the end, no matter the colour.’

  King Billy I was familiar with, being a nickname of William of Orange, but “Seamus a Caca” was a new one on me.

  ‘James the Shite, as he’s known around here,’ Dónol explained. ‘The name he earned for running away from the planters.’ He gave a small shrug. ‘But maybe the yellow streak ran in the family. They say his grandson, the bonny prince, didn’t linger too long after Culloden either.’