Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  Rabbits were out in the farther field, a little apart from one another, nibbling at nothing, their underjaws a-quiver, fear in the eyes, as if they expected danger, and yet when they heard his step did nothing, only ran to one another and huddled. Safety in numbers, their tails like dirty off-white dusters and their rumps cleaved to one another in useless and abject camouflage.

  Dark was coming fast and crows were convening in the cold sky. Tucking the cartridges in, he felt something of the old expertise, the way they snucked in, so nice, so neat. As he crooked his finger around the trigger, he heard them scattering, heard them tearing up into the sky, and then as he fired, the sound of the shots came strangely placid and unmenacing. One or two fell, but he did not cross to see if he had killed. How he had revered her. If she had spent one hour with Bugler, the best and sweetest and most trusting times between him and her would be ruined. He was still talking to himself when he ducked down into a drain, his shoes cracking on ice, like cracking a bread plate, and coming up he spotted O’Dea foddering from the open door of his van. The cattle were mounting it because he had never mastered how to keep animals back. They had not spoken since the day they quarrelled, but they each shouted now at the same moment and with the same high-pitched nervousness: “Happy New Year, Happy New Year.”

  He hurried on, pretending to be looking for a stray beast. He went down to the river to see whether it was brown or blue or bottle-green, as if that mattered. The swans, Aziz’s mascots, glided by with a serenity as if it were a balmy summer’s evening. The mountain was coated white, ridges of the rocks showing through with a mineral blackness. Each of the trees was weighed with snow, but inside their black branches were shroud lines like the mad thoughts running amok in his mind.

  “Jump in,” O’Dea said as he caught up with him.

  “Ah no … I’ll walk.”

  “I was going to call on you … We’re having a sort of a party tonight. Why don’t you come down?”

  “Ah … You know me and the parties.”

  “’Twill do you good … And Brunhilde would like it … You’re about the only one she tolerates.”

  “I’ll see.”

  They were level now, and spotting the rifle O’Dea said, “When did you get the rod back?”

  “Weeks ago.” He said it as casually as he could. As he watched O’Dea drive off, it occurred to him that he should go back to the river and hide the weapon. But something prevented him. He put it down for a moment and flapped his arms to warm himself. Flapping and hawing, he felt that strange exhilaration, that burning warmth in the limbs which follows upon biting cold. His spirits had picked up on account of O’Dea asking him down.

  When he returned to the glade of trees, mare and foal had gone. He saw them walking in the distance towards a shed that was up there, their dark shapes carved out of the night, in a supple and miraculous conjunction. When he saw them so close together, his heart froze with a kind of agony at how outside everyone and everything he felt, an outcast in the world save for Breege, and he knew that by telling her that single grain of truth she would not desert him, and then in a headlong absence of reason he saw their lives return to normal, the pattern of the steady days as they had once been. At his feet there was the afterbirth, a big bunch of jellied mush glistening in the light of a risen moon, the bits of red like mincemeat where the mother had snapped it off with her teeth. She had done it right.

  He walked with an urgency now, trampling on his own shadow, annoyance at the amount of time he had already wasted, recalling that insolent and vainglorious boast of Bugler’s which would be null and void once he talked to her. The barn roof came into sight, a panel of sheer white, svelte as suede, with not a single bird track to mar it, and then a lurch in his breathing as he imagined that he had heard that detested sound, the rumble of the tractor breaking in on his newfound certainty.

  Not knowing then that which he was about to do and yet with the repetition of that dreaded sound, knowing it, because it was always there, like a dream, waiting to be dreamed. It had thundered into the yard, music pouring out of it, the cabin decked with sprigs of holly to give a festive appearance. The bridal chariot come to carry her off. And then, the very worst thing. His own house lit up, illuminated, the upstairs and the downstairs windows, her way of saying “I have come home.”

  “Well, well, well,” he said, putting the vicious pieces of the puzzle together. They had planned it.

  The outside light, garish, fell with a carnival splash across a stretch of snow, crimsoning the cobbles. As Bugler stepped down from the tractor, Joseph raised the shotgun, his finger curling on the trigger as on a ring, and firing, he saw the brown hat soar away with a phantom-like easiness. It all felt like that now, easy and phantom-like and inevitable. There was nothing of craziness or frenzy in him, it was too lucid for that, the shells spinning out with unerring rapidity and Bugler turning, saying, “Don’t … Don’t”; then a louder cry as the last shell snucked away and the long bulk of his body fell forward onto the ruddied cobbles. It was like seeing someone fall onstage. The moon hazed, pearl-skinned.

  Then silence followed, louder than any gunshot, the crows soundless, in a hush, hovering above the trees, and then a great bolt of terror as he put the gun down and walked, like one hallucinated, to his van, then drove off at such a speed that the broken gate swung violently from its hinges.

  GUARDS SHEEHY AND FLYNN were swapping duty when Joseph came into the barracks like he was drunk, and blind too, one hand out with something in it as he blundered towards the table and just stopped before walking into it.

  “I shot your man up in the yard,” he said, throwing five cartridges down.

  “Who?”

  “Who else but Mick Bugler.”

  “Why did you shoot him, Joe?” Flynn asks, although he does not believe it, the man has not the belly to kill.

  “I was afraid of him.”

  “How come?”

  “’Twas him or me.”

  “How far away were you when you shot him?” Sheehy, the senior guard, asks, giving Flynn the order to go out and telephone for a patrol car.

  “About thirty yards, I’d say.”

  “Are you sure you shot him dead?”

  “I don’t know … I didn’t go near him.”

  “Did he fall?”

  “He fell.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He shouted, but I couldn’t hear.”

  “Why were you afraid of him, Joe?”

  “From the day his tractor pulled into our yard everything went bust … He broke us … All over Christmas I was demented … My sister put away … Deadly … I wanted to kill myself.”

  “Can I get you anything?” Sheehy said then, watching the terror spread out from the skull and the petrified eyes down his whole shaking body.

  “I’d like some water.”

  When he was handed the water he was unable to hold the cup, and his lips kept missing the rim.

  “I hope I didn’t kill him … Can someone go up and see?”

  “The patrol car will be on the way up now.”

  “Why is it taking so long?”

  “Calm down … Calm down. He mightn’t be dead … Only injured.”

  “My sister is up there by herself.”

  “Where’s the gun, Joe?”

  “The gun is there on the ground where I threw it,” and suddenly terror turns to consternation and he runs from the door to the window and back again like a caged animal.

  “Don’t get so excited, calm yourself.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t be. You’re safe here.”

  “I’m safe no more,” he says, and sits and stares out.

  From the hallway as the phone rings they listen and wait in the fraught suspendedness, knowing that they will know in a minute or even less.

  Sheehy goes into the hall where Flynn is standing shocked and vehement.

  “Dead as Lincoln,” he says.

  “How do you know?�
��

  “Guard Tracy from Birdhill was shooting grouse up the mountain and he came on the body and the sister on top of it … A blood bath.”

  “Jesus … Christ.”

  “We’ll tell him together,” Flynn says, and as they go into the room Joseph knows what they are about to say. Then dropping to his knees he groans and groans, and looking up at them says in a broken voice, “Didn’t I do a terrible thing, lads,” and they are helpless to tell him that it was otherwise.

  All of a sudden he began to take off his clothes, saying they were bloodied, they were contaminated, flinging them off as Guard Flynn rushed at him, outraged, saying he could not do that, he could not tamper with crucial evidence.

  “Fecking evidence,” he said, and flung his second shoe into a corner.

  “Fecking monster,” Flynn said, and went to hit him.

  “Leave him alone,” Sheehy said.

  “He’s an animal. He hasn’t even shown one ounce of remorse … Not one.”

  “Leave him alone.”

  And he stood before them naked, his arms dangling slightly, like a crucified shape of pity and desolation, staring into the space that was only a few footsteps away and into a long incarceration that he could not even yet imagine.

  BREEGE HOLDS HIM, shivering. It took moments after the sound of the shots had reached her to run out, then turn off the insane music and kneel beside him.

  There is breath in him. She puts her mouth to his and gives him more breath and still more. She listens. She breathes the life back into him.

  “You’re not dead, Mick … You’re not dead,” she says, and knows it to be true, because he is still breathing and he seems to see her there, seems to hear her and to be talking to her, though not able to say the words.

  There are no gashes and no bloodshed, which she takes to be a hopeful sign. The fact that his face is going slightly blue is only because of snow, the reflection of snowy light from the stars. He is looking at her and he is still alive.

  “Can you hear me,” she says, and touches him down the length of his clothes to his high boots, which she drags off. As she feels her way back up along the other side of his body she finds a patch of damp, warm damp, becoming damper, like water oozing out from a ditch, except that it isn’t water, it must be blood. She cries then and she prays, her cries and her prayers as one, all air, all heaven, all earth, all Cloontha rent with it. She will not allow him to die, he must live for his own sake and for hers. Then she sees the gaze going out of his eyes, that thing which a moment before had held him to her; and then he is gone, he is without breath, and she begins to drag him across the yard to the house, to bring the life back into him.

  There are footsteps and Goldie racing out and snapping.

  “In the name of Jesus, what’s going on here?”

  “Who are you?” she calls back, but without looking.

  “I’m a guard,” he says, and rushes and kneels by the body and starts to examine it with a chilling expertise. When he pronounces him dead, he looks at her as if she is the criminal and she cups Bugler’s face in her hand, refusing to let it go.

  “Let go of him … You’re not to touch him.”

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t touch him.”

  “I can,” she says, kissing the dead face, and he pulls her back then and pushes her like she is being sucked back into an immeasurable distance.

  “He’s mine,” she says.

  “He is not … He’s not your property.”

  “Whose property is he?” she screams at him.

  “The first rule is always the preservation of the scene,” and putting his hands under the armpits, he drags the corpse slowly back to where a dark and uneven pattern, empanelled on the snow, shows him where it had fallen.

  PRESENTLY THE MOUNTAIN road was alive with cars, cars arriving, cars leaving, the two dogs in separate outhouses howling ceaselessly. The doctor was the first to come, then more guards, then the curate, a white surplice over his overcoat, carrying his bowl with the sacred oil. Bending, he touched each of the orifices, then said the absolution and asked her if she wanted any spiritual help.

  The superintendent, escorted by two guards, was the most curt. As he got out of the car and looked around at the bleak landscape and the untidy yard, he seemed to recoil. He stood formal and scrutinising, a red muffler around his neck, and asked if anybody had touched the corpse since the tragedy occurred.

  “The young woman was trying to bring it into the house,” the guard said.

  “I have to ask you to go inside,” the superintendent said coldly.

  “I can’t … I won’t.”

  “Take her inside,” he said then to one of them.

  “Please … Please … Let me stay. I won’t go near him … All I want to do is to be here …”

  “She’s not well, sir … She’s in shock … She knew the man,” Guard Sheehy said, and pushed her back gently as the other guards began to seal off the area with bright yellow tape.

  It was a space the size of a room and she would sit beyond it, cut off from him in death as she had been in life.

  A young strange guard was ordered to stay with the remains, given strict instructions not to let anyone near it, which of course meant her.

  Not long after they had gone, she went inside and brought him some tea in a flask, then went in again and came back with two kitchen chairs and two blankets. He drank the tea and ate the slice of cake, but sat with his back to her.

  Some time after, he half turned and said, “I’m glad you’re here … I’d hate to be by myself. It’s kinda spooky.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Fergus … Fergus Flynn.”

  “How long will we be here before they come?”

  “Hours.”

  “What will they do to him?”

  “Cut him up.”

  “Butchers,” she said under her breath.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m fifty percent guard and fifty percent human. I’ll walk over to that gate … I’ll give you two minutes to say your goodbye.”

  But when she looked in on the face it was already remote, a mask of pallor without sadness or anger or anything; a blank stiffening bulk under the cold sheet and the cold stars.

  They stayed through the night, getting up to walk around from time to time, to warm their feet, gradually pulling their chairs that bit closer.

  “What do you think happens when people die, Fergus?”

  “I don’t know … I wouldn’t like to say.”

  “Have you never thought about it?”

  “Not really … Maybe I’m too young.”

  “I’m young as well.”

  “Was he your sweetheart?”

  “Yes.”

  “And were you his?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s tough … That’s very tough.”

  The cold weary night gave way to the sullen light before dawn and the pale stars began to go back into the heavens as people gathered, quietly, solemnly, on the far side of the fallen gate which a guard had removed; too afraid to enter, they stood aghast, saying little, redeemed for a brief while by untimely death, which brought them to their compassionate selves but which could not bring Bugler back. Prayers were muttered for what had happened, for what had had to happen, for the slaughter to become an instrument of peace. Hatred and bloodshed. A hawthorn tree and a corpse. Atonement. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  Cloontha Garda Station

  I am a member of the Garda stationed in Birdhill. I was up the mountain shooting grouse and on the way back a howling dog refused to get off the road. I tried lifting it, then I heard a woman crying nearby. On entering the yard I saw the body of a man lying on its back next to a tractor. It was a well-developed muscular adult with dark hair, a beard, and sideburns. I saw a wristwatch lying on the ground with the clasp open. It appears the clasp had broken off when he hit the ground. His pupils were dilated and fixed; he ha
d absent heart and respiratory sounds and his pulses were absent. The face showed some purple suffusion in the cheeks and the hands were grease-stained and calloused. The genitalia appeared normal. Blood was oozing from his pullover at the back. Present at the scene was a very distraught woman who refused to move despite repeated entreaties. I pushed her away from the body, explaining that it must not be touched, but she seemed not to understand a word. I immediately summoned assistance from the nearest Garda station and asked for spiritual and medical aid to be sent to the scene.

  LIFE AT THE CASTLE was ordered, ordained, a place renowned for an atmosphere that combines grandeur with freedom, guests coming and going with their children and their dogs and their fishing tackle, throwing their coats down in the great hall as if it is home, because the very essence of the castle is to make guests feel at home. They wander down the hall and glance at the paintings of ancestors, in browns and vermilion, some jowly, some overthin; they warm themselves by either of the two fires, remark on the nice peat smell, and maybe help themselves to a drink from the small impromptu bar, where there is a pencil and notebook to jot down what they have taken. The clock chimes quarters of an hour, the thick brass weights an intriguement to children, who are allowed to run up and down the hall in the half-hour just before dinner.

  Rosemary likes her new surroundings. It was, after all, how she imagined her homecoming, a honeymoon of sorts. She has passed four days without breaking down and even rationing the number of times that she rung him. Her hunch tells her that by Sunday he will search her out. He will ask Duggan where she was dropped off. When she phoned there had been no answer. She has been successful too in persuading the manager that her fiancé is joining her at the weekend, coming expressly to discuss wedding plans. She believes it to be true. She has written several letters, nice letters, ugly letters, haughty letters, begging letters, and prides herself on the fact that each day as the postman came to deliver and collect the mail she has not been tempted to run down and hand them to him. She has reread them in the order in which they were written, the hour of day or night at the top of each one — how he conned her, conned her parents, broke her trust, how she was a person who worked for the couple, how disillusioned those recent days had been, how foolish she had been to allow for months of separation knowing that men lust for a woman, any woman that is there. Having voiced such sentiments she apologised for them and said she could not express herself in any other way and had she not done so it would chew away at her and make their future intolerable. By writing, it was all behind them. She let him know that since she came she had felt something was amiss, but now that it was out in the open she was able to forgive him his bit of wanderlust, and what is more, that they were the most important thing in life to each other.