Torn Away

by James Heneghan

  “The what?”

  “Thomas. The idiot. We call them eejits in Ireland.”

  Anna flushed angrily. “That’s a terrible thing to call a person. And Thomas is not an idiot! He was born with Down’s syndrome! And he’s one of God’s children, just like you. And he’s wonderful and I love him. And Matthew and Kate love him too. And if you think . . . “

  “Hold on there! I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry. I like Thomas too. You sure get mad over nothing.”

  “I do not get mad over nothing. You’re so cruel sometimes. Thomas is . . . “ She clenched her fists as if about to strike him.

  “Ana, I said I’m sorry. You’re right. But I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m sorry.” He put his arm around her shoulders, but she shook it off. “Look, what do you want? You want me on my knees, begging for forgiveness?”

  Ana was so upset, tears started in her eyes. “Declan, sometimes you’re such a jerk! You make me . . . “

  Declan glowered in silence.

  “You get me so mad sometimes, I could . . . I could scream!”

  Declan said nothing until she became a little calmer. Then he said, “So tell me about Thomas.”

  “Promise never to use that ugly word again.”

  “I promise.”

  “We love Thomas.”

  “Matthew and Kate adopted him too, right?”

  “It’s the same story almost,” said Ana. “Kate told me. He was left on the steps of the chapel. Nobody knows who his mother is.”

  Declan shook his head in disbelief.

  “Father O’Connor was new in the parish then, and didn’t know what to do with a tiny, newborn baby wrapped in a blue blanket, so he asked the repairman, who happened to be there in the rectory fixing the plumbing, what he thought he should do, and Matthew—that’s who it was of course—took a look at the baby and said it would be hard to find a home for a child who’d been touched by the fairies . . . “

  “Touched by the fairies? Matthew said that?”

  “According to Kate, yes. I had to ask what it meant. Anyway, Matthew took the baby home to Kate, and she called him Thomas after somebody-or-other, and now this is his home.”

  Declan frowned and shook his head again in disbelief. “I bet Miss Ritter’s another one! Her house burned down, right?”

  Ana nodded. “She lost everything she owned. She forgot to buy insurance. She had nowhere to go, and Matthew . . . “

  “Matthew and Kate took her in,” Declan finished for her. “They’re both people fixers! I knew it. That deal we made. They think they can fix me so I won’t want to go back home. Well Matthew and Kate Bloody Doyle are not going to fix me, let me tell you, not me, not Declan Doyle!” He flung himself from the porch and down to the yard. “I’m no TV set that needs fixing! I wasn’t left on any chapel steps for those two phony interfering fixers to find me!”

  “Declan!” cried Ana. “Where are you going?”

  “That’s my business!” he yelled back as he headed for the beach.

  He stayed down on the beach, sitting on the rocks, until it was almost dark, his head a wild ravel of thoughts. Those meddling fixers had forced him to come to this foreign country. What right had they to make such a decision for him? Now they had talked him into making a deal with the intention of fixing him like the others—Ana and Thomas and Miss Ritter. Well, they would not trap him in their sly web with their clever smiles and coaxing ways. He would have no part of them and their world. So long as he didn’t feel part of their world, he wasn’t.

  His uncle found him. “Kate has your dinner in the oven.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Come on up anyway. The wind is cold.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  Matthew left him.

  By the time he returned, Ana and Thomas had gone to bed, and he could see his aunt and uncle in the living room, watching TV.

  “Is that you, Declan?” Kate asked.

  “Goodnight.” He did not stop, but, shivering with the cold, went straight up the stairs to his room.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Mind if I sit?”

  Declan looked up from his lunch. It was Joe Iron Eagle. Declan’s answer was to shift slightly to make more room.

  Joe sat on the step beside him. The steps led down to the track and playing field where a football game was in progress.

  “That blond girl with the sunglasses, she your sister?”

  “Ana? Kind of a second cousin.”

  “Pretty.”

  “Hmmnn.”

  “You sign up for the science fair?”

  “Science fair?”

  “You weren’t listening. There’s to be a science fair in Sechelt. All the schools. Good prizes for original projects.”

  “What good prizes?”

  “Books. Botany, zoology, physics, chemistry.”

  Declan snorted.

  “I put your name in as my partner.”

  “You did? You must be crazy!”

  “You game?”

  “Maybe.”

  Silence.

  “You sure you want me be your partner?”

  Joe grinned. The grin changed his face completely. It started slowly, wiping away the dark, brooding cast of his features—what Declan had initially taken to be meanness or toughness—and lit up his face so that it seemed at once innocent and mischievous. “You’re not as dumb as you look,” said Joe quietly. “We could win big.”

  “Maybe.”

  Joe grinned.

  After a while, he said, “So you pegged Dybinski.”

  “That’s right.”

  Joe reached into his lunch bag. They ate in silence, watching the game.

  “Too bad,” said Joe after a while.

  “What’s too bad?”

  “Too bad you had to peg Dybinski.”

  “He had it coming.”

  “Maybe. But he would’ve stopped bugging you. Eventually.”

  “Eventually. In some dim and distant future,” said Declan sarcastically.

  “Patience.”

  “Huh?”

  “Patience. It takes patience.”

  “Yeah? Well, I guess I’m not a patient person.”

  “No.”

  They ate in silence. When they were finished, Declan got up. “See you later.”

  “Sure.”

  Declan killed a squirrel in the yard, and Ana was furious.

  “It’s only an old gray squirrel,” said Declan, unable to understand why she was so upset.

  “A squirrel is an animal, Declan. Just like us; we’re animals too. Killing an animal for no reason like that, just to show how smart you are, is cruel. You gross me out! You really do! I just wish Matthew and Kate had left you in Ireland, I really do! Then you could kill as much as you liked, and no one’d notice!”

  Declan noticed that even Thomas was unusually silent and grim. He watched Thomas sit down beside Ana on the front step, trying to comfort her by patting her gently on the shoulder and saying, “There, there,” over and over the way he had probably heard Kate say it.

  The incident had occurred when Declan was showing Thomas how to push several long nails through an apple so that the harmless fruit became a weapon. “We threw them at the Brits,” Declan had explained, “the English soldiers.” He drew back his arm. “Watch,” he said, and fired the apple at a squirrel which happened to be exploring the shade of the cedar hedge.

  All children in the Falls Road were ace marksmen. Years of throwing stones at British soldiers had seen to that. Declan had developed this special skill when he was a member of the Holy Terrors, so it was no surprise to him when he scored a direct hit on the squirrel. One of the four-inch nails pierced the animal’s small head and another penetrated the chest and killed it instantly. An excellent shot, Declan congratulated himself.

  Thomas had picked up the dead squirrel and carried it into the house to show Ana. Declan heard Kate order Thomas outside with the dead animal.

  Declan felt mise
rable about upsetting Ana once again, and mulled it over when he was lying in bed that night, trying to understand why she had thought it cruel. He wasn’t cruel. The thought upset him. How could it be cruel to kill an old squirrel? When they were learning how to harass the British, they’d practiced on cats, and they had never considered their behavior cruel—necessary, but not cruel. Their practicing on cats had helped to make them so deadly accurate that the Brits had to protect themselves behind plastic shields.

  He lay with his head turned on the pillow, staring out the window. A full moon made the quiet night silvery and bright. It had been hard at first to get used to the quiet in this place. Living in Otter Harbour was almost like losing your hearing: no traffic noise; no yelling and screaming and banging of garbage can lids, which was what the women of Falls Road did whenever the British soldiers patrolled their street; no whine of military armored vehicles constantly patrolling the neighborhood. Instead, there was the sound of the sea and the songs and cries of birds. Otter Harbour was another world. It was good to know that the house was safe, that he would not have to clamber into his jeans in the middle of the night because the Prods were about to burn the house down, or because the Brits were breaking in to terrorize them with one of their so-called “security searches.”

  Declan’s street had had three houses burned down last year when a bunch of Protestant militants stole a car from downtown and set it alight in the street beside the McLarens’ house. The car exploded. The firetrucks came and were lucky to save the block. As well as the McLarens there were the Carneys and the Sullivans made homeless that night.

  Declan had not been having his nightmare so much lately, but tonight, because he had been thinking about the car exploding in the street, it returned.

  The nightmare started as it always started with the white wool sweater and a pale sun with no warmth in it shining fitfully through Belfast’s toxic gloom and through the tea shop window onto Mairead’s white sweater. Declan was outside the window of the tea shop. He could see his ma and his sister inside, drinking tea, smiling at each other. He hammered on the window, trying to warn them, but they did not see or hear him. He yelled and screamed at them, but they went on drinking tea and smiling. He ran around the corner to the entrance, but the door was locked and he could not get in. He ran back to the window where they were sitting and he pulled off one of his shoes and pounded on the window with it, and just as they turned, surprised to see him there, the bomb exploded.

  The nightmare now erupted into a thousand fragments of flying glass as the front of the tea room blew out into the street. Which made no sense, for it had been a car bomb in the street that caused the explosion. Declan was untouched by the blast, but everyone in the tearoom was blown up high into the sky. They began to fall to earth in slow motion. He ran around frantically among the falling debris, his face upturned to the smoke-filled sky, searching for his ma and his sister. If he could catch them, they would be safe, he thought. It was his duty to save them; he wanted to save them; he ached to save them. But he could not find them. His arms were stretched wide, ready to catch them, but he could not see properly with all the dust and the smoke. Blood-soaked, once-white linen tablecloths floated to the pavement in terrible slow motion and settled over the bodies to become shrouds. He stumbled over something and fell to the ground. He put out his hand and saw a white wool sweater, now spattered with red, lying crushed on the pavement beside an unbroken porcelain teacup.

  He woke up in a sweat, as always. But this time he was not calling out. He lay there in the moonlit room, listening to the thump of his heart and the quiet music of the ocean, a whole world away from a porcelain teacup.

  He remembered the squirrel. It made no sense, any of it. How could Ana and Thomas and Kate get so upset over the death of a rodent—that’s all it was—when on the other side of the world they’d killed his sister and his ma, innocent people blown to pieces?

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was a calendar of birds and it hung on a nail over his uncle’s rattan chair in the kitchen. Declan took it down and flipped through the pages. April was the month of the great blue heron. His ma and Mairead died in April.

  September was a horned puffin, October a Canada Goose, November a common loon, and December a bald eagle.

  For Declan the December eagle was an omen, for hadn’t it watched over him during his attempted escape to Sea Island? So it was only fitting that this eagle now guard that promise of freedom, that last day of December which Declan had colored in red with a crayon so that when December came around and his Uncle Matthew glanced up at the calendar he would not fail to notice both the reminder of his promise and the eagle’s fierce eyes and deadly beak threatening revenge should he and Kate renege on their promise.

  Meanwhile, in the month of the puffin, Declan could stop running for a while, he could relax; the deal with his uncle and aunt was forcing him to slow down and take things easy. He was surprised at the relief he felt: for the first time in five long months, he could stop rushing; he could stand still.

  Five months ago, with the deaths of his ma and sister in April, he had suddenly become a different person—had changed overnight. Joining the Holy Terrors had allowed him to lose himself in action and revenge. Then when Matthew sent for him, giving the police a good reason to get rid of him, he had lived like a wild animal, constantly on the run, always looking over his shoulder.

  Now he could stop searching for ways to escape. A few months in this peaceful place between the sea and the mountains would do him no harm, would help build up his energy and strength for his return after Christmas. And if those two meddling, do-gooder fixers, Matthew and Kate, thought they were going to work on him to change his mind, then they had another think coming. Declan felt almost light-hearted.

  He thought about his return to Ireland. A new year. It would be a new, triumphant Declan keeping the promise he had made himself when he was torn away from his native soil: he said he would be back and he would. He felt tough, invincible. It would be a new beginning.

  And once he was back, he would join the IRA if they would have him. Brendan Fogarty said they were recruiting for the Fianna, the IRA youth auxiliary for young people who were quick and smart, who knew the streets and the police and the Brits, who knew the ropes. Declan was already an expert maker of gasoline bombs. He knew just the right mix of sugar and flour and gas, and the right kind of bedsheet strips that made good fuses. Milk bottles made the best bombs. He chuckled to himself as he remembered the joke about the woman who asked the milkman to leave her one bottle of milk and two empties.

  And he knew how to make a nail bomb with gelignite and razors and nails and ballbearings, knew how to attack the Brits on foot patrol with fast hit-and-run tactics, knew how to steal a double-decker bus—as the Holy Terrors had done—and wedge it in one of the Shankill Road streets, set it on fire and burn the Protestants down, the way they had burnt and destroyed the Catholics in the Falls and Ballymurphy neighborhoods.

  He would make a good IRA man.

  He would strike a blow for national liberation, a blow for Ireland’s freedom.

  And he would revenge the deaths of his sister and his parents.

  At night as he lay in his Canadian bed, listening to the ocean, he thought often of his ma and his sister. He still found it hard to accept that they were dead. Gone. Death was so final. He remembered his ma in many different ways. Standing at the door of their house, Mairead only five, clinging to her legs, himself about eight, playing with the other kids in the street. “You’ve played enough, Declan. Don’t you see it’s dark?” Her voice worried. Or out in the street at four in the morning with all the other women, thumping and rattling their trashcan lids on the curbs, bravely refusing to be intimidated by the Brits or the police terrorizing the Catholic neighborhood with their surprise search-and-harass games.

  He began having his nightmare less often.

  “Make that noise again.”

  “Hmmnn?”

  “Th
e bird call. I like it.”

  Joe pursed his lips and whistled.

  Declan laughed. “I can’t tell the difference between your whistle and the real thing.”

  “Redwing blackbird.” Joe pointed to a bright flash of black and red in the thicket.

  It was lunch hour. The small lake was a mere five minutes’ walk from the school. Declan lay back in the grass, relaxed and happy, the warmth of the sun on his face.

  Joe sat, watching the lake, back straight, his legs folded under him.

  “Too nice a day to waste in school,” Declan murmured.

  “You talk all the time of going home to Ireland,” said Joe. “But you know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “You will stay here. You like it too much to leave.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I know it.” Joe laughed. “You’re hooked.”

  Declan opened one eye. “What do you say we take the afternoon off school?”

  Joe shook his head. “No thanks.”

  “You scared you’ll get into trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Then why not?”

  Joe grinned. “I like school.” “I’ll fight you for it,” said Declan. “I win, we skip school. You win, we go back, okay?”

  “I don’t fight,” said Joe.

  Silence. “But I’ll wrestle you, if you want.”

  “Wrestle?” said Declan.

  Joe nodded. “No striking. Wrestling only.”

  “Okay.” Declan leaped to his feet, and crouched, ready to wrestle.

  Joe stood calmly and pulled off his sweater and his shirt. He peeled off his sneakers and socks. Then he undid his belt and stepped out of his jeans, and stood practically naked in his Jockey shorts.

  “You don’t need to undress,” said Declan, embarrassed and puzzled, glancing quickly around to see if Joe’s performance was being observed.

  Joe folded his clothing carefully, and placed the pile on the ground beside an old cedar tree. “I don’t like to look all mussed going back to school.”

  Declan laughed. “You think you’re about to win?” He threw off his sweater.

  “Of course.” Joe grinned and rushed at Declan, grasping his smaller opponent in his arms and throwing him down quickly with a thump, and pinning his shoulders to the ground.