Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Ah, love,” he said and drew her hand against him.

  He stopped at Glencolumbkille, a village in a deep, solemn valley that gave way at its mouth to the sea. It was particularly desolate when the clouds darkened the sun. The cliffs, where barren of growth seaward, were a reddish gold, vivid in the sunlight, muted in shadow. “Even the pilgrims are done in by the weather this time of year,” he said, “but one must not pass this place without bending a knee to the ancient saints. It was from here that Saint Columba went out to convert the heathen Scots. He had a hard start to a harder end.”

  “Are you religious, Seamus?”

  “I pay respect, but I’m a little lacking in faith.”

  “Me too. But sometimes I wish I had it.”

  “Keep an open mind. You never know when it will strike.”

  They went as far on the pilgrim’s way as the Place of the Knees, where the stone mounds marked ancient graves. Seamus made a quick and perhaps reflexive sign of the cross. They turned back, facing into the wind, and Julie thought of the slumbering Catholic in him. With a wife, divorced or undivorced, matrimony would not be his object. Nor was it hers, she told herself, although she had not felt as deeply as this for Jeff when she had married him. Or had she? It was hard to tell from this distance. Suddenly she realized that the distance between her and Jeff had grown wider of late and that there was hardly any pain at all in remembering him.

  They returned to the car, and Seamus took a silver flask from the glove compartment. He unscrewed the cap and poured her its capacity of whisky. She drank it down and commented when she could get the words out that it was almost as good as orange juice.

  “I’ll drink my fill of that in the coming months,” Seamus said and then added, “God willing.”

  “In New York?”

  “Aye.” He gave himself a capful of whisky. “Now, we can head inland for the far, far hills of home, or take a five-mile snag further on and I’ll show you where Aengus and I met and talked the clock around.”

  Julie chose the long way, having come this far.

  They drove over a one-lane road mostly through bogs and into another long valley. The black-headed sheep ran from them, and at a thatched, whitewashed cottage a man stood with a bucket in one hand and the scruff of his mongrel dog’s neck in the other hand and gave a half nod when Seamus waved at him.

  “Are you hungry?” Seamus asked. “We could beg bread and a cup of tea.”

  “I can wait.”

  They came to where the road forked with a trail that had once served vehicular traffic but was now chassis-high with coarse grass. A lone cottage stood nearby. They could hear a dog barking when Seamus turned onto the trail and cut the motor. They got out of the car. Neither the barking dog nor its owner showed himself.

  “It’s a hard mile’s climb,” Seamus said. “The gorse will be clawing your legs, but I’m game if you are.”

  Julie, wearing corduroy slacks and a short down coat, had no intention of quitting. Seamus got a flashlight from the glove compartment and his anorak from the backseat of the car. He put the flask in the inside pocket and zipped the jacket up to his throat. He squinted up toward the headland. Julie shaded her eyes and looked where he was looking.

  “What do you see up top?” he asked.

  A human profile in stone, she thought, with an oval-shaped projection sticking out behind. “An Indian head?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Is the cave abandoned?”

  “Long since by the looks of the trail, wouldn’t you say?”

  About halfway up, the climb steepened and the trail circled around on itself with only a faint footpath going on. The Indian head lost its definition as they drew closer to it, mere juts of quartzite. The curlews grew more numerous: they swooped and screamed as though they might attack. Near the top the rock formation split into two humps, a few square feet of level stone between. The climbers paused and looked back. The car where they had left it looked the size of a beetle. Someone was walking around it, a man with a dog. “Let him,” Seamus said. “In the old days I’d have worried there might be Provos around who’d lift it. I remember Aengus saying when I was about to go down, ‘Let me know right off if they lift your car—before they convert it.’”

  “Into a booby trap?” Julie said.

  “Aye.” And after a moment: “A terrible phrase that—as though to be innocent was foolish.”

  “They don’t call it that anymore anyway, do they? What? An explosive device?”

  “A car bomb,” he said.

  The wind caught them, gusting through the hollow between the shoulders of rock. They turned their backs against it and stood firm until it eased. Underfoot the mottled red and ocher stone was plateau-level, salt-and rain-washed, speckled with bird droppings and the empty mollusk shells the sea birds had dropped to crack open. With the slackening of the wind they turned and looked at the sea—sapphire blue with crinkles of whitecaps, lucid pearl at the horizon, and the sky another, lighter shade of blue, but piercingly clear. Three fishing vessels seemed to lie at anchor far, far out. Not at anchor, Seamus said: that was an illusion. Small gray and lifeless islands broke the waters near the shore, and strangely, they seemed to be moving.

  There were fissures in the rock formations, and through one of them, Seamus said, they would reach the cave. He suggested that Julie wait until he found the entrance.

  She was glad to stand there and try in her mind to make the place her own, as by inheritance. This was her father’s refuge. She felt elated, proud to be the daughter of a man who could live by himself in rockbound isolation.

  The first alarm was the screaming of birds. Almost simultaneously the explosion staggered her, and she felt as though something had been clapped over her ears that stopped the sound. For only a second or two; then she heard her own voice calling out to Seamus.

  A new sound came—like that of a waterfall—and a cloud of dust rose from where Seamus had first passed from her view, searching for the cave’s entrance. The sound was the falling of crumbled rock. She pushed herself, stumbling, toward the rising dust and then passed between the jagged peaks.

  She found him sitting, his feet spread, his back against rock, staring, it first seemed, at the curtain of dust at the mouth of the cave. She thought then that he was dead. But closer, she saw that his eyes blinked now and then. She ran to him, unzipped the jacket, and got the whisky. She talked, murmured, chattered, trying to coax a response while she uncapped the flask. “Open your mouth, Seamus. Please. … Can you hear me?”

  His jaw dropped like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “God, God, God …” She pulled his head back and poured the whisky into his mouth. It brought a gurgling sound from his throat and tears into his eyes.

  “Can’t you speak?”

  His eyes finally sought hers. He drew a deep breath and moaned. Then he moistened his lips and said, “Oh, Jesus …” and after a few seconds: “What a fool I am.”

  “How would you have known? And you’re alive. That’s what matters.”

  A crack of a smile, not enough to show teeth. “They almost trapped a booby.”

  The pain was obviously bad when he tried to move, but he was soon able to speak. “I knew there was something and I almost jumped clear in time. It was a mine or some such I touched off. But look, I still have both feet and shoes on them.”

  “Seamus, don’t make jokes about it. Tell me what to do and I’ll try to do it.”

  “I wonder now if there’s another way that goes down to the sea. There must be, and I should have known it. Could you take great care and have a look?”

  Julie approached the seaward ledge of rock. At one end there was a great fissure between it and the mountainous clump of stone within which, some thirty or so yards from its sea face, was the cave. The entrance was still roiling with dust when she looked back. She lay down on the level rock and eased herself, snakelike, to where she could look downward. She caught hold of scrub growth and managed a f
ew inches more. She could see no life below but a buoy rocked in the choppy water. She could not see the shoreline for the projections of the cliff. She knew from her walks with Edna O’Shea that there were unmapped coast roads of short distances between local points, roads often lost to the tides or storm. The wind gusted. She lowered her head and hung on. In the lull that followed she studied another ledge a few feet below and roughly parallel to where she lay. It could be man-hewn, she thought, and the more she studied it, the more clearly she saw it to be a trail, faint and narrow, that would have started this side of the fissure and likely continued layer by layer down to the sea’s edge.

  She squiggled back and returned to Seamus. He was on his feet, clutching at the wall, his face as pale as the seagulls’ feathers. They decided it was safest to try to go back the way they had come. Seamus sent her to see if the car was still where they had left it. It was. Solitary: the curious cottager and his dog were nowhere in sight.

  “He’ll have heard, the cotter will,” Seamus said, “but he won’t let on. He may or may not know what’s here.”

  “What where?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know myself. I think I blew up everything that was going to blow. If only I could wiggle my arse, I’d go in, but whatever’s wrong is down near my backside. … Can you drive the car?”

  “In an emergency.”

  “It’s at hand,” he said.

  The flashlight lay halfway between him and the cave entrance on the very rim of the hole the blast had left. Without a word, Julie retrieved it and, finding that it worked, went around the hole, staying every step of the way on solid rock. She avoided cracks and crevices. She groped her way through the thinning dust that now hung like a theater scrim between her and the cave’s entrance. Inside, the dust was more ancient and settled. The beam of her flashlight discovered wall supported by crude, knotty logs. To one side four plain wooden coffins stood roughly end to end. Whatever was or had been in them, the arrangement suggested that their tops might have been used as seats—or even beds, for there were sacks and moldering blankets stacked on one of them. A house door was stretched between four kegs and had been used as a table. Two other kegs might have served as chairs. On the table were pots and dishes, canned goods, a camp stove and a teapot. Someone would seem to have left in a hurry, for a shriveled potato and what might have been a carrot or turnip lay, shrunken tiny as mouse food, on a plate, along with the brown bone of a chicken leg. A five-gallon milk can might have contained water, but Julie was afraid to try it, much less offer anything from it to Seamus. Coils of rope lay in a heap alongside a machine of several wheels, a handle on one, so that Julie surmised it to be a pulley device. Then she came upon three cardboard boxes standing aside, and these were new. Very little dust on them. Over the grocery labels the word Clothes had been scrawled with a black marker on one; on a second were the words Tinned Goods and on a third, repeated in several places, Caution. She did not wait to examine them.

  Seamus was of the opinion that they must get away at once. “It won’t be bloody safe to stay or to be found here. And the cotter may already have raised the alarm. I’m going down with you,” he went on fiercely. “It’s only pain, and you’ll spit in my face if I pass out.”

  He pulled himself along the wall of rock by the scrub growth until they reached the open. There he shifted his hands onto Julie’s shoulders, then onto one shoulder, and ordered her to put an arm around him. His grasp was hard. She bit her lip and made no sound. “One, two … one, two,” he guided their steps in unison. “They work!” he cried out. “The bloody legs work!” Julie’s own legs were shaking, and she wished she could carry him on her back. There was no way—a hundred and eighty pounds of him. She might be able to drag him if she had to, his arms around her neck. “One … two …” Her legs became steadier, and well it was: downhill and on the overgrown path the footing was treacherous. “You’re doing grand,” Seamus shouted. “You’ve a gorgeous pair of shoulders on you and the back of an Amazon.”

  “Save your breath,” Julie called back.

  They paused every few steps. It could not be called resting, their having to stay on their feet lest Seamus not be able to get up, once down. When he came near to faltering, he hooked one arm around her neck and got the whisky from his pocket. “There’s enough for two.”

  “Save it. It might make me sick anyway.”

  “And the heart of a mother lion.”

  “Oh, shut up, Seamus.”

  “Mush!” he cried, and clasped her shoulders again.

  Julie thought of the lion rampant, the weather vane on the tower of the Stone Ring.

  It was a long time before he spoke again except to call the “One-two” by which they coordinated their steps. Then: “Julie … I don’t think I can make it, love, and I’ve got to piss.”

  “Does it take two hands?”

  “Three.”

  They were saved by the need to laugh, even if they were scarcely able. He relieved himself, and then before they took the next step, he said: “When we reach where the old road circled—remember?—couldn’t you drive the car up and I’d wait here for you? I think I could make it. You just don’t want to be timid with it.”

  Little did he know that her only experience of driving was from a summer at Amagansett, New York, when Jeff let her take the wheel on the country roads. “Refresh me on the gearshift,” she said.

  “You’ll need nothing but low until we get out, and lean heavy on the petrol so it won’t stall on you.”

  FORTY

  “JUST LET ME PASS OUT in the backseat,” Seamus had said, “and then don’t stop till you get to the hospital in Donegal.”

  That was the way it happened. The sun was at their backs by the time she turned onto the road overlooking Donegal Bay, and by then she could say that she knew how to drive a car. She called to Seamus now and then, but although he moaned at times, he did not answer. She experimented with the car lights in advance but she did not need them. Though fading, the daylight was still sufficient when she pulled up at the emergency entrance to the county hospital. Seamus was in the X-ray room before anyone came to her. The nurse brought her tea and biscuits. And McNally’s wallet, from which she was to provide the hospital with such information as they needed. “And you’re to get onto the telephone for him to his ‘daily woman’ and ask her to take care of his dog. There’s an orthopedist coming down from Sligo. You’re not to worry.”

  “When can I see him?”

  “Let him rest. He’s under sedation, but the last thing he said was, ‘Tell her she’d better go to the Gardai with the story right off.’”

  FORTY-ONE

  “WE WERE WONDERING ABOUT you, Mrs. Hayes,” the young policeman said. “Inspector Superintendent Fitzgerald inquires every day from Dublin if we’ve heard.”

  “He knew where I was going,” Julie said. “There is no police station in Ballymahon.”

  “But they’re on the telephone line, surely.”

  “I should have phoned,” she admitted.

  “You’ll be staying in Donegal town for a time now, won’t you? I’ll inform the inspector superintendent. At the Abbey again, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.” She’d been gone almost a week, but she was given the same room by a desk clerk who remembered her. “Is there anything new on the Sligo murder, sir?”

  “Not that I’d know of, Mrs. Hayes. It’s all inquiry from there and very little disclosure. I must call through to Special Branch on the discovery you and your companion made. The coffins, now, wouldn’t be of an archaeological nature, would they?”

  “No, sir. Plain wooden coffins.”

  “Hard to come by these days. It’s a Special Branch matter, sure. What were you doing there in the first place, if I may ask?”

  “Exploring,” Julie said, knowing that she would have to tell the story many times to officials with more than local authority. The town Gardai, she suspected, rarely had to deal with violence that was not in the nature of a traffic acci
dent or an after-hours donny brook.

  “You’re an American,” he said, explaining her curiosity to his own satisfaction.

  AFTER SEVERAL ATTEMPTS Julie reached McNally’s housekeeper by telephone. The woman was convinced he had been in a car collision and gave a determined, mournful account of how recklessly he drove and how she had foretold that this would happen. There seemed little point in trying to tell her what actually happened. In fact, it seemed better not to try. Julie promised that either she or Seamus would call again in the morning.

  SHE WAS AT HER DINNER when the two detectives arrived, one an Inspector Costello of the Special Branch and the other, Sergeant Lawrence Carr, the Dublin Murder Team man who had been present during her interrogation by Inspector Superintendent Fitzgerald in Sligo. She ordered coffee for them and soon joined them in one of the lounges not open to the public that night. Carr’s warm smile was reassuring. Inspector Costello looked like a seasoned footballer—big shoulders and a knotty jaw that was crisscrossed with scars. The surprise about him was his voice: low and cultured. He had what Julie thought of as a university accent.

  Both men listened without comment to her story. Costello’s first question: “And you did not look into the newly installed boxes?”

  “No, sir. One of them was marked Caution, and I was feeling pretty cautious by then anyway.”

  Costello made a sound that might have been sympathy. “What led you to so desolate a place, may I ask?”

  “It isn’t far from Ballymahon, and it was where Mr. McNally had once gone himself to interview my father.”

  “And it’s to search for him that you are in Ireland. Is that so?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And his name, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “Thomas Francis Mooney.”

  Inspector Costello nodded.

  “Did you find him?” Carr sounded genuinely concerned.

  “No, sir. He’s been gone from Ballymahon for seven years and is presumed dead. His boat was washed up three days after he disappeared at sea.”