World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  A line of high Austin taxicabs was in an alley beside a saloon directly across the street from the railroad station. The porter walked the bags through the traffic. As they were walking across the street the door of the saloon swung open. It was crowded and painted in circus colors, lights and glass gleaming everywhere. The saloon had a long bar with six bartenders working. The wall along the back of the bar was covered with huge mirrors made of engraved glass. The engravings along the top of the mirror glass had scrollwork and inscriptions saying BLENDED WHISKIES.

  “How old is that glass?” Dermot asked the bartender.

  “Hundred fifty years old,” he said.

  The rest of the saloon was a long row of semicircular booths with tables that were behind partitions. Each booth had a door to it. If you got in the booth, closed the door, and hunched down over your drink, nobody could see you from the bar or through the window from the street. On the door of each booth was a polished silver plate with the word MATCHES on it.

  A man a few feet down the bar said something to Johno and Dermot, but it was unintelligible to them.

  “How’s that?” Johno said to the man.

  The man spoke again. Johno leaned toward the man so he could listen to him more carefully. Johno still could not understand the words. In the booth directly behind Johno and Dermot, a man raised his voice. Dermot concentrated on what, the voice was saying. Still, only a couple of words had any familiarity to them. Dermot found that at first his ear was a quarter-beat off in picking up the flat, sparse, Scottish-base Belfast inflection. There was not a trace of the familiar stage-lilt Irish heard in the counties to the south. The brogue Americans know from the movies. Northern Irish is a winter language. Words to be spoken in a cold rain.

  The bartender nearest them called out to somebody at the far end of the bar and Dermot missed most of it until one phrase spoken by the bartender came through to him.

  “… they doan want to know ye.”

  The last word, the “ye,” rose a full tone higher than the words before it.

  The man at the far end of the bar called something down to the bartender. The bartender listened. Then he called back, “Well, ye’ve got to get to the rut of the matter.”

  The voice went up on the word “rut” and immediately came back down and finished the sentence in a monotone.

  As Johno and Dermot continued to listen, some of the strangeness came off the tongues around them in the barroom.

  “It’s a goddam nice bar,” Johno said to the bartender.

  “Oh, it’s a civilized place to drink, all right,” the bartender said. “The only trouble is that sometimes the fuckin’ customers go out and get fuckin’ killed.”

  They finished the drink and went out to the cab. The center of Belfast, Royal Avenue, was thick with traffic and people coming from work. A jeep swung in front of them. Four soldiers in flak jackets and Scottish plaid caps, the tail ribbons whipping in the wind, sat with their weapons held up. An Army truck came out of a side street and onto the Royal Avenue. It was filled with soldiers sitting across from each other. The two at the end faced out, their rifles pointing at the traffic behind them.

  “Get alongside that truck,” Johno said.

  “Aye?” the cabdriver said.

  “I said get alongside the truck. I want to tell those kids about how to handle a weapon. You don’t point it at traffic.”

  “You sure the fuck do,” the cabdriver said. “In Belfast you point a gun all day. Or someday they’ll be pointin’ fingers at you and sayin’, ‘Jesus, but he was a lovely fella before he got killed.’ ”

  The cab turned onto the Crumlin Road. It is a busy cobblestone street which rises slowly up a long hill. Both sides of the street are lined with two-story wooden buildings with small shops on the first floor. Nearly every corner had a saloon which was boarded up, but people walking in and out through the plywood door showed it was open for business. On three consecutive corners the sign for the saloon was on the building, and underneath the sign was a charred cavity. Across the side streets there were wooden barricades with coils of barbed wire around them. Three and four soldiers stood at each barricade. Women in kerchiefs held on to little children and walked under the barrels of the rifles. The little children kept looking back at the soldiers as their mothers pulled them up the street. The small shops ended and the road became factories, a hospital, and on the left side, standing alone, a courts building, and on the right, directly across from the courts, a dark-gray stone archway with huge newly painted green doors and black metal ring handles, the entrance to the Crumlin Road jail.

  “Bookin’ office on one side, your reserved rooms on the other,” the cabdriver said.

  They went a few more short blocks and the cab started to turn into a side street but stopped in the middle of the turn. Men in old suit jackets and work pants, their faces red from the air, stood on both corners of the side street. A man in a shapeless topcoat, the top of a black turtleneck sweater showing, walked toward them. He had the thickness of a light-heavyweight put on a body that was far too short. He was no more than five-foot-nine, for the bulk. He was not fat. The shoulders of the topcoat were strained. You could trace the contour of the tops of his arms through the topcoat. His hands were in the coat pockets and he walked with a swagger that had the hint of a waddle. His thighs were so thick that they probably rubbed into each other when his legs moved. He stuck his face into the cab. High cheekbones pushed his eyes into slits. Black hair was brushed straight back.

  “Lansdowne Road, they told me,” the cabdriver said.

  The slit eyes had a street cruelty in them as he looked at Johno and Dermot.

  “Who is it you’re lookin’ for on Lansdowne Road?” he said.

  “Meehan,” Dermot said. He pulled out a piece of paper with the address on it. “Sixty-seven and a half Lansdowne Road. Ardoyne. Meehans are relatives. We’re from New York.”

  “Aye.” He pulled his head out of the window. The cab-driver started away. He went only a few yards down the side street and he was at a cross street. Three and four men were standing on each corner. One looked back at the corner of Crumlin Road. As his face showed he’d received a sign, he stepped back, waving them on. The cabbie made two turns, came onto this street of identical houses running down and up a hill, slowed down while he hung out the window, looking for the address.

  Dermot’s mother’s uncle was at the front door, his finger in the pockmark in the bricks. Behind him, down a hallway that was four or five steps long, Aunt Cathy was at the stove. As they walked in, she said, “Oh there are two of you. Which one of you is which now? Oh, I can see who you look like.” She pointed a spatula at Dermot. “So now, who might you be?” she said to Johno.

  “I came with him all the way from New York and I have to have a room all by myself tonight,” he said.

  “What’s that?” she said

  “I need a room all by myself because I have a copy of Italian Playboy and I have to be alone.”

  Nobody knew what he was saying. Aunt Cathy looked at the stove, the mother’s uncle slogged into the kitchen, limping slightly, and opened a cabinet. “Have a drink?” he called out.

  “I don’t think we need anything to drink,” Dermot said to him.

  “Oh, you have to have a wee drop.”

  The uncle was reaching up into the cabinet for small glasses, ducking under the cabinet for a bottle of Paddy’s, pouring the whisky, putting the bottle away, handing out the glasses. Aunt Cathy sipped her glass without looking up from the stove.

  In the living room there was a couch on which you could sit two people. The couch took up one wall. The mother’s uncle sat in an easy chair which filled a corner of the room. A fireplace with an electric heater glowing under false coals, a television set with the screen the size of the ones in New York in the early fifties, a straight-backed chair, a small table, two lamps, and two windows with clean curtains on them made up the rest of the room. A picture of the Sacred Heart was on the mantel of the
fireplace. A candle in a wine-red holder, a church candle, flickered beside the picture. On the other side of the mantel was a framed color reproduction of John F. Kennedy and his wife standing together with their foreheads touching.

  The uncle sat in the easy chair and held up his glass. “Give ’em the warks with a Wabley!” He swallowed the drink in a gulp, slumped down in the chair quickly, dropped his left hand to the floor, poked the hand under the chair, came out with a bottle, dug his heels into the floor, and sent his body zipping back up the chair until he sat like a medical student.

  “We had a Gaelic football field right across the way,” he said. “The B Specials got in there with Lewis guns in a sandbagged post. They’d fire all the time at night. No reason atall atall. Just fire at night. A wee girl, three years old she was, she run out of the house the other night onto the field. She goes runnin’ across the Gaelic field with the mother chasin’ after her. The B Specials opened up with Lewis guns. Cut the wee girl in pieces. Cut her right up like butcher meat. The mother was bendin’ over to pick up the wee girl, they shot her through the top of the head. When they found her, the hair and all that on the top of the head laid open, well, they thought she’d been shot from an airplane. She was bendin’ over to pick up the wee girl, you see.” He rolled over the arm of the chair for the bottle. “Here.” Johno took a drink, but Dermot didn’t want one.

  Aunt Cathy stood in the doorway with a drink. She did not mention food.

  “Why didn’t your mother come?” she said to Dermot.

  “She couldn’t this time,” he said.

  “Does she not like us?” she said.

  “Oh, never,” Dermot said.

  “We be sendin’ her lattars in the mayel and she never sends a lattar back.”

  It took him a couple of seconds to realize she was talking about letters in the mail. It was not just whisky on the edge of her voice. Dermot stood up. “I want to go out and see what the place is like,” he said.

  Thevaunt waved a hand at him. “Sit you down and tell me why your mother or you never send us a lattar back in the mayel.”

  Dermot stepped past her and went out into the street. He could feel her eyes glaring at him. Johno lumbered after him. Dermot heard the woman’s voice rising inside. His mother’s uncle, muttering, came out the door. When he came up to them on the sidewalk his face eased. “How it was,” he said, “with the head laid open like that, everybody thought she got shot from the sky. Took a while to realize when she was bendin’ down the top of her head was sittin’ there like a target for the bullet. Laid her head open somethin’ terrible.”

  The mother’s uncle led Dermot and Johno down the hill to a cross street. To the left, four corners up, a burned-out double-decker bus blocked the street.

  “Protestants live on the other side of the barricade,” the mother’s uncle said.

  The houses on one side of the burned-out bus were the same as the houses on the” other side. Dermot mentioned this to the mother’s uncle.

  “There’s a big difference,” he said.

  “What difference?”

  “In the morning everybody down there gets up and goes to work on a job. Up here, most of the boys don’t bother gettin’ up. Nothin’ to get up for. No jobs. The one’s got jobs on account of bein’ Protestant, the others got no jobs account of bein’ Catholic. That’s the difference.”

  “There’s no work at all?” Johno said.

  “Where would you work?” the mother’s uncle said. “The shipyard hires ten thousand. Five hundred of ’em are Catholics. And the five hundred do porter’s work. Dunno a Catholic with a good job in the shipyard. Huh. The Mackie Works is on the Springfield Road. It sits facin’ a whole Catholic section. They must have four thousand workers in there. Only a couple Catholic. A couple of sweep-up men, that’s the only Catholics in the place. All the Catholics sit across the road, watchin’ Prods go to work at Mackie.”

  “They turn you down just because you’re Catholic?” Dermot said.

  “Notatall, notatall,” he said. “They don’t hire because we’re lazy and we’re too dirty to have around. Catholics are lazy and dirty, you know. Oh, you’ll hear that around here, you will.”

  He was punching the palm of his hand. “Where would we work? On a job like you fellas have, on the police? No Catholic policemen in Ulster. Just as well, because when the Army goes away we’re gonna kill all the fuckers on the police. If Catholics was police, we’d wind up killin’ some of our own by mistake maybe. No, let the Prods be police. Greatest moment of a policeman’s life is when he gets a chance to shine at his own funeral.”

  He started walking in the opposite direction from the bus barricade. They crossed two blocks of these row houses with gates in front of them and came to the side of a school building. They went through an alley alongside the school and came out in front of the school. The school was on a street which consisted of a long row of one-story cement houses painted gray with windows and doors every few feet—there were about a hundred doors. The roofs were so low that the coal smoke from the chimneys rolled across the sidewalk. The windows were dark with soot and the doors were scarred. The street was the first of a network of streets with these low houses on them. There were no hedges or gates in front of the doors, just cracked sidewalks. A chimney sweep, his face and clothes as black as the brooms tied to his back, came by on a bike.

  The sign over the doorway to the school said it was the Holy Cross Boys’ Primary School. Four men were smoking cigarettes just inside the entrance.

  “Larry there?” the mother’s uncle called to then

  “Who?”

  “I said Larry.”

  “He said he’d come back.”

  The mother’s uncle nodded. “We’ll have a look around and come back,” he said to them. They walked down the street the school was on and came to an empty dirt lot. A crowd of about fifty, young guys of about fifteen and sixteen all the way up to old men who looked like they were seventy, were crowded around something.

  “You call this a pitch-and-toss school,” the mother’s uncle said. Everybody in the crowd was throwing money into a pot, the way you do in a crap game. One guy stepped into the middle of the circle. He began swinging a thick chain, the end of it dragging in the dirt. Everybody began stepping back as the chain swung in a wider arc, then lifted off the ground. The guy swinging the chain started to spin around, whipping the chain around at knee height. The chain cut into one pair of baggy dungarees and the baggy dungarees jumped back. Whoever was in the dungarees made a little moan. The chain slapped against the top of a pair of rubber boots and the boots jumped. The guy in the boots swore loudly, but nobody paid any attention to him. The chain whirred in the air now, clearing a wide circle around the men. As the chain stopped, an old man in a greasy suit jacket came into the circle. He crouched down. He held a small wooden block between his hands. On top of the block were two big copper coins. “Yup!” he said. He flipped the board. The coins came down to bounce in the dirt. The crowd tried to push closer, but the chain man came back into the circle swishing the chain to keep the legs back. The flipper went to the coins, shook his head and picked them up.

  “Nothin’ that time,” the mother’s uncle said. “The coins have to come up both the same side. Two harps or two faces. That’s what you bet on. Flip this time come up a harp and a face. So you just toss again.”

  They all began throwing coins into the pot for the next toss. Nearly everybody in the crowd had a bottle of beer or stout to drink from. At the edge of the crowd, a

  couple of dogs screwed on the sidewalk in the coal smoke.

  There was another yell while the two coins hung in the air, flipping, then falling.

  “Game goes on all day, most of the night,” the mother’s uncle said. “Nobody got anything else to do. Just stand around drinkin’ and gamblin’.”

  “Where do they get the money to gamble?” Dermot said.

  “The bru.”

  “The what?”

  “
The bru, the dole. Where else would you get it from?”

  “The dole. You mean unemployment?”

  “Unemployment, welfare, whatever you want to call it.”

  “They take the money and gamble with it?”

  “What the fuck else do you do with your day?” he said. “Take a few bob, get somethin’ to drink, and come to the pitch-and-toss school. We call it a school because that’s where you start in the game, you see. Start playin’ when you’re in school. And where else would you get money except the bru? Can’t get any work. So you go down and collect the bru every week.”

  “Everybody here is on welfare?” Johno said.

  “Aye.”

  “And it’s the best they can do?”

  “Aye. Oh, exceptin’ one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Johno said.

  “Stealin’.”

  They walked back to the entrance of the primary school. One of the four men smoking cigarettes inside the front entrance nodded to the mother’s uncle. He shuffled through the door. The fellow pointed down a dim hallway. They went down it. “You see, Larry’s in charge of everything in here,” the mother’s uncle said. “This is his station if something happens. Everybody has a post. Do ye know Cathy’s job? She has to keep the front door open, no matter what’s going on, account of our kitchen is first-aid headquarters.” He began looking in doorways. “Where are we going here for fuck’s sake, oh, Jesus, I’m sorry to be cursin’ inside the Lord’s school.” He blessed himself. “Oh, here ye are.”

  In a classroom there was a girl in a brown sweater, her arms folded, leaning against a desk. A baby sat on the floor playing with a low stack of diapers. A young man sat on the edge of a coat, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. A comforter and pillow were on the floor.

  Larry was standing by the windows, but he didn’t bother to say hello. Dermot had seen only pictures of him. They were cousins.

  “This is where a family lives,” Larry said. “How do you like this?”

  “How’s everything tonight?” the mother’s uncle asked the girl.

  “Ah dunno,” she said.