World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Going where?” Deirdre said.

  “Back to the hotel. Get my hands on the uncle and go home with him.”

  “It’s so late now.”

  “I don’t care, I’m going.”

  “Stay. We’ve to be up early for the funeral.”

  “What funeral?”

  “Paddy’s funeral. The wee drinkin’ man with the flowers.”

  “I never had a drink with him. Where the hell is the hotel now?”

  “What hotel?” Ronald said.

  “Where’s the International?”

  “Oh Lord, man, you can be there in ten minutes. Right down Sandy Row you go. Bus is right on the corner.”

  The topcoat was in the hall. It still was damp.

  “Do you know which way to go?” Deirdre said.

  He went out without looking at her.

  He was walking on the wet empty street to the corner. There was no bus coming. Trucks and a few cars came by. He began walking past the dark shops toward the center city. Walking and talking to himself inside. The anger nearly forced the words out of him.

  Afraid of beards? Dermot told himself. Hey, the beard has nothing to do with what bothers you. It’s what’s under the beard you hate. When you come up against one of them you see why they go around all the time with their hair down to, their ass and a big beard covering their faces. Afraid of them? Huh. One night in nineteen-sixty-eight George Wallace gave a speech at Madison Square Garden. All these beards and fags showed up to picket. They pulled Dermot out of Brooklyn and had him on Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, on the west side of the street. The bastards were behind wood horses there. Motorcycle helmets, beards, Vaseline all over their faces, you’d think they were going inside to box six rounds, Goddam Army jackets, beards, hair sticking out from under motorcycle helmets. They were wearing, the kind of eyeglasses, half-glasses, that the horse breeders walk around Belmont Park wearing. They were calling the cops pigs and fascists and they give the “Heil Hitler” and all that and the sergeant out in front kept shaking his head no to the patrolmen. Then the dirty bastards broke out the Viet Cong flags. The sergeant didn’t have to say anything. Over the horses all the cops went. The bastards cut and ran and the broads screamed like babies. Anybody standing got a whack with the club. Then here this one guy went. A big tall bastard with a motorcycle helmet and glasses and a Viet Cong flag. He hopped out from behind the barrier and he began running on Eighth Avenue. Dermot went over the barricade after him. Running like hell, he went right out into the traffic on Thirty-fourth Street, hoping Dermot was right out there after him. The guy came running back to the sidewalk on Thirty-fourth Street and he went really flying into the freight doors of the nearest building. The doors figured to be locked, it was a Sunday night. But one of them wasn’t. The kid went flying through it. A big brown metal door. Dermot was at the door before it closed. Perfect, because now nobody could see what was going on. The kid was trying to find his way around the packing cases in the freight area. Dermot got to him right away. The bastard turned around and went crazy. He let out a scream and swung the Viet Cong flag. The thing was on a pole made out of cardboard. Dermot just walked right through the swing. The cardboard pole hit him on the shoulder and neck. He was down a little bit, just right for leverage, and instead of throwing the right hand from back behind the shoulder, crazy, he let it go short and nice. His whole side came around with the punch. The bastard fucking went down and he fucking stayed down. Dermot Davey afraid of beards?

  Dermot came to the bridge by the railroad station. The hotel was only a couple of empty streets away. He did not go down to the bar. The clerk gave him a room. He said the night porter, who ran the elevator too, would bring something to eat. The night porter brought a plate of tiny wedges of ham on white bread and a glass of milk. He could’ve eaten five plates of them. He got undressed and into bed. The room was a dungeon.

  His empty stomach woke him at ten o’clock. The night’s sleep had taken the heat out of his eyes. The end of a morning rain dripped in the shaftway outside the window.

  The phone ringing startled him. “Hel-lo, will you have a cup of tea?” Deirdre said. “I’m downstairs here.”

  “I don’t know where I am, let me pull myself together, I’ll be right down.”

  He was stung from the night before. He wondered why she even had bothered to come to the hotel for him. He knew he goddam well liked her body. But he had never touched a Communist in his life. Christ, it was a mortal sin to know one. Vaguely, something drifted through him. Pro-fessional. Now Dermot remembered Creel talking the Wallace storefront in Richmond Hill. Dermot rubbed the back of his neck. Maybe the Creel guy would understand her, he thought. I’m running away from her and a professional would walk in and like her. He wished he could think it out on his own without using somebody else as an example, but he did not know how to.

  She was at the elevator, smiling, her eyes lively, her hair glistening. He didn’t say anything about last night and neither did she. They went down the main street, Royal Avenue, and had breakfast in a place in the Grand Central Hotel called the Copper Penny. The morning paper Dermot bought was the Protestant paper, the Belfast News Post. On the first page there was a story about a twenty-one-year-old IRA gunman, Martin Kelly of Leeson Street, Falls Road, being shot while attacking troops of the Queens Second during rioting Saturday night. The terrorist was listed as being in critical condition at Royal Hospital.

  “How the hell can they do a thing like this? Twenty-one-year-old gunman?”

  “Do it all the time,” she said. “Not just this particular newspaper either. The authorities always announce that a wee eleven-year-old boy is a dreaded IRA gunman. If a woman is shot she held a bomb in her hand. The journalists believe the authorities. And the people who read the newspaper account believe what they read. Then you can see why a Protestant bloke on the Shankill thinks all the Catholics are terrorists. Who can blame him?” She looked up at the clock. “I’ve to be at the funeral,” she said.

  “What the hell, I’ll go with you,” Dermot said.

  They walked down to City Hall and climbed on a double-decker bus marked FALLS ROAD. A few blocks up, in front of shabby new high apartment projects, children too young to be in school wrestled on the ground in spaces between lines of parked Saracens, the morning sun strong enough now to reflect off the armored turrets over the children. The sidewalks were blackened from petrol bombs and covered with broken glass and paving blocks. The bus came past a wedding-photo shop, the grocery store, and here was Leeson Street. A high-roofed hearse, limousine after it, crept toward them. The street was filled with people walking behind the cars. Deirdre said it would take forty minutes for them to get up to the cemetery. Two blocks up, a burned bus blocked part of the road. Traffic went past it slowly. Past the bus was the gloomy hospital building. Deirdre shrugged. Their bus picked up after the hospital. They got off at the last stop and sat on a ledge of the cemetery wall and smoked cigarettes.

  A few minutes later, the hearse and the limousine moved into the cemetery and stopped. Only men were in the procession in the road. Women and children walked on the sidewalks. Traffic from the opposite direction tried to keep going. A bulging woman in her raincoat stepped off the sidewalk. Her mouth had a hard twist to it and she stood in the middle of the Falls Road and stared the traffic to a stop.

  Men crowded around the back of the hearse. “Back a bit,” a woman called out. All the women around the cars moved away. “Now wee girls. Wee girls. Stand back.” Children moved away.

  The coffin came onto the shoulders of men whose baggy pants were almost over their rundown shoe heels. Two young boys ducked their shoulders under the casket. They weren’t tall enough for their shoulders to touch the casket. They each held a hand up so they could touch the coffin.

  “The immediate family have first and last lift,” Deirdre said.

  The old priest led the line of men walking behind the casket. The women and children streamed through the overgrown grass
around the old chipped headstones.

  “Still livin’?” a woman from Leeson Street said.

  “Still livin’,” Deirdre said.

  “That’s what he gets for sarvin’ them for twelve years,” the woman said.

  “Serving what?” Dermot asked her.

  “Her fuckin’ majesty. He was in the RAF twelve and a half years, he was.”

  When she was gone Dermot asked Deirdre, “How could she say that?”

  “Oh, because he was in the RAF.”

  “How could the guy go out and fight his own then?”

  “Who said it was his own? These murderers from Glasgow? Huh. Catholics are the only ones from Northern Ireland who ever joined the British service. We had no conscription in Northern Ireland during World War Two. The Stormont government fought conscription to the death. Oh, Jesus. They’re loyal to the Queen as long as it means keepin’ Catholics out of work. But ask the Stormont government to go fight for the Queen, even for a thing like the fookin’ Nazis and, Christ, they had a fit. No conscription. That’s only for Great Britain. So Catholics enlisted at the ratio of ten-to-one over Protestants. For good reason. Protestants had jobs. Catholics had no place to go. Once the enlistments began they became a way of life for Catholics. The poor man here was in the RAF for a dozen years because it was the only work he could get. But he certainly was no brother to these scum in the streets. He drew his pay from the RAF. Nothing more.”

  An old workman guided the family through the weeds to the open grave.

  “This is what you get for being a minority,” Deirdre said. “It costs forty-five pound to open a Catholic’s grave. Haitch Pee, you know. Hire Purchase. Pay so much every week of your life for the ground, you know. Then when you die you still have to pay forty-five pound to have your own ground opened up and your body fitted into your own ground. Protestants are buried for nothing.”

  “Well, they can only kill us once,” another woman said.

  “And they never can kill our faith, either!” an older one called out.

  The family had their arms around each other’s backs as they walked under the casket. The two little boys weaved off balance and bumped into the men while they tried to keep their hands on the bottom of the casket as they walked.

  A gold-tipped prayer book in the priest’s hands stood out against his black raincoat. The old priest began to shake holy water on the casket and ground.

  “Just like he was blessin’ guns the other day,” Deirdre said.

  The children clustered against a headstone near the open grave. Rosary beads came out through the crowd. The limousine driver stood by his car in a long chesterfield coat and smoked. The glove compartment was open, with a yellow can of Simoniz showing. The driver had a rag in his hand.

  A gravedigger leaned on the shovel, his chin sitting on his fist. He straightened up and handed his shovel to one of the men who had just set down the coffin. He bent over. There was the sharp sound of the shovel going into the dirt. He threw the shovelful on top of the casket in the grave. The dirt and rocks thumped against the wood. The old priest’s voice rose, “… dust unto dust…”

  The man handed the shovel to one of the boys who had walked under the casket. The boy stuck the shovel into the dirt. He sent rocks and dirt banging against the casket.

  “… but the Lord shall raise you again,” the priest called out.

  The other kid stepped up to do the same thing, the adults making way for him, while the old priest was saying, “You shall rise again.”

  Then it was over and the people began walking back through the cemetery. Dermot stood with Deirdre, looking across to the hills. The family packed into the Daimler limousine, which was alone on the walkway now. The driver got in. He couldn’t get the car to start. As one man came to the car he stooped over and grabbed a handful of grass and wiped his shoes with it. The driver was out lifting up the hood, looking inside. You could see by his eyes that he was looking at a wonderland he’d never seen before. He slammed the hood down and got into the car. He took off the brake and let it start rolling down the hill. While it rolled he was a frenzy at the wheel trying to get the car started. Little faces in tears pressed against the windows for their last looks at the casket in the ground. The car rolled down to the bottom of the walkway, and the driver had to turn it to keep from going into the cemetery fence. The car made the turn and rolled to a stop. It sat there, far at the bottom of the hill, out of sight of everybody. Deirdre looked, lit a cigarette, and started walking toward the cemetery entrance.

  “We’ll get somebody,” Dermot said.

  “Let him, it’s his business,” she said.

  They walked out of the cemetery. There was a pub across the road. It was a large, bare pub, jammed with men drinking with caps on. They found two spaces on a long bench against the far wall and sat in silence at a little round table. A waiter got halfway to them and asked what they wanted. They ordered two pints of stout. They were passed along, table to table. They drank a little bit of the stout. The saloon door opened and Pauline and Ronald burst into the place. Deirdre waved to them and jumped up. Dermot followed her. Two bus drivers at the table next to them went for the glasses of stout.

  “Why were you not at the cemetery?” Deirdre said to them.

  “We were at the church,” Pauline said. “Aye, church,” Ronald said.

  “I prefer the ground to church,” Deirdre said. She hooked her chin onto Dermot’s shoulder. “Will you not come to Derry?”

  “I don’t know, take a shot and stop by the people you told me about.”

  “Aye.”

  “Where do I find you?”

  She started fitting herself backward into the small crowded car. “City Hotel. Anybody there can put you onto us. Or you can ask anybody where the meeting rooms are for the Derry Socialist Labour Party.”

  A big old high taxicab rolled along the wet cobblestone street. Dermot waved. When he got to Lansdowne Road he told the taxicab to wait. He knew he wasn’t going to spend another night with the aunt. He had any of that he needed in Ozone Park.

  He and Johno took a room in the International. Johno went straight to the bar. He found the two guys from the day before. Johno would always find ones like them anywhere. Fuckin’ bums, Dermot thought. Fuckin’ bums fall onto each other all over the world. Dermot went into the lounge to watch television. Before dinner he went up to the room and called home collect.

  “Are you all right?” Phyllis said.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “A lot of trouble.”

  “I know, it’s been on all the television. You’re nowheres near it, are you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s better than being where there’s trouble.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What time is it where you are?”

  “Five after six.”

  “Oh. It’s only five after one here.”

  “It’s five hours,” he said.

  “Yeah. Well, Dermot, the car wasn’t working right today so I took it to the Gulf station. The man there said there was something the matter with the radiator hose. He kept it.”

  “Forget about it. Let me talk to the kids.”

  The oldest one came on first. “Hi, Daddy!” She was gone.

  The small one came on with a voice he could barely hear. She was crying.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kim says you’re not going to bring me a present from Irish. She says you’re only getting a present for her.”

  The operator cut in with a three-minute notice. Phyllis had the phone back.

  “Oh God, this must cost so much. All right, you’ll call again? Everything’s fine. Get a good rest and I’ll see you when you get back.”

  When Dermot woke up in the morning, Johno was on top of his bed with his clothes on. “I’m dead,” he mumbled. “They gave us whisky all night.”

  They left in a rented car from
in front of the hotel at nine. Dermot drove, following a road map, while Johno kept his head against the window, eyes shut. To leave Belfast for Derry they went up the Crumlin Road, past the men still standing on the street corner you use to get onto Lansdowne Road, and continued until the road runs along a hill looking down on all of Belfast and the long deep, cold-looking loch. The houses on the sides of the road now were the kind guys making big salaries in America live in. The houses ended and they were going through a turn at a long low white building that looked like a stable, or maybe one of those mews things. The black trim and black metal door hinges and handles were shining with new paint. The turn took them around the corner of the stable and brought them onto the main street of a town. The signs said it was Antrim. The place was busy and looked clean. People walked with energy in and out of neat shops which had Union Jacks flying over them. Dermot had coffee and scones. The waitress, a woman of about forty, had good teeth. She and the other people in the place did not have any sadness sunken into their faces, the way everybody on Leeson Street did.

  The map showed Derry sitting at the foot of a finger of water coming in from the North Atlantic where it comes against the top of Northern Ireland. Alongside Derry on the west is Donegal, which is part of the Irish Republic. Donegal forms the west coast of the island. The upper tip of Donegal curves with the island. For a few miles, until it reaches the border with Derry, the Donegal coast has the sea coming at it from the west and north. The drive from Antrim to Derry took two hours. At first, coming out of Antrim, the road went alongside fieldstone walls of huge estates. Even when Dermot slowed down at entrance gates, all he could see was a roadway going past ponds and through trees and fields to infinity.

  The road sank between cow pastures, then came up into the back of a town. Rows of one-story, dirty white houses with slate roofs wet from the rain and covered with pigeon shit. The end house on one side of the street was plastered GUINNESS FOR GREATNESS. The end houses on the other side of the road had a Gallagher’s cigarette sign. On some of the houses on the street the people had painted the window frames a bright yellow. Mostly, the houses were dirty and sat in the coal smoke with kids in front playing games on smaller patches of sidewalk than kids play on in the middle of the city.