World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  Men with wounded faces stood in the doorways. At the end of the row of houses the road turned onto the narrow, dark gray stone main business street. A bank with a clock and a saloon with a Morton’s Red Heart sign and a news agent with a blue Rothman’s cigarette poster and a butcher with a whole cow hanging pink and red in the window. On one of the buildings a sign said MAGHERA. The street widened into an empty cobblestone square with a feed warehouse on it. They were onto the other side of the town now. An antiseptic frame building with front steps stood alone on the roadside. The sign over the front said it was the Orange Hall. On the road past the hall there were farmhouses, not shacks. Cows grazed in fields. Men in hip boots and thick suit jackets drove tractors along the side of the road. The men had straight faces that did not show very much damage inside them. A Union Jack flew from a tall flagpole in front of one of the farmhouses.

  The road sank between more fields and came out into the back of another town. Half an hour later, they were into empty country. The road widened into a six-lane highway going across a desolate mountain. To the right, the mountain, brown, with glints of green moss on the rocks, rose to a top that was naked of any color but tan rocks. In the middle of the nakedness was a cement building. Out of it rose an antenna—as big an antenna as you’ve ever seen. The map said it was a United States Military Base. On the other side of the road, on the left, the land dropped away steeply. The steep slope was rocky and dirt-brown. Streams of water that became black, reflecting a sky dark with rain clouds. The water poured through the rocks down the mountainside to the bottom, where a black stream ran through cocoa ground that had stretches of deep green through it. The land rose again, going high up to the left, into the rain clouds. When any light came through between sets of rain clouds it glinted on the sheer rock just underneath the thin covering of dirt and moss. Ahead, on a curve, the traffic stopped. A deliveryman in a cap and smock climbed out of the red three-quarter-sized truck in front of them and stood and stretched. On both sides of the road, cars were lined up. The road was blocked by a herd of sheep. A big herd, hundreds of them. More were coming down from the side of the mountain. The herd was crossing the road and starting down the steepness toward the stream of black water at the bottom. Dermot got out and walked to the front of the line of traffic. Up close, sheep are dirty as hell. The only clean thing about them were purple and red die markings somebody had tossed on them. Their little feet tapped on the highway like thousands of hammers. The sheep coming down the mountainside splashed in water that must have been just under the surface. A black dog chased them. Tail wagging, mouth open, he ran to one side of the herd, barking and pushing the sheep. Then he doubled back and chased one edge of the herd across the road and started them down the steep slope. The dog went back to the man herding the sheep and stood alongside him with his head up. There is nothing like being in charge, whether you’re on the side of a mountain or on Forty-second Street.

  Half an hour later, a wide river, slate-gray in the dull sky, showed between waves of hills. The hills were green, light yellow, light green alongside the light yellow, then deep green with black hedgelines wavering through the fields. As the car dipped on the road the fields swirled, the colors running together and separating and running together again. A pinwheel spinning or one of those psychedelic things. It looked like the road flattened into a brick street. The view of the river was blocked by the Ulster Fertilizer big gray shed. The first barbed-wire coil showed on the red-brick street. An Army truck went by. The wind whipped the canvas. A soldier with a bare head stood in the back of the truck. His eyes closed in the wind, sandy hair blown straight back. And then here on the right, down on the other side of the river, climbing up from the river, was a gray, age-darkened, smoke-covered city that looked like a torture chamber.

  Johno was awake now. “Look at this mother,” he said.

  You could see walks with parapets and notches for guns, the kind of things kids used to make out of cardboard. Buildings were outside and inside the wall. Here and there you could see archways in the wall with streets running under the arches. The place couldn’t have been any different five hundred years ago. Past an empty railroad station and they were at the top of a double-deck bridge going across the river into the city of Derry.

  A sandbag pillbox with a corrugated-iron roof, a machine gun sticking out of an opening in the sandbags, guarded the entrance to the bridge. At the foot of the pillbox a red sign said: B. CO., 1ST BN. 22D (CHESHIRE) RGMT.

  Out on the bridge, four soldiers were patrolling. One listened to a radio strapped to his back, the others held their rifles up. They kept looking straight ahead.

  On the other side of the bridge, the city of Derry began with a factory a block long sitting on the riverbank, another factory across the street from it, and off to the left, a narrow street twisting between two gray-blue two-story houses with doorways opening onto clean sidewalks. Union Jacks covered the houses and hung over the street. Dermot asked a cop standing with two soldiers where the City Hotel was. He sent them down a steep street which led to a bus terminal and to the City Hotel, which was on one corner of a square. Behind the hotel was water. Across from its front entrance was a red building, an official-looking building that with its stained-glass window was almost a church. Atop it was a high clock tower, a small copy of the one in London you see pictures of. The building had to be almost a hundred years old. On the other side of the square, facing the hotel and the building with the clock, was the wall. Big stone chunks had rough faces of charcoal-gray black. Black cannon stuck out from gunports on top of the wall. Two archways running through the wall were crowded with traffic. The wall had to be twenty feet high. With the cannon sticking out, the kind of cannon you see in movies about pirates, the wall sat on the place like an old history book.

  To get to the hotel, they had to swing around the square and drive along the wharves behind it. An old freighter with more rust than white on the bridge was docked sideways along the wharves. Dermot parked the car at the back of the hotel. Somebody had scrawled across the wall:

  SARAH IS A FUCKING HUSSY

  12

  THE ROOM IN THE hotel faced the clock tower of the old brick building. The Guildhall, the bellhop called it. Off to the right was the water and the wharves along the water. The bellhop directed them to a street going through an archway in the wall. He said the Derry Socialist Labour Party Clubhouse was halfway up the street inside the wall. The archway really was a small tunnel. Trucks of almost any size could get through. Inside, two-and three-story wooden buildings stood facing the dark wet wall. A stone staircase went to the top of the wall. They climbed up for a look. The top of the wall was a wide asphalt walkway. Looking along the walkway, you could see that for long intervals the wall ran between buildings and was hidden. In other places it rose out of the streets high and old and bare. Where Johno and Dermot stood, a sign on the wall said SITE OF COWARD’S BASTION. BEING MOST OUT OF DANGER, COWARDS RESORTED HERE.

  The street inside the wall was steep. They passed an archway to a street busy with shops. Then up the hill some more, there was a sign on high wooden garage doors which said DERRY SOCIALIST LABOUR PARTY. The garage doors were part of a tea merchant’s warehouse. A small entrance door was cut into one of the large garage doors. The small door opened into a courtyard still wet from rain. Cigarette butts floated in dirty puddles. They had to walk through the puddles to a rickety wooden staircase. “This pussy of yours put you through an obstacle course,” Johno said. They came into a large attic with a bumpy wooden floor. Young kids, maybe twenty-five of them, some of them no more than ten or eleven, sat on the floor smoking cigarettes or hunched over a long worktable. Deirdre was at a small table piled with papers in the corner of the room. A mimeograph machine was alongside the table. She was smoking a cigarette and her hair wasn’t combed and she was in the same sweatshirt. She came over, rocking and skipping. Her whole body was coming out of her eyes. She took the cigarette out of her mouth when she put herself against D
ermot in a hug. She smelled of cigarettes and whisky from last night. Dermot introduced her to Johno. He noticed the wall was covered with big posters of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

  “What do you call these nigger bastards hanging here?” Johno said.

  “The Black Panthers? When they started standing up for their rights in America all the people here read about them. Especially the kids.”

  “What’s nigger derelicts in the Black Panthers got to do with Irishmen fighting?” Johno said.

  “What day is today?” Deirdre said to Dermot. Her eyes had hard light to them.

  “Tuesday,” he said.

  “Then will ye fookin’ tell him it’s fookin’ Tuesday so at least he’ll know what day it is!”

  She leaned over and took the last drag on her cigarette before dropping it onto the floor.

  And now the mimeograph machine and the small bare room came together in Dermot’s mind with the night in the Wallace storefront on Jamaica Avenue.

  “It’s a business,” Dermot said to Johno.

  “What?” Johno said.

  “If you never been in it, you wouldn’t understand,” Dermot said. “It’s a business and you never, take it personal.”

  “Well, I take niggers personal,” Johno said. “Good and personal.”

  “How would you like a nice drink?” Deirdre said.

  “Jesus, would I,” Johno said.

  Deirdre stood in the doorway with him and told him how to walk just across the street and through the wall, and the bar, the Castle, would be right there. Johno went down the stairs. “Give the nice niggers a kiss for me,” he called back.

  “That person sounds just like you sometimes,” Deirdre said. “Shitty awful.”

  “He doesn’t understand,” Dermot said. “He’s never done anything in politics.”

  “You have?” she said.

  “Oh, sure. I worked in a Presidential campaign.”

  “Whose?”

  “Wallace.”

  “A fookin’ Tory! A fookin Enoch Powell!”

  “Who’s Powell?”

  “He’s our fookin’ Wallace.”

  “Yeah, but we were all ready to go one way or the other. Either the Kennedy workers was coming over to us or we’d have gone over to the Kennedy workers. You’re in politics in America, you got to survive. That comes first.”

  “Well, I can understand that. You can’t get anything done unless you’re there. But why should a fookin’ Wallace deserve to fookin’ survive?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Dermot said.

  “Well, I fookin’ well do,” she snapped.

  “Hey, it’s politics, don’t take it personal,” Dermot said.

  “Who the fook told you to take everything personally in Belfast. Rantin’ and fookin’ ravin’ about a picture on a wall. Jesus Christ!”

  “It wasn’t the posters I was mad at.”

  She began to laugh.

  “I was mad at the fuckin’ people getting in the way of my game.”

  Now she was laughing. Dermot felt good about it.

  “I’ve a couple of things to do and then I’ll get you down to Finbar. I could tell you where it is right now if you want to go down there alone.”

  “No, I’ll wait.”

  She said she had a couple of things to do. She went over to the small table. Dermot sat on a box at the end of the long picnic table. One boy plucked the good string of a broken guitar. Another drummed his hands on the table. A girl picked up a bullhorn and turned it on. The thing screeched. The kids at the end of the table put down the broken guitar. Two of them scrambled for it. One of them got it and sat there plucking the one string. Somebody else turned on the bullhorn.

  Dermot took out his cigarettes and held them out. Hands came from every part of the table. Cigarettes came out of the pack as if pumped out by a machine. When the hands stopped reaching he had only half the pack left. They lit the cigarettes and sat there smoking and drumming the table and grabbing the broken guitar and turning on the broken bullhorn.

  Next to Dermot was a small boy, about twelve or thirteen, but with the body of a ten-year-old. He rocked back and forth on a wooden chair that creaked loudly. The boy had both hands on the table, pushing himself back, then rocking forward, the hands hitting the table again. His face was flat and the brown eyes were set deep. He spoke in a monotone with almost no facial gestures except for what seemed to be a continual cringe from being either cold or hurt.

  “What’s doin’?” Dermot said to him.

  “I done me stint.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Puttin’ up broadsheets at the Guildhall Square. Broadsheets announcin’ a rally. I done it brilliantly.”

  “You had no school today?”

  “Don’t go to school.”

  “You don’t go?”

  “It’s too borin’, school.”

  “Well, how old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen? Young to be bored, isn’t it?”

  “Ah dunno. If they had to educate people when they was young, it would be better. There’d be less of fightin’ goin’ on. What they should’ve done is start educatin’ sooner. When I was five. I heard I was smarter then.”

  “Patsy is right,” a girl in a raincoat said.

  “I know I am,” the boy said.

  “Tell me how,” Dermot said.

  “The stories,” Patsy said. “All the stories is wrong. We have a book, with this story in it about a fella has a horse and he has to go into the Army and they make him leave the horse in a field by his house. The horse, he follows this fella to the Army camp and the fellas there, they take the horse in and feed him and everything comes out fine. That’s the way the story ends. Phoo. I like stories that tell the truth. They should make it the way it is in actual life. What should happen in this story is for the fella to go to the Army and the house stays home and nobody feeds him and he starves to death. The fella in the Army comes home one day and he finds the horse dead and the worms crawlin’ through the skin.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” Dermot said.

  “Oh, it’s a true story. You want to read things you know is true. Not stories where somethin’ comes in and puts everything to normal. Everybody knows it doesn’t happen that way. Everybody is happy ever after. Phoo. The way all the picture shows should end, the people should be all together in the house ready to live happy forever and then they should go to sleep and then the house should catch fire. Then all the people is burned alive.”

  Deirdre came over with broadsheets which said “Unemployed Comrades” and “Capitalist Oppression.” Dermot remembered swinging clubs at signs like that in New York. Across the bottom of the signs, in large letters, it said DERBY YOUNG SOCIALISTS.

  “I’ve a few more minutes,” she said.

  “Then what?” Dermot said.

  “I could do with a cup of tea.”

  “Let me go tell Johno.”

  “And tell him what?”

  “Tell him to make himself comfortable.”

  “I’ll call through the door. But I’m not goin’ in there,” she said.

  “Forget the number, I’ll take care of him,” Dermot said.

  He went out of the tea merchant’s warehouse and walked across the street and through the arch in the wall and came into the bar through the side door. Johno was in the smoke and the pale light with his arm around a guy in a neat brown suit. The guy had a thick neck and shoulders and he stood straight up. He had a face made of cut glass.

  “Here,” Johno called out. “Now we’re finally gettin’ with our own kind.”

  He put a hand on Dermot’s shoulder to bring him close. He said in a low voice, “This is Eddie Canavan. He’s the real. He’s not like that fuckin’ Communist cunt you got up there. This is the real.”

  “How are you?” Dermot said.

  The Canavan guy took his hand and looked Dermot in the eye. Canavan looked with narrowed eyes. He had high cheekbones that pu
shed the eyes together anyway. But narrowed into slits, as they were now, the eyes, blue eyes, looked particularly fierce. Canavan had short hair. As they shook hands, Dermot noticed how neat the suit was. Canavan was wearing a blue shirt and brown tie that went with the suit. He was the neatest person Dermot had seen since he came to Ireland. After a quick and hard pump of the hand, Canavan spun and faced the bar, snorting through a squat nose.

  “He’s in with Joe O’Neill,” Johno said.

  “Joe O’Neill is in with me,” Canavan said. He said it without looking at them.

  Johno clapped Canavan on the shoulder. “See? He’s the real.”

  “You up with that Deirdre O’Doherty, are you not?” Canavan said.

  Dermot didn’t answer.

  “That’s a whore’s get, the lot of them,” Canavan said.

  “You see?” Johno said. “Communist cocksuckers. I told you.”

  “They say they’re in the IRA,” Canavan said. “They’re IRA all right. The ‘I Ran Away’ brigade of the IRA.”

  “He’s in the Provos,” Johno said.

  “We believe in getting the British out and fook the politics,” Canavan said.

  “He’s my kind,” Johno said. “He’s no pinko hump. Let’s have a drink.”

  Johno bent over. He whispered. “Show him what you got,” he said to Canavan.

  Canavan looked straight ahead. He held a glass in his right hand. Dermot noticed the hand was clean. Canavan’s left hand pulled aside the front of the jacket. The square grip of an automatic pistol showed from his belt. Canavan went into his pocket. He came out with a roll of Johnson & Johnson adhesive tape. A three-inch roll, the kind holdup men carry with them to plaster over somebody’s mouth during the holdup.

  “How do you like him?” Johno said.

  “I guess so,” Dermot said.

  “For Chrissakes, he’s the first legitimate man we met here,” Johno said.

  Pleasure flooded through Canavan’s face. He began working his neck around like a fighter waiting for the bell. Canavan went into his pants pocket and came out with a good-sized roll of paper money. He looked at it. “The poor wee people in Aughnacloy thought their money was in safety in the bank,” he said.