World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  She put a finger up to his lips.

  “Christ, I never heard anything like it.”

  She hit his arm and kept the finger to his lips. Her eyes went to the girl in the front.

  Sean was driving with his head looking all over the car. He turned to the girl next to him in front and he said, “Are the two of you goin’ to be stayin’ together again tonight?”

  “That’s nobody’s business what I do with my own personal life,” she said.

  “Christ, though, that’s all a lot of them were talkin’ about. Did you not hear it?”

  “They’ve nothin’ else to talk of,” she said. “We’ll have to put other things on their minds.”

  “Father McPriest’ll keep remindin’ them wherever you go,” Sean said.

  “Tell Father McPriest to fook off,” she said.

  Sean shook his head. “Oh, wait till the dirt starts.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Ah, but there’ll be dirt.”

  Again nobody spoke.

  “I hear it goin’ around everywhere. Oh, dirty this one is going to be.”

  He stopped at a gas station. The man ambling out rotated his chin in a hello.

  “We’re off to an election meetin’,” Sean called out.

  The gas-station man nodded.

  “But it’s goin’ to be a dirty one,” Sean said.

  The gas-station man nodded twice.

  “Oh, the dirt’ll really fookin’ fly.”

  The girl next to him snapped, “Sean! Jesus!”

  Sean turned to her. “I’m just talking to him, you know.”

  “Talk no more.”

  They drove over a narrow, twisting, thicket-lined road. After about half an hour, the girl in the front said, “How did we ever work it out that we speak in Cookstown and then go all this way to Strabane?”

  The guy next to her didn’t answer, so she turned around and looked at Ronald. He leaned past Dermot and said to Deirdre, “How did this ever happen?”

  “I didn’t handle the schedulin’,” she said.

  “Yes, you did,” he said. “We had it right out on the desk.”

  “That wasn’t for today.”

  “Dear child, I remember that we were handling this detail in precise fashion. How it came to this I know not.”

  “That wasn’t for this trip. I did the handbills for Magherafelt,” Deirdre said.

  “Maghera?” he said.

  “No, Magherafelt,” she said. “I thought you were working out the details of the particular meetings.”

  “It most certainly was not. I. Was it you, Wilson?”

  The one in the front shook his head. “I was workin’ on the manifesto. I had nothin’ to do with this.”

  “Then it was Brian,” Ronald said. “Yes, it had to be Brian. I am certain. We said we would handle the Magherafelt, and he was to map out this schedule.”

  “Well, I’ll be talkin’ to Brian tonight,” the girl in the front said. “We’re wastin’ fookin’ hours drivin’ roads.”

  The ride to Strabane was long and uncomfortable. They came into the back of the town on a gloomy evening, onto a street that was really a rabbit warren of low huts with roofs of broken slates covered with bird shit The smell of coal smoke was bitter in the wet air. Kids with dirty faces and smeared bare legs hung in every doorway. Men stood on the sidewalks smoking cigarettes. The sky was brown, the clothes were brown. There was no other color on the street. No other color in the clothes, no other color on the window frames. Brown people standing on brown streets under a brown sky.

  The house they stopped in front of had children packed in the doorway. A woman looked over their heads, waved hello, and started shooing the kids out of the way. Inside, the walls were wet with dampness. Pajamas that weren’t dry yet hung on wash lines strung around a tiny sitting room. The wash lines were tied to a nail holding up a picture of the Sacred Heart and a nail holding up a picture of John F. Kennedy. Dermot turned in circles but there was no space to sit or stand. He squeezed in the space by the kitchen. The woman was at the stove. When she reached for a pot you could see the ripped underarm of her green sweater.

  “We got handbills out twice this week, as a matter of actual fact,” she said.

  “Ah, Jesus, you’re a good one, Moira,” the girl said.

  “Will ye not have a cup of tea?”

  “Aye.”

  The candidate was against the kitchen wall while Moira put on a kettle of water. They were talking. Deirdre stood in the doorway facing Dermot.

  “Those people in that last place were good and fuckin’ sick,” he said to her. He said it without moving his lips.

  She smiled. “They’re afraid.”

  “Are you goin’ to have that here too?”

  “No, not here. There’s nothin’ to be afraid of in this town. There’s no jobs for anybody.”

  The back door was open. There was a thunderclap and a full rainstorm began. The sound of the rain was loud in the house because the front door was open too. The woman’s husband came out of the toilet outside the kitchen door. He came out in a rushing motion through the sheet of rain. The two in the kitchen had to go up against each other to make room for the man to pass. He was against the wall, rubbing past them, when a white and orange and pale-green light exploded into the kitchen. The light was blinding and the thunder deafening. The lightning had come through the open kitchen door and it must have hit the greasy sink. Pots jumped and bounced out of the sink. One of them rolled out of the kitchen and spun to a stop at Dermot’s feet. He flattened against the wall. The husband in the kitchen was frozen against the two women.

  “They’re tryin’ to tell us something,” the woman in the sweater said.

  “The next time I wish they’d do it in Latin. I cannot translate fookin’ lightning,” the candidate said.

  They both began laughing and the husband stayed against the wall, trembling. Dermot inched his toes away from the pot.

  “That was nice,” Deirdre said. She was bending down to pick up the pot. Dermot pushed her away with one hand and went down and grabbed the pot. He brought it up so quickly that he nearly hit Deirdre in the face.

  “Want some tea?” Deirdre said to him.

  He told her no. He went to the front door and watched the rain storm out of a sky that exploded with electricity. The man came up behind him.

  “Christ’s mother,” he said.

  The three women were talking in the kitchen as if nothing had happened.

  The lightning and rain ended as quickly as they had started. Dermot stepped outside. Even a waterfall had not been able to make the place clean. The street was wet brown. Kids started to trot out of the houses, and soon slick mud covered the broken pavement. There was talking inside the house and Deirdre came out, calling, “All right, I’m off,” over her shoulder Ronald was a step after her, eyes down on the sidewalk. They all walked down the rabbit-warren street onto one street of the business district and came out onto the square. There were stone bank buildings with terraces and turrets and two-story buildings with shops on the ground floor. The shop buildings had slanted roofs. The shops had hand-painted signs, block lettering with the sides shaded, the kind you see in old neighborhoods in Queens. They walked into the square, past the American Bar, Strabane Weekly News, Cathgart’s Clothes, J. P. Colgan Cafe, Dan Kennedy Chemist, D. J. McLaughlin Clothier. Up at the head of the square, the main road ran out of town on one side and the other side was a bus terminal which looked like a small railroad station. The sign on the bus terminal said ABERCORN SQUARE STRABANE. In front of the bus terminal there was parked a flatbed truck with a high red cab, the cab looking powerful enough to ride through a wall. Up on the flatbed, a guy with great curly red hair and a huge beard played a guitar and sang into the start of the darkness. A crowd that was growing stood and watched.

  While he sang, people began streaming out of the rabbit warrens and coming into the square. There were perhaps five hundred people in the square now. Deirdr
e went up to the truck. A dark-haired guy in a gray button sweater stood with a cigarette in his mouth and one foot on a stepladder going up to the flatbed.

  “He’s on the last,” he said to Deirdre.

  “And then you go,” she said.

  “Aye, I do me stint.”

  “You just do the introducin’,” she said.

  “You’re absolutely right,” he said.

  The singing stopped. The people clapped in the wet air. The guy went up the ladder.

  “Patsy!”

  He turned around. “Aye?”

  “Just the introducin’, Patsy.”

  “Aye.”

  Patsy climbed onto the flatbed truck. He dropped his cigarette and looked down to crush it with his heel. When he looked up he saw the people in front of him, and more of them coming into the square. His eyes widened and glistened.

  The singer called out over the microphone, “The first speaker of the evening will be Mister Patsy Breslin of Omagh.”

  Patsy put one hand on the microphone. His feet spread apart.

  “People of Mid-Ulster! People of Strabane! I don’t intend to speak for long.”

  Patsy took a deep breath. Over the microphone it sounded like a heart attack.

  He then started in this measured North Ireland speaking style. “Some people … in Mid-Ulster … are saying … that our candidate … did not … attend meetings … as she had promised to do. People of Strabane. Are you electing … our candidate … to sit in your kitchens? Or are you … electing our candidate … to fight … for you … in Westminster?”

  An old gray-haired woman in a yellow raincoat, her legs heavily bandaged, waddled through the crowd smoking a cigarette.

  “Do you know … what they are trying … to do … to you?” Patsy roared at her.

  The woman took the cigarette out of her mouth and looked up at him.

  “I am going … to stand here … and tell you …”

  “Jesus!” Deirdre said. She went into her pocket for cigarettes. She leaned against the flatbed and smoked with her eyes closed. Patsy, a roar coming into his voice, kept on. A bald man in a tan corduroy jacket came over, his hand shaking while he took Deirdre’s cigarette and gave himself a light.

  “Christ, he’s fantastic,” he said. Then he stood at the ladder, looking up at Patsy, and when Patsy got to one particular rousing part of his speech the guy began clapping, and while he clapped you could catch the first whisky sway in his legs.

  Patsy’s eyes were coming out of his head and his right arm was pumping. Deirdre grabbed him by the pants leg. Patsy lost his cadences. He tried to pick them up again. She tugged the pants leg once more. Patsy’s arm dropped and his voice calmed and he came to an end. He started backward down the stepladder. Deirdre went on the last drag of her cigarette. Patsy was on the bottom rung and Deirdre was dropping the cigarette when the guy in the corduroy jacket flew up the stepladder. His foot came on the rung where Patsy had his hands. Patsy had to let go to keep his fingers from being crushed. He tried to get an elbow into the man. The man was past him and up the ladder onto the flatbed. Deirdre kept saying, “Oh, Jesus.”

  The man strangled the microphone with his hands. He put his mouth against it. He roared, “People of Mid-Ulster! People of Strabane! I am John McGeady of the Magherafelt Official Republican Club!”

  There was a commotion in front of the truck. The candidate came walking through, cigarette in her mouth, Wilson at her arm. He held the arm, but he was clinging to it. When she saw the guy up at the microphone, a hand went to her throat.

  Up on the truck, he stepped back from the microphone, held his arms straight out, and screamed, “Jesus Christ!”

  There was complete silence. He stood there, arms out, head thrown back, eyes closed.

  “Jesus Christ Crucified!” When he opened his mouth to scream all you could see was his tongue swollen with drink.

  “James Connolly!”

  He closed his eyes and held his hands over his heart.

  His voice became a whisper. “They murdered James Connolly with a firin’ squad.”

  Now he folded his arms across his chest.

  “Mahatma Gandhi!”

  In a whisper: “Some lunatic murdered him with a machine gun.”

  Chest heaving, arms flailing, eyes rolling in his head, he roared out, “Che Guevara!

  “The Americans murdered Che Guevara. Murdered him for what he was. A Communist. There’s a whole generation of them coming up in the world. Thank Jesus Crucified for each Communist he sends us. And remember it was the Americans who killed Che. And they would’ve killed Jesus Christ if they got the chance!”

  The girl had a crooked smile on her face. She said to Deirdre, “Everybody he mentions got killed by a crowd. Now he’s fixin’ to talk about us. I guess we all better go dash out and get ourselves killed or we’ll ruin his wee speech.”

  John McGeady was rocking on his feet, eyes bloodshot, flecks of foam on the corners of his mouth. His tongue was too thick to work well in his mouth. Half the words were smothered by it. Deirdre was up the ladder. Her hip came out and pushed him aside.

  “Thank you, John McGeady of the Magherafelt Official Republican Club.”

  A couple of people clapped. He went backward waving his thanks. He stood waving while Deirdre took the microphone and called out, “People of Mid-Ulster. People of Strabane.”

  Then McGeady stepped off the truck with one foot, tried to balance himself and couldn’t, and had to half fall, half jump. He fell onto the cobblestones. He gave a red-faced roar: “Mother’s cunt!”

  The candidate, next to Dermot, had a hand over her mouth to keep the laughing inside. Deirdre kept talking in a quick, clear voice.

  “… They say to us, the college professors, the monsignors, the politicians, ‘Don’t talk Socialism to the people, they don’t have enough schoolin’.’

  “Do you not find it strange that the people advisin’ us what to tell you are those who do not live among you? Who do not face your life every day. Who are warm in the cold and dry in the rain. And who have the time to sit in their rectories or business offices and look out on us and decide how we should live.

  “You don’t see the priest livin’ on stewin’ meat. You don’t find the businessman down here buyin’ the tail end.

  “We are here tonight to talk of these things. We are political people and this is a political meeting. Political people always are supposed to promise people something for their votes.

  “What do we offer you? We offer you pride in yourselves.”

  She introduced the candidate. The girl came up the ladder and took the microphone. She stood in the gathering darkness with her left hand on her hip and her right hand holding the microphone. Her body was leaning to the right. Her voice seemed to reach inside the crowd and made everything stop.

  “We are still slaves in our country,” she was saying. “We get up in the morning, those of us who can, and we go to our jobs, and you work all week and at the end you get your pittance. And those who do not have jobs sit home when it is too cold to come out, and when they do happen to leave the house, all there is to do is stand on the corner and wish for the day to end.

  “And they say to you, ‘Tut tut, if you had any dignity you’d work for nine pounds, not take twelve on the dole.’ The people who go and do a day’s work never get to share in the fruits of their labor. There is a man sitting in the Mediterranean receiving millions of pounds from your labor. You don’t know him and he doesn’t know you, but he owns you.

  “Last August in Armagh, when the factory burned and was closed down for six weeks, the men had to go on the dole. Nobody came and asked the man on the dole how he did. But the owner of the factory put in a claim for a loss of profit. That is above the cost of the machines and the inside of his factory. His claim was for loss of profit and he got two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. I ask you a simple question. How many workers, if they had worked six weeks in that factory, would have seen any of that two hund
red and fifty thousand pounds the owner would have earned? Oh, he earned such money every six weeks. He said it on his claim and the government agreed that it was right and proper. How many workers ever saw any of that money? How much of that money ever went into housing for the workers?

  “No, the man took the money to the Mediterranean with him.

  “There are two sources of emigration in Northern Ireland. Out through the banks go the money. Out through the hovels go the people.

  “If you want to keep people at home, then keep our money at home. A man. here in Strabane with a factory can get a lorry from Belfast and put that wee stick of machinery on the lorry and take it away from Strabane and leave the workers on the corners. And it is your machine he takes away. If any man in Strabane takes that stop sign over there away, six policemen will hit you and put you in jail. But a factory owner can take your job and your country away from you and the police will protect him.

  “Well, we own that machinery. We are the people who own Ireland, and it is time we assumed control of what we own. This isn’t extreme. This is common sense. Either we start providin’ jobs for ourselves or we better start widenin’ the street corners.

  “They tell us, the government and the industrialists and the church, that we’re not supposed to be thinkin’ like this. It’s all above our heads and the people in charge should be doin’ the thinking for us.

  “They say we’re ignorant. Well, we’re not too ignorant to suffer.”

  Dermot turned around and looked at the crowd. The crowd stood with their feet set apart, hands in their pockets. They had a farmer’s stare. An old lady with a hair net on was directly behind Dermot. The man with her had pants cuffs wet from the rain. Frayed ends of shoelaces hung over the sides of his cracked shoes. Thick white hair grew out of his earlobes. Whisky showed in the nose. The two of them stood there, broken by the years, and this little girl on a truck in a wet, depressing town square, with the traffic moving through it, stood and spoke to them and put a light in their eyes which maybe never had been there before.

  “You exchange the dignity of your labor—man is no animal—and for it you receive the right to be hungry by Thursday.