World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  “What are we? Are we cattle to be herded to the abattoir? Are we cattle to be herded onto the emigration ship?

  “You are humans! You have a heart and soul and brains. You also have feet. Time you stood on them. You also have knees. Time you got off them.”

  All around the eyes were wet and this haunting voice ran through them.

  On the truck, Deirdre stood off to one side smoking a cigarette. Her motions were cool and relaxed. Her head was up, the chin out, the eyes looking out over the crowd as if she were somebody in command of them. She seemed taller than she was. For this little moment she was distant. Standing there and looking out over the crowd, and this little long-haired machine next to her causing the crowd to freeze.

  The candidate finished the speech and a big noise came out of the darkness. The crowd pressed around the truck. Deirdre was bent down to jump from the truck. Dermot reached up and she took his hand and came down like a jockey off a horse, with no impact at all, touching the ground instead of hitting it. The speaker climbed down the stepladder frontward, hands were out to help her. The moment she was on the ground she took out a box of cigarettes and walked into a knot of old men wearing caps. The men nodded and grabbed at the cigarettes. One of them began talking to her and she cocked her head and listened to him intently. Deirdre was over with another cluster of old men. She had her cigarettes out and her head bent listening while a man said something to her. His front teeth were missing and he was having trouble putting words together. Deirdre put a hand on his arm and she said, “Ah, now Paddy.”

  They were all through the crowd now. Sean and Patsy and even McGeady, handing out cigarettes and talking to people. Dermot took out his own cigarettes. Ronald was in front of him, reaching for one. The crowd was starting to clear into the night, flowing around two dogs smelling each other, walking up toward the row houses on the rabbit-warren streets.

  Deirdre came over to Ronald and Dermot, and they all walked to the American Bar. It was closed and Deirdre knocked on the frosted-glass door. It opened a crack. A man came out, looked up and down the street, then said, “Come on, come on,” and they squeezed past him. The candidate came in at a full run, the boy friend alongside her. They went straight for a small windowless sitting room that was smoky and crowded. Deirdre and Ronald and Dermot went to the bar. Down at the end, Sean and the guitar player were drinking gin. The guitar was on a bench along the wall.

  The guitar player said, “Here we go,” and the bartender put gin in front of everybody. Just gin in a small glass.

  “How’d it go?” the guitar player said.

  Dermot rolled his eyes while he drank.

  “The wee one gets very special, does she not?” the guitar player said. “She’s a poet. Let’s have another.”

  Dermot turned to Deirdre. “I feel like I don’t even know you now.”

  She laughed. They had another drink.

  There was more knocking on the glass door. The owner let in a priest, and right after him was a tall guy with neatly combed, wavy hair, dressed in a suit and tie. The priest had the one line of pink on the front of his collar to show he was a monsignor. The tall guy began laughing as he saw everybody.

  “Wasn’t she great?” he called to Deirdre.

  “Aye,” she said. She did not turn to look at him.

  “Hey! Was that not great?” he called to the guitar player.

  “Philim,” the guitar player said. He picked up his drink.

  “Oh, hel-lo there. Here’s the rest of the Organization.” He laughed and slapped Sean on the shoulder and held out his hand to Ronald.

  The Monsignor had silver hair brushed straight back. His face was red with blood pressure.

  “How are ye this evenin’?” he said to Deirdre.

  She had a cigarette in her mouth. She closed her eyes and opened them.

  “Drink, Father?” Dermot said.

  “No, thank you very much. Ah, is she about?”

  Deirdre pointed back to the sitting room. The Monsignor nodded thanks. The tall guy, Philim, came over to the bar.

  “Have a drink, Philim,” the guitar player said.

  Philim laughed. “Fantastic! Do ye have a cigarette?”

  They all got another glass of gin. Philim held his up. “Here’s to the finest speaker I ever heard.”

  Deirdre spoke without looking at him. “Did you listen, Philim?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “Are ye backin’ her?”

  “With twenty-five pound. I’m goin’ to put twenty-five pound to her campaign.”

  Deirdre’s hand went out. “We’ll accept it now.”

  “Oh, have no worry. I’ll be at the headquarters tomorrow first off.”

  “ ’Twould be better right now,” Deirdre said.

  Dermot pushed his money out and ordered for everybody.

  “Is she having something inside?” he said to the bartender.

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  Dermot walked to the door of the sitting room and looked in. She was sitting forward, holding a cigarette, her eyes burning into the Monsignor, who was directly across from her. Wilson sat alongside her looking at the ceiling.

  “After all,” the Monsignor was saying, “the people of Strabane …”

  She cut in, with hard light deep in her eyes. “The people of Strabane were born cryin’ and they’ll die cryin’.”

  She started to sit back. Then she came forward to get as close to the Monsignor’s face as possible. The voice came out of her like tooled metal.

  “As for the remainder of our differences, perhaps the Bishop can sleep by himself at night. But I don’t. So tell the Bishop that I said fook off.”

  Dermot got out of there and was back at the bar. “Not for me,” he said to Deirdre.

  She laughed. “He had it comin’ to him, he did.”

  The Monsignor was standing at the glass door. He raised his chin an inch or so. Philim put down his drink and started to leave. “Do ye have a cigarette?” Dermot fished out one for him. He took it with a great laugh, and he and the Monsignor went out. The candidate and Wilson came out of the sitting room. The girl said she’d be at somebody’s house and Sean nodded yes. She barely waved good-by and walked out.

  “She’s a cold little turkey,” Dermot said.

  Deirdre shrugged.

  “Does she care or is she just doing this?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter whether she cares or not,” Deirdre said. “She stands for us in the election, and the people like her and she will win, I hope. And if she wins she will have power and we can have power from being with her. And the power will help us. All we really care about. Doesn’t matter whether she cares or not.”

  Sean went for the car while the others finished their drinks. The guitar player jammed in the back while Sean drove through the rabbit-warren streets and started out of town. He pulled into a driveway at a well-lighted modern house, a lot of glass and dark wood. Sean tapped the horn. Somebody opened the door and waved a hand. They waited there for fifteen minutes. The girl and Wilson came out and got in front. The guitar began singing through the ride in the blackness.

  “Now the sun is sinking low

  Children playing know it’s time to go

  High above a spot appears

  Now the sun comes to earth

  Shrouded in a mushroom cloud of death

  Now the sun has disappeared

  All is darkness fear and death.”

  For a strong-looking guy with a lot of whisky in him, he sang with softness and sadness. The candidate started talking. “We are going to be working very hard this time.”

  “Aye,” Ronald said.

  “We have a wee, wee election man in Omagh who watches very closely and he says that with a ninety-two-per-cent vote, we still will be losin’ six thousand of our voters. Anything in the eighty-per-cent range will make it very tough to accomplish.”

  “I’ve worked polls in New York don’t vote fifty per cent,” Dermot said.
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  “We have quite a high vote here. And we’ve a way to make it bit higher than it is. Furthermore, they left our dead on the votin’ register.”

  They all laughed. “You see,” she said, schoolteacher in her voice, “all the government jobs are held by Protestants. They keep their own voting registers right up to date. But they don’t know the first thing about Catholics. So when a nun dies, we bury Sister Mary Joseph. And the voting-register man strikes Sister Mary Joseph off the lists. That leaves us with the woman’s true name; Sister Mary Joseph may be dead, but Margaret Sullivan lives forever on our registers.

  “How many of them do you have?” Dermot said.

  “As many as we need, I hope,” she said.

  “How many is that?”

  “We’ll vote twenty-five hundred of the Lord’s best dead.”

  “Who does that?”

  “Nuns with strong legs.”

  “The nuns cheat?”

  “Well, we like to call it impersonatin’. It really isn’t very hard, you know. You hand the nun half a dozen wee votin’ cards, Anna O’Neill, May McCafferty, and send her to a pollin’ place. She just can keep walkin’ in, votin’, goin’ around outside, and comin’ back again with a different name card. The election officer can’t tell. To him one nun’s the same as another. Who can tell a penguin from a seal?”

  “It’s hardly a sport we’re playing, ye know,” Deirdre said.

  “In most things a person does in life,” the one in front said, “you try to be successful. Political life is different. The only word that counts is survival. A person will do certain things to be successful in life. But he will do en-nathing to survive.”

  Deirdre said, “Do ye know of the Russian who was throwing the babies out of the sleigh to the wolves?”

  “He was out campaignin’ for home secretary,” the one in the front said.

  Deirdre began singing to herself, in a tuneful moan. Then she began talking, mostly to herself. “This will be a very hard election. We’ve the Unionists to beat on the one side. And on our own side we have Mister Joseph McCool himself running. And by tomorrow, I bet, the Bishop will have his own personal candidate in the election. Three Catholics fightin’ it out. It’ll be very hard.”

  “The Church would rather lose the vote than accept the act of darkness,” the guitar player said.

  “They are not all that terribly uncomfortable with the Unionists,” the candidate said. “And certainly, the Church could care less who wins as long as it isn’t this little Communist twit who has the audacity to sleep with somebody and have it public knowledge.”

  “Who’s the Bishop going to put into the race?” the guitar player asked.

  “I know right now,” she said. “In the interests of charity, we’ll wait until we hear it from the man’s own lips.”

  “I know too,” Deirdre said.

  17

  OMAGH IS A TREELESS business street creeping up a steep hill. At the top, a pillared courthouse looks down the town’s throat.

  They came into the town, the streets night-empty, and went past the small shops, Green Shield Stamps and Michael Mullen Family Grocer, Swan and Mitchell Ltd., Shoes, Blacks Dryers and Washers, past the Belfast Bank, the Royal Arms Hotel, the Golden Griddle, the Cafe Rex, McDermott Chemist, Mid-Ulster Observer, and up the hill to the Melville Hotel and the courthouse steps. Traffic coming down the hill came onto the street from the right of the courthouse and stopped at an alley running between the Diamond Bar and a wooden hall with a sign saying INF. Deirdre and Ronald hurried down the alley. As Dermot got out of the car Sean explained it meant Irish National Foresters, a Catholic social club where you can drink after curfew. Going down the black alley, Dermot tripped over beer kegs lined against the saloon wall. Halfway up the alley, Wilson stopped and knocked on the side door of the saloon. The guitar player and Patsy sat on a bench against the wall in the lounge. On another bench McGeady had his head inside the collar of his corduroy jacket, snoring. Wilson put a five-pound note on the bar and ordered drinks for everybody. Dermot put money out, but Wilson waved the bartender away from it. Dermot swallowed the gin and held the glass out for another; this round was on him. The girl wandered in and took some of Wilson’s drink. They spoke very softly to each other.

  “Was it not better tonight?” she said.

  Wilson said, “Well, it is a bit strange to see grown people hanging on every bloody word you say. When I know and you know that you are just some sort of a freak. A wee girl with a voice that really shouldn’t belong to you. Just like a pop star. You still are, in actual fact, what you were the day I met you. And you still should be finishing school, then settling off someplace teaching and raising children.”

  “Aye,” she said.

  A few minutes later she said, “But was it still not better?”

  “Oh, I suppose for Strabane, you know. But you muck about so much with your rhetoric.”

  She took out a cigarette. Dermot picked up a yellow box of matches and reached past Wilson to give her a light. Her eyes were uncertain. She thanked him in a small voice.

  Dermot had another drink and got out of there. He went down the alley and around to the front door of the INF hall.

  Deirdre and Ronald sat in a haze of cigarette smoke. The room was crowded and busy. Deirdre said she would be over to the Melville Hotel for a drink when she could. As Dermot left, Philim Morrison stood at the entrance laughing and shaking hands with a few men. When he saw Dermot, he laughed a loud hello. He laughed even louder when he reached out to shake hands with an old man.

  The Melville Hotel smelled like the inside of a beach house first opened for the season. The ground floor had French doors with dirty windows leading into a dining room with dusty paper tablecloths on the wooden tables. An old woman, who looked to be either drunk or retarded, came out from the back. Somehow she got up the flight of stairs to the second floor and showed Dermot to a room directly over the street. The bed was flush against the window. It was covered with a spread as thick as it was smelly. Dermot opened the window alongside the bed to air the place. Then he went down the hall to a vault of a sitting room where the guitar player and McGeady, conscious now, drank gin.

  Dermot was on the second drink when the girl and Wilson walked in and sat on the floor. You could hear heavy rain on a skylight someplace. Dermot ordered a pint of stout, but when the old lady put the pint on the small table alongside him, a glass of gin was with it. The guitar player waved at him. His eyes were half shut. Dermot swallowed the gin, motioned to the old lady to bring another, and watched the guitar player drink his. The eyes stayed half shut, but he kept waving for drinks until the candidate gave up, stretching out on the floor. Bowlegged little girl asleep. Wilson stretched out next to her.

  The cockeyed old lady came in and threw a blanket over them. McGeady came out of the chair, reaching to pull the blanket from them. “Take it off,” he growled at the old lady. She asked him why. “Because it’s immoral, the both of them covered.” The woman pulled the blanket off Wilson, leaving the girl covered. That seemed to make McGeady feel better. In the middle of the next drink, Dermot’s head began to droop. He struggled up and walked out without talking to anybody. The last thing he saw was the guitar player finishing a drink and wiping his hand on his beard.

  He went up to his room and flopped on the bed without taking off his clothes. The middle of the bed sagged. There was so much water on the bedspread that it came through his jacket and shirt. He swung up, his rear end going right into the puddle. The streetlight outside the window picked out the rain still dripping from the open window, alongside the bed. He put his jacket and pants over a chair. The floor was wet around the bed. He went over to the door, where the rain had not reached, and sat down and fell asleep with his back against the door.

  The noise of trucks shifting gears pulled Dermot awake. The tops of the trucks were even with the hotel window as they started down the hill. The jacket shoulders still were wet. The pants had dried a little. It was
after seven o’clock. He looked out the window. Women walked on the sidewalk under the window toward the Catholic church behind the courthouse.

  Dermot picked up the jacket and went down into the street. He ordered eggs and coffee at a lunch counter and asked the man if he could put the jacket near his stove. The man hung it over a chair and opened the oven door. When Dermot finished eating, he said he’d come back later for the jacket He left a few extra shillings. Two doors down, he bought toothpaste and a toothbrush in a news agent’s store. The alley between the bar and the INF hall smelled of piss. Dots of blood from a fight were around the beer kegs. Deirdre sat in the office, smoking and going over papers, as if she never had left. The place was crowded. Dermot went into a big bare back room, and brushed his teeth at a sink.

  Out the window, across the slate roofs, out where the green hills began, a military helicopter fluttered and spiraled to land. Deirdre walked in while Dermot was watching it. “Lovely. The Army are here to help. The fooks.”

  “Why did you leave me up there all night?”

  “If Lenin had to stay in the Melville Hotel he would have quit the revolution,” she said. “I did come up, you know. They said you’d been asleep an hour. I just had some wee time to get to Bridget McAteer’s house for a shower.”

  There was a sucking sound, Ronald with his cigarette. He stood looking at her until she went back to work at the desk.

  Dermot stood around, morning-numb, while people walked in and out. Between phone calls, Deirdre asked him if he would go to morning mass.

  “What for?” Dermot said.

  “We have to watch wee Father McCluskey,” she said.

  The eight-o’clock mass at Sacred Heart Church had maybe a hundred women, kerchiefs keeping their lined, dry faces in semblance of ovals. Here and there an old man, eyes wet, jaw drooping.

  After the Gospel, instead of going back and continuing saying mass, the way they always do on weekdays, the priest closed the book, blessed himself, and cleared his throat to begin a Sunday type of sermon. He looked up, then looked down, then cleared his throat again. He started talking about sin in a drone. Catholics are the only people able to make it uninteresting. The hundred women coughed like a thousand. Finally, eyes closed, the priest came up with something.