“Are you up here in Sacred Heart?”
“No, I’m from Dungannon,” he said.
“What brings you here?” Dermot said.
“Just wanted hear the speakin’.”
“The girl?”
“Aye. I believe the girl to be brilliant.”
“Do you?”
“Aye. And the wee girl talkin’ now is brilliant herself, you know.”
Dermot took him by the elbow. “Let’s go for a drink.”
“Well, I don’t want to miss anything.”
He said this while he was walking. Inside the Diamond, the priest sat at a table and ordered Bushmill’s. The guitar player was standing up plucking the instrument. “I’ll have a wee one with you, Father, then I have to go out and do me stint.” Dermot said he’d be right back and trotted over to the side of the courthouse steps. Deirdre was finished. Patsy was up with arms flailing the air, screaming about traitors. He mentioned Philim Morrison and the audience clapped. Deirdre came over to Dermot. “When do we go?” he said. She gave him the car keys. “I want to wait for a wee while,” she said. He started away. “You’re sure about it’s just you and me?” She smiled.
He came back into the bar and sat down next to the priest, who was ready for another drink. Dermot got it. They finished the drink and went around to the front of the courthouse. There were about fifteen hundred people listening now. Egan was up, both arms spread to the sky. The guitar player was starting to come up the steps. Egan’s foot came out in a semi-kick. The guitar player backed off. Egan screamed something into the night. Dermot took the priest back to the Diamond. This time he stood at the bar. Dermot had stout. The priest stuck to Bushmill’s. The door was open and the wet evening air blew in. They went back outside. The guitar player was singing now.
“Want to stand a little closer, Father?” Dermot said.
“Oh, no, I’m sure it’s all right here.”
“Come on up front so you can hear better.”
Dermot put his hand on the priest’s shoulder and moved him right to the edge of the steps. Nobody could miss seeing him there. The priest looked at the candidate closely. “She is a wee little girl, isn’t she?” he said.
Dermot walked him right up the steps. Deirdre was up, hand out to greet him. The girl was on the priest, smiling, shaking his hand. The guitar player let out a singing shout and he finished his last number.
“Care to say a couple of words?” Dermot said to the priest.
“Oh notatall, notatall,” he said.
“If ye’ve got sense to come hear her give a talk, then I’ll bet you’re a fantastic speaker yourself,” Deirdre said.
The priest beamed. Deirdre slapped him on the shoulder. She got up and introduced him. “Just a few words,” he said to her. His breath made her pull her face back.
The first thing the priest did was try to dig his feet into the batter’s box. His chest bulged as he sucked in a deep breath. He jammed his right hand into his jacket pocket. The left hand came out, finger pointing. A perfect imitation of Jack Kennedy until Deirdre put the bullhorn into his left hand.
The voice rolled out of him. “People of Mid-Ulster! People of Omagh!”
Deirdre clapped her hands without making noise. “She is a Catholic!” He pointed at the girl. “But she spoke with a free mind. That’s a terrible thing in this country. They want you to agree with them. And always go around thumping your craw. They want …”
Deirdre crept along the step to Dermot. “Fantastic!”
“Thank you, and let’s go,” he said.
“Just a wee little while. I’ll come right around to the car.”
Dermot walked to the car and Ronald was there looking inside it. He was rubbing the back of his neck. His face seemed pained.
“What’s the matter?” Dermot said. It was the first time he’d spoken to him in a day.
“Just lookin’ for work to keep me busy,” he said. He giggled. “Only thirteen hours so far today. I must fill up the slack time, you know.”
Dermot didn’t answer him.
“Actually, I’m looking for the keys to the car. I just was on to them at Tobermore. They’re all mucking about I’ll have to get Deirdre and drive down straight off.”
“Come on for a drink,” Dermot said to him.
“I’m best waiting here,” he said.
“Come on!”
Ronald slouched into the bar, his head hanging. Dermot stepped out of the way to let him go through. Then he came in after him. Dermot kept his head down and didn’t look up. He looked at Ronald’s rear end and kept looking at it. He didn’t bring the head up, and he kicked him. It was a hard kick, a real hard kick, and Ronald went across the empty lounge to the back of it. He was half paralyzed for a moment and Dermot came right up and gave him another, this one a hell of a kick. It drove Ronald right to the door leading to the alley. He stumbled out the door and Dermot was all over him, shoving him so he would go down toward the office. Deirdre would see him. Ronald started down the alley. Dermot kept his head down. Ronald ran and Dermot ran after him and kicked him again. He didn’t look at him. He turned around at the finish of the kick and went out and waited by the car. Deirdre came around from the courthouse running. He held the car door for her.
The wet wind blew through the hole in the windshield. She put her head almost on his chest and pulled her coat together against the cold. As they drove they talked about the election and people in Derry. They did not mention Ronald. When he brought up the word “jail,” she closed her eyes. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said.
“Where are we going now?” he asked her.
“To one more meetin’.”
“Then to Derry,” he said.
“No, to Donegal. Eamonn has a cottage there and I already rang him up and he said we could use it.”
The road came up a hill and into loud noise running through the fields. It grew louder and louder as the car came to a couple of white buildings at a crossroads. Dermot stopped in the middle of the crossroads. A fat guy with hair in bangs was beating an enormous drum. He was bent backward against the size of it. Then he made it sound in a sort of rhythm. He gave three huge booms. Then he began to do rolls on the drum. He made the one last booming sound, then turned around and walked in a one-man parade into the courtyard behind one of the buildings at the crossroads.
“They send messages with it,” Deirdre said. “There’s certain ways they bang on it and it sends messages out.”
“Fuckin’ Indians?” Dermot laughed. He got out and walked over to the courtyard. There was terrific noise coming out of it now. Two drummers were in the courtyard, the guy with the bangs and an old man in a brown shirt with suspenders holding up pants that were nearly falling off as he banged away. A crowd of about twenty stood around drinking Guinness out of bottles. The place must have been a stable once, but now cases of Guinness were stacked under the sheds. The two drummers banged the drums with sticks made of long whittled tree branches. The drums had big paintings on them. The guy with the bangs had a drum with ornate printing saying J. WHITESIDE 126 UTILITY. The old man, who was toothless, had a drum decorated with a painting of an immense fat queen with battleship tits. Printing on the drumhead said ABSOLUTE TEMPERANCE OL. As the old man with no teeth banged away on his absolute-temperance drum, one of the men watching held a bottle of stout up to the old man’s mouth. The old man stopped banging the drum. He took the bottle in his toothless mouth, gums showing, and the guy holding the bottle tipped it. It was like feeding a baby. The old man had a baseball inside his chicken-skin neck. The baseball bobbed rapidly as he emptied almost half the bottle of Guinness. He began banging again.
The man with the bangs stopped playing. A younger guy took over. A man acting like a fight trainer helped the younger guy into the harness. He pulled on the ropes to tighten the drumhead. The younger guy started playing. Knees bent, pants riding down on his hips, he started to drive the sticks against the drum as fast as they could be moved. His hips sway
ed and his feet were coming up a bit to break the tensions and everybody stood around and watched him, the way trainers watch a guy hitting the light bag in a gymnasium. The drum was so wide that the young guy’s wrists kept hitting the edge of the drum. He had thick bumps on the insides of his wrists.
Dermot walked out of the noise and back to the car. “It seems to be their idea of a sport.”
She said nothing.
“Why don’t you look next time? It’s better to know than to walk around afraid of something you can’t see.”
“I know what I’m speakin’ of,” she said. “Nothing is subtle around here.”
They came down a long hill running between fields. Everywhere you could hear the big drums booming. Now there were well-dressed, stiff-faced people walking along the side of the road. Off to the right was an Orange Lodge Hall. People were coming out in groups of three and four. The men were all going the other way. The car came down a slope to a small bridge over a shallow river that had mist rising from it The road went up from the bridge. A hundred yards or so up the road there was a small store with a night light in the window and a few doors up was a pub with no signs on it.
People were across the street from the pub in an open space that ran along a stone wall. Cars coming up the hill from the bridge rushed along, just missing the people standing at the edge of the meeting area. Then the cars rushed into darkness as the road ran between trees. The cars coming out of the darkness ran past the front of the saloon. The booming of the drums was unnerving as it ran through the hills and fields. The people kept coming along the road. Just a few, and still in the distance. But coming with the sound of the drums in the background. Across the bridge and up the hill came the two small Army trucks, their antennas waving as they came along the bumpy road. The trucks swerved onto a side road several yards from the meeting place. It was getting dark and people were gathering and Patsy wasn’t around to start the talking. Deirdre went into the pub looking for him. It was a bare place with a bar that had no mirrors or bottles on shelves. Just a wooden bar and a thin old man behind it and it was packed with men drinking warm stout. Patsy was in the middle of a large circle. As usual only he spoke.
“The first two jabs, will ye not remember them forever?” he was saying.
Somebody said, “What is it he said?” and Deirdre said to him, “When Billy Kelly came out straight off against Sammy McCarthy. The first two jabs.”
“Oh, aye,” the man said.
Patsy nodded to Deirdre. He drained the glass and reached through them to knock it on the bar. He went outside to start the thing. Deirdre held up a hand and the bartender came over. She ordered two pints.
“The fight I mentioned took place before I could read a newspaper,” she said. “But, in actual fact, I have to know every blow that was landed. Billy Kelly was from Derry, you see. He won the British Empire something or other. Defeated Sammy McCarthy in Belfast before Christ was born, as far as I’m concerned. But around here it’s their lives, you know.”
She put a cigarette in her mouth. Dermot went through his pockets, didn’t find any matches. He called the bartender and bought one of the yellow boxes of matches for twopence. He started to light the cigarette for her but a man bumped into him in the crowded room and the match went out.
“Here, I’ll do for meself,” she said.
She took the matchbox and started for the door. “We’ll be ten minutes here and then off to Donegal,” she said. She smiled and went out the door, hair swinging.
The barman was standing with his arms folded. He looked down at his watch. “All right, lads,” he said. “Time, lads.” He began gathering glasses on the bar. The crowd in the room began swallowing and growling. One of them asked him why he was closing. “Because of all the Army and police across the way at the meetin’,” he said. “Tonight we best obey the curfew.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” a man said. He had to be over seventy. A cap was pulled over a bony nose specked with blackheads. Watery eyes looked out from under the cap. Dermot walked outside behind him.
Across the road, Patsy was talking. Three words. Stop. Two words. Stop. Three more words. The old man listened for a couple of stops and starts, then he started walking down to the bridge. Dermot went along after him. He stopped and looked at the water. Dark water that looked cold ran fast over a rocky bottom. The mist rose from the water and curled around their feet.
There was a noise, a bolt clicking, and Dermot turned around. In the almost darkness he saw the soldiers, sitting in the two trucks and the jeep several yards down the side road they had turned into. Down the hill, a crowd of kids in dungaree suits and an old man in a dark suit had come along the road until they were within yelling distance of the bridge. They stood in clusters and you could hear their voices calling up, “Dole … Vermin … Fook the Pope …”
The old man was telling Dermot about the good salmon fishing in the river. Patsy’s voice was still coming through the bullhorn when they left the bridge and walked up the hill. The little store with the night light in the window had a display of taffy, cigarettes, plastic hair dryers, and magazines about television stars.
They walked up in front of the saloon. Deirdre was up talking now. Where she was, across the road, there was a half-blue light in the air. To the right, where the road went under the trees, it all became dark. She stood in the deep blue with her voice clear and beautiful and her head high and she talked about prison now, her chin coming straight out.
“I don’t give a damn if I go to jail for a million years, we still will bring out people off their knees.”
The people clapped and cheered. They spilled into the roadway and a car rushing up from the bridge had to swerve away from them.
The man with the blackheads said he wanted a drink. Deirdre was finishing, but the others weren’t here yet, so she wouldn’t come down until the guitar player and the candidate took over. She pointed to somebody in the crowd and waved him up onto the back of the truck with her. The old man started down an alley alongside the saloon and Dermot went with him.
“What do you do with yourself around here?” Dermot asked.
“I’m unemployed at the present time. Had been workin’. I was put on redundancy. I was general laborin’ at the Michelin plant. I tell you what it is, there’s very little industry around here. Most of them here travels, you know.”
“Whereto?”
“Belfast.”
“How far is that?”
“Be forty mile to Belfast.”
The old man banged on the back door of the saloon. When nobody answered he dropped onto his stomach, pressed his cheek against the ground, and tried to look through the space between the bottom of the door and the floor. He was still down when Dermot heard noise from the road. He looked down the alley and saw cars pulling into the crowd. Then he heard the voice coming through the bullhorn, and it was the girl’s voice, not Deirdre’s, and Deirdre was through and they could go to Donegal.
He was just starting up the alley when a car with a loud engine roared up from the bridge. There was an explosion in front of the saloon. It registered slowly. But he knew it was a shot. The car roared up the road under the trees. Screams came from the road. Men were running and shouting.
Dermot was down the alley running to the street. There were more shots out on the road and people were throwing themselves on the ground. A pack of women and men came screaming into the alley. He tried to get through them but they kept running against him and he had to turn sideways and smack at them with his hands to get through. He ran into a small boy and knocked him straight back, and when he tried to step over him he tripped and ripped his knee open as he fell. He got up and half ran, half stumbled, one hand out to keep from falling. He ran into a soldier who was at the entrance to the alley with his rifle at him. Dermot didn’t even look at it and started to go past him, but another one came up from the side and slapped his rifle into Dermot’s side and he went up against the wall. Soldiers were running and waving and one of
the trucks raced past, going up the road into the darkness under the trees. The soldiers in the back of it were standing with their rifles pointed ahead. The soldiers in the road kept chasing everybody away and then the second truck came whining up. It poked its hood into the small crowd of people pushing around where the speaking had been.
Soldiers tumbled out of the rear of the truck and reached down. Patsy’s face came up from alongside the truck. He came up with his arms under Deirdre’s shoulders, lifting her up onto the back of the truck. Her head was hanging back. As Patsy brought her up to put her onto the truck, the head came forward. There was nothing between the forehead and the chin. Blood pouring on-to her black coat. And some white lumps in the blood. They had her stretched out on the back of the truck now. The people got out of the way and the truck pulled back onto the road and it started down toward the bridge, tires whining, with the antenna waving and a soldier jumping on the back, cowboy style, his rifle held up. The soldier pushed Deirdre’s legs over so he would have room to sit down.
The candidate, a cigarette in her mouth, eyes straight ahead, walked past the soldiers and slipped into a car. As the car started off, somebody pulled the guitar in through the window. A jeep rocked to a halt in the middle of the street. The driver shouted. The two soldiers, keeping Dermot in the alley, left him. The soldiers ran out to the jeep and swung onto the back. The jeep jumped forward and started after the car with the candidate in it.
There were two groups in the street. The old people stood talking to one another. “Christ,” one of them was saying, “they was aiming for herself and they got the goddamned poor wrong one.”
“Comin’ so goddamned fast, the car was,” another man said.
Cold air blowing through the hole in the windshield. There was rain when he got to Magherafelt, where the hospital was, rain coming out of the darkness and streaming down the glass entrance doors. A fat policeman slept on a bench inside the doors. The cop woke up and mumbled that there would be Army surgeons around in the morning. “There are to be an autopsy you know. Searchin’ for the type of slug, you know. Dunno if there are much left to search through, you know.”
World Without End, Amen Page 37
