‘I want to go home ... I want to go home,’ Maddie says, thumping her now though in his temper he is still thumping them.
‘We’re going home.’
‘It wasn’t a party.’
‘It wasn’t a party because you mauled poor Hilda.’ ‘Were you flabbergasted?’
‘No. Annoyed.’
‘I’ll never do it again ... I swear.’
Once outside the gate she looked around in dismay. Her car was gone. She found it further up, driven off the road, hidden with over-hanging branches, a fall of yellow pollen on the roof. It looked shaken to her. There was a note on the seat and picking it up she saw a mawkish scrawl on a torn billhead from one of the shops. She read it twice - ‘Blow lady blow through the hole in your big fat duck egg.’
‘I’ve goose pimples,’ she said and looked around and Maddie rubbed her arms to do his magic, to rub the goose pimples away.
A Weapon
Jeremiah Keogh talks to his rifle, except that it is not there; O’Kane has just sped off with it in the night. He keeps going over its life, him and it together and the day he bought it from the firearms dealer in Limerick forty odd years ago when he could scarcely afford it. A single shot bolt action to it and the dealer bringing him into the back room where there was a sort of rifle range for beginners to practise. Giving him little tips on how to use it. He memorised the certificate number, in his head, the very same as a prayer, or a recitation, in case it should get lost. And now O’Kane has sped off with it in the night. His legs still hurt where O’Kane bound them with twine. He recalls dreaming of being in China or somewhere Far East and having his hands and feet bound by men, pickaninnies with ponytails and he wakened with the pain and found he was in his own room and there was Michen O’Kane, the returned native with a mask over his face, his eyes wild, shouting, ‘Where’s your fucking gun where’s your fucking gun’ and him defying him and telling him what a pup he was to break into a house like that. Yes he did defy him. He will tell that to his sister Geraldine when she starts to complain. When she sees the mud marks on the carpet and on the window sill that she cleaned, she will ask how he gained entry and weren’t windows supposed to be locked and why was he let get away with it, why was he let run off with a weapon to threaten others with.
He recalls the times with it, going out at dusk to shoot rabbits and hares, shooting weasels and stoats and time and time again the magpies in the cornfield. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a wedding and four for a boy. Half his life stolen, with that rifle. He has only to show Geraldine the wardrobe with its front door smashed in for her to know the blackguarding that went on. He is lucky to be alive, his shins and his feet bound and the hooligan with an axe, holding it above his head, swinging it, then smashing the lovely walnut panel of the wardrobe and him saying, ‘You could at least have opened it, the key is in the door’ and the vile language of the pup, every other word feck and the lunatic, flinty eyes glinting in the knitted balaclava. Geraldine will say, ‘Go to the guards’ and he’ll say, ‘No’ because if he goes to the guards O’Kane will be back to finish him off. Between two stools, the law and the outlaw, O’Kane’s parting words, ‘You go to the guards and you’re a dead man.’
If he had a woman beside him now she would bring in a basin of hot water to bathe his feet, but he has no woman, his Helena gone ten years, his rifle gone too, and the ammunition, the live rounds of bullets, at least eighty, kept in the tin that used to have floor polish and that imparted to them such a clean, housewifely smell. O’Kane with enough ammunition to do his raids and his rounds and his housebreaking. He recalls the impudence of the pup as he lifted the weapon out of the wardrobe, wrapped in its bolster case, said, ‘It’s as old as yourself,’ then wiping the cobwebs off it and cocking it and sighting him and him trying to plead with the bugger, ‘I need that gun . . . it’s my only protection . . . what else have I against marauders like you’ and O’Kane digging him in the ribs like it was child’s play. His torch taken too, his blue torch that saw him home nights from the pub.
He has a good mind not to tell Geraldine at all, except for the fact that she will see the muddy footprints on the window sill and on the fawn bit of carpet and see the ravaged wardrobe, the lovely walnut panel in bits, splinters on the floor and the top lintel hanging off where O’Kane found his money, his last little bit of security for the rainy day. ‘Where’s your fucking money’ and him saying, ‘I’ve no money . . . I’m a pauper . . . I’ve only a pension’ and he’ll tell Geraldine that, how he stood up to the bugger and O’Kane repeating it and him saying, ‘I forget, I forget where I hide things’ and then the bolt pulled back and the bullets put into the magazine, the chill of it and O’Kane panting with excitement, the hunter in his blood coming out and him pointing to the top of the wardrobe, to the money in a leather purse that Helena had made and thonged herself when she went to night school in the technical college and studied leatherwork as a hobby.
He can just see Geraldine, one hand in her apron pocket, wagging a finger, fuming ‘Go to the guards’ and him saying, ‘The guards are no friend of mine and never were’ and not telling her, because it would scare her, of O’Kane’s parting shot, ‘Go to the guards and you’re a dead man.’ He can’t tell that to the guards, can’t tell it to Helena, can’t tell it, has to keep it to himself, alone in his room and his faithful weapon gone.
Chase
It is dark as the patrol car comes tearing down the lane and swings into Cooney’s back yard, stones hopping off the kitchen window and Kim, their little terrier, yapping. They storm into the kitchen shouting abuse at Cooney and his wife for harbouring a felon. Children who have been around the table back off and huddle on the stairs, nervous at the sight of two men in uniform.
‘Bring him down,’ Corbett the senior guard says.
‘The hell I will . . . you come in here like cowboys . . . scare the wits out of my kids . . .’
‘We know he was here ... we have proof.’
‘Look, Rambo ... I’d agreed with Guard Tulley that if O’Kane came in here again, I’d feed him, talk to him and Rita my wife would telephone the barracks and ye’d park the car up on the road and walk in the back door and I’d express surprise . .. instead of that ye burst in . . .’
‘So why didn’t you telephone the barracks when he got here?’
‘He stayed two minutes ... he wanted a sleeping bag that he left here before he went to England . . . and at this very moment he could be on the other side of that ditch resolving to kill me and my family for talking to scumbags like you.’
‘We have to bring him in,’ Corbett says.
‘Ye took your time over it,’ Cooney says with a sneer.
‘We had nothing on him . . . until Cissy’s car was found.’
‘A pile of ash . . . you won’t get his dabs on it.’
‘Is he armed?’
‘He says he has an axe and an iron bar.’
‘Where did he go?’ Corbett does not so much ask, as fling the question from the doorway.
‘Off.’
‘For feck’s sake, cut out the fascism, Jim.’
‘Look, cut out your own fascism . . .he goes one direction, then he turns round and comes back the same way . . . there is no method . . . there’s only chaos, madness.’
‘What’s his mental state?’ O’Heirlihy asks.
‘Hyper.’
‘So where might he be?’
‘I’d try the Congo ... he often calls to Minogue in a caravan up there.’
‘You hide him on us again and you’re done,’ Corbett says and goes out.
They are on the mountain road by the cow walk where Moira Tuohey had reported dropping him off. Desolate country. The odd light from a window only emphasising the long and tedious distances, neither dog nor man in sight. Sometimes they slow down to peer out at a bit of plastic or a torn coat on the wayside, both hoping and not hoping that they will find traces of him.
‘I wonder what brought him back.’
‘To hurt the father . . . nothing more and nothing less.’
As they veer off the road over a bed of rocks into a 96
field, O’Heirlihy whistles to give himself pluck. In the thick, sightless, mountain darkness the weak light from the caravan gives the appearance of a ship far out at sea, receding from them. Next to it is a second caravan, sunk into the ground, saplings forking out of the roof.
‘Oh, state of the art,’ O’Heirlihy says, then, ‘We’ll park the car so that the headlights shine directly on the door.’
They trip and stumble on stones and various bits of machinery, greeted by a growling dog and hens huddled under the adjoining caravan.
‘Do we knock or do we call?’
‘We shout.’
Minogue opens the door of the caravan and extends his arms in mock crucifixion. He is in his shirt sleeves and wearing rubber waders up to his thighs.
‘Have you seen O’Kane?’
‘As a matter of fact I have.’
‘Bring him out.’
‘Come in yourselves and get him.’
Then O’Kane appears. It was as if he didn’t walk out of the back room, but flew, abrupt and raving, holding something and shouting, ‘Get back or I’ll blow your fucking heads away.’
The light from inside the caravan gives a puny feeble glare so that it is impossible to say what he is holding, whether it is a gun, a hurley stick or an iron bar. ‘Put that weapon down,’ O’Heirlihy says edging forward in a youthful show of bravura.
‘You young eejit, I’ll put you in a bog hole,’ O’Kane says, leaping in a transport of joy and fury, wielding the thing with long swinging thrusts.
‘Come back . . . we’re not going to die for that fucker,’ Corbett says and the two of them take cover
behind the car, watching as he races back and forth, the caravan bouncing, calling theni cowards, assholes, threatening them and all belonging to them. Then, as if he has wings, he floats from the caravan over barbed wire and into and beyond a copse of young evergreen trees. They move from where they have been crouching, vexed and confounded, listening for, but not hearing the sound of his feet running through the dark. Corbett massages his stiff knee with a kind of weary fatalism. He is still going through the motions of following the fucker, of catching him, but he is not following. Instead he yells at Minogue to come out and account for himself.
‘You are harbouring a criminal, you pup.’
‘He called for a cup of tea ... I was pouring it when you boys dropped by.’
‘We could arrest you, you know.’
‘You weren’t fuck able to arrest him.’
‘There was a serious danger to guard O’Heirlihy and myself ... his language, his movements, his stance . . . were all threatening.’
‘That wasn’t a gun, that was a broomstick,’ Minogue says and he picks it up and rides it and starts crooning -‘Gee up old gal, for we’ve got to get home . . . to . . . night.’
In the car they do everything to reassure one another. ‘To have run after him would have been craziness.’ ‘Oh mad. The fight in him,’ O’Heirlihy says.
‘It looked like a gun, did it not?’
‘You’d need to be a genius in that light to say it wasn’t.’
‘We won’t find him tonight . . . he’s in some hole . . . but find him we will . . . the Rat.’
As they get back towards the town they are quiet, constrained. Outside the station they stand to stretch their legs. The same stars, a few dogs, the quenched string of fairy lights around the pub, not a sound and yet an unease. He could be anywhere, behind the stack of porter barrels, beyond the high wall of the youth hostel, up in the ash tree, anywhere and fucking nowhere.
‘I feel kinda bad,’ O’Heirlihy says.
Corbett does not answer. A sentence seems to grind repeatedly inside his head. We let him go ... we let the little fugitive go.
A Letter
‘Queasy in the head queasy in the tum turns too much diddly diddly dee . . . queasy in the head queasy in the tum turns too much diddly diddly dee.’
Maddie goes around the kitchen, half singing it, then opens the door and shouts it out to the cows and the stocky red bull. Eily sits on the stairs drinking a mug of coffee summoning the strength to go to the village. There will be a letter from Sven. She is sure of it. Her hair is all knotted from the reckless midnight swim and she has not the will to draw a comb through it. Snatches of the previous evening make her laugh, make her groan. The singing, the barbecue by the lake with Otto as head bottlewasher and too much diddly diddly dee. Her head is splitting. She takes a scarf off the back of a chair and winds it around until she is slathered in it like a mummy.
‘Eily’s a mummy,’ she says wanly.
‘Eily’s a mummy,’ he says and opens the door again to announce it to the herd, then slams it shut. He is jocular because there are no lessons. Every morning there is a lesson. He puts dots on a word in his colouring book and writes a name in English and in French. The French is on account of Elmer the elephant being a French boy. Elmer is watching from the dresser, Elmer in his harlequin suit and his cloth eyes, who doesn’t miss a trick, making sure that they don’t go without him. Elmer is no fool. His droopy ears are all agog. He has a squeak box inside his belly. Eily loves bellies. Eily paints women with bellies. Bellies bellies bellies. He came out of Eily’s belly and he was a giant.
Since she feels too queasy to carry him he takes one of the big sticks from behind the door and they set out across the mud field, him jabbering non stop. If only he would shut up. If only the birds would stop singing. If only a cold breeze would circulate through her head. Bits of the previous evening keep coming back, the excitement, the banter, the jokes the men made, the ice cold swim, the way it felt like getting born down there, then the warmth from the barbecue, their heated faces, a young boy singing a love song, keening it out to the lonely fields and the distant lilac mountain. Too much diddly diddly dee like there was no tomorrow. Tommy, the soberest of the group, landing the van in a ditch and their having to walk to the house of the young accountant and his coming out in his striped underpants and everyone getting the giggles. Much cajoling to get admitted and then seven of them packed into a room, like children, unable to restrain themselves, still laughing, still intoxicated. The young accountant coming back in every few minutes and threatening to turf them out on the road if they didn’t stop their malarking. No tomorrow.
When she held the letter up her eyes brimmed with emotion. She knew it would be there and it was. But for her own stubbornness he could be there himself, talking away and they would be crossing the road to Ownies for toasties and coffee and Maddie plying Sven with pompous little questions about farming. It was a pale blue envelope with wavelets of paler blue and it had a lot of stamps. She walked to the bench under the tree, saw how damp it was but sat there anyhow.
‘Can Elmer and me go for a walk?’
‘Don’t go far.’
It was as if Sven were there talking to her, she could hear his voice, that soft bedtime voice reassuring her:
So I am back in my old room in my parents’ house in the eastern part of the country, close to the German border. From my window I have a view of a church steeple and a water colour sky. It has been raining the whole week.
Because I got to know you so much through our listening to music together it is now very important to me. There was an old keyboard in the room here that I got tuned and I play on it, songs we played if you remember. I am also getting on with my studies. I plan to be a bit more intensive on that part of my life as it’s a good way of forgetting. How is your place coming along? Does the roof still leak? Maybe not, maybe Declan came. My strongest memory is our going out that night just to make certain no one had squatted in it and playing the car tape very loud and the music went off outside and down to the lake and we made us a dance in the dark under the stars - ‘You can get it if you really want, you can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try, try and try.’
I meet vibrant, red haired, attractive, husky voiced women every time I go down the street. Hahaha. That’s not true. It’s a shame people can’t express themselves better. Listen to the tapes I guess. Of course I’m thinking about all things small and big.
She decides to write two letters, the safe and the unsafe and would ponder over which one she should send:
The other morning I went up the track to give an eye to the ewes in Dessie’s field because they are about to lamb. There was a fox coming across the opposite field, lifting its leg every other minute and then it crossed a stream and I wondered if it saw me or if it would attack the ewes. Smokey our stray dog spotted it and chased it, the two of them flying like mad over the fields, barking, their coats a mirage of red and grey, rounding on each other and then the fox disappearing into a hole and Smokey hurrying back, panting, waiting for his reward, the big, dozy, pregnant ewes oblivious of his valour . . .
She put it down and began her second letter:
Believe me I did not want wedding bells, I hoped for something to happen between us that would be permanent and maybe it has. Life is a roller coaster and we never know, do we?
A scream broke in on her thoughts and then the crunch of brakes and someone running and her turning to look. What she saw was a car veering onto the pavement to avoid an oncoming Jeep and Maddie thrown up into the air like a ball, then coming down again and dropping under the Jeep, then a deathly silence and as she runs, the driver of the Jeep, a woman wearing a man’s hat, has her head out the window perplexed. Fred from the garage comes running, shouting, ‘Don’t move the car . . . don’t move it ... the fan is under there . . . it’ll cut the hands off him’ and as he grips the front wheels he mimes to the woman that he is going to push them back slowly, slowly. Eily and those who have foregathered watch aghast.
‘Hello there . . . hello there’ they hear Fred say as he stoops down.
Edna O'Brien Page 8
