Edna O'Brien

by In the Forest (epub)

  It was a different priest, young, dark haired, wearing a gold watch and a natty suede jacket.

  ‘Will you help me?’ he asked.

  ‘Who are you?’ the priest asked, a bit tetchy.

  ‘I knew Father Hayes ... I did jobs here ... I mowed the grass.’

  ‘Father Hayes passed on. What can I do for you?’ ‘There’s someone in a bad way in a wood . . . you have to bring me there.’

  ‘How do you mean a bad way?’

  ‘He fell and broke his neck.’

  ‘But why come to me, especially at this hour of night?’

  ‘You’re a priest . . . God’s brother.’

  ‘But I don’t even know you.’

  ‘If we don’t go ... it will be a black night.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘He needs the last rites.’

  ‘Well if it’s that bad . . . then I expect we have to go,’ the priest said and opened the door cautiously to let him in.

  Father John

  I am writing this in an empty house while the young man sleeps beside me. Beyond the shutterless window a lonely quiet and the vast wood, the scene of some awful secret that he won’t tell me. At one point he threatened to kill me. I don’t believe he will. To ask him why he wants to kill me is quite useless, might as well ask him why his eyes are a dark colour or mine are grey. However he claims to like me, to have got to like me after our little contretemps because I did not show fear. I feel sure that he has broken out of an asylum and is being searched for in some county or another.

  He looks so young sleeping there on the floor with the cake crumbs at the side of his lips. It was a sponge cake that Baba Melody gave me when I was leaving her house earlier tonight. A sponge cake and eleven duck eggs. He was waiting for me in the rain when I drove over the grid into my own gateway. I could scarcely believe it. He said he was home from England and that there was someone in trouble over in his own area and needed the last rites. Driving along, I asked him why he was out on such a wet night, he said, ‘It was all to do with the devil’s work’ and suddenly he ordered me to turn the car around. At first I thought he was joking, then he lifted the muzzle of the gun out from under his anorak and I don’t know which gave me the worst fright, it or his disjointed talk or the so-called jokes he made. Passing the grounds of a hotel with its tall cedars, he threw the duck eggs out of the window and laughed boisterously. He asked if the sponge cake was a gift from a lady friend. I said I don’t have a lady friend, I’m a priest who has taken the vows of chastity. He mocked that and said we were all the same under our habits. Then he asked who won the match and I said there was no match, that it was a weekday and not a Sunday. He said he’d lost a few days, scrunched up in a hole somewhere and that one morning he wakened and there was a young foal licking his face. He said he needed to be in a forest, they were the only safe places.

  The first forest we tried had a locked barrier and he said they’d regret that, the keeper would regret that and he would be back to get him. He was talking, talking, talking. The odd thing is I discovered later on I had a connection with him through his sister. I had baptised her child, his nephew and he appeared in one of the photographs in a clean suit, holding the child. He asked me did I consider him good looking. I said very. He said he’d been in a lot of jails since then and picked up a lot of hooliganism. Kept telling me to speed up.

  When we came to the track that led into Cloosh Wood he got very agitated and asked if I would help him. He made me promise to help him no matter how terrible the shock. I gave him my word. We walked, or fairer to say we stumbled, through a very dark, very soggy wood, treacherous under foot and seemingly vast. Then he ran to one side and came back with a torch which I presumed he had hidden there. The light from it was sputtery and soon expired. All of a sudden I felt myself go stone-cold. I cannot say what it was because he would not let me any closer. I just had the sensation that I was approaching a scene of calamity and instinctively I began to say some prayers for whoever might be lying there in that loneliest of spots. He went berserk, said that I wanted to frame him like all the other f* * * * * s. I somehow managed to calm him and we found our way through the undergrowth and through the dark to this empty ghost of a house where he claims to have lived as a child. He said it was the happiest time of his life because it bordered on the woods. I believe that he brought me to give the last rites to someone and then bewilderingly changed his mind. He kept saying ‘I’m an animal . . . I’m an animal.’ The moment I proposed hearing his confession, he went ballistic, told me to mind my own effing business, said I was part of a ring out to get him. I reminded him of the secrecy of the confessional and said I would not break his trust to anyone. He said then that he had misled me. The person that was in danger was in another wood altogether, held captive by a gang. I felt that he was lying. I told him that the best thing we should do was sit down and talk things over until daylight. I said everything was worse at night, fears were worse and suspicions were worse. I asked him was he hungry and he said yes he was starving. I sent him out to the car for the remainder of the sponge cake and he was eating it as he came in. It was unnatural the way he pawed at the cake and as he ate it he was also sucking it as if it were both food and drink.

  We sat on the planked floor and I tried to get him stable, telling him news of the parish, children about to make their first holy communions, a hurling match I had been to on Sunday and a holiday I will be taking in the autumn to the Holy Land. All of a sudden he picked up his gun and put it to his head and I jumped and grabbed at it to wrest it from him. We fought like soldiers all around the room him asking me to shoot him, begging me, said he deserved to die and that he would be better off out of this world. I asked him what he meant by such a remark and unfortunately inflamed his temper again. He grabbed the rifle, cocked the hammer as an expert might and with his hand on the trigger pointed it at me and said ‘Happy Christmas . . . this one is for you Santa.’ The crackle of it and the speed of the lead going through the panel of the door, then the tiny hole all happened in an instant. How quickly life can be taken and how thoughtlessly. I asked why such an outburst. He said I had it coming to me, that I was caught up in bad work, associated with the devil, especially some she-devil and that I was about to baptise the devil’s children. I pointed out to him that if that had been so, I could have killed him in that vulnerable moment when he asked me to. He thought about that and seemed satisfied but nevertheless he took out a box of bullets and reloaded the gun before my eyes. I hid my fear as I think that would have made him more threatening.

  He apologised for choosing me, kept saying there was no one for him, then repeated the names of Christian brothers and prison officers that are supposed to have been brutal to him. He asked me if we could go to his mother’s grave in the morning because he wanted to speak to her and to pray, he wanted to unburden everything. Before nodding off to sleep he thanked me and said I was brave when he fired that lead. I don’t believe he will kill me, that is why I have stayed. I believe that at the deepest level he needs a friend and that I will become that friend. He did say that a dog would have a better life than him. My whole priesthood, I now believe, was intended for this, for this dark night of the soul, watching over a young boy whose soul is in torment.

  Shadows

  They jump at their shadows’ shadows and the thicker shadows of the headstones that seem to collide into one another in the enveloping dusk. It has begun to rain again and the lake has the turbulence of a sea, rough waves pounding in and out and the old bent thorn trees creaking, letting out little squeals like the squeals of field mice.

  They are all women, all edgy, tired, footsore; their mistrust has deepened since they commenced their search that morning, scouring vacant houses, caravans, outhouses, horse boxes, unused lime kilns and inlets all along the lake shore where small boats bobbed and sidled in their beds of reed.

  They had come to his mother’s grave, some approving, some not, they encircled it as though beli
eving there lingered evidence of his having recently been, and expecting from the tall tombstone and the damp mound of earth, something to float upwards, a whispered message from the other world, a deliverance. At the same time they are in fear that O’Kane might be behind one of those headstones about to take a shot at them. Gladys, whose brother is a guard, says how he told her that once a person has shot or maimed, it is quite simple to do it again.

  ‘Who’s talking of shooting or maiming anyone? No one,’ Lorna says, nettled on account of her being a third cousin of O’Kane’s, on his father’s side.

  ‘Let’s ask his poor dear mother,’ Martha says and kneels and gestures that they kneel with her.

  ‘Ask her why she reared him so rotten,’ Nancy says.

  ‘Sh sh.’

  They are about to start the rosary when Ming suddenly stands up, looks out at the water and in a shrill hysterical voice says, ‘Why are we here in a graveyard? It is so negative.’

  ‘It is essential,’ Lorna snaps.

  ‘You are all crazy women . . . you are all judgemental women,’ Ming says then and they are disbelieving, hearing accusations from her who had always been so polite, so reserved, so courteous that if she called to their houses she would not step over the threshold, ever.

  ‘Coming here was stupid,’ she says defiantly.

  ‘How can you say that? Some of us gave up our work . . . we’ve left our children with others to mind,’ Nancy says.

  ‘You are all doing it for obligation . . . for reputation . . . you are hypocrites . . . you you you,’ she says, her face chalk white, her black wet hair streaming, like some tragedienne in a play.

  ‘What is it, Ming?’ Martha says offering her a hand.

  ‘She is not anywhere here near water ... I am one hundred per cent sure of it.’

  ‘You’re just het up . . . you’re just a little bit overwrought.’

  ‘She’s a foreigner . . . they don’t feel like we do . . . they’ve no hearts, they’ve no religion . . . they come to our beautiful little country to rip us off,’ Lorna says.

  ‘Don’t Lorna . . . don’t . . . there’s enough anxiety hanging over us.’

  ‘You all walk so fast,’ says Ming. ‘You know the countryside ... I don’t know the countryside ... I was left alone in a wet field facing to the north ... I asked you to wait, one of you said yes but disappeared ... I was frightened . . . scared.’

  ‘We don’t know north from south . . . we are not compasses, we are human beings,’ comes Lorna’s retort.

  ‘Eily is putting us through this,’ Ming says.

  ‘You are angry with her . . . you, the one who knew her . . . her friend, her confidante!’ Gladys says.

  ‘I didn’t know her ... no one knew her . . . she had secrets that she never talked of.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I can’t say . . . please excuse me . . . my mind is working crazy at this time’ and she bows contritely to each one.

  ‘So are our minds working crazy but we cope,’ Martha says, a little wearily.

  ‘You stayed with Eily, didn’t you?’ Nancy asks.

  ‘Yes, that was last year . . . there were strange noises in my back garden and I couldn’t sleep . . . probably foxes ... I mentioned it to Eily and the next day I found a letter on my doormat inviting me to stay in her flat, near here, overlooking the lake. She was very kind . . . she made me very welcome . . . but then one evening a young man came, a young man with short blond hair and she tried not to introduce me . . . she didn’t want me to know that he was her boyfriend, just as she didn’t want him to know that she. was a mother . . . she was very secretive.’

  ‘So . . . maybe you agree with the guards . . . maybe they have a point when they say she’s just off on a dirty weekend.’

  ‘That is not what I meant at all. She was a secretive person but she is not a harlot.’

  Ming is wishing now that her jangled nerves had not betrayed her. She feels that she must say something to redeem Eily’s name and almost pompously she says, ‘She had a strong spiritual side . . . there was a sacred book she used to read before she went to sleep.’

  ‘Huh, with a boyfriend in tow.’

  ‘Excuse me but you have no truth,’ Ming says to Lorna.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She was on a quest.’

  ‘What kind of quest?’

  ‘Goodness . . . spirituality.’

  ‘She liked a good time.’

  ‘That is how you see it . . . but in the Buddhist teaching, the blank scrolls contain the true meaning.’ ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘She’s nuts.’

  Suddenly they are all shouting, rounding on her, each racked by her own fear, imagining their own children spirited out of their beds and buried in some bog hole. At the sight of a figure beyond the lych gate they jump and listen to the scrape of metal over the grazed stone step.

  ‘It’s him. It’s O’Kane,’ Lorna says.

  ‘Keep together,’ Martha says, gathering them into a huddle.

  ‘Let’s call out,’ Nancy says and they stand in a herd as the figure comes slowly towards them, his hat slouched over his face, magnifying their terrors, walking around the gravestones until Lorna recognises that it is her husband Milo and shouts, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m hungry . . . the kids are hungry . . . there’s no dinner on the table.’

  ‘Giving us the fright of our lives,’ she says.

  ‘Anyhow yer search is called off.’

  ‘Are they found?’

  ‘No, but her car is ... burnt out twenty-five miles away in a field.’

  ‘But that shouldn’t stop us searching here ... in this area.’

  ‘The guards say they have a lead anyhow, and that vital evidence can be interfered with because of footprints and so forth ... so the search is off.’

  ‘Who ordered it off?’

  ‘It was on the local radio . .. although I met a young guard in the town and he didn’t know about it ... he said the dragnet was in place.’

  ‘Who knows what . . . who is in charge . . . who is at the helm?’

  ‘All is unclear.’

  ‘All is a fuck up,’ Milo says and they troop out after him with a sense of failure and frustration, not even realising that they have left Ming behind on the grave.

  She did not follow. She was afraid of them, afraid of their girth, their hardness, the way they all seemed to swoop down on her. She wanted to cry, because she was crying in her mind but something told her that she must not cry - ‘If I shed tears, tragedy will happen,’ she said aloud to the grave and the moaning trees. If she withheld her tears, Eily would be safe.

  Looking up she saw human faces between the tombstones, joking faces that were laughing and she knew that at that moment she too was turning mad.

  She stood up, looked out at the dark blue of the water that was a Prussian blue and kept telling herself that she must not cry, because if she shed tears tragedy would happen, kept repeating it, staring out at the iron blue of the water.

  Searching

  Another group of women set out very early the next morning, the mist a cottony white, a presence, so that walking through it was like breaching through net. They were heading towards Cloosh Wood.

  In there, whispering, moving quietly, cautiously, sometimes having to crawl under a shelving of fallen and leaning boughs, in fear of every stir, dreading what might be behind the next tree trunk and the next, a little breathless, the air sultry, silent and as a game bird is risen, the speckled feathers in a frantic unnerved flight give them the jitters. Afraid, and yet driven by a kind of blind intuition, certain that their determination will lead them to mother and son, proud of having eluded the guards and the other local volunteers.

  They have fanned out, promising each other to call every so often in solidarity. Immense solitude, the trees like pillars, solemn and solid, trees which seemed to have been planted by no man; trenches of brown water scummed with hordes of insects, a suffocating plac
e.

  Suddenly Josephine is heard to shout, ‘Girls . . . girls come quick.’ They run through the undergrowth and see her pointing to something on the ground with her umbrella. It is a child’s shoe, pink canvas and caked with mud, its lace missing. The sight of it chills them.

  They form a circle around it, clasped now, and it speaks to them of a child recently there, losing its shoe and not being allowed to stop to put it back on. It speaks of haste and captivity and even violence. They search now in the scrub, they kneel and delve their hands into years and years of packed damp pine needles, they reach into the lower branches of the trees and shake them, hoping to find a second shoe, the cardigan, a coat, any clue indicating that they might have passed that way.

  It is Anya who calls first. She says ‘Maddie’ then she says ‘Eily’. Her voice is subdued, nervous, expecting almost to be chastised as she looks at them and then gaining courage she shouts the names boldly and then the others follow and the drowsing wood is wakened from its inertia with the repetition of the two names, Eily and Maddie and hope and fear alternating in those who were chanting them. ‘Where are you, where are you?’ their shouts carry from tree to tree, from furrow to furrow, up and beyond and their echoes came back to them in a wan, despairing mimicry.

  They decide to bring the shoe back to the barracks, carrying it on the umbrella as if carrying a trophy and they arrive in the town and make their way slowly and a little triumphant towards the barracks.

  Dread, hysteria and mounting speculation. The shoe rests on the sergeant’s desk, absurdly small and muddy and does not constitute a clue of any kind because he has established that it is a shoe for a child of six or seven and moreover the missing child wore blue wellingtons.