The Mystery of Ireland's Eye

by Shane Peacock

  How could it not be Ireland’s Eye—it seemed to be in the right place. Maybe the eye was very small. Whatever the case, I had no choice: Eye or not, I was headed for it. I’d have to deal with the consequences when I got there.

  I peeked at my watch. There were five minutes left.

  My path from here to that rock was down a slight decline through a long stretch of woods and then back up an incline on the other side where I’d have to take a sharp turn to the right and then motor along the top of the arm, moving slightly upward as I went towards the precipice. It looked to me like a ten-minute sprint, and nearly half of it was through the woods. I put my head down and ran like I had never run before.

  I entered the woods without changing gears. How do you move most efficiently in here, I thought. Think, I heard my grandfather say. Well, what makes sense? You have to see where you are going, first of all, but you can’t look down. I crouched a bit as I ran, and I tried to use my peripheral vision. That’s something coaches always talk about in hockey, being able to see things without looking directly at them. I remembered reading a book once about high-wire walkers and learning that they never looked directly at the wire. Their eyes were cast slightly ahead of them, though they saw the whole wire, from the point where their feet touched it out to great distances in front of them. I looked in front of me, but tried to be aware, peripherally, of the stumps and logs beneath me. Much to my surprise I flew.

  Before long I was bursting out of the far side of the woods and making the turn along the grassy land at the beginning of the arm. I glanced down at my watch again. Two minutes to go. I could see the rock now, but it looked five minutes away. I remembered seeing a clip of an old commentator named Howie Meeker talking about “afterburners” on Hockey Night in Canada, explaining how a speedy player gets going at what looks like top speed and then turns on the afterburners and goes even faster. If I had any such things, I had to use them now. Howie Meeker, rookie of the year in 1946, right wing with the immortal Teeder, on the ice when Barilko scored. I turned on the afterburners.

  But what I heard next almost stopped me in my tracks: the crunching sound of the hurried footsteps of the man with the gun. He was already out of the woods and lumbering towards me. It hardly seemed possible, but he was gaining ground. We tore along the grass and then onto the rocks. I couldn’t help glancing back at him every ten strides or so. He was less than fifty metres away!

  A minute to go.

  There was the rock right in front of me. I could hit it with a slapshot from here.

  “I’S GOT YU NOW, YU LITTLE MOLE!” screamed the gunman in an ugly voice. He was about twenty strides behind me.

  Thirty seconds.

  He was ten steps behind.

  Twenty seconds.

  He started reaching out with his hands.

  Ten seconds.

  I came to the rock. It was three metres high. But there! There about halfway up was a little hole about the size of an eyeball! A few feet below it a piece of the rock jutted out. I leapt at it, planted one foot on it, lifted the other one, and jammed it straight into the eye of Ireland’s Eye.

  Just as my first foot left the rock the gunman threw down his gun and reached for me. He just missed. Now I was struggling, reaching for the top of the rock, trying desperately to pull myself up. He jumped and caught my foot! Help me, Grandpa! Help me!

  My running shoe came off in his hand. I heard him curse and throw it. It went sailing, in a long looping arch, out over the precipice and down into the ocean below.

  He swung at my foot again. But I pulled it up and with one great heave landed myself on the top of Ireland’s Eye. For an instant I turned and looked down at my enemy. There was hate in his eyes—he was, in my grandfather’s words, spitting mad. I smiled at him.

  Now he was climbing the rock, coming towards me at twice the speed I had risen. I pulled the flare gun out of my pocket and glanced out to the ocean.

  No coast guard!

  But then I scanned towards the opening of the village harbour and saw it, puttering along without a care in the world. I prayed on the grave of Bill Barilko that I wasn’t too late. There would only be an instant, right at noon, when the captain would look the Eye in the eye and give it a salute.

  Hoping it wasn’t too late, I took the flare and put it to the barrel of the gun. At that moment the man grabbed my foot and yanked. The flare dropped from my hands, hit the rock and, in an agonizingly slow descent, fell over the edge and dropped down the far side of the precipice, following my running shoe into the ocean.

  “DAMN!” I cried.

  The man pulled himself up onto the rock and struggled to his knees. I snatched the other flare out of my pocket—the last one. I snapped it into the gun. The man rose.

  We looked at each other.

  “Don’t do it!” he said.

  But I fired. Up went the flare—that beautiful, smoking, bursting red flare shot into the blue sky of Ireland’s Eye. For an instant we both turned and watched it. And then we looked at the coast guard. We stood there for a long time, both of us silent. He hoping the captain’s watch was fast and me hoping it was just a little slow.

  For a second it seemed as if the coast guard boat actually came to a full stop. And then it turned. It was making a bee-line for Ireland’s Eye cove, and Mom and Dad!

  “YES!” I shouted. “YES!”

  “Yu little rat! Yu—” screamed the man.

  But a snarling voice from below cut him off. “Get down from there, yu bozo!” shouted the old Newfoundlander, standing there red-faced and frantic. “We’ve gotta get out of here, fast! We’ve gotta make it back to the boats before that damn coast guard does! Forget about the boy!”

  They had been standing less than fifty metres away, huffing and puffing, watching the flare arc into the sky, waiting to see if the captain had seen it. Now they turned tail and ran.

  The gunman scowled at me and descended the Eye. I looked back towards the boat and watched with satisfaction as it steamed through the opening into the harbour.

  That was a mistake. Lesson One when dealing with scum: never turn your back on them.

  As the goon was descending the Eye he had noticed that I was looking the other way.

  “Take the money out of my pocket, will yu, yu little rat!” he said under his breath. Then he shoved me.

  I fell from the Eye and hit the ground with terrific force. I had been pushed so hard that I kept spinning when I landed. In a flash I was rolling over the edge of the precipice!

  As I fell, I had the strangest thought. It wasn’t a deep feeling about my short time on earth, or an image of my grandfather. My life didn’t pass in front of my eyes. It wasn’t a profound thought. It just seemed funny to me that after saving Mom and Dad, it would be me who would die, and I would do it by falling from Ireland’s Eye.

  13

  The Boy

  It’s amazing how many notions can run through your mind in a split second of extreme danger. First came the almost comical realization that I was about to die after saving my parents. Then I heard this is why I came to Ireland’s Eye running through my mind. I had been trying to figure out what had drawn me here ever since last summer. It had seemed to me that it was something mystical. When the storm was about to drown me at the entrance to the island, I thought for a moment that I understood what it was all about. Now I knew for sure. I had come here to die.

  But there was more than that running through my tiny mind, thank goodness. What came to me next was much more reasonable. Save yourself, a voice said. It wasn’t my grandfather or my mother or father or some mysterious presence on Ireland’s Eye. It was my own voice, plain and direct. So I did.

  Shooting both arms out towards the rock, I grabbed for something, anything. My fingers raked along the hard surface like fingernails on a blackboard. But the rocks were rough-edged and soon I had a grip. Now I was d
angling by my fingers over the ocean.

  That was when I came to value the concept of preparation. Had I not gone through all the training to get myself ready to come to Newfoundland, I would never have been able to save myself at that moment. Part of getting ready had been weight training and by early this summer I had succeeded, once, in bench-pressing my own weight. Lifting myself up onto my elbows now would mean hoisting my whole weight, and with the adrenaline flowing the way it was I’d have the extra strength necessary. Slowly but surely I pulled myself up and put one entire arm and then the other over the top. From this position I hauled the rest of my quivering frame back onto solid ground.

  I lay there for a full five minutes, my heart pounding, staring straight up into the sky. Before long an eagle floated by, just a speck in the distance. I’d better get up, I thought, before he figures I’m dinner.

  When I got to my feet my legs were still shaking. There was no need to run back to Mom and Dad. I only had one shoe now anyway, so I would hardly move at a gallop. And the henchmen were finished. They would never get there before the coast guard, and they would never try to get away without retrieving their stash. So they were in an impossible situation. If they tried to high-tail it to the woods, the coast guard would send for whatever reinforcements they needed and track them down. Their boats were tied to the dock, and in order to go anywhere they had to have their boats. There was no escaping Ireland’s Eye. They couldn’t even make a quick run for their goodies—Mom and Dad knew where they were hidden. “Stay with the stash!” the old Newfoundlander had yelled at his lookout man at the mayor’s house just before they started chasing me, in earshot of all of us: me, Mom, and Dad. Just exactly what that stash was I didn’t know, but I did know this: those thugs were caught in a trap of their own making and it seemed like a perfect place for people like them.

  Passing by the Eye, I ran my fingers along it, set my hand on the ridge I had dug into with my foot and thought about how terrified I had been just a few minutes ago. But that moment now seemed like a dream or a movie of some sort; no one else will ever quite understand what it felt like. It must have been that way for Bill Barilko too.

  Three or four hobbling steps on my way back to the main harbour, I remembered that I hadn’t even bothered to look through the eye of the Eye. I walked back to it, stood on my tiptoes, pressed my eye right into the hole and gazed out. It was remarkable. My eye fit into it as though it had been moulded for me. But I didn’t see Ireland. All I saw was the horizon. Beautiful beyond belief, but in the end, just the horizon. There was no magic in Ireland’s Eye, I thought, and I had not been sent here for any reason. It was just a trip, a good one, mind you, and full of an adventure I would never forget, but really just a trip.

  Getting down from the Eye again, I turned and headed back towards the harbour. I hadn’t walked for more than a minute when I saw something white lying on the ground. At first I thought it was a book, but it was really only part of one, a chapter that someone had torn out. “A Brief History of Ireland’s Eye” read the first page. As I flipped through it, it seemed that every sheet was clean and white, as if they hadn’t been read. Then I found one that was soiled and marked with a pen. The instant I began reading it I knew it had fallen from the clothing of one of the thugs. I also knew something else.

  * * *

  It seemed to take me an hour to get back. And it wasn’t just because I took off my remaining shoe and walked in bare feet. No, I just took my time and stared out at the ocean and the islands nearby. I paused in the woods to look at the trees I had rushed past so quickly just a short time before. What am I becoming, I thought, laughing to myself, some sort of a nature lover like Mom and Dad?

  Later, as I looked down from the top of the hill, I could see the coast guard boat at the wharf. Mom, Dad, and the captain were talking to the handcuffed crooks, frantically motioning up the hill in the direction I had fled. One thug made a shoving motion in the air as he talked and then a slight falling action, like someone toppling off a pedestal. As Mom listened to this she collapsed to her knees and Dad started running, tearing up the path towards the Eye.

  A strange thought passed through my mind. As far as anyone knew, I was dead. Right now, this very instant, I was dead. So what if I stayed here? I could easily hide from Dad, and watch him search for me from a good vantage point. He would look all around the Eye and then peer over the cliff and perhaps see my shoe floating in the ocean. Imagine something else: what if I could get off the island on my own somehow and get back home? I remembered a part of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom and Huck were lost on an island and then came back to see their own funeral. That’s got to be every kid’s dream. Imagine seeing all those people sobbing over you; imagine the looks on Rhett and the Bomb when I suddenly appeared, back from the dead!

  But going to your own funeral was for storybooks.

  “Dad! Dad! Up here!”

  I wanted to live, and when I did die, I wanted people to remember me for what I had accomplished, not for what I might have been.

  And when I saw my dad throw up his hands and actually give a shriek of joy to see me alive, I knew it wasn’t in me to put them through that sort of pain. It would even be okay if he said he loved me.

  He was still shouting now as he ran towards me. Down below, Mom, good old guilt-ridden, smart aleck Mom, who I would never trade for another mom, rose to her feet and cried out as she spotted me doing a barefoot sprint down the hill towards Dad.

  I leapt into his arms and he told me he loved me. I didn’t bother to scoff, not even inside.

  “They told us they killed you!”

  “They lied.”

  “You remembered the Eye and the story about the coast guard. I knew you would!”

  “From now on, Dad, when you’re telling a story, I’m all ears.”

  * * *

  Moments later, after being reunited with Mom, I watched the coast guard load the men onto the boat. The captain was very apologetic, as if he felt the need to take some personal responsibility for the actions of a few bad Newfoundlanders. Dad told him it was not only the most beautiful province he had ever been in but the friendliest, and if the captain wanted to see, as Dad put it, “some truly badass dudes,” he should pay a quick visit to our “neck of the woods.”

  But I wasn’t paying much attention to their conversation. I was waiting for a chance to speak to the old Newfoundlander. There were things I had to ask him. When he was about to make his way on board, I asked the captain if I could speak to him. He was immediately collared and shoved in front of me.

  “How did you do some of those things?”

  “Yu means the ghosts?” he snarled.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it wasn’t very complicated. We had yu goin’ right from the start, that was the main ting. If yu get people into the right frame of mind they’ll believe anyting, eh? I heard yu barkin’ about comin’ here and we couldn’t have that. We’ve been usin’ this here place to stash loot for over a year now. No one comes here no more.”

  “No one? I thought people visited it as a sort of tourist attraction.”

  “Not in kayaks. Folks get brought out here in motorboats from time to time, sure. But buddy here knows all the guys who run those outfits and their schedules too, so we can keep tabs on them easily. But in those dinghies of yers? That’s somethin’ else. In all my born days, I’ve never seen that before. We didn’t know how long yu’d take, when yu’d get here, how long yu’d stay. And we couldn’t even hear yu comin’. We had to set it up so yu’d get the hell out almost the minute after yu got here. So we rigged a few tings, some ghosts.” He laughed.

  His laughter seemed a bit uncalled for.

  “The cigarette?”

  “Didn’t yu see that there spyglass?”

  “You did that?”

  “Sure. Worked didn’t it?”

  “And my name carved in the desk?�
�

  “Did that the night before. And then I snapped that there map up and down a few times, and then we popped our heads in and out of a few windies when yu were snoopin’ around with those binocs of yurs. We even lay in the grass by the boats to see if yu might tink yu saw a ghost. Did yu?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rang the bell in the church.”

  “Right.”

  “Tipped over some gravestones. Damn lucky ting yu tripped over one that seemed to spook yu.”

  “Well, the boy on the headstone was almost exactly my age.”

  “Really? That was a bit o’ luck. Too bad it didn’t work better.”

  He turned away from me and walked on board, his hands in cuffs, stepping carefully as the boat rocked. I turned away myself. Not far from us the captain was coming briskly out of the boat and approaching Mom and Dad.

  “That was St. John’s on the radio,” he said. “These characters have a list of bank jobs and drug charges as long as a minke whale. Seems like they thought Ireland’s Eye was a good place to stash stolen money.”

  “That’s not the only reason they’re here,” I said.

  “What?” asked the captain, looking at me with surprise.

  “What do you mean, Dylan?” asked Mom. It was the voice she used to talk to adults.

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out what I’d found near the Eye. They all leaned forward, anxious to see what it was. I glanced at the old Newfoundlander. He had noticed what was in my hand and his head had dropped.

  “This is from a book about Newfoundland history,” I said, “and this section is about Ireland’s Eye. Do you see this page? It’s about the cemetery. It reads, ‘The people of Ireland’s Eye had a practice of burying their most valued possessions with them.’”

  “So?” said the captain.

  “There’s a shovel—a brand-new shovel—up in the cemetery.”

  My parents and the captain looked like they’d seen a ghost. Then the colour in the captain’s face turned distinctly redder. He snapped his head around towards the old Newfoundlander and snarled. “Grave robbin’ eh, me darlin’? Isn’t that a fine practice for a gentleman like you?”