by Kevin Barry
The years gave in, the years gave out, and only the trousers changed—breeches of sackcloth gave way to rain-soaked gabardine, gave way to tobacco-scented twill, and on to the denim variations (boot cut; straight leg; at glamorous times, beflared) and then to the nylon trackpant, and then to the cotton sweats. The signal gesture of a Canavan in all this time did not change: it was a jerk of thumb to the waistband to hoick up the pants.
The Canavans—they had for decades and centuries brought to the Ox elements that were by turn very complicated and very simple: occult nous and racy semen.
– 8 –
As Canavan went about the country he was readied—in precisely the way that meat is readied when salted—by the saline taste of blood on his lips.
– 9 –
Sergeant Tom Brown steered the Primera in accordance with the stirrings of his chubby hands—call it feel, or divination. The almost half-century of his service had earned him an intuitive reading of an offender’s rhythms. He recognised the moment when a long hiatus in activity might break with quick flurries, the way a run of successes might stiffen the blood and embolden, the way the odds that were chanced could suddenly steepen, and most of all he knew the feeling of an imminent violence: it caused a clamminess to his skin and upset in his tummy.
The feeling was on him now as he drove the sea road on this Sunday of mist and fear. His hatred of a Canavan—of this particular and of the type—permeated his senses. Everything was off—his vision so blurred the road signs were a squiggled Arabic; his hearing out of whack as though shot by thunderclaps—and everything would remain off until the bastard was caught and done for.
“He’s not far,” he said, and as he rode sucked honey from a squeezable tub.
– 10 –
A pensioner in an old farmhouse on the Mayo side of the mountain—picture it forlorn—had on the Thursday previous heard a midnight rustling: she lit the yard lamp to find the Canavan with a slash hook raised and a finger to his matinée lips.
He took four hundred euros and a phone charger and for badness’s sake hit her a dig in the kidneys.
He had to be laid up someplace close.
– 11 –
The worry for Sergeant Brown was that Canavan could lay up now the way a ferret will lay up in the burrow with the rabbit it has killed, the forked spit of its tongue lapping at neck blood, the pointed teeth taking tendon and bone apart, the claws carefully tearing back the skin—so tender the care, almost loving—to reveal the feast of vitals within, a feed that might last for days, and there is no way of getting the ferret out again short of extendable poles or dynamite.
– 12 –
But it was merely patience that was required—a Canavan could not keep its snout down forever. It had to show itself always. The handsome dying face would seek again the light. Would take to dance floor or to bar stool. Would search out the windows left open against the humid spell or try the handles of the parked cars at the golf club. All a Sergeant Brown—the particular, the type—had to do was be patient and wait and gauge closely the stirrings in his hands.
– 13 –
From a barman in Enniscrone he took first word of the widow—her new-build dormer, outside Easkey village, was the latest known Canavan hide.
When the sergeant got there, at teatime on the Sunday, she was alone and already bruised. She had the dead-eyed aura of drugs about her and there were raspberry-coloured thumb marks on her neck and shoulder.
“Ah, stupid,” she said. “Stupid.”
As he sat opposite her and peered closer he saw that the mouth, too, was lately busted. The bottom lip was beestung yet with a rude sexual swell. Tan makeup did not quite hide a bruising to the cheekbone.
“I’d it coming to me,” she said.
Fucking eejit woman, the sergeant thought.
“How long were you knocking around with him, Sheila?”
Outside the sea rasped hoarsely; she rolled her eyes to show the whites.
“A while,” she said, and there was the smell of whiskey off her, too, a bottle of High Commissioner nearing its last on the coffee table.
Blended scotch filth, the sergeant thought.
“Where’s it he is now, Sheila?”
“I don’t fucken know, do I?”
“I’d say different, Sheila.”
“Can say what you fucken like.”
“Has he left anything here?”
She acknowledged that he had and it was in a bedroom thick with an unmentionable musk that the sergeant went through Canavan’s holdall—a Reebok with a busted zipper. It contained a phone charger, a pack of Nurofen painkillers, a change of sweatpants, and some briefs. The holdall was heartbreaking and the sadness it caused set the sergeant to his course.
He went back to her, as she poured the bottle’s last, and he eyed her carefully, and he was stirred for her and for the dying man both—their glow of life.
“Where’s he?”
“I said I don’t know.”
The sergeant moved in beside her on the couch then, and slipped an arm around her shoulder, and clasped her tightly to him, and whispered why it was best that she tell.
“The treatment could help him yet, Sheila,” he said.
She looked at him as a serpent might.
“Could be it’s Keash Hill,” she said. “The caves up there.”
Breathing fatly, Tom Brown rose and made to leave the bright, impersonal dormer—its walls as thin as eggshells—where the widow had been fucked and beaten, and he knew, inarguably now, that within the shadow of the Ox a killing was imminent, and would occur before the country turned from dark into daylight again.
He considered the purplish thrill of her busted lip.
“That’d want a stitch,” he said.
She threw hate at him as he left.
“Fuck off,” she said.
– 14 –
The caves at Keash Hill were no more than a forty-minute haul from the Ox Mountains and there lay the remnants of elk, wolves, bear. It was a place haunted by desperate mammals since the hills and mountains had cracked and opened—as the province of Connacht formed—a place with a diabolic feeling sometimes along its shale and bracken stretches; a darkness that seeped not from above but from beneath.
Sergeant Brown parked on a side road and walked the ledged ascent—he held a palm to his heart for fear that it might at any moment give.
– 15 –
The higher he climbed the more treacherous the ledges and just barely was the track a fat man’s width. His small feet were nervous in tan brogues and swam greasily in their socks. The last of the long Sunday shed light for a half-darkness; the sky had deepened in the haze; the corduroy lines of its vapour trails wavered on the fade. The half-night was shadowland. A killing will name its time always and it had named it for now. He found the Canavan sitting outside the last and highest of the caves, sucking on a cigarette, blithely, with his legs hooked up beneath him, and aware fully that the killing time had been named, and that this time he could not wriggle free.
“Get up,” the sergeant said.
The handsome eyes burned into the sergeant as he rose and Tom Brown wanted to belt him and he wanted to kiss him.
– 16 –
For the sergeant there was no decision to be made. Take one of them and spare one of us—an act votive to his trade. As he led his captive down the ledges it took just the palm of a hand to the small of the back—a jolt and sudden force, and the Canavan was over the ledge, and falling, and the rocks below made quick silent work of the hazel eyes, the languor, the cancer.
– 17 –
There was no victory in it. Sergeant Brown knew as he drove the sea road home that each tiny light that burned on the Ox might burn to light a Canavan child, and it would be no time at all until he was in long pants, and no time at all until he was driving,
and the sergeant would by then be cold and sober in the clay of Sligo, or at best in the coronary-care unit, and all that would be left to him would be the fear, which persists.
He feared now the summer night for its sly and sweetfound darkness, and he imagined on the night breeze a sardonic note, as though the Ox were taunting. These mountains, their insistences: those who would run would run and those who must follow must follow, and waiting—oh, wasn’t there always—some heated girl, so wistful.
Listen?
The tinkled chime of her laugh against the mountain black as she feigns outrage at a dropped hand, and now—listen—the tiniest brushing of the air as her eyelashes close and bring down the darkness: the falling-in-love-all-over-again.
OLD STOCK
The spring had been long and cold. The wind that came across the lake still had winter’s bite and the house was wearing its age and ached loudly in the wind, as though poorly, and I was myself sick in the bowel, the gut, and the gums. Or the nerves, in other words. Or the soul. I badly needed to get out of County Sligo, and it was word of an imminent death that allowed me to.
* * *
Early in May, the call came through that Uncle Aldo was on his way out up in Donegal. It was a miracle that he was even going still. Aldo had drank like a fool always and chased women and crashed cars; he burned summonses; he fell out of a hotel one time and landed on a taxi. I was the last of his close relations. He was my father’s only brother, and my father was long dead. It was the lungs, in either case, that would cart them off. The lungs and the dampness, I suppose. Here’s a very old joke—
Cause of Death: the west of Ireland.
* * *
Aldo had mostly been a figure of my childhood. His visits had been antic, unpredictable. I remember him one Christmas in plaster of Paris to the shoulder, lurching into the house, lame as an old pirate, a naggin of John Powers whiskey in his free paw; another time in the company of a foul-mouthed blind girl called Margaret; once so atrociously drunk he pissed in a corner of the guest bedroom and there was murder over it—my mother put him out of the house the next morning. But I had seen him infrequently in recent years and I was a little surprised that contact had been made at all and to be summoned to his deathbed like this.
I aimed the car north for Donegal and though my business was sombre, I felt a quiet soaring of the heart—I clearly welcomed this chance of a visit to the country outside Glenties, where my uncle was living out this last spell.
And yes it was very beautiful there. It was early in the Maytime, and there were dreamy glens and rooky woods, and all the rest of it, the mountains in their pure realm, and so forth, and being closer to the coast, the sky was clearer and the air that much quicker; the expanse of clean raw light was reviving.
And anyway Aldo was eighty-fucking-odd, I mean how devastated was I supposed to be?
* * *
His cottage looked across a bog to the Bluestack Mountains; the ocean was nearby, unseen but palpable. There were huge granite boulders around the fields, as if giants had been tossing them about for sport. The ocean hissed at the edges of the scene like a busy gossip. There was salt on the air and the local cars wore coats of rust. I felt somehow a little hardier and tougher in myself as I looked out from the doorway of Aldo’s place. I was in shade from the noon sunlight under the strands of a whitethorn’s blossom. I rested its tiny flowers in the palm of my hand and blew on them.
“Bad luck, they say, to bring it into the house?”
The doctor smiled—
“Are you superstitious?”
“More so than I used to be, actually.”
Once identified as family I had become in the usual way a functionary of the dying. I was consulted by the doctor and by a priest—Aldo had refused the hospital, abused the cleric. The doctor said there was only so much he could do. He murmured the usual words: we’ll try to make him comfortable at least. Aldo was fixed to an oxygen rig-up. He was pumped full of the good stuff. He was in and out of consciousness.
“Hours rather than days,” the doctor said.
And we agreed together in the native way that he’d nearly be as well off out of it.
* * *
Hence to the deathbed—
Aldo was much reduced; he was a remnant of himself already. It was heartbreaking, actually. He was thrown back against a cast-iron bedstead, a nineteenth-century original that I reckoned at a glance you could sell for two, two and a half grand in Dublin. In fact, everything in the cottage was antique and beautifully functional and reeked of a kind of authenticity I had a great yearning for. Uncle Aldo told me at once—the oxygen mask ripped melodramatically from his face—that the place was to be mine.
“Ah Jesus, Aldo,” I said. “That’s too much.”
He was going quickly. A new life yawned open before me. I looked out towards the Bluestacks, and I could hear the sea, and the mountains were hard-founded in the clear evening light.
* * *
When he could get the words out, in these final hours, they came in quick lucid rushes—he was on his last visits back to himself—and he spoke mostly of old jobs, old adventures.
“I fucked a nun once in Moose Jaw,” he said.
“Where’s Moose Jaw?” I said.
“Canada,” he said. “There was great money that time layin’ tar in Canada. She was after hoppin’ the convent wall of a Tuesday. This was the Thursday.”
Once he woke and took me to be his brother but then as myself again. With a weak sweeping of the hand, he displayed the room around him, the house, my legacy.
“The place isn’t worth tuppence,” he said. “No point selling it.”
He beckoned me to come closer—
“There could be a tumour the size of a small dog atein’ you from the inside out,” he said, “and you wouldn’t even know it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So what you should do,” he said, “is live your fucken life.”
“I have you now,” I said.
“And I tell you,” he said, “this place? Whatever way this house was set down…just here…on this spot…I can’t explain it but the women go mental fucken gamey as soon they get a waft of the place at all.”
With a surge of unnatural strength he clawed me towards his chest and rasped the words at me—
“Get them sat in there by a peat fire with a glass in their hand,” he said, “and they can’t keep the clothes on their backs.”
* * *
As he dozed off for a while—“dozed” may be a little pretty for what he was up to—I went outside and circled the cottage slowly. Aldo had a round of sally trees for a windbreak and they moved in the stiff breeze now to show charms of light. This place could wreak fucking havoc on a man’s prose if you let it. Perhaps the austerity of south Sligo had been the saving of me—looking out at endless rain and reed fields, you are not inclined towards a curlicued or ornamental style. But here the aspect was glamorous and drunk-making. I went inside again, scared of it, and I examined the old crockery, the time-worn flags of the stone floor, the poignant maw of the original peasant fireplace. I went to find Aldo alert again but for the last time in his chamber.
“Your father was a strange drinker,” he said. “Lazarus I used call him. He’d look to be on his way out after six or seven pints, kind of swayin’ and half rollin’…But then suddenly he’d straighten the shoulders, suck down a bit of wind, and go again for another three or four hours…Looking at you like a judge.”
“That was your father,” he said.
* * *
Aldo—the complicated event now of his dying face. This tic, and that tiny wrenching, and what did this last cloud that passed across his straining eyes tell? Aldo, proud as a hawk and poor as a wren, the closing of the eyes, and then at once the final thing. And suddenly he was without life or pain.
I went outside. I had a rush of true
feeling. This could be the place for me all right. Maybe the thin film of skin between me and the world would at last here be pierced. I would be at one with the natural things, with mountain, sky, and sea.
* * *
There is a belief, of course, that the love of nature is a type of spilt religion and to develop it later on in life, in one’s forties, is suspicious stuff indeed. And there was something unseemly in the way that I was almost weeping with happiness as I walked the lyric fields and lanes in the blissful June evenings, but it was in this manner, over those slow weeks, that I mourned my uncle, and more than I would have expected to.
* * *
I fell quickly into a routine in my new home. I was neat as a sparrow about my days. I was up as it got bright. I no longer took the metaphorical whip to myself as soon as I woke. In fact, I treated myself like a lord. I had soda bread toasted and slathered heavily with butter, a pot of strong tea at its side. Sometimes I added a splash of cream to my porridge, sometimes a little whiskey. I listened without panic to the morning news. The world receded beautifully from my new hide in the northwest. It was a plain but luxuriant life in the well-swept cottage, with the door left open to a fine and thickening summer. A solicitor’s office in Donegal town was on to me about the will and the deeds but I sailed through it all. Nothing was a bother to me here. I seemed to carry myself in a much calmer way. I was slow and deliberate about things. Suddenly I had an old farmer’s patient style. I walked the narrow roads and waved stoically to passing strangers in holiday rentals. I was a reassuring presence, I felt, on these roads. On a peg on the back of the kitchen door I found an old cap of Aldo’s—a proper Donegal tweed—and I perched it at a jaunty angle rising from my forehead. I began to get the sense that life is not much more than an inch or two deep, really—how you display the surface of things can dictate all else. I eased into my new skin. And I thought about Aldo plenty. The evenings could be a sad time—here I was among all his things. I believed that Aldo’s talk of women had been no more than an old man’s wishful thinking. He had been alone, lonely and sick here. The cottage was cold enough, even on these summer evenings, and I burned a few sticks for warmth and company. I drank not much, read sparingly—I had no great thirst, and I could not keep my eyes focused on the pages; I was encountering, I believed, some kind of transformation.
