Back in the kitchen she tried to read. Again and again she had to re-read sentences. She could not disconnect her mind from the action just taken. It would be simpler to deal with what was in her head by trying some way to explain in a letter. She sat down at the kitchen table, and for almost two hours she wrote and re-wrote, tore up and started again. Finally she finished a letter which she left on the table:
Clonoula
4th May 1883
The kitchen 3:30 a.m.
Dear Billy, Sir,
What I have done and the manner of my leaving will I know enrage you. I am sorry. You left me little choice.
How you have behaved with me this past three years, you know full well, though every now and then you pretend to innocence. In your own words I had:
‘A roof over my head, the run of my teeth and a fair allowance. What more could any woman want?’
The little guilt I felt vanished when I read the terms of your will. The ‘love’ you sometimes profess for me and have willed for me is more fear and hatred of the people you have used and despised for so long.
Against all common sense, I have in a way always loved you and still do, in a way, and will miss this house where I was born and the fields where I grew up . . . for the most part happily.
I remain or more correctly I should say I leave,
Yours sincerely,
Beth ‘one of two’
She tore the sheet from the notebook and left it on the kitchen table, opened the back door quiedy, carried the two cases out, left them on the sandstone flag of the doorstep and then pulled the door to, dropping the latch soundlessly into its holder. As she crossed the moonlit cobbles, a vixen shrieked up by the ravine. It was answered by the old labrador barking defensively somewhere at the front of the house. She walked out under the arch, placed the two cases in a small, rarely used dog-cart up-ended in a lean-to off the back lane. She then went into the garden paddock with a handful of crushed oats in a bucket. Punch, lying under a beech tree, got up and snorted, a graceful apparition in silver as he walked towards her. He followed the bucket to the lean-to. She let him feed as she harnessed, bridled and placed him in the shafts of the dog-cart, methodically buckling, strapping and tightening chains to the collar and britchen.
She then led him through the trunks of rearing beech on the back lane. Above them, the first hint of blood in the east as the outbuildings of the yards fell away, a grey stillness in the fields on either side as she approached the main avenue, tense, listening out for Ward to call or whistle.
It was Punch who alerted her before she heard anything. She could feel a vibration from the reins. He stopped, suddenly trembling all over, as she asked:
‘What are you afraid of, Punch? Don’t be silly!’
Now startled herself, she began stroking his neck, talking quietly saying ‘it’s all right, it’s all right’, staring ahead into the half-light, listening. When she heard the sounds she knew exactly what it was and said aloud:
‘It’s all right Punch, it’s only the Dummy McGonnell, it’s only the Dummy.’
When the Dummy came into view, he was mouthing and grimacing, strange squealy noises coming from his larynx. When she could see him properly in the moonlight, he stood very still, staring at her almost with disbelief. He then turned towards the thirty-acre scrub alongside the avenue, brandishing his stick, waving it with mock heroic threat over his head, a gesture she had seen him use before in response to mockery or refusal of alms. What could have made him so angry, in the middle of the avenue at four o’clock in the morning? Surely Liam had kept well out of his way?
He now began walking towards her, looking round and pointing all the time and when she saw him closer, his eyes were huge. The nasal whining was almost like the whinnying of a horse. He kept pointing back towards the scrub. Without attempting to lip-read her ‘what’s wrong’, he took the reins from her hands, gripped her arm with the other hand and kept walking, turning Punch and the dog-cart and heading back up the side avenue towards the yard and going so quickly that the dog-cart wheel went up on the side of the ditch almost coping. Clearly he must have seen or heard Liam Ward in the trees and been frightened. There was no point in trying to resist or argue. When they reached the yard he seemed if anything more frenetic, pushing her towards the door and pointing back all the time.
He sat down at the kitchen table, his great bald head and jowls gleaming with sweat. He kept mouthing, showing his black rotting teeth in red gums, his lips making incomprehensible movements. Aware that she could not understand, he began sign language, trying to make her see what he had seen. Suddenly impatient, he gestured for a pencil and paper, for milk and bread. When he picked up the letter she had written to Billy Winters, she took it from him, put it on the dresser, and placed the notebook and pencil down in front of him. She then put her forefinger to her lips and pointed upstairs indicating that Billy Winters was asleep and he must be quiet. She went out to the hall and listened. Steady breathing as before, this time combined with a snoring sound.
When she came back to the kitchen, the Dummy was scribbling and drawing. He looked up for a moment, pushing the notebook towards her. He pointed at a chair indicating that she should sit beside him, stuffed a half-slice of bread into his mouth, gulped at the mug of milk and began pointing with a black-nailed forefinger at what he had drawn. For a minute or longer, she looked at it. She could make no sense of it. Then gradually something alerted her as he insisted almost angrily that she follow line by line what he had sketched. She realised now that she would get away if she really paid attention to what, had frightened him. He had established on paper the house, the yard, the front, the main avenue, the side avenue and the thirty acres of scrub. He had then pencilled in the short cut from the main avenue to the county road, then mime by mime with dummy language and mouthing he conveyed to her that he was asleep in the darkness of the scrub. He asked her did she understand. Yes, she nodded, she understood. In the laurels? Yes, she understood, and nodded again. He was asleep? Yes she understood. Something woke him. He saw by the the light of a lantern two men with spades, a rope and some kind of hammer. It had a spike. She questioned him saying ‘one man’. He shook his head vigorously to convey ‘no’ . . . two men . . . and the two men he said were digging beside a dead ash tree. It was very overgrown, difficult to approach but he crawled to where he could see them properly. Her mind had now moved from impatient attention to sudden and extraordinary alertness. Why, how, would the Dummy invent such incredible detail? Who were these men? What were they digging for? She pointed at the sketch and asked why they were digging. The Dummy lip-read and then drew a rectangular box on a separate sheet. On the box he put a cross. Underneath the box he drew another rectangle, pointed at it. When she said the word ‘grave’ he nodded, blessed himself, pointed at her and drew his long forefinger across his throat, pointing at her with his other forefinger.
Her heart had already slowed as the details emerged: the rope, the spiked hammer, the digging. Now she mimed to find out what the two men looked like. As he began to sketch on a fresh piece of paper, she knew what she would see before it was drawn, Ward’s profile, a foxy effect, stressing the nose. Spiky hair and two circles for eyes conveyed Blinky Blessing, and as he drew a narrow face she could feel the colour draining from her own, could see her hands whitening on the table and then the burning of tears down the coldness of her cheeks as the room moved into an underwater blur of rage.
It was the Dummy’s grip that kept her from falling off the chair. As normality returned, she covered her face, aware of a screaming noise in her throat, a sort of discordant viol to the Dummy’s rumbling bass. This seemed to go on for quite a while. She was aware that her eyes and her nose were running. She got up, blew her nose, composed herself, looked at the Dummy and pointed again at what he had drawn asking with her mouth ‘my grave’. He nodded, very slowly, opening his hands almost apologetically and shaking his head slowly.
She had no reason whatsoever to disbelieve
him. He was regarded as a rogue of sorts, but why would he invent such a tale? Yet it must be some kind of mistake, some kind of illusion or nightmare. Perhaps he had imagined it all. There was nothing to suggest that he was lying and she could see that he was frightened by what he had seen. She would have to find this grave herself, look down into it – the place where she would be butchered and buried by two men, one of them her lover whose child she carried. It seemed to her that nothing in the world could be more brutal, unbelievable or grotesque.
She now mimed to him that he would have to take her and show her exactly where this grave had been dug. With nasal whining and much head-shaking, he made it clear that he would not. She mimed that he had nothing to fear. He continued to refuse. Of course, he was afraid. He did not know that there was a ransom of gold in a suitcase in the dog-cart outside and that for this, men would kill. Without the gold she or the Dummy were no more likely to be killed than any other human under the moon. More and more she began to grasp the coldness, the callousness, the calculation.
She picked up the Dummy’s caricature, looking at it closely as if it could, in some way, offer an explanation. There was nothing to explain beyond the fact that it was a simple brutal plot. She would disappear, likewise the gold. They would look for her here, in Britain and America. They would never find her, nor the gold. It was safe. Both were safe. They had planned the perfect theft, the perfect murder. Nothing could go wrong. Disbelief now altered to an anger so intense it caused her to tremble. She could see that the Dummy now imagined she was trembling with fear. He put up his fists towards the door much as to say ‘don’t be afraid, I’m here’. She muttered and turned away lest he could lip-read, saying aloud ‘It’s not my blood they’re after, it’s Billy Winters’ gold.’ She now turned towards the Dummy and said:
‘If Billy Winters wakens we’ll be in trouble. He’ll come down here and put you to clearing ditches, gathering stones.’
He growled and frowned, pointing with a thumb towards his back.
‘I know about your bad back . . . You’d better move out now . . . you can sleep in a loft in the lower yard, go on now, and thank you for warning me: you’ve saved my life.’
She could see that he was puzzled by her matter-of-factness. She held the door. As he was crossing the yard she became aware of encroaching light. She untied the leather cases, carried them into the living-room and began emptying the gold back into the tray of the safe, aware that it was taking much less time than the stuffing of coins into stockings, but half-aware also that it was noisier. She was so engrossed with this unloading that only part of her realised that she was crying. Her nose was blocked again. As she reached for her pocket handkerchief she became aware of a sudden change of light, of a consciousness of something. Outside in the half-light, there was a sudden thrum of pigeon wings.
She continued to unload, and then knew that what she could hear was breathing. She turned, startled, expecting to see the Dummy standing in the doorway. It was Billy Winters and never in her life had she seen on his or any human face such a naked expression of shock, disbelief and hatred. She opened her mouth to speak, to explain. It was a scream that emerged as he came rolling towards her with extraordinary speed and agility, attacking her like a windmill, one whirling foot smashing her arm and scattering the suitcase and the coins, then the talon-grip of his left hand, while his right fist smashed her face. Before she could wrench away he had lifted and flung her twisting towards a chair in the corner of the room, which knocked over a pedestal and pot which smashed about her left shoulder. She heard him shouting as she crawled away: ‘Thieving, lying bitch,’ aware that he had snatched a hunting-crop from the mantelpiece and felt it now searing her back, neck and shoulders and she could hear herself screaming with terror and pain. She could not now make out what he was shouting, and when she got to the door she stumbled up limping and running away into the half-light till she reached the refuge of beech trees. She stood behind one and now heard his voice come hoarsely:
‘Run, run, run, thief to thief, run to Ward, Rome’s mug of Fenian poison; help him blow our world to bits . . . I married a viper that hatched a viper . . . Run, run, run, and keep running, you’ll never get my fields, my gold!’
His voice suddenly sounded broken as he shouted again after a silence, ‘Can you hear me, girl, run to the knife-grinder, out of this place and out of this life forever! Can you hear me? I never, ever want to see or hear you ever in my life again the longest day I live . . . can you hear me, girl . . . never.’
She had fallen to her. knees scarcely able to breathe. When she heard the porch door and then the front door close, she got up, crossed the avenue and found a path down through the laurels into the middle of the scrubland. She kept going till she came to the trunk of an oak tree. There she sat leaning against it, holding her pulsing face with both hands. One eyebrow was cut and streaming blood. There was blood in her nose and in her mouth. Two of her bottom teeth felt loose. Her tongue felt thick and too big for her mouth. She still found it difficult to breathe.
Far away down to the left a startled blackbird called out. Then she heard what sounded like the crackle of dry twigs underfoot. Her breathing almost stopped completely, as she listened. Again a crackle further down and the sound of branches swishing together. Ward and Blessing? She stood, moved out a little into the open, aware that she could only see with one eye, the other was blurred. She covered it, staring down towards the county road and the bundle of odd-shaped fields that tumbled away in the half-light towards Brackagh and Ward’s cottage in its thirty acres of whins and rocks. After a few minutes she saw them, two small dark figures emerging onto the county road. They stood talking for what seemed about ten minutes before parting, one heading down Clarna Brae towards Enniskillen, the other crossing the road and ditch and walking steadily towards the lower road. She had failed to keep her appointment with death. Clearly now they were looking for her, alive, to discover what had gone wrong.
There were clumps of reddish dock leaves growing in the area of light round the oak tree. She used some of them to clear the congealing blood from her lips and chin, aware now that the left side of her face was badly swollen, and that she could not close the fingers of her left hand. She continued to clean her face almost unaware of physical pain, her mind unable to take in what had happened and was still happening. And then she heard her voice saying, ‘There’s a grave somewhere here but no body to put in it.’ Then she was saying: ‘This is my body and this is my blood! What’s God up to? All’s wrong with the world!’
She began to make her way over and down through the laurels and rhododendron shrubbery towards the double ditch which led to the county road. She had played often in here as a child, knew exactly where the double ditch ran down the middle and the line that led to the dead ash tree drawn clearly on the Dummy’s map. Ashes to dust. She could hear a thrush singing somewhere and paused to listen. How extraordinarily beautiful the world could be and all the creatures in it, excepting mankind.
To reach the ash tree she had to crawl through the undergrowth and there it was, exactly as described, a gash in the ground not quite six feet deep, a chilling rectangle with a pile of brown, yellow and bluish clay on one side mixed in with shards and stones and, standing against the tree, a spade she recognised – the handle a shaft cut out of the ditch with a black horn on top for leverage, a good Fermanagh spade she thought, just the job for burying old cows and dead girls. Lying at the base of the tree was a masonry hammer with a long steel-pointed edge on one side, and the rope, exactly as described. The Dummy was not imagining. She picked up the spade and looked at it and heard herself say:
‘He loves me; he loves me not.’
She moved to the edge of the grave and stood looking down into it, remembering her mother’s burial. This, a much nicer place to lie, she thought, I’d almost have picked it for myself, peace and quiet under the sun and moon, rain, wind and stars, what more could any girl want? She looked around the tree and up at the sky. Fa
r below in the quarter-light, a scattering of small lakes in a haze of quilted fields and to her right, a necklace of green islands set in the lower lough and beyond them, fifty miles off, the bulk of Queen Maeve’s tomb staring out to sea.
What words did they use across a table or in a public house? And what had they planned between them? How exactly would they do it? A rope round her neck, a savage blow to the skull, that spike to the brain, prostrate then and twitching with twisting mouth and eyes open like any dying beast tumbled into this hole to sleep forever with clay and stones and worms. And what if not dead? To waken even for a minute in that black, suffocating dark, Dear Christ, the terror! And again she could feel herself beginning to shake all over. Crying then so bitterly, so loudly, that a dog somewhere began to bark in response. When the emotion eased, she heard herself say distinctly:
‘Dear God in heaven, will you punish him, my lover, Liam Ward? Answer me, God, because if not, let me tell you now that I will kill him, some way, somehow, somewhere, some day without pity and without guilt, or die trying; you have my oath on that.’
Death and Nightingales Page 15
