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  For St. Patrick did only banish the poisonous worms, but suffered the men full of poison to inhabit the land still; but his Majesty’s blessed genius will banish all those generations of vipers out of it, and make it, ere it be long, a right fortunate island …

  —SIR JOHN DAVIES,

  Attorney General of Ireland, to the Earl of Salisbury, 1606

  We have murder by the throat.

  —LLOYD GEORGE,

  after dispatching the Black and Tans to Ireland in 1920

  The Child

  History is everywhere. It seeps into the soil, the subsoil. Like rain, or hail, or snow, or blood. A house remembers. An outhouse remembers. A people ruminate. The tale differs with the teller.

  * * *

  It’s like no place else in the world. Wild. Wildness. Things find me. I study them. Chards caked with clay. Dark things. Bright things. Stones. Stones with a density and with a transparency. I hear messages. In the wind and in the passing of the wind. Music, not always rousing, not always sad, sonorous at times. Then it dies down. A silence. I say to it, Have you gone, have you gone. I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be. Battles, more battles, bloodshed, soft mornings, the saunter of beasts and their young. What I want is for all the battles to have been fought and done with. That’s what I pray for when I pray. At times the grass is like a person breathing, a gentle breath, it hushes things. In the evening the light is a blue black, a holy light, like a mantle over the fields. Blue would seem to be the nature of the place though the grass is green, different greens, wet green, satin green, yellowish green, and so forth. There was a witch in these parts that had a dark-blue bottle which she kept cures in. She was up early, the way I am up. She gathered dew. Those that were against her had accidents or sudden deaths. Their horses slipped or their ponies shied on the hill that ran down from her house. She had five husbands. Outlived them all. I feel her around. Maybe it is that the dead do not die but rather inhabit the place. Young men who gave their lives, waiting to rise up. A girl loves a sweetheart and a sweetheart loves her back, but he loves the land more, he is hostage to it …

  Gurtaderra is the Valley of the Black Pig. The last battle will be fought there. The Orangemen will meet the Irish Army at Cloonusker and Sruthaunalunacht will run blood. The Irish will be driven back through Gurtaderra and Guravrulla, but the tide will turn at Aughaderreen and the Orangemen will be driven back and defeated. In the morning it would be as easy to pull an oak tree out of the ground as to knock an Orangeman off his horse, but in the evening a woman in labour could knock him with her shawl.

  It says that in the books.

  The Present

  “…Bastards … bastards … baaas … tards.” He says it again and again in each and every intonation available to him, says it without moving a muscle or uttering a syllable, scarcely breathing, curled up inside the hollow of a tree once struck by lightning; cradle and coffin, foetus and corpse. Bastards. English bastards, Free State bastards, all the same. Dipping, dipping. The helicopter wheeling up in a great vengeance, giving him a private message of condolence: “We’ve got you, mate … We’ve got you now,” and the lights madly jesting on the fog-filled field. They’ll not find him. Not this time. He has nine lives. A fortune-teller told his mother that. Three left. He scrunches himself more and more into the tree. Lucky not to have sprained an ankle or broken it when he jumped. Jumped from the moving van, said nothing to his comrades. They all knew. The game was up, or at least that bit of the game was up. A car tailing them from the time they left the house. Someone grassed. Who. He’d know one day and then have it out. Friends turning traitor. Why. Why. Money or getting the wind up. Deserved to die they did, to die and be dumped like animals, those that informed, those that betrayed. Bastards.

  The grass smells good to him, and after three months cooped up in a house in a town, he’s tuned to the smell of grass and the fresh smell of cow dung, to the soft and several lisps of night. He knows his country well, McGreevy does, but only in dark. The dark is his friend. Daylight his enemy. Who set him up. Whom can he trust, not trust. When the fucking Valentino pilot gets tired of his antics in the sky he’ll make his way, in near the ditches, across to the pinkish haze of a town. He’ll skirt it and go on South, the sunny South. This journey he will make no matter what. He is the sole player. His to do. Even if it’s his last. The whirr comes near and far like sounds heard in a half sleep. The fuckers. Wasting their dip lights and wasting their fuel. His mates in the van are protoplasm now, which is why there was no time for the sweet goodbyes. War in the sky and war on the ground and war in his heart.

  He says the rhyme that he knows to calm himself. It is his jingle, it sees him through, except the bastards in the beetle are doing cartwheels in the sky, trying to frighten him, to get him off course.

  * * *

  “Daddy’s home … Daddy’s home.”

  What sort of mood would Daddy be in? Sometimes they can tell by the slam of the car door. Sometimes not. Rory. He walks into the hall past his wife and towards the lounge, where a tea tray is laid with cups and saucers and scones.

  “Did you get the fuel for the barbecue?” Sheila asks.

  “I didn’t.”

  “I asked you.”

  “I didn’t,” he says, and takes a bite out of one of the scones, then drops it and asks what time is dinner.

  “Never anything I want, never ever, except what time is dinner.”

  “You live in clover,” he says, and gestures to a new carpet, the cuckoo clock, the sideboard crammed with ornaments, antiques he has paid for with his blasted sweat and his blasted arse. Women. Goods. Wardrobes. Finery. Jewellery. Lolly. There was a time when this avarice of hers was a charm in itself and never did he go for a trip or do a job without bringing back some little thing to hang on her. Once it was a golden seal that she thought was a duck and they laughed buckets over it, which was how the nickname Duckie had come to her. There were lots of little things like that.

  “How do I cook this thing?” Sheila says, returning and holding up in its bloodied bag the shins of the deer he had shot a month before. They were sick of eating it. Rory loved to get up early on Sunday morning and go into the woods with his rifle, to track and shoot deer. She never knew whether it was the pure sport of it or whether it was for another reason, and she never asked. There were things you did not ask a policeman that you were married to. A war of a kind was going on, though no one admitted it, a war in bursts, young men coming down from up North, coming down to rob banks and post offices, postmistresses in lonely stations in dread of their lives, ordinary folk too in dread of these faceless men with their guns and their hoods. One had been shot dead on a road not far away. It was in the papers, a photograph of the very spot, details of the rounds of am
munition, the nickname of the victim, his comrade who got away, who hijacked a timber lorry and held a guy at gunpoint for three hours. It was well known, well reported, discussed again and again: the number of rounds fired, the angle at which the Guard shot, the type of wound, the length it took your man to die. Later the Guard was awarded a medal for valour, one of the very few. They met him at a dinner dance and shook his hand. Men like him and her husband lived with that eventuality and it’s what made them edgy, made them worry about a mystery caller or look under their cars when they went out. Once, she had asked Rory what he would have done if he had been that policeman and he said the same, the very same, it’s either them or us, him or me. For the most part, of course, life was uneventful and Rory’s weekly adventure was Sunday mornings, getting up at five and going off to shoot deer. It got him out of the dumps. He hated his boss and hated the other Guard. The three wise men, they were called. In a small barracks, bickering. The deer that he had brought home made a little trail of blood up the path, and somehow she could never forget it on account of its delicacy. The children watched while he made a big show of skinning it, then cutting it, then making parcels for the deep freeze. The children wrote the labels but weren’t sure which bits were which. She would be glad to see the end of it.

  “I said how do you want this cooked,” Sheila said, holding up the bag fuzzed with blood, which looked gruesome to her.

  “Stew it,” he said. He was in a foul mood. Manus had put the boot in with the superintendent and blown his chances.

  “There’s no need to snap,” she said.

  “I’m not snapping,” he said, and looked at her with a sort of apology. At least she kept thin. Every day he battled with his damn weight, and now it was his teeth killing him.

  “The abscess in my back tooth is flaring up again,” he said, and tapped his tooth with his ringed finger. It was a Claddagh ring she had given him and he had said when he put it on that he would never take it off, that it would go with him wherever, whatever, and it did, for all eternity.

  “What’s Manus up to now?” she said, softening a bit. There was no point in these rows; they had a nice bungalow, enough to eat, their children were hardy, and all who visited commented on the beautiful view, were offered a look through the binoculars and told to veer in on the various sights on the lake—stone monasteries and oratories, the several islands, the houseboats moored on the far side, mostly white boats.

  “I’m stuck … We’re stuck … Thanks to Manus.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I read the minutes.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Oh, Manus talk, how I lacked vision … Visions … I stop people for nothing … I am uncouth … I am unpopular.”

  “We’re all right … You love going up the country, going into the forest and shooting deer,” she said, taking his part now and going with him in imagination in the early morning to the wooded tracks under the purple mountains, a moistness in the air, young trees and old trees dripping, astonishment when two or three of these haughty creatures appeared and stood still, then the bang-bangs, one of them felled, the remainder vanishing like wisps of smoke. He had described it to her once in bed and she had liked it, heard another voice altogether, softer, deeper, and somehow truthful.

  “Manus … My bête noire.”

  She knew what he meant. Knew that Manus had it in for him since that time when he arrested the wrong man for the anonymous letters. Was sure it was that man, that Englishman who had come in a caravan to live. Sure it was him with his ponytail and his earring and his homemade beer. That Englishman. Pornographic letters sent to one woman after another, disgusting. He thought he had the man a dead cert, except it turned out he had the wrong man, and for that he was put over the coals.

  Without addressing either his mother or father Caimin crossed the room and turned on the television. A cure for dandruff featured a wife rebuffing her husband’s advances, but sometime later his dandruff-free hair made him irresistible.

  “That bloody thing,” Rory said, and shouted to his son to turn it off, when his whole world, the one with Manus, the one in the forest in the morning, the one with his wife when they lay down together, the one alone after she had gone out to work in the morning when he pondered, the one when he went to confession, all the worlds he had known suddenly went on revolve.

  “Jay-sus … Christ Almighty…” He was up and crossing over to make sure that this was not a mistake of some kind; he was listening to the announcer telling in a dry and polished voice how a terrorist had got away, had jumped from a moving vehicle and disappeared despite dog and helicopter search.

  “Fucking imbeciles,” he said.

  “Rory!” his wife said curtly.

  Kneeling now, close to the set, he asked the lady announcer who was reporting war in another part of the world to tell him how the British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Garda, and an entire operation could let a guy who had got away before, who was known to be a pimpernel, go into a field and vanish. How, unless he was a fucking buccaneer. Even in his outrage he gave the fella credit and said, “That’s my boy McGreevy, that’s my baby.”

  “Maybe he’s a spaceman,” his little daughter Aoife piped up.

  “I hope he comes this-a-way,” he said, waving his fist at the television.

  “I hope he doesn’t,” Sheila said, reminding him of the foreigner who had given masses of employment and who was taken hostage for almost three months and was now having to have treatment in Cologne or wherever he came from.

  “We don’t want him this-a-way,” she said, and put her arm around her little girl as a protection.

  “I thought we agreed never to talk shop,” he said.

  “This isn’t talking shop, this is self-preservation,” she said, and stormed out, adding that if he wanted dinner he could cook it.

  “Cúchulainn did that, Daddy … He ran the length of Ireland, kicking a ball,” Caimin said, remembering a hero from his schoolbook.

  “Don’t you be getting any ideas,” Rory said, and looking around at the room he saw the emblems of his youth, his proud youth, the cups and ribbons, trophies from his great athletic days, and he thought of the young man leaping out of a moving car and the thrill, the thrill that was part and parcel of danger.

  “Ducks,” he said through the open door, “don’t bother with the damned shins,” adding that he’d pop down and get a takeaway and they’ll have an al fresco by the fire.

  “I don’t like curry,” Caimin said, and asked if he could have crisps.

  “I thought we were saving for Christmas,” Sheila called in.

  “What’s that wine you like … that Bulgarian?” he said, and before she could answer, he was out the hall door with a stride, a stride in which he tried to imitate a young man who had sprung from a moving car, and he remembered the hero he had once been, the adrenaline when he went out on the pitch, the puck of the hurley, the slithering, the crowds roaring, the goal, the goals, his wizardry and the adulation of the crowds booming in his ears.

  * * *

  The manure bags don’t soak up the wet, but at least they are cover. Three plastic bags and a manger of straw. Like Jesus. Not that he’s praying. Others pray for him, but he does not pray; he’s seen too much and done too much and had too much done to him to kneel down and call on a God. Some of what he’s done he’s blocked, he’s had to, but inside, in the depth of his being, he feels clear and answerable and circumspect.

  A few hours’ sleep and the damp will have dried into him. If they took an X-ray of him he would be all water, all rain. His two mates will be being buried now, the flags, the national anthem, the salute, and that’s it. Forgotten. He’s had deaths in his own house, so he knows what it is through and through, and still they call him an animal. Well, insofar as he sleeps in a manger, he is one. A child’s coffin, a wife’s coffin, he’s seen one but not the other. He’s seen the child’s, brought, handcuffed, police on every side, searching the white
habit for explosives. Couldn’t look at the little face, the little bundle of frozen wisdom that played games with him in the jail on visiting day, hid under the chair when it was time to go, went missing, said she was missing Minnie Mouse and her daddy was Mickey Mouse and he needed her to stay all night. With the angels.

  He scrapes the muck off with the end of a spade; the water from a pan that he found under a barrel is brackenish and tasting of galvanise, but he drinks it all the same. His hunger has gone. If they come and find him, that’s it. They won’t break him. They know they won’t. They know that. Jumpy lads, all lip, giving statements, one statement and then another and another. Can’t take the heat. He can take anything, heat, cold, even the electric wires flaring his inner temples. The certainty runs deep. It has to. It’s all he has left.

  Half-asleep; the fields he’s crossed and the drains he’s fallen into come weaving in over him. He thinks he’s eating hay, chewing it like a cow, and then chewing the cud. Who shopped him? The ones to trust and the ones not to trust? Like a terror that comes over them, as if their Maker told them to balance the books. Touts. Traitors. Warmer now. Not the warm of a bed or her body but a dank mineral warmth. He’ll know one day and he’ll settle up. Sleep, Jesus, sleep. Straw streaking across his face and his mind spinning like meat on a spit.

  “What the feck … What the feck … They’re here.” He reaches for the rifle next to his chest, his finger at one with the trigger. Through the narrow slit in the stone wall of the loft he sees nothing, neither a vehicle nor a figure. It’s a cow—moaning for all she’s worth. All he bloody needs. Where is she? Where are you?

  “Where are you, Peg … Peg?” he says. Why he calls her Peg he does not know. The sound is low, long-drawn-out, enough to alert the farmer, his dogs, duck squads, the lot. Peering over the ladder he sees her down below, too big gormless eyes moiling in her head and her body in spasm. She has come in to calf.