By the Lake (43 page)

“We were looking for you as soon as we saw Jimmy Joe come early,” Jamesie said excitedly. “We want you to keep him above in the room till it’s time to leave.”

“I’m no friend of Jimmy Joe or his movement. You must know that,” Ruttledge protested.

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll be able to talk to him. We can’t have him down with everybody.”

“What about yourself or Jim?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “We’re wanted below.”

“Patrick Ryan is your man,” Ruttledge said in desperate inspiration. “There’s nothing Patrick Ryan would like better than entertaining Jimmy Joe McKiernan.”

“No, no. Patrick would want too much ground. He’s too bloody bold,” Jamesie said adamantly. “Jimmy Joe would be sick listening. It’s not much to ask. You’ll be well able. Tell him, Kate.”

“I’m out of it, Jamesie.”

“It’s not much. You’ll be well able. There’ll be whiskey and glasses and everything you’ll want.”

Ruttledge saw that he would have to refuse stubbornly or agree, and he wasn’t going to refuse Jamesie on this day.

They were put in the upper room. A tray with a full bottle of Powers and a big jug of water and lemonade and glasses were placed on the table at the foot of the bed. The pendulums of the four big clocks on the walls were still. The two men had not been alone together and had not spoken other than the daily courtesies whenever they met in passing since Jimmy Joe had sold them the farm above the lake all those years before. They had met in passing many times, especially in bars, where Jimmy Joe sold
An Phoblacht
. There were a few who bought it out of active sympathy, and more still, like Jamesie, out of a desire to please and keep all sides happy. There were also a few like Ruttledge who refused to buy the newspaper because they disapproved of violence and the aims of that violence. Jimmy Joe had always stood courteously indifferent in the face of acceptance or rejection. If the newspaper was taken he would hand the paper over and accept the coins with a smile or an inclination of the head; and if refused he would acknowledge the refusal with the same slight bow and turn silently away.

“I made the mistake of thinking the removal was due at the church at six,” he was the first to break the silence after the door had been firmly shut on them both and they had shaken hands.

“They think you too important to sit below and for some reason or another I have been appointed to look after you,” Ruttledge explained apologetically.

“I’m used to people looking after me,” he responded with
grim humour. “A lot has happened since I sold you that place across the lake.”

“More to you than to me,” Ruttledge said as he offered whiskey.

There were the explosions in towns he had been linked to, kidnappings, the making and carrying of bombs, murders, maimings, interrogations, executions, the years in Long Kesh; it was a source of some surprise—but finally none—that such a man should be declining the whiskey so courteously. Easier still to imagine him on hunger strike and proceeding to the final self-effacement with a quiet, unbreakable resolve. Others he would use pitilessly as tools.

“I gave it up. I used to enjoy it once but was meeting too many people and was too much in the way of it. I don’t even miss it now,” he explained.

“Would you like water or lemonade or a cup of tea?”

“I’m quite happy without anything.”

After a long silence, Ruttledge asked, “It must have been hard in Long Kesh?” more out of courtesy in the face of the silence than any desire to know.

“It was no holiday camp,” he answered.

He had led a breakout in which his arm was broken but insisted on continuing when others wanted him to turn back. The escape and his part in that escape had been made into a ballad that was often sung at gatherings.

“They thought you’d be too busy to come yourself. They were expecting someone else to come with the hearse.”

“I often have to get a man but I find it a relief to get out among people when I can,” he said with a watchful authority in a conversation that had become more halting and difficult. In the many silences, the talk and laughter, and words of welcome and condolence, entered the room with the clink of glasses from other parts of the small house. The street was now filled with people and loud with a murmur of voices and the occasional
laugh and then the constant sound of shoes changing position on the gravel or walking to or from the house.

“They are enjoying themselves,” Ruttledge reflected during one of the long silences, but Jimmy Joe McKiernan made no response.

“What do you do over there on that place of yours?” Jimmy Joe asked.

“The usual: a few cattle, sheep …”

“You can hardly make it into a living?”

“We would probably just get by if we had to—we don’t need much—but I get outside work as well,” Ruttledge said.

“What work?”

“Writing work.”

“Is that hard?”

“Hard enough. Being out and about in the fields is much more pleasant.”

“Would the birds and the quiet over there be useful to that kind of work?”

“No.” It was Ruttledge’s turn to smile grimly. “The quiet and the birds are no use.”

“What are you doing over there, then?”

“You mean I should live closer to my markets? It is where we live, a place like any other. You asked me about the birds as well that first day you showed us the place.”

“I don’t remember,” he said agreeably. “I’m told your uncle still visits you regularly.”

“He’s been coming every Sunday since we moved here.”

“I like the Shah. He doesn’t support us very much but he doesn’t stand in our way either. He takes life easy.”

Gradually, the talk moved into the easier waters of personalities and finally how the dead man had come home every summer since he had first left the place for England. So easy were these neutral waters that Ruttledge was fully expecting them to see the hour out when Jimmy Joe McKiernan took him by surprise
by asking, “You don’t seem to have any interest in our cause?”

“No,” Ruttledge said. “I don’t like violence.”

“You don’t believe in freedom, then?”

“Our country
is
free.”

“A part of it is not free.”

“That is a matter for that other part. I don’t think it’s any of our business.”

“I think differently. I believe it is all our business.”

Ruttledge knew that as he was neither a follower nor a leader he must look useless or worse than useless to this man of commitment and action. As far as Jimmy Joe was concerned he might as well be listening to the birds like an eejit on the far side of the lake, and he made no further attempt at speech.

“Do you have the time? My time is plainly untrustworthy,” Jimmy Joe said with his quiet, disarming charm out of the held silence.

“We could be making a start,” Ruttledge said when he looked at his watch.

“We might as well be showing ourselves, then,” Jimmy Joe McKiernan said.

Ruttledge opened the door and stood aside. When Jimmy Joe entered the lower room there was a distinct hush. Patrick Ryan came towards him quickly, his face wreathed in effusive recognition. As soon as Jimmy Joe realized Ruttledge wasn’t following, he disengaged himself from Patrick and turned back to thank Ruttledge for his company. Patrick Ryan then accompanied Jimmy Joe out to the hearse to carry in the coffin. The house quietly emptied. The door was closed. A woman started to call out the Our Father, and the Hail Mary was taken up by the thronged street until it swelled out to the people standing as far back as the cars parked in the fields.

Jamesie and Jim and Patrick Ryan manoeuvred the coffin out through the narrow doorway to the hearse with Jimmy Joe
McKiernan directing and helping. Mary and Lucy followed arm in arm behind. Nobody cried out in grief or anger. Jamesie’s face was taut and strained but only Mary was visibly upset. Patrick Ryan climbed into the hearse and sat like a stern, implacable god beside Jimmy Joe. It would have been customary for Jamesie to ride with the corpse on the last journey: he must have given his place up to Patrick. The hearse moved slowly out from the house. The mule was no longer at the gate but grazing far back in the field. People walked behind the hearse, thinning as soon as they reached their cars. The line of cars was still coming down the hill from the house when the hearse stopped at the corner of the lake where, on Sundays long ago during the shooting season, the guns used to gather. Once it moved on, it quickly gathered speed. The Ruttledges’ car was one of the last to join the procession, and at the corner of the lake they turned in round the shore instead of continuing on to the church.

A few days after the funeral the Ruttledges drove round the lake in the late evening to see how Jamesie and Mary were and if they wanted anything. At the corner of the lake they stopped the car in amazement. A telephone pole had been set down in the middle of the wild cherries and a line of poles stretched all the way out towards the main road. Some months previously the telephone company had offered to connect each house in the country for the same fee, no matter how remote it was, and nearly everybody around the lake had agreed to the offer. After all the talk and final agreement it was still a shock to see the substantial creosoted poles in place.

The street in front of the house was empty, the brown hens pecking away behind the netting wire, the pair of dogs barking the car to the open door.

Within, the house was altered. The clocks had been removed from the walls and were spread everywhere on beds and tables and chairs. The shapes of the clocks were distinct and pale where they had hung on the walls: without them the walls looked impoverished and plain.

“The place is a mess. I don’t even know if I can invite you in,” Mary said as they embraced.

“The little clockmaker was here all day. We couldn’t get some of them to start after the funeral so we thought we’d get them all looked at. Severals of them haven’t been telling the right time in years,” Jamesie said in a rush of words.

“He’s cleaned and oiled them. He’ll adjust them tomorrow when they go back on the walls. He says some are near enough to antiques and worth money and there’s nothing much wrong with any of them.”

“Like ourselves,” Jamesie said.

“Do you think for a minute anybody would give money for you?” Mary said.

“Lots of money. Because I’m a topper,” he argued. “That’s what Tom Casey told everybody after he married Ellen, who was a bicycle and ease and comfort to the whole country. ‘Was I as good as the rest of them?’ he asked her after he had performed on their wedding night. ‘You were a topper,’ she told him. ‘You were the very best.’ ”

“He’d disgrace you but I suppose we are used to him by now,” Mary said.

“Did you see the telephone poles?” Ruttledge asked.

“Saw them, saw them early this morning,” he stretched out his great hand. “They all went up today. They have machines, diggers, everything. It’ll be all done in a matter of weeks. The
men are from Cork. Everybody has a telephone in Cork. They have no work there now and were sent here. They go home at weekends on a bus and think this is a lovely part of the country.”

“So it is,” Kate said.

“Since everything is askew with the clocks, why don’t we take a run into the town,” Ruttledge suggested. “We’ll come round another evening when the clocks are back on the walls.”

They were both plainly glad to leave the house.

“You can’t twist or sit or turn with the clocks. It’s great to get out.”

As she was locking the door Mary paused. “Poor Johnny’s gone. It’s almost as if he never was.”

“Jim flew over to London in the aeroplane to get his things,” Jamesie explained. “There wasn’t much. The flat was in the basement and smaller than he said. Jim said it was a nice part of London. The flats were big but not all that posh.”

“Did he meet Mister Singh or anybody that knew Johnny?”

“No. No. He saw no one,” Mary said. “He wrote a note for Mister Singh and pinned it on the door. Johnny had a will made. We were all surprised. He left everything to the children. Most of what he got from Ford’s was still left.”

“That was very good of him,” Kate said.

“Johnny was always very precise when it came to himself,” Jamesie said.

“Poor Patrick took it very hard. He never quits about the acting and the plays and how on Sundays when everybody was blazing away all Johnny had to do was to raise his gun for the bird to fall,” Mary said.

“Patrick has his shite,” Jamesie said. “Patrick had no more value on Johnny while he lived than he had on anybody else that’s plain and ordinary.”

“Maybe Johnny has become big and strange for him now that he’s gone,” Ruttledge said.

As they passed the new line of telephone poles, Jamesie
counted them silently. “Fourteen in the one day. In no time at all they’ll be up.” They drove past the closed mart, past the two detectives standing in the alleyway across from Jimmy Joe McKiernan’s, the church, Luke Henry’s bar. As they were approaching the Central, Jamesie, who was leaning forward in an intensity of watching, called out, “Hold your horses. Stop. Look,” and Ruttledge drew in along the sidewalk.

The Shah had just come out of the hotel, and his round, heavy figure was making its satisfied way towards the station house, a knotted white plastic bag in his hand. At the same time the sheepdog emerged from the sheds and made his way across the square to the place where the white railway gates used to close. The sheepdog sat and waited there with its beautiful head raised. When they met, the words could practically be heard in the rhythm of the petting and endearment before the dog was handed the white plastic bag. The sheepdog walked proudly ahead with the bag but paused every now and then to wait with wagging tail as they went together towards the station house.