Habit of Fear (28 page)

The enclosure, the paper yellowing, was the poem “Where the Wild Geese Fly No More,” in her father’s hand.

S
HE LISTENED FOR THE SOUND
of Seamus’s car and twice went out to the great doors when there was no one there, the wind and her imagination playing tricks on her. She tried a last time to make friends with the donkey called Maud, but she would have none of Julie, the only improvement in their relationship a dubious one: now she waited until Julie’s hand was almost upon her before turning her backside and kicking out her heels. And Julie would have none of the goat, a fragrant creature. O’Shea squeezed milk from her morning and night, a rich, strong-tasting milk that made Julie slightly ill even to think about.

Seamus came while she was in the courtyard, and she was out the big doors to meet him as soon as he had parked the car. He caught her in his arms and lifted her from the ground. “This time it will take an act of God,” he said.

“Sh-h-h-h,” into his ear.

“Obeisance, not a challenge,” he said.

Julie led him by the hand past the stately Ford.

“Is Edna O’Shea your stepmother truly?”

“Yes.”

“And your father? Why have I not heard of him?”

“He’s been dead for seven years—or gone from here anyway. But Seamus, you have heard of him. Edna said you would know him under the code name Aengus.”

McNally stood stock still and turned Julie around to where the sun was full in her face. “Holy Mother of God,” he said. “I’ve been wondering since the night we met at Ginny’s who you reminded me of. I met him but the once, but I am never likely to forget it. I was doing a documentary film script on piracy and patriotism—how does that strike you?”

Julie grinned and pulled him toward the kitchen door. “Edna left early this morning. We’re alone here.”

“Are we? It’s about time.” Then, soberly: “I daresay she didn’t want to see me. I’ve moved away from my fervent days, and I don’t suppose she has, once married to Aengus. He was IRA, you know, and a Provo at that, yet the gentlest man I ever met.”

“Wait,” Julie said. “I want to listen carefully and hear everything right.”

T
HE TEA
was a lot stronger than what she had given him that night on Forty-fourth Street. “I’ve learned,” she said in response to his compliment.

“It was like a pilgrimage,” he said presently. “I climbed a mountain trail and found the cave where he sometimes lived. It’s all hallowed ground, the cliffs and the hills thereabouts, where saints once trod, it’s told, and the fairy people are still conjured by those who need them. And that’s what we talked about, Aengus and I. He’d been gathering the legends of Ireland’s wild west. ‘I’ll preserve them, never fear,’ he said, ‘though the land’s salvation might have lain in their destruction long ago.’ A lovely man, half-wise, half-simple. You know, I think I did hear that he was dead. Lost at sea, was he?”

“His boat was found ashore, but not him.”

“Are you satisfied?”

“No.”

“And the widow?”

“She may be—after seven years’ waiting.”

“Do you know where she is right now?”

“I don’t. We’ve walked miles and miles every day since I’ve been here, and wherever we went, she’d been there many times before.”

“You’re beginning to talk Irish, girl.”

Julie laughed. “I’m a chameleon.”

“Could we have a wee look around the place as long as we’re on our own?” he asked conspiratorially. “The Stone Ring has a dark history—smuggling, and it was once a prison for men they’d call terrorists today, during the struggle with the landlords.”

Julie was reluctant to poke around the several buildings she had not been shown by O’Shea herself, who merely said they were no longer in use. And she wanted to go before the woman returned, but Seamus was alive with curiosity and primed her favor with anecdotes concerning Aengus. He was supposed to have been high in forbidden councils, at one time a district IRA commandant. So it was said. The word gave Julie no great pleasure. Such bitter romance as
The Informer
or
Odd Man Out
belonged on television at home, where it seemed much more real. Then it occurred to her that Seamus might be weaving a story he thought she wanted to hear and was reminded of what O’Shea had said—that a bit of the teller’s dream goes into every tale told to the seeker of origins. She asked Seamus if he had ever been associated with the IRA.

“I wasn’t, but I had chums who tried to recruit me. If I’d been in Derry as a kid, I’d have thrown a few rocks and banged the pot lids to sound the alarm, but I don’t have much taste for radical personalities, however just their causes may be. There. I hope I haven’t offended you.” So he had not been weaving tales.

She showed him the tower room, where all her father’s papers were stored much as he had left them, notebooks now molding in the cold salt air. The stove looked not to have been lit in his absence. She was slightly hurt that Seamus showed no great curiosity about her father’s writing. Hypocritical: her own curiosity had been soon reduced when she tried to read them.

A sound like that of creaking hinges stopped them in then-tracks. Julie went to the stairway and called out her stepmother’s name, but no answer came. As they went down to look, one side of the double door banged in the wind. Julie was sure she had closed it behind them, although she had not bolted it, thinking they would soon leave.

“Edna,” she called again from the courtyard. Her stepmother might have returned to the house by the meadow door. Then from off somewhere she heard the
gee-haw
of the donkey. “Oh, my God, she’s out.” The goat was placidly munching near the kitchen door. But when they rushed outside the Ring to look for Maud, the only life to be seen was a donkey-drawn flat cart with two men aboard on the road to Ballymahon. The donkey brayed, and the driver laid a whip to its flanks that hurried it along. From inside the Ring came a responsive bray.

“That’s Maud—there all the time,” Julie said, laughing with relief, and when they went in, they found the beast on the other side of the scaffolding.

“Maud. After Maud Gonne, do you think?” Seamus ventured.

“Yeats’s beloved?”

“Cathleen Ni Houlihan herself, a patriot beyond the call. But some called her all the same.”

“I don’t understand,” Julie said.

“She was a woman of flesh as well as spirit, and that created a terrible conflict among the patriots.”

When they went out from the Ring a few minutes later and Seamus pulled hard on the great doors to be sure the latch had caught inside, Julie said, “I can’t really be sure: I may have left it open.”

“And you may not have done,” Seamus said.

She thought about the implications of his remark while he was putting her suitcase in the hatchback of the Nissan. She walked back to the ring of huddled stone buildings she had thought long abandoned and discovered that where the great doors on the entry were secured only by a latch and a hand bolt on the inside, the locks on two of the weathered doors she now looked at more closely were comparatively new, modern certainly. And in the loose earth close by she detected the wheel marks of a cart and the imprints of a donkey’s hooves.

“What do you think it means?” she asked when Seamus joined her.

“That she has a secret life interrupted with your arrival.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am and I’m not. It’s you that lived near a week in her house.”

“What
could
it mean?” she said.

“For one thing it could mean she’s storing arms that have been smuggled into the country. Drugs, I doubt, but something. Whatever it means, Julie, I have the feeling you’re better off not knowing.”

“She said something like that herself concerning my father. I believed everything she told me.”

“And why not? That doesn’t mean she had to tell you everything, does it?”

J
ULIE, HAVING DECIDED TO
do nothing about the presence in Ireland of Kincaid and, presumably, Donahue, saw no point in telling Seamus they were there. If she was ever to throw off the feeling of degradation they had cast upon her, it must happen during her visit with Seamus. While he drove, he reached his hand for hers now and then and held it until the next jagged curve in the road required both hands on the wheel.

“Old friends,” he said, not quite what she had hoped for. Then: “And lovers to be?”

She gave his hand a squeeze.

“Ah, love,” he said and drew her hand against him.

He stopped at Glencolumbkille, a village in a deep, solemn valley that gave way at its mouth to the sea. It was particularly desolate when the clouds darkened the sun. The cliffs, where barren of growth seaward, were a reddish gold, vivid in the sunlight, muted in shadow. “Even the pilgrims are done in by the weather this time of year,” he said, “but one must not pass this place without bending a knee to the ancient saints. It was from here that Saint Columba went out to convert the heathen Scots. He had a hard start to a harder end.”

“Are you religious, Seamus?”

“I pay respect, but I’m a little lacking in faith.”

“Me too. But sometimes I wish I had it.”

“Keep an open mind. You never know when it will strike.”

They went as far on the pilgrim’s way as the Place of the Knees, where the stone mounds marked ancient graves. Seamus made a quick and perhaps reflexive sign of the cross. They turned back, facing into the wind, and Julie thought of the slumbering Catholic in him. With a wife, divorced or undivorced, matrimony would not be his object. Nor was it hers, she told herself, although she had not felt as deeply as this for Jeff when she had married him. Or had she? It was hard to tell from this distance. Suddenly she realized that the distance between her and Jeff had grown wider of late and that there was hardly any pain at all in remembering him.

They returned to the car, and Seamus took a silver flask from the glove compartment. He unscrewed the cap and poured her its capacity of whisky. She drank it down and commented when she could get the words out that it was almost as good as orange juice.

“I’ll drink my fill of that in the coming months,” Seamus said and then added, “God willing.”

“In New York?”

“Aye.” He gave himself a capful of whisky. “Now, we can head inland for the far, far hills of home, or take a five-mile snag further on and I’ll show you where Aengus and I met and talked the clock around.”

Julie chose the long way, having come this far.

They drove over a one-lane road mostly through bogs and into another long valley. The black-headed sheep ran from them, and at a thatched, whitewashed cottage a man stood with a bucket in one hand and the scruff of his mongrel dog’s neck in the other hand and gave a half nod when Seamus waved at him.

“Are you hungry?” Seamus asked. “We could beg bread and a cup of tea.”

“I can wait.”

They came to where the road forked with a trail that had once served vehicular traffic but was now chassis-high with coarse grass. A lone cottage stood nearby. They could hear a dog barking when Seamus turned onto the trail and cut the motor. They got out of the car. Neither the barking dog nor its owner showed himself.

“It’s a hard mile’s climb,” Seamus said. “The gorse will be clawing your legs, but I’m game if you are.”

Julie, wearing corduroy slacks and a short down coat, had no intention of quitting. Seamus got a flashlight from the glove compartment and his anorak from the backseat of the car. He put the flask in the inside pocket and zipped the jacket up to his throat. He squinted up toward the headland. Julie shaded her eyes and looked where he was looking.

“What do you see up top?” he asked.

A human profile in stone, she thought, with an oval-shaped projection sticking out behind. “An Indian head?”

“That’s it.”

“Is the cave abandoned?”

“Long since by the looks of the trail, wouldn’t you say?”

About halfway up, the climb steepened and the trail circled around on itself with only a faint footpath going on. The Indian head lost its definition as they drew closer to it, mere juts of quartzite. The curlews grew more numerous: they swooped and screamed as though they might attack. Near the top the rock formation split into two humps, a few square feet of level stone between. The climbers paused and looked back. The car where they had left it looked the size of a beetle. Someone was walking around it, a man with a dog. “Let him,” Seamus said. “In the old days I’d have worried there might be Provos around who’d lift it. I remember Aengus saying when I was about to go down, ‘Let me know right off if they lift your car—before they convert it.’”

“Into a booby trap?” Julie said.

“Aye.” And after a moment: “A terrible phrase that—as though to be innocent was foolish.”

“They don’t call it that anymore anyway, do they? What? An explosive device?”

“A car bomb,” he said.

The wind caught them, gusting through the hollow between the shoulders of rock. They turned their backs against it and stood firm until it eased. Underfoot the mottled red and ocher stone was plateau-level, salt-and rain-washed, speckled with bird droppings and the empty mollusk shells the sea birds had dropped to crack open. With the slackening of the wind they turned and looked at the sea—sapphire blue with crinkles of whitecaps, lucid pearl at the horizon, and the sky another, lighter shade of blue, but piercingly clear. Three fishing vessels seemed to lie at anchor far, far out. Not at anchor, Seamus said: that was an illusion. Small gray and lifeless islands broke the waters near the shore, and strangely, they seemed to be moving.

There were fissures in the rock formations, and through one of them, Seamus said, they would reach the cave. He suggested that Julie wait until he found the entrance.

She was glad to stand there and try in her mind to make the place her own, as by inheritance. This was her father’s refuge. She felt elated, proud to be the daughter of a man who could live by himself in rockbound isolation.

The first alarm was the screaming of birds. Almost simultaneously the explosion staggered her, and she felt as though something had been clapped over her ears that stopped the sound. For only a second or two; then she heard her own voice calling out to Seamus.