The Death of an Irish Tradition (15 page)

Return fire, McGarr thought, remembering Keegan’s involvement with the I. R. A. He wondered if the “army” still meant anything to him and if he could count on support from others of them.

They had also gathered foot and tire prints.

About the booby-trapped car—standard gelignite that was practically untraceable. The device was artful, though, and had last been seen in the North during the spring. The prints on the screwdriver would also be hard to pin down: a partial thumb and index finger, but the left hand, which would narrow it down.

“What about the photos?”

There was a pause. “What photos?”

“From the Horse Show film. And the whistle.”

Another pause. “For chrissakes, Peter—take it easy, will ya? First you’ve got a murder, next a near bombing, then a shoot-’em-up a couple hours later. That damn case is a year old.”

“No, it isn’t. They’re all one.”

Yet another pause. “You’re coddin’ me.”

“I’m not.”

It was enough for McAnulty, but not Farrell. “I don’t know what you think you’re running up there, a bunch of Blue Shirts or an Inquisition, but it’s got to stop. I had some madwoman on the line yesterday afternoon charging you personally with harassment on two separate occasions. Then Fogarty with a complaint against Ward. And Michael Edward Murray himself wonders why you’ve unleashed O’Shaughnessy on his son.”

McGarr only raised the glass once more and watched his wife pause in the doorway, an image—her silhouetted there against the sunlit window of the general store beyond, hand on the jamb, looking about for him, her expression expectant—that touched him. In an instant he seemed to call up all their days together from their very first meeting in her father’s gallery on Dawson Street through all the flux of their lives together, abroad and in Rathmines, their hopes and aspirations and the trying times too, and he felt a poignancy—that the moment was over, that she’d seen him and now moved forward, that all those days and years now seemed to him to have gone by so fast, were over and irrevocable and dead.

“Well?” Farrell demanded.

“Well what?”

“Well—how in God’s name did they get my number? Now I’ve got to call the phone people in again.”

Ban Gharda Bresnahan, McGarr thought. “I think I can fix that.”

“Then do it and fast. I don’t know what the hell you’re up to and I don’t think I care.”

“Enough said.” McGarr began to ring off.

“But wait a minute—”

He paused for a moment, motioning Noreen to sit on his knee, but then he completed the movement. Farrell was an administrator and the less he knew the better.

The girl had realized that McGarr was trying to avoid Fogarty, and she carried their breakfasts in to them.

Paying for his drink, McGarr asked the barman, “How would I get to the Keegan farm?”

The man only eyed him knowingly.

“Or the Menahan place. Are you from these parts?”

“Indeed I am, Inspector.” He laid the change down. “It’s Bechel-Gore you’re wanting to see, I gather.”

“No, not exactly. First I’d like to see the Keegan house, if there’s anything left of it.”

The man, who was older—plump and rosy, like many in his trade—cocked his head and looked away, thinking. “A near ruin now, I believe.” And he gave the directions.

“And the Caugheys, do they have a place around here?”

“Now that’s a strange one, that is.” The man pointed at the whisky glass, but McGarr shook his head. “I saw the news about Maggie Kate in the papers and it stumped me, to be honest. I grew up with her and Hugh Caughey, and I’d swear that she was still unmarried when he was long dead.”

McGarr tapped the glass, and the man reached for the bottle.

“A sailor, he was. Lied about his age and entered the merchant marine just before the war. Ship went down somewhere in the North Atlantic. I saw in the obituary she left a daughter, nineteen. Now—that just doesn’t figure, wouldn’t you say?

“And then, Kate didn’t turn many heads, good soul that she was.”

“And Jimmy-Joe?”

“Older than me by,” he raised his eyes again, “a good ten years. Wild, it was said. Trouble. But he had a kind of style about him, as I remember.”

“Any others in the family?”

“Only one in the country that I know of.”

McGarr waited.

The man’s eyes moved from McGarr’s to Noreen’s and back again. “Married to Bechel-Gore. That’s why I was saying—”

Fogarty was waiting for them at the car.

“But what exactly did he say to you?”

“He insulted my person in public.” Fogarty’s thick eyebrows formed a dark, knitted line.

“But the words, man—what did he say?” McGarr had opened the door for Noreen and now walked around the small car and got in.

“They’re not essential.” Fogarty tugged at his hat, a tyrolean with a small spray of multicolored feathers in the band. His nose repeated the shape of the crown, a radical bend and large.

“I’d say they were.” McGarr closed the door and rolled down the window.

“Well—” he looked away, his lips working, “he insulted me for being bald, and I call that cheap, very cheap. And low.” He studied McGarr, waiting for a reaction.

“That doesn’t sound like Hughie to me. And with me on the premises, it’s a wonder he had to go afield.”

“And then—” Fogarty’s anger was nearly too much for him, “—then he called me…an innocent man.”

McGarr placed a finger alongside of his nose and tried to keep himself from laughing. Noreen had looked out her window. “I’d say you’ll have a job of it, proving that one in court.”

“But it was the
context
,” he insisted.

“I’m sure it was. I’m only sorry I missed it.” McGarr began to edge the car forward.

“Where’re you going?”

“For a little spin.”

“You are like hell, you lying bas—”

But McGarr was away.

Bechel-Gore had awakened with a start. Somebody had been banging on his bedroom door. Momentary anger flooded through him, but he quelled it. Only his accident had made him realize the lesson he could have learned as a young man at Sandhurst—that one needed to modulate one’s tone to command, and especially with these people. To shout, to swear, to holler elicited as much response as when one beat a balking ass.

He collected himself. “Yes?”

“Ah, sir—it’s Kestral. She’s got the colic. It’s all we can do to keep her on her feet.”

Bechel-Gore tossed back the covers and, using the grips on the stanchion over the bed, swung his legs out and tried to stand. He managed to raise himself up and lean his back against the bed brace, but his legs, wizened and slight compared to the rest of his body, wouldn’t hold his weight, and he sank back onto the edge of the bed.

But in spite of the activity that was strenuous for him, he said in measured tones, “How do you mean, colic?”

The other man’s voice was rushed, urgent. “Somebody’s been feedin’ her green apples. We found the spit-outs in the stall. She’s in a bad way, sir.”

“Has she gone down at all?” If she had, it was all over for the horse, as well as for his aspirations for the Horse Show, and perhaps even for his expectations of greater success for the farm at the bloodstock auctions there. Colic, especially from having eaten green apples, caused a horse such severe paroxysms of internal pain that it would throw itself down and writhe, thrashing about, tying its intestines in knots. The point was to keep Kestrel upright, keep her walking, and only then apply other remedies.

“I told them not to let her.”

“Did anybody think to drench her?” Again the even tone. Bechel-Gore meant the old and very Irish technique of trying to force a purgative down the horse’s throat by means of a solution in a long-necked, leather-covered bottle. Almost never did the gagging horse get all of it down its throat and into its stomach. Some nearly always got into its lungs and foreign-body pneumonia was the result.

And Kestral was Bechel-Gore’s attempt to show the international horse world that horses bred and trained on his farm, even the mare who had crippled him, could be made into a first-class hunter or perhaps, as in her case, even a premier show jumper.

“There was talk of it, but we remembered what you said, and I thought you’d want me to come get you up, beggin’ your pardon, sir.”

At least that was something. Fed her green apples, he thought. Somebody. He might have laughed, had he not pulled himself up again. This time his legs held him, and he took several shaky steps toward the closet. “Paddy, would you come in here, please? I’d like your help.

The door opened.

“Who’s with her now?”

“The grooms.”

“Which grooms, Paddy?”

“Will and Fritz.”

The best of a bad lot, he thought, reaching for his pants. And he really couldn’t trust them either.

But the man only stood there in the open bedroom door.

“Could you help me with these?”

“But, sir—you can walk.”

“So I can, Paddy. But not very well, at least first off like this.” He held up the pants. “Shall we try one leg at a time?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Of course, sir.” The man rushed toward him.

Bechel-Gore was well over six feet tall, and it seemed that his body—a barrel chest now covered with graying hair and a large but firm stomach—had been hung from shoulders that were rather too broad for his frame. With age they had become bony, and the reliance he had had to place on his arms, enlarging them, only emphasized the impression. His hair, like his mustache, was a light-brown color, almost chestnut. There was blond in the mustache but gray in the hair. His face was long and thin.

“Does my wife know about this?”

“No, sir. That’s why I came myself.”

“And the other matter. Has anybody been speaking to her about that?”

“Which other matter, sir?” The man glanced up at him. “Oh, that matter.” He looked away. “No, sir.” He helped Bechel-Gore into his socks, rolling them up from the toes.

Deaths and wakes and funerals, all their lugubrious interest in collapse—Bechel-Gore knew these people well, but his understanding did not make him any more sympathetic to them. All the woman had been was a blackmailer and a cheat, but he said, “I realize all this secrecy is…curious, Paddy, but please try to understand that we—all of us—have our livelihoods at stake, and you know how Grainne is. She’s—” he thought for a moment, “—impulsive and uninhibited and the death would most certainly keep her from riding in the Show. Afterwards—that’s the time I’ll tell her.”

Reaching for a boot, the man said, “But I don’t see how you’ll keep it from her.”

Bechel-Gore did, however. Only there in Leenane was it known she was related to the dead woman, and the change of name—Caughey, wherever they had gotten that—was suitably remote. They’d be in Dublin tonight, if Kestral could be saved, and Grainne wasn’t much interested in the…world.

“And it’s only fittin’ that she get a last look, I’d be thinking.”

“I’m taking care of that, too, Paddy. The funeral, the wake—but in a case like this I believe a post mortem—” Bechel-Gore left off, as though the whole matter was too difficult to consider. “But I’m having it all postponed, and she’ll be buried out here. With us.”

The man’s eyes shied.

With us, Bechel-Gore thought. He’d never be with them, not even if he divided up his holdings amongst them and allowed them to pursue the dreary, impoverished, agrarian idyll they cherished; they’d only think it was their due, that he and his ancestors and all of his kind were interlopers, that his having wrung cash from this barren soil was a passing wonder, luck, what have you, and they’d be content to let it go back to sheep and gorse. But that was acceptable to Bechel-Gore: letting them think of themselves as discrete. It took strength to bend events to one’s will—his own ancestors had known that, perhaps too well—and in a modern world ethnicity, patriotism, and other atavistic ties were irrelevant, if not downright counterproductive. But he wondered about the child and how much she was like them.

“Now, if you could help me down the hall and stairs, like a good fellow, I’d be most grateful.”

In the hall the man said, “Isn’t it wonderful that you can walk, sir?”

“Well, thanks to you I can, my friend, and it’s really not established. I’d like to keep it between you and me, if we could, sort of as a surprise for Grainne, for after the Show and after the…other matter. As a pick-me-up, so to speak.”

“Ah—I understand. Yes, that would be perfect, sir. Grand. Not a word from me. Not one.”

“I’m counting on you. You know how people talk.”

“That I do. I do, sir. And I will—I mean—I won’t, and that’s a promise.”

Across an expanse of tumbling, barren hills they could see Lough Nafooey to the south and Lough Mask to the east. There wasn’t a tree in sight, and the breeze McGarr had noted in Leenane was a gale that pushed them back and made Noreen’s skirt flap like a flag. But still, there in the blast, tiny, bright wild flowers grew with abandon, bobbing their yellow and violet crowns at a sun that thin clouds—more like a mist—only partially obscured.

It was bright and hot and, gaining the brow of the hill, McGarr had to raise his hand to his eyes, having left his hat in the car.

Below them, back the way they had come, was the ruin of the Keegan farm, an old, formerly thatched-roof cottage of two big rooms and several outbuildings that had fallen to rubble. As McGarr had suspected, the front door had been removed. Now sheep were using the crumbling fieldstone walls for shelter during storms. The carving on the lintel said
Keegan, 1831
, and McGarr had been struck by the fact that the family had managed on such poor, if beautiful, land to survive the Famine and the attendant deprivations of a century—the nineteenth—that had been perhaps the hardest of any on the Irish, only to have relinquished it out of—what had it been? He didn’t as yet know—torpor or ennui or disinterest during a period doubtless less severe.

And indeed the wind, soughing down the flank of the hill and through the chinks of the crumbling edifice, sounded like keening to him—a steady, low moan that rose to a chilling wail and died off, as though the mourners had paused for breath.