The Whore-Mother (19 page)

“What made you smile?” the woman said.

“Moll McCullough.”

“Who's she?”

“Schoolteacher.”

“Did I remind you of her?”

“Yes.”

“That's good. I was a schoolteacher once. We've been pouring penicillin into you,” she said. “You've had pneumonia. You'll be fine now.”

If she'd known Moll McCullough she wouldn't have thought it was good, and if she thought it was good why didn't she smile? Only her voice smiled. Or her voice sang at him, as if he were an infant.

“I'm going to give you a little clear soup. I'll fix your pillows. The doctor said only a little clear soup. We'll do as he says. He's a very good doctor.” More infant tones.

She sat close to him, on the edge of the bed, pulled him up to her with one strong arm and with the other raised his pillows, patted them, and then put both arms about him and cradled him. “My poor child,” she said, and held his face against her; against her breast. He could feel her nipple through the dress, against his mouth. His mother did that when he was sick, and he'd wondered years later whether she'd been wishing him back to infancy. But this woman pressed his face so hard against her breast that he coughed for want of breath. “Poor child,” she said, and lowered him down on his pillows. I hope she does that again, he thought; she gave him a safe feeling. An odd thought occurred to him. She can do that to me, he thought, she's known me for three days. I've never really seen her before.

She brought the soup and fed him, wiped the spills from his chin and chest. “Take your pills,” she said. “They'll keep you sleepy and you'll be fine in no time.” She lowered his pillows, covered his shoulders. “I'll leave you now. Sleep some more, child. You'll mend quick.”

He woke and slept and woke and it was like climbing a terraced hill on a crisp day. He felt better every time he turned to look about him. From soup to scrambled eggs. A week, maybe two weeks, waking and sleeping, taking pills and being washed. Two more days, in fact. On the third day time became measurable again, but by then he was enveloped in timeless kindness.

It was today, while the washing was going on, that he lay in pleasant acceptance, his eyes on the bun on the back of her neck and remembered what Pat McGladdery said one day in school about Miss Martin, who had hair like that. “She's got very sexy hair—that's pillow hair, Johnny boy.” It had fixed an erotic image in his mind and women in his fastasies had long hair that flowed on pillows. Mrs. Burke was washing his upper thighs when his penis rose.

His embarrassment colored him. “Don't fret, child,” she said, and moved her face cloth a little higher as if everything was normal. “God made you whole. Thank Him.” Her voice was flat.

He sneaked a glance at her face. It was as severe as ever and as cold as the face of a spinster vigilante beating the village bushes for sin.

But she didn't wash him again. “You can take a bath tomorrow,” she said. “I'll help you in and out in case you slip, but you're coming on fine.” She put him in warm pajamas when the washing was done, and piled pillows behind him. “The doctor's coming,” she said. “You were sleeping when he came yesterday. He just took your pulse. Sit up and we'll talk.” She helped him, then was busy about the room, tidying the tidy.

“Tell the doctor you're fine,” she said, lifting and laying about the room, and not looking at him. “Would you like to go to a hospital?”

“No. No.” It was too urgent. “No,” he said calmly. They could get at him easily in a hospital. “If you can stand me,” he said.

“All right, child. You'll stay. You need a mother.”

Did that explain her? She came suddenly and sat on the bed. “Before he comes, we need to have a frank talk.”

She was in a hurry. It harshened her voice and her look. “You raved a lot,” she said. “There's two paperback books in your pack. You're John McManus. Your name's in them.”

“Yes.” Her urgency frightened him.

“Was Maureen your sweetheart?”

She knew it all, one way and another. What in God's name had he been saying? Raving. Hopelessly, he decided he'd told her too much to lie. “My sister.”

“A man by the name of Powers? He killed her?”

“I think so.”

“You said a lot of names—this man Powers, McCann, Clune, McCandless. Everybody knows who they are. They must be the only television stars the law can't find. Were you a Provo too?”

“Yes.”

“You're not the kind.”

“No.” Bull Baillie saw it. She saw it. Powers and Clune saw it. Everybody saw it but him. Maureen would be alive if he'd seen it.

“Did you turn informer?”

That was the life-and-death question. The way she spoke, though? About Clune and McCann and the law?

“Not till they killed my sister.”

She was about to say something and closed her mouth. “How old are you?” she said instead. He knew she'd been going to say something else, something more important.

“Twenty-two. “

“Do you know what's going on in the North this past week?”

“No.”

“There's been nothing else in the papers or on the air for a week. The army got a big haul of Provos, bomb factories, a Catholic doctor by the name of McDermott and a lot of guns and ammunition. The same night twelve Officials were shot, including their top man in Belfast. The Provos issued a statement. They claimed they did it. They said the Officials informed on them and they gave them twenty-four hours to get out of the North. They've been killing one another for a week. The civil war the Provos wanted to start has started—but it's between Catholics. Again.” She stared at him steadily, from a cold, thin face.

His head was heavy. He could barely hold it up. He didn't want to hold it up. What was it he told the policeman when he phoned home? Houses, factories? Jesus, when they understood there'd be hundreds of them after him.

“Maybe you're wrong,” she said. “Maybe they're not hunting you. It's the Officials they're after.”

“No. They decided to give me the black cap before any of that. I was quitting. They tried for me and it went wrong. They killed my sister ... they'll keep after me. They never stop.”

“You're for England?”

“If I ever reach it.”

“Your gun's in the dresser. Top right-hand drawer. With your money.”

She was in a great hurry now, giving the room a last look over for anything out of place. “I'm making trouble for you,” he said.

“That's enough,” she said sharply, and put her big hands on her big hips, bracing her shoulders as if to ease her back. “Lie down.” She had made up her mind about something. She punched his pillows. “Give the doctor no more than the time of day,” she said brusquely. “Just yes and no. No talk.” She covered his shoulders. “I'm Mrs. Burke.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I told you that. He's Sullivan. Dr. Seamus Sullivan. He married my sister. She'll be here too, but you won't see her. Nobody else in Ireland knows you're here. The three of us listened to you raving.” She was nervous, building something inside herself. “She'll be here because Seamus comes almost every day.” She looked at him cannily. “You see what I mean?”

“No.”

“If a brother-in-law who's a doctor visits his sister-in-law almost every day, either she's sick or she has somebody in the house that's sick—or he's going to bed with her. Anybody who saw him would take the third choice. So my sister comes too.” She rushed away from that. “You were reading one of Thomas Burke's books.” He grasped at a change of thought like a change of step.

“Yes. I was re-reading it.”

“Good,” she said, and the corners of her mouth creased a little. She bent suddenly and kissed his head. “That's a good child. I'm Thomas Burke's widow.”

Then the doctor's car came and with it, he feared, hostility. So he braced for the strain, burning up energy, and Mrs. Burke went out to meet them.

There was talk in the next room among the three of them. It made him feel like a specimen.

“How is he, Kate?” A big deep voice. Not unpleasant.

“Sleeping. A bit better, poor child.”

“Child? He's a full-grown man.” A woman's voice, not far from Mrs. Burke'S, but harsher. “Some child!” That had overtones, and he thought with guilt and pleasure of his erection in Mrs. Burke's hard fingers.

“I'll get him into the Schull Hospital,” the doctor said firmly, making decisions for Mrs. Burke

“Am I a useless old woman? Is that it, Seamus?”

“That's the bloody point. You're not an old woman at all. That's what has your sister worried. That ‘child' you're talking about has all his parts, full size.”

“Watch your tongue,” Mrs. Burke said, but it wasn't a rebuke.

“Where do you sleep, Kate?” the sister asked sharply.

“You've got the mind of a horny curate,” Mrs. Burke said, as if her sister amused her.

“Kate!”

“By God, I think you need an invalid in the house, Kate,” the doctor said. “Can't you do without a patient?”

“Go and see the child, Seamus.”

McManus closed his eyes and waited for the doctor.

He was a hefty man with a weathered face. He probably spent as much time with a rod in his hand as he did at bedsides. “You're the great sleeper,” he said to McManus, and took his wrist and stuffed a thermometer in his mouth. “And you have the constitution of a horse.”

McManus did as Mrs. Burke had told him to do. “You talked a lot,” the doctor said.

“Sir?”

“Why did you run to here?”

“It was far.”

“Nowhere's far in Ireland. It's a big saucer. Didn't they teach you that in school?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The Civil War was over fifty years ago. The last revenge killing that came out of it was only done a few years ago.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'm sure you'll get the point I'm about to make. The Irish have a lot of unlovely things in their heads and hearts. So as soon as you're ready to move, I'm going to move you.
Out
of here. I'm not referring to Mrs. Burke's house, boy. I'm referring to the whole of West Cork. Right
out
. I'll smuggle you to the Cork Airport, and I'll leave you there. After that it's sink or swim. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fair enough?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We don't want them around here. They
are
here. But their guns aren't going and we don't
want
them going. We don't want executions, black caps—none of that stuff here. Keep it in the North. Have you got me?”

“Yes.”

“I won't labor the point.” But he labored it. “The minute you can move, I move you. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Seamus,” Mrs. Burke said from the bedroom door, “there's plenty of sick people in Schull.”

“Do you want that fuzz off your jaw?” the doctor asked him.

“No, sir.”

“Holy God, d'you think that'll hide you?”

“Schull, Seamus!” said Mrs. Burke.

“What the hell got into you, boyo? You're not a back-street gunman....”

“Seamus!”

McManus watched her at the door with them. She waved them away with thanks and closed the half-door and shut the snib on the incongruous Yale lock. There was the first and odd little smile on her face. It was like the little smile he used to see on his father's face when evening came and he locked up the house and came to them and said with a great sweetness and contentment in his voice, “Well, the world's shut out.” The family's private world was waiting and secure.

A rich sense of safety and of home flowed in him.

She came again into the room, her narrow face softened and private and warm, as if from some small victory. “We—ll,” she said, and brought him a woolen dressing gown. “Come and rock by a nice turf fire and we'll talk a bit, child.”

And he thought, I like the way she calls me child.

She was excited in a quiet fashion. The sign wasn't on her face; faintly in her voice, maybe; mostly in her talk. She chattered as she whipped eggs in a bowl; the chatter was idle in a way, but it all turned on one subject, purposefully he thought: Thomas Burke. She didn't call him Tom, or my late husband. It was always Thomas Burke.

Thomas Burke was a Name when McManus was fifteen and wandering the summer hills with more books than clothes in his pack. Burke was a Bad Name. His books were banned in Dublin, acclaimed everywhere else, and fought over in the Dublin press, “like mongrels at a meat bone,” she said.

The banning started with Thomas Burke's first book,
Judas
. It was a book about political and social obscurantism, Catholic Nationalism masquerading as patriotic Republicanism, about devious Irish treachery, about politicians “whose only talent through the years of independence has been for talking out of both sides of their mouths,” about malignant parochialism, malice and hungry sex. The book was a rejected lover's iconoclasm.

“Thomas Burke took me to America,” she said, as if he had been a lover and not a husband. “He got to be a professor of English at New York University and I taught school. He wrote all his books in America. But he always wanted home to change Ireland and when the books made money, we bought this place and altered it, put in the electric, built on the bathroom and a pump and plumbing from the well. The little end room is his study.” Is, she said.

The cottage had three rooms, the room with the bed, the electric kitchen, and the little end room full of books, a desk, a chair, and a cupboard. There was only one bed.

Where did she sleep? His sleeping bag was rolled up in a corner of the kitchen. His heart warmed to the lonely, generous woman. He slept in the good bed they brought back from America—Colonial, they called it?—and she slept on the floor in his bedroll. And didn't explain where she slept to the vigilant sister.