The Whore-Mother (28 page)

“Yes.” He felt treacherous.

The doctor saw daylight. “All right. Come on. The car's at the crossroads. . . .”

Mrs. Burke walked to the bed. Her face old and desolate. She stood silent for a moment, staring at the bed. “You want to go.”

“They'll find me.”

“No.”

“Yes, they'll find me. They'll kill me. You come too.”

She dropped the dressing gown at her feet. Her belly bulged, her breasts drooped, her hips were creased by skin from which past substance had retreated. She got into bed, “You too,” she said, and pulled the covers up to her chin.

“I can't go without you, Kate. She'll eat me alive,” the doctor pleaded, seeing only surfaces. “Please, Kate.”

“Take
him,” she said.

“Take him where?” The voice from the kitchen made their nerves leap like plucked strings. Cleery and another man and a thin pale youth were standing inside the half-door. Cleery waved his big gun at them. “Who thinks he's going anywhere, missus?” His white face sweated bitterness. He stepped into the bedroom and tapped his gun carelessly on McManus's shoulder.

It was the combination of bitterness, carelessness, and strutting gun-power that petrified McManus. He had seen it in the Provos, in innumerable acts of intimidation against helpless Catholic families unwilling to have their houses used as snipers' nests, or when strutting boys were collecting dues for “the Cause” or hunting informers or doubters or critics, or defaulters or non-cooperators. . . . The Officials were a little more stable, a little more political, but the gun was their answer also when the skein of human behavior was even slightly tangled. So he said nothing, for he didn't know what answer would meet Cleery's need and the wrong answer could pull the trigger and resolve the doubts in Cleery's mind. There was no point in cold bravery, even if he had been capable of it, for bravery might humiliate Cleery and therefore enrage him beyond restraint, for courage placed a limit on their power to terrorize and that could not be endured; fear fed their contempt for the fearful . . . McManus merely looked and his heart boomed in his ears.

Mrs. Burke stared at the ceiling.

The doctor said, “My wife sent me to bring her sister home,” and worked his tongue and his jaws to make saliva.

The three pale heads turned to the doctor who stared palely back, the russet gone from his face. McManus saw them all in a sort of disassociated tableau, still and peculiarly distant.

Cleery turned to McManus. “You were going to make a run for it.”

“Yes.”

“But not now.”

“No.”

“You're a gutless wee shit.”

There is nothing to say when that is true. He said nothing.

“Y'are, aren't you?” Ram self-knowledge down the victim's gullet.

“Yes.”

That was a satisfying admission. Cleery nodded thoughtfully. “Your sister had more guts.” Cleery knew more than Powers about the mind. He smiled when the tears of shame and pain started in McManus's eyes. “Didn't she?”

“Yes,” McManus said like a little cry.

“Scum,” Mrs. Burke said.

Cleery turned to her. She was glaring at him with scorn.

“He was all man in there w'you, missus, wasn't he?”

“Scum,” she said, and turned her face to the ceiling.

“Gabby oul bag,” Cleery said, his humor lightening with each victory. “There'll be no run for it.” He prodded McManus. “Dead or alive, you're bait, boyo. You all stay here now till Powers gets here. . . .”

“My wife . . .” said the doctor, and decent fear for her safety stopped him.

“Fuck your wife . . . or get McManus t'do it.” The doctor shriveled. “Your wife's sitting in thon grand Mercedes up at the crossroads. Let her sit. If she comes down here, she stays till we're done w'Powers.” He nudged his head at the other man behind him. “He's Kevin O'Connell, Danny's brother. He'll stay in here t'keep you all quiet. And that's Danny's son, Diarmuid. When the shop opens, he's walking up there. D'you know what he's going to tell them, McManus?” Grinning, he turned away and led his little army into the kitchen. He walked with Diarmuid O'Connell out of the house and closed the door behind him.

“Relax,” the man Cleery called Kevin said, and sat down in Thomas Burke's rocking chair by the kitchen fire.

Silence sat in the bedroom, dissected by the rhythmic creaking of the rocking chair.

“I'll show them something,” Mrs. Burke said softly to the ceiling.

Kevin came to the bedroom door. “You two,” he said, “in here. Sit at the table. You, missus. You stay in bed. You look in the need of sleep.” He waved them to their stations and closed the bedroom door. Mrs. Burke lay on her back, staring at the ceiling as if she intended to do it harm.

Time ticked by in the kitchen. The man Kevin watched it on his wrist in the stirring silence and seemed to judge the quarter-hours with uncanny precision. When an hour had passed he stood up. “He's sleeping by now,” he said. “Away on. Quiet now.”

“We can go?” the doctor asked with relieved astonishment.

“Quiet if you don't want shot,” O'Connell said to McManus. “I know all about it, son, your sister and that. Powers murdered my brother Danny. All I want is Powers dead. As long as he thinks you're here, you don't need to be. I'll handle Cleery. Away on.”

“Mrs. Burke too?” McManus said.

“Thons your desperate woman. I'd be glad to see the last of her.”

McManus went back to the bedroom. “The man says we can go if we do it very quietly. Get dressed, Kate, and come away on,” he said.

“Come here, child.” Her face was even older, even more severe; there was no trace of a smile round the wide mouth or of humor in the eyes. The eyes were lifeless. “Sit here,” she said, patting the bed beside her. He sat down and she took his hand. “Tell me honest, child, were you happy in this bed with me—in the dark?”

“Yes, Kate.”

“In the light?”

“Yes, Kate. Get up and come on.”

“You did my heart good, child.”

“You mine, Kate.”

“You're for England now.”

“If I'm lucky.”

“We have a brother there. He's rich.”

“Come away with the doctor, Kate.”

“He lives in East Grinstead.”

“Never mind that, Kate. Get dressed and come on.”

“Get me a folder from the bottom drawer over there.”

O'Connell stood impatiently in the doorway, “Will you for God's sake cut it and get outa here?”

“Five minutes, sir,” Mrs. Burke said, with surprising charm, and McManus brought her the folder. “My brother has no children,” she said. “He and his wife go to Spain every summer. He's a stockbroker.” She said it with naïve pride. “We can use his house anytime in the summer.”

“Use it now, then.”

She wrote on the pad from the folder and gave him what she had written. “There's a key at an estate agent's in the square in East Grimstead. Give him that. He'll give you the key. You'll be safe there.”

He took the letter. “Thank you, Kate. Now come on.”

“You're a gentle child. Stay gentle. Kiss me again.”

He bent and kissed her.

“I'm always left, child. I'm always left.”

O'Connell was back in the doorway. “For fuck sake, if that's what you want, get into bed and get it. Make up your bloody mind!”

McManus leapt from the bed. God, everything went sour, everything was ridiculous in the end. He was ridiculous. “Goodbye, Kate,” he said in confusion and grabbed his money and his gun from the drawer and rushed from the room. “She won't come,” he said to the doctor.

“Then let her stay.”

O'Connell took the gun from McManus. “You won't need that. You should never have touched one. You're the great bloody pair,” he said, “and by God, doctor, no polis or we'll come for you.”

They went through the front fuchsia hedge to avoid the creaking gate, and down between the slate ridges and through the grassy hollows to the crossroads. The doctor's wife was asleep in the back seat.

“I'll drive,” McManus said, and took the wheel. He thrashed the car through the narrow twisting roads and wakened the doctor's wife.

“Where's Kate?” she screeched.

“She wouldn't come,” her husband said curtly.

“You should have made her come. Let her rot. I did all I could for the crazy woman. Why's he driving?” the woman whinnied.

“Shut up,” the doctor said as if for the first time in his married life.

“Seamus!”

“Shut your bloody mouth!”

The Mercedes roared through Schull.
“Schull! Schull! Stop!”
the doctor shouted. “Where the hell do you think you're going?”

“Cork Airport.” McManus didn't speak again. He was away. Again. Well away. He'd be in England in hours with a place to hide. Well away. Again. Thank you, Kate.

“I'm dying with sleep,” Mrs. Sullivan complained, and joined in the exhausted silence.

The light came up. The brakes ground in the fourcourt of the airport. McManus got out without speaking and walked into the lobby. There was a Cambrian Air flight to Cardiff at a quarter to nine. Yes, there was space on it. Yes, he would take it. He would take anything to get away quickly.

“Hullo,” the voice at his shoulder said.

He turned and said, “Brendine Healy of Boston.”

“I tried to find you,” she said. “You look all right now. I don't mean it that way. I mean you're looking well . . . not sick . . . you know?”

“Oh?” he said. “I see,” he said, surprised at first and then surprised at the sudden relief that ran through him. Laughing, suddenly, for the nightmare, the unreality was shattered in his head, and the normal, the real was with him. He reached out his hand to touch it.

P
OWERS
drove.

“This car,” Kiernan said bitterly, “will do the main road from Schull to Mizen Head and everything we can see from it. Half a dozen take the coast road. The rest do back beyond the main road.” He sat behind Powers.

Sorahan sat up beside Powers with little Barney behind him. Sorahan's head was full of smiles at the cause of Kiernan's bitterness. But he kept his smile inside his head.

“I don't know,” Kiernan said broodingly for the fourth or fifth time. “I don't bloody know. Nobody from Skibereen? That's a bloody mystery.”

It wasn't to Sorahan, and his smiles were harder to hold. He was doing well as a conspirator. But then, intrigue's second nature to us, he told himself happily. We do it better than anybody.

“Thon Sheehy of Skibereen,” Kiernan said, “thons a sleekid man.” (Sleekid, Sorahan explained to little Barney, was a northern word meaning slippery, deceitful, devious, untrustworthy.)

“Very busy he is,” Barney said ambiguously.

Sheehy had been very busy. Sorahan phoned him at the end of the Bantry men's meeting at the house of the priest and they met early that night in the back of O'Keeffe's Bar in Schull. “I'll tell you what it is, Tim, and I'll ask you what you'll do and I hope you'll do nothing.”

Sheehy listened. “That's the way of it?” he said at the end. “That's the way of it.”

“Rape?”

“Rape.”

“Holy God.” Sheehy folded his hands defensively over his crotch. “That's the fearful thing.”

“The worst.”

“There was no call for that.”

“No call at all.”

“There'll be
two
killins here?”

“Two.”

“Jasus. I thought they'd take the boy back and do it up North.”

“No.”

“Here?”

“Here.”

“Jasus. Tis the wrong time o'year, Daniel. There's the Ballydehob Annual Show, the Skibereen Gymkana, the Skibereen Festival, and the Drinagh Harvest-Time Festival. All at the same time. Two killins here would bugger the lot.”

“That's the God's truth. T'would leave a bad taste.”

“Very bad taste, Jasus, aye. Have you the time to follow me into Skibereen and we'll knock doors and get the boys together?”

“I have all night, Tim.” They looked quickly into one another's eyes and the look conveyed all the things they had left unspoken, and they smiled little glancing half-smiles as if them that weren't meant to would hear whole ones and drove to Skibereen and knocked doors and went into conference with the men of Skibereen.

It was a long meeting. The light was brushing the sky before they went home for their breakfasts, having heard Sorahan recount in detail what Kiernan told him about McManus and Powers and Maureen McManus and Powers, and the dread word rape fell with cunning from his schoolmasterly lips onto their early-morning nerves. The word was not spoken again when he was done.

“Then there's two killins at the time of the Ballydehob and the Festival and the Gymkana and the Harvest-Time ...” Sheehy said wisely and looked from face to face “... tis ruinous timin,” he said, and in their sidelong way they skirted their revulsion and renewed their loyalty to the Cause, containing each in separate compartments in the single and collective mind.

“Tis a busy old time,” a circular man said from the floor, “and the least we can do for being so busy is send the boys in the North an extra collection this week.” They went home to fried bacon or mackerel and sweet tea with their consciences as fresh as the new day's air.

When they met Kiernan and Powers later in the morning, the two frustrated and impatient men from the North listened to a careful recital of the responsibilities, this week of all weeks in the year, borne by men who were in charge of the Irish dancing and horse-jumping and the fish-and-chip and fried-sausage van, and the flower shop and the country craft work . . . and how would they explain runnin round the country with the Ballydehob and Drinagh and Skibereen annual festivals fallin apart from want of them? They had to live here, it is.