After the Lockout (27 page)

‘Victor, please put down the gun,' Maggie keeps repeating, ‘put down the gun and come away with me and we can get married, we can go straight to the priest and he can marry us tonight, he can marry us right now.'

‘It's not in my hands, Maggie, the world doesn't work that way.'

She stamps her foot on the ground. ‘
This
is the world, right here,' she cries, and slaps her hand hard against her chest. ‘
This
is where you make your mark.
I
am the one you have to fight for.'

A support stanchion falls, taking another stanchion with it in a howitzer-like cacophony, enough to make me fear for my
hearing. The last few stanchions endure, but they too will be smouldering wreckage soon. I look at Maggie. Her glistening eyes are bulbous with tears that stain her beautiful face. ‘Maggie, you are perfect. I'd have to be perfect to be worthy of you. Well, I'm not perfect. I'm not even good. I'm so sorry.'

The last, flimsy pillars of my creation burn away under the heat and I can hardly hear the gunshot over the terrible noise of things falling apart.

There wasn't any hope, he had lost too much blood. He was babbling, could say nothing coherent. His pain was terrible but his release would come soon. ‘You don't have to speak out loud, Pius, God knows your sins. You need only ask His forgiveness. God is merciful. You have nothing to fear, my son,' Stanislaus told him, but he looked terrified as the end came. Stanislaus heard his last breath. It was always the same sound, like a door being sucked shut in the wind. Stanislaus closed over his eyelids. No-one needed to see the terror in his eyes. He looked much more at peace this way.

After the last of the barn collapsed Victor stalked towards Stanislaus and Pius with gun in his hand and murder in his eyes. Women screamed. The second motorist was motionless now.

‘Did you give him his Last Rites?'

‘Yes.'

‘He would have wanted that.' Victor looked at his father, and it seemed he might weep. He looked away, as though the sight was too terrible.

‘Let me say some prayers over those other men,' said Stanislaus.

‘They're not men, they're dead,' said Victor, his finger twitching on the pistol by his side, latent and terrifying. Victor looked at Margaret Cavanagh, who knelt sobbing and wailing, then looked back to Stanislaus.

‘Get her out of here. Get all of these people out of here. Get them all back to their homes. I don't want to see anybody. I'm going to bury my father.'

Father Daly slammed down the telephone hurriedly when Stanislaus came in. He was shaking. ‘I had to place a telephone call,' he said.

‘Good man, you called the police?'

‘Uh, yes, that's right. I called the police.'

‘What did they say? Are they coming straight away?'

‘Uh-huh. I saw it all. Is there a gun in the house? He's out there with a gun and I have no gun. I mean, I think we should have a gun.'

‘Tim, calm down. What's wrong with you?'

‘He's quite mad. He could come here and try to kill us. We need to be able to defend ourselves. Have you a gun or not?'

‘You know very well I don't. Why would he come here? Compose yourself, Father.'

‘Keep the lights off. If he comes looking for me, you haven't seen me, right?' said the curate, before dashing out the door.

Stanislaus went to his chair by the window and watched through the gloom. Every curtain in Madden twitched but
Victor was alone in the Poor Ground, save for the dead bodies lying on the barren turf and the damned souls beneath. Only the angry red glow of the smouldering wreckage lit the scene. Victor worked like a demon though he had no shovel, no implement but his hands and planks of wood that were lying around. All the spades and shovels and loys he could want lay up the street in Charlie Quinn's smashed window, but Stanislaus supposed the boy wasn't really thinking clearly as he threw himself at the soil. Victor's laboured grunting was the only sound that punctuated the silent terror sitting over the parish, until he saw Father Daly's car pull out from behind the Parochial House and hurtle recklessly down the street and out of Madden. He realised that the curate was a man with secrets, and that the dead men had been no motorists. There was a rumour that there were two curates in Tyrone and another in Limerick mixed up with the IRB, and he supposed that if there were three young fools out of three thousand clergy, there could be four or seven or twelve …

Stanislaus stopped himself from thinking about it any further. He was getting close to articulating something he was determined not to know, so he told himself that exposure to violence affected people differently; that it was a time of blood, that Victor Lennon was a man of blood and that poor Father Daly was only a youngster who had been scared out of his wits. At most, he had been naïve, but hadn't people once said the same of Stanislaus himself? The darker rumours had never been true, not really, but he had flown closer to the flame than he should have. Poor Father Daly had been taken in by unscrupulous men claiming to be motorists, and his flight proved only his terror at the killer in the Poor Ground. Yes, that was it, that was the truth and there was no other.

Stanislaus closed the front door and moved as quietly as he could down the street to Quinn's General Stores. Victor didn't even notice him pass. The shattered glass crunched under his feet on the paving outside the shop. He reached into the window and picked out a shovel, took coins from his pocket and left them on the display where the shovel had been. When he reached the Poor Ground he waited a moment at the wall for Victor to spot him. The boy stood upright from his work. Stanislaus held up the shovel. The Victor fellow stepped closer and reached out to take the shovel. Stanislaus saw that his hands were torn to shreds.

‘Will you come back tomorrow and bless the grave? For my father,' Victor said.

Stanislaus nodded. Pius deserved it. As he let go of the shovel to let Victor take it, Stanislaus was struck by something, something he had not seen before. Victor was so young-looking. Hardly more than a boy.

‘Thank you,' said Victor, cradling the shovel in his hands.

Stanislaus retreated to the Parochial House, to his study, to watch Victor dig deeper and deeper till he disappeared into the hole. He watched the boy gather his father with extraordinary gentleness and grace, making light of Pius's fifteen or sixteen stone, and lay him beside his mother with the care of a priest with a relic. He watched him put back the fresh-dug earth, probably believing he had reunited his parents, and a single hot tear trickled down Stanislaus's cheek. The poor boy. It was all for nothing. The commingling of remains was meaningless. This was no reunion, unless Pius Lennon too was in hell. Then Stanislaus watched Victor Lennon leave his parish for the last time.

When the job is done I throw down the shovel and stand over the grave. It's strange: I have little memory of digging it. A couple of images in my mind, like photographs snatched from a scene, but otherwise, blank. The sound of the gunshot started something. And ended something.

I have no idea of the time but I can tell it is near dawn. I still have the train ticket. It'll take me away from Madden, that's the main thing. There is only blood and pain here now. I must go to my fate, even if it means I'll be in the shallow soil of the Wicklow Mountains soon, unremembered and unmourned. There's no-one here for me to talk to, to preach at, to persuade. I'm alone. There is only prayer. So I pray. Pius would want me to. Let it be one last act of superstition for the superstitious old bastard. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, Amen. There. Are you happy now? An old reflex kicks in. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Rest in peace, Mammy.

Benedict has courage, it has to be said. I wish he was here again to pray for my parents. I wish he would hear my confession. Not that I believe in that stuff, it's just that, well: I think I might be ready to tell the truth, if only there was someone to tell it to. I might tell him I envy Charlie, and all like him put on this earth to follow orders. I might tell him I wish I could surrender my judgement and my conscience to other men, and wade
through fields full of men's brains and guts and evacuated bowels and merely feel, not think. But thoughts suck the blood from me like midges on a summer's day. I might tell him how the revolution was fun at the start. We were tweaking the lion's tail. I might tell him how I see the starving children whose fathers I recruited to Larkin's union in my sleep. Their emaciation is wildly exaggerated – eyes withdrawn into their heads, ribs sticking out from their chests, like something from an old daguerreotype taken during the Famine – but the sacrifices others endure for your sake are the hardest to take. I might tell him I had no choice but to get in deeper after the lockout.

I brandish the revolver prominently as I leave the Poor Ground, in case anyone thinks of approaching. I leave the smouldering remains of the People's Hall, pass the locked doors of the Parochial Hall, the triumphal spire of the chapel. McGrath's the post office. Kane's. Murphy's. McDermott's. The other Murphy's. The Harte house, bringing the whole tone of the place down. I reach the top of the town and stop at Cavanagh's, the only naked window in a street of twitching curtains. Inside stands Maggie, and though it's dark I can see her clearly. Her face is wet with tears, I am responsible, but she is only the more beautiful for her distress. Every microscopic detail etches itself into memory. She has always been a dream. She pulls the curtain and becomes a memory.

Behind me I hear footsteps on broken glass. Charlie stands inside the smashed window of his shop. He regards me silently, without malice. There is nothing I can say to him. I simply leave.

When I'm a quarter mile out I look back down into the hollow at Madden for the last time. My eye is drawn to the Parochial House. He'll be watching me, as he watches always. The black
sheep he will watch drift away. The bishop will rejoice over the one that is lost, for the hundred that might be saved.

A mile up the road a horse and cart idles at the crossroads. I keep the gun by my side and move slowly.

‘It's all right, Victor, it's me, Ida. Ida Harte. Where are you headed?'

I scan around, in case anyone lurks in the darkness. ‘Dublin,' I say at last.

‘Will there not be people there looking to kill you?' I don't answer her, but she perseveres. ‘Have you not packed any things? You have no belongings with you.'

‘I don't suppose I'll need any.'

‘We can get the boat and start a new life somewhere else,' she says. She pats the seat beside her in the cart. ‘Come on, climb up here. I'm coming with you.'