Gospel (22 page)

“This a bad area?” asked Lucy, nervous in the presence of so much weaponry.

“Nowhere on the border's a good area,” said David. “But the IRA are only killing soldiers these days, pretty much. They did blow up that marching band in England, but that was connected to the military. They can justify whoever—you remember they claimed Mountbatten and his grandchildren were a military target.”

The road signs had changed, Lucy noticed. No more Gaelic under the English with kilometers, back to the British style and mileage. They inched toward a sign that informed them Newry was five miles.

“Remind you, Rabbi, of the West Bank a bit?” called out David cheerfully.

“It's sunnier there,” he said, joining his hands and looking down at them, sighing.

“Ever been to Northern Ireland before?” asked David.

“First, and I suspect last time,” said Rabbi Hersch. “This I can get at home.”

Lucy looked over to see ten white roadside crosses. They approached the border guard … how old was he? Nineteen? He asked to see their passports, please, in a Northern British lower-class drawl.

“There oughta be no problem,” said David quietly, not quite having the confidence to make it a prediction. “Three Americans and I've got me U.K. passport.”

Lucy looked around at the pillbox beside them, the camouflage-colored tin and concrete walls on either side of them, in case a car bomb went off, and the video cameras that were filming them for evidence. And she glanced back at the indigent Irish family standing nervously to the side of the armed guards, the woman's tiniest child inches from the semiautomatic rifle, as their van was searched.

“I got caught at this very border one time for hours,” said O'Hanrahan softly. “Coming to see your folks back in 1972. I was loaded up with research on the Celtic Church and these goons thought I was some kind of Catholic militant. Any American with a name like O'Hanrahan might well be bringing NORAID money into Ulster.”

Lucy startled to hear NORAID mentioned, as if she belonged to it herself. Of course, thanks to Dad, there was a check somewhere in her name to the organization.

“What're you doing here?” sneered the guard, handing the passports back and motioning them forward, as another guard looked under and around their car for explosive devices.

David answered respectfully: “I live in Ballymacross and these are friends of me parents, coming up from Dublin. From America on their vacation and—”

“Ullroight,” he said, waving them by, not interested.

Lucy scanned the dismal countryside for clues to life here. It looked placid enough. The roads were better paved than the Irish Republican ones. Forkhill was the first turnoff, more of a military base and armed camp than a town. As David explained, many of the southern Ulster towns had no income, industry had fled, but with the land cheap, the army had moved in. And then what was once dull and peaceful had become a battleground. Bessbrook was such a village in decline. In nearby Whitecross in 1976, three Catholic brothers were watching TV one night when Protestant terrorists burst into their home and shot them. Then later in Balldougan, Protestant terrorists arrived at a family reunion and blew away two brothers and an uncle in front of their children. So Catholics sidetracked this bus of Protestant workmen from Bessbrook, marched them out, asked whether they were Catholic or Protestant, then killed the eleven Protestants.

They were almost through the town of Newry. David would slow for a village and Lucy would spy a group of soldiers, in full battle attire, walking idly around a public square, a piece of graffiti
SMASH BRITISH RULE
with the orange, green, and white tricolor taking up a wall.

“So these towns are all divided?” asked Lucy. “Catholics on one side, Protestants on the other?”

“Not that many Protestants down here,” said David. “It's mostly Catholics. It's sheer stupidity that the British decided to keep this county, for it's of no use. The Catholics and Prods pretty much got along until the Brits put the army bases here.”

A big blue British-style sign reported that the motorway began ahead that led to the heart of Belfast. A city with a reputation only second to Beirut, Lucy thought grimly. The next minute she thought: but people live there, don't they? They go shopping and go to the pub and carry on their lives. All I'm doing is riding in a car through town.

“Shall we have a pint at the Crown, Patrick?” asked David.

“Oh,” said O'Hanrahan, licking his lips, “Morey, you must see the Crown. Best pub in the United Kingdom.”

Yep, thought Lucy resignedly,
that's
how we're gonna die. Blown up in a pub in Belfast so O'Hanrahan can have a drink.

“The tailor's shop is in Andersonstown,” O'Hanrahan said, looking at his address book.

“That's a lovely place,” said David unhappily. “If I'd known that's where this store was, Patrick, I wouldn't have volunteered to drive you.”

“I've heard of that neighborhood from somewhere,” said Lucy.

David recapped the history: In 1969 the Troubles were at their worst and some hundred British soldiers were killed, though they had come to protect the Catholics initially. Protestants had moved out of the shambling rowhouses and apartments during the riots. The city reallocated the public housing of Catholics, but the Protestants didn't want them even in their abandoned houses. A priest died, a 13-year-old girl was shot, ten British soldiers were then assassinated by the Provisionals that weekend, before the IRA set off 22 bombs in a one-square-mile area in downtown Belfast and the derailing of the Dublin-Belfast express train. Thousands panicked in the melee of bombs going off every few minutes and as hundreds huddled in a bus station terminal waiting for it to end, an IRA car bomb went off outside that killed six, spraying blood and body parts all over the waiting room.

David negotiated the car to the Falls Road, which had a renown no one in the car felt needed comment, and they all grew quiet.

“Paddy, why didn't you get this suit in Dublin?” asked the rabbi, looking at the grimacing residents on the sidewalks, dodging the rain.

“It's cheaper here, and they do good work,” said O'Hanrahan. “I've bought two other suits from this guy.” O'Hanrahan gauged his companions were all a bit nervous but no one wanted to say it because, statistically, the chances of wandering stupidly into sectarian violence were rare. “Look, people,” he said with forced calmness, “I'll hop in the store, get my suit, hop out, and we'll be on our way. I tell you, you can't judge a place by its problems. Belfast is a blast.”

“Yeah,” said David as he drove along,
“kaboooom!”

O'Hanrahan insisted: “The people are warm, they have a sense of humor, they're generous, and I find the lack of hearts-and-flowers, sugar-coated bullshit quite refreshing in Belfast conversation, so get that cringing look off your face, Dantan.”

“Yes, the city's nothing like it was,” reassured David.

Lucy saw the vacant lots pass with neighboring walls given over to one- and two-story painted slogans:
OUR DAY WILL COME
with a caricature of Mrs. Thatcher, dolled-up fascistically in jackboots, a combination of a swastika and Union Jack on her helmet, as she rises in triumph over a grave. The painted tombstone, thought Lucy, had an ever-changing epitaph that had been painted over several times. It now listed children killed by rubber bullets and the British Army.

At the next stoplight, Lucy read a streetlamp poster demanding
STOP THE TORTURE
, which detailed Amnesty International's charge of torturings, beatings, unlawful detentions, shootings on sight. This poster was accompanied by the motif of the 20th Century, a grainy black-and-white close-up of some poor prisoner's battered face.

“There's the place!” signaled O'Hanrahan.

David pulled the car to the curb. O'Hanrahan's destination was an ecclesiastical uniform shop on the other side of the street; a faded, smiling John Paul II poster hung in the window. Lucy watched O'Hanrahan dance through the puddles to the sidewalk and the shop, his suitcoat collar pulled up uselessly against the cold rain.

“Shall we stop at the Crown, Rabbi?” asked David.

“I wouldn't mind just getting it over with and getting on to Ballymacross, to tell you the truth,” he said. “In this weather. Besides, the rush-hour traffic will start up.”

“Aye, that's a point,” said David, though it wasn't even two o'clock.

Lucy listened stoically to the rain hit the roof of the car.

At last, O'Hanrahan appeared with a black suit wrapped in cellophane on a hanger, running across the street, nearly being hit because he failed to check the traffic from British left-side-of-the-road directions. As he slid inside, the rabbi announced good-naturedly, “Almost another martyr of Andersonstown, Paddy!”

“Almost,” he cackled.

They started up again and Lucy breathed a sigh of relief.

“Got you a present,” said O'Hanrahan to Rabbi Hersch, handing him a booklet of indulgences and rosary prayers, blessed by the priests at Knock. Knock, O'Hanrahan reminded his friend, was the Lourdes, Disneyland, and PTL Club of Ireland.

David drove with great relief down the Falls Road to the downtown and pointed out the ever-cantankerous Divis Flats atop which an Irish tricolor flew. It was an armed camp, vigilante-patrolled by Republican groups, a no-man's-land for Protestants. And across the street from it was the Hastings Street police station, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who rode around in silvery metal-plated Rovers, armed with semiautomatic machine guns and all the equipment necessary for a small war. The police station could have been out of pre-1989 Eastern Europe. Barbed wire, television cameras, pillboxes manned with machine-gun-toting officers.

As they entered the more Protestant north of town, the walls again were brandishing giant political signs and slogans; a large red hand, the Red Hand of Ulster, clenched in a fist, showing no sign of easing its grip. Streets that would otherwise be a quiet neighborhood lane had cement roadblocks and mechanical gates to stop a speeding car-bomb driver. The traffic light ahead was red and David slowed to the intersection. A car next to them pulled up and Lucy looked over. Lucy saw two older men, the driver unshaven with a gray grizzle on a heavily lined face, while the passenger seemed to be cursing under his breath and yelled something that showed his missing teeth.

Lucy's blood froze.

“Oh jeez, here we go…” muttered Rabbi Hersch, looking to the ceiling.

The rusted car revved beside them. No one said what was apparent: the old, ill-tempered men doubtlessly had a firearm in the car.

“Nice fellows,” said David quietly.

“Let's tell them we got a Jew in the backseat,” said O'Hanrahan just as quietly.

The rabbi: “Hey, bet I'd do better than you papists.”

The light turned green and David pulled ahead slowly with the car of old men going the exact same speed.

Lucy looked down at her feet, hoping that when she looked back the old men would be gone. Old men looking for trouble. Looking for an easy victim to report back to their Ulster Club, looking for those free pub-rounds that come with being a hero and blowing a Catholic's head off. No, Lucy told herself, it didn't happen every day, but it happened, and there were no rules about when it happened and why it happened, it just keeps happening, the mindless, automatic, unthinking willingness to go on with the killings.

After a grinding shift of gears, the old men sped forward with a screech of tires.

“Well,” said David, “I guess they showed us, hm?”

Lucy looked over at a burned-out apartment building, like one sees in the South Side of Chicago. But, like in the dark spots of American poverty, people lived in this block of flats too. Starting on the third floor Lucy observed clotheslines and signs of life. The first two burned-out stories were boarded and bricked up so no one could shoot anything into the rooms or throw a grenade. And there was another entry in the continual war of graffiti:
UFF RAMBOS IN STONE'S ARMY
 …
SHOWED YOU FUCKIN BASTIRDS AT THE CIMITARY.

After a raw moment of shame for America's gift of
Rambo
to the world, Lucy stared at the misspellings, assessing the poverty and ignorance that saturated the problems here. “Stone's army,” Lucy wondered aloud.

“You know,” said David. “The Protestant guy who shot up those people at the cemetery. I thought the whole world saw that one on TV. Now we're off to see a castle,” he emphasized hopefully, finding the motorway and accelerating beyond the reach of Belfast. “If we can change the subject here?”

“Yeah, let's change it,” said Rabbi Hersch.

“Big castle it is at that, at Carrickfergus,” David previewed. “And then we'll take the coast road to Ballymacross.”

Minutes later, the North Channel of the Irish Sea came into view out the right of the car. The six-lane highway became just four lanes, then two, and the congested, winding road along the coast began. Soon hills, then mountains appeared, then little seaside villages at the foot of the cliffs, little towns gray and insular on this harsh day but not unwelcoming, the hanging pub signs swaying in the wind, the unbelievable spectacle of a group of pale boys playing soccer outside in shorts, pelted by cold rain.

“Oooh,” said David, “painful to watch! I remember being out there on days like this meself.”

The sky remained a blank, an almost-evening winter-white. The hills of Antrim were brown with only the sporadic farm or cultivated garden behind an isolated house striving for order against the mud-colored scrub. The passing fishing villages looked quiet and content, smoke from the chimneys, lights on behind yellowed curtains. Lucy pulled her coat a little tighter wishing she were inside somewhere. How much more peaceful it was after Belfast, how much more one could persuade oneself that violence and hatred had never troubled this outermost corner of Ireland. Lucy had been reading roadsigns automatically as they went by, but she came to full consciousness when she saw Ballymacross announced.