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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

A
FTER
MIDNIGHT
,
RESTLESS
, Ian walked his land. He couldn’t see a thing after coming from the brightness of the house, and once he was twenty feet from the front door light the inky night swallowed him. He felt his way, crossing from gravel to grass, his sense of direction taking over. The acrid scent of smoke, ominous yet reminiscent of childhood autumns, after he and his mother had moved from Ireland to upstate New York, floated faintly on the wind, yet no light flickered in the distance. Only a hearth fire, or a specially fueled one, could thrive after a rain like today. He contemplated walking the perimeter. After a time, he reached the eastern edge of the property line. On a breeze he smelt a heady noxious gust of kerosene. A drawling voice spoke out of the darkness.

“You think you’re good for her?”

Ian tried to see a human shape. The bare sliver of moon hung behind the trees, illuminating nothing. “Hank?” He couldn’t imagine who else it would be.

Only the burning tip of a cigarette was visible. Ian smelled a mix of burnt and fresh-mown grass. Hank must have tried to burn wet grass with kerosene.

“I know all about you.” Hank's voice was so curdled and venomous Ian hardly recognized it.

Ian stopped trying so hard to see and waited for his eyes to adjust. An outline began to form—a familiar lanky man leaning up against the split-rail fence.

“Think you’ve got it all figured out. Think you’ll have it both ways.”

Ian stood where he was, about ten feet from Hank, which felt about right. 

“Think you know what you’re doing. Haven’t got a clue.” The lighted butt arced to the ground. Hank spat and twisted his heel on the spark. “And you’re heading for a shit-storm you don’t see coming.” 

Ian folded his arms, tucking his hands into the wedge between each underarm and bicep. He stretched his neck and studied the ground, chewed on his lip. He kicked the ground. “You been talking to Jane?”

“None of your business if I have,” Hank's voice was low and level, yet with that something else in it. 

“You been reading the papers.” It wasn't a question.

“I live in the world.”

“Huh.”

“You don’t understand dirt, do you?” The moon slid out from behind the trees and Ian could get a better view of Hank propped against the fence, details of his clothes revealed, though his face remained in shadow beneath his short-brimmed cowboy hat.

“Why this new view of me, Hank?”

“’Cause I’m a card-carrying member of your club.”

“You don’t say.” Ian shifted his weight into an even stance, released his arms, brushed his hair behind his ears. His arms hung loose by his sides. 

Hank leaned easy and casual against the fence, his elbows propped against the top rung of the four-footer. “That’s right. You can’t hide from the eyes that seen, the feet that walked that path. I’ve done it all. You ain’t thought of nothing new.” Hank snaked his hand in the pocket of his denim jacket and brought out a tooled leather and silver flask, glinting in the darkness. He took a brief pull. Ian could see Hank’s arm reach out toward him in an insistent gesture, offering a swig.

Ian had to walk closer to take the flask. He stepped away before tipping it back, tasting the smoky curl of bourbon as it slid down his throat. Returning the flask, stepping back again, he said, “I’m curious. This fellowship of ours. It’s not something you take particular pride in, I take it.” 

Hank snorted. “There’s no pride to be taken. Only the temporary pleasure such vices provide. ’S all downhill from there.”

“I think you’re laboring under an…ah…misapprehension, there, Hank, and that’s where the trouble is.”

“Trouble? There ain’t no trouble but what you’ve brought down on your house.”

Ian was silent for a moment. “You’ve got it all worked out.” 

Hank’s voice became quieter, colder. “Some men’ll risk it all on a gamble, think it’ll take ‘em further than they ever dreamed. Make their career, maybe. Even if it costs them all they got.” He spat out the last word. His voice changed again, became reflective. “Now men who have nothing left to care for,” he shook his head, “they got nothing left to lose.” His eyes glimmered in the moonlight. “Nothing to lose, why not try for what might’ve seemed impossible?” He took another swig. “Watch yourself.”

Ian didn’t know if Hank was talking about himself or Ian. Ian shook his head. 

In a blinding moment Hank had covered the ground between them and had Ian by the shirt. The alcohol on Hank’s breath evoked a memory: fresh, stinging, again, reminiscent, this time of his father in the early years, when he’d been around. Hank was a shade taller than Ian.
He’s an old man
, Ian told himself, though only by twenty years. He fought the urge to strike out, to escalate this pointless scene. 

“You’re a lightweight. You won’t hold her.” He stared Ian in the eyes for five beating seconds. Ian stared back. Hank turned away with a sneer. 

“Thanks for the advice, mate.” Ian repeated in his head:
This isn’t Hank. This isn’t Hank
. “See you around.” He stumbled as he tried to leave, as if he were the one incapacitated.

Weaving across the fallow corn field, Ian saw the light of his house in the distance. He should have taken the offensive sonofabitch down. He didn’t have any illusions about one punch. He had the feeling Hank had been in his share of bar fights. Hank was no lightweight, like he’d accused Ian of being. But that wasn’t the kind of lightweight Hank had meant. Ian felt himself starting to shake, his skin turning to gooseflesh. A cavern seemed to have opened in his gut in which he could feel the seedling insecurities prompted by Hank’s words take root. He’d pierced through the armor Ian had accumulated over fourteen years protecting those particular vulnerabilities. So much better had he become at guarding himself, hiding that inner self and revealing it only in environments best suited for its survival, that he felt physically sick, as he had in his early acting days, before he’d learned how to control his emotions better. Hank had attacked on three fronts. His relationship with Jane. His moral fiber. His value as a person and contribution to society in general. Hank had a point there. At least a farmer could say he fed people. 

The porch light was brighter, but blurry. Ian brushed the air in front of his face as if chasing away flies. Fuck it. What was Hank’s bleeding motive anyway? What was going on while he was away from home? How far had the helpful neighbor act gotten him? Preying on a vulnerable woman alone in a big house.

 Kicking Hank’s ass was not going to solve anything. It would infuriate Jane, ruin neighborly relations, and put them on Kittrie’s shit list, perhaps forever. They were incomers, as it was. Hank was their connection to the town, their champion, the one who made them acceptable in the eyes of the folks who had found them a curiosity at first. Besides, it was obvious Hank was in an altered state from his usual gentlemanly reticence. Everyone deserved at least one free pass in Ian’s book. Ian’s ass-kicking days were well behind him, in any case.

He dragged himself up the steps, turned the knob, entered his silent domain, and as he fell forward into the chair, her chair, he thought moodily that he might have made short work of Hank after all, had he chose. 

There’d been that one brief span of time, when he’d tried to live up to his father’s reputation; when he’d gone back to Ireland after his mother’s death and hung out with his Da’s old mates and their sons, and found himself backing up the lads in a pub brawl; a point of honor it seemed, if you were Benty O’Reilly’s son. He’d done the mates proud. And shamed himself. The pure surge of adrenaline, addictive and freeing, was too close to the bone. Close to his DNA. One of the lads, a graying, bristle-haired chap, had wanted to throw a pair of gloves on him, even at the late age of twenty, to train him as a fighter. Word spread around, in some circles, that Benty O’Reilly’s son was back: the prodigal son, going to take up where his father left off. People hadn’t cottoned on to his parentage before that, because of the loss of the O to his name and as he hadn’t advertised the fact. Even the mates had kept it quiet, knowing how he felt about it (and perhaps factoring in Benty’s reputation) until the brawl got everyone talking. Then everyone knew whose son he was. An excitement burgeoned, a buzz he could feel when he went into what had become his local, the pub where he felt at home and could relax after the work he’d picked up at a local brewery hauling cases, sweeping aisles and the like. 

The trainer was persistent. He drew a map to the gym for Ian on a beer coaster, tracing it over and over in black pen so Ian could see the path through the maze-like streets of Dublin. 

On his first visit Ian found the fuss he’d observed at the pub translated into bristles and snubs from the gym regulars, the same gym his father had fought out of. Sean Gallagher, the trainer, who had known his father, didn’t bother to introduce him around. The other men, mostly smaller, trim and shining, were silent, punching and jabbing fiercely, either at bags, the air, or each other, as Ian got a brief tour. He got the unspoken message. He wasn’t wanted. He didn’t know why. Sean glanced around, beady-eyed, circling his charge, voice upbeat as he muttered half-heard bits of wisdom, sometimes rising up on the balls of his feet, shifting weight as if someone might be about to take a shot. 

Somehow the atmosphere had been enough to suck Ian in. If only for the opportunity to wipe the looks off those faces turned away from his. 

The first weeks of training were achy and dripping in Ian’s memory. Then the clarity of his first time in the ring with an opponent, sparring. Sean had held him off, not wanting him in the ring, as the days dragged and his body protested. As he worked out, the other lads avoided him; as he learned the bag, learned how to develop his body. Except for the occasional under-the-breath comment he was let alone. He knew by some osmosis they thought he was too lean for his height. This gym was famous for its bantam and featherweight fighters, such as the bantam his father had been. The other fighters thought he needed more weight to fit his height, to fit his reach. And they thought he must have a glass jaw to go with his classic profile. Otherwise why would Sean keep him out of the ring? One day when he was around the corner from the benches, hidden from their sight by the L-shape of the room, he heard more of what they thought. 

“The lad don’t much resemble Benty.”

 Ian recognized the voice of a seasoned visitor, Pat Coolihan, who came daily to watch the young fighters and pick up tips for betting. 

“Benty was a runty chap, with legs bowed as a sailor’s and the face of me granny’s pug dog,” Pat said with relish. “Added to which, Benty’s eyes were his best feature, his only one, mind, blue as the Irish Sea on a bonny morning, they were; added to which, he was a cocky fellow with a chip on his shoulder the size of Ben Bulben. This here lad, now,” Pat’s voice took on a ‘come-now’ quality, appealing to his listeners as reasonable men, “with his quiet ways, all tall and straight, browny eyes, with hardly a peep of Irish out of him. Sounds a bit Yank to me, or would if he ever bothered to utter.”

Ian came out from behind the corner where the cabinets holding equipment had hidden him from view. He surveyed the small group gathered round Pat. 

Mickey, one of the younger trainees, only fourteen, spoke up after a stiff silence. “We thought you was already gone for the day.” He swallowed and looked at Pat, then down at the red trainers on his feet.

“Never can tell where a Yank might turn up,” Pat said, unrepentant.

Ian was very aware of the group watching him, but he spoke to Pat. “You might not know a few things about my family. It would clear up some confusion.”

“I knows you’re a Reilly and not an O’Reilly,” Pat said.

Ian ignored him. “My mother…” he said, and then for an impossible moment he felt something rising in him, memory made immediate by being in Dublin, surrounded by his parents’ country-people, doubted as his parents’ own son. He saw his mother: her tall, proud figure, the sweep of her hair in its knot, the way she would have shamed this lot with a few words and the flash in her eyes, and had them eating out of her hand somehow as soon as she’d done it. He missed her so intensely in that moment he couldn’t speak. They all watched him as if expecting he might keel over, or cry out; their eyes fixed upon him as if he were an orator, the star of a play, a loose mental patient: only his next words would tell. 

When he could continue, all he found to say was, “I favor my mother’s side of the family. Not my father’s.” He was turning away when he heard a new voice, protesting creakily from the back: 

“I knew her, I knew your mother!” A black-eyed man, upright and rosy-cheeked, lines radiating from his eyes, a cane balanced in front of him, hollered the words, making the whole gym echo. Complete silence had long since fallen as all workouts ceased. “Nobody as met her was likely to forget her!” On the tremulous voice ranted. “And you’re as like her as could be her brother. So Pat Coolihan stop your gossiping and worming up trouble. This boy is Daphne Finlay’s or I’m not James Halloran Kelly. And if he’s Daphne Finlay’s he’s Benty O’Reilly’s.” He glared about the room as if daring someone to contradict his assertion. “Weren’t it ‘cause of the boy here Benty had to give it all up, now? Are you all too feeble-minded to remember the scandal of it?” He searched their faces. The only one who seemed to show recognition was gossiping Pat Coolihan, and Ian’s trainer Sean Gallagher, who seemed to know exactly what James Halloran Kelly was talking about. 

Kelly snorted in disgust. “Barely off the teat, the lot of you.” He looked over at Ian. “Do you know the story yourself, then?”

“I know my mother wanted my father to stop fighting.”

“Tcha!” Kelly reacted with amazement. “You could say that, couldn’t you? Best sit down, lad.”

Disturbed by the public nature of this outpouring, but curious, Ian seated himself with the others on the benches by the ring. A few who had been half-pretending not to listen gathered closer, some sitting down on the edge of the ring, some the benches or the floor. Kelly crossed in a dignified manner over to the desk next to the front entrance, grabbed the back of the rolling chair behind it, and rolled it over to where everyone was gathered, sitting himself in the old leather creaker with the back propped against the ring so he wouldn’t roll backward. He hooked his cane over one arm and leaned forward.