The Secret Scripture (19 page)

He is unburdening himself, as he might a sin. Certainly his text is far from sacred. But he does not flinch. He is staunch. He is fearless. Fr Gaunt conscientiously details it all.

As a rule, a policeman in Ireland was never stationed near his own home town, one presumes so that there would be no question of favour to people among whom he had grown up. Roseanne's father was actually one of the few exceptions to this rule, as he had been born and bred in Collooney, not so far, and certainly not far enough, from Sligo town itself. So he knew the district in a way that was perhaps not healthy for himself. It was possible for people to take more personally his presence in the town, in particular after the bringing in of the auxiliary police, made up of officers who had fought in World War One, and the Black and Tans, men and officers from the same site of carnage. This was in answer to the various 'outrages' of the war of independence, consisting mostly of the ambushing and shooting of soldiers and police – the crown forces as they used to say.

Her father it seems had the capacity therefore to be very aware of things happening in the town. Perhaps he was able to pick up information casually in a manner not open to a stranger. People might be more inclined to include him in gossip and rumour at the public house in the evening. Certainly her father had an enormous capacity for alcohol, being able like a docker to down fifteen pints of porter in a night and steer himself home afterwards. Apparently his daughter Roseanne would wait, anxiously no doubt, for his tread as he turned into their street, when she would gather him into the house.

Roseanne's playground was Sligo cemetery at the back of their house. She knew every alleyway and quirk of the place, and her special spot was the old ruined temple at its heart, where she liked to play hopscotch and the like in the crumbling portico. One evening, wrote Fr Gaunt, it seems she witnessed a strange burial. It was a group of men coming in with a coffin, quite without priest or ceremony, and lowering it into an open grave, and burying it there quietly in the dark, the only thing to show them the fags sparking in their mouths and the subdued chat. Roseanne, as would be natural in a daughter, ran to tell her father what she had seen. It seems she thought it was grave-robbers, though in truth the coffin was being put in not taken out, and there had not been such thefts in Ireland or anywhere else for half a century.

How Fr Gaunt knew all these details is not clear, and indeed as I read it over now I am puzzled by his omniscience, but then that was the ambition of a priest in his time.

At any rate her father had the coffin disinterred the next morning, Fr Gaunt himself in attendance, and in the coffin was found not a body but a stash of guns, items very hard to get in the war of independence and gathered with great hardship, indeed often by means of taking one from the corpse of a slain policeman. And so it turned out, many of the items in the coffin were indeed police issue, and the haul from ambushes and raids. So from Roseanne's father's point of view, he was looking at the relics and signs of murdered comrades.

The newly cut name on the gravestone was Joseph Brady, but no one of that name had died in the town.

Unbelievably, the men had also buried with the guns notes of secret meetings, including, by some foolish miracle, various names and addresses, including certain individuals wanted for murder. It was a wretched bonanza for the police. Before anyone knew what was happening, some of the names were arrested, and one of them was killed 'evading capture', a man called

Willie Lavelle, whose brother later played a part in Roseanne's life in Sligo, according to the good priest. For some reason this man Willie Lavelle was buried in the very grave where the guns had been so futilely hidden.

The recapture of the guns and documents and the killing of the man caused a subterranean furore in the circles involved in hiding them. Orders were issued no doubt for any and every possible act of reprisal against the police. But this did not happen immediately, long enough for Roseanne and her family to experience living day by day and minute by minute under this pressing tide of dread. I am sure they hoped and prayed that the insurgents would be defeated and Ireland restored to peaceable ways. Chance would be a fine thing, they might have said.

As I lay my hand on these withered sheets of Fr Gaunt, I wonder sincerely how I can use them. Can I really ask Roseanne to live through all this again? But I must remember it is not the pain of her life I am after in the first instance, but the consequence of that pain, and the true reason for her sectioning. Now I go back to the original reason for my quest, which is simply to ascertain if she was mad, and whether or not her committal was justified, and whether or not I may recommend her to be returned out into the world. I think I may decide this without her corroboration, or only with her cor-roboration if she wishes it. I must make a judgement about the verities that are before me, not the verities that are only intimated, or that are suggested by my own instincts.

The bells of St Thomas church in the town are ringing eight. I am as late as the rabbit in Lewis Carroll.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

I met the world and his wife with Tom because he was a sociable man in the extreme, but it was actually some years before I was shown to the mother. I heard about the mother of course, two brothers talking will often linger on that subject. I formed an idea of her, her small stature, her fondness for scrapbooks in which she recorded all matters pertaining to her sons, Jack's travel tickets, documents, Tom's dance notices in the Champion, and now, as time went on, his speaking at various times in the town, on various topics. I got the idea that she and her husband were often on poor terms, that Old Tom generally went his way in, to her, a feckless manner. But maybe she was a connoisseur of fecklessness for all that. Not on her own account. I knew she had promised her only daughter to the nuns at a young age and this girl Teasy went duly to the Sisters of Mercy, as a dowried nun. That was a mendicant order that lived in a place called Nazareth House. They had houses all over England and even America. I never knew if the mother had ambitions for her sons in the priesthood, but she must have thought it was some insurance on her immortal soul if she could offer her daughter to that life, I don't know.

There was another son called Eneas of course but he was only spoken of sideways, although once or twice it seemed he did sneak home, returning from the wide world where apparently he roamed to sleep the daylight hours in his mother's house, and only venturing forth at night. This was a small mystery in a time of great mysteries, and I don't remember me paying special heed to it.

'Why's your brother Eneas gone from home the most of the time?' I asked Tom once.

'Just a little peccadillo,' said Tom, and that's all he would say at first.

But another time we were in town together and one of his rivals, one of the up and coming Republican men, taunted him mysteriously in the street. He was a man called Joseph Healy and by no means a blackguard.

'Ah Tom,' he said, 'the policeman's brother.'

'The what?' said Tom, not with his usual ease and bonhomie.

'Never mind, never mind. Sure we all have our skeletons in the cupboard, I am sure.'

'Do you want to make something of this, Healy, in the council elections upcoming?'

'What? No,' said Joseph Healy, almost contritely, because though they were opponents, everyone in truth liked Tom, and Healy as I say was a decent skin at heart. 'I was only teasing you, Tom.'

Then they had a hearty enough handshake. But I could see Tom's mood had changed, and all the way up the street he was quiet and darkened. In a country of cupboards, every one with a skeleton in it, especially after the civil war, no one was exempt. But I could see that Tom resented that, and bitterly. Tom after all had a plan, a road to travel, which was an admirable thing in a young man like him. But skeletons he could do without obviously.

The mother was of the same mind. She loved the glory of Jack and she loved the glory of Tom, even if Jack looked in the ransacked trunk of old decency for his clothing, and Tom was a man to wear a modern hat in the new Ireland. This I gleaned from their conversations, and I always paid heed when they spoke of her, as a spy might pay heed to chit-chat in bars, because I had a feeling that some day I would need every scrap of information I could get, if I was to survive actually meeting her.

If ever there was a cold card in that game it was the blank, dark card of my own mother.

In those strange days when if anything unexpected could happen, it probably would, Mr de Valera became head of the country.

'Now the guns are back in the Dail,' said Tom darkly. 'How do you mean, Tom?' I asked.

'They're so afeared of being there, they're after bringing their guns into the chamber.'

Now Tom spoke with understandable disgust, as these men were the very ones his own crowd had striven to subdue, imprison, and alas execute. So how it came about that the very men against the Treaty, and who lads like Tom had wanted erased from the Irish story, were now the men in charge… You could almost feel a lurch in the life of Sligo. It was fellas like Joseph Healy were up now. This was hard and bitter for Tom all things considered. Myself, I wouldn't have had three thoughts about any of them, but that even in his love-talk Tom could flummox me with the politics.

We were lying up the back of the great dune that gave Strandhill its name in fact, when he uttered the above sentiment. It was a greater obstacle to his future than any he had experienced. He had never been a gunman himself, coming to maturity after all that. To give him his due, he thought the time for guns was past. He had a sort of idea that North might be joined to South at last, but with the crazy notion that it would be some man like Carson would be the first 'king of Ireland', as he jocularly put it. This was an old notion of men like Tom. There was a sort of dancing swing to his notions, like his music. Joseph Healy would've put a bullet in Carson if he could have done it quietly and gone home to his family after.

It was families and young ones mixed up in it now, it wasn't just single lads going round, and lassies maybe helping them.

Well, in spite of all that, he soon turned to kissing me again, in the quiet dunes, with the seagulls outraged but only them seeing us, and the sea bearing Tom's heroic record the other side of the sand. Strandhill's habitual breeze raged along the marram grasses minutely. It was bitter cold but kisses dealt with that.

And a few weeks later walking across the bridge by the Swan Hotel who should stop me but the fading figure of John Lavelle.

He was nearly a young man still but the fringe of something else had touched him. He looked hard beaten by his time in America, or wherever he had been, and I looked down and saw the soles of his shoes were well worn. I imagined him hopping trains like a hobo and gadding about futilely generally. He was handsome though, with his narrow grey face.

'Look at you,' he said. 'I hardly knew you.'

'Likewise,' I said. I was on my own, but wary, because Sligo was like a wretched family, everyone knew everyone and if they didn't know everything about everyone, they wanted to. I think John Lavelle noticed my furtive looking.

'What's up?' he said. 'You don't want to talk to me?'

'Ah, no,' I said. 'I do. How are you keeping? Were you away off in America then?'

'That was the idea,' he said. 'It didn't go just like that. The best laid plans.'

'Ah sure, yes,' I said.

'At least I can walk free in Ireland now,' he said.

'Oh?'

'What with Dev in now.' 'Oh, yes. Well, that's good anyhow.' 'Better than the fucking Curragh jail.' The curse word made me jump, but I thought he had the right to use it.

'Is that where you were?'

'That's it.'

'Well, John, I'll see you around the place.'

'I'm going down home a while to the islands, but yes, you'll see me back here all right. I'm going to be working for the council.'

'You're an elected man?'

'No, no,' he said. 'On the roads. Council work. Digging and the like.'

'That's good. It's work.'

'It is work. Work's hard to find. Even in America I'm told. You working yourself?'

'Cafe Cairo,' I said. 'Waitress.'

'Good for you. I'll come see you when I get back to Sligo.' 'Ah, do, yeh,' I said, suddenly uneasy with myself, and embarrassed, I knew not why hardly.

John Kane brings me my soup just now.

'This bloody job will kill me,' he says. 'I'd rather be a mole-catcher in Connaght.'

All the while with his unfortunate gobbling of the throat.

'But there are no moles in Connaght,' I said.

'In none of Ireland. Isn't it the perfect job for an old man? Them bloody stairs.'

And off he went.

The mother's bungalow was nice enough but it smelt of boiling lamb – in my vivid state of alarm, I might have said sacrificial lamb. Somewhere down the back of the house you sensed pots boiling, curly kale, cabbage, from Old Tom's garden, and a lamb, boiling, boiling, spewing its distinctive mild, damp smell into the corridors. That was my impression. I was only near that bungalow twice in my whole life and both times felt like dying just to be near it. In those days, the odour of cooking meat turned my stomach. But boiling meat took the biscuit. Why, I don't know, since my mother relished all forms of meat, even offal and innards that would frighten a surgeon. She would dine quite happily on a lamb's heart.

I was brought by Tom into the front sitting room. I felt like a farm animal in there, I felt like the cow and the calf and the pig must have felt in times past, when they'd be led into a cottage at night. People and animals slept in the same house one time in Ireland. That's why many a country kitchen still has a sloping floor, sloping down from the fire and the hag's bed and the upper bedroom, so obviously the shit and the piss of the animals couldn't flow that way. Human-wards. But I felt like that, awkward, bumping into the furniture in a fashion I never would have normally. The why of it was that I shouldn't have been there. I wasn't meant to be. It even took God by surprise that I was, I'd say.