The Secret Scripture (7 page)

Yes, it was lads of the new army in their awkward uniforms. It would be thought as they came in that they had bullets aplenty, at least they levelled their guns at us in their own fierce moments of concentration, and to my young eyes, looking out through my father's legs, the six or seven faces that entered the temple looked only terrified in the light of the fire.

The long thin boy from the mountain, with the trousers not quite to his ankles, jumped up from behind the table, and for mad reasons of his own, charged against the newcomers as if he was out on a proper battlefield. The brother of the dead man was right behind him, maybe in his grief demanding this of himself. It is difficult to describe the noise that guns make in a small enclosed space, but it would make the bones drop out of your flesh. My father, Fr Gaunt and I reared back against the wall as one, and the bullets that went into the two lads must have made queer tracks through them, because I saw sudden exploding pocks in the plaster of the old wall beside me. First the bullets, and then a thin falling cascade of lightest blood, over my uniform, my hands, my father, my life.

The two irregulars were not killed, but writhed now on the ground caught up in each other.

'For the love of God,' cried Fr Gaunt, 'desist – there is a young girl in here, and ordinary people.' Whatever he meant by the latter.

'Put down your guns, put down your guns,' shouted one of the new soldiers, almost a scream it was. Certainly the last man our side of the table threw down his gun, and his handgun out of his waistband, and he stood up immediately and raised his hands. He looked back at me just for a second and I thought his eyes were weeping, his eyes were doing something or other, certainly piercing into me anyhow, fiercely, fiercely, like those eyes could be used to kill, could be better than the bullets they did not have.

'Look,' said Fr Gaunt. 'I believe – I believe these men have no bullets. Just everyone do nothing for a moment!'

'No bullets?' said the commander of the men. 'Because they've put them all into our men up on the mountain. Are you the bastards were up on the mountain?'

Oh dear, oh dear, we knew they were, and yet for some reason none of us spoke a word.

'You've killed my brother,' said the man called John on the ground. He was holding the top of his thigh, and there was a great strange dark pool of blood just under him, blood as black as blackbirds. 'You killed him in cold blood. You had him captured, you had him harmless, and you shot him in the stomach, three fucking times!'

'So you wouldn't be creeping down on us and murdering us where we went!' said the commander. 'Hold these men down, and you,' he cried to him who had surrendered, 'count yourself arrested. Bring them all out to the truck, lads, and we'll sort this out. In the dark of the night we catch you, in this filthy place, gathered like rats. You, man, what's your name?'

'Joe Clear,' said my father. 'I'm the watchman here at the graveyard. This is Fr Gaunt, one of the curates in the parish. I called him, for to see to the dead boy there.'

'So you bury the likes of him in Sligo,' said the commander, with extraordinary force. And he rushed around the table and held the gun to Fr Gaunt's temple. 'What sort of a priest are you, that would be disobeying your own bishops? Are you one of those filthy renegades?'

'Are you going to shoot a priest?' said my father in astonishment.

Fr Gaunt had his eyes closed fast and was kneeling now just the same as he might in the church. He was kneeling and I don't know if he was praying soundlessly, but he wasn't saying anything.

'Jem,' said one of the other Free State soldiers, 'there was never a priest shot yet in Ireland by us. Don't shoot him.'

The commander stood back and raised his gun away from Fr Gaunt.

'Come on, lads, gather them up, we're getting out of here.'

And the soldiers raised up the two wounded gently enough and led them out through the door. Just as the third man was being arrested he turned his face full on me.

'May God forgive you for what you done but I never will.'

'But I never done nothing!' I said.

'You told them we were here.'

'I did not, I swear to God.'

'God's not here,' he said. 'Look at you, guilty as Jack.' 'No!' I said.

The man laughed then a horrible laugh like a lash of rain into your face, and the other soldiers brought him away. We could hear them cajoling the prisoners along the paths. I was shaking in all my body. The commander, when the room was clear, held out a big hand to Fr Gaunt, and helped him to his feet.

'I'm sorry, Father,' he said. 'It has been a terrible night. Murder and mayhem. Excuse me.'

He spoke so sincerely my father I'm sure was as struck by the words as I was.

'It was a blackguardly thing to do,' said Fr Gaunt, in a small voice that nevertheless had a strange taint of violence in it.

'Blackguardly. I support fully the new country. We all do, except those mad misguided boys.'

'You should heed your bishops so. And not give succour to the damned.'

'You let me have my own thoughts on that,' said Fr Gaunt, with a sort of schoolmasterish arrogance. 'What are you going to do with the body? Don't you want to take it with you?'

'What do you want to do with it?' said the soldier, now with a sudden weariness, the fall in energy that comes after great effort. They had charged into an unknown place with God knew what danger, and now it seemed the thought of lugging John's brother Willie was a feather too far. Or a hammer.

'I'll have the doctor fetched and pronounce him dead and find out who owns him, and then perhaps we can bury him somewhere in the yard, if you have no objection.'

'You will be burying a devil if you do. Better throw him in a hole outside the walls, like a criminal, or a bastard child.'

Fr Gaunt said nothing to that. The soldier went out. He never looked at me once. When his boots stopped sounding on the gravel path outside, the queerest coldest silence dreeped into the temple. My father stood silent, and the priest, and I sat silently on the cold damp floor, and John's brother Willie was most silent of all.

'I am extremely angry,' said Fr Gaunt then, in his best Sunday mass voice, 'to have been dragged into this. Extremely angry, Mr Clear.'

My father looked nonplussed. What else was he to do? My father's unmoored face scared me just as much as Willie's stiffening corpse.

'I'm sorry,' said my father. 'I'm sorry if I acted wrongly in getting Roseanne to fetch you.'

'You did wrong to do that, you did wrong, yes. I am deeply aggrieved. You may remember it was I who put you in this post. It was I, and great powers of persuasion were needed, let me tell you. I feel very poorly thanked, very poorly.'

With that, the priest went out into the dark and the rain, leaving my father and myself with the dead boy, till the doctor could arrive.

'I suppose I put his life in danger. I suppose he was frightened. But I did not intend it. By heavens, I thought priests liked to be in on everything. Indeed and I did.'

My poor father sounded frightened too, but now because of a new and different cause.

How delicately, slowly, fate undid him, I suppose.

There are things that move at a human pace before our eyes, but other things move in arcs so great they are as good as invisible. The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.

I think it was that my father embarrassed history.

He was neither willing nor unwilling to bury that boy Willie, and called a priest to help him in his decision. It was as if as a Presbyterian he had meddled in sacred murders, or murders so beyond gentleness and love that to be even in propinquity to them was ruinous, murderous even.

Perhaps in later years I heard versions of that night that didn't fit my own memory of it, but all the same, there was always one grand constant, that I had stopped in my path to fetch Fr Gaunt and told my tale to the Free State soldiers, either at my father's bidding or by my own instincts. The fact that I never saw the soldiers, never spoke to them, never even thought of doing so – for would that not have put my father possibly in further danger? – is in the informal history of Sligo neither here nor there. For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.

History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.

My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making. The heart and the soul, so beloved of God, are both filthied up by residence here, how can we avoid it? These seem not my thoughts at all, but maybe are borrowed out of old readings of Sir Thomas Browne. But they feel as if they are mine. They sound in my head like my own belling thoughts. It is strange. I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.

He had better be in my case, or I may dwell with the devil shortly.

Our house was clean, but did not look so clean the day that Fr Gaunt came to visit us. It was Sunday morning about ten, so I may assume Fr Gaunt was between masses and had hurried from his church along the river to knock on our door. As my mother had an old mirror balanced on a yellow brick in the window of the sitting room, we could always see without showing ourselves who was at the door, and the sight of the priest sent us scurrying about. A fourteen-year-old girl is always vividly aware of her appearance, or thinks she must be, or whatever it is, but speaking of mirrors I was at that time a slave to the one in my mother's bedroom, not because I thought I looked well, but because I did not know how I looked, and laboured many a minute to adjust myself into a picture I could trust, or was content with, and never could achieve it. The gold of my hair looked like some wet grass gone wild to me, and for the life of me I did not know the soul of the person that peered back at me in my mother's mossy little mirror. Because the edges of the mirror were strangely decayed, she had actually bought some unusual enamel paint in the chemist as may be, and decorated the edges of the mirror with tiny black stems and leaves, that lent everything that appeared in that less-than-poetical mirror a funereal look, which perhaps had suited my father's profession, at least up to now. So my first action was to dash up our few little stairs to the mirror and make an assault on my fourteen-year-old sense of horror.

When I got back down to the living room my father was standing in the middle of it, looking about him like a baulking pony, his eyes lighting first on the motorcycle, then on the piano, then on the spaces in between, his hand dashing now to a cushion on the 'best' chair. When I glanced out into the tiny hall, my mother was merely lodged there, stuck there, not moving a muscle, like an actor waiting to go out on a stage, gearing up her courage. Then she lifted the latch.

As Fr Gaunt edged into our room, the first thing I noticed was how glistening he seemed, his face shaved so closely you could write on it with a pen. He looked so safe, the safest thing in Ireland in an unsafe time. Every month of that year was the worst month, my father had said, as every person killed echoed in him. But the priest looked sacrosanct, pristine, separate, as if separate from the history of Ireland itself. Not that I thought this at the time, God knows what I thought, I don't know, only that this cleanliness made me fearful.

I had never seen my father quite so fussed. He could only speak in rushes and gaps.

'Ah, but, yes, sit down there, Father, do, now,' he said, nearly advancing on the unsmiling priest, as if to knock him back into the chair. But Fr Gaunt sat down steady as a dancer.

I knew my mother was in the hallway, in that little gap of privacy and silence. I stood at my father's right side like a watchman, like a sentry against the storm of an attack. My head was filled with some unknown darkness, I couldn't think, I couldn't continue that long conversation we make in our heads, as if an angel were writing there unbeknownst.

'Hmm,' said my father. 'We'll make tea, how about that?' he said. 'Yes, we will. Cissy, Cissy, will you heat the kettle, dear, do.'

'I drink so much tea,' said the priest, 'it's a wonder my skin doesn't turn brown.'

My father laughed.

'I'm sure you do, out of a sense of duty. But no need in my house. No need. I, that owe everything in the world to you, everything in the world. Not that, not that -'

And here my father floundered, and blushed, and I blushed too I dare say, for reasons I could not understand.

The priest cleared his throat, and smiled.

'I will take a cup of tea, of course I will.'

'Ah, well, that's good, that's good,' and already we could hear my mother scraping about in the pantry down the corridor.

'It is so cold today,' said the priest, rubbing his hands suddenly, 'that I am very relieved to be near a fire, now, I am. It is so frosty along the river. Do you think', he said, drawing out a silver case, 'I might smoke?'

'Oh, fire away,' said my father.

The priest now drew his box of Swan matches from his soutane, and a funny oblong-shaped cigarette from the case, struck the match with a beautiful precision and neatness, and drew in the flame with his breath through the crisp tube. Then he exhaled and gave a little cough.

'The – the,' said the priest, 'the position in the graveyard as you can well imagine is not – tenable. Em?'

He gave another elegant pull on the cigarette, adding: 'I am afraid to say, Joe. I dislike this fact as I am sure you dislike it. But I am sure you will appreciate the – the great cloud of dust that has descended on my head, between the bishop, who believes all the renegades must be excommunicated, as was decided at the recent synod, and the mayor, who as you may be aware is very much against the treaty as it stands, and as the most influential man in Sligo carries great – influence. As you can imagine, Joe.'