The White Plague (27 page)

Kevin lifted the pistol, then lowered it.

“What you don’t understand, Kevin O’Donnell, you stay out of!” Doheny said. “Unless you don’t want us to find a cure for the plague!”

“What a thing to say, Fin!” Kevin sounded hurt. “Find the cure then if you can. It’s your work and I wish you joy of it. But when you find the cure, it’ll be mine as much as yours. You understand?” Kevin put the pistol back in his side pocket.

Doheny stared at him, realizing that Kevin saw the plague as just another weapon. With a cure, he would want to use it against everyone outside Ireland. He’d play at Madman and the whole world his target!

“You’d spread this madness?” Doheny whispered.

“There’ll be kings once more in Ireland,” Doheny said. “Now, be gone to your Lab and thank Kevin O’Donnell for the sparing of your life.”

Doheny lurched to his feet and left the cell, staggering at the threshold, expecting a bullet in the back at every step. Not until he was in the outer court, Kevin’s guards opening the gate, did he believe he had been spared. Inchicore Road looked insanely ordinary, even a flow of auto traffic along it. Doheny turned right and, once out of sight of the gate, leaned against the old Kilmainham wall. His legs felt as though the muscles had been stripped from them, only the bones and weak flesh left behind.

What could be done about Kevin O’Donnell? The man was as mad as poor O’Neill. Doheny felt mostly pity for Kevin, but something had to be done. There was no escaping the necessity. Doheny looked up past a full-leaved tree at a sky with patches of blue in it.

“Ireland, Ireland,” he whispered. “What your sons have come to!”

He understood Kevin well – all the fighting and the living with death at your elbow. It banked a fire in every Irishman. It had gone on for so long, for so many generations, that the brooding, unquenchable flame had become a full partner in the Irish psyche. It was fixed there by the adhesive of oppression and starvation, kept alive in each new generation by the hearth-side stories in the night – of tyrant cruelties and the agonies of ancestors. The shuddering realities of Ireland’s travail were never farther from any Irishman than the words of his own family.

Doheny looked left where a group of armed Finn Sadal were emerging from Kilmainham. They paid no attention to the man leaning against the wall.

There goes the fire to be renewed,
Doheny thought.

The Irish past was a sullen ember, always ready to erupt. Melancholy could become in an instant the berserker’s abandon. It was hatred of the English; that was the hub of their lives. Each new Irishman pledged that a thousand years of cruelty would be avenged. It was ground into the Irish soul.

It is the source of our passion, the grim aspect behind every jest. And the object of our hatred was never more than sixty miles away across the Irish sea.

Oh, Kevin was easy to understand, but he would be harder to stop.

Doheny pushed himself away from the cold wall of Kilmainham Jail. Sweat was chilly against his skin. He turned and headed for the Royal Hospital.

I must call Adrian immediately.

Original sin? Ahh, Father Michael, what a fine question for me as knows it so well! Original sin is the being born Irish. And that’s sin enough for any god!

– Joseph Herity

K
ATE
O
’
G
ARA
sat at the little wall desk in their new quarters writing in her diary the things she could not say to Stephen. She knew it was a bit after 10:30
A.M.
because she had just heard Moone Colum and Hugh Stiles come on guard duty outside there in the castle courtyard, which, she thought, must be almost completely bricked in and covered over by now. The daylight was much dimmer than when they had been moved here.

She wrote in the diary:

“I do not like Adrian Peard. He enjoys his authority too much.”

In all fairness, she knew why Stephen admired the man so much. No denying Peard’s brilliance, but he demanded this recognition at every turn. There was something lacking in him, she thought. Peard did not project Stephen’s solid reliability.

I’m being ungrateful
.

Everything done here was part of a design to hold the plague at bay for one lone woman – herself. Nothing was being spared, so they assured her, to keep her happy in this protracted isolation. Only eleven days after Stephen had almost physically forced her into the pressure tank, a great mob of men had come with a lorry and cranes and big machines. By nightfall they had been ready to move the tank entire with Stephen and herself in it like two beans rattling in a pot. There had been soldiers all around, armored vehicles and motorcycles and guns. The air pumps and a great diesel generator had been carried on the lorry with the tank. The noise of them so close had alarmed her and she had clung to Stephen.

“What if the tank breaks?”

“It’s steel and very strong, love.” Her ear against his chest, she could hear his voice rumbling there and the strong steady beat of his heart. That, more than the words, had calmed her.

She had peered through the ports once and seen the lights of a city burning in the night far off across the fields. There had been fires on a distant hill as they drove down into a valley and, once, protracted gunfire stopped the convoy beside a bridge with dark water flowing nearby in the starlight. She had huddled against Stephen until the lorry once more began to move.

They had arrived finally at this courtyard, it illuminated by brilliant lights up high on the inner walls. Through the ports, Kate had glimpsed stones and bricks piled all around, stacks of cement in sacks. There had been the crackling blue of welders and men working over large sheets of steel.

“They’re building us bigger quarters, love,” Stephen had explained. “The airlock end of this tank will be fitted into the other quarters.”

“Will it be safe?”

No mistaking the source of her anxiety. The stories of women dying – on the radio and relayed by the men outside – had filled her with terror.

“Adrian will sterilize the place and everything in it,” Stephen had reassured her.

Still, she had been reluctant to crawl out the airlock into the other rooms when the workmen had finished there. Stephen had pointed out that the new chamber contained a television and a private room for the toilet, and it even had a bath.

To Kate, the toilet facilities had been the ugliest part of living in the smaller tank. Never mind her training as a nurse and all the understanding of bodily functions. The little tank had only this pressure-operated bowl for a toilet and it right out in the open opposite a port. Wastes went out through a pipe into a sterile container designed originally to capture specimens for medical examination. She had forced Stephen to turn his back while she used this
convenience
, but anyone could look in from outside… although she had to admit she had never seen a face at the port while she was on the damned toilet.

And there was the smell. Within a day, the confined quarters had taken on the stench of a latrine.

Canned food was her other complaint.

“Cold canned food!”

Those three words uttered with revulsion had grated on Stephen. She had known this but could not stop herself from saying them.

And the water in sterile bottles! No taste to it at all.

The new quarters had vertical walls and a flat ceiling of steel. There was even brown-and-white lino on the floor and two electric burners on a bench beside a small pressure sink. Nothing near as grand as the kitchen in Peard’s cottage, but the food could be heated. It all continued to come from cans, though. And the water, the tasteless water in sterile bottles! Although now they could get an occasional bottle of Guinness if it had been made before the plague.

They still slept in the original tank, but now it was on a big mattress left sterile in the new chamber. It sagged a bit toward the middle because of the tank’s curvature, this in spite of resting on a big sheet of plywood supported at the middle by wooden blocks. The blocks had a disturbing tendency to bounce and drum when she and Stephen made love.

“We’re animals in a zoo!” she complained, thinking about the men outside hearing that noise.

“But you’re alive, Kate!”

She could not explain why this terrified her. It should have been reassuring.

I’m alive.

But the terrible news relayed from outside, and even some of it now seen on the telly, only made her continued existence more alarming. She felt fragile and subject to the awful whims of a malignant fate.

In her diary, she had drawn a crude map and plotted on it the plague’s inexorable spread – Brittany, North Africa, Sicily, the toe of Italy, then Rome itself, the citadel of her faith. On her map, she blotted out each new plague place with ink and felt as she did this that she removed these regions from her world. The plague spots were like the places marked on antique maps – Terra Incognita. They would have to be rediscovered… if anyone survived.

She knew she was not the only woman left alive in Ireland. There was talk outside that she could overhear and they answered her questions when she asked. There were women isolated in the old mines near Mountmellick and near Castleblayney. Another group of women was said to be in a great house on its own land near Clonmel with a madman named Brann McCrae. Rumors and reports spoke of tiny groups here and there throughout the land, each protected by desperate men.

Her own position, though, was unique.

In his own cold-blooded way, Peard had let her know this as an eavesdropper while he discussed the situation with Stephen.

“Most of the other women are sure to go as their men are contaminated in the search for food.”

She had stood at a port, looking out at Peard while he spoke to Stephen by telephone. Peard was a bitter-faced little dynamo, no more than a meter and a half tall, with frigid blue eyes and a thin-lipped mouth that Kate had never seen smile. He had straw-colored hair, which he kept close-cropped or shaved off entirely, as did many of the men she saw through the ports. Peard’s skin was tanned and the brow heavily creased by frown wrinkles.

“Can’t we do anything for those women?” Stephen had asked.

“We’re providing sterilized food, but the men are all suspicious and won’t accept our medical advice nor anything else. We thought of taking some of them by force, but that would be fatal for the women. Best leave things as they are and hope.”

“What about the women being sent back from overseas?” Stephen had asked.

“Not many of them getting here alive. Those who do…” Peard’s features had grown glowering and thoughtful “. . . well, we tried isolating some of them, to no avail. And the Beach Boys control all the coast. They aren’t cooperating. We’ve had to go along or risk a civil war… which we may do yet, although Fin says…” Peard had shook his head silently, not revealing what Fin had said.

Fin, she knew, would be Fintan Doheny, a man of power in the high councils.

“What about England?” Stephen’s voice had sounded beaten down, hopeless.

“Worse than here, so we’re told. It spread faster there for some reason. The Welsh say they have some women in a coal mine, but the problem of food is terrible. And the water… Some Scots have thirty-two women isolated in Stirring Castle, but there’s violence in Edinburgh and mobs. Last we heard, the people at the castle were starving and some religious madman with a mob at their gates.”

“Surely, we’ll have an answer to the plague before all the women die,” Stephen had protested.

“We’re working on it. Rest assured of that.”

Peard’s words, uttered as they were in his coldly impersonal way, had given her no reassurance at all.

She had begun to cry, deep racking sobs. Her poor mother dead! And not even a funeral nor a priest to pray over her. All the women of Cork gone excepting herself. And what was she here in this room of steel? A guinea pig! She could hear it in Peard’s voice, see it in his manner. He thought of her as an easily available
test subject!

She longed for Maggie to talk to, a woman friend to understand and speak the common language of their concerns. But Maggie was gone with the rest.

Hearing her sobs, Stephen had broken off the conversation with Peard. His arms around her helped some, but the sobs died off only when she grew too tired and lost in her misery to continue them.

“I want us to be married,” she whispered finally.

“I know, love. I’ve asked them to bring a priest. They’re trying.”

Seated at the little desk against the cold steel wall, Kate wrote in her diary: “When will they bring a priest? It’s been fifteen days since Stephen asked.”

She could hear Moone Colum and Hugh Stiles arguing outside her wall. A trick of the acoustics made the desk a focal point for overhearing the words of the two men out there. She often sat here listening to them. She liked old Moone in spite of his blasphemous attitude toward the Church. But he and Hugh kept up an argument about religion that had begun to bore her. They were at it again, she noted. 

“The system of birth and death has been broken, that it has,” Moone said.

From behind her, she heard the page of a book turn and Stephen’s whisper: “Moone’s off again.”

So he could hear them, too. She folded her arms on the desk and lowered her head to her arms, wishing the two men would take their argument someplace else.

But Moone was ranting in that peculiar rasping whine of his, which Kate had come to identify as his angry sound: “This completes the process begun by the Catholic Church!” 

“Aw, you’re daft,” Hugh said. “Birth, death – how can such a thing be broken?”

“Would y’ grant me, Hugh, that the work of bearin’ children was once part of a circle, part of an endless return?”

“You sound like one of them heathen Indians,” Hugh protested. “Next thing you’ll be tellin’ me you’re the spirit of Moses himself come back to…”

“I’m just talkin’ about the circle of birth and death, y’ old idiot!”