The White Plague (39 page)

Herity, seeing the green-framed mansion, thought:
There’s Brann McCrae’s little dovecote! We’ll soon see what this John O’Donnell’s made of!

The priest and the boy stopped at the near abutment of the bridge and turned to watch their companions approach.

John walked out onto the bridge and looked downstream where water rippled over green rocks. The meadow visible through the trees sloped down to a narrow stretch of boggy ground beside the river. Valerian and yellow flags could be glimpsed in the marsh. Bees were working the meadow, but the river sounds masked their humming. The sun, the warmth, the river – a sense of relaxation settled over John. He accepted a slab of soda bread from the boy, a thin slice of white cheese on it. The boy put his elbows on the bridge’s stone rail and watched the water while he ate. John could smell the perspiration of the boy, a sweet odor. The young cheeks moved evenly with the chewing.

What a strange child, John thought. A personality attempting to be transparent. Not here! But he
was
here. He ate the food Father Michael gave him. He called attention to things by looking sharply at them. He nestled against the priest at times, a hurt animal seeking such comfort as he could find. And the attention he called to himself by his silence – discordant! A protest louder than any scream.

“I do not speak!”

It was a thing repeated every time John looked at him. As a protest, it was remarkably irritating – especially to Herity.

John looked at Herity and Father Michael standing there beside their packs at the end of the bridge, eating silently, not looking at each other. Herity occasionally glanced at John and the boy. Herity, slowly eating his soda bread and cheese, keeping an eye on the road they had traversed, studying the land around them, looking for anything that moved, anything with a threat in it. Wary, that was the word for Herity. He was as isolated as the silent boy, but the wariness was different. There! He had his pocketknife out again! Always manicuring his fingernails with that knife – meticulous and purposeful, an action like a habit. Cleanliness by rote. He had handsome fingers, too – long and slender but with power in them. John had seen them flex like claws, the tendons standing out along the knuckles.

The priest beside him: tall and haggard. Very tall. A Hamlet in a dark suit, the black hat pulled low over his eyes. The features put John in mind of “horse face” – that protruding jaw, the forward thrust at the neck, the strong nose and the dark eyes beneath those heavy brows, those thick and powerful teeth slightly protruding. Not a handsome man but it was a face not easily forgotten.

The boy beside John coughed and spat into the river. John tried to imagine the boy happy, playing merrily, some fat on him. He had been a toddler once, animated with joy of life, running to his mother. Such things were back there somewhere. A sturdy lad. The flesh appeared healthy in spite of its emptiness. Dead but not dead.

Why did the boy irritate Herity so? Time and again, John had seen Herity try to make the boy break that vow of silence. “What good is such a vow? It won’t bring back the dead!”

There was never an answer. The boy withdrew farther into his silent armor. The way he pulled his head into the blue anorak begged comparison with a turtle, but the comparison failed. The turtle might withdraw its vulnerable parts, staring out fearfully until danger passed. This boy cowered in some far deeper place than the hood of his anorak. So deep it was that the eyes sometimes had not a glimmer of life in them. Everything the boy did at such times was transformed into a sullen patience far more stilled than mere silence. It was suspended animation, as though the life processes were put on hold while the flesh plodded along. The flesh remained merely the carrier of an inert spirit, a mass without internal direction.

Except when he threw rocks at the rooks.

Why did this boy hate the black birds so? Had he seen them settle onto beloved flesh? Perhaps that was the explanation. There could be bleached bones somewhere, cleansed by the birds, bones that once had carried someone this boy loved.

John finished his soda bread and cheese, dusted his hand and crossed the bridge to where worn, irregular stone steps led down to the water. Beside the stream, he knelt and scooped the cold water into his palms, drinking it noisily, enjoying the coldness on his cheeks. The water tasted sweet and faintly of granite. John turned his head at a sound beside him. The boy had joined him on the ledge beside the flow and was drinking with his face plunged into the current.

Face dripping water, the boy looked up at John, a solemn, studying expression.
Who are you? Should I be like you?

In a sudden feeling of confusion, John stood, shook the water from his hands and climbed back to the bridge. How could the boy speak so plainly without words?

John stood at the bridge rail above the boy, not looking at him. There were low willows along the boggy ground beneath the elders. A cloud came over the sun then, throwing the world between the trees into a sudden chill gray. The river sounds were only river sounds, John told himself. Not people talking. Once this land might have been enchanted, but now the spirits were gone. It possessed only this emptiness, an absolute vitiation at one with the gnarled willows beneath the elders and the dank bog at the river’s edge. The river spoke to him, a blasphemous echo: “My spirits are gone. I am wasted.”

The cloud passed and once more the sun beat down between the trees, sparkling on the water, but it was different.

The boy joined John on the bridge. The priest came to them, carrying his pack in one hand, leaving Herity at the end of the bridge, staring off across the meadows.

“This is desecration,” Father Michael said.

The boy looked up at Father Michael, a question plain on the silent young face:
What does that mean?

The priest met the boy’s gaze. “It’s a terrible place.”

The boy turned and looked all around, his expression clearly puzzled, saying that he thought this a pretty place – the trees, the river, a full stomach.

He’s healing,
John thought. Would he speak when he was fully healed?

Herity, coming up to them, said: “Ahhh, the priest’s in one of his black moods. His faith is wavering in his mouth and it like a faucet that lets everything run out.”

Father Michael whirled on him. “Would you destroy faith, Herity?”

“Och! It’s not me destroys the faith, Priest.” Herity smiled at John. “This great tragedy is what kills the faith.”

“For once, you’re right,” Father Michael said.

Herity pretended surprise. “Am I now?”

Father Michael inhaled a deep breath. “All the doubts that ever were are growing like weeds in the untended garden that was Ireland.”

“What a poet you are, Father!” Herity turned and met the gaze of the silent boy. “It’s Shaw’s stony land you’ve inherited, poor lad, and you’ve not mind nor senses to see it.”

A deep shuddering sigh shook Father Michael. “I think sometimes this must be a terrible nightmare, the white horse of all horrors. And we’ll wake soon enough, laughing at the night’s terrors, going on about our ways as before. Please, God!”

The boy clutched his anorak around his throat and turned away from them, plodding off the bridge. Father Michael slung his pack onto his shoulders and followed.

Herity glanced at John. “Shall we be going along now?”

Almost imperceptibly at first, the road began to climb out of the valley. Herity, with John beside him, stayed closer to the priest and boy, no more than five paces behind.

Was it safer here? John wondered. Herity was not keeping them spread out. Or was it the sharp turns in the road around which nothing could be seen? Did Herity want to be closer to the priest and see with him what next the road revealed?

“D’ y’ know what happened to our Father Michael there?” Herity asked. “I can see he’ll not be telling you and him the best witness to it all.”

The priest did not turn, but his shoulders stiffened.

Herity addressed the stiff back, his voice loud. “In the first days of the plague’s terrible scything, a great maddened mob of men burned Maynooth in County Kildare – the whole place, even St. Patrick’s College where Fitzgerald Castle once stood and it a shrine to the old ways. The new block burned like a torch, it did. And the old block came tumbling down to the big machines pushing it and the explosives. It was a sight to see!”

“Why did they do it?”

“The terrible anger in them. God had abandoned them. They couldn’t get at God so they got at the Church.” Herity lifted his chin and called out: “Isn’t that what you told me, Father Michael?”

The priest remained as silent as the boy walking beside him.

“The smoke rose to heaven for three days,” Herity said, “and longer if you count the smoldering. Ahh, the flames so high and the mob capering about it and hunting priests to burn the while.”

“They burned priests?”

“Right into the fire with ’em!”

“And Father Michael was there?”

“Oh, yes. Our Father Michael was there to see all that capering. The priests had a fine store of drink in their cellars, they did.”

John thought of the brand on Father Michael’s forehead. “Was that when they branded him?”

“Oh, no! That was later. His own folk did that because they knew he’d been at Maynooth and him still alive. Ahh, no, it was death for a priest to be seen there during the whole time of the burning.”

Herity fell silent. Only the sound of their footsteps echoed between the road’s rock boundaries and there was a faint, murmurous praying from Father Michael.

“Listen to him pray!” Herity said. “Remember how it was, Priest? Ahhh, John, the burning of Maynooth could be seen for miles. The smoke of it went straight up, it did. I know a priest was there and I heard him say it was a signal to God.”

Only the low droning of prayer came from Father Michael.

“We saw the message to God, didn’t we, Father Michael?” Herity called. “And what did we say? God can lie! That’s what we said. God can lie to us.”

John pictured the scene in Herity’s vivid words. O’Neill-Within could be sensed there, listening, but not attempting to come out. The fire, the shrieks… he could almost hear them.

“You were there with Father Michael,” John said.

“Lucky for him! Saved his mangy skin, I did.” Laughter bubbled from Herity. “Oh, he doesn’t like that, him owing his life to the likes of me. So many priests dying and him alive. It was a sight, I tell you! They kept no count but it was over two hundred of ’em burned, I’m sure. Into the fire and straight to hell!”

Father Michael raised his fists to heaven, but did not turn. His voice continued its murmurous prayer.

Herity said: “It was a fiery martyrdom the likes of which has not been seen in this land for many a century. But our Father Michael doesn’t have the stuff of martyrs.”

The priest fell silent. His movements looked weary. The pack on his back dragged at his shoulders.

“Some say only twelve priests escaped,” Herity said. “In mufti, hidden by the few of us who kept our senses. I sometimes wonder why I helped, but then it was a terrible stench and the drink running out. No reason to stay.”

Herity smiled secretly to himself, then turned and winked at John. “But the Madman would’ve loved the sight of it! Of that I’m sure.”

John’s step faltered. He could sense O’Neill-Within, hysterical giggling.

Why had Herity said that?
Why tell me?

Herity had lowered his attention to the road at his feet, though, and his expression was unreadable. It was steeper here, the road climbing around hills that, when they opened to a view ahead, showed the way rising toward the tree-framed notch at the top of the valley.

There was a damp, almost tropical heat in the afternoon air. John’s senses wanted jungle and palms, not these green hills and this black, narrow roadway cutting like a sheep terrace into the land. The bracket of trees ahead was mostly European poplars, scrawny from fighting the winter storms that used the notch as their pathway into the forests and boglands to the east.

The memory of Herity’s words in his ears, John was taken suddenly by the oddity of the Irish relationship with this landscape. Why had Herity saved the priest? Because Father Michael had been born of the same soil. Something happened in this marriage of people and land. The Celts had got under the skin of Ireland. They did not move just across the surface of the land like nomads. Even this tramp was more through Ireland than across it. Herity’s people had made themselves part of the very soil. There was never any question of them owning Ireland. Quite the contrary. Ireland owned them.

John lifted his gaze to the path ahead. Behind the poplars could be glimpsed the deeper stain of evergreens clinging closely to the hillsides in neatly planted rows. There, within the deeper trees, lay the great house with its mansard roof: a French château appearing untouched above the ruins in the valley. Smoke lifted from its chimneys. The house nestled into the trees; it had been adopted by Ireland. No longer French. It was an Irish house. The smoke smelled of peat.

And finally I tell the Irish to remember the Banshee of Dalcais Aibell, the Banshee warning Brian Boru that he would die at Clontarf. Listen for the Banshee, Ireland, for I will have my revenge upon all of you. No more can you evade personal responsibility for what you did to me and mine. I am the ultimate gombeen man come to make you pay – not just during the hard months but forevermore.

– John Roe O’Neill, Letter Three

S
AMUEL
B
ENJAMIN
V
ELCOURT
had come up through the ranks in the United States Consular Service and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Maverick tendencies had restricted his advancement but he had managed to make many military friends during his USAID days, a fact which helped him now. There were, also, his reports, often praised for their insights.

At age sixty-one, seeing the way ahead finally blocked, he had quit USAID, where he had only been on loan from the Consular Service anyway, and he ran for the Senate from Ohio. His assets were formidable –