The Whore-Mother (23 page)

“When do we start beatin the bushes?” Powers said impatiently.

“The mornin will be time enough,” Sorahan told him.

It was a soft statement, like the southwestern air, and criminally, even treacherously lax to an impatient northern mind. “What sorta talk is that?”

“Bantry talk,” Sorahan said even more slowly, even more softly. “Out here we never look for any thin in the dark, unless we know where it is.” He finished his pint with elaborate deliberateness, put down his glass on the bench, and stood up. “If you want to start west, in the dark, on your own, Mr. Powers ...” It had the elusive hint of a threat or an insult in its tone and Powers lifted his head and waited for the rest of it like a listening bull, looking hard at Sorahan “... go ahead and good luck to you and we'll catch up with you in the mornin.”

The young men around the wall grinned, tonguing the air for promising hostilities, their eyes darting from face to face like dogs sniffing trees for the taste of enmity and the odor of relief.

Kiernan lifted his five-feet-two off his bench and stretched it, watching the grins from behind his warming smile. “The mornin's fine w'me,” he said.

The grins shifted to Powers, but he did not look at them. He drained his pint, watching Sorahan steadily over the rim of his glass. He put the glass down beside him and wiped his mouth. “Right y'are,” he said, and sat where he was, with Sorahan in his sights all the way through the door. He saw his back long after it had left the doorway and gone into the night.

“Good night. Six in the mornin. Here.”

“Night.”

The night air was like damp black velvet. Their voices clung to it. The young men went home, smiling in their heads, doing intuitive emotional sums in their heads, calculating whether Powers would push Daniel Sorahan to a bit of sport when the drink was running. They were eager for the morning and the hunt.

But not yet for the kill. That was two steps away, and only the first one was yet allowed into their minds.

Three cars, several motor scooters, bikes, and binoculars. Bread, slabs of Irish cheddar, cold sausages, and beer in cardboard boxes. Wives and mothers made them ready; manhunters and their transport gathered in Wolfe Tone Square under the statue of St. Brendan the Navigator who, it was said, discovered America. They gathered under his outstretched arms. Brendan looked out over Bantry Bay to the Atlantic. The manhunters packed their food and drink into the trunk of Powers' car. There was no sense in being hungry or thirsty. The day might be long; even longer than that; it looked like rain.

Daniel Sorahan hadn't slept well, though here in the cool morning air he felt fine.

“Do I know what's on your mind, Danny-boy?” his wife Liz asked him in the night. That was what she always asked him when “it” was on her mind on an unscheduled night.

“You do not.”

“Then what is it?”

“Go to sleep.” For several years, Friday night had been sex night, when the week's work was done. This held good on school holidays and it was still only Thursday.

In the early morning she came into the bathroom while he shaved. “You didn't have a good night, Dan.”

“I did not.”

Prudently he ate a large breakfast and didn't talk, though he was a talker at the table.

At the door, he kissed her. He had never left the house without kissing her, even when it was up the street for tobacco, a minute and a half away. But he forgot to smack her bottom and he had done that too, for twenty-five years.

“There's somethin about this, Dan,” she said.

“There is.”

“What?”

“Well,” he said, and remembered her bottom and smacked it. “It's nothin much.”

She caught his wrist. She had strong hands. “It's somethin,” she said.

“It is.” He kissed her again. “They might find the boy,” he said.

“Well,” she said, and thought better of saying more. She knew her husband. Yesterday when those two men from the North were on their way, he had wanted them to find the informer. Now the informer was “the boy.”

“I wouldn't want those two to slaughter my pig,” he said, and kissed her again. “These Ulster people are a coarse breed of human.” He waited for her comment.

“Well?” she said, gently steering a weaving spirit she knew as well as she knew her own. She held his face and kissed his cheek. “You're a gentle man, Dan,” she said, and having loaded her dice went in abruptly and closed the door on him.

“Liz,” she heard him call. She went to the kitchen to rattle the dishes against the sound of his voice. Dan drove in unhappy thought to Wolfe Tone Square.

They were, he thought, a cross between one of those motorcycle gangs he'd read about and never seen, and a conflux of bird-watchers on bicycles. They stood beside their machines and listened more or less carefully to Powers' directions. T'would be the fine outing, anyway.

Powers was, Kiernan declared, “acting field commander of this search and destroy operation;” then he wafted back to St. Brendan beside Sorahan like a wisp of lost cloud. “Mr. Powers likes the one-two-three stuff,” Kiernan whispered. “The man's a born corporal.”

They went down the thin accusing finger of the Sheep's Head peninsula that stabbed sharply at the Atlantic between Bantry Bay and Dunmanus Bay. They went like an infestation of Bertha worms, covering the ground and chewing the stalks that might cover “a boy and a girl,” as Sorahan had them now insistently in his head. From the hills they probed the hollows with their field glasses, knocked on doors, followed farmers over small fields, open hills, and into byres and chicken houses.

“Did y'see ...?”

“A girl, on a bike, with a pack on her back ...?”

“Campers wantin to sleep on your land ...?”

“A man and a girl, with one bike between them and two packs ...?”

They varied the questions as they thought about their search and their quarry.

The replies were elusive. “They'd be friends of yours I'm thinkin ...?”

“There's plenty like that, now....”

“There's always a bike on the road....”

Sly evasions; eyes wandering to give suspicious minds time to wonder. Two of them, the eyes seemed to say, askin questions in my yard now, and up there on the hill two more of them is it, at Curley's? And a head tilted to look past them, to see better the two men against the whitewashed wall of a distant cottage. “ 'Tis a windy place now. You don't hear much when your back's turned.” Enclosed faces, sheltering half-smiles, shifting eyes; it was like trying to keep a hold on the belly of a wet salmon.

And the English in their cabins that had been converted into retirement cottages, looking blank and asking courteously for more detail. “I'd like to be able to help you. A boy and a girl? Are they lost? Could you describe them? Oh, they can't get lost here. All the roads lead somewhere. I wouldn't worry too much. I wish I could be of more help to you. I'm sorry....”

And the hours passing and the thirst growing and the stomach full of little but wind. You'd think, in the name of God, that somebody'd see somebody and the place only the width of a donkey's thigh.

Powers roamed the peninsula in Cullen's car, rolling out of it and pounding the earth like a dray stallion as he spotted searchers. “What'd y'get? What'd y'get? Jasus Chirst, you could see if y'were blind in this bloody place....” But the blind had not seen. They were getting tired and bored and hungry and thirsty and the cases of beer and the cardboard boxes of food were in Powers' car and Powers was fierce and relentless and tireless. It was not the way these young men lived or thought or felt. The replies he got shortened and the surliness thickened and Powers did not see it.

He stormed the hollows and hills with implacable energy, barking, bawling, like an embodied shadow of the lowering clouds that rolled their mass across the sky, full of crushing turbulence and annihilating anger. “Find the fucker!” he raged, and rolled into the car and crashed gears and thumped the car over farm tracks and fields and stony hills to find other searchers and yell other maledictions.

And the dementia lurking behind the young men's eyes seeped to the front. A shy small youth named Barney said, “D'you think that big Ulster boar's right in the head?”

His hulking companion whose name was Colum sniffed the wind off Dunmanus Bay like a horse at a gate and said, “We'll find out when we get to the drink,” and knocked with crusty knuckles on another door.

Kiernan drove with Daniel Sorahan along the north shore of the peninsula. Sorahan was, he thought, like himself, a dacent man. He liked the lean, stooped schoolteacher. There was something kindly in his angular face, and in the graying black hair and white temples there was an air of gentility; something to trust? Was that it?

He wasn't sure. What he knew was that there was some thin confusin, alien, foreign, deceitful about the people they questioned at doors and in the fields and on the hills ... the wee smiles, the eyes that were always just leavin your face when you looked at them, the sly wee peeks when they thought you weren't watchin, the squints over your shoulder to give them time to think up evasions and questions of their own.... The ground under him was soft, the air around him thick and alive with strangeness. He couldn't name it, but he knew it—a slippery insecurity. He could understand an Orangeman in the North shoutin “Fuck the Pope” better than he understood these southern people. Foreigners they were; they made you feel as if you couldn't swim and were wadin up to your neck in a shore swell, not able to move where you wanted to, with your feet hard to keep on the bottom.
Answer a simple question, for Christ's sake!
But not bloody likely, O God no! He yearned nervously for the forthright North; lying back in his seat fitting it like a tall little boy. He said, “That farmer y'were talkin about that saw the ravin man w'the gun in his pack. Where's he?”

“Cusack? Sheep's Head. The Garda said he was likely drunk.”

“Aye. I've seen a Iota funny things when I was drunk. Go to Cusack.” It was an order. Sorahan swung the car off the north shore road and up over the Goat's Path that intersected the thin peninsula at about its middle and went west on the south shore road, hurrying to Sheep's Head to find the cottage of Cusack the drunk. Well, it was activity anyway. He was paying his dues to the new revolution.

The sky was dark. The wind came in off Bantry Bay, carrying rain. It squalled at first, then came steadily, driving across the peninsula.

“The boys'll get wet,” Sorahan said.

“In the North, the boys're gettin killed,” Kiernan said bitterly, forgetting his smile.

They climbed the narrow weaving road up the back of the Head and the wind and rain brought the cloud down on them. So they crept, peering for the edges of the road. Sometimes there were sheer drops to their left and worked-out peat bogs flooded and shrouded in ghostly white and green water lilies to their right. It took them an hour to reach the tourist car park at the last navigable point on the Head's back. They got out to walk in the lashing rain, and to find Cusack's cottage in a smothering blanket of musty dripping cotton wool.

From the car park they went steeply downhill over a short rocky road that turned sharply towards a seventy-degree drop down to the cliffs and the ocean-churning rocks. The rain drove into them, the wind staggered them. They stumbled down.

“Nobody lives here,” Kiernan shouted against the wind, and came off the falling slope onto a broad ledge with three cottages huddling together like diminutive row houses. They were closed against the storm.

Hammering brought a man to the door of the first cottage. He opened the door a crack, holding it against the wind, and Sorahan shouted,
“Cusack?”

“By himself. On the right,” the man yelled back, and jerked a thumb. “Windy day,” he shouted, and closed the door.

There was nothing to see on the right, but they went right and found a branching track onto a broad knob on the steep slope, and the ghost of a cottage with its back to the hill. They hammered again and got no answer. There was no light in the window. They tried the latch and went in. The place was dark.

“Gimme a match,” Kiernan said.

“They're soakin. I'm wet through to the skin.”

The ashes of a peat fire glowed. Beside the fire a darker bulk. Sorahan groped at it, shook it, and said, “It's human.”

“It's a woman.” Kiernan stirred the ashes. There was a corked half-full lemonade bottle in her lap. It had no label. “She's drunk.” They found the light switch. Even in remotest Ireland as the young pour out to England the Electricity Supply Board pours power in. In weather like this it often stopped pouring for long periods. It flickered uncertainly at the best of times. Now it lightened and darkened like a divided mind.

They shook the woman awake. She grinned sleepily, without surprise, and handed them her bottle. Sorahan put it back in her lap. “Mrs. Cusack?”

“Aye.” The bottle reached out again.

“Where's your husband?”

“After the cattle.”

“Where?”

“North Slope.”

“In this rain?”

“In shelter.” She was happy, only half aware, grinning like a gargoyle.

“Do you remember the young man with the gun in his pack? Your husband took it out.”

The grin dimmed and died. Her fuddled eyes shifted from face to face. She wrapped her forearms around the bottle and held it against her belly. Slowly she fell back in her rocking chair and closed her eyes. Maybe she had fallen asleep again.

“Wake her up,” Kiernan said impatiently, and didn't wait. He grabbed her arm and shook. Maybe she was asleep. The arm was as hard as a man's and tense. Her eyes stayed shut. Maybe she was asleep.

“Forget her. If you want Cusack you'll have to find him.” Sorahan didn't care whether he found him or not. He was wet, cold, miserable, and Ireland's trouble could wait so far as he was concerned. He wanted a hot bath and dry warm clothes and Liz to talk to by the fire more than a united Ireland. The whole search was ridiculous. In this rain, in these clothes, the whole bloody dispute was ridiculous. He wondered ruefully how many Irish conspiracies, rebellions, heroic enterprises wilted and died in the Irish rain? Didn't Frank O'Connor in the story of his youth have a ludicrous tale about the Civil War and Erskine Childers with a woman's little gun “like a flower” pinned over his heart to his braces, and a wet night and an artillery piece nobody knew how to fire, and Irish Civil War enemies lost entirely and stumbling over one another by accident and running like Dolan's donkey, from one another and with one another and anything else that moved? “Find him by yourself,” Sorahan said to Kiernan. “I'm chitterin to death.”