The Whore-Mother (27 page)

Go to sleep, Mrs. Burke. Go to sleep, Cleery: all of you, for the love of God, and let me make a run for it.

“Yes.” He closed the curtains over the big window. Cleery out there, are you watching to see how I'm doing without my sleeping bag? So you know now. Wrong in the head, is she, by God? Harbored a wandering student, did she, in a house with only one bed? She's like me, she's empty and lonely and needs somebody to touch. Do you know the feeling, you stupid bastards? Spread the word from the crossroads to any bloody questioner who asks about Thomas Burke's queer widow, but I know how she feels. Go to sleep and let me run for my bloody life. . . .

“Your face is angry,” she said.

“Yes.”

“About him?”

“Yes.” About all of them. And you too, Mrs. Burke. You need me at the wrong time. I know how you feel, but it's my time to run again. Don't you know we're always running away in this God-damned country; from one thing or another?

“Taking you away?”

“Yes.” She was entitled to a lie, and its feelings, and whatever hopes were in it. And she'd sleep quicker.

“They wouldn't have found you.”

“I know.” He warmed to her. Pity or affection? He didn't ask himself. It didn't occur to him to ask himself. He was as young now as when he joined the Provos. I'm sorry, Mrs. Burke. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I have to run away again.

“Come to bed, child.”

He reached for the light switch.

“No.” She got off the bed in an awkward movement and he saw the movement. Its awkwardness warmed his warmth for her, a kind of pity; he knew that; affection was better; sometimes it grew out of pity, didn't it? He owed her affection. “Could you stand me in the light?” she said.

“Don't talk like that. It's nonsense.”

“Then take off my clothes.”

Now? Waiting for the guns to go? With my mind on running? She turned the back buttons of her dress to him, waiting. I can get hard: All right, by God, I'll give her a ride that'll make her sleep. A long last one, Mrs. Burke, for both of us. He could see her smiling, listening to the fussing of his clothes and shoes as he took them off. He laid the gift of God against her. He had learned a lot in the dark. He unbuttoned her dress and raised her skirt slowly, kissing her neck. It was a long neck, and that he hadn't noticed either. His fingertips traced patterns on her hips and he felt her shiver. She pulled her dress over her head and threw it on the floor. “That's Knocknamadree,” she said, smiling the way he'd never seen her smile, with her head on the tilt looking at him when his fingers ran over her soaring left hip, and “that's Gabriel,” she said when he caressed the right one and he knew she could hear the voice of Thomas Burke. . . . Holy God, she lived in Thomas Burke's books. She was created in books and poems and lived in them. What she said was from a seduction scene in a little stone barn in Burke's
Carry Your Own Coffin
, a novel about love and girls and young men and priests in Ireland, and Cleery was out there in the original little stone barn and Knocknamadree was the mountain beyond The Hill and Gabriel was the mountain behind Schull. It was a passage they used to read with the book hidden under their desks in school. Their Protestant friends said they hid the book behind their Bibles and read it in Church and Sunday school. The memory fired his lust. Maybe she lived in fantasies, but the same fantasies, from the same books, served them both in their own place and time. He knew how it went on; let her have it; make her fantasy real. Then she'd sleep. He drew her pants down slowly, kissing her back on the way, laying his face against her hips as she untangled the pants from her feet, and set her legs apart—how did Burke put it about the country girl standing like this on the hay in the little barn?—“like a standing mare”? It fed him blind, like a stud at a mare and tenderness bolted. He gripped her belly and her breasts and chattered loving obscenities that her lusting laughter multiplied as he bundled her onto the bed and mounted. Her big hands took God's gift and buried it, “Fuck me, my sweet child,” she said, and rutted to his brutal rhythm, clamping him in her great thighs, her hands full of his flesh. She came, convulsing endlessly; presently her hips rose and fell gently and she said, “Child, child, child, oh child, I've been well and truly fucked.”

She wrapped him in her arms and legs and held him on her, and he waited, saying nothing. Sleep would come. But she talked, rubbing his body.

“Do you think I'm a hoore of a woman?”

“No. I love you.”

“I'm an old woman, though?”

“No, you're not.”

“But I'm just a horny old widow lusting for young boys?”

“No. You're a glorious woman, a wonderful woman, and I love you.”

“That's what Thomas Burke said. You're not ashamed lying here in the light this way?”

“It's wonderful.”

She rutted at him, binding him with her arms and thighs. “Can we do it in the day?”

“Like this. Every day.” He wished it could be true.

“He was younger than me.” She was with her maker again. “He used to catch me in the barn, in the kitchen, in the fields, on the shore. He never said, ‘I want to make love to you, Kate.' He never said, ‘I want you' or ‘I'm going to take you.' He lusted after me something terrible and stripped me in the barn or in the fields in the dark and he always said, ‘I'm going to
fuck
you, woman.' He fucked me naked in the cold dew. . . . Sometimes he thought I wouldn't want him, that maybe I'd leave him, but oh God, he could have fucked me all day and all night and I'd have wanted more . . . oh God, how I love Thomas Burke . . . up there at the grocer's shop on the corner they told Seamus I wasn't right in the head. . . . They all killed Thomas Burke.” Her eyes were wet.

He listened, and wasn't sure now who killed Thomas Burke.

“Thomas Burke made up old tales about Ireland,” she said, “and made out they were about me. I know them all by heart.”

“Tell me one.” She'll tire. She'll sleep. Then I'll run for my life. Forgive me. Her arms and thighs relaxed their hold. She spread her legs. “Stay on me, child, while I tell it. There was this time Gall McMorna set out on a journey before the light was up.

“When he reached the shore of the lake he lay down on his face to ease the dryness in him.

“This voice came at him while he was drinking and the first time he heard it he said, ‘I heard a trout breaking the water.'

“It came to him the second time and he said, ‘The birds are calling to the light.'

“The third time it came he said, ‘The air is bending the grass.' “Then the voice said, ‘McMorna is the beautiful champion.'

“And the small man stood at his full height and said, ‘I'm a diminutive creature, with no beauty at all.'

“The voice said, ‘McMorna sings like the blackbird.'

“And McMorna said, ‘My song frightens the corncrake.'

“ ‘Come up the bank to me,' the voice said, ‘and I'll make you taller than Finn and your song sweeter than Cuchullain's.'

“McMorna went up the bank and there was this young girl, lying naked in the grass and her glowing like wrought gold.

“ ‘Take your pleasure and give me sons to give me sons,' she said, and McMorna swam like the salmon in a golden stream, taller than Finn, sweeter than Cuchullain.

“But when the light came the girl under him was an old wandering woman, her breasts the broken hills, her belly as creased and cracked as the Burren, her legs the dead willows, and he leapt off her like a frightened deer, and ran over the hills.

“When the light was dying she was behind him shining like fine silver and he lay down to rest, the strength run out of him trying to leave the woman.

“In the dark she said to him, ‘Suckle my two breasts, McMorna, aren't they the sweet green hills to cool your face on? Lie on my belly, McMorna. Isn't it as soft and rich as a meadow in Meath? Bound between my thighs, McMorna. Aren't they the young limbs of the oaks of Derry? Lay your mouth on my mouth, McMorna, for isn't my tongue the darting salmon of Shannon? Broach my womb, McMorna, and give me sons for me to haunt in the day and whore with when the night comes.'

“All the night McMorna whored with the shining girl and when the light was up there was no will in him to run from the old woman and they walked and whored together night and day from that time on.

“ ‘What name do you go by?' he asked her when the light was going down and they were looking for a place to lie down.

“ ‘The name they call me,' she said, ‘is Cathleen the Whore-Mother.' ”

Her voice was sleepy, her eyes were closed and wet, her body was soft and relaxed, her legs flat on the bed, her arms by her sides. Her face was old. He rose off her gently and settled beside her. She drifted, mumbled, and was gone.

He looked at her in the hard light. The face was tired. She was the only naked woman he had ever seen, the only woman he had ever loved, and the breasts were full, the belly white, the thighs long, and she was marvelous in his sight. She was kind and lonely. Her lust was glorious and she shared it with him. She was created by a poet and storyteller and she lived inside his poems and his stories and he didn't understand that. She was there, that was all. And, God forgive me, at the right time she's asleep. He bent over her and kissed her nipples. She smiled a little as if she knew. He was sorry for her. He was sorry to go.

Half an hour, he thought, and lay gently. The light was on. Cleery would be sleeping now. He could dress, and get his money and his gun and be far gone walking, before she woke. There'd be a lift on the road beyond Schull and Cleery could do nothing and Powers could do nothing and he'd be in England by the first plane out of Cork. He watched her with pity and gratitude and heard the key slip into the lock of the front door. His breath choked him.

“Kate!” he shook her and she smiled and curled towards him, more than half asleep.

“Kate! Who has a key to the house?”

“What?”

“Who has a key to the house?”

“My sister,” she said sleepily, half holding him.

“She's got it in the door!”

Mrs. Burke shot upright in the bed, propped on hands that were a little behind her, her arms stiff, her breasts out, her eyes unfocused, and the doctor slammed the bedroom door back against the wall, standing in the doorway with the eyes of a charging bull.

“You hooring oul sow,” he shouted. “By God, I knew you were at it again.”

McManus hopped out onto the floor guilty, confounded, and overwhelmed by the vulnerability of the naked threatened by the fully clothed. To him the doctor's clothes and boots were as substantial as a suit of armor; he was fearful for his tender genitals and his naked feet. He could feel the impact on both, of the enraged doctor's boots. He snatched his trousers from the floor and didn't dare disarm himself by trying to get into them. All he could do was stand there, foolishly covered by his trousers, held foolishly in front of him.

“You dirty little shit,” the doctor yelled. “That's what you stayed around for!”

“Don't dare talk like that in this house,” Mrs. Burke said in a deep loud voice so full of righteous outrage that McManus risked a quick glance at her.

She was still propped stiff-armed on her hands, her back held straight, her breasts flaunting. Her head was high and her ankles crossed. She seemed unaware of her nakedness, aware only of stiff indignation. “You're jealous, Seamus. You've always had a grievance because you picked the frigid sister. Hand me my glasses. They're on the dressing table,” she said curtly, “and get control of yourself.”

“Holy Mother of God,” the doctor said despairingly, “sitting there in your skin giving orders,” and went round the end of the bed to get her glasses. When the man was safely across the bed, McManus stepped frantically into his jockey shorts and trousers and got his vest and shirt on. Watchfully, he sat down to put on his socks and shoes.

“She woke up in the middle of the night,” the doctor said, and handed her her glasses, “yakking about the three men who came looking for this dirty bastard. ‘Get her out of that house,' she says, so get up now and get out.”

Mrs. Burke put on her glasses and stepped out of bed, naked in her spinsterish steel-rimmed spectacles. She reminded McManus of a thin man he had seen changing in a locker room, bushy-bearded, bespectacled, naked. The hairy head looked too large for the hairless body. Mrs. Burke's steel glasses seemed to bear some incongrous relation to her pubic bush and her belly did bulge and droop a bit. Merciless God, did everything end in farce? She was swelling with defiant confidence and dignity.

“You're my sister's monkey on a string, not me. We're not leaving. We'll cope. Away on with you.” She walked round the bed and sat on the arm of McManus's chair, indifferent to her nakedness. “Off you go home, Seamus,” she said briskly, and waved the doctor away.

“Holy Mother of God!” The doctor held out appealing hands.

“Kate, will you for Jesus sake put on your clothes and come home with me.”

“No.”

The doctor appealed to McManus. “All right, McManus, you have a lot of influence in this room. You ask her.”

“Mrs. Burke,” McManus began lamely. All he wanted to do was slip through the open door unseen, and run for it.

“Kate,” Mrs. Burke corrected.

“Kate,” McManus tried again.

“No.” She was smiling her victory smile.

“He can come too. I'll get him out. I'll get him to Cork Airport. . . .” The doctor opened a cupboard and threw her dressing gown across the bed. “Put it on, Kate,” he yelled.

She put it on. “We've settled all that.” She looked confidently at McManus. “Do you want to go, child?” Her hand was on his head. Her face was certain of his answer.