War Children (9 page)

‘Touch that truncheon,’ Jamesy said in the same mild, friendly voice, ‘and I’ll blow a hole in you that a pigeon could fly through – if it didn’t mind getting its wings wet.’

Phil Murphy’s bulging eyes rose from the pistol to the still-smiling face of the man who held it. They went back down to the pistol, and then back up to the face. He simply didn’t seem to believe what he was seeing. His mouth worked, but still nothing came out. His face wasn’t dark red any more, nor even pale red: it was white.

‘Now,’ Jamesy said with mild satisfaction. ‘
Now
you look more like a police sergeant.’

Tom Farrell moved to stand in front of Phil Murphy, who looked at him blankly. The sergeant was like a man who’d been in an accident and was still dazed. He was in shock. Tom Farrell smiled at him. He reached up with one hand and took Murphy’s helmet off his head. He had to stand on tiptoe to do it. He hefted the helmet in one hand, and in the other he hefted the hurley he held. He
considered
them both. Then he threw the sergeant’s helmet in the air and hit it a savage belt of the hurley. The helmet flew up through the air and bounced off the roadway a good twenty yards away. Murphy stared after it, blinking. Then he turned empty eyes to look at Tom Farrell.

‘That was my helmet,’ he said. There was a catch in his voice, almost like a little child that was going to cry.

‘Count yourself lucky,’ Jamesy said coolly, ‘that it wasn’t your head.’

Murphy looked at him with that same blank look on his face. He seemed to have completely forgotten the gun stuck in his chest. Jamesy ground it into his tunic, to remind him it was there.

‘On your knees,’ he said.

Phil Murphy stared at him. He didn’t seem to understand.

‘Get down on your knees!’ Jamesy said. ‘NOW!’

His voice was suddenly cold.

Phil Murphy looked like he was going to say something, but he changed his mind. Slowly, stiffly, almost humbly, he sank to his knees on the roadway.

‘Sure, you wouldn’t shoot me, boys,’ he said. ‘I never done anything to deserve that.’

I was shocked by the humility in his voice. He looked up at the young men with a terrible, lost look in his eyes, like a man whose whole world had been taken away from him. Even if I did hate Phil Murphy, I hated it even more to see him like that. I hated the look on his face.

‘Will we shoot him, do you think, Tom?’ Jamesy asked Tom Farrell. His tone was conversational again.

Tom Farrell stood looking down at Phil Murphy’s bare head, bent now, so that you could see a big spot of bald, naked skin gleaming white through the red hair. Tom hefted the hurley again, and for a terrible second I thought
he was going to pull on Phil Murphy’s head with it, in the same savage way that he’d pulled on the helmet. There was a look of downright gloating on Tom Farrell’s face, a look I hated seeing as much as I hated seeing Murphy humbled, and with – it seemed to me then – as little reason. But
something
mean and cruel stood out plain on Tom’s face at that moment – the hatred, I suppose, bred in Irishtown blood by generations of being thought of as hardly more than vermin. But then Tom seemed to take possession of himself; the look faded, and his face became again the one I knew.

‘Look up at me, Phil Murphy,’ Tom said.

Phil Murphy looked up, and I was disgusted and horrified to see that he was crying. There were tears running down his big face. His whole world had been turned upside down in the space of a couple of seconds. He thought he was going to die there in the dust of the street, and he didn’t want to. Beside me I heard Mickey Farrell and
several
of the other Irishtown boys snigger, but I saw nothing to snigger about. I didn’t like seeing men in this situation. It made all of them
cheap
, somehow, and I didn’t think any of them – even Phil Murphy – deserved it. But then, I
suppose
, I had the leisure to feel like that: I wasn’t from
Irish-town
, and the terror of Murphy I felt was of a different kind from the terror the Irishtowners knew. All other things being equal, it was unlikely, in the ordinary run of things, that he and his cronies would ever beat me up in a dark alley: I was far too respectable for that to be an option, at
least in the world we had known before now. Though it was obvious from the scene in front of me, even to my young eyes, that that world had suddenly changed.

‘What’s it to be, Tom?’ Jamesy said. His revolver was pointing at Phil Murphy’s head. He placed the muzzle of the gun now between Murphy’s bushy red eyebrows, and he pulled back the hammer. I jumped at the sound of the dry metal click. A shot itself couldn’t have been any louder. There seemed to be no other sound in the world.

Phil Murphy started blubbering. There’s no other word for it. His face crumpled up, and under his ragged
moustache
his lips made strange, ugly shapes. He was sure, I knew, that he was going to die. I was sure of it myself.

‘For God’s sake, don’t kill me!’ Phil Murphy said. He was begging. There was a whiney sound in his voice that I would never have imagined it could have. The three young men looked at him with no feeling in their eyes except, maybe, a sort of curiosity. They had the look almost of little kids playing with a new toy, trying it out to see what they could make it do.

‘I’ve a poor widowed mother,’ Phil Murphy pleaded, ‘and I’m her only support.’

Jamesy raised his eyebrows.

‘She’d do better,’ he said, ‘to look for a steadier
prospect
, so. I don’t think your job is a secure one, sergeant.’ He looked at Tom Farrell. ‘Well?’ he asked.

Tom Farrell leaned down until his face was right up
against Phil Murphy’s. Murphy’s face, raddled with tears and with fear, looked suddenly old, fat and weak.

‘You’re looking at the next Member of Parliament for this constituency,’ Tom Farrell said. Then, like a teacher: ‘What are you looking at?’

‘The next …’ Phil Murphy’s tongue stumbled over the words. He had trouble getting them out. ‘The next Member … of P-Parliament for … this constituency.’

Tom Farrell nodded. ‘You’ll leave me alone,’ he said. ‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll leave you alone.’

‘You’ll leave my friends alone too.’

‘I’ll … I’ll leave your friends alone.’

‘You and your men will stay away from the election meeting tomorrow. And you’ll stay out of Irishtown. If you show your face there even once before election day, we’ll blow it off of you. And the same goes for any other peeler in this town. Do you hear me, Phil Murphy?’

‘I do, Tom, I do.’

Phil Murphy had suddenly realised that he wasn’t going to die. His voice bubbled with gratitude. He reached out his two big hands and grabbed one of Tom Farrell’s. He bent his wet face and, in an act that disgusted me to my stomach, he kissed it.

‘God bless you, Tom!’ Phil Murphy said. ‘God Bless you! May his own blessed Mother look down on you. And thank you, son. Thank you!’

Beside me my Irishtown friends were still sniggering, but they mightn’t have existed at all for all the notice that Phil Murphy took of them. Jamesy uncocked and put up his revolver, but didn’t yet put it back inside his coat.

‘Get up, now,’ he said almost gently to Phil Murphy. ‘Get up, and turn around, and go away. Stay clear of us, and tell your men to do the same. If you do that, then maybe – just maybe – we won’t kill you. Do anything else and you’re a dead man. Do you understand?’

Phil Murphy got to his feet, grovelling. In the space of a couple of minutes he seemed to have aged by twenty years. When he stood up he still towered over all three of them, but even so he seemed smaller than any of them. Even a little gun, I suppose, is bigger than any man; and Jamesy’s gun wasn’t little.

‘I do, sir,’ Phil Murphy said. ‘I understand you, and I’ll do everything just as you say.’

I had never heard him sound so keen to please.

‘That’s my boy,’ Jamesy said. His breezy manner had hardly changed during the entire interlude.

Phil Murphy looked as though he were about to say something else, but he didn’t. He just turned around and walked back the way he had come. At first he walked with slumped shoulders, but as he went he straightened up, and his step brightened, and by the time he disappeared around the corner he was striding purposefully along. He strode, though, without his helmet, which still lay in the roadway
where it had fallen. It was a thing unknown for a police sergeant to be seen in public without his helmet; it was sure to be noticed.

The rest of us, men and boys alike, stood staring after Phil Murphy till he disappeared. No-one said anything. Then Jamesy hefted the revolver in his hand and looked at Tom Farrell.

‘What did I tell you?’ he asked. ‘A gun makes all the difference.’

But Tom Farrell had come back to the real world.

‘Except,’ he said, ‘that he’s gone back to the barracks now, and there’s guns there too. How do we know he won’t come back with his men and their carbines?’

Jamesy smiled.

‘He won’t,’ he said.

‘But what if he does?’

‘Then we’ll shoot him. And anyone with him. And then we’ll have more guns, and that will make even more of a
difference
.’

‘And if they come to the meeting tomorrow?’

‘If they come to the meeting tomorrow then we’ll be ready for them. Right now we have posters to put up.’

The third man had gone off and fetched Phil Murphy’s helmet. He brought it back and held it out to Tom.

‘A souvenir for you,’ he said.

Tom spat. ‘I don’t want it,’ he said. He was almost snarling.

The man held the helmet out towards us boys.

‘How about you lads? Do you fancy a game of
policemen
?’

The Irishtown boys mobbed him, clamouring for the helmet. I hung back, not wanting to touch it, but not knowing why. I felt completely confused, and when I looked at the eagerness of my friends I felt more alone than I’d ever done in my whole life. The three young men went about their business, leaving us boys on the green. The others soon invented a new game, where one boy got to wear the helmet and be the policemen, while the other boys chased him and, when they caught him, beat him up. I didn’t join in: it seemed too much like a reverse version of the game that Phil Murphy and his constables had played with Tom Farrell the night he came back. My feelings were all mixed up, and I didn’t understand them. When Mickey Farrell noticed my odd mood, and asked if I was all right, I said I had a pain in my stomach, and was going home to lie down. I went off for a long walk on my own.

I walked the town for hours before I went home. There I was so quiet and distracted that my mother thought I was sick. She felt my forehead and declared me feverish. She sent me to bed, where I lay for a long time, thinking. Later, my father came in to see me. He could see that, whatever was wrong with me, it wasn’t a physical thing. When he asked me whether anything had happened to upset me, I told him the whole story. He sat on my bed and he listened
in silence, only prompting me very gently when I faltered. By the time I finished, he had his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands.

‘My God,’ he said after a while. ‘Has it finally come to this?’

‘To what, Daddy?’ I asked him. I’d turned the events of the afternoon over and over in my mind, trying to
understand
what had disgusted me about them so. Phil Murphy, whom I hated, had got his come-uppance. I felt that I should have been glad. But I wasn’t glad at all. Instead I felt ashamed, as though I’d seen some awful thing I shouldn’t see. But all I’d seen was the blubbering face of the ex-King of Irishtown, humbled by a young man with a gun. I had no reason to feel any sympathy for Phil Murphy – indeed, I didn’t feel any. I didn’t even pity him. But I felt no triumph either, nor even pleasure at his downfall. What I felt instead was that shame, and a kind of disgust. That was what I couldn’t understand.

‘What did I see today, Daddy?’ I asked my father. It was a question I’d never have asked my mother. I wouldn’t have dreamed even of saying a word to her about the events on the fairgreen. I knew, in any case, exactly how she would have interpreted them. My father, though, was different. He sat and thought about my question for a good while without saying anything. Then he reached over and put his arm around my shoulder and – eleven years old though I was, and disliking soft stuff – I burrowed gratefully into his
warm, strong embrace that smelled vaguely of ink and tobacco.

‘I think, son,’ he said, ‘that you saw something very few people ever get to see.’

That, of course, was perfectly true: I’d seen a pistol
produced
in our town, and I’d seen Phil Murphy frightened and crying. I’d hoped for something a bit more, though, from my father. I’d hoped for something that would help me understand my feelings. But when, disappointedly, I admitted as much, he hugged me even tighter.

‘That’s not what I meant at all, son,’ he said. ‘Not at all. I wish it was.’

‘What, then?’ I asked him. I desperately wanted to know. ‘What did you mean? What did I see?’

‘The future,’ my father said, and his voice was every bit as sad and lonesome as I’d felt all afternoon. ‘I think you saw the future.’

I knew what he meant and I didn’t know what he meant, all at the same time. There was nothing to say. So the two of us sat on my bed, huddled and silent, and listened through the closed door to the muffled sound of my mother’s voice off in the house somewhere, giving out to the maid.

I was thirteen years old when I found the dead man in the barn, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I'd seen dead people before, of course – my grandfather, the time we got him dead in the chair, and young Murt Breen that time the horse kicked him in the head. Murt had lain in the churned-up muck of Carty's yard and there wasn't a mark to be seen on him, but his eyes sort of fluttered and he called out real loud for his mammy one time and then he died. When the men picked him up he was all floppy, and nearly slithered out of their arms. He was sixteen then, and he'd been a great hurler. His team did very bad the year after, missing his skill.

I'd seen a dead woman one time too, when I was ten. It was Mary Callaghan's daughter Rose, that went missing on the hill. I was the one found her caught in the weeds at a bend in Murray's stream. Her long hair was flowing in the water and the little fishes were darting in and out of it. The searchers found me standing there looking at her, and they thought I was too frightened to shout out. But really I'd
been thinking how peaceful she looked, swaying there in the stream like she was dancing to a music the rest of us couldn't hear – fairy music, dead men's music – some tune, anyhow, that left her at peace. She'd been funny in her head, Rose Callaghan, and I'd never seen her looking peaceful before. There was a kind of beauty off her face there in the water, if that doesn't sound soft. Her eyes were wide open, and they had a look in them like she was seeing something lovely and far-off, like she was after being let look at some special secret we poor live ones couldn't see.

I said nothing about that to anyone, though. They'd have thought I was mad. We children used to catch them little fishes in that stream – ‘minnies', we called them. Our fathers and mothers had done the same thing, and their fathers and mothers back as far as ould god's time. But I never felt right doing it after that. I'd look at the ones that I'd caught and wonder whether any of them had swum in Rose Callaghan's hair. It took the good out of catching them.

What I'd never seen – till I found the man in the barn – was a person so obviously killed on purpose by other people. The man that I found in the barn didn't look peaceful at all. I'd never seen a dead person so bloody. And that will show you that I'd led a quiet life, because men were killing each other by the new time in Ireland then.

It was the blood I saw first – a big slawm of it there in the dust, like someone was after dragging a slaughtered pig across the floor of the barn. But I knew there'd been no
pigs slaughtered there. I followed the trail with my eyes and at the end of it I saw a man with a scarlet face, wearing a scarlet shirt, lying in the straw in the corner. I can picture it this minute. I knew straight away that his face and his shirt weren't scarlet by nature, only dyed that way with the blood. It's funny, I suppose, that I still call him the dead man, because of course as it turned out he wasn't dead at all. But that's the way I thought of him when I saw him first, because I couldn't imagine that something so bloody could be alive. But he wasn't dead – not in the way that Murt Breen and Rose Callaghan were dead anyhow. And now, at my age, I'd hardly even call him a man – he can't have been more than twenty, though that was hard to see then under the mask of dirt and blood.

Later, after he was cleaned up and when he was hiding in our hayloft till he was strong enough to travel, I still thought of him as the dead man. It was something dead in his eyes, something cold and far away. Eyes were made to look out, to look out and to look forward. But even when he was all cleaned up and getting better, the dead man's eyes – even when they were looking straight at you – seemed to be looking inwards, and to be looking back. And what they were looking at wasn't what Rose Callaghan had been looking at: it was nothing beautiful, and it wasn't far away. Sometimes too when you'd talk to him he wouldn't even hear you. It was like he was listening to something else, something inside of him. Maybe it was another kind of
dead man's music he was hearing. If so, then I'm glad I never heard it, because it surely wasn't peaceful like Rose Callaghan's.

The time that I found him, anyhow, I didn't know he wasn't dead in the ordinary way. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and I suppose I just assumed the Tans or soldiers had shot him. There was no sign around his neck saying ‘SPIES AND TRAITORS BEWARE', so it didn't look like a rebel job. The rebels, in any case, left the bodies of people they killed in more public places. Not that I was any great expert – there'd been no killings yet around our way that time. But I'd listened to my father when he read the newspapers out at night around the fire. I liked to know what was going on, and what was going on in Ireland then was murder and madness. The adults would shake their heads at news of fresh burnings and ambushes and robberies and executions, but we children found it exciting. There was no television then, of course, nor even radio. There wasn't even a picture house or anything around that we could go to. And farm life could get awful tedious sometimes, so a bit of excitement was always welcome.

I stood looking at the dead man for a minute, that morning I found him, then I thought I should go and tell someone. I didn't want anyone to blame me for anything. My father was in the house getting ready to go into town on some bit of business. On my way to the house I noticed bloodstains in the yard. I hadn't seen them on the way in.
They weren't big, which meant that the dead man had still been walking or at least staggering when he'd come through there.

When I ran into the kitchen my little brothers, Tim and Matt, were dancing around my father's feet begging him to bring sweets back from the town. Daddy was teasing them, asking them why he should bother. His old black hat was on the back of his head, and his pipe in his hand.

‘What sort of childer am I rearing,' Daddy said, ‘that would sell their souls for a bit of Peggy's Leg?'

Peggy's Leg was a sort of a sweet you could get nearly anywhere then. I don't think you can get it at all now.

‘Daddy!' I said. ‘Daddy! There's a man!'

The three of them looked at me, standing in the middle of the floor, dancing with the thrill of my news.

‘What man?' my father said.

‘A dead man,' I said. ‘A dead man covered with blood in the barn.'

I'd hardly got the words out before Tim and Matt, squealing with excitement, ran out past me to get a look. It wasn't every day that started off with such a marvel. My father looked from me to them and back. Then he roared after them to stop, but they were already gone.

‘A dead man,' he said flatly to me.

‘Dead,' I said. ‘And all bloody. The floor looks like a dead pig is after being dragged across it.'

My father said a curse-word and stalked out to look. I
went after him. When we got to the barn Tim and Matt were standing with their arms around each other, staring at the man in the straw. My father said the same word again.

‘This is exactly what I need,' he said then, but you could tell he meant the very opposite.

‘Sure he've nothing to do with us, Daddy,' I said. ‘It's not our fault he died here. We didn't kill him.'

My father scowled at me.

‘Look at his chest,' he said.

I looked, but all I saw was torn, bloody cloth.

‘You eejit,' my father said. ‘Can't you see that he's breathing?'

When I looked again carefully I saw the little rise and fall of the bloody chest. But still I didn't see why that was bad: a live man, surely, was better than a dead one.

‘We'll go for the police,' I said. ‘They'll sort it out.'

I'd never thought the fighting in the country had
anything
to do with us. We weren't political. We raised our
animals
and watched the weather in dread of a lost crop. What did it matter to us who ran things in Dublin? What had Dublin to do with us? You kept your head down and got on with your work – there was always plenty of that to keep you busy, and never enough time to do it all. That was the way that we lived around these parts then.

But my father looked at me now like I'd sprouted a second head.

‘What am I rearing?' he said. ‘Are you mad as well as
stupid? There was never an informer in our family!' He looked angrily at the bloody man. ‘It's an unhealthy life anyhow, informing,' he muttered. ‘Unhealthy and short.'

‘What informing?' I said. ‘We found a man. We should tell the police. That's not informing, is it?'

‘Talking to the peelers when you don't have to,' my father said, ‘is enough to get you called an informer.'

‘But look at the blood,' I said. ‘If he's not dead itself then he can't be far off it. If we get the police after he dies then we can't be blamed, can we?'

‘Shut up,' my father said. ‘I'm thinking.'

He took his chin between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and rubbed it. It was a way he had, as though he was trying to rub an answer out of the blue-shadowed flesh.

‘This man is hurted,' he said finally. ‘We can't just let him die. But he's even more trouble alive, that's for sure.'

Tim and Matt were standing in front of him, looking at the man, squirming with excitement. Their heads leaned close together, whispering. Da gave both of them a mild clatter on the backs of their heads.

‘Youse get out of here,' he said. ‘Tell your Ma to heat some water.'

He turned to me. ‘I've the horse in the yard,' he said, ‘ready to put in the trap. You ride down to Murrays' and tell Paddy what's after happening. Do whatever he tells you. Say nothing to anyone else you meet, mind, apart from the Murrays – do you hear me?'

I nearly fainted with pleasure. An adventure!

‘I won't tell a sinner, Da,' I said. ‘I swear to God. Will Paddy Murray know what to do?'

Da looked hard at the dying man and sighed.

‘He'd bloody better,' he said. ‘Because I don't.'

I was a bit surprised at the man I was sent to fetch. I wouldn't have expected Paddy Murray to know much about anything beyond dogs, horses and dances. The
Murrays
were our nearest neighbours. Their farmhouse was about a mile down the lane. They were a big, prosperous family of six sons. One of the sons was a priest in America, the rest lived at home and worked the farm. Paddy was the youngest, and he was known locally as a bit of a playboy. He was a handsome man of about thirty, very popular but not regarded as the steadiest of men. He seemed to live for his own enjoyment, and took nothing seriously. He had a joke for every occasion. He was the last man I'd have thought of turning to at a time like this.

I rode our horse Jessie down the lanes to Murrays'. It was still early, and I met no-one on the way. Across the valley I could see a cart slowly descending the lane on the far slope, and I could see the smoke rising from the
chimneys
of the scattered homesteads on the side of the far mountain. It was a cold, sunny day in November, and the air was full of a brittle winter light. Jessie's big hooves plopped in the muck of the lane, and the bare hedges still
dripped from the last night's rain. I noticed all of these things very clearly on that short ride, and I noticed them as though I was seeing them for the first time. And yet I'd seen them all a thousand times before, because this was all the world I knew.

I thought about the dead man in the stable, the dead man who wasn't quite dead. I finally saw what was troubling my father. Dead or alive, the man was trouble. In fact, as my father had realised, he was more trouble alive than dead. If the worst came to the worst, you could dump a dead body. But the dead man hadn't even had the manners to die properly. I know that might sound cruel, but they were cruel times. All times are cruel to people who only scratch a living at the best of times. We had enough to do looking after our own. We didn't know the dead man, and he was none of our business, but now he was very much our problem. If he'd been involved in some outrage then the British would punish the whole area for harbouring him. It wasn't fair, but it was their way. There would be no use in explaining things. Tans didn't listen to explanations, it wasn't their job. Their job, so far as I knew, was to frighten people. It had never made sense to me, but it seemed to make sense to them. They were good at it, too. When I looked at the scattered houses on the slopes across the valley, I tried to picture them burning. That was what the Tans would do, and my own home would be the first to go.

At least the dead man wasn't a problem for our family
alone. The valley people were careful and silent and
sensible
, and they kept their own counsel; but when there was a shared threat they would stick together. I couldn't feel that this fighting had anything to do with any of us, to whom only the weather and the farm prices mattered; but if having the dead man on our hands made him our business, then at least our own business was a thing we could look after. The valley people had a saying about a man:
He sees what he sees and he says what he says
, they'd say,
but he never says the half of what he sees.
When they said that of a man, it was said with approval.

When I turned into Murrays' yard Paddy and his brother Har were there looking at the engine of Paddy's Ford motor car. It was his own car, for his own use, and not a farm machine. Paddy rented the car out sometimes, as a hackney, but that had been only an excuse for buying it. Mainly he used it to ferry himself and his friends around. People looked on it as an extravagance.

‘How do his Ma and Da let him waste money like that?' the old people used to say. ‘Is it any wonder he's gone to the bad, and he so spoiled.'

Paddy and Har had heard the horse coming, and were looking up when we came through the gate. I told them what had happened. Har Murray was about forty, and I expected him to take charge of any response, but he said nothing. Paddy, on the other hand, kept interrupting me with short, serious questions. Har deferred to him,
watching his brother's reactions.