The visit, p.16
The Visit, page 16
The tall man had hands big enough to carry all his mother’s old pots and pans. The smaller one came out with a milk crate cupped in his arms, clinking like a broken music box, and Patrick knew it was stacked with her cutlery and cups and saucers. The third man emerged, and the others laughed and bent and slapped their knees as he walked straight-backed to the van, wearing his mother’s good hat, a berry-coloured thing that she only wore to mass. She’d have worn it to see Kennedy if she was still around. The man’s arms were full of her clothes and an old greatcoat of his father’s fell from his left shoulder. Rage filled Patrick as if he was drawing it from the ground, so that it filled every limb and extremity. He clenched his teeth so tight he thought they might crack. The men’s laughter sounded like wild animals.
He rested the barrel of the rifle on the bucket of the Massey, feeling its power extend to his index finger, then chambered a round. He thought that the bullets he fired from the top of Carrickbyrne in the morning might still be travelling, overtaking ships in the Atlantic by now.
The man tossed the clothes in the back of the van and then bent to pick up the coat, holding it in front of him like a magician’s cloak. He folded it to reveal himself again, and Patrick pulled the trigger before deciding that he would. The power of the shot trembled through the bucket and the bullet cut through air and blew the man’s left knee apart. Patrick felt the recoil in his shoulder like a balled fist and the sound rang in every direction, as clear as the bell on St Michael’s. He looked at the gun as if he was surprised to find it in his hand then looked through the scope again. The thief writhed on the ground, pleading like a broken-legged horse that had clattered over a hurdle, his pained cries like something from some backstreet operating table. His partners looked at each other then dragged him to his feet, ducking their heads while they loaded him into the back of the van to bleed over everything they’d stolen.
The van pulled out of the yard with its lights off, hitting the gate on its way, the engine roared through the gears and as the sound faded, Patrick saw the lights switch on and the van sway as if it might topple, racing to whatever doctor they could find.
Patrick walked through the gap in the wall and stood in the electric light, so much brighter than the lamps at Roche’s. His hands were shaking and he realised after a few seconds what he had done. He’d turned himself from an outcast to a fugitive. Near the doorstep, he saw some wet blood and imagined the man’s knee, blown into as many pieces as the pheasant. He bent and picked up his father’s coat and pulled it on.
He righted a chair that was knocked on its side and sat at the corner of the table facing the ransacked room, with the rifle on its end between his thighs. The whole place felt lighter, after Casey’s men decided that scavenging the place was a perk of their job. He held his hands out and watched as their tremble slowed to stillness, coming to terms with having shot a man for the first time.
It hadn’t felt different to shooting anything else. There was no change in the mechanics of the task, no extra resolve needed to steady the weapon and take aim. No hidden strength needed to pull the trigger. Once that was done, the bullet did the rest, hurtling off on a journey that only ended with its target. The target this time a tall and skinny thief, who bled just the same as all the winged and four-legged creatures.
He was back in Roche’s, the paraffin oil burning and a plateful of beans and potatoes in his stomach. He’d taken anything he didn’t want ending up in the hands of Casey’s men. They’d almost stripped the place. He salvaged a couple of his mother’s brooches and his father’s flat cap. Her knitting book and some of his poor attempts. He tied the laces of the old boots he’d planned on giving to Roche together, and hung them around his neck for the journey back. Leaving things behind had been one thing, leaving them behind for thieves was another. He laid them on Roche’s table like a sorry altar shrine, a miscellany of near-worthless and sentimental items like things reclaimed from a battlefield’s dead.
He wondered who the men thought was shooting at them, or if they believed it to be one of the Hatten ghosts, stirred from the grave to put a stop to their desecration. When their fear had passed and the light of day helped them to see sense, they’d come to the conclusion that there was only one likely shooter. Whether or not they’d tell the law how it came to happen was a coin toss. The more he thought about it, the more he realised that it didn’t matter. He was a man who was already found guilty without judge or jury. Casey had fixed it so he couldn’t resurface and Field’s men were part of it. Even if Field hadn’t been part of his eviction, he’d have no choice but to involve himself now, after a man’s leg was shot to pieces.
The thought stayed with him while he lay in Roche’s bed, a fox barking somewhere near the hills. He scratched his torso and legs, tossing and turning. They couldn’t punish him any worse than what was already planned. It was as if a peculiar freedom had been granted. He was a man who’d been given his sentence, then told to pick his crime – would he like to be hung for a sheep or a lamb?
He turned from bed and lit a lamp, keeping the flame low so he could only see inches beyond where he held it. He closed his eyes and relived the moment of firing. Of standing unseen in the darkness, the fate of those men in his hands. How the two he left standing had turned and looked into the wall of night and couldn’t see him, though he stood with the gun still aimed, looking directly at them. The burning smell from the barrel, the stock set against his shoulder. How in an instant, he could have picked either one of them to blow apart as easily as blowing out a candle.
He went to the fireplace and scooped out a handful of dry ash then took it back to the bedroom. He opened the wardrobe door and put the lamp on a shelf inside and looked at his face in the scarred mirror. He rubbed his hands together then daubed his face, like a man washing in reverse, so that when he looked at himself again, he resembled a miner just returned to the surface. He kept his mouth shut and used his fingertips to spread the charcoal ash into the folds around his nose and back to his ears, then he stepped back a couple of feet, so that all he could see in the mirror and lamp light was the whites of his eyes.
23
Donncha’s funeral was like practice for the Kennedy crowds. The latest estimate is that we’ll have thirty thousand here, but I still think it’ll be more. People coming from far and wide, half of them with no place to stay the night and no plan on how to get home until the following morning, two or three to a bike, whole families to a truck bed.
There weren’t thirty thousand out for Donncha Reilly, but it was as big a funeral as I can remember. The man taught someone from every family within twenty miles at one stage or another, and was remembered more fondly than plenty of schoolmasters might be. Myself and Siobhán joined the slow march of mourners following the hearse to the graveyard, along streets where businesses were shut and curtains were drawn. Catriona walked part of the journey and I carried her the rest of it.
Peter Casey positioned himself right behind the Reilly family, his hat pressed to his chest. There were tears, and grandchildren, and spits of rain. Father Crowley stayed true to form in making the rite of committal as miserable as possible. For a faith that believes in life after death, it hardly seems less likely when watching a box lowered into the earth. The hollow sound of dirt tossed on the coffin coming from the grave like coughs, while a priest reminds us of our sins before men come with shovels to bury the departed in soundless sleep.
After the plywood was slid over the grave, I let Siobhán and Catriona fall in step with the rest of the crowd, telling Siobhán there was someone I needed a word with. I hung back and watched them leave through the gates, carried away with the sound of whispered grief from the crowd so I was left listening to the breeze and jackdaws in the yews. I walked through the maze of graves and stopped in front of the simplest stone in a row near the west wall. Sean Hatten 1900–1956. His wife, Maura Hatten 1910–1962. I don’t know what I was hoping to find.
Maura wasn’t buried long enough for her grave to be in ruins. How long since I visited Declan’s? At least a year, when I went with my mother and she tried to cry but didn’t manage it – tears dried up by time. The Hatten plot was ragged all the same, streaks of bird shit down the headstone, and the stalks of rotten flowers wrapped by a thin red-ribbon knot. A dozen or so tiny, damp patches of wool, poorly knitted and frayed at the edges, scattered on the grave like petals lost to the wind. I bent and picked one up and the stitching near came apart between my fingers. I dropped it back where I found it, not sure if it was just wind-tossed debris or some sort of tribute to Maura. I put my hand on the headstone, Sean’s handkerchief soft between my fingers, and said sorry – knowing there was nobody there to hear me. Sorry for what I did to him and sorry for not doing a better job of looking out for his son. There was rubbish burning somewhere nearby and the smell of smoking rubber ghosted between the gravestones.
All six feet six inches of Nollaig Quinn were beyond the gate, the bulk of a man who’d played hurling at county level, bent by time, and bruised by the shoulders and elbows and hurleys of every opposing midfielder in Leinster. I suspected he was waiting for me and wondered if he had watched me go to the Hatten grave. A sergeant, three months past retirement, coaxed into staying on to help the newly built station in Glynn find its feet. He was uniformed, with grey hair parted to the left, and a neat and thick black moustache. A constellation of freckles dotted his forehead and he had a sickle-shaped bald spot in the stubble of his jaw – the result of a cigarette end pressed to his face during an arrest.
‘That’s a man who’ll be missed. I saw you at the church, Jim. How’s the family?’
‘They’re grand, Nollaig, thanks. What about your own?’
He tossed his chin. ‘My lot are halfway to talking with American accents. Both lads are in Boston since last year. Anne-Marie has been there three years with no sign of coming back. They all tell themselves they’ll be back. Something to keep them warm on the crossing.’
We shared a silence to acknowledge his loss and he watched memories of his children disappear down the road.
‘How are you getting on with everything?’ he said. ‘Not long now until the famous son returns.’ He tapped a cigarette from its box and pulled it out with his teeth, then cupped his hand to light it. ‘Have the Yanks been in to check and triple check? I’m surprised they haven’t asked to strip search everybody on the day. Or better yet have us all show up bollock naked.’
‘I think we’re being sold short with the number of guards. I’d say we’ll be policing fifty thousand in town.’
‘You might be right. Drinking, celebrating and fighting.’
‘You’ll be drafted across yourself, I’m sure?’
He exhaled his smoke. ‘We both have that to look forward to. People vomiting and pissing up against walls, singing the Star-Spangled Banner. So Kennedy can come and tell us how lucky he is that his family fecked off out of the place.’
I saw no point in trying to convince Nollaig of the significance of the visit. Of the difference between a congregation that looks to Kennedy, and one that looks to Father Crowley.
‘How’s the new station?’
‘Years in the making, the ribbon’s been cut, and the place still isn’t finished. One flushing jacks, still no telephone.’
‘Anything lively?’
He smiled. ‘Quiet as always, thank God.’ He released another cloud of smoke. ‘One bit of noise though. Do you know Matty Whelan and Eamon Doran?’
‘They do odd jobs for Peter Casey? I only saw them yesterday evening, over at the stud.’
‘The very men. They were off hunting with some wild fella from up the country last night. Must be after they’d finished with Casey. Susan had them land into the hospital at all hours with this lanky character – Drummond is his name – strapped around the thigh and below the knee, some botched effort at mending him. Howling the place down he was.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, it looks like one of the brainboxes shot him by accident. Susan said the fella’s knee is shot to more parts than a jigsaw. And that it’s missing too many pieces to be put back together.’
‘Which of them got him?’
Nollaig laughed. ‘Hopalong says it was his own gun that went off. He won’t give a name. Those three want the Guards involved about as much as a man wants Kennedy involved with his wife, so it’s all written up as an accident. Suits me fine.’
‘Maybe it was?’
He looked doubtful and scratched the corner of his moustache. ‘Maybe. But Susan says the stories were too similar, as if they’d practised how they’d tell it. They said they were after rabbits, looking at each other while they gave the doc their spiel. I’ve never seen a man shoot his own kneecap off with a hunting rifle.’
‘Whelan and Doran, though. They’ve never given trouble. If it wasn’t an accident, they’d have no reason not to come out and say so.’
‘Unless they were up to something they shouldn’t have been. But what can I do? Drummond is bandaged up and won’t be walking in a straight line any time soon. I thought I’d say it to you, on the off chance they were up to something around here.’
‘Thanks, Nollaig. I’ll keep an eye out.’ He flicked his cigarette to the ground and twisted a shoe on it. ‘How well do you know Casey?’
He folded his arms. ‘Ah, not well. You know he made it to the All-Ireland handball finals as a young man? Beat me in an early round. Of course, he had youth on his side and I was carrying more injuries than a war veteran – a left knee made of glass, the right stiff as concrete. By God, Jim, it was like sharing an alley with a fucking bear. A big, sweaty, mean bear who thought every single inch of the court was his – even the bit you were standing on.’
‘I don’t doubt that for a second. Say hello to Susan from myself and Siobhán.’
He called after me on my way to the car. ‘Jim. Donncha looked better in that box than you do today. Take care of yourself,’ he said, pulling his keys from his pocket and walking away with the sound of them jangling, a thin ribbon of smoke dancing from between his lips.
Siobhán hadn’t turned a page in her book for ten minutes. I’d taken The Exploration of Space from my bottom drawer and was struggling to re-read essays I’d read years ago. It made little sense then and made less now. The science of it is beyond my comprehension, but I reassure myself that my lack of understanding only heightens my sense of wonder. Maybe if I understood it all, down to the composition of dust on the moon, it would cheapen it somehow, and remove the mystery. I read the same line over and over and it wouldn’t straighten itself out. I put the book on the floor.
‘That was a long day,’ I said and she kept a thumb in the book and closed it. ‘What has you stuck in the book?’
She looked at the cover as if she’d forgotten what she was reading, then shook her head. ‘Ah, nothing. I’m distracted is all.’ She put the book on her nightstand and turned off the lamp. It took a few seconds to adjust to the darkness.
‘What is it?’ I reached over and ran my hand through her hair, my fingers apart so the soft strands felt like water flowing over them. She hesitated. ‘What is it, love?’
‘I want to take Catriona to Mammy and Daddy’s tomorrow. I know you can’t go.’ She said nothing more, just let her words take flight to see how they landed in the dark. I stopped rubbing her head and sat straighter, knowing that there was something wrong.
‘We’re not long back from visiting. It’s a rotten journey without a car. Is everything okay back home?’ I thought of the empty envelope and wondered if the letter had been a summons of some sort.
She turned to her back. ‘Everything’s fine. I don’t know, I’m not saying it’s because of it, but today was Catriona’s first funeral. I wonder how many more times she’ll see them.’
‘Christ, love, they’re only in their fifties.’
‘I know,’ she said, sitting up. ‘But time goes so quickly. Do you remember Daddy holding her for the first time? Terrified, he was. Like she was made of paper. Now she’s losing baby teeth. It won’t be long and she’ll be going off to university – at least she will if I have anything to do with it.’
‘You’ll worry these years away. She’ll be with us a long time. Twelve years until university.’ I took her hand. ‘Think of it this way. It’s not even twelve years since you broke the heart of a young policeman. Look at us now and all that’s happened. A lifetime’s worth.’
She sighed and took her hand away. ‘I stole those years from us.’
‘Rubbish,’ I said, face to face in the dark. ‘If you had never left you might be here with me now, wondering how things would have worked out if you did. Or maybe you wouldn’t be here at all.’
‘Do you not have any regrets?’
I swallowed and was glad that the darkness hid my hypocrisy. Preaching about making peace with the past, when I carry it with me every day.
‘One or two.’
We lay in the quiet. A floorboard sighed and pipes tutted.
‘What do you think, pet? For a few days while she’s still off school. You’re busy anyway. You might be glad to have us out of your way.’
‘Come on, love, you know that’s not true.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘How do you mean?’ She said nothing, only sighed. I rolled to my back and found the light switch. ‘Where’s this coming from?’
‘Well, you were out most of the day on Sunday when you were supposed to be off. Your head was someplace else at the funeral. It’s Peter Casey, or it’s Patrick Hatten, or it’s JFK, but it’s rarely us. Jesus, pet, when was the last time you took her for a spin, just the two of ye? You know she loves it.’
I said nothing and she rubbed her forehead, seeming to have overestimated her energy for the argument. She pushed back the blanket and turned from bed. I looked at the shape of her back, cloaked in a white nightdress, her sunburn fading.
