Now and in the Hour of Our Death (53 page)

Anyone who believed that probably still had a soft spot for Santa Claus, Alfie reckoned, and he'd been certain for years, as he had told Sammy, that the O'Byrnes were active volunteers. The father had been a well-known IRA man in his time. But be damned if anyone had been able to prove their involvement.

Getting a good look now at the folks at the graveside would give Alfie more faces to add to his mental catalogue of potential suspects for the future. And the O'Byrnes, who would assuredly know they were suspects, would have their suspicions raised if no one from his branch showed up. He'd seen them when he'd accompanied the uniformed men to tell the O'Byrnes about the death of their brother, and the girl had seen him. It wouldn't hurt to let her see him again.

When the funeral party had departed, Alfie would check the dead-letter drop under the big cross in case Sunshine had left a message.

 

CHAPTER 43

TYRONE. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1983

He'd get a message to Spud today, Sammy thought, the phone call that would make amends and set things to rights for Erin and Cal. He sat at their kitchen table finishing his breakfast. He'd slept reasonably well last night, although at first he'd been uncomfortable when Erin put him in Fiach's old room. He'd eventually drifted off after he'd told himself for the hundredth time that the way the peelers had set it up, he'd had no choice, none at all, but to turn. Now he was going to put things straight, but—he chewed a piece of black pudding—he was going to miss Erin's cooking when she went to America.

He glanced at the telephone on the Welsh dresser. The minute the O'Byrnes were out of the house, he'd be on to Spud, and, Sammy smiled, he was going to fuck up his new friend, him and his “trusting each other” bullshite, and there wouldn't be a fuckin' thing the peeler could do about it.

Better still, no one in the townland would ever know Sammy had been an informer. They would have figured that out in no time if he'd stuck to the original plan and buggered off to England. Now he didn't have to go, he'd not have to share the shame of Mollie MacDacker or Art O'Hanlon, names remembered with hatred over the centuries.

The door to the hall opened, and Erin, in a black dress, hat, and veil, walked across the kitchen; Cal followed wearing black shoes, black suit, black tie, and black armband. Both the O'Byrnes were in the Northern Ireland uniforms of mourning.

Sammy rose. “I'm sorry I can't come, too, pay my last respects, like.” He bowed his head.

“That's all right, Sammy.” Erin lifted her raincoat from the coat stand. “You just get on with your work here until we get back.” She sounded subdued, but Sammy couldn't see well enough through her veil to tell if she'd been crying.

“Come on, Erin,” Cal said, taking his sister's arm but needing the other hand to wrench the lower half of the kitchen door open. “If you've a minute, Sam, could you take a plane to that? I've been meaning to, but…”

“Aye, certainly. Never you worry.” Sammy was going to add that as soon as the O'Byrnes returned, he'd scoot over to his cottage and bring the detonators, but decided this wasn't the time. “Cal, say you a couple of Aves for me, will you?” Sammy knew there was little point asking Erin. She hadn't set foot in a chapel since old man O'Byrne died.

“I will.” He stepped aside and let Erin out through the door.

Sammy waited until he heard the noise of the van fade, walked to the dresser, lifted the phone, and dialed. He listened to the ringing at the other end, picked his nose, and tapped one foot on the floor. “Come on, for fuck's sake.” Ten double rings, and no one answered. Where the hell was Spud?

Sammy replaced the receiver. “Shite.” He'd wanted to put the finishing touches to his deception as quickly as possible, but the call could wait until after he'd been to his cottage and back here. Surely to God the peeler would be in by then. And what the hell had made Spud suggest leaving a note under the cross in the Ballydornan churchyard? Today the place would be crawling with O'Byrne family friends and, like as not, a wheen of Provo volunteers. Sammy imagined excusing himself and pushing through the crowd, saying, “I just have to leave this here wee note for a policeman, so I do.”

Fuck that, but the idiocy of the scene made him laugh out loud, and that was something he hadn't done for months. He'd have a few more laughs with his smuggling friends in the pub in Ballybofey, particularly on Saturday morning, when, if all went according to plan, the Strabane Barracks would be a heap of stinking rubble, the O'Byrnes safely on their way to the States, and E4A Spud shitting himself with frustration. It was about time the peeler had his own grief. Sammy had had enough, more than enough.

Still smiling, he grabbed his duncher, put on his raincoat and Welly boots, let himself out, having to shove hard at the door to close it, and whistled for Tessie. The stupid bloody cows wouldn't get themselves out to pasture. When he'd got that done, he'd pick up a plane in the barn and see to the door. Some days, he thought, Cal wouldn't bother drinking his pint if he could get someone else to do it for him. Perhaps, Sammy decided, he'd try the phone again once he'd fixed the door.

He crossed the yard, collar turned against the rain, opened the barn doors, and heard the cattle lowing and stamping in their stalls. They'd not understand why they'd had to wait. By the bawls of some of them, they were getting impatient. He walked along the aisle, opening gates and giving the beasts room to squeeze past him. Cal had said something about one called Margaret, but Sammy was damned if he could recognize her.

“Away to hell,” he yelled, thumping one hard on the rump as she tried to squash him against the front of the pens. Instead of lowing and skittering away, she heaved her bulk against him. Jesus. Margaret. Sammy struggled to breathe but couldn't force his chest to expand. The cow had him pinned against the gatepost. He heard his ribs snap and felt stabs like red-hot irons in his left chest. Specks of bright light swam in front of his eyes, his knees buckled, and he slipped sideways, to tumble back into the manure on the floor of an empty stall. In the second before the darkness crushed in on him, he had time to think—Spud.

*   *   *

Erin held her hurt to herself as she stood beside Cal in the autumn rain. She glanced at her brother, solemn-faced, cheeks glowing in the chill, red hair darkened by the rain. It was the colour of the sadness within her. Bloodred, tinged with scarlet anger.

And if she could see Cal's emotions as a colour, they would be grey. Grey as the clouds that were stalled immobile above them. Her brother had been numbed by Fiach's death, yet more accepting than she. Perhaps grey was the colour of acceptance.

The mourners huddled sheeplike against the cold beneath the moss-grown Celtic cross or inside the drystone wall with its iron gate. The ancient, timeless gravestones sagged lopsidedly, the newer marble ones cowered in the shadows. Old Father O'Driscoll in his biretta, cope, cassock, and stole was as damp and musty as the mound of newly turned soil beside the open grave. It felt like the Irish had been attending funerals in the rain since the dawn of time.

The priest droned on,

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.

Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructis ventri tui, Jesus.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

Outside the wall of the Ballydornan churchyard, police officers stood with their bottle-green uniform raincoats sodden, their Sten guns reversed, heads bowed in respect. To the side of the small contingent, she could see the man with the funny triangle in his left eye, the man who'd come to the farmhouse and stayed in the Land Rover when the peelers had arrived to notify her and Cal of Fiach's shooting.

He wore a civilian coat and was bareheaded but held his head erect, eyes never still. He seemed to be interested in the Celtic cross, and for a moment she wondered why. She knew very well why he kept scanning the faces of the people. He'd be making mental notes of those he thought he should add to his list of Provo suspects. Special Branch bastard. Let him. If he was anywhere near Strabane Barracks on Saturday, he'd find out for sure about some of them. Much good would it do him then. She hoped he'd catch pneumonia from getting soaked.

“
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritu Sancti.
”
The priest wagged his aspergillum and sprinkled holy water into the grave.

“Amen,” murmured the priest and mourners in concert.

Erin moved to the grave's lip and looked down. The lid of Fiach's wooden coffin glistened and she saw drops of water, each one a discrete blob, shining on the brass plate. His hurley and ball lay to one side.

“Rest in peace, Fiach,” she whispered, lifting a handful of earth, letting the soil trickle from her fingers, and hearing it rattle off the lid. “Rest in peace here in Ireland, Fiach,” she said. “We'll not forget you, darling.”

She allowed herself one last look and turned aside to Cal. Tears ran down his ruddy cheeks. She'd not cry. She'd not. Not until the last shot had been fired, they were safely across the border, and she and Eamon were in America, the land that had been the refuge of so many of her people.

She walked with Cal through the gate to their parked van. She nodded silently as family friends and Fiach's hurling teammates murmured their condolences. She didn't speak, didn't look back. She promised herself she would not look at Fiach's grave until the day she returned—when her Ireland was whole again.

Cal said nothing as she climbed in beside him. She left him to his thoughts.

The van jolted over the grass verge and onto the road. The windscreen wipers made rhythmic squeaks as they swung across the rain-mottled glass. Cal turned on the heater, and she watched the condensation vanish from inside the windscreen, felt the warmth of the air being blown from the vents, and hoped the heater she'd put in the neolithic grave would be keeping Eamon and his friends warm, too.

Fiach had always looked up to Eamon, admired his passion, his strength. She wondered how her young brother would have taken to Davy McCutcheon.

Davy seemed an interesting man. She'd like to know more about him and hoped she'd be able to get him to open up once they'd crossed the border. They'd've time to kill in Dublin before they went their separate ways to what used to be called the New World.

Why, she wondered, would a man like him, a man who'd given his life to the Cause, repudiate it as fiercely as she had rejected the Catholic faith? Did he still believe in an avenging God, fear his immortal soul was burdened with the people he'd killed, see himself hell-bound when he died? According to the Church, we were all sinners anyway, so what difference did it make? He was no more guilty than the old IRA volunteers who'd fought alongside Michael Collins and Harry Boland against the Black and Tans in the Irish War of Independence in the '20s. It had been a just war, forgivable as the one Davy had waged, the one she was still waging.

What thoughts had run through the minds of Collins's “apostles,” his handpicked assassins, on the eve of one of their attacks on the hated G-men, the undercover policemen in the pay of the British? Had they been haunted by the fear of their own deaths? They must have been. And since Sammy had made her face the possibility yesterday, she'd been forced to consider the risk that she herself might die. She was proud to find she did not fear death. She'd regret the shortness of her life, regret never seeing Eamon again, regret not learning all the new things in store for them when they settled in America, never knowing if the Irish would win their freedom. But she had no anxiety about an afterlife. Her cause
was
just, and there was no limbo, no purgatory, no hell in store for her.

If she died on Saturday, there was solace in the thought she'd be buried in Ballydornan, beside Ma and Fiach and Da in the rich Irish earth, under a weeping Irish sky.

The van jolted over an uneven place where a pothole had been filled with new tarmac. Her knee banged on the dashboard. She told herself to stop being so morbid, that all soldiers must feel like this on the eve of battle. She stared ahead to the slopes bordering the narrow road, the bracken brown, the whin flowers chrome-yellow against the green of their thorny bushes. Take a good look, she told herself. You'll see them once again on Saturday on the way to Strabane, and after that, how many years will it be until you're free to walk these hills again? Erin crossed her arms, hands on her shoulders, and hugged herself.

The events of the last week had seemed vague, unfocused back then, but now she could not escape from the fact of Fiach's death and the reality that she would be leaving her little corner of Ireland, the land her family had farmed for generations here in the County Tyrone. She was bound for America.

Erin glanced back over her shoulder and was pleased to see there was no other car following them. She'd not have put it past the man with the odd eye to have tailed them, and with the men in the tumulus, the last thing she wanted was having a peeler sniffing round the place.

She wondered how Sammy was managing and wished he'd shown more understanding when she'd tried to explain the accounts yesterday. She was grateful for his offer to keep flowers on Fiach's grave and knew she could rely on Sammy to ensure there'd be a proper headstone on Fiach's grave, there beside his da.

She became aware of the van slowing down as Cal tucked in behind a tractor. He usually swore when he was held up like this, but today he sat tight-lipped, big hands clutching the wheel.

“Are you all right, Cal?” she asked quietly.

“I'm right enough, but I'm sad.”

“About Fiach?”

“Aye. And Da, and all the rest. I wonder,” he said, “is all the dying worth it?”

“It has to be.”