The Whore-Mother (22 page)

But this was the mere biology of makin wains. There was a more important—certainly an equally important—ingredient. “That's not the big thing, Mr. Powers,” Kiernan explained. “The big thing is your statea mind when you're doin it, y'know? To get good-Iookin healthy wains y'have to have the right attitude, d'you see?”

“No.”

“Well, look at it this way. When her and me was married the priest said t'us some thin like ‘a chile'll be as beautiful as the moment of its conception.' What'd'you think that? That's somethin, isn't it?”

He waited. Powers waited, counting cows in an approaching field.

“Well, all the time we're at it I'm thinkin of all the good things I can think of about the wife—y'know? She's a good mother. She's good in the house. She's clean and she's a great temper. Very gentle, y'know? So I'm tellin her all the time what a smashin woman she is, and she's tellin me ‘you're wonderful, Sean, you're great.' Y'know what happens?”

“What?”

“Y'get lovely wains. My six is the healthiest, happiest, best-lookin wains God every put guts in. What d'you think of that?”

“What?”

“What I told you.” His face was eager, earnest, fully persuaded. His smile was expectant. He had let this man Powers into an important secret of his small life.

“Y'mean, you thinkin well of her and her thinkin well of you while you're up her? That's what gives you good-Iookin wains?”

A little shadow crossed Kiernan's bright face. It wasn't the way to speak about it or his oul woman—but the man was what he was and knew no better. “Aye.”

Powers shifted in his seat and half-turned to face Kiernan. He was smiling a small Michael Collins smile. He'd seen it on an old movie on the Irish telly.

“Tell me somethin, Kiernan,” he said, looking down on the tiny man from under the roof of the car.

“What?”

“You're five-foot-two in your stockin feet?”

“Aye.”

“What weight are you?”

“Seven stone.”

“Well, tell me this, now. When they made you, whicha them was drunk—your da or your ma?”

Kiernan stopped the car slowly, letting it run a long way. He pulled in to a ditch, his neck stretching to give him a good sight of it. The car was tight against the bank of the roadside, under a high hedge. He seemed not to have heard Powers. He said, “Get out, if y'please, Mr. Powers. I want to show you somethin,” and opened the door.

Powers opened his door and swung his legs out. His rump was still in the seat, his back to Kiernan. For big men, gettin out of these wee cars is a bloody struggle, and what was he gonta do with the door half-caught in the bloody bank? A knife settled its sharp point in the back of his neck and drove out of his head whatever he was about to say.

Kiernan said, in a gently spitting voice, “Powers, you're a stupid big cunt. You're a dirty fuckin stupid big cunt. But I was sent t'work w'you and I'm gonta do it. If you open your fuckin mouth again unless I let you, I'll cut your throat.” He was kneeling on the seat. He put his hand over Powers' shoulder and withdrew his gun. With the agility of a lively boy he was over the seat, into the back of the car. “Now slide back and drive. We're gonta the southwest to kill another fuckin cunt. And in case them boys in Stranorlar didn't tell you—
I'm in charge here
. Away on....”

Powers saw Kiernan's face in the rear-view mirror. It was pale. The lips were a little apart and drawn back and trembling. His pupils seemed to fill his eye sockets and they were black with lust.

Powers didn't wonder if that was what Kiernan really looked like in bed, joyously extolling the virtues of his wife when they were making beautiful children. The things he knew about told him what he saw.

And he was thinking: thon fuckin wee man's a killer. By Jasus, the looka that wee smiler'd take y'in, all right.

He put the car in gear and moved it gently into the road, as though to rock Kiernan might disturb his detonator.

Kiernan smiled and talked to the Donegal town men. He talked to the Sligo men and the bartender at the Great Southern. He found the shop where the man with the painty clothes bought a tweed suit. They slept the night in Sligo and left in the morning, Powers driving, Kiernan behind, thinking that maybe tomorrow he'd be on his way back and number seven could be started. But all the way to Bantry, the silence ticked like an alarm clock.

The Bantry men met in a back room at Dolan's. For years there had been three of them, middle-aged, ridiculous, and patient, waiting for The Day.

On The Day, the last English boot would be off the last Irish neck and even the Northern Protestants would find happiness and a new thing: Irish peace. It was only a failure of understanding and the cunning of English propaganda that kept the Northern Protestants from believing there was a boot, English or otherwise, on their necks. Understanding would come with freedom. Freedom was a mouthwash that killed the subtlest germs.

Daniel Sorahan the schoolmaster was one of the three. His father survived the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed it, and was murdered after the Civil War by a former comrade of the War of Independence who believed with the Grand Inquisitor that a man who fought on the wrong side in Ireland was better dead than in mortal error.

Daniel did not, of course, remember his father, only the manner of his dying and the oppressive burden of his mother's unforgetting, unforgiving bitterness.

He was a humorous and a devious man who believed himself to be almost miraculously longsighted. He agreed cheerfully with those who laughed at the Bantry men, that they were ridiculous keeping the old IRA alive “like a bunch of playactin schoolboys,” when “that sort of thing was away out of date.”

“You're right there, you're right there,” Daniel always agreed, “but I'll tell you somethin worth knowin ... you don't throwaway your feet when you're not usin them in your sleep at night. You leave them on your ankles. Maybe you'll live through till the mornin and there they are. Or put it this way. The Jews put the Maccabees in a book and kept them there till somethin happened ... the ovens in Germany. Then they took them out of the book and called them the Irgun, and there they are. They call the place Israel. I'll get you another pint. Guinness, isn't it? It's bein there when somethin happens, isn't it?”

Something had happened in the North and the three middle-aged men in Dolan's backroom were joined by young men waiting for something more to happen. Not killing. Not bombing. This part of Ireland was a mild and gentle land with mild and gentle people who spoke softly. They were waiting for nothing more definable than something.

Daniel lived in a semi-detached house in Bantry. It was the only place in the town where he ever said what he really thought and he said it only to his wife.

He still loved the woman. He found her teaching in the school where he started his own career and they spent their honeymoon in London. They were Catholics whose Catholicism was aesthetic and social and at times cautiously religious. So they agreed in London that if the best was to be got out of the occasion, Daniel should find one of those shops that displayed a little card reading “rubber goods.” It was Liz Sorahan who said after a couple of nights, “Danny, I'm not gain through my whole married life thinkin we do it every night and all I've felt of the real Daniel Sorahan is a secondhand impression inside a rubber bag. I'm seein a doctor.” So the Sorahans in quietness but in nobody else's confidence brought the Dutch cap to Bantry and every day hurried home from school and laughed a lot in bed. Their two planned sons were away in Dublin at Trinity College with twelve hundred other Catholics who ignored the hierarchy's ban on Catholic attendance at the old Protestant Ascendancy College. And as the fire smoldered more and flamed less, Daniel and Mrs. Elizabeth Sorahan found laughter and trusting talk a fair compensation for the loss of six of the week's seven nights. With one another, they were themselves. They were the kind of Irish who could usher in the new hoped-for Ireland, if ever they had the public courage to stand for it.

The most violent thing Daniel Sorahan had done in his life was to catch and kill a salmon or a trout, a mackerel or a herring. He had a great fondness for the English and their ways. “In the broadest sense,” he said, his rump extending towards his own fireplace and his eyes smiling at his wife, “the English are the most civilized people in the world.” All he had against them, he liked to tell her, was that they came to Ireland too soon and stayed too long. “If they could have made Englishmen out of us, they'd have done us a great favor. They couldn't, and the best reason for gettin rid of them now is that they'll leave us nobody to blame but ourselves. That's the great wrong they did us,” he liked to say to her, “they gave us somebody else to blame for what we are. When they're right out of Ireland entirely we'll have to start dealin with Ireland's biggest problem—the bloody Irish.”

But he didn't say things like that in the back of Dolan's Pub. His shrewd eyes inspected his young men and he thought as he had thought often in the past few years: the North's the big wide screen and these Bantry boyos are only sittin in the cheap seats, watchin. They need somethin to do.

Well, there was something now to do. Find a deserter and possible informer from the North. It made him nervous. It was more directly human than he had had in mind. What he had in mind wasn't clear even to him. It came under the general heading of “something.” In Ireland one didn't face such issues till they bruised the nose. His eyes inspected the executioners from the North, and he didn't care much for them. They were direct, like bulldozers at a barricade, with blinkered single-track heads.

He particularly disliked the big one, this Powers. He didn't like their harsh clipped voices. He thought more softly of Kiernan, but that smile made him wary. It was too Irish. There was too much of it. Kiernan was agreeable, flattering, grateful to excess, a decent little creature, he was certain; very likely the man had never kicked a dog. But deficient. In what? In the sense that there was something in there that poisoned the smile at its roots. It would show, maybe. Meanwhile they brought the young men a prospect of patriotic if not heroic labors—to hunt, find, and deliver to Powers and Kiernan, one McManus, a student.

A graduate. That also made Daniel Sorahan uneasy. This McManus was not an urbanized peasant, like Powers or Kiernan; a middle-class Catholic with, maybe, more delicate perceptions? Scruples also? With ideas in his head that never entered theirs; and critical faculties? Was that it? And he wondered what he himself would become if he were locked in an urban ghetto with urbanized peasants trained single-mindedly to kill and demolish? He loved to fish. He disliked the killing of his catch. And what was he to think of what they said about “the soft-bellied-educated?” Did that include himself and Liz? Sorahan had in fact never till now set eyes on urban guerrillas.

“What we've got is this,” he said, and spoke to Kiernan across Dolan's back room. “Nobody like McManus saw any doctor around here. He didn't go near the hospital. He wasn't in any chemist's shop tryin to get medicine for whatever it is he's got. He just walked west out of town.”

“Right y'are, right y'are, Mr. Sorahan now;” Kiernan said gratefully. “What about the girl? Any thin on her?”

“She hired an old bike from Driscoll's, and left her bags at the Westlodge. That's the hotel the coach tours use in Bantry. She booked in there, packed a rucksack and said she'd be back in a couple of days.”

“She went after McManus?”

“He went west. So did she. One of the boys was down at Kilcrohane and heard from the Garda there that a farmer by the name of Cusack found this man ravin on the rocks at Sheep's Head with a gun in his pack. But the Garda says Cusack and his wife's not sober more than a day a month. That's what we have for you.”

Powers said, “It's not much.”

“It's more than you had when you came here,” Sorahan said gently, “and it took time and people.”

“Y're great, Mr. Sorahan, y're great,” Kiernan said, smoothing waters and smiling and drawing smiles he tried to understand from the young men who stood and sat around the walls. They were big, red-faced young men with tumbling black hair and they were caught between discomfort in the presence of real executioners—a scuffle after a dance was the worst any of them had ever seen off the television screen—and cautious admiration for men who had faced “the enemy” for “the Cause.” They could carry the deaths of soldiers in the forefront of their minds. Killing and dying were part of the life style of an army and the British army in the North was “the enemy.” The civilian dead they shuffled behind a mental curtain as accidents to be regretted and not thought about.

Daniel Sorahan watched Kiernan watching his young men and was glad he had not explained to the little man that the mood and the history of West Cork were not quite like that of other places; that here there were Protestant peasant farmers, as well as Catholic, that here there had never been animus between the two, that here a tradition of violence and strife went no deeper than an occasional drunken brawl far less serious than the normal behavior of Scottish soccer fans, and that these young men were willing to collect money for Northern fighting men—who were in reality headlines and abstractions, even romantic illusions—but were unlikely to be open and trusting with harsh men with harsh accents who had actually killed other human beings and were here to kill. And “the enemy,” the British, came here on their holidays as “the English,” and yarned in pubs about soccer and asked questions about Gaelic football and hurley and meant the livelihood of most of these young men who were now, because the English no longer came, unemployed. West Cork was a harsh land of gentle people who believed in “the Cause” and had not for many decades met it in the flesh. So with slight smiles and deep curiosity they watched Kiernan perform and he distributed his praise, “Y're all great. Great. Great.”