War Children (11 page)

As for the dead man in the stable, he recovered. He was moved very carefully to the hayloft, where a snug little cell was hollowed out for him in the hay. A reliable doctor was brought that night to examine him. He said the man had lost a lot of blood, but no vital organs had been damaged so far as he could tell. The man had been wounded by a knife, and not a bayonet, and that was good because a bayonet, with its long blade, would probably have done more damage. The doctor sewed the man up, and left a supply of morphia and antiseptic powders to be used on him. He came back a few times after.

The dead man was with us for a week and a half, and when he was well enough he ate food that we brought him. That came to be my job, and it was while I was bringing the food that I noticed the dead eyes he had. He didn't talk much, and then one morning he was gone.

On the afternoon of that first day, the day that I found the dead man, Paddy Murray led a group of ten men up through our haggard onto the hillside. My father told us to stay out of the way when they came, but from behind the net curtain of the bedroom window I watched them pass through, watching as I was sure I myself had been
watched that morning. I knew every one of those men that passed by. I'd grown up knowing them. But there wasn't one of them I'd have guessed for a likely rebel if you'd asked me before. They were ordinary men, ordinary
farmers
. That day as they went up the hill they all carried guns. These men especially I could never look at in the same way afterwards; I felt as though I'd glimpsed through the net curtains some secret adult side of them, some side that a child should not see. And I felt that I'd never known a single one of them at all. Then my mother caught me
peeking
and gave me a puck in the head, and I ran upstairs and hid. But I was glad to go, because watching those men I'd seemed to feel a thing I could barely put into words: I'd seemed to feel my whole world slipping away.

We heard afterwards that two bodies were found in the river, clear across on the other side of the mountain. They were found in a car that had been driven right into the water, leaving a clear trail in the mucky ground from the old cottage on the estate land. The river was swollen by the winter rain, but it wasn't full enough to float the car downstream. Someone had seen it there and reported it, and a party of Tans and police had come and found it, with two dead men sitting in it, shot. There was a bit of a fuss, but then things quietened down.

In the year after that the British left, and we had a civil war. Of the men I'd seen go up our haggard that day, some took one side in that war and some took the other.
Four of them died, fighting on opposite sides, and two of those men were first cousins and had been brought up in each other's houses. Another of the four was Beeda Hogan. As for the dead man from the barn, I never saw him again, though I know he took the rebel side in the civil war and I know that he became well-known to the big world. I know that because a few years ago a fellow came here asking questions about him for a programme that he wanted to make for the television. Someone told him the dead man had been cared for in our barn one time, and the man came here to ask me about it because all the other people round here from that time are dead. I told the
television
man that I knew nothing. I'm a valley man, after all: I see what I see, and I say what I say, but I never say the half of what I see.

But it was true, too, in a way, what I told the television man: I really knew nothing about the dead man. For me his stay with us was just something that happened, like a kick from a horse or a storm when a storm was not expected. For me his stay with us meant nothing in itself; its importance lay in what it made me find out about my world. That world, of course, was small: it was made up only of the hillsides and the valley, and the people who lived there. Nobody makes television films about that world. But back then when the dead man came it was the only world I knew, or thought I knew; and the day that he came was the day I found out that I didn't know it at all.
And from that day to this, though I have lived a long life now, and spent much of it far away from this valley where I was born, I have never seen anything anywhere that
surprised
me more than that first great surprise, because I have never believed quite as completely in any world since.

Mr Murphy, the neighbours agreed, looked the picture of health. They hadn’t seen him look so well in years. If not for the fact that he was lying in a coffin with two pennies on his eyes, you might never even have guessed he was dead.

‘I declare to God,’ said Nellie Browne from next door, ‘but it’s nearly worth it. Wouldn’t you welcome your death in the morning, all the same, if you thought you’d look half as well after?’

It wasn’t all the doing of the undertakers’ men, for all that they’d worked on Mr Murphy for an hour or more that morning with their paints and powders. Mr Murphy had died suddenly in his sleep, with no outward sign of illness at all – not so much as a sore throat or a cough. He’d gone to bed hale and hearty the night before, and this morning his wife had found him stone dead in the bed. His coffin lay on the table now in what the family described to visitors as ‘the parlour’. Among themselves they just called it ‘the room’ because it was, apart from the back kitchen behind it, the
only downstairs room in the house. Even the toilet was in the back yard.

The room wasn’t a very big room, but, still, the coffin didn’t take up all that much of it because it wasn’t a very big coffin. And it wasn’t a very big coffin because, for all that he’d been a loud man on occasion, Mr Murphy hadn’t been a very big one. His mouth, his own brother Mick used to say, was the biggest thing about him – that and his heart. Certainly his mouth was the bit of himself that Mr Murphy had used most, whether giving out about the world and his family or filling it – when he could – with porter. It was the heart, though, that had worn out first – ‘The ould ticker,’ as Uncle Mick said, ‘wasn’t up to scratch.’

Mr Murphy’s mouth had spent quite a bit of time lately talking about Mr Murphy’s heart, mostly declaring it broken – or, as he himself put it, ‘broke’.

‘Me heart is broke,’ he’d say, ‘with the state of poor ould Ireland.’

No-one had taken him literally when he said it, of course. Mr Murphy’s heart was always broke about
something
or other, whether it was the country, his income, or a bad hurling result for the local team. And his was by no means the only heart troubled by the state of the nation then, though of late the Murphys had more cause than many to be heartsore. Their two sons, Eddie and Myles, were in the Volunteers, and since martial law had been extended to the whole country they had, like other IRA
men in the area, been on the run. Only Eily and Katherine, the Murphy daughters, shared their parents’ house now.

The absent boys were a constant source of worry to the whole family. Under martial law the military were free to fight their enemies as they saw fit, and they had the local IRA run ragged. There were constant army patrols and sweeps of the countryside, and an endless stream of arrests of both guilty and innocent. Now and again some of the rebels would be caught where they couldn’t retreat, and would decide to fight it out. When they did that they lost, usually with several dead or wounded before they
surrendered
. The heavy army presence in the towns kept them cut off from most of their supplies, and their sympathisers in the countryside were gradually being arrested or frightened into cooperation with the authorities or at least
non-cooperation
with the Volunteers. Even safe houses were no longer safe: three farms had been burned as reprisals for attempted ambushes, and though the ambushes hadn’t stopped altogether after that, still, they’d tailed off
dramatically
– though mainly because the Volunteers had hardly enough ammunition to defend themselves if they had to, never mind mount an ambush.

In the town, meanwhile, there were soldiers everywhere, and a strict night-time curfew. Hardly a day passed without at least one army raid on the house of suspected rebel
sympathisers
. Eddie and Myles were known to be ‘out’, and the authorities kept a close eye on the whole Murphy family.
There had been half a dozen raids on the house in the past couple of months, mainly in the middle of the night, and that hadn’t done Mr Murphy’s heart – or his temper – much good at all. He’d liked his night’s sleep, had Mr Murphy, especially when he had a sup taken. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been a rebel himself, but he’d always thought his sons were daft to get involved with the IRA at all. They’d had terrible arguments about it in the past, before the boys went on the run.

‘Youse might as well be out there playing gouts,’ he used to say to Myles and Eddie. ‘Youse might as well be playing cowboys for all the differ youse will make to the British army. Them boyos bet the Boers and they bet the Germans, and the Boers and the Germans were better
soldiers
nor your crowd will ever be. All youse will do is bring trouble on your own. And even if youse
did
beat them, what would happen? Who’d take over then? Every jumped-up gombeen man in Ireland would put on a
morning
coat and queue up to get to the trough, and the bishops would be standing over them, grinning, blessing them on their way.’

Myles, his eldest son, knew better than to get into a row with his father, but Eddie, who was only nineteen, was a hothead, and would always make the mistake of answering his father back.

‘Our republic will be for all Irishmen,’ he’d say angrily. ‘And if the clergy don’t know their place then they’ll be
taught it. The bishops are no friends of ours.’

But his father would just laugh at talk like that, while his mother would chastise Eddie for speaking disrespectfully of the Church. It was hard to know which annoyed Eddie more, his Da laughing at him or his Ma giving out to him like he was a child. He’d stand fuming for a while, redfaced and speechless, and then he’d storm out of the house; but in a few days or weeks the very same routine would be repeated, and Eddie would rise to the bait yet again.

Such entertainment had been gone, of course, since the lads went on the run, and Mrs Murphy had even been known to say she missed the rows; certainly they’d upset Eddie, but at least he’d been there to be upset. Now she never knew when she might hear he was dead in a ditch somewhere. And she’d never heard her husband laugh as much as he did at Eddie’s political views, not since the time the ratty old fleabag of a lion in the travelling show had attacked its handler, not long after the Murphys were
married
. Since the boys went on the run the only excitement in the house had been the army raids, and Mr Murphy hadn’t found them one bit funny. He hadn’t been afraid of the
soldiers
, who in any case always seemed more embarrassed than anything else to be disturbing plainly harmless people in the middle of the night; but it was annoying to be rousted out of your sleep and to stand around in your nightshirt with your family while total strangers searched your house.

‘What are youse looking for, anyhow?’ Mr Murphy would demand of their officer. ‘Do youse think I have room to hide two big strapping buckos of lads in a house the size of this? My boys are not midgets, you know. It’s not the seven dwarves youse are fighting.’

The officer – it was usually Captain Cobbett, a terribly nice young man who was always very respectful and
apologetic
– would hem and haw and make reassuring noises, which is quite hard to do, really, when your men are
tramping
all over someone’s house in their big army boots,
prodding
bayonets into all sorts of unlikely corners. None of the young officers liked raiding the Murphys. It was well known around the town that Mr Murphy, though certainly no flaming loyalist, thought very little of the rebels, and was unlikely to be harbouring them or hiding material for their use. But his sons were well-known Volunteers, and known to be on the run, so raids on their home were automatically ordered from headquarters. Even if nothing was found, the theory ran, it would make the Murphys dislike the IRA even more. In practice, of course, it made Mr Murphy
dislike
the army just as much as he disliked the IRA.

‘They’re all the same,’ he used to say to whoever would listen when the subject came up. ‘A load of young chaps running around with too many guns. The army was never the same since they left off the red coats, anyhow. The best of them died in the war. These are all amateurs now, on the two sides. Only chaps, the whole lot of them.’

Mr Murphy spoke of military matters with an air of some authority, based on the fact that he’d once had a cousin in the ranks. His own military experience was non-existent, barring what he read in the papers. But even he could see that those ordering the midnight raids had a very poor grasp of civilian psychology.

‘A few more of these raids,’ he’d told Captain Cobbett one night, ‘and I’ll start running guns just to spite you. I’ll have a party for the boys and invite every gunman in
Leinster
. I’ll hide pikes in the rafters, and dynamite in the
shoe-polish
tin, and bullets in the butter-dish.’

‘Now now, Mr Murphy,’ Captain Cobbett said. ‘There’s no need to take that attitude. These are difficult times for everyone.’

‘I don’t care about “everyone”,’ Mr Murphy said, ‘any more than “everyone” cares about me. I cares about me and mine. Sure, I can hardly close my eyes at night for wondering whether youse are going to start banging on the door as soon as I go asleep. Me poor wife’s nerves are in
flitters
, and youse have the fear of God put into them two young ones there.’

The two ‘young ones’, Katherine and Eily, always seemed to Captain Cobbett to be anything but afraid. While Mrs Murphy was torn between admiration for her boys’ spirit and fear for their lives, her daughters had no such qualms. In their own way they were as bad as their brothers. Katherine, who was sixteen, at least had the sense
to stay quiet while the house was being raided, although there were daggers in her eyes whenever she looked at the soldiers. Eily, who was thirteen, didn’t even have that much patience. She was an out-and-out rebel sympathiser, and complained loudly about every step a soldier took inside her house. As far as she was concerned, she told them quite frankly, there were only two good places for a British
soldier
to be: in his own home or dead.

‘Haven’t youse a big enough empire?’ she’d demand of them. ‘Go and annoy a few natives out foreign someplace, why don’t you? What do youse want to bother us for?’

When she said things like that you could see her parents cringe, but almost all of the soldiers saw the girl’s fury as a good joke. Among themselves they called her a fiery little thing, and they said it almost with admiration. During a raid they would smile at her high spirits, until their sergeant had to tell them to take their job seriously. Just as her father’s laughter used to aggravate Eddie, so the soldiers’ smiles only made Eily angrier. She’d stand there brazenly in her nightdress with her face glowing redder and redder, with Katherine and her mother restraining her lest she physically attack some of the foreign young men. It wasn’t funny, really. Captain Cobbett had even gone so far as to warn Mr Murphy to be careful.

‘That’s a hotheaded young lady you have there, sir,’ he’d told the old man once. ‘She’s very free with seditious comments. It’s all right her saying those sort of things
around us – I mean, she’s only a kid, and I can even
understand
her point of view. I wouldn’t want soldiers tramping around my house either. Fortunately my own men rather like the child. But I don’t think the Black and Tans would take her carry-on very well, if you know what I mean. They’re not great men for humour, the Tans.’

That was putting it mildly. The Black and Tans would burn the Murphys’ house down around their ears if Eily were to say to them half the things she said to the young soldiers. And she wasn’t even content to keep her treason within her own four walls. When she went out she wore a tricoloured ribbon around her hat to symbolise her
support
for the rebels. Mr Murphy had lost count of the number of times he’d torn off the ribbon, but she’d always found another somewhere. The sight of her walking down the street with the ends of the green, white and orange ribbon waving gaily in the air behind her gave him, Mr Murphy used to say, the palpitations. And of course no-one had taken that seriously either, when he said it. But there he was now, stretched out dead in the parlour, with his palpitations as far behind him as his arguments with Eddie and Eily. He, at least, had no more worries.

The funeral was next day. What with the curfew, of course, there was no question of having a proper wake; but the family sat up with the body anyway, and during the evening
a few neighbours dropped by to offer condolences and remark on how well the corpse looked. Nellie Browne stayed after the others had gone. She lived in the next house in the terrace, so she didn’t bother about the curfew, what with the night that was in it. Katherine and Eily wanted to sit with their mother awhile too, but Mrs Murphy made them go to bed. Then she and Nellie sat up talking by the dying fire. The oil-lamp stood on the mantelpiece, and six white candles burned around the coffin in candlesticks loaned by the undertaker. Mrs Murphy threw a bit of coal and few sods of turf on the embers of the fire, and turned the big wheel bellows to redden them. Sugrue, the cat, sat between them and looked into the glowing coals,
communing
with the fire.

‘Every time I turns this wheel,’ Mrs Murphy said, ‘I thinks of poor Jack doing it when the lads were small. He used to have an ould rhyme that he’d say for them when he was doing it, and they only babbies:
“Jeremiah, blow the fire. Puff! Puff! Puff! First he blows it gentle, and then he blows it rough.”’

She cast her eye over to where her husband lay now, his eyes closed under the two copper pennies, his grey hair sleeked flat with macassar oil, a rosary beads clasped in his cold, joined hands.

‘He was full of ould notions and sayings,’ she said. ‘And he drank too much sometimes. But he was a good man – a good husband. And he doted on them childer.’

‘He wasn’t sick long,’ Nellie said. ‘There’s that at least, ma’am.’