Doyle is the man who tries to keep his men true and indeed safe. No constable walks alone now through the streets of Athlone, and many a homespun speech issues forth from Doyle’s lips on the topics of duty and order and loyalty and God. God is the chief superintendent, right enough, or even a commissioner.
Bit by bit Eneas understands that a fella by the name of Mick Collins is the big man behind the wild lads willing to kill for the lovely trout of freedom. No decent description of him exists in police files, but a field of stories growing fast with brambles and tares attaches to the name. And yet the name rises immaculate and bright as a sovereign from the mire of events that muddy all normal men. It’s a mystery. Eneas could call Collins the enemy except in his private mind he does not. If he had a picture of him maybe he could. He sees the Reprisal Man every so often stomping through the wooden corridors of the barracks or passing up the street in a Crossley tender like a savage prince, and it seems to Eneas that that same Reprisal Man is more his enemy than the invisible Mick Collins. But both are men of blood no doubt. Eneas’s head rackets with warring notions. He’s adrift on the shallow sea of his homeland.
At first he tries to get home to his Mam and Pappy every furlough but the cat’s cradle of Sligo talk is against him. His Pappy is stopped in the street and talked to by O’Dowd, the auctioneer, one of Collins’s men it may be, but a proper bowsie, according to Old Tom McNulty. Yes, a proper bowsie, a scam merchant and the son of a boxty cooker from over Strandhill way, an unkempt boiler of a fella that used mash up spuds for the trippers and their kids hungry after the salt sea and the wild playing. So it is a mighty affront for Old Tom to be stopped by the son of O’Dowd the boxty man and at the same time the words he says to Old Tom are precise and calm.
‘Let your son keep out of Sligo, man, if he wants to keep his ability to walk.’
There’s no misunderstanding that song and Eneas keeps to barracks when other men are able to catch motor-buses or trains or go on the long walk and lift-cadging home to towns and rural places, and no word said against them, as yet. But Eneas knows that the stint at sea is held against him also, the stint at sea and maybe also his old friendship with Jonno Lynch, which might be a useful thing to a policeman bent on gathering intelligence. Eneas is not bent on anything except daily life but O’Dowd’s imagination and the imaginations of a score of worried men in Sligo are afire with conspiracy and secrecy.
At any rate something occurs that puts such straightforward matters in the halfpenny place. There’s a right old hooley of a series of tit-for-tat jobs between the Roscommon rebels and the Tans, with the RIC mixed in somewhere too. And the doings of the rebels are further tangled by betrayals in their own number as the curious war grows in months like a terrible child, and certain quaint advantages are to be got out of the situation. Sometimes now Eneas carts back creatures done in by their own comrades, mightily done in. And fellas say now that it’s like the old famine days when some of the worst cruelty was visited on the poor of Ireland by them that were slightly less poor, and Doyle’s ould grandfather is darkly cited. When a strong farmer was content to see his rentless neighbour driven off to fever, death or America, if he could only get a hoult of the vacated farm, and attach it to his own. If this is not the bedevilment of Irish historical goings-on, Eneas doesn’t know what is, or so he says plainly to his companions, though indeed the matter is not quite so clear as that in his head.
Well, he’s going up the town one night in Athlone with Sergeant Doyle himself as a companion, and they’ve been idly drinking in the old Great Western Hotel where the proprietor is above politics and beneath neutrality. It has become a policeman and soldier’s drinking spot but no matter, the two are well watered now but not drunk as such and climbing the little hill past the curious pewter of the black river and the mossy walls of the Cathedral. And there’s a little stone-covered alleyway there that would bring you up conveniently to the sacristy if you were a priest, and there are two dark men in the gap there that get a good hold on Doyle and a penknife to his throat. And Eneas hangs back from jumping at the men or trying to get his gun out of his cut-down holster because he piercingly sees how honed and steel the knife is, as thin as the leg of a sandpiper.
‘Come in, you bugger, out of the light,’ says one of the men, ‘or I’ll tear out the gullet of your sergeant.’
So Eneas steps in carefully, into the holy dark, where priests and priests’ messengers have often darted, and Doyle says not a word, for fear of inciting a regretful move. These are clearly some of the bould men themselves, some of the heroes of Athlone, the dark men of freedom. Some of Jonno Lynch’s crowd, or the Athlone branch anyhow. They have an air about them fretful and desperate, not like policemen or soldiers but like hunters, fellas that go out after hares with big long streels of dogs in the blessed autumns. Townies with guns — nothing worse, nothing more dangerous to the peace of the countryside. And Eneas is silent, as indeed his training recommends. For an attacker is like a snake that strikes at movement, at history, at words.
‘We’re taking you for the job done on Stephen Jackson,’ says the same man, ‘just so you know why we’re doing this to you.’
And Eneas knows who Jackson is or was and so does Doyle, because Eneas took Jackson to the coroner’s icy room with bullets of the Reprisal Man in his cold head.
‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ says Doyle in his Leitrim accent.
‘Ah, you do, and you did,’ says the man.
‘It’s the feckin Tans you want,’ says Doyle, simply.
‘Jaysus, that’ll be the day, the day we get him, the long bollocks that he is. The Reprisal Man, in all his glory. That’ll be the day of history, the time we get that shite. But he’s no easy sparrow like yourselves. We’ll get him too some day, some day. In the meantime, your ticket’s come good, Doyle, and we know you’re mixed up in it.’
‘I hadn’t got a finger in it,’ says Doyle. ‘I never even met the man.’
‘Arra,’ says the murdering man, ‘isn’t that a big fib. Ha? Didn’t you go to school with the fella, up with the brothers in Mount Temple? Aren’t you on the old register there, and anyway, don’t I know you knew him, because he told me himself, with his dying breath. Said he’d know your skin on a board. After the Reprisal Man put bullets in his face at point-blank range and the poor bastard came running down Cook Street with his life leaking from his ears, blind from blood and pain, and into my arms like a boy, oh yes, and the last thing he said was it must have been yourself put his name in the Big Man’s way, because you were pals in the school on the hill with the Brothers.’
And Eneas looks at Doyle to see if this could be accurate, at least about the schooling together, and he can see from Doyle’s simple face that there’s no lie in it.
‘We’ve been waiting for you to make something of your old associations, you hooer’s melt, ye. And didn’t your grandfather make his money in the hungry days, you poor witless cunt, ye?’
‘That’s just an ould story, men,’ says Doyle. Now Eneas smells a strange smell, a smell he’s smelt once or twice only, and it’s the stink of fear that rises from a man when he’s in mortal dread.
‘You had a hand in it as sure as cowshite, and if you didn’t, aren’t you peeler enough for our intentions?’
And Doyle hangs now in the man’s arms, as if every grain of energy’s gone out of him. And his face acquires a complete deep look of stupidity and gracelessness. Eneas himself stares like a calf. No course of action presents itself. A few people even going home late in their raincoats pass up the street but he doesn’t feel inspired to call out to them, with the thin knife sparking at Doyle’s scraggled throat. The four of them know something is going to happen, they are united at least in that certainty. It could be the flicks or a dark penny dreadful, the way the four of them know all that. And their different histories, their different childhoods, their different ages and faces and hopes even, their different souls sullied up by different matters, all seem to tend towards the
same event, this cold and shadowy event in the little granite slipway of the cathedral priests.
‘Say goodnight, Doyle,’ says the speaking man, and never a word from the other. ‘May God forgive me.’
And he takes a snug gun from his coat of darkness and places it up against the bullocky face of Doyle no doubt just as the Reprisal Man did with Stephen Jackson, Doyle’s childhood companion in the roistering schoolyard, and he prints the O of the little barrel against the right cheekbone and fires into the suddenly flashing face. And places the gun a second time into the left cheekbone, or where it might well be if the blood and splinters and scraps of flesh were cleaned off, and fires again and Eneas looks into the face of the killer and it has the set effort in it of a person struggling for precision in a world of vagueness and doubt, struggling with a physical task in a world of Godless souls and wormy hearts.
‘Will I do this poor bastard too?’ says the trembling killer to his friend, turning the little gun on Eneas.
‘One’s enough for the night,’ says the other man. ‘One’s enough. The whole town will be stirring now. That’s McNulty, the Sligoman. Let Sligo look after him, if they want. I’m not killing a simpleton like that. Look at the gawmy stare of him. Look at the stare of him.’
So he looks at Eneas for a second, the killer man, as if having been bidden to do so, he is honour-bound to do it, to fulfil every article of talk and action. For the freedom of Ireland and the Republic so earnestly wished for.
‘Oh, let’s feckin run for it,’ says the assassin, weary as a donkey.
Then off indeed, truthful and exact, they run like they are kids hooering out of an orchard and the apples bubbling from their ganseys and banging on the metalled roads. And
Eneas is left there standing indeed like a gom, like a remnant, like an oddment. Couldn’t they have shot him too, for the look of things? For courtesy even? He thinks that and in another corner of his head he knows it is a daft thought. He feels a tremendous love as long as an English mile for the poor corpse in the lane. He knew him but slightly, yet all the purposes of that ordinary life, the tobacco, the papers, the idle talk, the dreams of promotion that never came true, afflict Eneas in the darkness. He wants to kneel down and embrace the dead man, soothe him, do something to send him up safe and sound to his Maker. But he stirs not a muscle. He finds he is frozen by terror. And Doyle is at his feet, simple as a song, all ruined and wrecked like Humpty Dumpty. Doyle is at his stupid feet, his bloody feet familiar and square, cased brightly in their police-issue boots.
Not even Eneas’s superiors believe he knows nothing about it when the Reprisal Man duly removes the killers of Doyle from the hastening world of Athlone. Mere days after, yes, they’re found, out by the distillery, perfunctorily destroyed. It’s assumed Eneas has given, given gladly, to the Reprisal Man descriptions and the like, and when he denies it simply, they know he is exercising a clever caution and concealment. But he is not. The Reprisal Man has been able to ferret out his rabbits without him, ferret them out with the drear force of his broken mind. And no great task perhaps.
At any rate he is honourably discharged from his duties. It is not considered wise in the worsening days to leave him to the see-saw of reprisals. His turn would come round as surely as the sun. It is, he is told, the opinion of District Inspector O’Callaghan up in barracks that though the RIC is short of men, desperately, they are not short of corpses, and Constable McNulty is shortly to be such if he lingers. But it’s also whispered around the barracks Chinese-fashion that the Republicans have issued a death-threat against Eneas McNulty on account of the foul words of betrayal he has spoken to the Tans, and he languishes now on the blacklist that they all know exists. A black-list growing as long as the Shannon. And when the whisper reaches Eneas it is mightily embellished and includes possible modes of execution if he remains in the force. His balls tied about his head like two roots of garlic and his tongue torn out and fed to pigs. And so whether it is horse-trading or honest concern for his safety that has prompted the District Inspector he cannot say. Another recruit who has never been his pal tells him that even if all the fools of Ireland are in the peelers, as the saying goes, some fools are more fool than other fools. Some fools are beyond the pale.
At any rate the handsome uniform is perforce handed back, and he returns, raw as a scrape, to Sligo.
He sits fast in his Pappy’s house, not daring to go out in the daylight, expecting even so the sky to fall on his head through the dark blue slates. In his dreams all manner of talk flows swiftly, swiftly, like the intent waters of the Garravogue, mutters and threats, clear as the bells of death. He senses the fright of his brilliant brother Jack, just preparing himself for his own assault on the world and in need of no scandalous brother, and he knows his Mam understands only too well the ticket of terror flying in the wind, but they don’t speak about it. They’ve taken silence to themselves like an adopted dog. Because it’s all manner of talk, any manner of talk, might be the knife now. Luck in silence or at any rate a sort of murk and darkness. Only his Pappy is content to blunder about in words.
‘It’s a bad sort of time to have your head up, you know, in any class of a political manner,’ says his father, the two of them standing as of old by the back window, looking out over the eternal ruins of the Lungey House. How different it is now, Old Tom older, and Eneas a ruined twenty-year-old.
‘The worst of it is,’ says his Pappy, laying a hand in familiar fashion on the broad back of his son, a back indeed all strength and youth, hard as a saddle. ‘The worst of it is, I blame myself.’
‘Why so, Pappy?’ says Eneas, surprised.
‘Didn’t I steer you into the polis, with my talk of the under-surgeon’s son? Christ, and the same boy killed last month in Donegal, a stone tied to his leg and drowned in an estuary. Arra, child, I done you a bad turn that time, that I spoke of the peelers.’
‘Ah, Pappy, I don’t think so. A policeman’s there to take the villain out of the village. Trouble is, these times, a good citizen is a rare one. Or I don’t know, maybe that’s nonsense. But, Pappy, I feel it as a terrible thing to be hiding in my own town, from my own people, and what remedy will there be for it?’
His father stands fast by him in the dwindling light. Not a sound is there. Certainly no wild boys go sneaking to box the minister’s fox.
‘Maybe I should be just going away. Going away quietly with myself somewhere.’
His father says nothing at all for a long bit.
‘Trouble is,’ says his Pappy, ‘a man goes away like that and maybe he never comes back to his people.’
‘Better than to be killed here, Pappy.’
‘Trouble is, a man could go away, and the buggers would go after him.’
‘You don’t think they would, Pappy?’
‘I was reading, there was a fella got in Brisbane for something like this, now he was a fella that did something bad, or so it was believed, and he probably did at that, not like yourself’ — and he touches the back of his child’s head gently, hardly noticing himself do it, and stroking the bristles of the short back and sides — ‘and he was followed out to Australia, and that’s a long way.’
‘You can’t go further, I believe, Pappy.’
‘If you abide near us, sure, maybe that will content them. If you tuck yourself in near us. You’re only a young fella. Maybe they’ll content themselves with frightening us all. I don’t know. Maybe, sure, jaysus, the British Army in all its glory will deal with them. The Tans are a queer wild lot. Maybe they’ll settle their hash.’
‘Jesus, it’s not a good business, when you have to wish a thing like that.’
‘The matter of sons is above politics. Maybe you’ll see that one day, if you have your own. I hope so. I do.’
He can feel the odd thrumming of his father beside him, his heartbeat it must be, the same feeling as holding a wild bird in your hand, the ache and the muscle of it to be away free again. He has put his father under a strain certainly, and the o
ld man is quiet and easy about it, but Eneas can sense that strain, that thrumming, that beating of the heart. Jesus, he’s sorry for the old man. He’s sorry for all the old fathers of foolish sons. Having to dip their heads in matters too foreign, too deep, too curious — too murderous. Truth is he doesn’t know what to do, any more than his Pappy knows.
‘A black-list,’ says his father, musingly, half a-dream. ‘A funny way to describe something. On the black-list. Funny, that.
‘Aye.’
‘You know, Eneas,’ says his father. ‘Well, you see me always going about, up to the asylum, to measure the poor fellas there, or over in better days with the orchestra to, well, to play for the people in Bundoran and the like, and you probably think, there he goes, Old Tom, my Pappy, there he goes, and maybe you don’t think much else about it.’
‘Well, I do, Pappy.’
‘Aye, well, it’s good for a young man to know certain things, and I often think of my own father, and the habit of silence he had, and why not, he worked like a slave all his days. And I suppose poor low people we’ve always been, and I used to be gassing to you here about the damn Lungey House, and all that codswallop
‘Ah, sure, well.’
‘Aye, well, we are poor people, and God knows when there was hunger we felt it, and when there was cold we felt it, and we were never people above cold or hunger. No. But, child, though I learnt silence off of my father—’
And Old Tom stops there. Fact of the matter is, he’s weeping. Or something’s come up in his throat, more likely, a stopper that is the stopper on a father’s feeling for his son, generally. To a degree it’s worse than being shot by patriots, being shot by his father’s obvious love.
So he must resolve on something. A person can tire of being that mortal leaf twisting and shrugging on the galloping river. The scorch on his heart where Jonno Lynch snubbed him on Main Street doesn’t suggest to him that there might be a gap in the hedge where Jonno stands. There must be someone he can march out to beard, even if all the secrecy and terror of the days says otherwise. He fixes on a plan of sorts. He doesn’t know if anyone has succeeded, before execution, in being taken off a black-list, but then the history of Sligo is not the history of great escapes. They are more doomed and fixed in their courses, the men of Sligo, it seems to him, than those bewildered and doomed Greeks of old that the master used to relish.