In the Province of Saints Read online

  Like fleas on a dog.

  Aye, you have it right there sure enough, Katherine. Ahh, there we are, grand, grand so. The Republic’s reward to the people who served her well all these years. Lugh kissed the pound notes, bowed, and, taking my shoulder, led me out into the sunlight.

  September 1976

  We didn’t get to go to the beach often although it was only a short drive away. But Father was home from America and there were all sorts of things he had planned for us. The beach was deserted because it was the end of summer and much too cold to be swimming. We had sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and a large flask of tea. Father bought us pink rock candy from the only shop that was open in the village; I wanted to play the penny arcades but everything was boarded up and closed. Besides me and my father and mother and sister, Molly, I saw only two other people on the beach. An old couple, in blue anoraks, bundled up from the wind and the sea spray, treaded carefully around tide pools in the distance, every once in a while peering and pointing, then holding each other and walking on. It seemed natural to be cold all the time when you were old; mother was cold all the time but I’d never thought of her as being old.

  I ran up and down the sand dunes whooping and hollering, sending birds lifting in great flapping crowds. All the way along the beach, one end to the other, I was leading the armies of the West into Ulster. I was Cuchulain defending Ulster from Queen Maeve and the Connaught invaders. I shifted allegiances and heroes and outcomes. I was Queen Maeve and I’d come into Ulster with my men, come for revenge and for the great Brown Bull while the Ulstermen dozed beneath a magic spell of sleep or lay down helpless, crying with women’s cramps. What if Cuchulain came too late, what if all of Ulster was destroyed? I was Finn McCool and his son Oisin; I was Caoilte, the fastest man in all Ireland. I swung a great cudgel and crushed the fleeing Fomorians before me. With a sling I drove a rock through the big eye of Balor, turning his eye back in his head so that he stared at his own men and turned them all to stone.

  I dove and flopped on the sand, mortally wounded, then back up on my feet cutting great swaths of air with my sword. Gannets shrieked above the cliff tops, echoing my war cries; they rose into the low gray sky and became specks out over the waves before they wheeled back toward their mossy crags.

  Mother was sitting up near the rocks with my father and sister, together, sheltered from the wind. Father had been home from the construction in America for a month now, and it seemed as if he might stay. He said all the jobs in America were done. Mother was as content as I had seen her in a long time. She stretched her legs and arched her back toward the sun and looked young and strong again, the way she looked when Molly and I were little, before Father left. She had her sandals off and was curling the sand with her toes. She winced momentarily, a small tight exhale whistling through her clenched teeth. Father looked up. Are you all right? he asked.

  She nodded and tried to smile, but her teeth were still clenched. After a moment: I’m fine, just an old muscle ache is all. Father shifted closer to her on the sand, pulled up the bottom of her jumper, and began to massage her. Mother drew her knees up to her chest, dropped her head as Father’s strong hands worked her back.

  From here I could see the tower of the Knights Templar standing above Ballyhack Harbor and all the colorful boats pressed in against one another as if awaiting a storm. Shearwaters dipped and rolled above the whitecaps, raking the crest and coming up with fish angled silver in their claws.

  Mother lifted her face and closed her eyes, a smile playing on her face. The small wireless was tuned to Radio 1, which was counting down the top forty. Telly Savalas was singing “Lovin’ Understandin’ Man,” sounding, I imagined, like a New York drunk rolling in a gutter, and Father laughed.

  Is that what it’s like then? Mother asked, teasing him—but there was a slight edge to her voice.

  He grinned and shook his head. No place like America. That’s for sure.

  The skin pinched between my mother’s eyebrows. She stared at her toes moving through the sand. Her lips pursed and she nodded her head. No place. Molly was next to her, chewing on her stick of soft rock, her mouth stained pink as if she’d just been slapped.

  Father began fiddling with the lure at the end of an entangled fishing line. The rod’s cork base had crumbled; he held it daintily with three fingers, his little finger curled in midair as if he were holding a teacup. Each time he looked up, the tide had receded further. He grunted and worked faster on the lure but it was futile, and he laughed. Jaysus, he said when the water had made the breakwater at the outer edges of the rock scar, everything turning the color of a dirty washcloth.

  Finally he threw the rod behind him. And sure I wasn’t meant to bring home the supper today, he said. What on earth shall we do? I suppose we could get chips in town, and some battie burgers? He raised his eyebrows questioningly. But I don’t know so, sure everyone was counting on me catching some fish. He looked at Molly seriously; I paused halfway up the beach.

  Father laughed and pulled Mother close to him. The small bleached skeleton of some unrecognizable thing jutted up from the sand. Mussel shells scratched at the bottoms of my feet. I looked back toward the drying sand, darker where my feet had pressed.

  I stood in the pools as the tide receded, the sharp brine of the sea high in my nostrils, the sound of the gannets and shearwaters filling up the sky as my parents kissed.

  Molly wrapped up what was left of her rock candy even though the plastic was covered with sand. Father helped Mother up, and then collected the towels and blanket. Mother carried the flask and what was left of the sandwiches in her Dunne’s Stores shopping bag. They wiped the sand off each other’s backs and made their way up the beach to the car, and I followed them, ignoring the pain in my feet, but by the time I reached them, something had changed. The radio was on and it was announcing that the government had declared a state of emergency following a summer of sectarian violence in the North. Catholics and Protestants were killing one another on the street, in the pubs, and in one another’s homes. The latest were ten-month-old Brigeen Dempsey and her brother and sister killed in their home by a petrol bomb.

  Mother sat motionless in the front seat, staring straight ahead and crying, and at first I thought it was because of the murders. The sky had turned darker beyond the glass, and low clouds had come in with the waves. I cupped my hands over my feet, squeezed my toes tight; I’d left my socks on the beach.

  You know what they’ve said about you and Mag, she said. You know what I’ve had to listen to this entire time, me raising two children on my own and not a word or care from you.

  This town, this bleedin town, Moira, you know as well as I that they live to spread muck like this. I can’t believe you of all people would listen to such rubbish.

  Even her own husband believes it.

  I can’t take this. I can’t.

  Did you cry when you’d heard she’d died, John? Did you cry in America thinking of her?

  For fucksake, Moira!

  The sky darkened and the beach lay empty; even the old couple was gone. Wind whipped against the dunes and rain began to fall, hard and fast. The birds retreated to their scraggy nests. I waited for Father to start the car, but he sat in his seat unmoving, his hands on the wheel and his head bowed. The radio crackled and spat. Rain rattled and thrummed upon the roof and Mother was speaking again but sounded far away as if she were trying to see into Father’s bedroom in America all those years without us, of pictures that might adorn walls, of clothing in closets and bureaus, and of all the letters she told us she sent him and he never answered: Did you cry thinking of her, John? Did you cry? Well, did you?

  I sat next to my father at the bar munching on crisps, listening to Uncle Oweny talking about gunrunning during the War of Independence, and of swimming the English Channel from France during World War II with top secret information hidden in a waterproof pouch about his waist, and being shot at by a British submarine that suddenly breached like some great whale
off to his right as he paddled into the dark Dover-peaked twilight. And although I knew he had done none of these things, Oweny had a way of making you believe his stories, and I’d missed hearing them since Father had come home. Uncle Brendan was there as well, but he and Oweny had been fighting over the price of a fishing catch they’d split, so I sat between them. Whenever Oweny ordered a pint Brendan raised his pint as well, then winked at me. When the two pints came, Oweny paid. Brendan nodded and, with a scowl, drank the offering, and then a second and a third. Oweny sighed.

  The pub was crowded because it was a Thursday night and everyone had gotten the dole and some of the men were talking of the North and of the shootings and bombings and of the murder of young Majella O’Hare by British soldiers, and I was laughing at the expression on Oweny’s face when I heard the word Hoor, and then a pint glass shattered and bar stools were squealing and Oweny was wrapping an arm around me as tables were overturned and bodies banged against us as they surged toward the door.

  Oweny took me by the hand and led me outside. Men were gathered in the road cursing and spitting, and we stood back from them. In their center, spotlighted by the streetlamps, stood my father and Flaherty. I went to go to my father but Oweny held me. Stay by his side, Michael, Brendan said. Your father won’t want you out there.

  Flaherty was much bigger than Father, but when Father moved I’d never seen anyone move so fast. His sinewy muscled forearms snapped and his large fists worked like sledges as he battered Flaherty into the gutter, and then, once Flaherty rose, his trousers muddied and stuck with a single fluttering crisp packet, Father raised his fists again and drove him all the way across the road into the far ditch. Men tried to call him off but it was no good. One man pleaded, Sure, he didn’t mean it, Padraig. It’s only the drink talking. Another shouted, Sure, what is Mag Delacey to you, McDonagh? Sure, what effin business is it of yours at all? Go back to America where you belong, sure no one wants you here. But none of it stopped my father, and gradually the crowd became silent.

  The lights of the pub spilt out onto the dark road. I could hear a boat blowing its horn down along the quay, and buoys clanging softly, and the sounds of Father’s fists working Flaherty’s face, and his harsh breathing and then Flaherty’s own voice, small and moiling like an animal in terrible pain.

  My father stepped back. His large hands hung by his side, his breath steamed through his nostrils. Someone came out of the crowd and he turned on them with his fists raised, but they were rushing to Flaherty, who lay still and quiet in the muck, the bottoms of his boots mottled with shadow and light.

  Father reached for me, but I remained still. Give me your hand, he said.

  But I could not move.

  Michael, he said, and his jaws clenched. Give me your hand.

  His eyes were small and bright, his face suffused with blood. I imagined if Flaherty were to stir, Father would be upon him once again. I prayed that Flaherty would not move, that he would stay where he was, and that no one would say a word to my father.

  For fucksake, Michael! Give me your hand. I turned and looked to Oweny, who’d let go of me, and then to Brendan. Then Father took my hand and I was aware of blood on his knuckles as he dragged me up the street, his long legs tamping the road like metal bars, and I looked back at the pub and the town and Oweny and Brendan and all the staring faces until they were gone and the only light came from stars glittering dimly atop distant hedgerows.

  Spring 1977

  Father stood in the scullery with the shotgun in his hand. He jammed shells into the gun breech, his jaw working relentlessly. Blackie howled from the shed, a long and painful sound to hear, and I felt I would be sick. It was twilight and the fields spread out into the bruised evening light—a vast undulation of valleys furrowed by black plow lines stretching farther and farther away for miles.

  Even at this late hour men still moved on the slopes, calling to one another as they turned toward home. Harvesters sprayed the drills with seed as tractors growled up the hillsides, their lights bobbing softly. There was the smell of rich earth and the turmoil of crows circling above fresh-turned drills.

  Our footsteps crackled on twigs and brush as we climbed through the ditches. The sounds of men and machinery faded. Everything seemed very still and silent. For a moment I thought that perhaps I had made a mistake, that there had been no sheep, and that I had merely imagined Blackie ravaging it. Could I have been wrong? My heart hummed on a thin wire of expectation and fear. Father spat into stagnant ditch water. I smelled rot beneath the undergrowth, and the fetid odor of hog wallow drifting over from Milo Meaney’s pigpens.

  I had been waiting for Father to return home. Waiting for the light to fade, for the cover of night to come. But the day seemed to prolong itself and the sun made only a slow track across my bedroom wall. It was as if I could hear the sound of the sun roaring in my ears, the explosion of gases on its surface. I listened as Molly traipsed down the hall in her Wellingtons and out to the fields with the slop buckets. Her boots sounded on the cobblestone and then passed the shed. I had not told Mother about the dog attacking the sheep and I’d made no attempt to clean him up; I could not explain why, except, perhaps, that I knew they would find out sooner or later, and when they did, there could be no excuses. Father would check in on the dog when he came home from the foundry; it was one of the first things he did of an evening, and then I would be punished. And although he wasn’t the type of man that would strap me—my mother would do that—he had an unpredictable temper that I feared.

  The sound of the Angelus and of Lugh cycling into the pub told me it was just after six. The milking pumps from Meaney’s farm across the way hummed to life, and one of his men brought the cattle up from grazing, their hooves clacking on the macadam, and then the rattle of Brid Long’s Cortina returning from Easter novenas told me it was sometime after seven and then eight. I heard the sound of the telly and Molly listening to Top of the Pops.

  I dozed and woke to my parents’ voices. They seemed to be arguing all the time these days. My cheek was numb from the pillow; nausea tumbled in my stomach.

  Come down here, you! Mother shouted, and I treaded the stairs slowly. The telly was off and the house was strangely silent. She was waiting at the bottom and grabbed the sleeve of my jumper, pulling me from the last two steps. The flesh around her eyes was swollen as if she’d been crying; she spat when she spoke.

  Why didn’t you tell me about the dog? she hissed, and I heard Blackie howling from the shed, his blunt nails scrabbling at its door. Father stared at me; his long shadow reached across the lino.

  What have you done with Blackie? I asked.

  I’ve done nothing with that blasted dog. Yet. The bloody fool. Father shouted through the walls as if the dog could hear him, Shut up, would you? For fucksake, shut up!

  Why didn’t you tell your mother what the dog had done? he asked. Did you think we wouldn’t find out?

  I was scared.

  You’ve a good mind to be scared, Mother began, but Father silenced her with a look.

  Sure, the dog is covered in blood, he said. You didn’t even have the sense to clean him up. What kind of fool are you, altogether? What in God’s name were you thinking? Were you thinking at all? Did you think that this would just all go away? Jaysus, boy, I thought you had more cop on than that. He shook his head and chewed on his bottom lip. What was he at this time? he asked.

  A sheep—a lamb. I shrugged.

  Is it dead?

  I don’t know.

  You don’t know?

  I don’t think so, I said.

  Where?

  Flaherty’s.

  Ah, Jaysus. Father sat heavily at the table and stared at his large fire-scarred hands. He nodded and scraped his knuckles against his stubbled chin. It would have to be Flaherty’s. Just what I feckin need. How in God’s name are we going to pay for this? You know the bastard has it in for me as it is.

  He stared grim faced into the dusk night beyond. The Sacred Heart
glowed red on the mantel above the fireplace.

  He’ll get this out of me in blood, he muttered.

  You lied you lied, Mother said over and over again. She stared at the floor and spoke around the tear-damp handkerchief she had balled against her mouth, and I had the sense that it was not me she was referring to at all, but my father, as she suddenly struck me about the head and I stood there unmoving looking at Father, who remained tight-lipped, his jaw set, ignoring the both of us.

  When he and Mother spoke these days all I heard was America, America, America. When he came home after a day slogging at the foundry down in Waterford it was all that was on his mind. He was already there, he had just to leave, and it was with the pending sense of his leaving that things had changed between them—I could not say what it was really, other than a kind of loss from which it seemed they could not recover. Father stared at the Sacred Heart as if it might offer strength, or succor.

  You lied you lied you lied —.

  For fucksake, that’s enough! Will you be quiet! Father shouted and they stared hard at each other, Mother’s face red and pinched, her eyes blinking rapidly. Father exhaled slowly and reached out to touch her arm, but she brushed his hand away.

  We’ll talk about it later, he said, but Mother just glared at him. He turned and stamped into the scullery for his shotgun. Mother held the sleeve of my jumper.

  Go on, boy, she said, her face a grimace of disgust, her hand squeezing my arm tightly so that I winced. Go after your father, sure, aren’t you and him the same.

  Get out of my sight, she spat. America would suit the both of you. Her throat convulsed, and she pushed me from the room.

  Michael, Father called, his voice already drifting out into the night so that it was fading before I reached the door and asked, Da? And he said my name again.