Carn (11 page)

“Two pints,” interrupted Benny, “and less lip Cisco.”

At the end of July a notice appeared on the telegraph pole outside the meat plant and subsequently was to be seen covering every wall in the town. It read:

Beneath the circus-red typeface a stick man cavorted and played a tin whistle. Benny and Joe tucked their biscuit tins under their arms and said, “Now we’ll see some real
action!”

They squeezed the bulging hearts into their tight plastic containers as Maisie ranted furiously to herself about this latest development.

“If the priest had any say left, there’d be no festival in this town! There’ll be no licentious behaviour in the town of Carn. Don’t think I don’t know what goes
on. And you—you and your big motorbike, or who do you think you are? I see what goes on all right. I see them with their gins and tonics lying with their legs open for all the tramps of the
day. Twenty years ago I know what they’d have got. But now? Into the bin with the holy pictures and bare your arse for the whole country. They’ll rue the day they let the whoremasters
into this town, festival or no festival!”

A marquee was erected on the fairgreen. Primary school teachers loaded down with violin cases and brochures bustled through the town all day long. Bunting was draped across the main street.
Hotel yards were converted into public bars, with crude painted wooden notices advertising
sangwitches
and
minerals.

Tents appeared in odd places, long-haired youths in Aran sweaters loitered outside the hotel drinking out of paper cups. Bikers roared in on massive machines and converged on The Diamond. Benny
and Joe drank with them into the small hours, listened eagerly as they swopped stories of Californian Highways and European autobahns. They came from Waterford and the north but there was nowhere
they hadn’t been. Chains dangled from their leather jackets, they wore studded wristlets. The longhairs joined them and tuned up a guitar. From behind a swaying mane of hair a melody went up
and the bikers sang along with their glasses raised. Joe Noonan took the instrument and sang a number by Donovan Leitch the Scottish minstrel. Then they went back to their tents and sang until
dawn, stumbling back into town in time for the opening of one of the makeshift bars.

“This sure is some machine you have, man,” said one of the bikers to Benny. “You guys sure know what you’re at. If you’re ever in Waterford, make sure and give us a
call.”

Beer-bellied ballad singers thrust out their stomachs and sang songs about Mexican peasants and Irish emigrants with equal enthusiasm. A crackling public address system struggled to be heard as
it announced details of forthcoming competitions. Francie Mohan stood in the centre of The Diamond and waved a bottle as he cried, “Hah! You never thought you’d live to see the like of
this, did youse? We’re a long way now from the boat train and the brown paper parcel! Here we go, the sky’s the limit, all we need now is Ulster back!”

All along the roads leading into the town, prone bodies lay scattered beside empty crates and bottles. The longhairs seemed to be everywhere. They washed their clothes in the fountain and romped
naked in the lake. An unsavoury incident had provoked a near-riot at a meeting of the urban council. A pair of men’s underpants had been draped over the Matt Dolan Memorial Plaque. “The
men of 1916 didn’t die for these unwashed bastards!” the chairman snapped.

But the shopkeepers didn’t concur as their tills were ringing like never before, so there was little more about it. Even when a youth climbed on the roof of the library and stood there in
his pelt singing,
“Even the president of the United States one day has to stand naked”
the shopkeepers would not relent. They said that it was police business and no concern of
theirs. They were there to trade and nothing more. Through the open window of the cinema, loud rock music blared, the soundtrack of the film which was showing, carefully selected by the
projectonist for this week,
The Sweet Ride
.

The bikers and the longhairs sat back with their arms folded and their legs up on the seats and watched with glee as their American counterparts zoomed across the sand on mighty motorbikes and
threatened to reduce roadside cafés to rubble unless they were supplied with the day’s takings. They cheered from the front row where they sat munching crisps and drinking lager as the
fuzz-bearded angel flung the puny owner right across his own shop. By the time the film drew to a close, the atmosphere in the cinema had risen to a frenzied climax, and the bikers climbed on each
others’ backs as a girl in a wet t-shirt wiggled her breasts provocatively.

The film became the talk of the town.

The priest was apopleptic in the pulpit.

The Fleadh Cheoil went on for three days. The streets were littered with battered cartons and beer cans. The bunting drooped forlornly over the main street. A smashed plate glass window looked
emptily out from the draper’s premises. The barmen began to take down their wooden signs and sweep up the yards. Benny and Joe gave the bikers a firm handclasp.

“Come back to Carn,” they said. “It was real good to meet you.”

“Carn Bikers Okay,” said the Waterford Angels.

Joe and Benny stood watching them leave, followed by the dilapidated caravan of the longhairs with their pots and pans, waving to them as they faded from sight.

“My head is lifting off me,” said Joe, “three days on the trot.”

Benny hopped on the Yamaha and shook his head, then off they went to have a last one for their Waterford brothers.

The following week the priest could not contain his fury. He was so upset that at times it looked as if he was about to use a few expletives himself. “What would our forefathers have
thought?” he asked wistfully. He went on to say that people had now too much money. Too much of everything. They were like tigers who having once tasted blood, were now mad for more. More of
everything. The parishioners looked at each other, redfaced. He quoted statistics from other European countries and alluded to lifestyles propogated by the glossy magazines and the seamier English
dailies. “We are on a slippery slope,” he concluded darkly.

The congregation gathered in small groups outside in the churchyard, smoking cigarettes and fiddling nervously with their prayerbooks. They said that the priest was right, that people in the old
days, in the days of the railway and before that even were better off. “Do we want the place to be like Hollywood?” said an elderly man. But then the conversation turned to other topics
and by the time they got home, they had forgotten everything the priest had said for it could not stand up to the seduction of an afternoon’s television and the smell of cooking roast
beef.

Benny and Joe spent very few weekends in Carn after that. Joe had bought himself a Suzuki and together they found themselves in the cities and larger towns of the north. Wherever their favourite
bands were to be found, they made their way there, standing at the back of the dancehall with their helmets in hand, until they eventually left with local girls who prodded them with questions
about their bikes and where they came from. “We’re the Carn Angels,” said Benny with a smile. “Eh Joe?”

“Si senor—whatever you do, don’t mess with ze Carn Angels.”

They sat with the girls outside their tent as Joe strummed a tune. “You’re great on the guitar,” they said, “there’s no fellas around here like you boys. Where are
you going next? Can we come?”

In the city of Dublin they sauntered through the shops that had begun to spring up around the Dandelion market and the girls moved closer to them as they priced bottles of patchouli and Indian
pipes, the longhairs passing them across the counter with the misty-eyed nod of understanding that had of late become an international semaphore. They went to parties in the city’s flatland
where the air was thick with the smell of Lebanese Red dope and the sound of Pink Floyd meandered until dawn. They sat in cafés and drank endless cups of coffee.

“I wonder what Maisie would do with an auld joint, eh?” laughed Benny.

When they found themselves on the highways of Europe, it seemed that Carn was a distant place that belonged only in the dim recesses of memory. They sat in Dam Square and watched the pigeons
fluttering into the sky like leaves as moustachioed policemen strolled casually past them.

Joe drummed on his helmet and said, “Beats Belturbet of a Friday night anyhow.”

They cruised as far as Istanbul and then the money ran out.

“I told you youse’d come to a bad end,” mocked Joe in his Maisie Lynch voice. “Youse had no business running to them places. You could get a class of a disease out
yonder.”

They spent their last night in a camp outside Paris. The moon rose up above them and foreign voices clacked in the nearby tents as Benny lay back on the bank of the river and slugged the last of
the cider. He turned to Joe who was lying beside him and as the flagon spun into the sky above him, Benny said, “Are you all right there Joe boy?”

“Never was better senor.”

And when they hit home three days later the birds were getting ready in the trees and on the wires and Blast Morgan was just beginning his tour of the gutters and pavements of main street. They
grinned sleepily as they saw yet another trophy had climbed to the top of the pyramid in the photographer’s window, and high up on the hill the first lights were coming on in James
Cooney’s new extension which had just received news of a massive order from Saudi Arabia.

VII

The Sacred Heart of Jesus looked down on Josie Keenan and outside the wind blew across the Hairy Mountains. Affixed to the oleograph, a small red lamp sent its shadows about
the room. “I’d appreciate you leaving it there, we were reared with it like,” the farmer had said when giving her the key. The flowing golden locks fell on Christ’s
shoulders and he pitied her. Once upon a time those same eyes had spent their days overseeing the daily life of God-fearing decent people, who toiled and trudged long hours in the fields and
returned only at night to be fortified by griddle cake and buttermilk before falling on their knees to give thanks for their little bit of ground and the strength in their limbs. Eyes that kept a
constant vigil in a town that had yet to know even the prosperity of the railway never mind meat plants, ruled then with an iron fist by a red-faced bull of a clergyman who rode his mare with his
riding crop in hand, who could by his own admission perform miracles. Cassie, Josie’s mother had known that town in her youth and had heard at first hand the story of the miracle he had
performed, instructing a distraught mother to put her sick infant into a barrel of holy water to cure her consumption, and not a whimper out of the people when it died three days later, of
pneumonia. A long way from the Carn of the Turnpike Inn and the fluttering bunting.

The eyes of the Sacred Heart had looked kindly down on Cassie Keenan every night of her life as she knelt on the stone floor of the kitchen where her husband lay snoring, her whispers drifting
like moths out into the silence as she pleaded with Him for a glimpse into the world to which He belonged, a world that was blue and never-ending, where her and her one wee Josie would fuse as one
and nothing bad would touch them ever again.

And when he went away to the markets and fairs, she combed her daughter’s hair and said a Hail Holy Queen into her ear for she knew that the kindness in the eyes on the picture above the
fireplace was the only hope she had.

Even at the end, Josie’s father had turned to those eyes and that face too, clawing at the grave as he cried out, “Don’t take my Cassie away from me, please Jesus please give
me my Cassie back.”

But there was no reply then either, not a finger twitch, the same immobile stare, and somewhere beyond, her mother, pale and serene beneath a blue sky in a meadow that never ended, waiting for
her daughter to come and be a part of her.

And when the Buyer Keenan called her to come to him in the days after her burial, she did not hear.

Cassie, Cassie can you hear me calling you come to me Cassie!

Cassie lay with her arms folded on her chest and if he called for all the days that would ever exist she would never hear him, and that was how the Sacred Heart made the Buyer Keenan sorry for
all the wrongs he had perpetrated on her and his child.

His face loomed up before Josie, his bottom lip quivering. He reached out to her with an unsteady hand. “I didn’t know pet. You were the apple of my eye. I swear I wouldn’t do
anything to hurt you. You don’t know what it’s like for a man. I’d kill myself dead if I thought I hurt you.”

Josie tried to turn away from it, but then she thought of her classmates at school, all those frail bodies in patched dresses, grown now like herself to women and some of them already with her
mother.

Was that where they were or was it all a dream? A blue and never-ending place? Or a handful of bones and a grinning skull, a stopover for worms under a cross on a hill outside the town.
Is
that what you are Molloy? You’re a long way from it now, with your flashlight shaking and your bitter words
. The side of Josie’s face tightened and she stroked it to ease the
pain.