Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (94 page)

The postmortem examinations took several hours, the early winter dark having fallen long before they were finished. Father Jim touched Pat’s shoulder. Pat blinked, feeling as though he’d just come up from under water.

“You ought to go home, boy,” Father Jim said gruffly. “I can finish up with the doctor here.”

Pat shook his head mutely, throat turned to stone. “No,” he finally managed to rasp out. “I’ll do for now.”

“Not without food and sleep you won’t,” Father Jim said firmly. “I’ve only a couple more things to finish with here and then we’ll find the both of us some hot food and a good stiff drink.”

He knew Father Jim was right. He was so tired he was half-hallucinating now. Twice when he’d looked down at his hands today he could have sworn they were sheathed to the wrists in crimson, that the blood of those dead men was somehow, despite hot water and soap, still there and maybe always would be.

There was something inside his chest, something hot and red that threatened to overspill its boundaries and lay waste to all in its path. It had grown steadily larger over the last twenty-four hours.

He had always known, in a theoretical sort of way, that all men and women held within them the capability for violence. Any mother with a threatened child could tell you that. But to know it on another level, to feel the urge of it in your very veins, to fear that it would take you over, seize your rationality, conquer the very finest things in your soul—this, he found, was another thing altogether.

THE CHURCH’S SMALL CEMETERY was walled. Blowing snow had found its way in, banking in light drifts against the headstones and bringing a cold peace to the inhabitants. Pat stood in the lee of an oak tree whose roots and branches had mingled with the stone and stood sentinel over the dead for many generations. The late winter light tinted the graveyard a melancholy blue that seemed all too apt, Father Jim thought, as he walked on the narrow pathway between stones.

“Sylvie called, she’s very worried.”

“I called her last night. She knows I’m neither dead nor wounded.”

“She said you told her to stay in London.”

“It seems the safest place for her right now. Belfast is likely to see some bad trouble over the next while.”

“I suppose it’s inevitable,” Father Jim said, thinking of his congregation back in Belfast, those that had teetered on the edge of taking to the gun, the young men he’d slowly tried to coax away from the brink. In one day, the British had managed to wipe out the work of months on his own part, years on the part of others. There would be severe repercussions, of that there was little doubt. And the innocent would suffer, as they always did, caught in the crossfire of history. “It’s so senseless, I’ve had people asking me why all day, and I’ve no answer to give. I was there and I’ve no clue what happened.”

“Don’t you? Ask yourself this—why do you think the Paras opened fire?”

“They lost control, panicked—I don’t know,” he finished lamely, knowing all the explanations he’d tried to formulate strained even his own credulity.

“Does that make any sense to ye, Father? The Paras don’t lose control, don’t go berserk, they’re trained for much more stressful situations than what occurred yesterday.”

“I can’t make sense of it any other way, Patrick,” he said wearily.

“It makes a great deal of sense if ye look at it from the Brits’ perspective. An’ by Brits I don’t mean even the soldiers themselves, for the truth is they were following commands from higher up.”

Father Jim shook his head. “I’m not following you.”

“Pretend for minute yer the man behind the desk, the one who’s supposed to invent the formulas to control the rabble on the other side of the sea. The biggest threat to that is the IRA. The cells are impenetrable, ye can’t get yer men inside, ye can’t seem to turn enough of the lads on the inside to get at what ye need to start tearin’ the organization apart. So what do ye do?” Pat’s voice was cool and quiet. The tone of it sent a chill of unease up the priest’s spine.

“I don’t know.”

“In order to place key people within such a tight structure, ye need to have a huge influx of new blood. To create that situation ye stage an event that’s goin’ to cause a big emotional backlash across the community the organization is tied to. Then ye ride out the resultin’ fury, an’ when things quiet down ye’ve achieved exactly what ye wanted. Boys that join in emotional haste will be easier to turn when they’ve the leisure to repent.”

“That’s quite a stretch,” Father Jim said.

“Maybe so, maybe no,” Pat rejoined in the same emotionless tone. “But I traveled about a bit last night. The doors of the IRA in this wee city were bein’ knocked down by sheer numbers. Anyone could have predicted it would happen, are ye sayin’ the powers that be in Britain couldn’t see it clear?”

“Were you one of those boys lined up at the door, Pat?” Father Jim asked.

Pat moved out from under the wet black branches of the oak. “I don’t need to knock on the door; it’s always been open to me.”

“Because of who your father was?”

“Because of who my father was, and my grandfather before him,” Pat echoed back the priest’s words in the affirmative. A thin layer of snow was lying on his dark hair, the ends etched in pale blue frost. His skin was a ghostly white, as though he was more akin to the people that were beneath the iron hard ground than those that walked above it.

“Is it a door you would choose to walk through?”

The silence that stretched between them was long. Pat’s answer when it came was quiet, and released on a breath of crystallized air.

“Not today.”

Pat hunched down by a simple headstone that leaned precariously over the gnarled root. It was the resting place of one Martin Herlihy, aged twenty-nine. His was the last grave dug in the small courtyard. Fifty years separated him from the previous internee to these grounds. Father Jim wondered who the lad had been—a relative of one of the monks that had labored here? The byblow of some important family?

His stone told no tales, for it merely held his name, the dates of his birth and death and two lines of Yeats.

Here is...
No place for love or dream at all
For God goes by with white footfall.

He had always loved that poem, yet here the lines seemed rather a bleak way to speak of heaven. Here they seemed to speak simply of the grave, or even the country, for today there seemed little place for love or dreams in this land.

“You need to sleep, Pat. If you can’t manage it I’ll give you a shot of something. It might be best to forget for a few hours.”

“No,” Pat shook his head. “I don’t want it. I don’t want to forget just yet.”

Father Jim gave him a long look, then walked back into the office. He returned a moment later. “Go inside, there’s a fire lit in the study as well as pen and paper waiting for you. Write it down, every bit you can remember, leave nothing out no matter how trivial it might seem. And then, like it or not, you’re getting the shot and going to bed.”

Pat followed the priest inside. He settled at the long oak table, where Father Jim had left a glass of whiskey for warmth and comfort. Father Jim sighed, and put his hands to eyes that felt like sandpaper. Outside the sleet fell in icy sheets, the wind wrapping round the thick monastery walls with an eerie moan.

He was so exhausted that he had the odd sense of being separate from his body, of rising above the dark, quiet study, with the peat fire a small glow in the hearth. He could see his own head bent over the desk, the posture one of extreme exhaustion and grief.

After a long time, Pat rose and left the study. The paper and pen sat on the table, blank and abandoned. The whiskey as well was untouched.

Father Jim rubbed his hands hard over his face, trying to return some feeling to his skin. He felt numb all over. Except his heart, which seemed both the size and consistency of a large stone. The truth was he loved this country, but it was breaking his heart. History collapsed in on itself here at least once every other generation, renewing the cycle of blood sacrifice to a greater cause, a cause that could not be defined except through myth. Yesterday, Britain’s soldiers had relit the torch for this generation. And this too would become myth, its victims added to the pantheon of patriot martyrs that littered the halls of Irish history. He had seen the fire in the faces of the young all over the city today, had heard it in the voice of Patrick Riordan, who had struggled much of his life to avoid what must have seemed inevitable. It depressed him, these children committing themselves to a life of futile violence that always ended the same way. It differed little from what he’d seen in Vietnam—different scale, different voices, same results. Perhaps it was time to leave, settle into a parish somewhere near his old home of Springfield, Massachusetts, to try and forget.

He didn’t sense the man in the doorway until he spoke.

“Excuse me, Father.”

He looked up startled, blinking to clear his fogged vision.

The man was big. He took up a great deal of the doorframe, both in size and presence. He’d only met him once, and briefly then, but he wasn’t a man to be forgot.

“Casey. I suppose you’ve come for your brother.”

“Aye, is he here then?”

“He is.”

“How is he?”

“He’s been very quiet. He’s yet to sleep since all this,” he made a helpless gesture with his hands, “happened.”

“My Da’ said it wasn’t when the Riordans were in a temper that a man need fear them, it was when they got quiet.”

The priest heard the truth implicit in the simple statement. Everything had changed for the soft-spoken lad who’d worked so hard to effect fundamental and meaningful change in his neighborhood over these past two years. The abyss of violence that always beckoned in Ulster would be yawning up to the most peaceful of souls at present. He wondered if the lad was right about the reasons behind this attack, and the murder of fourteen souls.

“Father, could ye take me to him?”

“Of course. I’m sorry, we’re all a little dazed here.”

Father Jim led Casey down the long corridor towards the small sleeping quarters.

“He was exhausted. I think he may have gone to sleep.”

Pat was not asleep. His small bag was packed, his coat and boots on. He’d obviously been readying himself to leave, though he stood looking at the small crucifix above the bed, face drained of all expression. A strange peace seemed to have fallen across him. Perhaps fatigue and shock had taken their toll at last.

“Patrick, Casey’s here.”

He didn’t turn, nor acknowledge his brother’s presence.

“Patrick,” Casey said quietly, though the tone was firm. “I’ve come to take ye home, lad.”

After a long minute, Casey reached out and took his brother’s hand.

“Take me home then, brother,” Pat said, dark eyes as distant as they’d been the previous night.

Casey nodded as they passed Father Jim, their movement stirring the edges of his soutane. He’d forgotten he still wore it. The garment felt oddly natural today, despite the fact that he’d not worn one in years, a cloak of black mourning for the peace that had seemed only a day ago, possible.

Suddenly he was very afraid of tomorrow.

CASEY’S RE-ENTRY INTO THE WORLD was destined to be rough, personally as well as politically. The aftershocks of Bloody Sunday had been expected, but were no less tragic for all the knowing. There were protests worldwide, and two days after the massacre in Derry a crowd burned down the British embassy in Dublin. Belfast was ready to blow apart at the seams, with anger surging like a blood tide through the streets. On a more personal level, Pamela was aware her husband seemed as likely to implode as the streets of his city.

His actual physical coming home had been a gradual process. At first he had stayed at a variety of safe houses, with occasional stealthy conjugal visits home during the night. Then he’d begun to spend all his nights at home, disappearing like smoke with the dawn. The next step had been the occasional meal at home, then doing the chores that needed a man’s hand, and finally after a month of this routine, he had boldly gone out and about in the day time, had even ventured down to Gallagher’s for a pint. The result of this had been an absolute lack of repercussions. This in itself had worried Casey at first, but then as day followed upon day he gradually resumed all the facets of his old life. However, there was a funny smell about the whole situation that started a suspicion growing in his chest with which he was not at all happy.

His emotional journey home had been altogether more difficult. He was prickly as a porcupine, gruff with both Pamela and Lawrence and then instantly repentant and apologetic. This alternated with long spells of silence. After two weeks of this behavior, Pamela wished he would blow up and get it over with.

It was apparent he was having trouble fitting back in with the household in as seamless a manner as he’d expected. She’d come upon him a few times, stopped in the middle of a task, staring into some remote vision that took him several minutes to come back from. The intensity of these spells worried her.