Cast A Cold Eye Read online

  CAST A COLD EYE

  ALAN RYAN

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Dedication: To Doug Winter, for the hours spent together laughing at the dark

  First published in hardcover by Dark Harvest in 1984

  First paperback edition published by Tor in 1984

  First Valancourt Books edition 2016

  Copyright © 1984 by Alan Ryan

  Excerpt from “At a Potato Digging” from Poems 1965-1975 by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 1966, 1969, 1972, 1975, 1980 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber, Ltd. from Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney.

  Excerpt from “The Hungry Grass” from The Hungry Grass by Donagh MacDonagh, copyright © 1947 by Donagh MacDonagh. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber, Ltd.

  Excerpt from “Under Ben Bulben” from Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats, copyright © 1940 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Anne Yeats, and Michael Butler Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  Cover by Henry Petrides

  Centuries

  Of fear and homage to the famine god

  Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,

  Make a seasonal altar of the sod.

  —Seamus Heaney,

  “At a Potato Digging”

  Little the earth reclaimed from that poor body,

  and yet remembering him the place has grown

  Bewitched . . .

  —Donagh MacDonagh,

  “The Hungry Grass”

  Cast a cold eye

  on life, on death.

  —W. B. Yeats,

  “Under Ben Bulben”

  PART ONE

  These lonesome people in the wild places, it is their nature to speak; they must cry out their sorrows like the wild birds.

  —Frank O’Connor,

  “The Bridal Night”

  CHAPTER 1

  “Have you the blood, John?”

  They sat there, four old men, as old as the dirt-floored cottage, a stone and thatch-roofed shebeen, and the rock-scattered hill it stood on, their shallow breath making thin white puffs before their lined and solemn faces. The one who spoke the needless question was Brian Flynn, the second eldest. He sat nearest to the closed wooden door, his back turned a little away from the chill dampness that entered through its cracks. His shoulders hunched forward beneath the shiny black cloth of his coat. The narrow frayed collar scraped against thin gray hair at the back of his neck. His hands were knotted together in his lap, great bony fingers and twisted swollen knuckles, all bloodless and gray with the cold and damp of the morning. He raised his eyes from a contemplation of the pitted dirt floor and squinted through the smoky interior at John MacMahon, the eldest.

  MacMahon raised one slow hand, as gray as Brian Flynn’s, and drew it across his mouth and chin, dry fingers scraping across the gritty stubble of a beard.

  “I have,” he said, in a voice as dry and gritty as his skin.

  The other three men in the shebeen stirred, grunted, chafed hands together against the cold. At the end of the single-roomed cottage, the next-to-last sod of turf tumbled on its side and coughed out a puff of smoke that drifted toward the men, filling the room with its thick and acrid scent. Outside, the ceaseless drizzle pattered for a moment against the wood of the door, trying feeble strength against the smoky dryness inside, then subsided to its steady hissing on stone and gravel and thatch.

  “Give us a look, John,” said one of the two remaining men from his place on the end of the bench, in the corner. His name was James Brennan and he was the youngest of the four. The civil records of his birth and the church records of his baptism had long been lost to history, but he was understood, among the four of them, to be the youngest. He coughed around the half-burned cigarette in his mouth, squinted past the curl of smoke that touched the side of his face, and said again, “Give us a look.”

  “Do you trust nothing?” said John MacMahon, his voice as dry as thatch on a hot day. He turned his head a little toward Brennan. His watery eyes searched out the other faces in the hanging smoke from the peat: James Brennan, Brian Flynn, and the fourth, Martin Gilhooley. “All right, then,” he muttered. “Here’s a look.”

  He twisted a stiff arm and got the hand into the pocket of his coat. After a moment of rummaging there, stiff fingers grasping at a hard round object and wrestling it free from the cloth, he drew out a small stone bottle, stoppered with a smudged cork. The bottle might have held near a pint of something. He held it up for the others to see. They edged a little closer and Brian Flynn stood and moved across the cottage. His first steps were shaky until his legs limbered up.

  “It’s all right, is it?” asked Martin Gilhooley. He looked at the bottle in John MacMahon’s hand as if he thought it might leap at him across the room.

  “It is,” MacMahon said, his voice edged with impatience. “What else would it be, and I after taking it myself?”

  “Aye,” Martin Gilhooley said. The others nodded.

  MacMahon lowered the bottle and rested it on the thin bone of his leg.

  “We’d best be going, I think,” he said. “They’ll be along in a minute now. See, would you, Brian.”

  Brian Flynn moved back to the door. His fingers fumbled for a moment at the ancient rusted latch, then pulled it free. The door, twisted by age and its own weight, swung back at a lopsided angle, creaking in protest. The rain immediately sought to enter the cottage, wetting the dirt floor and stirring the thick gray pall of smoke. Tiny wisps of smoke eluded it and slipped outside to dissipate in the rain. Outside, all was gray and silver, rain washing the world of color, leaving it only the cold dark shades of stone.

  “They’re coming along now,” Flynn said over his shoulder, and turned back to watch outside. Behind him, the others pushed themselves to their feet, heavy shoes scraping on the hard rough floor, and came to stand beside him in the doorway.

  The cottage was halfway up a hillside, at the end of a ragged path that led from a low stone wall at the edge of the road. The wall was tumbled down in places, and rambled on up across the slope and away on the far side out of sight. Once, in the distant past, the hill had been thick with growth, protecting the shebeen from wind and rain and the sight of strangers, but now it was empty of everything but stones and scrubby low vegetation pushed flat by the salty wind, and the view from the cottage door was unobstructed, except by the sheeting gray mist, across the other hills and the rain-soaked village below.

  The mist drifted in shifting waves across the hillsides, touching everything with wet, cold fingers and occasionally spitting icy rain, like a handful of angry gravel, into slate-gray puddles on the hard earth, shattering the shiny surface that was the same blind color as the sky.

  “Here,” said James Brennan, and lifted one stiff finger to point.

  The funeral procession moved slowly up the winding road, climbing the hill wearily beneath the weight of the cold, the rain, the grayness of the morning sky, and the dark wooden box carried on the shoulders of six of the mourners. The figures in the procession, black shapes gliding slowly, slowly, in the gray road, were blended into one form, robbed of sex or names or faces by the rain and mist that engulfed them. On they came, hea
ds bowed, feet shuffling, climbing steadily up the hill toward the cemetery. Solitary at the head of the procession moved the priest from the village, his slow step setting the pace for the others, his long black raincoat clinging wetly to his legs. On they came, on and on, black shapes against the gray.

  “They won’t be long in this dirty weather,” Martin Gilhooley said quietly.

  “That they won’t,” John MacMahon agreed. He moved his right hand, brushed it against the damp wool of his jacket, feeling the heavy bulge and weight of the stone bottle in his pocket. “They won’t, indeed.”

  The four of them moved back, without another word, into the smoky darkness of the cottage as the dark procession glided silently past the break in the wall and on up the hill to where the grave awaited. They watched until the black straggle of mourners was past and had flickered out of view around the side of the hill where the stone wall still stood high. They would be almost into the cemetery now.

  “Best to close the door while we wait,” John MacMahon said, and moved back to his place on the worn wooden bench, its boards shiny from the press of cloth during several centuries. Brian Flynn closed the door and came to sit beside MacMahon. Martin Gilhooley poked at the struggling fire with an old rod of twisted and blackened iron.

  They sat in silence and waited, hands clasped between knees for evasive warmth or shoved deep in jacket pockets.

  After a while, without reference to a watch but knowing it was time, MacMahon pushed himself to his feet. The others stood with him and, together, they moved to the door.

  The rain was harder now and the wind a bit nastier still. They pulled their caps low on their foreheads, pulled collars higher about their necks, clasped lapels close over narrow chests, hunched shoulders against the damp, making a smaller target for the weather. Their shoes slopped on the wet earth as they walked down the path toward the road, then started up the hill.

  The entrance to the cemetery was only a ragged break in the leaning stone wall and, inside it, a muddy path that climbed farther up the hill. The place was deserted now, the mourners having done their cold, wet duty and proceeded on to warm themselves and the priest at the home of the departed soul and his mournful relations. A little way up the path beyond the wall was a level stretch where the first of the graves lay soaking up the rain, and beyond that began a sparse stand of trees, climbing higher up the hill. The trees slouched tiredly beneath the rain, and added their dripping to the puddles on the ground.

  Wordless, saving their breath for the walk, they made their way to the edge of the fresh grave, and stopped. It was only partly filled in, someone no doubt having said they’d finish it later when the rain was ended, and also no doubt unwilling to miss the warm wake at home. Rain ran down the muddy sides of the grave in rivulets and had washed one end of the coffin free of dirt. The ground at the edges of the grave was slippery, trampled by many feet, glittering with puddles.

  The four old men paid no heed to the mud and came as close to the edge of the hole as solid footing permitted. They craned their necks, ignoring now the icy touch of the rain, and looked in, looked at the bare end of the coffin, the mud in which it rested, and the rain pooling at the sides.

  John MacMahon was the first to raise his head. He looked around at the three others. Each of them met his gaze briefly, then looked back into the grave. MacMahon reached into his pocket and, after a moment’s struggle, pulled free the stone bottle. With fingers stiffened by age and the cold and damp, he drew the cork from its neck and fisted his left hand around it. The others raised their eyes and watched him, watched the bottle. MacMahon looked to the muddy ground and inched a little closer to the edge of the grave. James Brennan moved then and came closer to MacMahon, grasped his left elbow and steadied him.

  MacMahon drew in a breath and looked around once more. The others continued to watch him and Brennan nodded. “Do it, John,” he said.

  John MacMahon stretched his right hand out above the muddy hole and the wet coffin. Then he hesitated. A wave of pain had suddenly washed through his stomach and twisted his intestines. It had been three days since he’d felt it last. And it had been five days before that time. It was coming always closer. He shut his eyes tight and held his breath and it quickly passed away, leaving only the memory and a lingering fright.

  Rain spattered on his hand and darkened the cold stone of the bottle. He tilted the neck of the bottle and a thin, slow stream of dark red blood dribbled from it into the grave. He moved his hand to the right and then swept it slowly to the left, to the other end of the grave, regulating the red stream to spread it evenly. The blood, mixing with the rain, dripped into the dirt and mud at the bottom, stained the wood of the coffin with fat drops, and blended in, becoming one with the ancient earth. After a few moments, the blood stopped dripping from the bottle but John MacMahon, breathing deeply, continued to move his arm back and forth. One final drop of red clung to the lip of the bottle, clung and shivered as he moved it, and then at last that drop too fell off and mixed with the mud of the grave.

  That done, the four of them stepped back from the edge, minding now where they put their mud-caked shoes on the slippery ground. They huddled together silently, cold breath pluming from their mouths, while MacMahon pressed the stained cork back into the bottle and replaced the bottle in his pocket.

  “That’s done, then,” he said, and the others nodded. Then, without looking again into the muddy grave, they started down the path toward the wall and the road and the cottage.

  When they reached the cottage, its dark interior was still thick with warmly scented smoke but the fire was dying out. Martin Gilhooley bent into the corner and added three crumbly dark bricks of peat to the fire and rubbed his hands in front of it, waiting for the warmth. John MacMahon pulled the stone bottle once again from his pocket and, without speaking a word, replaced it in the niche between two stones in the wall beside the fireplace. Then he too rubbed his hands before the fire and James Brennan and Brian Flynn came and stood beside them and did the same.

  After a few minutes they began to feel the new warmth from the burning turf and their tight shoulders eased and began to slump and relax. The smell of the peat, ancient, bitter, and warm, filled the cottage, mixing with the raw smell of earth and the thick aroma of rain-soaked wool.

  “So it’s done another time,” James Brennan said, his eyes fixed steadily on the fire, hands still moving.

  “It is,” John MacMahon said quietly, and then added, “until the next death.”

  Brian Flynn’s head bobbed once in agreement but he said nothing.

  Suddenly John MacMahon gasped, pressed a tight-clenched fist against his stomach, and squeezed his eyes shut for several moments until the twisting pain receded. James Brennan’s hand came to rest lightly on his shoulder.

  “Will you last it out, do you think, John?” Brennan said, his voice barely louder than a breath. “Until the time, I mean.”

  MacMahon took two deep breaths to be certain of his voice, and then answered softly, “With the help of God, I will.”

  No one said anything to that and they continued standing there, rubbing their hands before the fire as if the cold would never leave them.

  CHAPTER 2

  The sun was shining brightly on Dublin when Jack Quinlan first saw the city. The yellow double-decker buses were freshly washed by the morning’s rain, the taxis sparkled, the stone of the O’Connell Street bridge was newly cleaned and dried white by the fresh cool air, and even the River Liffey itself, normally brown and thick and sluggish, seemed to flow more easily and even sparkled­ once or twice, as if the unexpected sun insisted that it smile too. The green of Trinity College was bright as emeralds, the store windows of Brown Thomas and Switzer’s in Grafton Street tried vainly to lure unwilling shoppers from the sunshine, and the columns of the G.P.O. stood tall and white and proud. There were beggars in the streets, in O’Connell Street itself and in the busy, narrow lanes around the post office, but the sun shone on them too and on the peach
es and oranges they sold from rusty carts and wobbly prams and strollers, and the crowds waiting for buses in front of Clery’s Department Store stood out full in the sun, sporting bright colors, white Aran Island sweaters, and pink-cheeked smiles.

  This is like coming home, Jack thought. After all this long while, a whole lifetime, of hearing about Dublin from my grandmother, from friends and relatives and neighbors, all the stories, all the memories, all the songs, it’s just like coming home. I know this place. It’s mine.

  He had just come out the front door of Clery’s into the bright colors and bustle of O’Connell Street. Under his arm was a bulky parcel containing an oatmeal-colored Irish knit sweater he’d just bought. Shop at Clery’s for the bargains, they’d told him at home in New York, you’ll only do better out in the country. And they’d been right. The sweater would have cost at least twice the price in the States—he was already beginning to think of it that way, as a far-off land: the States—if you could find such a thing at all. He’d get another when he reached the country itself; he’d be there by tomorrow evening. Now he stood beside the busy doorway of Clery’s, lit a cigarette, and gazed happily about at the scene.

  He had arrived in Dublin by Aer Lingus only that morning and taken a taxi directly to the bed-and-breakfast house in Clontarf, out along Dublin Bay, where he’d reserved—no, where he’d booked—a room from the States. Luckily, the movie projector on the plane had suffered blessed mechanical trouble and he’d been spared the bother of a movie. Even with his long legs feeling cramped in the narrow space, he’d managed to sleep through most of the flight, including the twenty-minute stopover at Shannon. Though he was still tired from the trip and the last-minute packing and the excitement of seeing Ireland for the first time, he’d let the landlady show him where breakfast was served, then settled quickly into his room, and hurried off to catch a bus to O’Connell Street.