down a bog hole. Comical it was, the way Ger told it. ‘I’ll go up there no more,’ Ger would say, ‘for fear of meeting all the crowd he was telling me about.’ Da couldn’t work with Ger of course. Ger was always pulling his leg, d’you see. Da was very serious.”
“Crowds of people, is it?” Minogue asked.
“Ah, God, no,” Mairead O’Reilly said. “There was no one there ever. Da would be lecturing Ger, getting carried away with himself. ‘That layer there now, Ger, that’s Rome being founded.’ An amateur archaeologist.”
“But sure he wasn’t far off the mark now when it was finally excavated,” said Noonan. “Was he?”
Minogue watched her eyes roam the hillsides. Her smile faded a little.
“Tis true for you,” she said. “But Da would have had you believe that this was where civilization started.”
“Paradise lost,” said Noonan, and he threw his head back once.
The few trees and hedges were behind them now. The views to both sides were across roadside ditches to bog. Minogue tried to figure north from west but the twisting road drove the sun across the roof of the car too often for him.
The road rose to a plateau. Minogue caught glimpses of the turns and dips as the road wound its way toward the coast ahead. They passed rusting forty gallon barrels, mounds of crushed rock.
“This road’s going to be widened now to go along with the site,” said Noonan.
“Hard to imagine fifteen or twenty thousand people living up here, isn’t it?”
“That many,” was all Minogue could manage.
“There’s Carra Hill beyond,” said Mairead O’Reilly.
Minogue followed her pointed finger. Rising ground culminated in a gently rounded hill.
“There’d be the crowning there,” she said, “with all the goings-on over by the road. That all died out of course. But it started up again after the Famine for a few years. It never caught on again after that. The people emigrating…? I don’t know.”
“Your father had all this researched?” Minogue tried. She shifted in her seat.
“He did, he did,” she replied. “But some of it turned out what you might call fanciful. Or at least that’s what the ex — well, the history people thought. Da was an amateur, you see. And proud of it too: the Latin root, he’d always say — amo, amas, amat — to love something is not necessarily to carry a degree from some university around with you as authority. Those were his ways.”
Was it the warmth of the sun, he wondered, or the pleasure of being away from Dublin that made him dreamy. Maybe it was the idea of this country schoolteacher for decades doggedly unearthing a forgotten history. He imagined O’Reilly in the classroom, singing, conjugating obscure Irish verbs, dependably clattering the odd dunce, roaring at one of his charges errant or lackadaisical with a hurley stick. Quite a breed, the country schoolteachers then, and some lost genius in many. He remembered the books given to him by his own teacher, McMahon, as a parting gift. Chekov and Gogol, Maupassant. McMahon, run over by a car at midnight on a road ten years later. Asleep in the middle of the road, drunk.
“People thought he was mad, of course,” she was saying. “But sure everyone loved him. The kids adored him. Oh but he was strict! I get people writing me and telling me about Da. Universities, heads of companies, even people who ended up in Australia. A man sent us a thousand pounds from Sydney. He’d had Da as a teacher back before the war, but he hadn’t forgotten. ‘A habit of mind for learning,’ Da would say, ‘A cast of mind for truth.’ The old school, I suppose some would say.”
Minogue suppressed a yawn and tried to smile at her.
“Well of course the world caught up to Da,” she went on. “But do you know, it didn’t interest him much. He went on about his business after retiring, gathering the stories and the poems and the songs. He was going to buy a computer, he told me a week before he died. So as he could do the things he’d collected. He had eyewitness stories of the Famine, sure. People who were children when it happened. All that way back. He’d taken them down when he started teaching. His first notebook is 1928, when he was in school himself. A born historian. So there.”
“Here we are,” said Noonan, “up ahead.”
Minogue saw the roof lights of the Garda car above the heather. Next to it was a sign. They rounded a bend and came in sight of a cleared graveled patch joined to the road by a makeshift bridge. Noonan took the car slowly over the ruts. He parked by a granite boulder sticking out of what looked to Minogue like an abandoned turf bank. He took a walkie-talkie out of the glove box. Minogue felt the anticipation worm in his stomach again, his chest grow tight.
“We’ll go up now and introduce ourselves?” Noonan was asking him.
Minogue savored the give, the juicy sponge of the bog underfoot. His wellies sucked as he drew them out of the muck where he’d been standing. He held the edges of the map tight. Mairead O’Reilly ran a finger along the line.
“That’s us there,” she said. “And there’s tracks and boreens here. And here.”
How the hell could you get a car up here, he wondered. Malone was hunkered over a track fifty yards away with Noonan pointing to something. Minogue looked beyond them to the parked cars by the Office of Public Works sign.
“So the site here is wide open really, you’d have to say,” he said.
She pointed over to the fence surrounding a pit.
“That’d be to stop people falling in,” she went on. “Liability, I don’t know This is all rock here up on the left and…” She looked down at the map again. “I think it’s here they’ll put in his plaque and what have you. A seating area too.”
She looked over again.
“Da wouldn’t be one for all the fuss. But he’d like it, I know. A nice touch.”
Minogue looked from the map up onto the bog again. The only road most likely to have been fit to bear the weight of a small car was somewhere behind the other fenced-off place, the court tomb.
“Am I right now for that road here?”
She looked at the map.
“Yes indeed now. That definitely leads over to the cliff. Unless now they’ve added a road of their own. There’s going to be some kind of an observation spot up over the cliffs there, I suppose.”
Minogue folded the map and looked around. There were no ancient peoples striding through the heather toward him. There was only Carra Hill, heather, clouds like candy floss, the softest of breezes stirring the heather. He looked down at his boots. He hadn’t been mistaken: the mud was over his ankles already. He pulled each out in turn. Mairead O’Reilly gave him a sympathetic smile and tucked her hair in under a headscarf. Henna, that was the name of the stuff, he remembered now.
He realized that his nostrils were no longer blocked. He tested the Velcro on the video camera grip and wondered if he’d get through this excursion into this sodden and desolate hinterland of Mayo without passing some remark to Noonan about the plodding boot prints of the Guards last night. All over the damn site, it looked like. He imagined Noonan’s reply, and it’d be the correct one: wasn’t my idea to send fellas in here in the dark. What did you expect would happen?
“Will I carry anything?” she asked.
“No thanks, Mairead. No.”
The breeze freshened closer to the cliffs. Malone changed films in the Polaroid. Minogue looked back at the white sticks he’d left stuck into the side of the track. Though blurred and worn away by the rain there were traces of vehicle tires in two spots.
Noonan was a man who liked marching through heather, it seemed.
“A week, do you think?” he called out. Minogue nodded. The hush in the background must be the sea. The edge of the cliff was but a hundred yards ahead.
“We have to get a fix on the last time anyone was up here, Tommy. If the car has been at the bottom of the cliff for a week…”
Malone bent over to shield the film as he inserted it.
“Who’d be up here, for Jas — I mean, do people go walking and hiking up here? In the pissing rain, like?”
