trying to make themselves miscarry. Hemorrhaging to death. The body and blood — I had to tell her stop. It wasn’t the hint of blasphemy either. Then there’s your job, with killers. People’ll begin to wonder.”
Minogue took a measured gulp of Bushmills.
“People don’t really wonder much, so far as I can see, Kathleen.”
“I think it’s the pregnancy. But I’m not going to admit that.”
“She’s always been heading in this direction. She’s coming into her own.”
Her eyes darted from the bottle to his face.
“Are you getting slagged over her at work?”
“No,” he said. “Not that I noticed in anyhow.”
“Oh right, Jim’s off in the States. I nearly forgot. Good timing.”
“How’d you mean?”
She shivered
“Larry Smith and his crowd,” she said. “Don’t be talking to me about them. I saw the news. That family… God, they give me the creeps. Do you know what one of them said? ‘This isn’t over yet, not by a long shot.’ Isn’t that a threat?”
“They’ll hide behind something, I don’t know.”
“They shot up that squad car out on Griffith Avenue last month, didn’t they?”
“Prove it,” he said. “Anyway. We’re going to have Internal Inquiries look over how we’ve handled Smith.”
“But what if they’re serious, Matt? That they really will follow up on it, with the squad? You’re in the hot seat now.”
Minogue looked around the kitchen. He lingered on the shadows, the dull reflection of the light on the kettle, the dark corners. Would she know that Tynan wanted them to carry pistols now? She was staring at the calendar.
“People’ll think she had a terrible childhood or something,” she murmured “You know how the jokes go around.”
“Ah, it doesn’t matter, love. I’ll laugh it off.”
Her frown returned.
“You think you can?”
He looked over at the window.
“It’s either that,” he said, “or I’ll knock them down in the street. She’s my daughter, isn’t she? Ours. She’s telling the truth. As she sees it. And that’s that.”
Kathleen sat back and folded her arms.
“So: how is our daughter then, after your chat?”
“Thrilled,” Kathleen murmured. “Says she knew we’d understand.”
Minogue sighed and shook his head. Kathleen let out a sigh.
“She says she won’t preach about us still eating meat though.”
“Good of her. Tell her I’d compromise on the black pudding. But the rashers stay. Did she give you the lecture on carnivores and violence…”
Kathleen searched his face. He kept staring at the sink.
“Are you all right, Matt?”
Meat and milk had made those Masai tall, strong.
“I am,” he managed. “Yes.”
“You must be tired after the gallivanting.”
“I was just — Anyway. There were a few odd things lying around at the back of my mind. I think I just fell over them.”
Dowsing, that’s what Mairead O’Reilly’s father had done to find the buried walls. And it worked, didn’t it? In the right hands, it was said. Maybe his own job wasn’t far different. He put down the anniversary Shaeffer and rubbed at his eyes. A quarter after two, for the love of God. Fire with fire: he poured more Bushmills.
Next to his glass the photo of Peadar O’Reilly, done badly on an old photocopier, holding his forked stick, with the bog-cut below. The copy was good enough to see O’Reilly’s pride in the direct stare, his staged grasp on the divining stick. The long poles he could understand. There had been hundreds used to plumb the bog. The excavations had laid bare thick walls under eight feet of bog.
He turned to the beginning of the folder again, looked down at the drawing of the Carra King. It had been done by a talented amateur with plenty of the heroic. It reminded him of a comic book of years gone by. It was probably one of O’Reilly’s pupils. The Carra King? The Richly Imagined Carra King, it should be. The embellishments were as obvious in O’Reilly’s version as they were in the drawing. The artist had slapped in a heavenward look on the dying king, as well as elaborate Celtic patterns on the hero’s outfits. O’Reilly had dropped in gems like ‘weighing as much as the king’s finest bull,’ ‘sacred hazel groves.’ Hardly science: a storyteller.
Minogue sipped at the whiskey again. He tried to imagine a country schoolmaster toiling away in a remote part of the west of Ireland. Postwar Ireland, asleep and detached, a man rearing a large family in a place being stripped of youth and history by emigration. O’Reilly, like so many of the teachers Minogue remembered, probably had an appetite for heroism and drama thwarted by making a living. This teacher had done much and worked in obscurity. Separated from those who were official custodians, no wonder he let his imagination fill in the gaps.
The stone was to crown the hill, Carra Hill. A signal, O’Reilly claimed, that the king was dead but that the new king was already installed. Maybe carrying the stone was practice for carrying the king up by himself when the time came.
The Bushmills still had bite. He flipped to where O’Reilly had thrown in stuff from the more widely known legends. It was common in legend for a man to be given a geis, a task, to fast or go out on the hills and live off berries and watercress. And it wasn’t just poets and holy men like the mad poet Sweeney, lovesick and off the rails entirely, walking through hawthorn thickets like an iijit. Purification for the geis, to devour no creature, to abjure meat and milk, to abandon the sustenance his civilization had grown strong on.
Minogue held a sip of whiskey on his tongue. He looked over at the bank calendar open on a picture of a lake in Connemara. Wind, the curlew’s cry, wild: he should go back and read those translations of the ancient poems again.
So: after three days of steering clear of meat, this candidate was purified, light-headed, and weighted down with a boulder, “an effigy of the king.” But was there a stone carved for every succeeding king? Twenty thousand people in a well organized, peaceful settlement, there must have been craftsmen, ritual. Loaded down, your man was pointed toward the hill: off you go, son, find your way up there and you can unload at the top. Had many made it? If the chosen one didn’t make it, what happened? O’Reilly didn’t have a go at that. Wisely, probably. Nor had he much to say about a revival of the thing back in the 1840s.
He let the pages fall back to the one of O’Reilly standing over the exposed wall in 1952, the start of him being taken seriously: definitely a told-you-so look. He would continue for another fourteen years after he’d handed it over to the museum, or rather the museum had moved in.
He brushed the yellow stickies with his thumb. Where was the section on Donegal again? Carrick, that village on the road in to Glencolumbkille? Every second town in Ireland was Carrick-something. He opened the guidebook again. Wasn’t there a Glen Road to Carrick song? Donegal’ Dun na nGall, literally the Fort of the Foreigner. Shaughnessy had been over that road not two weeks ago Looking for…?
Minogue was getting addled now. He let the guidebook close. He took up O’Reilly’s folder again. “A chieftain to the North…” — he’d seen it two or three times on one page. Cattle raids and knocking heads were part of the folklore epics and mythology. Tain bo Cuailgne, the Cattle Raid at Cooley. The North: couldn’t mean the Vikings, they came a thousand years later… there. O’Reilly had it that the settlement went into decline when they had to give too much heed to guarding against northern raiders carrying off maidens and cattle and possessions.
There was nothing about the people of the Carra Fields just wearing out the pasture with cattle. Maybe that’s why O’Reilly was held at a distance by the experts. They could spout about rainfall patterns, erosion, and nutritional decline in grasses and social dislocation. That was science, those were facts. O’Reilly, the obsessed amateur, would wander into the bealoideas, the oral tradition that still came through by the open fires and in the twinkling eyes of the aged, the stories O’Reilly would have listened to and rewritten later.
