During a day Tomas looked over his shoulder a hundred times out in the fields as though he were expecting Conor, or even Liam, to be coming up the path. He lived on memories of Conor's hand in his own and Conor's intent eyes fixed on him joyously and filled with love and awe. And his step slowed. More and more time was spent in the sweat house to drive off the rheumatic demons that had stiffened his hands and kept his back in constant pain.
One day a whisper spread over the bog as it would with the presence of an intruder. Although Father Cluny was hardly an intruder, the only time he was seen in the bogs was during an emergency. He wended his way down the cut until he found Tomas, who unbent himself, set his slane aside and walked with the priest to a patch of scrub oak out of earshot.
"Thank you for coming, Father Cluny."
"I think the appropriate observation is something about the mountain coming to Mohammed."
Tomas laughed. The priest had blossomed into his own man since Father Lynch took leave and was rather an enjoyable fellow. "My presence here with you has started all sort of gossip and I'm more than a little curious myself, Tomas."
"Aye," Tomas said. "Meaning no disrespect, I don't think it would be entirely in order for me to enter St. Columba's and it is a grand day for a walk."
"The ground appears to be quite neutral," the priest agreed.
"Now mind you, Father, I just want to chat. I'm not confessing but I need counsel and I find you a piously adequate man."
Father Cluny nodded with inward delight, noting that this was a giant step for Tomas Larkin and reminding himself not to appear sanctimonious.
"It's like this, Father. I've made a bloody mess of things." Tomas licked his lips and sighed Irish. "I'm after making amends before, well, before my time comes."
"What kind of amends, Tomas?"
His eyes moistened. "I guess even I know that Conor isn't coming back. The time is past for me to keep on fooling myself. There are amends to make. You see, I took the lives of my sons into my hands and the results were ruinous. What I have to tell you now must be kept in great confidence."
"You have that confidence."
"I've, been having dizzy spells and spells where I almost go blind. I've managed to keep it from Finola and Fergus O'Neill as well."
"Don't you think you'd best go down to see Dr. Cruikshank?"
"Ah, that's not so important. What will be with me will be. What is important is to set things right. I want Liam to come home and I want him to have the land. Would you write a letter for me?"
Father Cluny got to his feet awkwardly, for he was a hefty man with little grace or muscle. He watched over Tomas, whose face remained downcast. "What about Brigid?" the priest asked.
"I'm doing all this for her sake as well," Tomas answered. "It is a certainty Finola will survive me and she will never accept the McCracken boy. However, when Liam returns and takes over the farm, Brigid will have to give up her ambitions for it. Now, I've a few quid saved and Conor's doing well in Derry. Between the two of us we could raise passage for Brigid and her lad so the two of them can marry and get away from here."
Father Cluny tried to follow the reasoning. It sounded simple, but yet. . . "I don't know, Tomas. It's a dicy plan. So many things can go wrong."
"What else can I do, Father?"
Not the most inventive of men, the priest could come up with nothing better. "I'll write the letter to Liam for you. It will do no harm and it may just work."
"Now, that's a good man you are. I only wish I could be there in New Zealand when his priest reads it to him. He'll be one happy lad."
Tomas got to his feet unevenly and in that moment Father Cluny realized the deterioration that had taken place. Tomas Larkin seemed to be aging before his eyes. He looked wearily up the path to the bog and the ever waiting spade. He had told himself over and over he would keep going somehow until Liam got home. Then perhaps he'd rest a bit.
"I want to try to make friends with Dary, too," Tomas said. "You see much more of him than I do. He's a good lad, you see, despite certain problems in his raising. I've come to realize he's going to make a fine priest, a fine priest."
This sudden acknowledgment to the Church puzzled Father Cluny, who studied Tomas with suspicion. Tomas had more to say but balked, and the two men remained awkwardly silent. Just then Tomas crossed the line with his decision. "There is one more matter," he said. "Speaking just now of Dary happened to remind me of it. I don't know how to put this to you, Father, but if anything should happen to me, well, let me put it another way. Finola has had to share my life and, although things have not been entirely right for us for a long time, we once had something wild and grand. The least I could do for the woman who has shared my bed is to seek absolution. I'll do it for her sake. So you know that if I fall sick you can go right ahead with it."
"Tomas Larkin, you're not telling me the truth, man."
"No, no, it's the entire truth," he insisted.
"No other reasons to seek absolution?"
"Well, I'd like to rest next to Kilty."
"Sorry, Tomas, I'll make no deal like that."
"Come now, Father, you're the priest. It's your duty to give me absolution."
"I'll give it to you but you'll take it here and now and you'll be coming to church for the rest of your days."
"Ah, Father Cluny. You're all alike. Now don't go trying to make an example out of me."
"You know I wouldn't do that."
"So why don't you give it to me just before last rites?"
"In the first place, you're not telling me the complete truth of why you want absolution. In the second place, I'll not have Conor raging at me the way you raged at Father Lynch at Kilty's funeral."
Tomas scratched his jaw and grumbled. "I do see your point."
"Very well then. You will be seen regularly at mass. I'll not have the parish whispering behind my back that I coerced you on your deathbed."
"Aye, aye. I see your point. Let me give the matter further consideration."
"Surely, there's no hurry. Now, if you'll come to my house tonight we'll get on with the letter to Liam."
CHAPTER NINE
Conor was unconscious by the time he slammed into the ground. Cooey Quinn charged onto the field with a squad of stretcher-bearers as excitement from the spectators reached an epidemic high. Conor was lifted by five puffing bearers, slung awry on the stretcher, which promptly ripped from age, and he crashed to the ground. Under Cooey's frantic directions, each of the other five grabbed a dangling arm or leg and dragged him to the sideline.
Mick McGrath, the second party to the collision, crawled on his hands and knees moaning. He was fetched beneath the armpits by a pair of teammates and slid off the field and plopped alongside Conor. Mick tried to rise but went down face in the mud.
"Resume play!" the umpire shouted over the uproar.
"Holy Mother of God!" Cooey cried, waving smelling salts alternately under the noses of his stars. "Ah, wake up, lads! Wake up for Cooey, would youse. Goddammit, stand back, everybody, and give them room!"
Mick unglued his eyes and waved his head around and was just getting in tune with the ringing in his ears when Cooey slapped his face. "Who am I!" Cooey demanded.
"Shiiiiiiuuuut!" Mick wailed. "Shiiiiiuuuut!"
Thundering feet rumbled the earth as play swung perilously close to the fallen warriors. Cooey stepped before them, waving them back lest his lads get trampled. They rumbled the other way.
Mick came about slowly, glazed-eyed. He swished about to gather up all the loose blood floating in his mouth, spat it out and, with it, a tooth, then studied Conor and began to approximate events.
In another moment Conor responded to smelling salts and propped up on his elbows. Both of them were greeted with buckets of water to the face. Cooey leaped back and forth over the sideline shaking a fist at the officials, yelling to his faltering team, swearing at the opposition, then back to Conor and Mick, imploring.
In another moment Conor successf
ully gained his feet and pulled Mick up by the jersey just in time to see the Strabane Eagles score on the Bogsiders with a clean goal to take the lead.
Dr. Aloysius Malone was convoyed through the throng, stood on tiptoes and peered into Conor's eyes, then Mick's. He asked a number of questions; for instance, who were they playing, what were the names of their brothers and sisters, their teammates, and several catechisms. As he did, the knot on Conor's head grew egg-size and, as it went up, his eye went down to a slit.
Strabane grew fierce in the absence of the Bogsider stars.
"Hey, Mick," Conor said, "what you say?"
Mick smiled and blood squirted from his mouth. The pair of them trotted back onto the field of play and the stands like to tore apart. Cooey cried for joy at the same time he screamed to them to be careful. The inspired Bogsiders rallied, but the game ended in a tie.
Nick Blaney's bar looked more like a slaughterhouse than a pub, as sportsmen and players of good cheer gathered to congratulate each other before the GAA banquet to celebrate the all-Derry finals.
Cooey Quinn elbowed into Conor and Mick, bringing a dandy with him, looking as grim as if he had been visited by a banshee. "This here's Derek Crawford," he said with obvious unhappiness. "He wants to talk to youse both."
The dandy was a big man and his hands were knobby and his face busted up to indicate he had been a warrior of some sort in the past. "Can we go some place private?" he asked.
They worked their way out of Nick Blaney's slowly, backslap by backslap, then down the road to Conor's newly rebuilt forge. He dismissed the guard and gave some attention to Mick's swollen mouth. Derek Crawford looked the place over and propped his foot up on a low anvil. "Great game," he said. "Did Cooey tell you who I am?"
"No."
"Derek manages the East Belfast Boilermakers," Cooey said.
The mention of Ulster's most prestigious rugby team received the desired effect. It was the club of the Weed Ship & Iron Works, the only professional team in Ireland, and nearly as illustrious as the national team itself.
"I'll get right to the point, lads," Derek Crawford said. "I've been touring the province scouting out new talent We've signed on three lads from the national team, the same team that won Ireland the triple crown by whipping Scotland, England and Wales in a single season. Needless to say, the Amateur Union is hollering and screaming over that and just as needless to say what kind of a team we'll be fielding next season. I'm hereby inviting you two gentlemen to Belfast for a tryout and I'm wagering you both can make the club."
"Holy Mother," Mick garbled through puffed lips.
"We're not rugby players," Conor said.
"Anyone who can play Gaelic, we call it garlic" — he paused and waited for the laugh — "can learn league rugby. We've a junior club, more or less amateur, but you've every chance to be on the Boilermaker squad before the end of a season."
"Holy Mother," Mick repeated.
Derek Crawford painted an exotic picture. There would be a guaranteed job at the shipyard for a quid a week minimum and they would be paid ten bob a game (under the table) while they played on the junior club. Later, when they made the big team, the pay was a quid a game and bonuses for winning.
Mick, whose head hadn't been exactly right since the crash, almost fainted at the size of the offer. Crawford went on with his non-stop pitch, glorifying Sir Frederick Weed's determination to have the greatest club in the world and dabbing in the final strokes with a dramatization of the annual team tour of the English Midlands . . . in a private car of the Red Hand Express train. Conor said nothing. Cooey was fearfully uneasy.
"Oh, it's a powerful offer," Mick said.
"Yeah, what about Catholics in the shipyard?" Cooey snapped.
"When it comes to the Boilermakers, we've only got one religion, winning. Almost half our lads are Catholic. I got no personal use for the sectarian shit and so long as you're on the team you'll have a decent job and have no problems at the yard. What's more, if you give us a few good years, your bread will be baked. Sir Frederick always retires his lads in style."
Conor grabbed Mick's sleeve before he could agree. "We've got to talk it over with Cooey," he said.
"Sure, lads. I'm at the Donegal House till tomorrow morning. Don't, for God's sake, allow this golden opportunity to pass. You'd be making a dreadful mistake."
*
At the banquet in the social room of Celtic Hall, two lads from the Strabane Eagles and Mick and Conor of the Bogsiders were named to the County Derry team to carry their banner into the all-Ireland playoffs. By a flip of the coin, Cooey Quinn was chosen as manager, with the loser as his assistant. While brotherhood waxed supreme as befitting a celebration of County Derry's co-champions, Mick and Cooey sat through it as though they had lost their favorite sisters. They maintained morose silence and ugly glares until the call for the late train to Strabane emptied the room, leaving behind a minor shambles.
Conor nodded to Father Pat, who closed the door after the final reveler had departed. Mick made an attempt to slip out but his way was blocked.
"I ain't staying here and talking as long as Cooey makes me feel like a shagging traitor."
"Well, that's what you are," Cooey retorted. "Maybe you didn't hear the speeches tonight or Father Pat's very own words on the subject of the meaning of our games. Look around the room, Mick McGrath, at them pictures on the wall, if you will. That's the meaning of it, man, us playing our own games in our own country and not going off and playing fucking British games . . . excuse my words, Father, but I'm like to breaking inside."
"Bullshit," Mick retorted.
"Bullshit, is it? Insulting the ideals on which the GAA was founded ain't bad enough, but what about running out on your mates when we've a crack at the Irish championship? It's a sellout and you know it."
"I’ll bust your head in, that's what!" Mick blabbered through bloated lips.
"Hold it, hold it," Father Pat said. "You're getting a bit thick, Cooey."
"Oh, is it now? You should have heard that sweet talking Derek Crawford. He took those two lads from the Strabane Eagles as well and God knows how many more from the county team. He doesn't give a shit, excuse me, Father, about us. I asked him to hold his trials till after our playoffs, but do you think he'd do it? He's pumping a lot of hot air about jobs you'll never see."
"I've checked into his claims, Cooey," Father Pat said. "It's a professional team and they can't hold trials during the winter, that's obvious. He wouldn't give Mick a round-trip ticket to Belfast unless he was serious."
"Them tickets don't cost him nothing. His boss owns the railroad."
"Shut up, Cooey!" Father Pat demanded. "What do you think, Conor?"
"It doesn't concern me, I can't leave Derry," Conor said.
"Thank God someone around here has some loyalty," Cooey retorted.
"It's nothing to do with loyalty," Conor said. "I've got a business. I can't go."
"What about me?" Mick pleaded.
Conor shrugged.
"Well, answer him, Conor," the priest said.
"In a year or two I was envisioning Mick becoming foreman of the forge but if the talk was between the two of us alone, I'd tell him to get the hell out of this place. I think you ought to go, Mick. The welcome mat will be out for you here if you don't make the Boilermakers."
The blood drained from Cooey Quinn's cheeks. Squat, bandy-legged Cooey was thirty-seven, beyond dreams. At his best no one would have offered him a shot at the Boilermakers. Gaelic football? A poor boy's game played in weed-covered stony fields for the collection of ha' pennies. A pub full of yesterday's heroes hustling drinks. Cooey would go on driving a draying wagon and his wife and kids would work at the shirt factory till they emigrated or died. Yet the Bogsiders were the pride of his life. Nae, the only thing in his life. It was he, Cooey Quinn, who had discovered and made players of Mick and Conor. It was he who had given them their Irish identity that they seemed so quick to dump at the first offer from bloody strange
rs.
"Why is it, Father Pat," Cooey snarled, "every time we have a man of substance in Derry, he's got to up and go!"
"Because in Derry all a man can hope for is to reach the upper level of stagnation."
Cooey seemed crushed and Mick McGrath began to cry. It was partly comic because of his bloated mouth. Then the tears became doubly sad because they gurgled from a tough stocky kid who had spilled very few of them in his life. Conor tried to comfort him but he pushed away and stood with his face to the wall and beat his fist against it
"See what you've gone and done, Cooey," Conor snapped.
Mick spun around. "GoddammitI Look at me! I'm nearly thirty and all I ever worked was for two years until Conor opened his forge. Jesus, at least I've got to try. You got no right making me feel like a shagging traitor."
"Cooey Quinn," Father Pat said, "dreams in this place are bashed around enough. You can't stop a man with a fighting chance to see one day in the sun."
"What about my dreams, Father?" Cooey said.
Cooey looked around the thready walls at the photographs of ragged teams. In a passing flash he was able to envision himself for a single instant as he did so many times alone with his own thoughts on the delivery wagon. There he was, his photograph on the wall, larger than the test, and alongside that a framed account of his prowess. COOEY QUINN, the Belfast Telegraph headline sang out, STAR LEFT WING OF THE BOILERMAKERS AFTER THREE SCORES IN A SINGLEHANDED DEFEAT OF THE BRIGHOUSE RANGERS. IRELAND'S MOST FAMOUS RUGGER ON A TEAR! COOEY QUINN, CHEERED BY THOUSANDS! COOEY QUINN, A NAME THAT WILL LIVE IN THE ANNALS!
He walked up behind Mick and jabbed him in the ribs. "Like Conor says, you're always welcome back. Come on, Mick, let's go down to the Donegal House and see that Crawford fellow."
Father Pat and Conor braced against the nip in the air as they made automatically in the direction of Nick Blaney's.
"And you, Conor?"
"I don't know, Father. It can't end here, can it?"
"The Bogside gets to us all, sooner or later, but it's part of Ireland, maybe it is Ireland."