City of the Tribes, page 4
‘You’ll what?’ Peadar asked. ‘Say that again about me darlin’.’
‘He’s five years of age,’ said the farmer, ‘and I’ll give you eleven pound for him.’
‘You gouger!’ said Peadar then, raising his stick and bringing it down solidly on the skull of the poor man. A most surprised look came on his face before he fell. The bulk of his hat saved him from the worst, but a trickle of blood shortly made its way down the side of his face. Then Peadar raised his foot and kicked him.
‘Here!’ Sean roared from the ring of the crowd, where he had come to watch, trying to push his way through. He saw the farmer rising to his feet and aiming a blow at Peadar. But Peadar dodged, and Sean heard the sound of the blackthorn hitting against the side of the farmer’s head.
He felt sick and furiously angry as he tried to force his way through the crowd. It was the same as if he had got the blow himself, to see the innocent man with the ashplant getting it. As if at a signal, the whole crowd around him became a vortex of fighting. The tinkers appeared by magic and started to hit out left, right and centre, while the friends of the farmer who had been stricken down waved their arms and their feet and their sticks or anything at hand. The tinkers fought them and they fought one another, because here at last was the chance not only to beat the townsmen and the countrymen but to get a bit of their own back in a bout of intertribal warfare. Even the women with the sucking infants joined in, using their baskets of Sacred Heart scapulars as weapons, with their shrill screaming curses and their black nails to scratch, falling back from the other tinker women to roar, ‘Hit me now with the child in me arms!’
Sean lost his hat first to the sweeping blow of a stick swung by a tall young tinker. Sean caught him close and took the stick from him and threw it far away and then flung the man from him. He was sorry. A raging woman came at him with her nails and he shouted as he felt the skin of his face being torn, so he caught her arms and held her down and turned her and flung her gently away. Then he got a blow on the side of his face from a closed fist. It rocked him so that he fell on one knee. He saw the boot coming for his face then, and fell further so that he just missed it, and after that he roared and raised himself and caught at the foot and pulled, and the man fell on the ground, and Sean planted a fist in his face and tried to get at Big Peadar, the instigator of it all. He could see him in the centre of a cleared space waving his stick and bringing it down, roaring curses and boastings like something out of a story. ‘If I can get near him,’ Sean thought, ‘I’ll kill him.’
He got near him, but it was a hard fight. His tunic was torn up the back and the collar of it was torn away, too, and hung down his chest. The bright silver buttons, many of them were missing from him when he finally got within hitting distance of Peadar. That was as far as he got. The great stick swung and Sean felt the sickening thud of it against the side of his own skull. Half conscious, he fell to the ground, and then he felt Peadar’s boot biting into his stomach and he groaned.
Peadar danced around then boasting, tearing the shirt from his chest to expose it and shouting in the arc of his swinging stick.
‘I’m a lion!’ He roared. ‘I’m a bull! I can lick any man in Ireland! I’d let the blood a Finn MacCool, so I would. Let ye all come! Let ye come from north, south, east or west and I can lick ye! I’ll lick ye with me arms tied behind me back. I’ll lick ye with me legs tied around me. Ah! Come on, any man in Ireland that wants it, let him come!’
Nobody wanted. There were too many of them either stretched bleeding on the ground or crawling away. So Peadar turned again to deliver another kick on the body of the Guard, but to his surprise the body of the Guard wasn’t there. Instead, he got a puck in the kisser that rocked him on his heels. Sean put everything he had in the punch, but there wasn’t enough in it. Peadar came for him again, his stick waving, his little eyes red. ‘I’ll crucify yeh!’ he roared. ‘I’ll drain ye as dry a blood as a stone be the side a the road.’ The stick swung. Sean caught the numbing blow of it on his arm and closed with Peadar, winding his arms around his body. Peadar raised his knee and brought it into his crotch. Sean fell with a groan.
He lay there, and he saw the stick being raised again, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Oh, for a baton, he thought! He felt the ridged handgrip of it in his palm. ‘If I had the baton now,’ he thought, ‘I would beat him into a clot of blood.’ The stick was beginning to rise, and he tensed himself helplessly for the blow, but it never fell. There was a commotion in the outer fringes and then a great shout: ‘It’s Magairle Mór, men, it’s Magairle Mór!’
Peadar raised his stick and danced around again.
‘I’m Magairle Mór, too!’ he roared. ‘I’m a better man than Magairle Mór! I can lick a hundred Magairle Mórs!’ And he danced around there, swaying, his great chest barely panting from his endeavours.
The Sergeant came through the throng like a scythe through a sward of hay. He just raised men in each hand and flung them aside. When the women came to scratch him, he raised them in one hand and smacked their faces with his other and threw them away. Sean raised himself to watch him coming. He thought he had never seen a nicer sight than the big face of the Sergeant and his waxed moustache ends standing out. The Sergeant cleared the ring and stood there with his hands on his hips.
‘So you’re at it again are you, Peadar?’ he asked pleasantly.
‘Come and get it now, Magairle,’ Peadar roared. ‘I’ll give it to yeh now, so I will, so that yer children wouldn’t recognise yeh for the rest of yer days.’
The Sergeant moved towards him slowly.
Peadar swung the stick and darted in towards him.
The Sergeant took the weight of the stick in his palm and then his fingers curled about it. He held it. Peadar held his end. They strained, and then the Sergeant started pulling Peadar towards him. He reached his free hand for him, caught him by the collar and hit him in the face. Peadar went back as if he had been hit with a mallet. The Sergeant took the heavy blackthorn stick then in his hands, and there in the sight of all of them broke it in two in his hands. Then he moved towards Peadar. Peadar was game. He was fighting mad indeed. He wanted no invitation. He tried the boot. It didn’t work. The Sergeant caught the heel of it and turned it so that Peadar had to turn too. Then the Sergeant caught him around the neck and sprung him with his knee like you would an arrow from a bow.
Peadar came up again though. You had to hand it to Peadar. If he could dish it out, he could take it.
Sean was standing by this time.
‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Please let me at him.’
‘Go on,’ said the Sergeant, ‘take him.’
Sean took him. It took him longer to take him than it would have if the blood from his head wasn’t blinding one eye and if his belly wasn’t paining him and his crotch. But he took him. People will remember that fight as long as there is a fair in the square of Galway. It was a near thing, though, but he beat him, Sean did, and then bloody and torn and assisted by the Sergeant, they took Peadar, lolling between them, down the back way to the barracks, because this was the time before the police were going around in V8s. But when they locked the cell on the unconscious Peadar, Sean collapsed there in the cold draughty corridor outside the cells.
When he woke again he was lying in his bed under the white quilt.
He woke to a screaming pain and a throbbing head. It was a long, long time before his eyes could focus themselves. He was bandaged and cleaned and aching, and the Sergeant was there, sitting by the side of the bed with his tunic open, and funnily enough with his eyes anxious.
Sean looked at him.
The Sergeant looked at Sean.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the Sergeant then. ‘I didn’t think it would be that bad. He was mad with drink. He must have got bad whiskey. I only wanted to show you. I didn’t think you would have gone in like that. I just wanted to show you. I wanted to have you coming running back to the barracks for help. That’s all. Just so that you would come running back and you would have to come to me, the iron fist, the dying duck, to get you out of a fix. That’s all. I never thought you would wade in like that.’
There was a pause as Sean closed his eyes.
The Sergeant’s eyes fell to his hands.
‘Maybe you are right, son,’ he said then slowly, ‘about me being the last of my kind. But you wanted my kind up to this. Things are not as rosy yet as you think. And they won’t be for a long time. You say when I die people will celebrate. Maybe so. But I wouldn’t like to think they would, because I have always been on the side of the decent people. You think maybe that many things can be settled with peaceful means. That may be true of the future, but I have also found that force settles many things peacefully as well. It’s just that we didn’t agree, that’s all. I’m a bad Sergeant to let you in for all this in order to show you a lesson. But, honest to God, I didn’t think it would turn out like that.’
‘Sergeant,’ said Sean, focusing his eyes on him painfully, ‘it’s me that has to ask your pardon. I should never have spoken to you like that. No other Sergeant would have taken it from me. I realise that now and also I realise that I have to make one great concession to your thinking. It’s this — there are occasions on which it is essential to use force. If I’d had a baton today I would have played “The Siege of Ennis” with it on Peadar’s skull.’ He grinned.
The Sergeant laughed, loud and free.
‘Ah, that’s great,’ he said. ‘So you have learned something all the same.’ He moved to the door then and paused there.
‘You know,’ he said, fiddling with the knob of the door, ‘there’s this difference between our thinking. You see me, all my life devoted to the police. I worked hard, too, and I always did what I thought was right. I’m a sergeant. One day you will be a chief superintendent, and you will be a good one. Believe me now, I know.’ Sean thought that over.
‘Maybe so,’ he said, ‘but then I think that chief superintendents are made, and that good sergeants are born.’
It was worth it, to see the look on the Sergeant’s face.
The door closed behind him.
The Passing of the Black Swan
It was late afternoon when she started for home.
The sea was ruffled, and heaved like a sleeping giant under green blankets.
There was just sufficient wind to fill the old brown sail. It caught the sail and billowed it, and the black boat sidled over the waves, gently, like her namesake. Her black breasts were gently rounded, like the bows of the Viking boats of long ago on which she was modelled.
She was nearly a hundred years of age.
From a distance she looked just the same as all the other black puckauns which sailed the bay after the elusive fish, and even when you came nearer to her, she belied her age. She sailed so sweetly, The Black Swan did, and she looked stout. It took a keen ear to hear the groaning of her tarred timbers, the odd lurch of the ageing keel, and the hidden places where the implacable seawater had found a crack and seeped to destroy. All that.
There were three men manning her at this moment as she headed for home.
Three generations.
The father, his son, and his son, too.
The father was very old.
At the tiller he was, sitting there holding the worn stick in his old hand. A very old hand. The flesh was loose on it, but still firm.
His fingers were gnarled from decades of weather. His legs in the rough blue cloth of his trousers were bent and thin. His body was curved, and he looked small in the blue high-necked jersey and the navy-blue reefer jacket. Only the eyes in his head under the black broad-brimmed Connemara hat were still young. They were blue and startlingly clear in his old face, a worn face, a sort of ivory brown from exposure, and looking delicately brown behind the short snow-white beard and moustache and the jutting white eyebrows.
His eyes were wistful and his lips were tight. He avoided meeting the eyes of his son or his son’s son.
They were uncomfortable and unconscious of the contrast they presented to the old man, showing in themselves and their dress the slow march of civilisation.
The son was a fine man in his prime, over forty. He leaned his body against the side of the boat, his feet resting on the fish boxes, one strong arm across his chest and the elbow of the other arm resting on it, to hold the bowl of the brown pipe he was smoking. He was dressed just a little differently to his father. The same-coloured clothes, but he wore a plain double-breasted mac and the cap on his head was a peaked sailor’s cap. But the high-necked jersey swelled on his great chest. He had a big face. The muscles on the sides of his jaws were prominent, and his skin was the colour of teak, and there were weather wrinkles around his eyes. Grey eyes. Very firm.
He was idly watching his son, who was just as idly coiling rope on the forecastle.
Even bending, the young son was promising bigness. You could see that from the swell of his thighs pressing against the cloth of the overalls he wore. Yes, overalls. Of blue cloth, of course. And over that an ordinary tweed jacket, much the worse for wear, shiny with washed fish-scales and tarred ropes, and on his head he wore a plain tweed cap. He had the blue eyes of his grandfather and the shoulders of his father, and he was smoking the butt of a cigarette. His lips were red and his skin was clear, the down of his teens barely left behind him.
He was uncomfortable, too, and cast a look now and again at the old man at the tiller, a worried look.
And for some time they sailed, no sound within but the swish of the water being pushed aside and the creak from the swinging sail on the blackened mast and the wind in the ropes and the cry of the wheeling seagulls above them, attracted by the glint and smell of the dead and dying fish.
It was a particular evening.
Late August it was, the season of sunsets and hunter’s moons. The sky above was clear, and all around a pattern of small clouds girdled the world. Behind them the sun was blazing to death behind the islands, and the clouds were coloured, multi-coloured, and if you had been on the sea ahead of them and looked back you would have seen the boat and the men in it as black silhouettes. Ahead of them, where at the end of the bay the land had shaken itself free of the clinging town, in the east there, the moon was about to poke its way into the twilightened sky. You could just see the tip of the top of it, gigantic. Where the sky wasn’t coloured from the sun, it was green, crab-apple green, and green-grass green lower down. The evening star was beginning to glint, too, and the winking light of the lighthouse ahead of them was beginning to take on significance.
Oh, a very lovely evening indeed, one for contemplation, and wonder, too, at the glories that God could create from a blank canvas. Had things been different, they would have been sunk in contemplation, because most men who go to sea have learned while at sea to talk only the minimum, and not about silly material things. They have to leave that for the land and the pub in the evening with the mumble of mens’ voices, or the clatter of crockery in their own homes.
But things were not different.
They were all tightened up inside with the things that were unsaid and had to be faced now. Every wave that the boat rode brought them nearer to the end of it, and the decision of it. The two younger men were surprised that the old man hadn’t talked sooner. Maybe he wouldn’t talk at all, they were thinking. That would be good, or it might be worse in a way, because concealed suffering only festers. So, although outwardly calm enough, the stomach muscles of the three of them were very tight.
And then the old man spoke, just as they were coming up on the small island where the lighthouse was built. The sun was gone at last, and their faces were in shadow, unlighted as yet by the climbing moon. He spoke then because perhaps he wanted them not to be able to look at his face and see the emotions working on his countenance. It is a fallacy that helps all of us, believing that darkness can conceal emotions.
‘I remember,’ said the old man, ‘the first day I ever went out in her, so I do.’ He had to clear his throat then, to get a frog of rust out of it. They waited tensely for him. ‘Oh, a long time ago, maybe over sixty years ago, I was very small then, and I remember my father, and he putting the long line into my hand, and the drag of the lead was almost too much for me. I could feel the bite of the twine in my palm. But I held it, so I did, and when I felt the twitch at the end of it, I hauled, hand over hand, and I will never forget, ever, the sight of the green mackerel there on the water. I had caught him, be meself, and I thought then that there was not a greater man than me in the length and breadth of Ireland.’
They listened as he paused, and for a moment they thought, too, of the times they had gone and first felt the bite of a fish-loaded line.
‘I loved her then,’ the old man went on. ‘You can love a boat more than you can love a woman or your own child. As true as God is there, you can. You can love a boat more than you can anything else in the world after God. People will tell you that a boat is only seasoned timber fashioned by the hands of man and ballasted by the even limestone blocks.’ He slithered his boot over the blocks now. ‘But that’s not so. If ever anything living had a soul, it is a boat. It was me called her The Black Swan, from the sight of them in the river, the white ones, sailing sweetly and without seeming to put any effort into it. She was the The Black Swan to me, and we in Ireland know that a swan is a precious thing, that inside the white feathers there is a human shape; everyone of us knows that. You would no more kill a swan than you would kill your own mother. Well, she to me is like that, too.’
His voice ceased and they could hear the lapping waves.
‘She often talked to me. Often when a great sorrow would be on me, when my father died and I was young and I had so many to provide for, when I took her out to sea then for the first time on my own. She talked to me then. She took me to the right places where the fish would be that meant so much to me. As sure as God is in heaven, she did! I wanted in my foolishness to go places other than where my father had gone, thinking like all young people that I knew better than he, but when my hand would turn the tiller to go in my direction, she would go the other way. This is as true as the tiller is in my hand now. I cursed her, too. I hammered at her sides with my hand and my nailed boots, but she wouldn’t go. I gave in to her in the end and followed her. That day I took more fish than I had ever done before. You know that, even though you are young, that she would know better than myself. Even though you don’t like her now and you are about to kill her, you know that what I say is true.’
