The Killer

I pushed open the back door and some hens scuttered out from under my legs. There was a homely smell of eggshell and turf smoke. I remember there was an old type of latch on the door, and I was interested in seeing how it worked.

"Hello there!" I called out. There was no answer, but the old man hobbled out from the inside room - the only other room - and looked me up and down. "How are you doing, are you well?" I greeted him. He shook my hand right friendly, but I could tell in his eyes he had no idea who I was.

"I'm Stephen McGuire, Eamonn McGuire's son," I said. "Ah God bless you how are you," he said. "You're a brave size of a lad. Come in, Come in."

I followed him into the living room. He fiddled around at the fire, throwing a few hairy sods onto it so it bristled into life. A black cat snoozing at the grate got up indignantly and settled down a foot farther away. The man briskly swept the crumbs and scraps from a chair and told me would I sit down.

"And how old are you now?" he asked.

"Fourteen," I said.

"I suppose you'd still be going to school, would you?" He didn't seem at all sure of it.

"Well, nearly finished now," I lied, and then added truthfully, "I deliver fridges at the weekend."

"What?" he said perplexed.

"I go around in a van and we have to deliver fridges to people. We do deliveries from an electrical shop."

He looked at me, frankly impressed. "You're a mighty man," he said. "Jaysus, pulling those things around. The weight of them things, the weight of them."

"Well, we have a trolley," I said with some embarrassment.

"No matter, you'd still want to be a brave strength to go hoisting them things around. And you'd be the eldest, wouldn't you Liam?"

"No, I'm Stephen. Liam is the eldest all right, and then there's Kieran, he's a year younger than me."

"Is that it? That's a great gang. I believe I might have seen Liam the once when he was a wee gossin. So you're Stephen, is that the way it is?"

"That's right," I said. "And then there's Roisin and Aine, the girls.

"Well it's not at a loss for company you are. Will you take a cup of tea in the hand? Sure a course you will."

I didn't know his name, or what kind of relative he was to me or my parents. It was on a summer visit to my Aunty's. A month on the farm where my father grew up would teach me manners, my parents reckoned. It would show me what hard work is, what fresh air is, and numerous other benefits.

My aunt sent me off for the day with a pound of ham wrapped in greaseproof paper, and directions to "Limmus Paddy's". That was just some sort of nickname, to distinguish him from all the other Paddys in the area, and I didn't know his second name. I still don't. So I'd pumped up the bicycle tyres and put a tube repair kit in my pocket. Ten or fifteen miles my aunt said; if I was dropping with exhaustion I was to throw the bike in a ditch and thumb a lift back. She had doubts about the stamina of a city boy.

Looking back to that time, I can only guess why she sent me. My aunt herself said she hadn't seen old Paddy in over twenty years. "We wouldn't have much to do with him," she simply. There was no special intonation in her voice. None required with a mere child. But it was clear it wasn't by chance she hadn't seen him in so long. Clear to me now they knew he was reaching the end of his days. I was some sort of envoy, a token of forgiveness or reconciliation, whether from my aunt or father, I know not. In those days and those parts unspoken grudges caused rifts that lasted more than a generation.

He died the winter after my visit. I only heard about his death a few years later. My parents had no reason to tell me - I forget if I'd ever mentioned my visit. A visitor from that part of the country had stopped by for tea. There were often such visitors, as my father held people from his home county in high regard. They mentioned "poor old Limmus" a few times.

"Is he dead then?" I interrupted. The two adults exchanged a glance. The countryman spoke first.

"Old Limmus Paddy, indeed he is God rest him."

"That's too bad," I said breezily, in what I thought was an appropriately adult manner. And indeed I was neither sad nor upset. He was the first dead person I'd known; it was a minor initiation.

But I did not think of him as an old man the day he invited me in the door. He was too agitated for that. He jumped on every word I said.

"Why wouldn't you take a cup of tea! Bother? What bother would it be. Stay where you are and I'll just put the kettle on for a drop of tea. Of course you'll have something to eat after coming up that hill on a bicycle. That's a nogious hill."

"Don't be going to any trouble," I said. While he rattled and clanked at the sink in the second room I looked around me. A small square window was set eighteen inches back, indicating just how thick the walls were. I tapped a finger on the plaster - boast over large sections, yet hanging on. The bright lilac paint made no difference to the cave-like feeling of the place.

There were two straight-backed chairs by the table, and a battered couch set back from the fire. No fireplace or mantelpiece, no chimney breast at all, just a black recess in the wall and a grate. The wall behind the fire was blackened and pitted, tar-black in places. The smoke marvellously found its way up the first five feet of its own accord, to where the chimney began. I could have stared for hours at the smoke curling up free, to a point where it got sucked into the opening above. I have never seen the like since. To the left of the fireplace stood a tall press, its side toasted from the heat. The top shelves bore stacks of heavy crockery and the lower shelves were cluttered with papers, bills, and brown envelopes. That was no surprise. I knew well that even the poorest farmer was plagued with paperwork. A couple of egg cups and empty eggshells lay beside a cut loaf of bread.

The steep steps up to the loft intrigued me. I couldn't decide whether they constituted a ladder or a stairs. Steep as a ladder, but with flat steps, and a handrail like a stair. I wondered if the old man slept up there. It was hard to picture him clambering up those stairs to bed. What would happen if he woke up dizzy one morning? I peered up into the opening and could make out the side of a wooden box. There was a scuffle from the next room and I quickly sat down again.

The cat - a sooty, scrawny creature - had crawled back right up close to the fire to bask in the warmth. It exhaled audibly and stretched out its claws. I wanted to annoy it by flicking its ear, but the old man came back in with a sandwich. He looked at me and he looked at the sandwich in his hand, then rummaged in the press and took out a plate. With a certain degree of ceremony he handed me the sandwich on the plate.

"Take that now. I have the kettle on for a cup of tea but it takes forever to boil."

I thanked him heartily. I could smell the mustard from the sandwich as I lifted it to my lips, but there was nothing I could do. It was like eating toilet cleaner. The volatile chemical smell rose to the back of my eyes. I chewed resolutely. I had a strong will at that age.

"I suppose you'll stay in the city and work there," he began.

"I suppose so," I muttered.

"A course you would, a course. There's damn all to be doing about here. You're far better off in the city, no matter what they might tell you. It's a tough old life on the land. You'd never be done with it. Always pulling and dragging things about. You couldn't be up to it day in day out. And no motor car, just a bicycle."

"Do you often go into the town?" I asked.

"No, no, no," he said with unnecessary ferocity. "Very seldom now. A waste of money, that's all it is. Why would I be bothered."

"But do you never have to go in to town for stuff?" I persisted.

"A neighbourman drops by of a Thursday evening and brings me all I need from the town, which does be damn all. And the district nurse calls by of a Saturday and she brings me a couple of things too. I have to take tablets for my liver. It's an awful curse."

He got up again wheezily and went back to the kitchen. To judge from the banging and rattling, the tea was taking an extraordinary amount of effort. I opened the sandwich and threw the worst contaminated pieces of ham on the fire. They sizzled and spat defiantly, alerting the world. Die you bastard, I whispered and shoved them deep in the embers with the poker. To one side of the fireplace was a shoe box, full to overflowing with bottle tops. Guinness', every one of them. I calculated quickly in my head. There must have been a whole year's worth of bottle tops there.

He came in with the pot in one hand and a pair of mugs in the other. He poured me a mug and set the pot down right in the ashes. He talked about how seldom he went into town and how it was only nonsense, you'd be better off looking into your own fireplace. There was mention of the old fools who sit in bars, and waterlogged fields, borrowed tractors, and people who wouldn't pass the time of day to you. Some talk of a falling out with the neighbours, and how they were waiting for him to die.

I felt awkward. He had forgotten I was a child. I didn't know how to contribute to the conversation, and said uselessly:

"That cat likes to keep warm."

"He surely does. Well able to sit right in conny over the ashes. He can stand any amount of heat, no matter if the fire is mad roasting hot, he can stand up to it. A powerful cat."

While speaking he crossed the room and pulled out two bottles of Guinness from a crate. He opened them with an old 'Sweet Afton' opener, and sat the bottles down near the fire, which had died down to a dull glow under white ashes. He threw the tops onto the pile in the shoebox. They skidded off across the floor.

"What you can do for me now is take that box and empty it into the sack at the end of the byre," he said.

"Where abouts is it?" I asked.

"Ah wouldn't you see it to ff. . " He suppressed a curse and composed himself. "You'll see it straight in front of your eyes when you go into the byre."

The sudden crankiness of tone jarred with his previous affability. I stuffed the scattered bottletops in my pockets and grabbed the box. Outside it was overcast and iron grey, as usual in those damp borderlands. All around were fields - just fields - with mud and grass in equal measure and no cattle. Huge straggly ditches crisscrossing the low hills. One of the winding thick green lines must hide the road to Enniskillen. But in the couple of minutes I stood in the yard no car passed, nor even the distant sound of one. I recalled a cousin who came to visit us from up the country. He was a year younger than me, up to spend a few days in the big city. Not a wink could he sleep, he said the first morning. The noise of the cars coming and going kept his nerves on edge. Who'd be going the road at four in the morning, he asked indignantly, every five minutes. I listened that night from my bed and it was true. There was a constant sound of cars, always one somewhere, if not on the road outside then on the next one. Always people driving and driving. That's when I decided I'd prefer to live in the country.

There was a fine drizzle in the air, the kind that persists for days. I wasn't looking forward to the long cycle back. I looked around around a couple of sheds with caved-in roofs and caked dung on the floors. None of them looked like a byre to me - I pictured a tall timber building with criss-crossed wooden beams. Maybe he meant the hayshed. In among the bales I found a cartwheel taller than myself. A rusted contraption hung from a hook above the window. A spring and serrated jaws. It was a rat trap. All kinds of interesting things were lying around, but the drizzle came through the roof - hardly a roof at all - and I didn't want to be nosy. In the adjoining building there were four stalls and a three-legged wooden stool. Several large sacks - of real sackcoth - leaned against the end wall.

I loosened the top of the first and least rotted one. It was full almost to the top with bottle tops, all black and gold and white. Guinness' bottle tops, every one of them. The second sack was tied loosely with aging threads of rope. I pulled it open and sifted my hands through the rusted tops, and kicked at the solid mass. There was no rubbish underneath the tops. It was bottle tops the whole way down. The same with the third sack, though the harp design was older and they were all clumped together with rust. I was in awe of the passage of time. So many days, so many bottles. Our geography teacher had told us that that rivers could carve out valleys and the mountains could wear down to the ground. In the face of that accumulation of bottle tops it seemed more plausible.

In the distance I could see only two other houses, both of them stuck onto the bleak hillsides with no visible access road. The rain never let up.

"Who are the neighbours?" I asked when I got back inside.

"There's no-one there now this past twenty year. Not a one living around this side of Moore's mountain at all."

He pushed a bottle of beer in front of me. In comparison with the fuss made over the cup of tea no comment was passed. Perhaps he reckoned that if I could lift a fridge then I could drink a beer. I picked up the bottle and tasted the warm metallic fluid. It was hard to swallow it, but I took a large swig anyway. I didn't know what beer should taste like.

"Did they all move to Dublin?" I asked.

"Not a haet about it. Time was, there were eight families on this side of the town - McGoverns, - two McGoverns, Treacys, McGuires, Bradys, and I don't know who all else. Now you'd be hard pressed to find anyone going the roads of an evening. We used to go aceili ten miles or more and there'd be a hundred people there dancing. A hundred?" He dismissed this estimate with a snort. "There'd be two hundred. And more. You'd see the little carabide lamps all the way home. The glow off them was something fierce. And the shouts going over the hills with people continuing a conversation and they might be a mile away from each other. Jaysus, you wouldn't credit it." He snorted again, something closer to a laugh. "Them talking away to each other till they reach the front door. Jaysus sound can fairly carry at night around here. You could hear a door shut two townlands away. Ah the amount of people round here! There was a school not a hundred yards down the road, and another one by Mile's Cross, that's two, and maybe another one that's closed since. And every one of them full to the doors. And what was the fire station was the meeting hall. Time was they'd be all turned out at the committee meeting, three or four nights a week. They used look well enough in their uniforms, and them all marching up and down. - That cat has no fear. He's as tough as nails."

He pondered the cat and went on. He talked on for a long time, and I never stopped him to ask what people he was talking about or when these things happened. I just listened to him wandering on and drank the beer.

"There was a quare amount of bad blood stirred up at that time. The people could get very het up about the auld 'politics'." He said the word like it was a codeword for something else.

"We got up to all sorts of wild things. Jaysus we were very involved with the politics, me and John Flynn - you might have heard of him. By Jaysus he could be a hard man too. That was me who had young Vincent Quinn out in the byre that time. There's not many knows that. What was I to do with him? I had him out there in the third stall trussed up like a turkey, three or four days. And I asked Flynn what I should do with him. 'Plug him, plug him between the eyes, that's what he deserves,' he said to me, may God forgive us. That's what I did. One shot straight between the eyes. And now sometimes I think . . . I think it'll follow me after, you know? Sometimes I think that wasn't the right thing to do."

"No, it wasn't." I spoke out involuntarily, unequivocally.

The loudness of my own voice surprised me. He lowered his head. I was pure and clean, as yet unsullied with the murk of context and compromise. I was on a height above him, with the God-given power of judgement, my idealism that sprung from nowhere. I knew what I was at that moment, knew right from wrong, and that killing a man was wrong, and I saw the killer in him still, not the doting old man. I sat it out, refusing to fall back into that attitude of respect for the elderly, the way my parents brought me up.

Jesus but I was a judgemental puritan at that age. The old Christian Brother teaching coming out in me. My messianic phase I call it. I could have called down fire and brimstone on all the hypocrisy I saw around me. A pedestal where I could rail at the masses would have suited me. Couldn't fathom why there was so much badness in the world when everyone knew what was the right thing to do.

Funny how you can be so judgmental when you're a kid. I think it's a phase a lot of people go through. Of course that old man was no saint either. But I learned later he was a local hero. He'd taken up arms, reluctantly, when he thought it was necessary. I don't suppose it was an easy decision for him. It can't be for any soldier. He did what he was called on to do and had to deal with his own conscience afterwards.

"And is he buried out there" I asked after the silence. He looked at me and realised who I was.

"Jaysus no. Who wants to know anyway?" Then, after some snorting to clear his nose: "How's your daddy these days? Is he keeping well?"

"Yes, he's quite well," I answered.

"And your mother?"

"Sometimes she still has trouble with the knee pains."

"That's a sight," he muttered and drank from the bottle. The cat let out a long hissing sigh. It was sitting right in over the ashes.

"Look at that, not a bother on him. Well able to stand up to any amount of roasting," said the old man in admiration. "That's the best cat in all of Ireland. He can put up with anything."

A thin quiver of light momentarily ran the length of the cat. The fire, which had appeared to be dead, crackled and spat, and the cat sighed wheezily again.