A Galway Epiphany

I checked the calendar. I’d been MIA for five days.

As I sipped the coffee, added a hint of Jay, I finally got the courage to check my phone.

Fifteen messages.

Took a deep breath.

Two from Ceola, the first berating me for not turning up to meet her, the second saying she and Dysart were heading for the farm and she hoped maybe I had already gone ahead.

A message from Malachy, saying,

“You were supposed to kill me two days ago and, what, you couldn’t even rise to a birthday card? Would it have been so difficult to do that? Some friend you are.”

Okay.

Then two from Dysart, calling me a cunt, demanding I show up. Another from Ceola. She sounded hysterical, scared, nigh screaming, like this,

“God, oh God, Jack, this has gone very bad, oh no!”

Then her phone went dead.

The rest were from Owen Daglish, urgently demanding I get in touch.

I rang him with a deeply ominous dread.

He opened by launching into a severe bollocking, then roared,

“Stay put, I’ll be at your apartment in jig time.”

He was.

He stormed in, asked for a large Jay, urged I have one too.

Looked at me, added,

“One more for you.”

He lit a cigarette, blew out a cloud of tense smoke, said,

“There has been a massacre at the farm of your buddy, the Rolling Stone guy.”

He let that hover, snarled,

“Where the fuck have you been?”

I didn’t want to hear him say what my mind conjured up. He said it fast.

“Your friend is dead, a young lady who I believe lived with him, she’s dead, and a man we have identified as an ex-priest and, weirdly, a falcon.”

I asked,

“No teenage girl?”

He was furious, went

“Girl? Christ, aren’t there enough dead for you?”

I said with an audible tremor in my voice,

“There was a girl of maybe fourteen staying there, the miracle girl, Sara?”

He said,

“Not the fucking miracle kids again. They have been a bloody curse.”

How right he was.

Slowly, he described the scene.

Keefer with his face shot off. Ceola, her throat cut.

Dysart was burned alive when the farmhouse was set ablaze. The falcon was beheaded.

Forensics was treating it as some sort of bizarre murder(s)-suicide.

I put my head between my knees and vomited onto the carpet.

For a week I was put under the Garda hammer.

Questioned.

Quizzed.

Threatened.

Cajoled.

My answer to everything was constant:

“I don’t remember.”

And I didn’t.

Melvin Minkler, now a senior officer, snarled,

“You’re telling me you were in a blackout for a week?”

I looked at him. I was so shattered he could have beaten me to pulp (which he sure seemed inclined to wish for) and it wouldn’t have touched the pain I was in. I said,

“No, no, I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you I don’t remember. It could have been five days, six?”

He threw up his hands in exasperation, said to the young Guard taking my short statement,

“You fucking believe this cunt? He’s admitting he’s such a drunk he was out of it for days?”

The young Guard, named Sweeny, I think, said in total sincerity,

“I believe him. My dad was like that.”

Melvin was enraged, went with

“Did I ask for your fucking family history? You think I give two shites about what your father does?”

Sweeny, undeterred, said,

“Does? No, did. He died screaming in the jigs.”

When I was released, alibied by most of the barmen in the city, I leaned over O’Brien’s Bridge, lit a cig, despair waltzing through every slow membrane of my beaten mind, and grief like a pounding blast of heavy metal hammering on every nerve.

A man approached, dressed in a fine white shirt, black pants with a crease (who irons anymore?). He was in his late fifties with short, neat brown hair, heavy black shoes. Despite the heat wave he had an aura of black anger. I know. I’ve been there often.

He near spat,

“You Taylor?”

I said,

“Unfortunately, I am.”

He had spittle at the corners of his mouth, said,

“I’m Mister Haut.”

Prick.

You call yourself mister, you obviously never had a real punch to the face, but it wasn’t too late.

I said,

“And?”

He literally quivered, managed,

“The name means nothing to you?”

I lit another cig, tasting nothing, said,

“Nope.”

His hand shot out, grabbed my shoulder. I said,

“Two seconds before I break your nose.”

I didn’t feel angry, not even remotely stirred up, but I would break his nose.

He pulled back his hand, said,

“My daughter, Greta, you threatened her, claimed she was a troll, the cause of a young woman’s distress.”

Took me a few seconds then,

“Distress? Fucking distress? Your bitch daughter hounded and terrorized a young girl named Meredith so much that she hanged herself with her dad’s tie.”

He backed away. I followed, consumed with rage, murder aflame in my heart, tears in my eyes, I shouted,

“Distress, talk to me of that!”

I looked at the bridge, warned,

“You say another fucking word to me, just one, and I’ll throw you over that bridge and then I’ll go to your fucking home and have another chat with your dote of a daughter.”

He was moving away, said,

“You’ll pay, Taylor. I’ll see you will.”

I got home, reasonably sober.

The young Guard Sweeny had followed me after I’d been released, asked,

“You okay?”

I asked,

“This good cop/bad cop?”

He sighed, said,

“I just wanted you to know that I was at the scene of the killings and I’ll never forget the burnt horses.”

Jesus H.

I said,

“What?”

What fresh horror now?

He said,

“The horses were doused in petrol then set on fire. People saw them in flames streaking through the fields, giving a sound that one man said was like the demons of hell had been released.”

I had to lean against a wall, my eyes spinning in my head, images as if from William Blake careening round my mind, a nightmare that I’d never unsee nor unhear.

I thanked Sweeny for his concern, said,

“You’re too decent to be a Guard.”

He gave a sad smile, said,

“You’d know.”

I rang Malachy, not knowing if he was dead, but he answered, snarled,

“You fuckhead!”

Hung up.

Went better than I’d hoped.

I met with Owen Daglish, tried to convince him that Sara was behind the massacre at Saoirse Farm. He was sipping from a pint of Guinness that had a creamy head it seemed a damn shame to disturb, but needs must.

He put the glass down slowly, didn’t look at me, whispered,

“You need to see someone.”

I was easing my sick soul into a Jameson, said,

“Right, right. I’m seeing you, telling you.”

He gave me a long look, said,

“The week you were MIA, a drug dealer was robbed, someone gave him a beating and cleaned out his money.”

I wondered,

Me? The bag of money?

He shook his head, as if the whole world was skew-ways. I asked again,

“Sara, the girl?”

He did something that underlined his despair of me. He pushed the pint away, said,

“You’re sick in the head, Jack. You need professional help.”

Walked away.

At a loss, I walked my own self, had finished my drink. I was fucked but not quite. I nearly drank Owen’s remaining pint but I had some standards, ragged and blown, but still.

Went to St. Nicholas Collegiate Church. The Protestant one. I felt a niggling guilt at entering there, Catholic guilt never fully dispelled. It was silent, which I loved, and I felt an odd rare peace, sat down, remembered the last time I was here, during the maelstrom of Galway Girl.

Then mourning a dead child, I’d found an old poem on faded vellum by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It had been uncanny in its lines, echoing the sorrow of the time, my time, not GMH’s.

No poem this round but, as I lowered my head in my hands, a memory of my days at the Bish in Galway, not a prayer away from where now I sobbed in hopelessness, our English teacher, a spoiled priest, beating me over the knuckles because I couldn’t for the very life of me remember one line of a poem.

The poem was “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.”

By Yeats.

Out of sheer tenacity, many years later, as a Guard on border duty, I’d found a tattered copy of Yeats’s Selected Poetry in a derelict house we were sheltering in from out of the rain.

I memorized that poem, remembered it there in the Protestant church.

I recited the lines under my breath.

They were scant comfort but the music of the structure was almost soothing.

I passed a guy who was wearing a T-shirt with a quote by the late Robin Williams:

  “If it’s not one thing

  It’s

  My mother”

Elicited a tiny smile from me. You take any trace of humor where you find it — even from a T-shirt.

The heat wave we’d been enduring rather than relishing was in its fifth week; the humidity was intolerable. Not that the vexed humanity was tolerable either.

I came out of the church to torrential rain, absolutely dashing, muttered the title of the very first Dennis Lehane book I’d read,

  Prayers for Rain.

Hard to blame Dennis, I guess.