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 hilclass="underline" 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.
Minogue squinted at the words: the customs among the dreams, the tribal groups. Ransom perhaps, forced marriages, local wars. He yawned and slid back in the chair. He sat listening to the fridge and surveying the empty glass and the books and notes scattered on the table until he couldn’t take the pain from the chair back grinding into his shoulders anymore.
He closed and stacked the maps and folders, shoved them to the wall. He probably wouldn’t be able to sleep. He fought off the thought of another half-glass of whiskey. The list he’d made might look downright stupid in the morning. So what, he’d make time somehow. He wondered if Geraldine Shaughnessy was sleeping in her suite, wherever that suite was. Was her husband — her ex-husband — awake himself, in his hospital room.
He paused by the door and laid his hand on the light switch. And Aoife Hartnett coiled up in the water for days, that band around her neck where she’d been choked turning brown as the tissue decayed. Pieces of her torn and chewed by whatever lived at the bottom of the Carra Cliffs.
Kathleen grunted and swallowed as he lay next to her “Are you all right?”
Talking in her sleep. He clamped his eyelids shut. It wouldn’t be the first time he fibbed. “I am,” he said.
CHAPTER 19
Fine by me,” Minogue repeated. “Honestly.”
One coffee wasn’t enough. He studied the edge of the carpet by the hall door. Anne Boland had a Cork accent. He wanted her to keep talking, about anything really. She was explaining how Geraldine Shaughnessy, her sister, was so nervous about going to an interview in a police station.
“It’s not that she’s trying to, well… She’s what you might say a bit phobic. She may be trying to keep some hope alive, you know, now? Going into a barracks now would be a real trial for her, I’m thinking. She doesn’t know I’m phoning now. I stayed with her last night. Sure she hardly slept a wink.”
“I understand, Mrs. Boland. There’ll be no bother. But at some point we’d be needing to get an interview.”
“She’d never phone yourself now…”
“So you’ll steer her over to Grafton Street then?”
“I will indeed. I’ll wait for her too. I have my eldest, Grainne, here too. We’ll all be driving down to Mallow when ye’re finished, please God.”
Minogue said good-bye and put down the receiver. Anne Boland had suggested the hotel but Minogue had said Bewleys. He finished his coffee and packed the folder in his briefcase. He set the house alarm under the stairs, quickstepped out the hall door, and turned the dead bolt.
He tilted the sunroof and cursed the return of that rubbery ache behind his eyes. Ranelagh was all right for a change. The traffic lights by the canal were out of kilter. A cyclist tried to pull a stunt on the footpath as Minogue worked around a bus with a foot of space to his left. The cyclist came close to taking a header across the front of the Citroen.