‘Dudgeon McDavie,’ Herbert Cutcheon went on. ‘He mentioned that man.’
Nonplussed all over again, Addy frowned. Dudgeon McDavie was a man who’d been found shot dead by the roadside near Loughgall. Addy remembered her father coming into the kitchen and saying they’d shot poor Dudgeon. She’d been seven at the time; Garfield had been four, Hazel a year older; Milton and Stewart hadn’t been born. ‘Did he ever do a minute’s harm?’ she remembered her father saying. ‘Did he ever so much as raise his voice?’ Her father and Dudgeon McDavie had been schooled together; they’d marched together many a time. Then Dudgeon McDavie had moved out of the neighbourhood, to take up a position as a quantity surveyor. Addy couldn’t remember ever having seen him, although from the conversation that had ensued between her mother and her father at the time of his death it was apparent that he had been to the farmhouse many a time. ‘Blew half poor Dudgeon’s skull off’: her father’s voice, leaden and grey, echoed as she remembered. ‘Poor Dudgeon’s brains all over the tarmac. ’ Her father had attended the funeral, full honours because Dudgeon McDavie had had a hand in keeping law and order, part-time in the UDR. A few weeks later two youths from Loughgall were set upon and punished, although they vehemently declared their innocence.
‘Dudgeon McDavie’s only hearsay for Milton,’ Addy pointed out, and her husband said he realized that.
Drawing up in front of the rectory, a low brick building with metal-framed windows, he said he had wondered about going in search of Mr Leeson when Milton had come out with all that in the yard. But Milton had hung about by the car, making the whole thing even more difficult.
‘Did the woman refer to Dudgeon McDavie?’ Addy asked. ‘Is that it?’
‘I don’t know if she did. To tell you the truth, Addy, you wouldn’t know where you were once Milton gets on to this stuff. For one thing, he said to me the woman wasn’t alive.’
In the rectory Addy telephoned. ‘I’ll ring you back,’ her mother said and did so twenty minutes later, when Milton was not within earshot. In the ensuing conversation what information they possessed was shared: the revelations made on the day of the July celebration, what had later been said in the kitchen and an hour ago in the yard.
‘Dudgeon McDavie,’ Mrs Leeson reported quietly to her husband as soon as she replaced the receiver. ‘The latest thing is he’s on to Herbert about Dudgeon McDavie.’
Milton rode his bicycle one Saturday afternoon to the first of the towns in which he wished to preach. In a car park two small girls, sucking sweets, listened to him. He explained about St Rosa of Viterbo. He felt he was a listener too, that his voice came from somewhere outside himself – from St Rosa, he explained to the two small girls. He heard himself saying that his sister Hazel refused to return to the province. He heard himself describing the silent village, and the drums and the flutes that brought music to it, and the suit his father wore on the day of the celebration. St Rosa could mourn Dudgeon McDavie, he explained, a Protestant man from Loughgall who’d been murdered ages ago. St Rosa could forgive the brutish soldiers and their masked adversaries, one or other of them responsible for the shattered motor-cars and shrouded bodies that came and went on the television screen. Father Mulhall had been furious, Milton said in the car park, you could see it in his eyes: he’d been furious because a Protestant boy was sitting down in his house. St Rosa of Viterbo had given him her holy kiss, he said: you could tell that Father Mulhall considered that impossible.
The following Saturday Milton cycled to another town, a little further away, and on the subsequent Saturday he preached in a third town. He did not think of it as preaching, more just telling people about his experience. It was what he had to do, he explained, and he noticed that when people began to listen they usually didn’t go away. Shoppers paused, old men out for a walk passed the time in his company, leaning against a shop window or the wall of a public lavatory. Once or twice in an afternoon someone was abusive.
On the fourth Saturday Mr Leeson and Herbert Cutcheon arrived in Mr Leeson’s Ford Granada and hustled Milton into it. No one spoke a word on the journey back.
‘Shame?’ Milton said when his mother employed the word.
‘On all of us, Milton.’
In church people regarded him suspiciously, and he noticed that Addy sometimes couldn’t stop staring at him. When he smiled at Esme Dunshea she didn’t smile back; Billie Carew avoided him. His father insisted that in no circumstances whatsoever should he ever again preach about a woman in the orchards. Milton began to explain that he must, that he had been given the task.
‘No,’ his father said.
‘That’s the end of it, Milton,’ his mother said. She hated it even more than his father did, a woman kissing him on the lips.
The next Saturday afternoon they locked him into the bedroom he shared with Stewart, releasing him at six o’clock. But on Sunday morning he rode away again, and had again to be searched for on the streets of towns. After that, greater care was taken. Stewart was moved out of the bedroom and the following weekend Milton remained under duress there, the door unlocked so that he could go to the lavatory, his meals carried up to him by his mother, who said nothing when she placed the tray on a chest of drawers. Milton expected that on Monday morning everything would be normal again, that his punishment would then have run its course. But this was not so. He was released to work beside his father, clearing out a ditch, and all day there were never more than a couple of yards between them. In the evening he was returned to the bedroom. The door was again secured, and so it always was after that.
On winter Sundays when his sister Addy and the Reverend Cutcheon came to sit in the back room he remained upstairs. He no longer accompanied the family to church. When Garfield came from Belfast at a weekend he refused to carry food to the bedroom, although Milton often heard their mother requesting him to. For a long time now Garfield had not addressed him or sought his company.
When Milton did the milking his father didn’t keep so close to him. He put a padlock on the yard gate and busied himself with some task or other in one of the sheds, or else kept an eye on the yard from the kitchen. On two Saturday afternoons Milton climbed out of the bedroom window and set off on his bicycle, later to be pursued. Then one day when he returned from the orchards with his father he found that Jimmy Logan had been to the farmhouse to put bars on his bedroom window. His bicycle was no longer in the turf shed; he caught a glimpse of it tied on to the boot of the Ford Granada and deduced that it was being taken to be sold. His mother unearthed an old folding card-table, since it was a better height for eating off than the chest of drawers. Milton knew that people had been told he had become affected in the head, but he could tell from his mother’s demeanour that not even this could exorcize the shame he had brought on the family.
When the day of the July celebration came again Milton remained in his bedroom. Before he left the house his father led him to the lavatory and waited outside it in order to lead him back again. His father didn’t say anything. He didn’t say it was the day of the July celebration, but Milton could tell it was, because he was wearing his special suit. Milton watched the car drawing out of the yard and then heard his mother chatting to Stewart in the kitchen, saying something about sitting in the sun. He imagined the men gathering in the field, the clergyman’s blessing, the drums strapped on, ranks formed. As usual, the day was fine; from his bedroom window he could see there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
It wasn’t easy to pass the time. Milton had never been much of a one for reading, had never read a book from cover to cover. Sometimes when his mother brought his food she left him the weekly newspaper and he read about the towns it gave news of, and the different rural neighbourhoods, one of which was his own. He listened to his transistor. His mother collected all the jigsaw puzzles she could find, some of which had been in the farmhouse since Hazel and Garfield were children, others of a simple nature bought specially for Stewart. She left him a pack of cards, with only the three of diamonds missing, and a cardboard box containing scraps of wool and a spool with tacks in it that had been Addy’s French-knitting outfit.