Malarkey (9 page)

"Who's Slade's heir?" Mike Novak drooped over his plate
with unconvincing innocence, but the question quivered on the
air.

"I am." As if aware that her tone registered smugness, Kayla
set the bread down. She dabbed at her eyes and left an unappetizing
black smudge on the linen serviette. "I'm his nearest relative. Our
parents died in a car wreck while Slade was in high school." She
sniffled. "Now I'm alone."

I made an involuntary soothing noise which she
ignored.

She picked up her knife and fork and attacked a slice of
capon with bruising energy. "Whoever did it, I hope the cops nail his
hide to the wall. Me and Slade had our differences, but he was my
brother." She speared the meat, American style, and poked it into her
mouth. "Bloody sods."

We ate in uncomfortable silence. Liam picked at his food. So
did my father. I was wondering how soon we could make a graceful
exit when Maeve reappeared looking cheerful. She was without
police escort.

Barbara and Alex rose in unison and began fussing over
her.

Alex poured her a glass of wine. "Where's Joe?"

"I left him at the station. He said he had to finish a
report."

"But dinner—"

"The man can open a tin of beans," Maeve said callously.
"We settled Grace in at the safe house and telephoned Caitlin
Morrissey. The old man was drunk."

Barbara said, "I hope Grace will be all right."

"Ah, Flynn's not a bad sort when he's sober. Joe talked with
Grace's mother. I think she understands the, er, situation."

Barbara did not look reassured.

"When we left, she was giving Flynn a piece of her mind."
Maeve smiled at her. "Send Caitlin a retainer, if it will make you feel
better. Grace is resilient. She'll be all right." She sat at the table and
dug in.

"Is that Grace Flynn you're talking about?" Kayla's voice
rasped.

Maeve raised an eyebrow, fork half-lifted. "I don't believe I
know you, but you must be Miss Wheeler. How d'ye do? I'm Maeve
Butler."

Kayla scowled at her. "Is it Grace?"

"Oh, yes." Maeve chewed with appreciative thoroughness
and took a sip of wine. "We've been seeing to the safety and comfort
of your nephew. Or niece." She beamed at Kayla. "What a blessing to
know that your brother's, er, lineage will go on."

"If she's pregnant," Kayla said flatly, "the brat is not Slade's.
He was a fiend for safe sex."

"Oh, Grace is safe as houses." Maeve raised her wine glass.
"
Slainté,
Miss Wheeler."

If I was a blackbird I'd whistle and
sing
And I'd follow the vessel my truelove sails in.

Irish song

Although we didn't reach Mrs. O'Brien's house until eleven
after the Stanyon Hall Theatricals, Dad and I set out for Ballitore
before noon on Thursday. I decided that postponing the visit to the
Quaker museum would be a bad idea. Dad had remarkable resilience,
but the revelations of the evening had depressed him. I thought his
morale needed a boost. After another heroic breakfast, we packed
and checked out, promising to return for a visit, Dad with my mother
when she came.

It seemed strange, given my apprehensions, but I found
driving to Ballitore on the narrow secondary roads easier than
driving south on the N11. There was little traffic, though the
occasional lorry zooming along in the opposite direction kept my
adrenaline flowing. I had to watch out for farm vehicles.

Dad had borrowed the atlas from Ballymann House and dug
a guidebook from his book bag. He kept up a litany of place names
every time we came to a signpost, which was often. There was no
point in trying to follow a numbered route. The only number to be
found on the signposts was the distance in kilometers.

We passed through villages with lilting names—Avoca,
Aughrim, Tinahealy. We should have gone to Tullow as well, but I
took a wrong turn and we wound up with an English clank in
Hacketstown. I spotted a signpost for Carlow there and followed
it.

We drove a while in silence. In fact, Dad had said very little
to me beyond commonplaces since we left Stanyon Hall. I thought he
was displeased with me for not telling him about the red paint. I was
not going to apologize.

One of the disadvantages of nervous driving is that you
focus fiercely on the yellow line—when there is one. The scenery
rushed by in a green blur. I wondered why the tourists hadn't
discovered the area. There were no B & Bs, which was how I
knew they hadn't. The rolling hills and pasture land were as lush as
Wicklow though lower. I crossed the main road to Tullow, still on
course. As we rounded yet another blind corner, I spotted the first
dolmen.

"My God, what's that?"

While Dad riffled through his guidebook, I heaved the car
over a humped, one-lane bridge, pulled onto a wide spot that looked
like a turnaround for tractors, and set the brake.

"I believe it's the Haroldstown Dolmen."

"Yes, but what is it?" I got out of the car and walked back
over the bridge. My father followed. A van rattled past. The driver
waved.

"A megalith. According to the guide, there are more than
fourteen hundred of them in Ireland."

The dolmen resembled nothing so much as a stout, three-
dimensional rendition of the Greek letter
pi
. It squatted in the
middle of a field full of black and white cows. Affixed to the stone
wall that girdled the pasture, a neat brown sign in Irish and English
warned that dire punishments awaited anyone who defaced a
national monument. So somebody else had noticed the dolmen's
existence. Part of its eeriness arose from the fact that we had come
on it unwarned.

I considered leaping the stone fence and slogging through
the cowpats for a closer look. The cows seemed amiable. I saw no
bulls. I didn't want to curdle some farmer's cream, though, so I just
stood and looked. The hair on the back of my neck bristled.

Dad was in lecture mode. "Dolmens were tombs. The stones
formed the interior framework for a burial mound, and dirt was
heaped over them. There are tumuli all over the country that
probably contain similar stonework. Here the earth eroded away and
exposed the stones."

A tomb.

We edged back to the car. I had not driven five kilometers
when we found another one. Dad identified it as the Browne's Hill
Dolmen, the largest in Ireland. The site was clearly marked and
featured a graveled lay-by for pilgrims. I parked the Toyota.

The dolmen sat on the brow of a hill on the far side of the
inevitable cow pasture. The Office of Public Works had built a tall
wire fence that created a safe corridor through the field.

I turned to my father. "Do you want to walk over there? It's
quite a distance."

He smiled. "Absolutely."

Close to, the dolmen was even eerier. The builders had
heaved vast slabs of stone into the characteristic formation. Smaller
stones marked the edge of the sanctuary, if that was the right term
for the area surrounding the tomb. A pair of frolicking calves nudged
the OPW fence, but the rest of the herd ignored us. The wind
freshened.

I walked around the dolmen several times and even stuck
my head under the huge capstone. I was searching for meaning, but
the symbolism eluded me. When Dad began to shiver in the rising
wind, we headed back to the car. As we walked, I kept looking over
my shoulder at the massive stones. Just east of Carlow, a roundabout
shunted us north onto the N9, and it began to sleet. I turned the
windshield wipers on without messing with the turn signal, a sign of
progress.

We had a snack for lunch at a pub in Castledermot, a town
with Celtic high crosses we didn't pause to investigate. The sleet
stopped, and the sun peeped out.

We reached Ballitore at two and found the museum. A
Quaker academy and meeting hall had been restored as a public
library. Museum exhibits—working tools from the village grist mill,
items of clothing, ledgers in neat copperplate—ringed the main floor
library. Up a flight of stairs from the foyer lay a small meeting hall
that was still used for religious purposes.

I looked. I listened while Dad talked to the nice librarian. I
followed the two men upstairs and admired the rows of plain
wooden pews, two and two, facing each other, in the tiny meeting
hall. The Friends who met there had no visual distractions. They
would have to look at each other's faces. Not a bad idea,
philosophically. I found the museum interesting, but my mind kept
drifting back to the dolmens.

What did they mean? How did the dairy farmers who owned
the land cope with their daily presence? A Quaker cemetery lay not
far from the Ballitore museum. I was looking at a Quaker meeting
hall and thinking about neolithic dolmens. The artifacts of religion
are sometimes very strange.

We left Ballitore before four-thirty. I believe my father
would have stayed until the library closed, but I wanted to get back
to the cottage and settle in.

I drove past the ruins of the huge mill around which the
Friends had built their settlement, then turned onto the N9, retracing
our route as the simplest way to get back. There were any number of
one-lane alternatives. I took a wrong turning and we missed the
dolmens.

As we left Tinahealy, Dad said, "You didn't like the
museum."

"I thought it was fascinating!" I braked for a manure hauler,
passed it.

"Really?"

"Really. The bride's gray bonnet was especially
fetching."

"Edmund Burke was a student at the academy."

"I heard that part, Dad." And Napper Tandy, the nationalist. I
wondered why my father didn't mention him.

I met with Napper Tandy and I took him by the
hand,
And I said how's poor old Ireland, and how does she
stand?
She's the most distressful country that ever yet was
seen.
They're hanging men and women for the wearing of the
green.

My father sighed. "I've never asked you what you feel about
the Friends." His tone warned me the indirect question was a serious
one.

I geared down behind a slow-moving car and tried to focus
my mind. "I have great admiration for their courage and
patience."

"Did you always feel that way?"

A straight stretch of empty road permitted me to pass. I
waited until I had pulled back into my lane then said, "When I was
small, I didn't think about it much. I loved my grandparents and the
farm."

My Quaker grandfather had suffered a stroke in his sixties.
Unfortunately, he had been driving a car at the time. Like Kayla's
parents, he and my grandmother were killed in the wreck. It would
be natural for my father to brood about that, given his own
stroke.

After a moment, I added, "I remember the funeral service.
I've always thought that was the way funerals were supposed to be.
'I will teach you, my townspeople, how to conduct a funeral.'" The
quote from Carlos Williams was inappropriate, but my father didn't
object.

We drove for a while in Friendly silence.

Dad eased his seatbelt. "I left the Meeting when I married
your mother."

"Would the Friends have disapproved of Ma?" My voice
squeaked with surprise. My mother was not of Quaker descent, but it
was she, not my father, who had participated in the Peace Movement
of the 60's and 70's.

"Possibly not. I didn't ask. You know I was a conscientious
objector, don't you?"

"Yes. Ma said you were drafted after the Second World War."
I took the sharp turn for Aughrim.

"I did my national service with the American Friends Service
Committee—in Europe."

"Refugees?"

There was another interlude. At last, he said bleakly, "We
interviewed survivors of the concentration camps. When I came
home, I found I was still in agreement with the Friends, that coercion
of any kind was an evil. Unfortunately, I no longer believed in
God."

I glanced at my father. His eyes were closed. I drove along a
stretch of green fields. "But you still find the Friends worthy of
study?"

"Of course, though their numbers continue to decline and, I
suppose, their influence. There were never many Friends in
Ireland."

The little I knew of Irish history had come to me indirectly,
in an English history course and in bits and pieces in literature
classes that focused on Irish writers. None of my reading had so
much as mentioned the Society of Friends, though there was a great
deal about religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. I
gained the impression that the Protestants were mostly Anglicans in
the south, and that the Scottish Kirk was strong in the north.

"Mary Leadbeater," Dad murmured.

"I beg your pardon?"

"She lived at Ballitore, a granddaughter of the founder. Mary
was a poet of some repute, like your mother. She wrote the most
lucid account we have of the rebellion of 1798, Napper Tandy's
rebellion."

So he had noticed the nationalist connection.

He added, "The librarian showed me one of Mary
Leadbeater's manuscripts while you were looking at the display
cases."

"1798. The United Irishmen?"

"Yes. It's sometimes called the Wexford Rebellion, though
violence occurred in Wicklow, Tipperary, and Kildare, too. It began
as a high-minded political revolution, modeled to some extent on
ours and also on the French Revolution. But it degenerated rapidly
into sectarian slaughter of Protestants by Catholics and vice versa.
An appalling failure."

I shivered, remembering Liam's comments on sectarian
killing in Bosnia. "And Mary Leadbeater was an eye-witness?"

"Oh, yes." He sat up straighter and his voice strengthened.
"Before the revolt broke out, the Friends had refused to support
coercive measures against their Catholic neighbors. During the
rebellion, the community at Ballitore nursed the wounded of both
sides. There was some looting, and the government hunted the
insurgents down ruthlessly, but no one harmed the Quakers."