The Troubles Read online

  He surprisingly does not respond angrily but with sarcasm and a dark hooded threat. “I thought that might be yer answer. I never thought ya were that daft. Get him out of me sight!” The man closest to Gerry Adams rises with a deliberate intimidating undertaking. ‘’By the way Son. There is nowhere in Ireland anyone one of us is safe.’’ I stand and turn quickly for I will not allow myself to be embarrassed further. As I reach the door frame, I feel a kick of excruciating force to the center of my back with the momentum sending me barreling to my knees, tearing the skin off of both my knees through torn blue jeans. ‘Ya be daft to turn around and trounce ‘em’, Kiera’s voice comes through clear like a beacon guiding my ship to shore. The door behind me slams shut and I am left standing on the stoop of the busy street with an amalgam of confronting emotions swirling like a wicked hurricane within myself, but I take a deep breath and find the calm eye of the storm.

  Rain is pouring down like a burst dam; gone are the individual droplets as relentless cascading sheets throng the paved streets forming streams as the sewers are overwhelmed. I have to squint my eyes into slits and pull my jacket over my slicked black hair. I am leaving Derry once and for all, as there is no place for me here and if I am to be honest, there never was; there was just displaced sorrow and grief that had manifested into a turbulent fever. What a fool I have been!

  Not one to dwell in perpetual guilt, I pace quickly in the downpour to the train station to wait sheathed by the train station’s canopy, anticipating my return to Belfast where Kiera and my gestating child are awaiting. My ribcage along my spine smarts and I am sodden with my clothing hanging like weighted rags upon my prune-wrinkled skin, but for the first time since Quinn’s murder, even in the behest of falling in love, I feel calm.

  The fire that compulsively licked my brain, giving my courtship a continuously brazen, masculine impulse, feels quelled and tepid as though the rain has quenched the flames and I am left with wet coals sizzling and protesting against the dominance of the elements. My hand in taking Protestant life did not resolve the anger and revenge I had become acquainted with. Every person I killed was not my brother’s murderer, but I had somehow slid into becoming the dreaded antagonist the slithering men at my back sought me to be. What were the laurels of constructive protest in bombing King’s Cross by the hand of an innocent boy on his spring of manhood? With my freshly gained insight there were none to be seen.

  My stomach lurches with excitement and my heart pounds forcefully as in haste my weather bitten fingers fumble with the brass key to the home I now have come to own through marriage. The carved metal preens out of my grasp and clangs onto the steps my muddy boots have soiled. As I pick up the key I feel a tenuous cold shiver run down my spine competing with a rivulet of rainwater. By intuition I dare not turn my head abruptly but through my bended legs casually peer to see a man but a hundred yards away wearing garments darkened by the downpour. Though my vision is capsized on this stormy day, I recognize him as one of Cathal Goulding’s henchmen that Lanary and I had encountered in Dublin. I make haste with gathering the key and with stressed accuracy plunge the corrugated brass in the lock and then whistle relief through clenched teeth as I make my way through the threshold locking the door behind me. Thrusting my weighted rucksack to the linoleum flooring anterior to the mudroom, my eyes briefly scan the soiled floor with an amused curiosity. Perhaps my wife is too advanced in her condition to contain the brunt of the household’s many chores. I take this as a note to become more domesticated.

  Kiera’s tidiness has always been apparent, but we have not been wed long therefore in my absence she might have abnegated her chores. I look through the condensate glass of the front door, rubbing my hand perpendicular to get a proper view to notice the man from Dublin has vanished like an apparition. With that nagging fear removed I strut into the home. “Kiera I’m home early.” My voice reverberates off of the unfurnished walls, still in a state of flux as Kiera had been preemptively relocating at the dawn of our relationship. Marriage, pregnancy had all taken precedence over the urgency of moving. “Where are ya? Are ya in bed?” I bound up the staircase taking two steps at a time in my flight. The bedroom door rests ajar and I decide to surprise my sleeping lover by taking off my already sweat stained shirt and undershirt. There is a petite figure lying completely obscured by rolls of colorful patchwork quilt but to my astonishment there is a bottle of whiskey placed on the bedside table and I pace quickly on my way over to it.

  “What the fuck is this Kiera?” My voice holds a note of anger perhaps too aggressive for a pregnant woman to hear, but for all my father put me through with alcohol, I couldn’t give a damn at this point. The figure in bed stirs and I hear a groan as I pull the coverlet down intrusively yet only a mess of black hair and slightly sallow olive skin presents itself. “Ena?” I stammer and turn away, my face hot with embarrassment.

  “Alastar?” Ena croaks my name through parched lips. Still with my back to the imposter in my bed, I implore, “Where is Kiera, Ena?” Again she groans.

  “Me head bloody smarts! Would ya be so kind as to get me a cup of tea?”

  “A cup of tea? Do ya think I came down the Lagan in a bubble?” It is bad enough she is careened, hung-over in my marital bed but now she wants me to relieve her self-induced symptoms. I think not! “Where is me wife? Is she all right? Is the baby…’’

  “Aye she is! I fear to tell ya this Alastar. Kiera is gone and I’m not to tell ya where and with whom.’’

  “Yer what?’’ Tears spill from her already painfully blistered eyes as she clasps her hands over her face with her shoulders quaking from the weight of her emotional burden.

  “I’m so sorry Alastar. She’s me best mate and now with Ma and Pa dead she’s all I’ve got. I vowed to her I would keep me promise.”

  I scrutinize my wife’s friend in her barely dressed bedraggled state, defeat and remorse imbedded into every one of the young woman’s molecules. “Just tell me one thing, I beg of ya!” She quizzically regards me intent in defusing her plight.

  “Aye, Mister Taggart, ya’ve been a good mate to me and better husband to me friend.”

  My mind rapidly spins as puzzle pieces align and a sense of realization takes hold. “Did Lanary Sloan take her?”

  CHAPTER 45: Sin sin, nil aon sceal eile agam (That’s all, I don’t have another story)

  Kiera Taggart… I hold fast to Lanary Sloan like my life depends on it, his hands crushing mine and as my feet stumble in an effort to keep up, my mind is also floundering with conflicting emotions and thoughts of treachery. “Please slow down.” My lungs draw in cold air that burns from the pace of my bodies’ effort.

  “He’ll come looking for ya. We’ve got to get ya as far away from yer parent’s murderer as soon as possible.” I look back over my shoulder at the canopy of intertwined vines and thickets of briar tenting the winding, pebbled trail that Lanary’s Fiat has parked in. He has hastily covered the alerting red carriage in downed holly and fading brown rowan branches. I shiver from the dampness as I trail the looming figure that is madly dashing into the highland forest before us. We careen noisily around a blind bend in the trail and before us posed in a preternaturally eminent stance, is a stoic, red deer buck with branch-like antlers hinged to the sky like invisible threads to the heavens. His spirited, proud eyes are the sunlit brown of amber brook water as they regard us as imposters and yet they are gentle and inquisitive. His majestic hide is made of velveteen a shade lighter than his eyes and his white tuft of a tail twitches energetically. The sentient creature paws his powerful, though delicate hoof on the forest floor and lowers his head in what appears to be a gesture of recognition and submission. An image vaults before me and as I stare at Lanary and the beast before him, the vision conjures a memory. I had fainted in the cemetery and as I had lost lucidity, when the darkness had overshadowed the light, I had envisioned an effigy of Lanary as Cernnusos the God of Virility, animals, the forest and the underworld. He was our proud antlered God, bor
n at the winter solstice only to wed the Goddess of Beltane and to die at the end of summer’s solstice and continue the cycle of reincarnation, rebirth and death whilst alternating with the Goddess of the Moon ruling over all life and death. I remember that as I had lain on my back overcome by shock and grief, Lanary had appeared before me in a mirage, casually undressed and naked, with an ornament of gnarled, wooden antlers atop his silvered brow.

  The vision has significance somehow as I watch the buck staring at us for a frozen moment and then finally after a nod of Lanary’s head, the woodland creature turns and bounds with what looks like one athletic leap into the cover of trees to disappear within an instant. The majestic spell is broken and I regain my wits under the weight of my rucksack, which has become unmanageable on my knotted shoulders.

  “What a mighty creature, aye, Lanary?” My tongue feels parched and I ache with an exhausted thirst. “Can I have yer canteen once more?” My vision stutters slightly as the cylindrical silver object seems to inexplicably appear in my gloved palm. I look to Lanary who is now vacillating like the furthest stars in our galaxy flicker as their own suns and moons rotate around them allowing our earthly eyes to catch the twinkling of their passing of light through our turbulent atmosphere. My hand feels numb and I rebuke it as though it is not conjoined to my arm and torso and raising the container of liquid to my lips with sudden, unforeseen weakness, I gulp the cold water as the liquid floods like a tidal wave, choking me with such a bitter taste and causing me to spit it out with distaste.

  “What’s wrong with me, Lanary? Is it the pregnancy?” My hand begins to feel like a pincushion and as my eyes resume focus my exposed wrist appears strangely tinged with blue. I try to protect my stomach but both arms fall limp, suddenly paralyzed. The bridge of my nose tingles as though I have been planted with a punch between my eyes. Panic begins to surge through me as I try to calm myself and take a step to Lanary, but my legs deceive me as my gait is reminiscent of a whiskey-fueled escapade.

  “Did ya put whiskey in the water?” The words appear clear in my mind but come out as an inebriated warble. Lanary continues to stare ahead as though he is waiting and annoyed at ailing presence. My disturbing sensations transform into agony, as the lanky man in the black trench coat seems to procrastinate any concern or care. Finally his lips move from a downturned despondency as though I am repulsive in my desperation to a tactile verbalization.

  “Don’t fight it Kiera!”

  “Me baby!” I croak out the plea as tears are dripping coldly down my numb, throbbing cheeks and the last lucid thought I have is how stupid I was to have given intoxicated Ena implicit direction she was not to betray my trust to Alastar. She now, is my lifeline and the only person who knows who I am with and where I am.

  I cling to my collection of memories of Alastar; combatively brazen, sexually forward, and loyal to some, though his rebuke of his father did not go unnoticed to me. He was illusive with the intent behind his IRA involvement and the volatile tempering of his spirit cannot solely be based upon the murder of his brother whom he regarded as his own son. My retention of anecdotal accounts had been so utterly tarnished by the sin I cannot bear to name, that I had run blindly into the arms of a waiting devil and no doubt he had been lurking in the light with no visible deceptions for us to question, yet every murky deed he had been witness and instigator of. My intense need and singular focus had been to Alastar and his to I, both obliviously indiscreet as our mentor had stalked his prey like a cougar biding time as it trailed gazelles, to await their fatigue. I have weakened from his falsehoods and have fallen easily into the hunter’s lair.

  Lanary is a man wise to his strengths and even shrewder to his own vulnerability and although he is thrice the age of Alastar and myself, he has outwitted, outlasted and defeated us in an insidious theatrical display, as the final curtain call is to the playwright’s con. Alas, poor Alastar. Does he know he is the lead character of this Shakespearean tragedy?

  CHAPTER 46: Rogha an da dhiogha (The lesser of two evils)

  Lanary Sloan…”No one can give you magical powers. You have to earn them. There is only one way to do this…practice, practice, practice.’’ –Donald Michael King

  Before Quinn, how many were there? My musings lilt and list as though my mind is a ship in the heart of a storm. In my arms is Kiera draped like a broken rag doll, her youthful alabaster skin so unblemished it looks like that of an artist’s careful simulation of porcelain doll. The only tell of her human actuality, is the pink foam that is dripping from her gaping mouth like the overflow of suds in a bathtub. She is alive and I will keep her so, but as she flounders in the control of my embrace, I am questioning why I have killed so many but am safekeeping her. I have equated at least five taken from those private tutorials and years teachingstudents and so many more have disappeared, like unaccounted for soldiers. Why did each gruesome murder of a child not spur on a climactic and final response to either the Protestants or the Catholics? Be done with them and give me back my island and I will no longer kill their heirs. My bargain has been made!

  CHAPTER 47: Na nocht d’fhiacla go bhfeadfair an greim do bhreith (Do not show your teeth until you can bite)

  Alastar Taggart…What was my mother’s maiden name? Was her first name Alice or Ailill? I consider with new clarity, how I was named after her, the one parent who left and did not ever look back. Is it my predestination to replicate this willing abandonment of a chosen spouse and children? Kiera has answered the questions that storm deafeningly, between my two ears like the rush of the sea pounding into my eardrums. Has she abandoned me because I had left her alone and with child and yet my most maddening ponder is why Lanary Sloan has enticed my new bride away from me? The nature of his betrayal could be one of a perverted plot but as those fragile puzzle pieces formed together at Ena’s bedside I think not. My gut ferments and tightens with visceral dread that his intentions are much more lascivious than bedding my wife. He is violent in nature and I assume all the times I have been with him, his libido has resulted in acts of cruelty rather than lust.

  “Ouch. Damn that smarts!” A piece of carefully sanded driftwood has flown through the air and has connected with the crown of my skull. I had driven Bobby Sand’s vehicle down the North Antrim Coast settling upon the polygonal columns of the Giant’s Causeway, parking a mile away from touristic locations and had trudged speedily down a path only a few locals would have been privy to. The wind has increased its howl exponentially, singing a song as ancient, and foreboding, as mystical and prehistoric as Ireland itself. My hand appears bloodied from my wound and the salt encrusted raindrops sting my cut scalp with the ocean’s brine. I am close to the sea and although she is not yet in sight, I can hear the slapping of surf against the oppressed rocks of a foreboding shoreline.

  It is Lanary who has a greater bearing of the land and sea than I and it is in my estimation that he would have taken Kiera to an imbedded cave, where the World War II veteran and my bride would have a stone fortress for shelter from the docking force of this winter’s squall. (The giant of Finn McCool is said to have forged layered gray basalt into tall polygonal formations, pillars poised like resplendent Grecian columns before a shoreline plagued by ocean wrought caves and grassy knolls, presenting an ancient home full of folklore and superstition.) As I pound the trail one thudding footfall after another, my eyes fly skyward as a flock of birds the color of the rain and clouds concentrate into a condensed mass. Vaulting with a mystical synchronicity, is an amalgam of cloud gray, soot black and silver in a tidal wave of flapping wings. What has caused me to pause and halt in my stead is the force with which the wind has blown and the flock is flying for it is against the easterly wind with a strength that seems unnatural. The birds do not break nor divert from their flight but pierce through the sixty-mile winds as though they have a preternatural strength.

  This brings to mind a folkloric tale that keeps Irish children wary of open windows on the west side of their homes for fear that the Sluagh (d
ead Irish sinners) will fly in and take possession of an inhabitant’s soul. This marauding, supernatural form is said to be in the animation of a flock of birds flying in from the west with gale strength.

  Droplets of bird excrement fall onto the skin of my pronounced forehead and with the same hand that had been tending to my bloodied crown, I raise it closefisted and curse to the wind wiping the warm shite off me face. The wind and rain deluge in a terrifying effort and remnants of the flock are lost within the zephyr of gusts and sleet. My eyes sting as the salt pricks my hooded dead-tired lids with a million needles rendering me blind and without mercy, the howling wind reaches a crescendo, and I am now deaf. My jacket, now cloaked over my face, provides little protection, as I breathe in streams of water while gasping and choking while the storm dares to drown me. I know I should return to the car and wait out the gale, but as my gut twists like a writhing snake, I am propelled forward. Even if I am to die, I must make my way to Kiera, for I fear that her life and my infant’s life are both in grave peril.

  I reflect for a moment, when I was a teenager and had run away to look for my mother, but had not gotten far without a map, money and too great pride. I had hidden for two and a half days in one of the water-worn caves a few miles down the coast from where I trudge this day. Although bats and crustaceans dwell deep in the murky depths of the caverns, the one cave I remember when I had haphazardly landed upon it as a wayward child, was a suitable shelter from the Nordic chill of the open ocean. Drawing upon all my memories I make one final lunge and now am standing on top of a ragged cliff with dead grass and moss blanketing beneath my boots. The endless sea lies before me like a gray sky with portions surging and swelling with limitless tons of water beneath, while white caps froth like a rabid beast gnashing its teeth. One hundred feet below my perch lies the shore, although the sabulous junction appears to be in a life threatening joust of a conquering ocean’s army pillaging the haggard rocks of land. I gather courage and draw in another salt soaked breath and spitting out the bitter brine, I angle my body like a lighthouse and turn my gaze left and then right as a spotlight seeking my wife.