chapter fourteen
Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
Driving into work this morning I passed a previously unnoticed hillside of windmills. I may not have noticed them before because they just weren't there, but if so I certainly missed their erection, which must have taken quite a long time. They were simply suddenly there. Bet always said I did not have my mind on the world at all. One day I came in from the rain, sat on the couch, and a few minutes later, happening to touch my hair, asked, 'Why is my head wet?' Bet loved to tell that story, or used to, when there was someone to tell it to.
But there were the windmills, suddenly. It is a hill – more of a mountain I suppose, if we have such things in Ireland -called Labanacallach, and there is a wood also, called Nugent's Wood, going up to the frostline. Who Nugent was or why he planted a wood is anyone's guess, or at least there would be only old codgers who know these things. I was driving along in my Toyota, feeling quite wretched, with the same drumming recrimination going on in my stupid head, when I saw the windmills silverly turning, as one might say, and my heart lifted like a quail from the very bog. It lifted. They were so beautiful. I thought of windmills in paintings, the strange emotions still attaching even to their memory. Don Quixote maybe. How sorry I always used to feel when I saw a ruined mill long ago. Magical buildings. These modern versions of course are not quite the same thing. And of course they are strongly objected to. But they are beautiful. They made me optimistic, like I could still achieve something.
I had woken in the night with an appalling sense of shame and disquiet. If I could itemise the attributes of my grief, and print them in a journal, I might do the world a general service. I suspect it is hard to remember grief, and it is certainly invisible. But it is a wailing of the soul nonetheless and I must never again underestimate its acidic force in others. If nothing else I will hoard this new knowledge in the hope that when it passes I may still retain its clinical anatomy. Thank God for those windmills.
But in the small hours of the night I awoke. I think it was that mysterious knocking again, whose source I still don't know. It is Bet beseeching me to remember her. She needn't worry. I looked over what I had written about Roseanne Clear but all I saw, all that registered, was those stupid words I had written about Saddam Hussein. I suppose it is as well I am a man of no importance, which keeps my views, especially when they are inappropriate and embarrassing, private.
When the late Pope died I had also odd emotions then. I was deeply moved by the death of a man who had not been helpful to those of my patients who are religious, but also gay, or God help them, women. While he lived it seemed the apogee of existence was just what he was himself. But in his death he was magnificent, brave. In his death he became more democratic maybe, because death includes everything, likes everything human -can't get enough of it. Death be not proud. Well yes, but death is mighty and dreadful. The Pope made short work of it.
Too much thinking on death. Yet it is the music of our time. As the millennium passed fools like myself thought we were about to taste a century of peace. Clinton and his cigar was so much greater a man than Bush and his rifle.
The more I look at Fr Gaunt's deposition, the more I seem to believe it. It is because he writes well in a sort of classical way, no doubt taking his syntax and his skills from his training in Maynooth. He has a very Latinate style it seems to me, of the kind I remember distantly from struggling with Cicero at school in Cornwall. His desire, almost his anxiety in psychiatric terms, to tell the story illuminates it.
He is unburdening himself, as he might a sin. Certainly his text is far from sacred. But he does not flinch. He is staunch. He is fearless. Fr Gaunt conscientiously details it all.
As a rule, a policeman in Ireland was never stationed near his own home town, one presumes so that there would be no question of favour to people among whom he had grown up. Roseanne's father was actually one of the few exceptions to this rule, as he had been born and bred in Collooney, not so far, and certainly not far enough, from Sligo town itself. So he knew the district in a way that was perhaps not healthy for himself. It was possible for people to take more personally his presence in the town, in particular after the bringing in of the auxiliary police, made up of officers who had fought in World War One, and the Black and Tans, men and officers from the same site of carnage. This was in answer to the various 'outrages' of the war of independence, consisting mostly of the ambushing and shooting of soldiers and police – the crown forces as they used to say.
Her father it seems had the capacity therefore to be very aware of things happening in the town. Perhaps he was able to pick up information casually in a manner not open to a stranger. People might be more inclined to include him in gossip and rumour at the public house in the evening. Certainly her father had an enormous capacity for alcohol, being able like a docker to down fifteen pints of porter in a night and steer himself home afterwards. Apparently his daughter Roseanne would wait, anxiously no doubt, for his tread as he turned into their street, when she would gather him into the house.
Roseanne's playground was Sligo cemetery at the back of their house. She knew every alleyway and quirk of the place, and her special spot was the old ruined temple at its heart, where she liked to play hopscotch and the like in the crumbling portico. One evening, wrote Fr Gaunt, it seems she witnessed a strange burial. It was a group of men coming in with a coffin, quite without priest or ceremony, and lowering it into an open grave, and burying it there quietly in the dark, the only thing to show them the fags sparking in their mouths and the subdued chat. Roseanne, as would be natural in a daughter, ran to tell her father what she had seen. It seems she thought it was grave-robbers, though in truth the coffin was being put in not taken out, and there had not been such thefts in Ireland or anywhere else for half a century.
How Fr Gaunt knew all these details is not clear, and indeed as I read it over now I am puzzled by his omniscience, but then that was the ambition of a priest in his time.
At any rate her father had the coffin disinterred the next morning, Fr Gaunt himself in attendance, and in the coffin was found not a body but a stash of guns, items very hard to get in the war of independence and gathered with great hardship, indeed often by means of taking one from the corpse of a slain policeman. And so it turned out, many of the items in the coffin were indeed police issue, and the haul from ambushes and raids. So from Roseanne's father's point of view, he was looking at the relics and signs of murdered comrades.
The newly cut name on the gravestone was Joseph Brady, but no one of that name had died in the town.
Unbelievably, the men had also buried with the guns notes of secret meetings, including, by some foolish miracle, various names and addresses, including certain individuals wanted for murder. It was a wretched bonanza for the police. Before anyone knew what was happening, some of the names were arrested, and one of them was killed 'evading capture', a man called
Willie Lavelle, whose brother later played a part in Roseanne's life in Sligo, according to the good priest. For some reason this man Willie Lavelle was buried in the very grave where the guns had been so futilely hidden.
The recapture of the guns and documents and the killing of the man caused a subterranean furore in the circles involved in hiding them. Orders were issued no doubt for any and every possible act of reprisal against the police. But this did not happen immediately, long enough for Roseanne and her family to experience living day by day and minute by minute under this pressing tide of dread. I am sure they hoped and prayed that the insurgents would be defeated and Ireland restored to peaceable ways. Chance would be a fine thing, they might have said.