War Children by Gerard Whelan

Author:Gerard Whelan [Gerard Whelan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847174086
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2012-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Dead Man’s Music

I was thirteen years old when I found the dead man in the barn, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I’d seen dead people before, of course – my grandfather, the time we got him dead in the chair, and young Murt Breen that time the horse kicked him in the head. Murt had lain in the churned-up muck of Carty’s yard and there wasn’t a mark to be seen on him, but his eyes sort of fluttered and he called out real loud for his mammy one time and then he died. When the men picked him up he was all floppy, and nearly slithered out of their arms. He was sixteen then, and he’d been a great hurler. His team did very bad the year after, missing his skill.

I’d seen a dead woman one time too, when I was ten. It was Mary Callaghan’s daughter Rose, that went missing on the hill. I was the one found her caught in the weeds at a bend in Murray’s stream. Her long hair was flowing in the water and the little fishes were darting in and out of it. The searchers found me standing there looking at her, and they thought I was too frightened to shout out. But really I’d been thinking how peaceful she looked, swaying there in the stream like she was dancing to a music the rest of us couldn’t hear – fairy music, dead men’s music – some tune, anyhow, that left her at peace. She’d been funny in her head, Rose Callaghan, and I’d never seen her looking peaceful before. There was a kind of beauty off her face there in the water, if that doesn’t sound soft. Her eyes were wide open, and they had a look in them like she was seeing something lovely and far-off, like she was after being let look at some special secret we poor live ones couldn’t see.

I said nothing about that to anyone, though. They’d have thought I was mad. We children used to catch them little fishes in that stream – ‘minnies’, we called them. Our fathers and mothers had done the same thing, and their fathers and mothers back as far as ould god’s time. But I never felt right doing it after that. I’d look at the ones that I’d caught and wonder whether any of them had swum in Rose Callaghan’s hair. It took the good out of catching them.

What I’d never seen – till I found the man in the barn – was a person so obviously killed on purpose by other people. The man that I found in the barn didn’t look peaceful at all. I’d never seen a dead person so bloody. And that will show you that I’d led a quiet life, because men were killing each other by the new time in Ireland then.

It was the blood I saw first – a big slawm of it there in the dust, like someone was after dragging a slaughtered pig across the floor of the barn.

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