Like a Wagon Wheel

My feet hit Brendan’s head as we jumped from our beds - we had been sleeping like foxes for only a few hours. Something hit a window downstairs and the bang had everyone in the house up and standing by their bedroom doors, struggling with some kind of clothing. Dad came running from his room in his vest and pyjama bottoms, his gun in hand, loaded, safety off. 

Mum begged him to take it easy, to be careful with that bloody gun because you’ll bloody well hurt yourself or someone else, then where would we be?

“Will you let me past, Annie?”

Please.

There was a second bang, and someone shouted, “Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph!” Someone else just shouted “Jesus!” That might have been me. The second bang was a big one, and we knew that a window was left dying on the living room floor. A second later and we heard glass fall from the window into the window-sill, the metal blinds twist and buckle in the air before falling back against the windows, one side then the other. The dog barked and glass fell, and in the quiet noise our faces filled with fear, we started downstairs, running quickly and silently, followed by Mum’s pleas for us to be careful down those bloody stairs, you don’t know what’s waiting, sure you don’t. Dad made it downstairs first, and out he went with his shotgun in his hands, with a fowl cartridge in the breech, with the gun cocked, with the safety off. Definitely. The safety was definitely off this time. He opened the door without thought, without pause, without care, without once looking behind him.

“Right boys! You two come with me! Come on.” He motioned us to follow him by bringing his hand up behind his head, then he pointed quickly up and down the street with a discreet, almost invisible motion of his finger.

I wanted us upstairs and out of the way, but Dad was in the street driving his Shredded Wheat truck, and he had one fowl cartridge in the barrel of his gun and one hundred whiskeys and one hundred beers in his fiery fenian blood. There was no way we could stay up there; we needed to go down to stop Dad fucking this up for all of us by blowing someone’s head off or getting slain himself in the middle of the street, making a martyr of himself, elevating himself to the status of the hero in the many songs that The Dubliners and The Wolfe Tones and The Pogues would surely write about him. The Carrick Martyr they would label him, and in “The Ballad of Arthur McKay” they would rhyme his name with “died that day” and “a brighter day,” and there would be some mention of how we all will pray for some better way. No surprises.

We followed, knowing we had no choice but to. There were no souls walking the street, and the orange lights barely lit up the first few feet of the entrances to the alleys and entries. Whoever did this could have been hiding anywhere, and there were many dark alleys and only one gun. It was never a fair fight. Anne-Marie, Una and Mum stayed inside. Martina took a solitary step out the front door. I could tell she was scared: she had her hands to her mouth; her dressing gown she had only half on, tied loosely and quickly at the front, in a knot that betrayed her alarm, and one so loose as to have little utility. She had tears in her eyes. The bottom of her pink nightie with the cartoon character on flapped in the breeze, and she stood stiffly on the cold top step of the garden path of number 43. The grass between the cracks in the steps made her jump when she first felt it prickly on the soles of her feet. She looked like someone who should have been somewhere else, somewhere noisy, like a busy street, asking for directions because she was lost and had forgotten who she was, or where she was, or what she was doing there. She looked like someone somewhere frantic, someone trying to understand and keep control, but knowing all the while that she could let go at any time. She looked out of place in her pink nightie and no slippers, because all was quiet and calm out there on that street: barely a sound rose, only distant cars and the rustle of anything the wind could move. In those quiet moments we heard everything. It was peaceful out there as we walked like astronauts or swimmers under water, aware of our movements and any other. We crept. We stared something in the face, and came to accept that we had to stare at it. Whatever it was it would greet us in its own time.

Martina carried her fear from the house and presented it to the street, telling the watchers the truth. No matter how brave Dad was, or how brave he made his sons, Martina told the Proud Protestants that they had won.

I came to. Martina should be the last of my worries, I thought. The sound of distant cars on Woodburn Avenue was comforting because it meant that the world was continuing, that there was life out there, maybe someone who could come to help us if we needed them. We were not dead yet. We were just cold, frightened of what could be lurking in the alleys, in the garages, or behind the sub-station. We had one gun between us, and Dad held it at the ready, guarding the front of the house, pointing here and pointing there, a thumb used to get us into the dark alleys and entries behind him, the alleys that ran from the front to the back of our row of houses. He watched as Brendan and I went into them as far as the orange light faded into shadow. We would go no further: the blackness that hid ten skinny bodies in our youths could hide four grown men. 

We each looked for ourselves and everyone else, and we talked in hand signals and nods and shrugs, all of which helped maintain the completeness and the bizarreness of a silence broken only by cars and leaves and plastic bags. 

Maybe they were clever, thought Dad. Did they smash the windows on the front of the house and run to the back of the house, down our own alleyway, into our very own garden? We checked our alley last, guided there by a thumb and the barrel of a gun: it was too dark so we came back through the house, switching on the kitchen and dining room lights. It was still too dark, so we opened the back door. A giddiness of moths fluttered in as we edged out: they craved the light as much as we did. There was the apple tree. The gooseberry bush leaves fluttered gently. The small carpet of strawberries. There was nothing behind the shed but its own broken and boarded window, clinging as it was limply to the white-with-a-little-brown. Everything rustled an eerie rustle or whistled an eerie whistle as the wind passed through on its way to the lough. Nothing else. There was not one soul behind the house, in front of the house or down any alley nearby. The stillness and aloneness in that moment is eerie, but comforting.

Having checked everywhere we wanted Dad back in the house, and we broke our silences only to report in.

“Nah. There’s nobody. They’ve gone. We’ve looked everywhere.”

“Did youse go to the top of the street?”

“Yeah, nothing.”

“They didn’t get that much of a head start, boys.”

“Yeah, but they could be anywhere. It’s just useless. It’s pitch black.”

“Hear anything?”

“Nope. It’s quiet.”

“Waddabout back there?” He took his finger from the trigger and with the thumb of that hand indicated the back of the house.

“Not a thing. Unless they jumped the fences back there or got into a shed, or…”

“There’s nothing.” We shrugged in unison and exasperation.

“Alright, alright. Just youse get yerselves back in.” With another sweeping hand he herded us back inside, him keeping rear point guard. For a few moments we stood on the pavement, our backs to the house, looking around ourselves one last time. As we moved back we looked up at windows in houses to see if anyone was looking out. Often people were, spectators. Maybe it was the person who did this, or a witness? But nobody came forward to own up to the act or own up to witnessing the act. We knew it was impossible not to have heard the bang as our windows came in. Nobody gave a damn about what was happening to us. I felt that nerve-sweat trickle again. Strange, I was so cold.

Inside the house Mum had brought the embers back from the dead and a fire was crackling in the hearth. She had coaxed the embers back to life using the vacuum created by a newspaper held over the fireplace. The wind roared in the chimney, sucking the newspaper tight to the hearth, the fire rebirthing noisily behind yesterday’s headlines detailing the gruesome deaths of fine Proud Catholic volunteers and bloodthirsty Proud Protestant thugs. The day started early. The fire started early. The kettle went on the stove. It would soon be time for breakfast, and the great bra hunt, Anne-Marie’s quest for her underwear taking her back to The Last Place You’d Ever Look. In their laments, I presumed, The Wolfe Tones would rhyme "bra" with "Tiocfaidh ár lá," the IRA’S notorious rallying call.

The police came, the police went.

“Tea, officer?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“A biscuit?”

“Thank you, sir, but no. Now... You say you were asleep at the time of the incident?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you see anything?”

“So...? Wagon Wheel?”

We covered the raggedy hole in the window with thick corrugated cardboard cut from a box taken from Crazy Prices, a box with a simple blue whale on. Soon we would go upstairs, wash our faces and get ready for the first of the morning’s scaldings. Then there was the walk down the garden path to our heavy car - watched by that smiling blue whale, which, I recall, was upside down - all the while readying ourselves for the second of the morning’s scaldings.

The year 1982 saw the start of a campaign by the Proud Protestants of Woodburn to get the fenians living in The Vatican of The Hollies to leave their home. By then we knew that the people we once called friends now felt little but hatred for us. Soon the adult friends of Mum and Dad stopped visiting The Vatican out of fear: it was not a place anybody wanted to be seen going into or coming out of. There seemed a sense of guilt - worse, conspiracy, treachery by the bucketload in this British land - by association. Only the insurance man and the milkman dared visit. But they had to.