Disappeared Read Online Free PDF Page B

their heads. The men had been branded informers, very much an endangered tribe during the Troubles.
    During the bad years, he had imagined his parish not so much a sanctuary for a God-fearing flock but as a no-man’s-land between two armies, an arena for IRA ambushes and British Army patrols. The normal standards of right and wrong did not apply to his parishioners, only what was necessary or unnecessary for survival.
    He drove through a forest of dense birches and came out at the town land of Derryinver with its expansive view of Lough Neagh. He swung the old car through a series of bends that the locals claimed would knock the devil out of a heretic, and, with gears grinding, passed by Maghery Church. The vague outlines of the Sperrin Mountains were visible in the distance, capped with snow. He sped along as the road rolled through a landscape that was a sniper’s puzzle of thick thorn hedges and slanting fields.
    It was fitting that this would be one of his last missions before retirement. The entire forty-eight years of his vocation had been a sad trajectory through the purgatories of this accursed province. Perhaps when he looked back from his deathbed, he might come to realize that the Troubles had saved his ministry, especially toward the end, the confessed crimes of his parishioners winding around his soul like a nest of snakes. It had been easy to distinguish good from evil, and prevent, or at least delay, his own slide into spiritual indolence.
    Pulling into Maghery Park the car skidded slightly on an untreated patch of ice. A fisherman, pulling in his boat at the nearby pier, looked up and waved at him. Disguising his unease, Father Fee got out and asked after the man’s mother, who had been seriously ill.
    It had been a long, dark winter with too many heavy skies. However, at the lough shore, the sheen of light filled his eyes, making his cataract weep. The bright swell of water lapped against the fisherman’s boat, casting arcs of light over his shadowy form.
    The priest asked the fisherman to ferry him across to Coney Island. Then he sank heavily onto the wooden seat, knocking the holy oils and water bottle in his pocket. He was glad the sun was shining as they rowed out. The light momentarily dispelled any dreaded thoughts of what was to come. For a while, it was enough to watch the fisherman as he rowed, and with whom he felt solidarity. Fishers of men, fishers of lost souls, he thought to himself. He exchanged a few words about the weather, determined not to make the mistake of communicating the reason for his trip, or the anxiety he felt.
    He was used to finding the bodies of informers left discreetly in half-sheltered places, clogged with weeds and briars, the corpse facedown and hidden from view. It had been difficult to locate the monstrosity in those humdrum scenes, his eyes eased by the sight of blossoming flowers and birds flashing through the hedgerows. When he stepped onto the island, he quickly found that this occasion was different. The person who had dumped the corpse had a showman’s talent for the macabre. The corpse was propped grotesquely in the hollow of a tree, the head and shoulders slumped with a look of haggard exhaustion in the grizzled face. Immediately he recognized the body as one of his elderly parishioners, and a regular Mass-goer at that. He had not seen him for weeks, which had been unusual.
    The priest shook his head sadly. Another piece of human flotsam washed up from the great shipwreck of violence they called the Troubles. Although the bombings had stopped more than a decade ago, it was still an unpleasantly recurring fact that his priestly life was hemmed in by sectarianism and murder.
    Often, when he looked down from the altar at his small congregation, Father Fee thought of his parishioners’ fears and hopes, their homes and families, the little crosses they carried on their backs and in their hearts. Since the cease-fire, many paramilitaries had gone to ground along