Return to Killybegs Read Online Free PDF Page B

fire. I put a new coat of whitewash on the thick walls. I repaired the slate roof. I chopped down the old diseased elm tree, but kept the huge fir. Over all these years, with nothing to hurry me, fearing nobody, I came here on retreat. A hermit, a monk from our monasteries, a recluse.

    I have often come back to my father’s house, but when I arrived here four days ago, I came to die. Without my wife, without my son. Alone, off a bus from Dublin. Sheila joined me two days later, for an hour. She brought me supplies, beer, vodka, Seánie’s hurley, and then she left again to go back to Belfast. I didn’t want her to stay. Too dangerous. Jack should be coming to see me in early January.
    On the kitchen wall I drew a rough calendar in black pencil, similar to the ones we used to make in prison so as not to lose track of time: 24 December 2006. One stroke per day and a cross through each week. For the first three days I managed to stay inside. The cottage had become my den. I barricaded the door from the inside, blocking the handle with a plank. Sheila had sewn me some dark curtains. At night, I drew them carefully before lighting my candles.
    My wife and son had begged me to avoid Mullin’s. They feared for my life. They were right, no doubt. After three days shut away in my father’s house, though, I gave up hiding.
    That morning, I walked into the village to buy a notebook and some pens. I have the urge to write. Not to confess, and certainly not to offer explanations, but to recount, to leave a trace. Then I walked along the harbour, the bog, along the edge of the wintery forest. I was just an old man, cap down over my eyes and wearing a jacket that has seen better days. Nobody would recognize me as Meehan the traitor. Not even that bastard Timmy Gormley, who had never budged from the street he grew up on, and who would surely die one day crossing it with shuffling footsteps.
    I called Sheila on my mobile phone.
    —Someone will recognize you. Go back to the cottage, my wife begged.
    She wanted to live with me here, in spite of everything. But I refused. Too risky. Belfast had become stifling for her, so she had gone to Strabane to stay with a friend.
    —They’ll come, she whispered.
    Of course, they will come. They had already come, for that matter. When I arrived here, I cleaned off the word ‘Traitor!’ that was smeared in black tar over the whitewashed wall. But what am I meant to do? Wait in Belfast, or here, behind the curtains of the house or in front of my pint in the pub, what difference will it make? They will come, I know that.
    I had decided. Every evening, I’ll walk through the door of Mullin’s, drink the Guinness my father drank, sit at his round table against the wall, between the dartboard and the jacks. My father’s window, his doorway, his drunken front steps. Today, even my first pint was for him. I drank it with my eyes closed. And then I looked around the pub. Everything had changed; nothing had changed. It was smaller than in my schoolboy’s memory. The smells had lost their intensity. Posters had replaced the framed drawings on the walls. The voices were softer, the laughter absent. But on the floor, close to the table, you could see the mark from the old stove that used to be crammed with turf. The wooden floor still bore the scuffs of old footfalls, spilled drinks, cigarette burns. Shards of our past were everywhere.
    I felt good. I took the sliotar out of my pocket, the hurling ball Tom Williams had given me sixty years previously. When he threw it to me one night in the middle of the street it was white, almost new. He had used it once, in a friendly match against an Armagh team. The captain from the opposing team was fifteen years old. He and his lads had hammered Belfast. As a tribute to the losing team they had signed the sliotar and given it to Tom as a gift. Today the names were worn away. The ball was the colour of slate after rain. The leather was flaking and the seams were