The White Plague Read online

  Returning to the two soldiers at the bridge barricade, he swiveled slowly, studying his surroundings, taking in the high hill above Pullrany and the higher crown of Corraun beyond; there was Alice’s Harbour Inn beside the car park, the barricade, the white buildings across the bridge on the island, a group of men standing there, heads close together, talking intently. Presently, the major returned to his radioman and inquired:

  “Have the patrol boats taken up position at the Bulls Mouth and Achillbeg?”

  The radioman, a pimply young man with nervous manners, bent over his microphone and, in a moment, said: “They’re in place, sir, and one’s coming down from the Bulls Mouth to pick up the islanders’ small boats.”

  “Good,” the major said. “We don’t want any boats left over there to tempt them into leaving.” He sighed. “Damned stupid mess.” He strolled back to the armored cars then and told a sergeant: “Better get the men deployed. No one enters or leaves, except the medics, of course, and they’ll be coming by helicopter.” The major went into Alice’s then and he could be heard inquiring if there was any coffee.

  Some two kilometers back up the road toward Mulrany, three squads of soldiers under a lieutenant finished setting up a row of tents in the lee of the hill that commanded the narrow, salty moat separating Achill from Ireland proper. A sandbag emplacement with two machine guns had already been installed on the slope above the tents.

  When the tents were up, the lieutenant instructed a corporal: “Take your squad and notify all the locals they’re to stay close to home; no wandering about and no going over to the island. Tell them it’s a quarantine and nothing more.”

  On Corraun Hill’s 526-meter peak, about four kilometers south of this position, more soldiers had piled sandbags onto a section of an old castle ruin, forming a shelter for two twenty-millimeter cannon and four mortars. It began to rain while they were positioning the mortars. They spread shelter halves over the weapons, then huddled in their waterproofs while a colonel standing slightly below them peered through binoculars at Achill.

  “A lot of moving around over there,” the colonel said. “I’ll be happier when we have their small boats and the water closed to them.”

  One of the soldiers above him ventured: “Colonel, is it a bad sickness they have over there?”

  “So I’ve been told,” the colonel said. He lowered his glasses, scanned the emplacement, fixing his gaze finally on a tall sergeant who stood somewhat apart. “Get some shelters up, Sergeant. And you’re to look sharp. Only the medics are to enter that place and no one’s to leave.” “We’ll not let so much as a fox through, sir.”

  Turning away, the colonel took long-legged strides down the slope to a jeep waiting on the narrow track below the emplacement.

  As one, the soldiers he had left behind looked across at Achill, the island of the eagles, which no longer were there. It was a brooding landscape in the rain, a speckling of white rocks and buildings against the greens. The few roads cut gray ledges around the hills and the ocean was a deeper gray below. Slievemore and Croaghaun thrust almost into the clouds toward Achill Head’s outer cliffs. It was a place turned in upon itself and the men looking across at the island could feel the simmering mood of the land. Generations of men and women had brooded passionately there on the wrongs done to Ireland. No Irishman could fail to sense that thing smoldering there, the sullen hopes of all those who had perished for “The Irish Dream.”

  “It’ll be a scurrying-around time for the priests,” the sergeant said, then: “Now, men, you heard the colonel. Shouldn’t we be raising some shelters?”

  Far below this position and at the Achill end of the bridge where the town street became the highroad to the island’s interior, Mulvaney’s Saloon Bar had begun to collect a crowd of local residents and a few tourists. They hunched against the rain, hurrying from cars and bicycles into the bar’s steamy interior with its thick smells of wet wool and beer. Mulvaney’s, a two-story whitewashed building with slate roof and three massive chimneys, was one of the island’s natural assembly points. It was soon crowded with men talking too loudly, their faces angry, their gestures abrupt and latent with violence.

  A small Garda patrol car pulled up outside, bringing a lull in the conversations as the word of it was spread through the bar. Denis Flynn, the local Garda, emerged from the car. Flynn, a small blond man with light blue eyes and a boyish face, appeared pale and trembling. Way was made for him as he entered the bar, pressed through the crowd to the western end and climbed onto a chair.

  In the expectant silence, Flynn’s voice was a thin tenor, which broke in unexpected places. “We’ve been quarantined,” he said. “They’re sending medical teams by helicopter. No one is to enter or leave the island except the medical people and officials.”

  In the sudden babble of shouted questions, Flynn raised his voice to demand silence, then: “We’ll just have to be patient. Everything’s being done that can be done.”

  Mulvaney, a soft giant of a man with a bald head as shiny as his polished bar, thrust his way through the crowd to stand below Flynn. Hooking a thumb over his shoulder, Mulvaney said: “It’s my Molly sick back there and only the one doctor. I want to know what it is.”

  “I’m only the Garda,” Flynn said. “It’s the medical men will have to answer that.”

  Mulvaney glanced out the windows beyond Flynn, looking toward Knockmore and the village of Droega, which lay hidden beyond the hills in the hollow that protected it from the worst of the Atlantic gales. His brother, Francis, had called from there not ten minutes ago to report another death, his voice full of the tears as he spoke.

  Turning a hard stare up at Flynn, Mulvaney said: “Your womenfolk are living safe beyond Mulrany. You can take the official view. But it’s my sister-in-law, Shaneen, died this morning.”

  A man back in the press of people shouted: “And my Katie has the sickness! We want answers, Flynn, and we want them now!”

  “I’ve told you what I know,” Flynn said. “That’s all I can do.”

  “What’s this about officials coming?” Mulvaney demanded.

  “From the Health Office in Dublin.”

  “Why do they have soldiers barring our way?” someone else demanded. “They’ve even guns up on Corraun!”

  “There’s no need to create a panic,” Flynn said. “But it’s a serious matter.”

  “Then why do we not hear it on the wireless?” Mulvaney asked.

  “Haven’t I said we don’t want a panic?”

  “It’s the plague, isn’t it?” Mulvaney asked.

  An abrupt silence settled over the room. A small dark man with pinched features, standing at Flynn’s right, cleared his throat.

  “There’s our own boats,” the man said.

  “There’ll be none of that, Martin!” Flynn snapped, glaring down at the speaker. “The navy’ll be here in a few minutes to collect your boats. My orders are to prevent your leaving Achill… using what force necessary.”

  His voice hoarse, Mulvaney asked: “Are all of our womenfolk to die then? Nineteen dead since yesterday and only the women and girls. Why is that, Denis?”

  “The doctors will find the answer,” Flynn said. He jumped down off the chair, steadying himself against Mulvaney, but not looking the man in the eye. Flynn’s own superintendent had voiced that same fear less than an hour earlier, speaking with gentle firmness over the telephone.

  “If all the women die there it could be very bad, Denis. And there’s talk it was done deliberately. You’re not to speak of that now!”

  “Deliberate? By the Ulstermen or the British?”

  “I’ll not discuss it, Denis. I speak only to impress you with the gravity of our situation. You there inside the quarantine will be alone for a bit to represent authority. We depend on you.”

  “Will I get no help then?”

  “Some soldiers are being asked to volunteer, but they’ll not be along until the afternoon.”

  “I didn’t volunteer, sir.”<
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  “But you swore an oath to do your duty and that’s what I’m asking of you now!”

  As he pressed his way out of Mulvaney’s, ignoring the questions still being shouted at him, Flynn recalled that telephone conversation. There had been more orders and things he must do now.

  The rain had turned to a light mist as he emerged from the bar. He got into his car, not looking at the angry faces peering at him from Mulvaney’s. Starting the motor, he turned around and drove slowly down to the concrete apron overlooking Achill Sound and the fishboats anchored there. He could see a fast patrol boat spreading a wide bow wave as it sped down from the Bulls Mouth. It appeared to be no more than five minutes away, for which he was thankful. He parked on the concrete and took his shotgun from its rack, feeling strange with the weapon in his hands. The superintendent had been firm with his instructions.

  “I want you on armed watch, Denis, until they pick up those small boats. I want it understood that you’ll use your weapon if necessary.”

  Flynn stared bleakly across the water at the approaching patrol boat. Seabirds were wheeling and calling over the strand. He inhaled the familiar salt odors, the smell of the seaweeds and the pungency of fish. How many times had he looked on this scene and never thought it strange? Flynn wondered. Now, though… the differences sent a shuddering through his thin body. The thing he had wanted to say back at Mulvaney’s, the thing that had filled his throat with sourness, stood uppermost in his mind.

  But his superintendent had been adamant on the need for secrecy. “A great many women are sure to die, perhaps all on the island. We count on you to keep the peace until help arrives. There must be no panic, no mobs. You must be firm in keeping order.”

  “I should’ve told them,” Flynn muttered to himself. “They should be bringing in the priests. It’s sure nothing else will help them now.”

  He stared out at the moored fishboats, feeling a deep loneliness and a sense of inadequacy.

  “Lord help us now in the hour of our need,” he whispered.

  Not since the Black Death struck Ireland in the winter of 1348 has there been such a terrible time with disease.

  – Fintan Craig Doheny

  ON THE day before the Achill Island quarantine, Stephen Browder and Kate O’Gara drove off together to Lough Derg, planning to lunch near Killaloe and then drive on to a cottage on the lake near Cloonoon. It was to be a stolen three days together before examinations and a hectic summer schedule for Stephen, who now planned to specialize in high-pressure medicine.

  The cottage, a remodeled farmhouse, belonged to Adrian Peard, who had graduated six years ahead of Stephen and already was recognized as an important researcher in pressure medicine and the ailments of divers. Peard, scion of a wealthy old County Cork family, had established a vacation and weekend base at the cottage on the lake, installing a large steel pressure-decompression tank in the barn behind the cottage. Stephen had been several times to the cottage, earning money as a guinea pig in Peard’s experiments.

  Since their first sexual experience beside the Mallow Road, Kate had rationed them to one or two repeats a month and then only at her least fertile times. She had resisted this outing at first because it coincided with her highest fertility period, but Stephen had promised to “be careful.” Kate, not certain what that meant, had warned:

  “We’ll not be having any bastards in our family, Stephen Browder!”

  They had arranged the outing with care. Kate ostensibly was with her friend, Maggie, on a holiday in Dublin. Stephen supposedly was boating with friends near Kinsale.

  Peard, who had guessed the nature of Stephen’s involvement with Kate, had volunteered the use of his Lough Derg cottage “when it doesn’t interfere with my schedule.” He had handed over the keys with a laugh and the admonition: “Leave the place neat and do try to get in a little time for study. I’d tike you with me someday, Stephen. You have a talent for solving unusual problems… such as this one.”

  As Peard had expected, Stephen blushed – as much from the praise as from the conspiracy.

  The car they took was a tiny green Fiat whose use Stephen had earned tutoring its owner in the niceties of kidney function, a subject that baffled the Fiat’s owner until Stephen hit on the stratagem of a large drawing with signposts on pins through which the student was required to maneuver a tiny cardboard automobile labeled “foreign matter.” It amused Stephen and Kate to call the Fiat “foreign matter” as they drove north.

  A few minutes before noon they crossed the narrow old stone bridge into Killaloe. The castellated tower of St. Flannery’s Cathedral stood out like a Norman sentinel against a gathering of clouds on the horizon. The sky overhead was blue, however, and the lake was a blue-and-emerald mirror to the surrounding hills, its surface rippled by a light wind and the passage of a quartet of swans.

  Just north of Killaloe, Stephen stopped at a roadside “gypsy stand” for sandwiches, chips and beer, which they ate in the meadow beside the mound where Brian Bora had raised his castle. Their picnic site looked down on Ballyvalle Ford where Patrick Sarsfield and his six hundred troopers had crossed the Shannon on the night of August 10, 1690, during the Siege of Limerick.

  Kate, fascinated by her nation’s history and a little awed to be “in this very place,” began regaling Stephen with the story of Sarsfield’s ride when she found him unfamiliar with the details. Watching her color rise as she talked about that “wonderful, futile ride” against the Williamite siege train, Stephen looked longingly at the concealing shade of the trees that hid the circular foundation of Brian Boru’s castle, wondering if Kate might agree to walk into that sheltering bower with him for a time. But he could hear children shouting at the lake below the meadow, and the picnic site soon was buzzing with flies attracted by the food. They wolfed their food and ran back to the car, pursued by the flies.

  In the shelter of the car, Kate looked back at the meadow and surprised Stephen with a mystical side of her nature that he had not suspected.

  “Terrible things were done in that place, Stephen. I can feel it. Could the flies be the souls of the evil men who did those terrible things?”

  “Ahhh, now, Kate! What a thing to say.”

  She did not really cheer up until they turned down the graveled track to the cottage and she saw the old double chimney pot above the trees. When they entered the cottage, she was almost childlike in her admiration.

  Stephen, who had come to understand and enjoy most of her moods, took a positive delight in showing her around. The kitchen had been remodeled from its old farmhouse days, a large window added on the lakeside, every piece of equipment not only modern but the best available.

  Kate put her hands to her cheeks as she looked at it. “Oh, Stephen, if only we can have a house like this.”

  “We will, someday, Kate.”

  She turned and hugged him.

  Outside, there was a small orchard and an area set off by stones for a kitchen garden. The barn stood on the far side of the orchard. It was a stone building with a new corrugated metal roof, and was easily half again as big as the house. A tall growth of weeds lapped against the stone sides of the barn but the path from the house through the orchard to a small side door was clear and neatly trimmed at the borders.

  Stephen unlocked the padlock and swung the door open for Kate. He flipped the light switch beside the door as she stepped through. Brilliant illumination flooded the one large room, pouring down from banks of reflectors suspended from the rafters by pipes. The big tank dominated the center of the area. It was a full six meters long, two and a quarter meters in diameter. There were two quartz windows on each side, small and set at eye level, plus another even smaller quartz window in the pressure-sealed airlock hatch at the near end.

  Kate, who had heard Stephen’s descriptions of his stays in the tank, said: “It’s so small. Did you really stay in there four days once?”

  “It’s comfortable enough,” he said. “There’s a double-seal sanitary exhaust system
. It has a telephone. The only uncomfortable part was wearing all the connections for Peard to monitor my vital signs.”

  Stephen led Kate around to the far side, showing her the long bench of instruments there, the leads into the tank and, at the end, the racks and shelves of scuba gear that they used in the lough, and then at the far end, the two French-made compressors with their elaborate air filters.

  Kate peered through one of the quartz windows into the tank. “I’d be bored silly in there all that time,” she said.

  “I took some of my books. Really, Kate, it was quite peaceful. I studied and slept most of the time.”

  Kate pushed herself away from the cold metal and brushed her hands against her skirt. “I want to make us a fine dinner in that kitchen,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a grand kitchen. Did you get all the things on my list?”

  “They’re in the boot.”

  While Kate busied herself in the kitchen, Stephen brought in their suitcases, the separate packs of their books from school and Peard’s blood-saturation tables. He left the suitcases on the bed, made sure Kate did not need anything more from the store at the village, then set himself up to study in the tiny parlor. He could hear Kate humming as she worked, the clatter of pans. It was possible to imagine the two of them safely married, a calm domesticity about their lives. The mood stayed with him all through dinner and right up to the instant in bed when he showed Kate how he intended to be careful. He held up a condom that one of his fellow students had bought in England.

  Kate, her face flushed, grabbed it out of his hand and hurled it across the room.

  “Stephen! It’s sin enough what we do, but I’ll not have that on my soul!”

  It took him almost an hour to calm her, but then she was especially tender, crying against his shoulder and laughing. They went to sleep with her head cradled against his chest.