“It’s ten in the morning,” Martin said.
“So that’s a no?” Francis lifted the lid on the ice bucket. “Can you believe it? No ice. Plaza Hotel, my arse.” He filled one of the glasses halfway and settled himself on the sofa. Like the other furniture in the room, it was upholstered in white and trimmed in gold. The cushions were so thickly stuffed that Francis barely dented the surface. He stretched one arm along the back of the sofa, a pose that suggested confidence, even nonchalance. “Don’t hesitate to pour yourself a small one if you feel the need. And I’ll apologize in advance for the quality of the liquor. I’d have asked for Powers, but it would have blown my cover, so I told them to bring Scotch.”
“Franny,” Martin said, “for Christ’s sake—”
Francis held up one hand. “What happened was this.”
IT STARTED WHEN a note from the parish priest in Ballyrath reached Mountjoy informing the prison’s governor that Francis Dempsey Sr. had died. Loads of men had been denied furlough for a mother’s burial or a daughter’s wedding, but unbeknownst to Francis, the governor made arrangements for him to attend the funeral. When it was settled, he called Francis to his office, a sternly whitewashed room around which were hung lavish still lifes, all painted by the governor’s wife. Francis did not know why he had been summoned, and as he watched the overhead light play off the older man’s bald dome, he considered who might have informed on him, and for what real or imagined offense. After a final jagged signature, the governor placed his pen on the blotter and turned his attention to Francis.
“Inmate,” he said. “I regret to inform you that your father has died. Mountjoy Prison is sorry for your loss.”
“My father? But how—”
“No talking, inmate,” said the warder at his side.
“Are you mad?” Francis was addressing both of them: the governor with this story about his father; the warder for saying he couldn’t speak at a moment like this.
The warder reached for the short truncheon he carried on his belt, but the governor waved him off. “You have been approved for a furlough,” he said, “to attend your father’s Mass of Christian burial.”
Francis struggled with the basic facts that had been presented. His father? Dead? But how, and when? The governor, who was not in the habit of offering condolences, recited the details not of his father’s demise, but of the furlough itself. They were to depart in the morning at half six and were expected to return that same night. Francis would be permitted to wear the clothes held for him in the storeroom, which were the clothes he had worn when he was processed into Mountjoy, but he would be required to have his hands shackled during the duration of his time outside the prison walls. If he made any attempt to escape or in any way delay his return, he would face the full force of disciplinary action: solitary confinement, a month on the paltry No. 1 Diet, and additional time added to his sentence.
At the end of this recitation, the governor turned toward Francis. “Understand one thing, inmate: This isn’t for you. It’s for your father. You’re a disgrace to his good name.”
This was the last in a chain of half-sensical comments directed at Francis about his father during the time he spent in Mountjoy. Most of the old-timers had given him a wide berth, muttering about Dempsey this and Dempsey that. Francis had assumed there was something about himself that rubbed the codgers the wrong way. More than once, he would put the question to a man: What problem have you got with me? Most would cut their eyes and shuffle off; others would tell him, I’m not afraid of you, so you know. It was the raving of lunatics, men who had spent too much of their lives staring at prison walls. Their only fun was in taking the piss out of the younger ones.
Francis arrived for the funeral in the back of a car from the Mountjoy motor pool driven by a warder who had complained bitterly through the hours it took to ply the winding country roads connecting Dublin to Ballyrath. The warder was a city boy, and every glimpse of cottage or pasture sent him into fits of boredom, rage, and derision. The pastor wouldn’t allow a shackled man to serve as pallbearer, and after much hectoring (by the pastor) and grumbling (by the warder) and chafing of wrists against iron (by Francis), the handcuffs were removed. Francis took his place at the casket, where he was given a rough embrace by Michael, who had been granted a day’s leave from the seminary. It was the first time the brothers had seen each other in the flesh in almost two years. Michael’s eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, but he gave his brother a wan smile. Michael looked so small, as if he were melting from the pain of losing his da. Francis stretched out his arm and wrapped it around his brother’s shoulder, pulling him close, something he couldn’t have done with handcuffs on. He had spent a year and a half locked up in a cage made of stone and steel, and when he could finally stretch his arms it was only because his father had died. He couldn’t make sense of that. His father couldn’t be dead, because as long as he had known him, his father had always been alive. In that grim logic of grief, he caught himself wondering what his father was going to do when he found himself in that coffin. There would be hell to pay, that was for sure.
But meanwhile here Francis was, out of jail and in his own clothes, back in Ballyrath, his father dead, and Michael dressed in the gown of a priest. He couldn’t sort out what was real from what was a dream. His only guide was the raw, hollow ache in his chest. The pain would tell him what to believe.