Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

volunteered for the mountains.
    What she was there would always be in her face, in her eyes. Hornet-like helicopters swooped on dark rivers of people in mountain-side forests and an American from San Francisco, Joseph Dinani, his long white hair like Moses’ scrolls, hunched on the ground in an Indian poncho, reading the palms of refugees for money and food. He’d found his way through the forests of Central America in the early 1970s. There were bodies in a valley, many bodies, pregnant women, their stomachs rising out of the water like rhinoceroses bathing. Ever after that there’d be an alarm in her eyes and her right eyebrow was permanently estranged from her eye. She had to leave to tell someone but no one in authority for the moment wanted to know. The Americans were in charge and nothing too drastic could happen with the Americans around.
    She threw herself into her work with the children. For some hours during the day she taught girls. The later hours, evening closing in in the hills, the mountains, she spent with the children. They became like her family. Little boys recognized the potential for comedy in her face and made her into a comedienne. In jeans and a blouse she jived with a boy as a fighter bomber went over. But the memory of what she’d seen in the mountains drove her on and made every movement swifter. With this memory was the realization, consolidating all she felt about herself before leaving the school in the Midwest, that all her life she’d been running away from something—boys clanking chains in a suburb of a night-time Midwest city, hosts of destroyers speeding through the beech shade of a fragment of Elizabethan Irish history—they now were catching up on her. They had recognized her challenge. They had singled her out. Her crime? To treat the poor like princes. She was just an ordinary person now with blonde curly hair, a pale pretty face, who happened to be American.
    The Reverend Mother, a woman partly Venezuelan, partly Brazilian, partly American, took at last to the doctrine of liberation and a convent, always anarchistic, some nuns in white, some in black, some in jeans and blouses, became more anarchistic. She herself changed from black to white. She had the television removed and replaced by a rare plant from Peru. An American man in a white suit came to call on her and she asked him loudly what had made him join the CIA and offered him cooked octopus. Honor was producing a concert for harvest festivities in her village that autumn.
    There was a deluge of rats and mice—no one seemed quite sure which—in the tobacco-coloured fields that autumn and an influx of soldiers, young rat-faced soldiers borne along, standing, on the fronts of jeeps. Rat eyes imperceptibly took in Honor. They had caught up with her. A little girl in a blue dress crossed the fields, tejacote apples upheld in the bottom of her dress. A little boy ran to Honor. They were close at hand. At night when her fears were most intense, sweat amassing on her face, she thought of Chris Gormley, a girl at a school in the Midwest with whom she’d shared a respite in her life, and if she said unkindnesses to her she could say sorry now but that out of frustration comes the tree of one’s life. Honor’s tree blossomed that autumn. Sometimes rain poured. Sometimes the sky cheerily brightened. Pieces moved on a chess table in a bar, almost of their own accord. In her mind Honor heard a young soldier sing a song from an American musical: ‘Out of My Dreams and Into Your Arms.’
    The night of the concert squashes gleamed like moons in the fields around the hall. In tight jeans, red check shirt, her curls almost peroxide, Honor tightly sang a song into the microphone. Buddy Holly. ‘You go your way and I’ll go mine, now and forever till the end of time.’ A soldier at the back shouted an obscenity at her. A little boy in front, in a grey T-shirt from Chicago, smiled his pleasure. In her mind was her father, his grey suit, the peace promised once when they were photographed together on a broad pavement of a city in the Midwest, that peace overturned now because it inevitably referred back to the turbulence that gave it, Irish—America, birth. And she saw the girl who in a way had brought her here. There was no panic in her, just an Elysium of broad, grey pavements and a liner trekking to Cobh, in County Cork. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art