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David Murphy was born in Cork, Ireland. He survived schooling from the Christian Brothers. He hitch-hiked thousands of miles in his student days, and graduated in Celtic Languages and history.
After years to teaching, he gave up this daytime job in 2003, to start writing full-time.
His first two published collections are “Arkon Chronicles” (2003) and the Aeon Press collection “Lost Notes”
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We hope you’ll enjoy this exclusive on-line publication of ‘Broken Heroes’, a story which appears in David Murphy’s Aeon Press collection “Lost Notes”
The lough shone beneath a proud moon, a blue whale that stretched forever. Behind me, the hills of Donegal. The moon's rays were so pervasive the contours on those hills were plainly visible. Across the lough, on the southern shore, the main road. I could see it plainly though I wished I could not.
"It's 3am," was Conor's way of signalling that he was tired. And why not, I thought, for I was tired too.
"I know a place," I said, and I did, though I was tempted to sleep down by the memory-lapped shore. I had caught my first trout there, on a bubble float strung out with heather moths. I still see my father netting it for me. 'Step back as you reel in!' he said, afraid that I might lose it. Then he stretched and lifted out a fine one-pounder, big as the smile on his face. To a nine year old it was a monster that diminished not one whit in all the years and rivers and lakes my father and I had fished since. "Let's sleep in the sawmills," I said, "just over the hill, near the old army base. We'll be safe there for a few hours."
Thirty kilometres of tarmac had taken its toll on Conor. He laboured like a deep-sea diver beneath that rucksack. Me, I wore a duffle bag like a limpet on my shoulder. I pulled it tight as we crested a rise in the road. A hundred metres ahead lay the welcome refuge of sleeping logs. I was studying their perimeter fence when Conor tugged my sleeve. One glance at his face and I knew what was coming. "Car!" he hissed, and together we dived for cover into the roadside thickets.
Twin shafts of light cornered the road and speared the night. We cowered behind bushes, bending ourselves into invisible shapes. In a rush of noise and light the jeep passed by, oblivious to all but the floodlit road. We drank in its exhaust fumes before jumping out onto the tarmac - at least I leaped out. Conor, well, eventually he dragged himself and his infernal rucksack out of the bushes - but not before losing balance and almost toppling back. A long thorn in a sore place would have served him right, but funny it was not - he caught my disapproving look. By the time he was ready to walk, the red tail-lights had disappeared into the distance.
The timber yard was a sea of logs piled high in neat geometric rows. The stockpiles were layered, warm too as we discovered when we found a ledge, wide as a man, halfway up a pile of planks. Above head height, in the wind's lee, we stretched out happy as a pair of lumber rats.
I lay beneath my coat, gazing out over duffle bag-pillow at that old army base. I swore I could still see the oil stains of Chinooks and Saracens glistening on moonlit tarmac. The southern militia did not maintain even a skeleton garrison here now - no need to since the last of the Loyalists had long ago fled behind a re-drawn border. A rustle of paper caught my ears. Conor was sitting up, a single sheet in his hand. I wondered what it was he was trying to read in the night's dim light. Before I got a chance to ask, he put the paper in his rucksack and turned to look at the skyline behind our logpile. Then I knew what he was thinking; his thoughts writ large as the Blue Stack Mountains so cruelly hidden by the crest of road above the sawmills.
Somewhere along that road we had forgotten to take one last look. Now it was too late. Donegal was gone, never to be seen again, though as far as Conor's resolve was concerned, I was beginning to have doubts. I too could feel the tang of Atlantic salt riding down on moonbeams over that crest; I could smell the turf from the slopes of Errigal on the breeze; I could hear, see, and taste those far-reaching charms - but I could not countenance going back. As I feared, Conor was beginning to wilt. One look at the brass mouthpiece sticking out of his rucksack and I knew that. He was also looking at that flute, and in his eyes I saw all the nights when father had taught us all those tunes. Those songs were playing for Conor now, calling him like a mermaid sweetly singing. "There must be a better way," was how he put it.
"No," I said. "We can't fight it here. We have to get out."
He was about to re-open that long argument but I killed it. "Best get some sleep," I said. "We've a long walk ahead of us tomorrow."
Four hours later an onsite chainsaw rasped a hostile wake-up call. In five minutes we were back on the road. By 9am Enniskillen beckoned. Our timing was perfect: plenty of people walked the road at that hour - which gave us cover from passing jeeps. There was no other traffic, the economic collapse meant petrol in these parts was reserved for the militia.
With my duffle bag over my shoulder I made an adequate impression of a work-bound brickie. My brother worried me though; he resembled a backpacking tourist - an exotic species around here. I looked ruefully at the lake on the right-hand side of town and thought of all the lakes that had once made this county so attractive. The lakes were still there, and just as pretty, but their spirit was different now. Something weighed them down, and robbed their sparkle.
We could have taken a short cut via derelict Loyalist estates but that would have made Conor look even more of an oddity. Turning past the roundabout onto the Belfast road, I began to regret not taking that option when we found ourselves walking directly toward a pair of armed militia men. The stubby barrels of their weapons poked menacingly beneath threadbare flak jackets; one look at itchy fingers wrapped around those triggers made me want to pray - something I had not done in years. One look at Conor and I wanted to do something else - curse him from a height. Christ, getting out from under martial law was bad enough without waving a dirty great flag that says 'we are moving illegally from one part of the country to another'. That's what that bloody rucksack was: a flag, and Conor was waving it recklessly beneath their noses.
The sergeant had that fidgety look of the world-weary soldier. Indifference vanished when he looked into the rucksack. As for the private, his eyes stood on stalks when he saw the chocolate and the cling-wrapped salmon. Nothing like the sight of luxuries to make a raggle-taggle army man forget his orders. Conor rabbited on about the death of our father and the sale of the family home. It was all true; the militia men could have checked it instantly on their links but they were too busy salivating. They barely glanced at the papers I offered, preferring instead to take the salmon from Conor's outstretched hand.
"Why the hell didn't you tell me what you had?" I hissed as soon as we were out of earshot.
"You were moaning so much about the rucksack I just couldn't be bothered. It was a last minute decision - the oldest trick in the book: make 'em see what they want to see."
"Yeah? What happens if the chocolate doesn't work at the next checkpoint?"
"Then I'll show 'em the brandy and the expensive jeans."
That was too much. As soon as we turned the corner from the militia I stopped his cocky stride with a firm finger to the breast-bone. "Listen," I said, "I've been around longer than you. The Irish militia might be a run-down, half-starved scumbag of an army, but they're not all as thick as the two troopers we met back there."
"Gimme some credit," he was almost squaring up to me. "By the way, I've had this big brother routine up to here," he jabbed a finger at his collar, "and don't tell me how experienced you are. Fat lot of good it did our d-"
He stopped himself just in time. I swear I would have hit him there and then only for two things: half a lifetime counting to ten after most things he said, and the sound of an approaching truck. Creating a scene was the last thing we needed.
We trudged on a wordless road. Then we turned south for Lisnaskea. Our feet ached and as darkness fell we found a resting place. A semblance of civility returned between us.
"Just that one checkpoint," said Conor. "Things are looking up."
"We were lucky," I said. "We still have a long way to go." I knew then that he would say it would be safer the further east and south we went, and I knew too that this was another signal that he was reconsidering our decision, so I added, "They're going to take over the whole country, Conor. Best get out before it gets too bad."
"You always look on the bright side," he said, smiling up at the stars. Then he looked at that brass mouthpiece sticking out of his rucksack. For a moment I thought he was going to play a tune. Talk about attracting attention. Before I could say anything he was turning the other way. "Clover for sheets tonight," he said. "Sleep tight, brother."
But I could not sleep. The stars were pinpricks jabbing my eyes. When I closed them I saw again that mob at my father's gates, baying like hounds for the kill. It had not started like that, of course. First it was a picket line - all frosty looks and stony silence. Then silence gave way to slogans, and stones became real enough to break windows.
Father was always going to be an easy target. He had made the mistake, years before, of refusing to teach religion. Teachers had that option in liberal days. Then the European Union collapsed, the British pulled out of the north, and chaos ensued. When the dust settled, the Loyalists had their three-county fortress in the north-east. Militant nationalists had everywhere else. At first their so-called 'protective measures' were designed to turn the country in on itself. Foreign broadcasts were jammed, liberal publications banned - so too were satellite dishes. E-mail and networking were outlawed, making computers illegal, except government ones which held files on state employees - files with information like, 'opted out of religious instruction'.
It became serious in rural areas first - especially the north-west. Father had been retired for years, but moral cleansing deals with sins of the past as well as the present. When the local mullahs named him from the pulpit of St Declan's, he should have sold up and moved out. But father was stubborn as a deep-diving salmon. He had lived all his life within a long cast of the Atlantic and was not going to move now. Then the pickets came, and when the stones broke his windows righteous hands reached in and hauled him before the local diocesan court. That was when Conor and I broke the travel laws and came up from Dublin.
I see him now in that musty courtroom, eighty years too clearly etched on his sunken face. On the day of his retirement, he had calculated that he had put fifteen hundred children from the parish of St Declan's through his hands. Given each of them six hours a day for a whole school year. He used to joke about the responsibility of 'terraforming people's minds' as he put it. I see him now, stooped and bent in anguish that all the civilization in the world could be nullified by a kangaroo court. I see him staring red-eyed as the local bishop's puppet performed verbal trick-of-the-loops, culminating in intellectual bungee-jumping like 'No teacher should have to teach religion but every teacher should want to'. I see him shake his head incredulously as those around, including some he had taught himself, nodded their heads in approval. That's what killed him in the end - the realisation that his life's work had been in vain; that those he had taught could turn out like this.
After what seemed a mere half-hour of sleep my nostrils twitched to the aroma of early-morning coffee. Conor handed me a dew-dripped mug. Nothing ever tasted so good. I sipped and watched him rub ointment on his blistered feet. He offered me some but I declined. Less than five hours separated us from Cavan. Blisters could wait until then.
Cars became more frequent the further south we went; jeeps less so. Fuel was not so scarce down here; affluence not yet as decimated as it was further north. By mid-afternoon we walked - hobbled - into Cavan. Yellow and white bunting across the streets told us we were passing through not a moment to soon - there was to be a religious retreat that weekend. We exchanged rueful glances. Retreats were invariably followed by outings - like the outing of our father.
Past the church we walked, where a sanctified woman on bended knee scrubbed the entrance clean. She lifted her gaze to us, her hands never leaving the granite slabs. She washed away the sins of generations, removing forever the last vestiges of impurity. Her eyes met mine and I knew she could see into my soul. Her hands still scrubbed but her lips broke into the worst kind of grin: the shady grin of one who had never known power, but was empowered now. I broke eye-contact with her as quickly as I could, hoping she would not notice the bandana of sweat that had sprouted on my forehead. She kept scrubbing, and I hoped she remained at her pious task as we strolled into the bus-station, trying to look casual.
The ticket clerk had the servile smile of a parasite. His beady eyes took us in from head to feet, then back up again via Conor's rucksack. "Under new travel law restrictions," he smiled with cobra-like sincerity, "I can't sell one-ways to strangers - not unless they have special clearance. Do you get my drift?"
Bill-of-sale papers from father's cottage were not enough to deflect those snake-like eyes from the rucksack. The man's body language stated articulately that the local economy had reverted to its more traditional form - barter. We understood alright: the brandy produced the desired result.
Twenty minutes later we were on our way, never so grateful that public transport still existed. This was drumlin country - all rolling hills and undulating road. No place for walkers, this. Not that we would have been able for much more. My blisters were Himalayan now. I had to use some of Conor's ointment. Of course he had to chirp that if I had used it earlier my feet would not have hurt so much. I complimented him on his judicious use of hindsight, and we journeyed on in silence. I looked out at passing hills - anthills compared to the hills of Donegal.
After the court appearance Conor tried to talk father into moving to Dublin. I argued against it - an old man needs his self-respect. Conor retorted that I was confusing self-respect with pride - but then he would say that.
Within days of returning to the cottage, back to broken windows and stone-littered floors, a new directive advocated the rounding up of 'agents of licentiousness'. Supporters of contraception, divorce, and gay equality were charged with promoting behaviour detrimental to the common good. Politicians, legislators and media people were incarcerated throughout the land. Not many of them lived in Donegal, so local militants sought other targets. Father, for instance.
A streetful of moral coat-tail riders gathered outside the narrow slits of already boarded-up windows. They stood there chanting; their nightmare howls bending truth and light, darkening an already darkened landscape. They cast history-warping stones and hurled fact-shifting rocks. An army of blind-faith soldiers bent on obeying orders of obedience, and enforcing them. A Holy Crusade of men - Guardians of the Faith; women - Queens of Heaven; and children - no gilt-winged Angels of Innocence, these.
Their sledgehammer dogma broke down doors. Anger swam in father's eyes. His face checkered with blood pressure as he bellowed at the splintering wood. On his feet, then off his feet; he keeled over clutching his chest.
The leader of an army of rectitude stood in the hallway, nonplussed by the body stretched before him. He knew not how to harangue a corpse. His confusion became alarm when he saw what came through the air at him. Conor vaulted over the table; a slow-motion vault that took him clean over every one of father's eighty years, over each river and lake he had ever fished, over every song and story he had told. A vault, inspired by the death of an old man, that sought out the death of another. Conor was thwarted as the invading mob fought him off and pinned him to the floor.
I made myself a buffer between them. I took punches meant for him. I pulled him clear. I pleaded for understanding. Conor crawled free, fists still clenched. Father lay on the floor, a piece of paper in his death-unfurled fingers.
The journey from Cavan to Dublin was long. Time slowed the way it does when Lady Luck deals you a rotten hand. Then it stopped altogether like when the deathcard lands in your lap. Or to be more accurate, when it steps onto the bus wearing a militia badge, when it walks with slow and deliberate pace to the seat behind you, when it leans forward and says, "Do you mind if I ask you something?"
I saw the alarm on Conor's face. In his eyes I saw my own fear reflected. My head spun with the dreaded possibility that the militia man was about to check our travel permits, to order us off the bus and onto our knees to reaffirm our belief in the one true church. I knew how Conor would react to that, and I saw all that we had achieved in getting this far thwarted. Then the militia man said, "Could you spare a Servant of God a couple of pounds to help him on his way home?"
I heard slurred words and smelled alcohol. Time marched forward again. The militia man thought we were smiling because we were happy to help him. He was wrong; our smiles were carved of bottomless relief. At Navan we again watched him walk slowly and deliberately - into a roadside bar. Our bus pulled away. We looked at each other and I slowly shook my head. Conor let out a long, low whistle. Wheels turned fast as we travelled the last leg of our journey in silence.
Dublin was almost different. Motorways, tolls, and feeder roads gave the impression of a turn-of-the-millennium city. In the suburbs the mask slipped to reveal the burned out, bombed out husks of factories. When road turned to street and the bus slowed, we saw the faces of passers-by. Mean faces they were, the question mark of what went wrong scribbled in blood on their brows; weighing them down, haunting them, burying them in their recent sad history. Grimness, fear, rectitude - these were our welcoming committee as we drove into town. And sirens. Sirens that rang not to pipe us off the bus, but to herald the closure of bookshops under new censorship laws.
We walked past bridges of hopefuls trolling the snot-green river for mullet, the latest substitute for fresh meat. Along the quayside, whores on the early shift leaned against dark alleyways like off-duty soldiers relaxing at barrack walls.
Another bus took us to Conor's flat. It had been raided. Books littered the floor, their titles undoubtedly noted for some preparatory book of evidence. By a pre-arranged signal we said nothing for fear of bugs. Conor filled the empty spaces in his rucksack with the bits and pieces he deemed essential. From his window I watched for militia. From his other window I saw the ferryport and the park. I pointed at the park.
We sat on a bench, a great willow flapping against our backs. Before us, through the rusty bandstand, the upper decks of the ferry shone swan-white, the only gleaming thing in an otherwise decaying harbour.
"I'm not going," he said.
"I know. What will you do instead?"
He took the flute from the rucksack and let his fingers hover over the holes. He shrugged and said,
"There's a safe house not far from here."
"You're a foolish man."
"At least I'm not a coward."
"Don't talk rubbish. You're playing into their hands by staying. You're letting anger rule your head. It's not cowardice to pull out - it's common sense. Go abroad, organise, fight them from a distance - first. They've too much control here now. They'll sweep you up tomorrow morning and throw you in jail - if you're lucky. Lay low until the mood of the country changes. When they become even more oppressive, when they've hurt too many people, there'll be plenty of others like you. Then begin the fight."
"Lay low?" he snorted. "That's exactly what you did when they came for our father."
I glared at my own flesh and blood, counted like mad, and said, "I pulled them away from you."
"Yeah. Protecting them."
"You're full of shit, Conor. Poisoned by hatred. If you don't cop yourself on you'll do something stupid and they'll have you in a flash."
"And you'll do nothing. Just walk away from it all like it never happened."
"You're being an idiot," I said.
He whipped open a side-buckle on his rucksack, snatched out a scrap of paper and held it under my nose. "What the fuck is this?" he said.
The Gates of Heaven, St Declan's Cemetery. Padlocked to all but the faithful departed. Father's coffin ached into our shoulders as the caretaker refused to open the locks. "Declan's is consecrated ground," he said. "Reserved for true believers."
The weight of my father shifted as Conor stepped from one foot to another. Anger boiled in him like magma spurting from somewhere deep, somewhere sacred. It roared through his shoulders, rippled through the coffin, and percolated down my spine where it met, and matched, the hot blood rising in me. Two things saved the caretaker from being buried in his own graveyard: a large squad of militia standing at the gates, and the dignity of my father's final journey.
Behind the boarded-up windows and battered door, in the stony soil of common ground, we buried him. The local estate agent, a man seedy and haggard through lack of business, stood at the graveside before offering us a pittance for the cottage. We took it. Time to cut loose, to scuttle the boat.
I see that cottage now, and the grave behind it. I see it clear as the scrap of paper in Conor's hand - that same piece of paper he had stared at that night in the sawmills, the paper crunched up in my father's dying hand. It was the purchase docket for a plot in St Declan's Cemetery.
"Father's last wish." Conor spat the words into my face. "Despite it all, he wanted to be buried in Declan's. He bought the plot only weeks ago. They persecute even the dead. And you're going to let them away with that? I'm not. I'm going to stay and fight, and organise here. And if there's no one else I'll still fight. And if they jail me or kill me, so be it."
My country ebbed from me in a swirling wash of mud. I clung to the side-rail, ship's noise shuddering through hands and feet and stomach as the screws pushed the pier away. Above it all a sound; a familiar trill of notes that soared above the cacophony of busy harbour and departing ship. No cruel blast of horn, no squawk of gull, no squeal of emigrant child, no belch of engine, could match the long weeping notes that floated across the dock, over the water, into my ears, into my head. I could see a tip of willow above the park. The music came from deepest willow roots. Though I could not see him I knew he was there, sitting on the bench, playing that distant tune of a distant land. A land, a tune, that grew ever distant, ever fainter, yet was still audible above the din of ship and shore.
I closed my eyes and heard that tune a hundred times a year for thirty years. Then I listened to it one last time and thought of Conor and all the fights we'd had: one for every note. And then I waved to where that willow was, or where it approximately was, for the ship was turning now and the park was growing smaller. I waved to him one last time and wished him well. When they caught him and took him to where they took people like him, he would, I hoped, have plenty of time to play that tune, and to teach it to others, and never let it die.
(c) 1995 by David Murphy. All copyrights retained.
"David Murphy's fiction is so much more than promised. Stories too complex and too delicate to be explained away with a quick sentence, these are for quiet, uninterrupted reading late at night when everyone else is lost in sleep. Overload … is the match of any short fiction that has been honoured with Hugo's or Nebula's or Stoker's. Every story carries its own unique brand of sorrow and regret. These are characters with no place to call home, nowhere to truly belong - the effect is devastating and arresting."
Lisa DuMond online at the MEviews site.
"...the lyricism of David Murphy."
Olivia Hamilton in The Irish Times.
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