Clearing of the Mist
Richard F. Fleck
ISBN: 1-58345-937-5 hardcover $19.95
1-58345-938-3 paperback $13.95
Featured title, Small Press Review, June 2001
Northern Ireland, 1973
Michael and Steven, two IRA gunmen on the run, hole up in a disused farmhouse. Hidden in the walls of the house, they discover the diary of Brian McBride, which records his experiences during the Famine, and his trip to the New World, where he struggles for survival. By coming into contact with many different cultures, he learns that freedom is something to be valued at all costs.
Richard F. Fleck
Richard F. Fleck was born in Philadelphia in 1937 and attended Rutgers University, where he graduated with honors in French, Colorado State University, where he received an M.A. in English, and the University of New Mexico, where he received his Ph.D in English. He has worked as a deck hand aboard a research vessel in the Delaware Bay, as a Park Ranger Naturalist in Rocky Mountain National Park, and as a Professor of English at the University of Wyoming with visiting posts at Osaka University, Japan and at the State University of New York at Cortland. He is currently Dean of Arts and Humanities at the Community College of Denver.
His more recent books include Henry Thoreau and John Muir Among the Indians (1985), Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction (1993), Where Land is Mostly Sky: Essays on the American West (1997). He has written numerous introductions for trade paperback editions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs. He is married with three children and one grandchild.
CHAPTER I
Slieve Gullion
Slanting sheets of cold gray rain drilled to the ground from the darkening skies, enveloping the slopes of Slieve Gullion in Northern Ireland. Two IRA fugitives, Steven and Michael, tramped over miles of spongy bogs in search of shelter. Green heather and dried-out whin bush cracked in the wind, while swirls of crows whirled through the skies above the rain-soaked potato fields lined with crowns of soft yellow ash trees and reddened hawthorn bushes.
“I’m after seein’ a wee shed in a vale below,” whispered Michael. “Do ya s’pose we should check into it or not?”
“With me drippin’ wet and soaked through you should ask such a question,” replied Steven.
They picked up their pace and slid over a dark muddy drill down to an ancient stone shed. It was abandoned, with cracked glass windows leaking badly, and some moldy piles of hay smelling as primeval as pre-Christian Ireland when wild Celts had wandered through dense fern-filled forests. The two exhausted men put down their small weapons and ammunition and stretched out on the damp hay.
“Will ya listen to that wind!” Michael exclaimed.
“These days do weary a man. What with raidin’ and runnin’ from Fork Hill to here you might not give a bloody damn about livin’ another day let alone worryin’ about the wind, Michael.”
In the distance an explosion reverberated through the gray misty valleys, followed by some rifle-fire which putted and patted like toy guns.
“Our boys is at it again. You know it’s a pity them Tommies spotted us. We’d still be with our lads,” Steven remarked with vehemence.
Michael just stared up at the cobwebs lacing the shed’s rotting beams. A yellow moon peeped through the storm clouds, casting its sad, dim light on the floor. Michael got up to look out the window up at the misty summit of Slieve Gullion cropped with rocks as though the legendary giant Finn MacCool had piled them there. He spotted the nearby ruins of an old house, consisting of one stone wall and the slender remains of a chimney. His hand happened to touch something damp and covered with mildew just above the warped windowsill.
“Will ya look at this now,” he said excitedly.
“What is it, Michael?”
“Looks like a bloody auld book or somethin’.”
Michael opened it up to see that it was a barely legible diary written in the faint hand of Brian McBride and dated 1890.
“Wonder who the devil Brian McBride was now,” Michael said as he quickly leafed through the pages. He saw that the writing wasn’t so badly frayed beyond the first few pages.
“Give me yer flashlight, would ya, Steven.”
They sat down looking at the nineteenth-century handwriting, and Michael began to read aloud.
“Oh God, it was hard times then. We all had great hunger. When was it now? Must have been forty or forty-five years ago over in Cavan.”
As Michael was reading, two British helicopters approached the damp green slopes of Slieve Gullion. The high-pitched whirl of chopper blades frightened the two rebels, who buried themselves in the hay. Spotlights from the choppers criss-crossed the floors and walls of the cowshed. A monkey puzzle tree’s branches hissed violently outside in the artificial wind.
“ Let’s hope they don’t catch us, Michael, and put us in some rotten jail like your brother at Long Kesh or even yer sister out in the West of America.”
Splotches of rain hit the windows horizontally, as though the planet’s very orbit had changed. The only sound they could hear for endless minutes was a hypnotizing whiss-whiss-whiss-whiss.
“When will those Protestant bastards get out of here,” whispered Steven.
“Whist, will ya, Steven.”
After ten terrifying minutes, the choppers crept onward like grotesque, giant dragonflies toward the bald summit of the mountain, and dismal rain came pouring down from a dark cloud totally obscuring the pale whitening moon. Steven crawled out of the hay and sneaked out of the shed, looking askance at the disappearing choppers. He walked past the ruins of the house to a trickling clear stream and laid down on its grassy bank for a drink. With all this rain you wouldn’t think a man could develop a thirst, he thought to himself.
As he ambled back, his eyes caught sight of a deserted church without a cross in a lower vale, and to its side were some tombstones which almost seemed to glow.
“A bunch of dead Protestants,” he mumbled. “Better they are dead!”
He trekked back up to the shed and found Michael looking at the diary with his flashlight as though nothing had ever happened.
“Michael, for the love of God, put out that light, will ya.”
“Ah now, listen to this!”
He continued reading aloud.
“Both me parents looked like death itself. I hated to look into them sunken faces after they gave us children half their small plates of hot fried cabbage. I remember the rain leakin’ in on us while we tried to sleep in that damp and cold thatched cottage. Me father was too weak to pick rushes for re-thatchin’. How long was it now before my mother died? God, I must have been only seventeen when it happened. Me mother developed a bad chest cough and spat blood. I think it was early winter or thereabouts. It was shockin’ cold weather, and our turf bog was about all used up, what with the neighbors and townspeople coming there to share our peat. Me father really was too weak to help much, and me brother and sister were bloody small babes. I remember puttin’ a hot water bottle at the feet of me mother, and she sayin’ it wasn’t no use as she was goin' to her Creator anyway for she had heard a lone dog wailing that morning.
Then it was that she vomited up blood and bile somethin’ fierce. I just looked out at the dark skies streamin’ with drops of icy rain, cryin’ to meself. I didn’t even have the heart to tell me father she was dead with him lyin’ in the next room so weak. I somehow managed to comfort me wee brother and sister.
Mother was a soft-spoken woman. She seemed to accept her lot, though I don’t know how. God, how she would love us children to death tellin’ us stories and makin’ us toys out of auld paper or straw. Before Gary was born she took Teresa and me to a hilltop covered with rushes and blackberry bushes. We could see clear to the northern part of Ireland, even if it was misty and gray. How many times Teresa and I would return to that hill pretendin’ mother was with us when she was really at home busy with chores. Me father loved her in his own way. He didn’t do much talkin’ wid her, but ya could tell there was love in his big brown eyes.
After we buried her in her cold, lonesome grave, me father never was the same, and how fast he failed, almost as fast as his potato crops. With his long gray beard, he looked like Brian Boru himself, only a dying Brian Boru. He said that’s who I was named after. Every morning after he woke up he whined and hacked with a fearsome cough.”
Michael’s eyes grew tired with a mere flashlight for illumination of the McBride diary.
“I think I’ll have a wee look up the hill to see if the Tommies is gone yet, Steven.”
“Mind ye, don’t let ‘em spot ya.”
Michael stepped gingerly out of the dark shed and looked up at the shimmering moon casting silver clouds aglow. No helicopters were to be seen, and all looked peaceful. He didn’t even hear any distant rifle fire from the valley below. Walking past some spiney hawthorn bushes and eating their red pithy berries, he spotted the abandoned church down the hill. Something drove him on toward that building, which reflected glowing moonbeams. He soon found himself in the moldering graveyard looking at white tombstones sticking above the grasses like prehistoric bones. Then he saw it! “Brian McBride, 1830-1891.”
“McBride, Protestant!” he muttered.
Michael climbed up through the damp heather toward his companion at the cowshed determined to spend the rest of the evening reading the diary aloud. Safe from the British, he knew that McBride’s life would be his for one starry night beneath the looming shadows of Slieve Gullion. He hadn’t thought that Protestants suffered during the potato famine; he thought only the Catholics had. Still, Catholic or Protestant, it was someone’s real life in that book, a real piece of history, and that made it worth reading.
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