The Death of an Irish Tinker by Bartholomew Gill Read Free Book Online Page B

obviously shaken even to recount the incident, tried to gather herself. She shook her head; tears had filled her eyes.
    Suddenly the bar noise was almost palpable.
    “Didn’t he spin me around and punch the bloody gun into me gob, pushing it down until I was chokin’?” With a finger she pulled down her lower lip to reveal two lower front teeth that had been snapped off at the gum.
    “It was then a shadow came between me and the lights in the caravans. Legs it was. Trousers. That was all I could see. Then a voice said, ‘We’ll start with the youngest. Bring the youngest one out.’
    “I was clawin’ at the gun that was like a stake pricked through me throat. I couldn’t breathe. I was gaggin’. When the shade in the caravan came to the door with Oney, the third one said something, and the gun was ripped out o’ me mouth. I’d swallowed me teeth, and didn’t they come up in a cough. I was rollin’ in the dirt, gabblin’. I could hardly see for the pain in me throat.
    “‘That your child?’ the third one asked. What I saw of him was smaller than the others. Older. Different-soundin’. ‘Isn’t she young for an old woman like you?’ I still couldn’t talk. I’d never been hurt so sorely in me life, not even in childbirth. It was like he quenched a poker in me lungs.
    “And all I could think of was poor little Oney. She was so tired from running with her ma that through it all, she was still asleep in his hand and him holding her up—you know, over his head like a stone or somethin’.” Maggie Nevins raised a hand to demonstrate. “Like he’d rear back and chuck her into the night.”
    Again she had to pause, and McGarr could not keep himself from thinking what a powerful witness she might be, could she be persuaded to testify, which he doubted. Travelers simply did not help the police, and those that did were never again trusted by their own. Added to that was the fright she had taken; obviously it was still with her.
    “Then he—the little, older one—squatted down to look in me face, smilin’, mind. ‘I’ll ask but once,’ he says in a voice soft as butter. ‘I make no idle threats. If you don’t tell me, he’ll kill the baby. It’s hers, isn’t it? Biddy’s?”
    “I was at sixes and sevens what to say, grass on me daughter and save her child, or play dumb and chance he wouldn’t. But I figured Biddy at least had been gone for a while, and she had her father with her. And when I looked into the man’s eyes, I could tell he meant what he said—that little smile and them devil eyes. That’s what they were. Happy like.
    “Says I as good as I could through the blood, ‘She come in, gave me Oney, and begged her father to take her down the country. That’s all I know.’ And he knew I was lyin’.
    “ ‘When?’ ” he asked.
    “‘An hour? Maybe two, maybe three. I fell asleep.”
    “‘Really?’ says he, sounding like a laird. “Two or three hours ago she was still drawing at the top of Grafton Street. You must not care for your granddaughter very much. Did Biddy tell you where she was going?’
    “Me mind was racin’, tryin’ to suss out what I could say that he’d believe and keep him off Biddy and Ned. The car they’d come in was big and rich-lookin’, and if I said Rosslare, they’d catch Ned’s old van sure. At last I decided to tell him the truth, or part of it. ‘She said she wouldn’t tell me that either. “If you knew, you’d have to run too.” Them was her words.’
    “That seemed to satisfy him. He stood. ‘What about in there?’ he asked the one in the doorway holding Oney. ‘Nut-tin’.’ ‘Put her back.’ And the bollocks just tossed her back into the caravan, where she cut open her head and started wailing.
    “Says the little mahn, ‘Will you remember me?’ Says I to him, ‘I can’t even see yiz.’ With that, he turns, like hewas going to walk away, but instead he spins and kicks me in the ribs. And what a kick! I thought he dropped