The Heart in Winter

by Kevin Barry

Because what kind of a fucking Irishman can’t even do away with himself?

The deathhauntedness of the Irish brethren was frequently a complication in the working life of Sheriff Stephen Devane. Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm. Terrible people, born of a terrible nation.

So what? So now you’re jealous-minded on an old Scotch that’s dead and gone the best part of twenty years? It’s the way my head turns. I’m sorry about it. It’s a sickness that I have. Okay. I mean try livin this bullshit from the inside out, Poll.

She told him of the skivvying jobs she had worked and the friends and the enemies she had made, the latter being the less numerous but the easier somehow to recall.

Drifts of rain moved across the sky and plain and he knew that he would live.

The old man gestured to the plain and the open sky then, and he was dismissive of it all— Detta löjliga land kommer att berätta sagor för dig. In a country like this, the boy said, all they give you is fairy tales. De kommer att berätta är att lycka är möjlig och i själva verket är det ditt öde. In this country? the boy said. They’ll tell you that you can be happy. That it’s your right and destiny. Det här är hästskit. Now that’s a bunch of horseshit. Lycka är inte det vanliga mänskliga uppnåendet. Happiness ain’t generally how it works out for folks.

Remember always that we’re only markin time until sweet death comes, and it’s surely comin for us all. God be good to us, Tom Rourke said. Om det finns någon där ute som kan hjälpa dig att lindra smärtan i din existens… So if there’s someone out there who can help you to ease the pain of your life… …så ska du göra vad du än behöver göra för att vara med henne. …then he reckon you gotta go an’ do what it is you gotta do.

She tried to pray but nothing came of it.

Love’s hard insistences are known even to the deathlorn, and perhaps especially so, with death being no more than the initiation of grief, and grief being no more than the mark of love’s inevitable loss.

The fact was he had offered himself at last to the world of fate and it had not killed him off yet and he had hope even yet.

The amber light came from the ancient and rank oil lamps upon the rough walls mounted—they hissed a little as they burned, and the sound of it brought to mind cats again.

But why look back is what she thinks. If she looked back she’d be eaten whole and alive by the past.

The past is not fixed and it is not certain and this much she has learned if nothin else. The past it changes all the while every minute you’re still breathing and how in fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all.