The Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor

starboard bow, perhaps a mile and a half in the distance – a hulking, blue-grey finback bull, such as he had once seen in a bestiary in a London bookshop window. The tail had appeared first, slapping the waves. A moment had passed. Mulvey was astonished. Then its obscene bulk had slid up from head to fin: impossibly long, impossibly black, a gush of frothing water spilling from its jaws – so sleek and vast as to be unnatural; something horrible and awesome from the depths of a nightmare.
    The plunge was like a mountain collapsing into the sea.
    Unable to move, he had stood still and watched, appalled at the immensity of what he had seen. Uncertain, in fact, that he had seen it. For nobody else had seen anything at all. None of the passengers. None of the crew. If they had, they said not a syllable about it. And surely they would have. They couldn’t have remained silent. The creature was half the length of the ship.
    He had kept watch for an hour – maybe more – wondering if finally he was losing his mind. He had seen it happen to the starving before. Had seen it happen to his poor, mad brother. While he watched the towering waves came a memory of the last night he would ever spend in Connemara. He could not ignore it. It broke against his mind, like the guilt of an old man for the crimes of his youth.
    How he had beseeched, but they wouldn’t be persuaded. ‘We’ll have men on the quay in New York. We’ll have men on the ship.If that English scum ever walks down that gangplank, you’re a deadman and buried. Don’t think we’re lying. And you’ll get the traitor’s death you deserve, you devil’s bastard. You’ll watch your own heart getting cut out and burnt.’
    Stone-hard brothers with bog-oak fists. He had pleaded to be spared this patriotic task. Whoever had denounced him must have made a mistake. He wasn’t a murderer. He had never killed anyone. That, said their captain, was a matter of opinion.
    ‘I’m leaving my land. Is that not enough?’
    It’s well for you that has land to leave .
    ‘The man has children,’ Mulvey said.
    What about us? Do we not have children?
    ‘Anything else. But I’ll not do this.’
    That was when the beating had started again.
    He remembered their eyes; so frightened and convinced. The black-stained sackcloth of the hooded masks they wore. The slashed-out holes where their lips appeared. They were wielding the tools of their livelihood, but as weapons – scythes, hoes, loys, billhooks. Now they had no livelihood left. Centuries stolen in one stunning moment. Their fathers’ labours; their sons’ inheritances. At the stroke of a pen, they were gone.
    Black soil. Green fields. The green of the banner draped across the table, splattered with ribbons of Mulvey’s blood. The glint of the weapon they had made him take, the fisherman’s knife pressed to his quaking chest while they raged at him about freedom and land and thievery. The words SHEFFIELD STEEL etched into the blade. He could feel it now, in the pocket of his greatcoat, nestling next to his lacerated thigh. He remembered the things they said they would do with that knife if he didn’t stop whingeing about murder being too heavy a burden to put on him. When they held him down and started to cut him, Mulvey had screamed to be allowed to kill.
    A man he had never met, let alone spoken to. A landlord and an Englishman; therefore an enemy of the people. A landlord without land; an Englishman born in Ireland – but there was little enough point in seeking definitions. For his class, his genealogy, the crimes of his fathers, for the pedigree bloodline into which he had been born. For the church he attended and the prayers he uttered. Asmuch for his name as anything else – a single word he’d had no part in choosing.
    Merridith.
    That trinity of syllables had sentenced their bearer to be slaughtered, had marked him down as one of the culpable. The family tree had grown into his gallows. It counted for nothing