Under the Lake by Stuart Woods Page B

was ample reason for a trip to town. He could always work over the weekend to make up for lost time.
    He found a parking space on Main Street; he could use one of Bubba’s cheeseburgers and a beer. The place was fairly crowded. “Sit over yonder with McAuliffe,” Bubba said, motioning toward a booth where a man ate alone.
    “You mind?” Howell asked the man, pointing to the empty seat.
    “Glad for the company,” the man said, sticking out his hand. “Enda McAuliffe, known to one and all as Mac. Sityourself down.” McAuliffe was a slender, rumpled-looking man somewhere in his forties, dressed in a blue wash-and-wear seersucker suit that had been washed too many times.
    Howell introduced himself. “How’s the, ah . . . ?” He indicated the food on McAuliffe’s plate.
    “Stuffed cabbage,” McAuliffe replied. “No worse than the pork chops, and a damn sight better than the chicken-fried steak. In fact,” he said loudly, glancing sideways at the approaching Bubba, “we’ve never been too sure around here from which animal the chicken-fried steak derives. It ain’t chicken, and it sure ain’t steak.”
    “Now, Mac,” Bubba cautioned, “don’t go knocking my cooking; you eat it most every day.”
    McAuliffe nodded. “The voice of experience. Bubba came to us from Texas,” McAuliffe said to Howell, “which will explain a lot as you get to know him, but not the origins of the chicken-fried steak—or, for that matter, one or two other bits of Western exotica which occasionally pop up on the menu.”
    McAuliffe had the characteristic mountain drawl of the local residents but spoke in different cadences, somehow. Howell ordered a cheeseburger and a beer.
    “Well chosen,” McAuliffe said. “Not even Bubba can do much harm to a cheeseburger. What brings you to our parts, Mr. Howell? I know you from your journalistic endeavors, of course.”
    Howell gave what was becoming his standard explanation of his presence, one which everybody seemed to accept with a grain of salt. Nobody seemed willing to believe that he had actually come to Lake Sutherland to write a book. “Enda . . . that’s an Irish name, isn’t it?”
    “It is indeed. So’s McAuliffe.”
    “Seems like I’ve run into a lot of Irish names around here—for Georgia, anyway.”
    “I expect you have. There are still a number of us scattered hereabouts.”
    “Still? Were there once more?”
    “There was a little community of us in the valley before it became the lake. A group that somehow ended up in Savannah instead of New York or Boston during the potato famine of the last century. They were hired right off the boat to work on the railroad up here, and eventually they bought some land in the valley and settled in. Their descendants lived in the valley for nearly a hundred years before the lake came. A very tight little community, they were.”
    “I saw a priest on Main Street the other day and thought that unusual.”
    “It would be in any other Georgia town of this size, I suppose. There were just enough Catholics in the valley to warrant one.”
    “He looked a little the worse for wear.”
    McAuliffe smiled and nodded. “Well, the Irish clergy have never held with the Protestant attitude toward drink, and I suppose Father Harry held with it less than most. Still, there was a time when he wasn’t always drunk. After the lake came, his parishioners scattered, and he was getting on a bit. The archdiocese pensioned him off. He’s past eighty now.”
    “Remarkable that the booze hasn’t finished him off.”
    “Ah, me lad, you underestimate the resilience of an Irish constitution.”
    “Where is the Catholic church, then? I don’t think I’ve seen it in my travels.”
    “It’s under the lake,” McAuliffe said wryly, “like a great many other things hereabouts.”
    “You’re the first person I’ve heard who seems less than enthusiastic about the lake,” Howell said. “It seems to have done a lot for the area.”
    “For