Death in the Air

By Cormac MacConnell

BY the time ye are reading this piece the swallows will have gone again. I went for a brief walk with Friday the terrier this Sunday evening between the showers. The swallows of our summer were doing that excited massing thing around the telephone lines over our heads. 

Friday got excited and started yipping at the world outside her ken, and that built up their pitch of fluttering twittering nerves just a tint higher. Against a golden sky I watched them a little closer than ever before. 

They huddle together very tightly on the lines at this time. Mostly their streamlined little bodies are physically touching. 

They quiver from beak to tail, a kind of ripple effect that passes increasingly through the chain of bodies and frequently, I noticed, actually exploded the end bird from the line up into the air as if to break the flow of energy. I’ve never actually seen them depart.

I wondered, watching, if this energy buildup, first running along a quiver of perhaps 20 small bodies, eventually, maybe even as I’m writing this, reaches a critical mass by passing through hundreds of small breasts and hearts, creating the explosion of the mystery of migration, of the empty high frosted skies of the upcoming ember days.

Friday goes silent as we walk away from the power lines on down the narrow road in the direction of Shannon Airport. After three years living here I still watch every takeoff and landing aircraft with the eye of a hack.

I know the livery of most of the airlines by now, I know the way the weather and winds influences the flightpaths. The fat-bellied big jumbo coming in this time is one of the aircraft I associate with the airlift of American troops to and from Iraq — they have been constants in the skies all this year — all the months of the flitting swallows, of the unrest around the airport itself, down below on my left hand side, all the months of the war bulletins from the bleeding front of the losing war against international terrorism. 

The jumbo gets a little flutter of low turbulence as it slides down towards landing. I think of all the young taut bodies inside the fuselage, pressed tightly together, just like the young swallows awaiting the adventures and risks of migration.

Lives on the line. The TV news before I went walking said that three more young American soldiers died today.

That must be about a dozen this week alone. I predicted it. And it will get worse before it gets better.

I’m thinking thoughts like that as the wiry terrier Friday and myself walk slowly past the lovely old Carrygerry House a half-mile or so from home. It is a beautiful period building of the Big House caste, surrounded by old trees with stately heads and sloping lawns and gardens. 

Now it is an upmarket country house with a fine reputation and great cuisine. In the past such houses would have been occupied by the landlords and their agents of an occupying empire whose representatives we Irish ambushed and slaughtered and murdered for centuries on end in the cause of freedom. 

The Carrygerry-type houses that survived the mass burnings and pillagings of our Troubles did so, I think, because they had a benign and caring reputation locally, as this house’s original occupants had. But the survivors are few enough and for that reason precious and distinctive.

I again admire the lines of the old house as I pass the gates. Friday is walking in front of me down the center of the small road as we turn back for home. Her tail is in the air and she is happy with the evening walk. 

She’s a deceptive little wild thing, our Friday, the picture of the black one on the Black & White whiskey bottles, very cute and lovable. But we rescued her from the Galway pound, a week before she would have been put down, and she knows all about the harsh realities of this world. 

She would have been living on her wits as a stray before caught and put in the pound. So she’s a born killer. And very good at it too. 

She stiffens in front of me, suddenly, her head riveted on the thick hedge to the left of us, all briars and thick undergrowth. Before I can stop her, like a black streak, she flashes into the hedge and I know she has scented a young rabbit inside the ditch. And I know the rabbit is to be dead in a second or two. 

There is the fierce rip and rustle of the terrier’s body through the heart of the hedge, then a brief cry from the rabbit, then silence. It only takes a few seconds. I just stand there, rooted to the spot.

The rabbit would be a young rabbit of the type called graziers. They are so good at protecting themselves when out in the field, always close to cover and a bolthole. 

But a seasoned assassin like Friday ambushes them where they live, savagely, from behind, without mercy. It is nature. There is nothing I can do. There is nothing I would do even if I could.

I walk away from the scene. When I get back to the cottage I make sure the back shed door is open and there is a dish of fresh water for the killer when she comes home replete after I’m in bed.

I stand at the cottage door for a little while before closing it for the night. The sharp edges of the telephone lines are ever so slightly blurred with all those little quivering bodies sitting compressed there, silent now, just waiting. 

A heavy plane takes off from Shannon below, all its engines thrumming hard and screaming to drive it upwards and onwards on its scheduled and rigid migration. It is too far away from me to identify but it is probably the troop carrier.

I think of young bodies sitting tautly close together, waiting. I hear the yiplet of agony in the hedge when the killer struck. I close the door on the world and I switch off the light.