And when they buried him, it was into a deep compartment of the mind that they put Matti Bonner, a place where the existence of God has never been fully resolved, nor their own lives really authenticated. His death triggered off in their psyches questions about the meaning of the word everlasting, the meaning of despair, and the meaning of the concept of redemption. There could be no uplift of the spirit in burying a man who had died by his own hand opposite two churches on Thanksgiving Day. Even the earth that was thrown on his coffin was somehow transparent, made of nothing. And the prayers for the dead seemed the final blasphemy.

Matti Bonner hanged himself from a birch that to the north commanded a view of a field where the Reverend Ian Paisley had come at midnight with torches and flares and flute bands to summon up votes for his entry into Stormont. Under it, Catholics usually stood smoking after Mass and watched the other sects file past. To the west was a small soccer pitch.

From a distance the tree looked like a man taking off his feathered hat with a flourish.

Some names had been cut into the bark with a penknife. The most famous of them now was Matti Bonner’s own, undated, dark and deep.

The Irish for the townland was Cul Fada. The English was Cullada. In the fields behind the birch Matti Bonner used to turn hay for his Protestant neighbours when they went off to celebrate the twelfth of July. He would have known the birch from all sides. Now, when the Catholics passed the tree they made the sign of the cross, and when the Adams girls talked in their rooms they talked of Matti Bonner the bachelor, who used walk the back garden of his house with his flies undone. They’d saunter up the road to stare at the tree where the bit of a rope without its noose still hung; they’d pick their way down to the untidy house and peer into the rooms with dizzy stomachs, see the porringers and cups, the milk pail by the door. They’d see the old black Ford tipped into a ditch, the red, upturned cart, the TV aerial cocked back at an angle after a severe gust in a storm, the Christmas cards still on the mantel, and, despite the hostile Catholic spirit, they’d feel a twinge of sentiment. Then they came across the skull of a dead cow under the apple trees and thought it was his; they stood petrified in his galvanize shed in a fall of hail and knew God existed, and yet whispered hard, uncaring things.

They were trying to outwit their fear.