Summary
After getting home, Cal tells his father about his new job. His father is happy and informs him that Crilly has called for him. Cal heads to Crilly’s place after dinner, where Crilly tells him that he has to drive him for a job that night. They head out at nine, first trading Cal’s van for a white Cortina from a friend. While in the car, Crilly loads a gun. They go to rob a liquor store; Crilly goes in to get the money while Cal waits in the car. The couple of minutes Crilly is gone, Cal is extremely nervous and time passes slowly. Crilly returns with the money and they speed off.
They go to Skeffington’s house to give him the money, but get pulled into having a drink with him and his father. Skeffington’s house is very fancy and luxurious. After an awkward conversation where Mr. Skeffington says very little, they count the money—it is 722 pounds. Crilly and Skeffington again question Cal on whether he wants to be part of the movement and Cal say he does not; they tell him he is either part of the problem or part of the solution. Skeffington reads a poem to them from the point of view of a mother who is happy her sons go out to fight and kill, as they are “faithful” to what is right.
The next day Cal starts working on the Mortons’ farm and realizes he knows very little about this sort of manual labor. Dunlop shows him around but is not the best teacher, rushing through the instructions too quickly. Dunlop tries to show him who is boss, continually checking in on his work to make sure Cal is doing it fast enough. One day Dunlop tells Cal that Cal is only the second Catholic hired by the Mortons and that he put in a good word for Cal on account of his father being a good man. Dunlop says he doesn’t mind Catholics, even though he is a Protestant. Cal slowly becomes annoyed that despite working at the Mortons, he rarely gets to see Marcella.
He goes to the library one evening to try and see Marcella and is elated to find her working. He approaches her and they have a casual conversation about her daughter and what type of things Cal likes to read. After they talk, Cal finds a spot in the library where he can secretly watch her. He decides to take out a book in order to impress Marcella. Cal heads home and is startled to see smoke billowing at the end of Main Street and a fire engine on the scene. He immediately starts to run toward his house, but he has to push his way through the crowd of people. His house has been set on fire. He finds his father sitting outside the house, crying. Seeing him, Shamie is happy that Cal is okay. Shamie and Cal take shelter in the home of Dermot Ryan, their cousin.
When Shamie tells Cal that he left the gun on his bedside table just before the fire broke out, Cal panics and runs back to what is left of their house. He begs the fireman to go upstairs, lying that he needs to get his father’s medication. The fireman says that he can, but it’s at his own risk, as the stairs have collapsed. Cal makes his way up using a ladder and gets the gun. All of his other possessions have been burnt and melted. He goes back to Dermot’s house. Before sleeping, he talks to Shamie about how the house was not insured but how possibly they can get compensated since it was intentionally burned down. Cal actually feels more secure than he ever has, knowing that no one knows his location now. Before they fall asleep, Shamie remembers that Crilly told him to tell Cal to come over on Saturday. Cal demands Shamie to tell everyone, including Crilly, that he has left town after the fire. Shamie worries that Cal is in trouble. Cal is thinking he will stay in the derelict cottage near the Mortons' farm.
The next day Cal waits in his usual spot to be picked up by Dunlop for work. Dunlop is surprised to see Cal after hearing about what happened. When Cal informs him that it was not an accident but intentional, Dunlop admits there are bad actors on the Protestant side. At work, while mucking, Cal’s mind wanders and he thinks of what could possibly be salvaged from the house. Although Shamie will have lost a lifetime worth of things, Cal thinks maybe it could be a fresh start for him. Cal goes to the derelict cottage to survey its state. He tells Dunlop he will not need to be driven to and from work anymore. Cal spends time in a pub after work until dark, when he heads to the cottage. He doesn’t have a flashlight or anything to sleep on.
He considers how he is not only without any light and comfort, but also without faith in God, which is the only thing that would “dignify his suffering.” Without God, the suffering is in vain and he compares this pointless pain to the situation in Ireland. He feels the memory of his “sin” coming back to him and in the darkness goes through it again. Around a year ago, Crilly called him to help with a big task: driving Crilly to murder a police officer from the enemy side. They meet at a school dance, where they steal a car and drive to the officer’s house. It is the Mortons’ farm, and the husband of Marcella who is shot many times by Crilly and killed. Crilly also shoots someone else in the house. Cal, waiting in the car, is extremely nervous the whole time and after Crilly kills the officer, they speed off and leave the car near the dance, where they set it on fire. They return to the dance and Cal tries to pretend everything is normal but feels sick to his stomach, knowing this will stay with him for a long time.
Analysis
In Chapter 3 of Cal, the story clarifies many of our questions, leading to perhaps a new perspective on the protagonist as more complex than we initially thought. In the last pages of the chapter, Cal remembers back to a year earlier, when he was an accomplice to a crime for the movement. It is not just any petty misdemeanor, but something so serious that it still weighs on him to this day, and probably will stick with him for the “rest of his life.” He helped Crilly as a driver in the killing of Robert Morton, a police officer and the husband of Marcella. It now becomes more evident why Cal has grown so obsessed with the young woman, as well as why he is constantly dealing with feelings of guilt and self-hatred.
Learning this about Cal, the reader is confronted with an uncomfortable consideration. How do we see Cal now that this has been revealed? MacLaverty portrays his main character as neither fully a hero nor a villain, but rather leaves things more ambiguous, just as in real life. Cal is developed in all his humanness. We see both his kindness and sensitivity—such as in his wistful reminiscences about his deceased mother and his inability to work in a slaughterhouse—and his faultiness. Unlike Crilly and the other IRA members, Cal doesn’t have a real urge for violence; in fact, he is always trying to get out of the movement by pointing out the immorality of killing, even for a so-called righteous cause. His weakness rather lies in his ability to say no, to stand up for himself and what he knows to be right—and because of this extreme timidness, he finds himself as an accessory to murder, something that will haunt him for the rest of his days.
With his house being burned down by the UVF, it seems like Cal and his father are perhaps being given a chance for a new beginning. They can start another life somewhere else, where there is less of a constant threat of violence and where they can live more peacefully. This is symbolized also in the way almost all of Cal and Shamie’s belongings have been melted and burnt to a crisp; in one sense, it is tragic, but in another sense, it can be seen as life giving them a fresh start, which Cal likens to “burning a wound to cleanse it.” In the face of such a loss, Cal is surprisingly calm, even nonchalant about the whole incident, almost as if he was hoping for it to occur in order to reap the opportunity of leaving behind this chaotic way of life. It is an excellent moment to escape, especially as Cal is again being pressured into the movement by Crilly, who makes him drive him to commit a robbery.
Yet something is keeping Cal in place. It is not his job, his friends, nor his desire to participate in the movement; it is his yearning to remain close to Marcella. He has the idea to secretly stay in the dilapidated cottage on the Mortons’ property, where he is in a perfect position to spy on Marcella to his heart’s content. But with the development in this chapter, we can now understand his fixation on Marcella is multilayered: there is the romantic attraction he feels towards her, and there is also the connection he feels to her rooted in the heinous crime he committed. Subconsciously, Cal might feel that he has to be there for her because he is responsible for ending the life of the man closest to her. And in this chapter, it begins to seem that maybe Marcella is not completely closed off to this possibility; her friendliness and humor when talking to Cal demonstrates her openness to the relationship.
Stylistically, MacLaverty has a way of using language to reflect the inner state of his characters. This is most prominent in the scene where Cal is waiting in the car for Crilly as he robs a shop at gunpoint. While Crilly is inside only for a couple of minutes, the time seems to pass incredibly slowly for Cal because of the risky nature of what they are doing. Cal’s anxiety is expressed in one passage, on page 61, through a series of short, staccato sentences. Cal’s inner monologue is related in a stream of consciousness, where there is a mixture of observations of his surroundings, his attempt to count seconds, and his own fantastical fears (such as thinking a man walking his dog is a police officer). In this way, the reader is made to viscerally feel Cal’s nervousness.
