1949 (11 page)

Although the Cosgrave administration was deeply concerned, Republican sympathizers in the Dáil turned a blind eye to this activity. During a heated parliamentary exchange in Leinster House one of de Valera's T.D.s, Seán Lemass, accurately if imprudently described Fianna Fáil as a “slightly constitutional party.”
⁵

 

On the fifth of February, 1929, Eamon de Valera was arrested on the border of County Armagh and taken to Belfast jail for infringing an order prohibiting him to enter Northern Ireland. W.T. Cosgrave personally made representations to the Northern Ireland government seeking his release, but de Valera was forced to serve a token sentence.

77 February 1929
BENITO MUSSOLINI SIGNS TREATY WITH POPE PIUS XI CREATING VATICAN STATE

Recognition of the Vatican's independent sovereignty was hailed by Irish Catholics for its religious significance. To others it was simply a political development.

Following the Treaty, southern Protestants had found themselves in a new Irish state proud of its nationalist and Catholic credentials. Although they did not suffer from discrimination as did Catholics in the north, they were uncomfortably associated with the former British regime.

A large number moved to England. Far fewer moved to Northern Ireland. Those who remained had personal or business ties inextricably linked with the south and could not imagine leaving. They negotiated the difficult path into a new Ireland by becoming increasingly Irish in thought and outlook.

But they did not read Catholic newspapers and they did not light candles for Mussolini.

 

Eileen Halloran was a great worry to her family. Since the age of sixteen she had kept company with one young man after another. Again and again Norah Daly had predicted marriage, only to be disappointed. Had Eileen been on the Continent, she would have been envied for her popularity. In Ireland she was a liability. People were talking.

So Ursula could imagine the relief with which Norah Daly wrote in March, “Eileen has agreed to marry Lucas Mulvaney from Quin. The wedding will take place on the twenty-third of this month.”

The sudden announcement was a surprise. A betrothal of at least a year was customary. Nor could Ursula recall any of Eileen's suitors who was named Mulvaney.
Unless he was one of those lads she used to meet at dances. She always did attract the handsome ones
.

“What good news, Aunt Norah!” she replied by return post. “I shall ask for Friday and Monday off so I can attend the wedding. I am sure you have put notices in the
Clare Champion
, but please put them in the Belfast and Derry newspapers as well. Perhaps Papa will see them.”

 

The train rattled over the tracks; tracks blown up during the War of Independence, then barely patched before they were blown up again during the Civil War. In their fractured iron they bore the scars of a fractured nation.

No one mentioned the condition of the tracks. A sort of national amnesia was underway. The revolutionary decade that had won a limited degree of freedom from Britain was being dismissed from the consciousness of the Irish people in an act of emotional self-preservation. They were willing to settle for what they had, flawed and incomplete as it was.

The terrible poverty that afflicted cities and towns existed in the country too, though it was not as immediately obvious. People with a little bit of land were able to subsist on what they could grow. Starvation had not been a problem in rural Ireland since the Great Famine. However, vast numbers of people still lived in dilapidated cabins innocent of sanitation. They had no money, but worked through the barter system. Their lives were little changed from the lives of their great-grandparents. Under British rule they had possessed no more than they had now.

But now they were free.

 

Frank met Ursula at the Ennis station with the farm wagon, a high-sided vehicle pulled by two shaggy draft horses. “The county council's tarring the Ennis road and they're letting people buy the empty barrels for next nothing,” Frank said, “so we'll collect some on the way home. They have all sorts of uses.”

Eying the filthy wagon, she gestured ruefully at her good beige coat. “Could you not have brought the pony and trap?”

“We put the pony down before Christmas,” Frank told her as he tossed her small suitcase into the wagon bed.

“Poor Tad! Did he break a leg?”

“He was too old to be of any more use,” the man said. Country people were not sentimental about animals. He added, “I could drive that horse of yours if he would pull a cart, but he won't accept a harness.”

“Saoirse's a saddle horse,” Ursula said indignantly.

Frank scowled. “Can't ride him either; he goes wild if anyone tries. He won't pull a plough, and thanks to what that fool brother of mine did, we can't stand him at stud to the local farmers anymore. So there's that bit of income gone. Divvil a soul will buy him now, not even a tinker.”

Ursula folded her fingers tightly over her thumbs. “Let me remind you that you can't sell Saoirse anyway, Frank. He's mine.” She kept her voice calm. Frank could be as stubborn as Ned. If she argued with him, he might wait until she had gone and then sell the horse anyway. It was best to change the subject. “Have you heard anything from Papa?”

“Not a sausage.” Frank flapped the reins at the plough horses, who broke into a shambling trot. “It's just as well,” Frank went on. “This wedding is cursed enough without Ned blowing in like the east wind.”

She gave him a quizzical glance but he said nothing more.

Norah Daly insisted on welcoming Ursula to the farm with a brimming mug of heated milk and sugared bread, a childhood treat known as “goody” that the young woman had long since outgrown. She consumed it obediently, however, and forced an appreciative smile.

Norah then took Ursula upstairs to her former bedroom and firmly closed the door behind them. In an urgent whisper the old woman said, “Before you see Eileen I have to warn you. She's showing.”

“Showing? You don't mean…is she…”

“She is,” Norah affirmed, crimson with shame. “Weddings should be in May, but this one won't wait any longer. Thanks be to God he's marrying her at all.” The old woman's thin lips closed over her disapproval as tightly as a farmer's purse.

There were none of the celebratory trappings Ursula had expected for the wedding. No crowd of neighbor women helping with the cooking and baking, no sheets and quilts being aired on fences and hedgerows, no small children taking up the stones that marked the borders of the path to the house and scrubbing them to pristine whiteness to welcome guests.

No guests; only the families of the bride and groom.

“Don't say anything,” Eileen hissed to Ursula when they met in the kitchen. “I can't bear it if you say anything.” There was a new, sullen set to her mouth. She was as plump as ever; plumper. But her youthful freshness was gone.

“I wasn't going to say anything, Eilie, except I hope you'll be very happy.”

“Happy. How can I be happy when I've got meself trapped?”

“Is Lucas Mulvaney that fine-looking lad who plays the tin whistle? Lots of girls would think you're lucky.”

“Lucas is forty years old and as ugly as lye soap,” Eileen contradicted. “And he's never played music in his life. He works in a slaughterhouse.”

Ursula raised her eyebrows. “He owns an abattoir?”

“I said he
works
there. Lucas sluices the killing floor after the cattle are slaughtered.” Her words began to rush over one another, anxious to get it all out at once. “He lives with a whole rake of brothers and sisters on a rented smallholding that's good for nothing but growing rocks. That's why he was willing to marry me. Frank arranged it.”

“But is Lucas not the…” Ursula's glance dropped to Eileen's swelling waist.

“He is not! You think I'd let myself be tumbled by the likes of him? The scrapings from the bottom of the barrel?” Tears rose to flood level in her eyes.

“Then who?”

“God!” cried Eileen. Her voice shivered like glass about to break. “The child is God's and I'm the Virgin Eileen!”

 

Ursula found Saoirse turned out in a distant field, barely surviving on the exhausted grass of late winter. Oats were no longer being grown on the farm. The horse's ribs resembled the timbers of a wrecked ship; his protruding hipbones formed a hat rack. When she called to him the gray horse threw up his head and stared for a moment, then broke into a trot. By the time he reached the gate he was galloping.

Ursula gathered his big head into her arms and baptized it with her tears. “I'm sorry,
a stor
,
^*
so sorry. I didn't know, I thought they would take care of you.”

Her sense of betrayal was acute.

 

The wedding was held in a side chapel as cold and dark as bog water. Father Durcan had refused to conduct the ceremony in the main church. The bride's loosely fitted frock was gray wool trimmed with Limerick lace. The groom was distinguished by profuse sweating and a fat neck that overflowed his collar like pudding spilling out of a basin.

Eileen's family kept an anxious eye on the bride, who had been teetering between depression and hysteria. The Mulvaneys were in better spirits. One of theirs was marrying up.

Afterward the party adjourned to the Halloran farm. There was no wedding feast. Norah Daly shooed the rowdy Mulvaney clan into the parlor, from which she had removed all breakables except Frank's small collection of records, stacked beside the gramophone to provide a salubrious atmosphere. Tea would be served to the women. The men expected something stronger.

The priest did not join them. Even the confessional had not extirpated the stain of Eileen's prenuptial fecundity to his satisfaction. “Father Durcan will be quick enough to urge Eileen to have scores of babies now that she's married, though,” Lucy remarked as she and Ursula were slicing fruitcake and putting the kettle on the boil.

The half-door creaked to announce a latecomer arriving. Glancing up, Ursula gasped. “Papa!”

They stared at one another across the debris of the past.

“Papa,” Ursula repeated. Softly. Not a plea, but an invitation to cease hostilities.

A muscle tightened in Ned Halloran's jaw. “Came for the wedding,” he said as if every syllable hurt him.

“I hoped you would.”

Ned was thinner than ever and his mop of black curls had turned to grizzled gray wire. A livid scar zigzagged from his sharp cheekbone to his left temple. His right ear was crumpled like wadded paper. As he gazed at Ursula a green fire ignited in the deep hollows of his eye sockets: an intense beam that searched and scorched.

When Lucy spoke they were both startled, so intense had their focus been on each other. “Ned Halloran, it's about time you surfaced! Poor Aunt Norah's been worried threadless. Every morning she's off to Mass to pray for you.”

Ned turned toward his body toward Lucy without taking his eyes off Ursula. “Is she now.” His voice had a knife edge.

“She is, ye ungrateful git,” snapped Lucy.

“And you,” Ned addressed Ursula in the same hard tone. “Do you pray for me too?”

Her clenched fists clutched her thumbs in the effort to keep her voice steady. “At Mass I light a candle for you. And before I go to bed I ask God to keep you safe.”

Lucy gave a sudden sob. “I was afraid you were killt!”

Ned bounded forward and gathered his sister into his arms. She buried her face against his chest. Over her head, Ned's eyes met Ursula's again. “Precious?” he whispered.

When he opened his embrace to include her, she flew to him.

That was how Norah found them when she entered the kitchen. “What's keeping you with the…merciful hour! It's yourself!”

“It is myself,” Ned agreed gravely.

His arms opened again.

“He's back!” Norah shrieked. “Come here everyone, our Ned's home!”

Hallorans and Mulvaneys surrounded Ned and carried him off to the parlor like a trophy. He was seated in Frank's favorite chair. A glass of Frank's favorite whiskey was put into his hand and refilled as soon as he took a drink. Norah ran back and forth between parlor and kitchen, urging food upon him and giving him anxious little pats to assure herself that he was, indeed, home.

If things were different, Eileen would have resented his stealing the limelight at her wedding. Under the circumstances it was a blessing.

Generations of rural inbreeding had given the Mulvaneys vacuous, interchangeable faces. Male and female alike were staring at Ned in open-mouthed awe.
At least they have enough wits to recognize a genuine hero when they see one
, Ursula thought. Then she noticed a strange expression on Frank's face. He watched his younger brother with something akin to hatred.

Resolutely apolitical, Frank had never involved himself in Ireland's struggle for independence. He had stayed on the farm and done his best to support the family. No one had ever said thank you. No one had ever looked at him the way people were looking at Ned now.

After a few minutes he muttered about needing to tend to the livestock and left the house.

No sooner had Frank gone than the Mulvaneys began firing questions at Ned. “Were you in the north?” one of Lucas's brothers demanded to know.

“Could be.” Gazing down into his glass, Ned swirled the whiskey like a fortune-teller examining tea leaves.

“Did ye shoot any Prods up there?” A female Mulvaney clasped her hands together under her receding chin and waited for gory details.

Ursula found their avidity unnerving. “Can't you see he doesn't want to talk about it?”

But the interrogation went on. “Who was with you?” “Any boys from Clare?” “What weapons had ye?”

Ned took a long drink and stared off into space.

His questioners persisted. “Did ye kill any o'them dirty loyalists? You can tell us, we're family now.”

Norah lost her temper. “Go away out o'that! We're after having a wedding, there'll be no talk about killing. Lucy, give these men another wee drop before they die of thirst.”

By the scruff of its neck the conversation was dragged to other topics. For an hour the Hallorans listened to the Mulvaneys complaining about their lot in life: their unproductive land, their avaricious landlord, their unrelenting bad luck. Then they went home with their pockets stuffed with chocolate biscuits and Norah's sausage rolls. Ursula saw one of the men hide a bottle of Frank's whiskey under his coat just before he nipped out the door.