A Star Called Henry (32 page)

I cycled to Dublin with the priest’s sock in my coat. Ivan and Willie were my scouts. I brought them to Shanahan’s and showed them famous men and we cycled back to Rusg with the promise of ten rifles and, while I entertained Cathleen, the big girl in Kinnegad, Ivan got on with her sister and Willie threw the priest’s empty sock into the river, and by the time we cycled back through Athlone they were ready to take down the barracks with their teeth. It had all gone to plan: I’d be leaving soon and I wanted Ivan to take over. The men elected their own commander and other officers but it was always tricky; it had been a problem in other places. They’d be ruled by their place in the local pecking order and they’d vote up, for the big farmer, the teacher or the lad in the bank with the brother a priest, big noises in the parish but hopeless soldiers. Ivan was born to it. He had respect, know-how, he never slept. But he was no one; he’d no land, no connections. I wanted to leave him in charge, our own man. The coming war was his big chance and I needed him to see that, to fight for the leadership and what he could do with it. Cathleen’s sister and the pints in Shanahan’s had done their job. Ivan wanted more.

The rifles arrived, ten brand-new Lee-Enfields in a bed of oil and straw, and I watched as they held and rubbed them and passed them on to their friends. The rifle gave them power, style, military legitimacy; it made men of them, the men who meant business. I showed them how to dismantle and clean them and they queued to do it, like jealous sisters wanting their turn with the baby. They bathed the guns with Rangoon oil and a can of 3-in-1, patted a plug of Vaseline into the muzzle and breech and put them back together again. I gave them each a bullet and let them fall in love with it.

I brought them out on a cloudless night and made them stand out on the road, on a wide, clear patch away from the corners. And, one by one, I made them shout it, and Ivan shouted and loudest and longest.

—Fuck you, God!

Straight up at the stars.

—Fuck you, God!

All of them.

—Right, boys, I said.—You’re in.

I never stayed in the same house for more than a few nights. There were peelers hanging around the roads, since the killings in Soloheadbeg and other skirmishes, and Crossleys full of soldiers were becoming a daily sight. I moved on and often I stayed away from houses altogether. I lived in the hill country where the peelers never ventured. I lay in against walls with my thoughts of Victor and women. I ate hare and hedgehog with the tinkers and slept with them too and stayed well clear of their women. The women stared at me and knew I’d never touch them. I stayed in friendly cottages and ate the silent meals and kneeled while they said their rosaries. I lay on the floor and listened to the crickets.

—Put your socks beyond on the dresser, Captain, for the crickets eat the socks of strangers when they’re sleeping.

I listened to the crickets and felt very far away. I wondered why I was doing it, far from Jack and Collins and songs written about me. But some memory of belief would calm me, a feeling of belonging that came when I thought of the people I knew and, always, it was parts of them that came to me - Victor’s hand, my father’s breath, my mother’s lap, Connolly at my shoulder opening the words, his finger following mine across the page, Annie and her singing, her dead husband’s empty sleeve, even Granny Nash’s whispering as she rode deeper into the stories in front of her on the table, Victor’s cough, my mother’s broken words, Paddy Swanzy’s back, him falling on Moore Street, Miss O’Shea running into the bullets on Henry Street, Victor under the tarpaulin and the frost on the gravel path that morning behind Grand Canal Dock, his cheeks, I rubbed them and rubbed them and all I wanted was to hear another cough, and Victor on my shoulders and Victor beside me at the school railings and Victor and me falling from the wall on to our father’s stomach and the grunting of the fat rozzers trying to follow us. And I knew why I was there, on the damp floors of those strangers’ houses, and I knew that I was right and it gave a point to my loneliness and made a good friend of my anger. I came back to old Missis O’Shea’s as often as was safe and prayed as I pedalled that there’d be griddle cakes waiting for me. And they were always there, always, with the cabbage and the chat.

She had bad news when I cycled up to her door.

—You’re very welcome, young Captain. But the water’s gone astray on me.

Her well had gone dry.

—And in April too, she said.—The water falling out of the sky in buckets but none of it coming out of the ground.

I dropped a stone into the well, and nothing came back except the noise of the stone hitting more stone.

—The diviner’s a mysterious man, she said.—God alone knows when he’ll come our way again. He was through here last spring.

—I’ll find you water, I said.

I took the leg from the holster under my coat.

—I have the power.

—Good man yourself, she said.—That’s the powerful leg you have there.

I had the power but I hadn’t used it since the day I’d discovered it and escaped from Richmond Barracks, and I’d never controlled it. I held the leg in front of me now in both my hands and I walked slowly from the well, away from the house and the yard. Old Missis O’Shea was behind me; I could feel her walking in my shadow. I waited for it to happen. I remembered the shake and my blood racing, pulling me towards the river under the barracks. I turned to the east. She followed; I heard her feet. I remembered being dragged and every bone I owned bending towards it, quivering, promising to snap if I didn’t move. I waited for it. There was no hurry, no urgency yet. I waited for the rush. It would happen; I knew it would.

She spoke.

—Two and two?

I stopped.

—Don’t know, I said.—Two and two what?

—Griddle cakes.

Meanwhile, after the killings at Soloheadbeg, parts of the south were now military areas, open prisons that made trade and courting almost impossible; buying and selling sheep had become an act of sedition, and kissing was downright treason.

—Griddle cakes, she said.

—Who made them?

—I did.

—Four.

De Valera decided to go on to America, to raise funds and heckles, much to the dismay of those who were afraid of Collins and the tight hold, getting tighter and meaner all the time, he seemed to have on everything - the money, the weapons, ideas, secrets, the loyalty of the hardest men and women. Collins, Minister for Finance, set up the Republican Loan.
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And he was escorted into the centre of Dublin Castle by Ned Broy and spent hours reading fat files in their treasury of secrets and bad business. He read his own file:
He comes of a brainy Cork family.
He read mine:
He comes of no known family.
At a meeting in Cork, Alfred Gandon, Minister for Commercial Affairs and the Sea, spoke of his days in the G.P.O. with Pearse and Connolly and the dark days after in Dartmoor and Lewes, and of how his faith in the Republic had never once wavered. A body was found in a ditch in the Wicklow Mountains, a placard around the neck.
Spy - killed by I.R.A.
And on the 24th of June, 1919, in Thurles, a peeler called Hunt was shot in the back. The terror was now systematic. The way to the state’s heart was through its police force.
Shun all policemen and spies! Three cheers for the I.R.A.

I turned.

Brown eyes and some slivers of hair that had escaped from a bun that shone like a lamp behind her head, even on the miserable day we were standing in.

—Four, I said.

—
Maithú
, Henry.

A mass of the finest brown hair, endless hair that was dying for fingers to comb it. Hair that had once washed over me.

—It was the leg that did it, she said.

Her hand reached out and she wiped some of the rain off the mahogany.

—You still have it.

—I do.

And there they were, the little brown buttons, running the length of the same brown dress, like the heads of little animals climbing quietly to her neck, only now, nine or ten years later, they seemed to be crawling down to her boots, her muck-fattened boots, her laces untied and trailing. And those laces were the wildest things I’d ever seen.

—How are you? I said.

—Not so bad.

—It’s been a long time.

—Not so long.

—You’re getting wet.

—And so are you.

The same brown-black eyes, but already I could see that she was different.

—Well, I said.

—Well.

In little ways. She was different in small parts of herself. The corners of her mouth, her nose, there was something about her shoulders. She was thinner. There was more of her now gathered under her eyes. She’d been sick. She had the face of a woman who’d been sick for a long time, whose mind was still back in the sick time. I looked for the horrible redness that ate the cheeks of men and women who were coughing to their deaths, and children too. But there were no red wounds; they were the cheeks of a woman who was out in the rain.

—You’re looking well, I said.

She blushed, and I remembered that too.

—So are you.

—I make the effort, I said.

—You’re still a great man for the answers, she said.—Your britches are gone.

—They were beyond saving, I said.—They went out a window. She’s your mother, isn’t she?

—Yes.

—She told me there were no teachers in the family.

—She wasn’t telling a lie. Why didn’t you get yourself a new pair?

—The old ones had become too famous, I told her.—I saw you going out the side door.

She knew that I was talking about the G.P.O.

—They made us do it, she said.—They never wanted us there in the first place. All we were good for was cooking stew and sewing haversacks. I’m a better shot than the lot of them.

—A better ride, too.

She blushed.

—You’re the same as ever, she said.

—A bit older.

—It comes with the life, I suppose.

—No more teaching, no?

—No, she said.—No more teaching.

—You were a great teacher.

—Thank you, she said.—But I can make only one proud boast about my teaching days.

—What’s that?

—I’m the woman who taught Henry Smart to write his name.

—That’s right. But I’m not Henry Smart around here.

—I know, she said.—You’re different men in different places. You told me to remember that, on the day you left the school. Do you remember that?

—I remember, I said.—I remember every second. Every sum and hymn.

—So do I. Well.

—We’re getting wet and I’ve water to find.

—Right, she said.—I’ll leave you to it.

—Right, I said.—I’ll be seeing you.

—Yes, she said.—You will.

I’d gone only a few yards through the muck when the leg started hopping in my hands, and humming. I watched the raindrops dancing to the tip of the shivering peg -
we’ll go home be the water
- and dropping down to more water. I let go of the leg before my blood started to race and it jumped from the remains of my grip and dived straight into the muck. The leather strap was all I could see. I knew where the well would be. I bent down to pull the leg from the ooze and felt, for a fraction, the coarse wool of an old coat on my neck and a man’s sweat warmed my cheek, gone before I could stand up straight, before I knew properly what they were. But the smell of old, murdered blood that came with them, the smell that had drenched my father’s coat, stayed under my nose until long after the rain had gone and the cousins and nephews were digging through the rock to the groundwater.

 

 

We were married on the 12th of September, 1919. A ruined teacher and a gunman on the run. Our wedding present from Collins was my birth certificate and four extra years added to my life; according to the Republic-issued cert, I was born on the 11th of May, 1897. That made me twenty-two, just ten years younger than my bride, an unusual difference, strange, but not a scandal. And from Jack Dalton I got my suit, cleaned and wrapped in brown paper, with a bullet hole where his shoulder would have been if he’d been half the man that I was, picked up in a skirmish on Winetavern Street. Neither Mick nor Jack attended the wedding. They were on their way - Jack was to be my best man - but military activity had held them in Granard. That was what they told me later, the next time I was up in Dublin to shoot a G-man and I saw nothing in the excuse to give out about. Getting any distance by road without coming up against a roadblock had become a lucky day’s work. By the day of our wedding, the times were racing.

We were married by our priest, the treasurer, owner of the sock that had gone into the river behind Kinnegad. The church was emptied, except for himself, the happy couple and Ivan, my emergency best man -

—Thanks, Ivan.

—For what?

emptied, just for the vows, so that my true identity would remain unknown. And another secret inside that secret: I put fingers to my ears when the priesteen turned to my fiancée and said:—Do you—

I pushed the fingers in.

And out.

—O’Shea, take this man to be—

We became man and wife without me hearing her Christian name. She was and stayed my Miss O’Shea. I never knew her name.

And there was the hooley in old Missis O’Shea’s house, tables out in the yard to make room for the dancing inside. Her own table and more borrowed from family and neighbours, decked high with sandwiches and cakes, crates of porter and minerals, and on one of them only griddle cakes, great piles of them, and children and women around the table burrowing into them like cornered ferrets. The whole day, from dawn to the dawn of the day after, was guarded by the men I’d trained and who were now under Ivan’s command. Men on the roof of the church, on the approach roads, hidden back in the hedges, men at the gate of the church, behind stones in the graveyard, in the car parked outside the creamery. And they led the way to the house and more of them followed and ringed us. The procession was a show of force: we controlled the town. We had our supporters, plenty of them, but there were also plenty who hated and feared us, who hated what we were doing. We let them see - they were behind the lace curtains of the town as we marched past - how easily we could take over, how inevitable it was. If we couldn’t lead them, we’d force them to follow us. And Ivan’s men were on the roof of the long barn, in the fields and bog-land surrounding the house, behind the bright stone walls. The car outside the creamery, now empty of men, was a gelignite bomb waiting for any armoured car or foot patrol to pass it. They were armed to the gaps in their teeth now; Lee-Enfields, Winchesters, and some Red Army Mosins, Smith and Wessons and some good-looking R.I.C. carbines, taken from the burning barracks in Muckloon. They had home-made grenades, tins filled with blasting powder, and a few grenades that had been made in Germany before the end of the War. They had a sergeant in an abandoned cottage near Cloonfree Lough and a promise to deliver him safe home if the day passed without interruption.