Obit (9 page)

I then heard Brennan’s curt voice. “Yes? No, not really. But I’ve a feeling he’s going to lose the will to live when he emerges from the bathroom. Mmm. What’s that? Ah, no. Gone. Chicago. No, I doubt it. I must be off. Oh. Just send it here. Bye.” Click.

I thought of just staying in the bathroom of room 703 for the rest of my natural life. And why not? The alternatives were too grim to face. I took extra time to make my teeth squeaky clean, then opened the door. Four pairs of eyes locked on to me as I emerged. “So. Chez Burke, for some lessons in history,” I tried.

Maura ushered the kids out with a deadly look in my direction as she passed.

“What was that all about?” I whispered to Burke when they had cleared the room.

“Didn’t you ever hear the phrase ‘I told you never to call me here,’ Montague?”

“Rosemary, I take it. She’s never called me in her life.”

“You dropped your credit card in her car; she’ll send it over. Don’t be worrying about it now. Tonight should be entertaining enough to distract The MacNeil.”

†

Declan was ensconced in a comfortable chair pulled up to the big card table in the Burkes’ family room downstairs. The room was done in dark green with framed posters and photos on the walls; there was an impressive selection of Irish whiskeys on the bar in one corner, and there was beer in a small fridge. Flanking the invalid were Teresa and Father Killeen. Somebody had recently vacated one of the other chairs, if the empty shot glass was any indication.

“Is that a glass of whiskey I see in front of you there, Declan?” Brennan said in greeting.

“Will you people leave me in peace?”

“Surely you’re not permitted to mix alcohol with your medication?”

“You sound like your brother Patrick. He’s been hovering over me like a nanny ever since this happened. I finally put the run to him — the chair beside me is still warm from his arse — and now you’re here tormenting me. Whiskey is not unknown to me; it has always perked me up. Sit down and stop giving out to me about my health.

“Maura!” Declan’s eyes lit up. “Have you come to murmur kind, sweet words to us all? Start there with my worried little wife, and save the best for me. Have you met Father Killeen?”

“Yes, we’ve met. Evening, Father.”

“Good evening. Please call me Leo. Ah, the children. Well, a young man, I should say. And a young lady.”

The kids said hello. Then Teresa wisely suggested other activities
that might interest them upstairs: a box of toys for Normie, a piano for Tommy Douglas. They were gone in a flash.

“We were just reliving old times,” said Leo. “I’m sure your father has recounted many of these tales to you, Brennan, yourself being the firstborn son, but I’m hoping you’ll indulge a pair of old timers if their memories tend to get repetitive.”

Repetitive? Not much chance. Declan never recounted tales to anyone, birth order be damned. The firstborn son crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow at his father across the table. Declan looked down and took a sip of whiskey, then gratefully turned his attention to Maura, who was admiring a framed poster showing a number of Irish writers, among them Yeats, Joyce, Wilde, O’Casey, Behan, and dashing Flann O’Brien in a fedora. “When you’ve had your fill of greatness over there, come find a seat among some of the lesser lights of the Irish race.”

“Lesser lights? Surely you’re not speaking of anyone in this room,” Leo Killeen protested.

“Just an attempt to put the girl at ease, Leo. She’s a shy little thing, easily intimidated by powerful personalities such as ours.”

“You’re not fooling me for a minute,” the old fellow laughed. “Here,
achree,
” he said when Maura came to the table, “don’t let me get between you. What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”

Everyone looked puzzled as he got up and moved so Maura could sit next to Brennan. I remembered then that Father Killeen had mistakenly assumed Maura was Brennan’s wife. Brennan caught on and smiled. Teresa began: “Surely, Father, you didn’t think Maura was —”

Leo interrupted. “You did say, quite discreetly, when I mentioned little Maura here, that they were having troubles and that Brennan was hoping the holiday would help them smooth things over.” Declan sat quiet, obviously amused by the mix-up. “But never mind. I shouldn’t have spoken. My apologies, Maura. You’ll work things out. I heard in great detail about the events of Friday night, when — thanks be to God — the attempt on Declan’s life was unsuccessful. I know young Brennan threw his body over yours to protect you from the gunfire. He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t think there was something worth saving!”

The smile vanished from Brennan’s face. But then he obviously
decided a bit of bullshit was called for: “Nah. I yanked her body over mine. Figured she’d provide more cover than the skinny girl I really had my eye on.”

Maura could not quite hide the emotion in her face, remembering the attack and her proximity to the line of fire. Suddenly, she turned in her seat and threw her arms around Brennan’s neck. He embraced her and patted her hair. It was obvious she was in tears.

“Women!” Brennan said lightly.

Leo beamed a smile of satisfaction in his direction. “So, where was I when these young people came in? Oh yes, back in the Joy. Declan here did not make any friends among the screws on B wing —”

“Excuse me for just a second, Leo,” Teresa said, “but would anyone like a fresh drink?”

“Oh, yeah,” Brennan replied. “We all would, I’m sure.” Teresa poured us each a whiskey and returned to the table.

“Isn’t it a bit unusual,” I asked Father Killeen, “for a man to leave off being a — a soldier in your organization to become a priest?”

Once again my ignorance set the old man reeling. “My dear Mr. Collins. May I call you Monty? I have to say it, as gently as I can, Monty: read your history. I am far from being the only man to make the journey from the Army to the priesthood. In some cases of course, it was the monastery. Who was the fellow, Declan, who started up a branch of the Legion of Mary while interned in the Curragh? No, no, that was after your time. The Curragh being the regular Army’s headquarters, in the South,” Leo explained to me, “where detention camps were set up. During the Emergency of 1939 to ’45 our people had to rub shoulders with Germans and even some Brits! But let’s not get into that. To return to your question, Monty, I’m not an unusual case at all. There was a very religious element in our movement, no two ways about it.”

Maura decided that, since the knife was in, she should give it a little twist. Taking a swig of whiskey, she confided: “Monty has never been to Ireland. But I have.”

Sadly, the old soldier shook his head. “He hasn’t had your advantages —”

“Neither has Declan,” Brennan interrupted, “not since he came here on the run in Anno Domini 1950.”

“Well, I’m about to straighten that out for him, aren’t I Declan?” Mr. Burke looked like a man who was longing to say:
Not in front of the children.
But he said nothing, and took a gulp of Tullamore Dew. “You understand that it was for his own protection, after —”

“Never mind that right now, Leo. We’ll work all that out.”

“We surely will. Now what was I saying before the prospect of a drink got us all distracted?”

“Something about B wing, wasn’t it, Father?” Maura smiled at Declan, who refused to acknowledge her helpful inquiries.

“Oh, yes, Mountjoy Prison. In Dublin, as I’m sure you know. Well, yer man here could not be described as a model prisoner and took some blows as a result. But a model Republican he was to the end.”

“What was it exactly that you were imprisoned for, Declan?” Maura asked sweetly, as if she had forgotten the minutiae of an oft-told tale.

Declan exercised his right to remain silent, and Father Killeen replied: “The Special Criminal Court, which of course your father-in-law, as a member of the Irish Republican Army, refused to recognize, found him guilty of being a member of an illegal organization. They swept a bunch of us up at the same time. Fortunately for everyone he only served — what was it, Declan? Six months? I wasn’t so lucky, so I served a bit more time than that. Still, it was a slice of cake compared to what I endured in the Crumlin Road jail in Belfast years later. But that’s all behind me now.”

Teresa Burke was looking at her husband as if she had just heard the verdict all over again, and had no intention of waiting six months, or six days, for him to be released. But Leo had not come to the end of his reminiscences.

“Remember how rough around the edges some of our lads were, Declan? God forgive me for saying it, but for some of them the best thing that ever happened was a stint in prison. It was tough, but the education they got inside was just not available to them in their regular lives.”

In response to the skeptical faces around the table, Leo explained: “It came to be known as the Republican University. Older Republican prisoners gave the younger ones classes in Irish, in history, in other subjects. I was something of a professor myself. Declan here brushed up
on his Irish between shifts maintaining the distillery we set up inside, eh Dec? But these young fellows, some of them didn’t know a thing when they went in. Like the lad on the pawnshop operation.”

Declan shot him a murderous look but Leo missed it. “I don’t know whether you’ve heard this one, Brennan.”

“I suspect it’s something I’ll be hearing for the first time, Leo.”

“Declan and this young boy were to rob a pawnshop to raise funds for our work. You’d be surprised how much money was sitting in pawnshops in those days. I think they got two thousand pounds, a lot of money back then. Of course that was not the sort of operation your father generally participated in. I know he felt it was beneath him, and he was none too happy about it.”

“He looks none too happy now,” Brennan remarked.

“He said he would put together a plan for a bank raid if need be. But orders are orders. The pawnbroker was notorious for his anti-Republican sympathies. The fellow who was supposed to go along with our young lad became unavailable very suddenly, so Declan was given the task. I hope you’ll all excuse my language here, or Declan’s language, I should say: ‘If I wind up doing seven years for holding up a fecking junk shop,’ he told his superior officer, ‘I’ll expect you to blast your way in to Mountjoy Prison, get me out, and then stand there like a man while I tear the heart and soul out of you with my bare hands.’”

“That would explain the little smile on Da’s face,” Brennan interrupted, “years later when he heard the news reports that a helicopter landed in an Irish prison yard and lifted some
IRA
men out.”

“Ah, yes, 1973. A most spectacular escape from Mountjoy Prison. It was hard not to smile. Now stay quiet,
avic,
and let me tell about your father.”

Brennan sent a barely perceptible wink in my direction. “Forgive me, Father. Go on.”

Dublin, 1942

“What went wrong in the pawnshop, Declan? Young Shea was picked up last night.”

“Young Shea couldn’t keep his feckin’ gob shut, that’s what went wrong.”

“No need for that kind of language when I ask you for a report, Declan. Now get on with it.”

“In we go, the pair of us, with our face masks on. We draw our weapons. I’m not saying a word. I point my gun at the pawnbroker’s head and then I gesture towards the cash register just in case he doesn’t get it. The poor man is palsied with the shaking. He doesn’t even see I don’t have my finger on the trigger; I’m not going to shoot a poor man working at his job. But he hands me the cash, all of it. I stuff it in my shirt. Mission accomplished. Time to go. Or so it should be. But then I see young Shea goggling at something in the show case.

“The lad pipes up: ‘What’s that doin’ here? Where’d ya get that necklace?’

“The man behind the counter can barely speak, he’s trembling so much. ‘I, em . . . a young girl and her mother —’

“‘She pawned the feckin’ thing! I loved that girl with all my heart. I want that back! Jazes!’ Then Shea looks up at the man. ‘How much for that necklace?’

“As if the lad doesn’t have me crabbed enough by this time, he then turns to me and asks for money!

“I’d maintained a proper operational silence up to then but I couldn’t help myself, Leo. I barked at the kid: ‘We’re robbing the fecking shop, you little gobshite. Grab the fecking jewels and be done with it!’ Of course he got arrested, linking himself to the jewellery like that.”

“Luckily for Declan, nobody was able to identify him,” Leo concluded.

“Lucky for him is right.” Teresa spoke with ice in her voice. “Because if they had, I assure you, there would have been nothing left of Declan to identify. I would have seen to that myself.”

“Understandable, Teresa, understandable. Some of this would not have endeared him to you at all.” Father Killeen then reached into his pocket and produced a small leather-bound notebook. The brown leather was worn, and yellowed papers stuck out on all sides. “Now here’s a rare sight, a photo of the man himself. That’s me. I was
OC
of the Third Battalion, Dublin Brigade, at the time. There’s Declan, and
the other fellow shall remain nameless.” It was a grainy photo of a young, hawkish-looking Declan in uniform, standing sentry with a machine gun at the ready. Leo Killeen stood in a doorway behind him, also in uniform. Thin and intense, dark eyes glaring at the camera, he had the look of a killer. It was difficult to reconcile the photo with the chatty cleric sitting across from me in Sunnyside.

Leo got up to “stretch his legs.” Before he left the room, he took Brennan’s hand and put it over Maura’s, giving them both a little squeeze. As soon as the priest cleared the room, Maura turned to her “husband” and asked him whether he had taken the garbage out as she had asked him to do, over and over and over.

“If I take the garbage out and mow the lawn, do you think your headache will go away? Dear?” Brennan replied sweetly.

“Ever mowed a lawn, Brennan?” Maura answered, every bit as sweetly.