JULIA O’FAOLAIN
No Country
For Young Men
Contents
Title Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Copyright
1
In late March 1922, the following item appeared in the columns of the Gaelic American, a journal published in New York City, price 5 cents:
AMERICAN CITIZEN
LATEST MARTYR TO IRISH CAUSE
Word has been received by relatives in New York and by The Friends of Irish Freedom of the death of one of their delegates to the Old Land. John Chrysostom Spartacus (Sparky) Driscoll was killed while performing his mission which was to observe the fighting being fomented in Ulster by agents of the Crown. The time-honoured tactic, ‘divide and rule’, has set Irishman against Irishman in a last-ditch try by the old usurper to strangle the new Free State at birth. This act of perfidy strikes at John Bull’s oft-aired claim to ‘justice and fair play’.
Do the tyrant-masters think such acts will stop Irish men and women from taking part in the onward march for the regeneration of their country? Do they believe that the sight of young Driscoll’s corpse going through the streets of Dublin will make Irish people more loyal to the English connection? What fools they are! What fools they must remain so long as they believe so!
The sympathy of a wide circle of friends and business acquaintances in New York, Massachusetts and other parts of the United States will go to the parents and relatives of this new martyr to an old cause. Sparky Driscoll could have lived a life of ease and comfort if he had so wished. Instead, he felt that the Old Land needed him and hearkened to her call. Deliberately, he chose the road of the Patriot and it led him, as it has led many, to a tragic end.
His father, Mr Aloysius Driscoll, has always been prominent in the Republican movement in New York as has Sparky’s mother, Mrs Mary Driscoll, whose children have not forgotten the lessons in Irish Nationalism received at her knee. All have remained identified with the IRΒ Veterans’ Association, the Gaelic League, the Clan na Gael and other similar organizations working for Irish freedom.
At the last meeting of the Robert Emmet Club a resolution was passed sympathizing with the family in their irreparable loss.
Beannacht De le h-anam.
1979
They didn’t call it ‘Children’s Hour’ any more but the ingredients were the same: two children, a dog, some mystery – what? Sister Judith was galvanized in her chair, her mind jerking from the screen before her to one whose picture curdled as though she had failed to adjust the setting. There was tension in her stomach and in the back of her neck.
Something was wrong.
She must – what must she do? Oh God, she begged, let me remember before it’s too late. Please, Jesus, I know it’s important. Remember, Oh Most Gracious Virgin – something appalling was about to happen. A knifing? There was a gap in her brain: a hole, and meanwhile … A hole?
Terror ebbed. Like water from a basin. Like blood. There had been a redness before her eyes but now it was all right. She was sitting here watching television and the well-spoken children were laughing with their dog. It was ‘Children’s Hour’ and she must have dropped off, got confused. The dog was the link.
Hers had been called Bran. A red setter. Dog? Digging? That was it. A hole. She closed her eyes and the image steadied. Bran’s bright body rippled like a feather boa, doubled, laboured. His chocolate nose was down, his feathered feet digging in the backyard of their house long ago. The soil flew. It was suspect, too soft, recently tampered with. Oh Jesus, Bran, stop! Judith was seventeen and the country in a perilous state. She hauled at the dog’s collar, screamed. She was seventy-five and wanted to see what happened next but the image had gone jumpy and her seventeen-year-old self pulled the dog from the hole. She was sweating. Both Judiths were clammy and terrified inside their clothes.
*
She had been found wandering the corridors and once – though that was years ago – naked at the convent gate. In the moment between sleep and waking, she had felt her nightdress – flannel – muffling the doors to her soul and had twitched it off. You could hardly explain such a thing by daylight, though could you? Especially to unflappable nuns! So she’d let them think she’d done it in her sleep.
Her fear was that they’d make her undergo more electro-shock.
‘Look,’ a doctor had told her. ‘I accept what you say. You’ve lost or nearly lost a memory. Well, why not let it go? Just relinquish it?’
Cheerily smiling at her, he might have been proposing to remove an old tooth. ‘Poison your system to hold on to it,’ he might say, ‘not so pretty any more either. Why don’t we get you a nice false set, h’m?’
Old tooth? Old heart? Your memory was you.
‘You think someone might fear your testimony?’
He was humouring her. Did he think her senile? The next thing she said sounded it. ‘The past can kill,’ she told him. ‘There’s an urgency,’ she said, ‘about this anxiety. I feel it.’
‘Ah, that’s nerves,’ he told her. ‘Tension. The urgency is in yourself. I won’t say “relax” because I’ve found that that only makes people tense up. Worrying about worry, ha ha, has half the population on pills. I’ll let you have some if you like, mind, but what I tell my patients is “a little worry keeps off worse”.’ Laughing. Pleased with himself. Did she want pills, he asked.
No, she did not. What about her dreams now, he wondered.
‘Do you think you see Christ?’
She was astonished. ‘I’m not mad.’
No, no, but she’d said, hadn’t she, that she dreamed of a man who held his guts in his hand. ‘Now, that would remind you of the statue of Christ showing his sacred heart, h’m?’ After all, he must be thinking, she was a nun and who else would nuns dream of?
She refused to see any more doctors and Reverend Mother said all right. That had been years ago. The side door to the building was kept locked so that she couldn’t get out in her sleep even if she had wanted to.
‘We’ll have to pray that there’s never a fire,’ said Reverend Mother.
*
Sister Judith told Sister Gilchrist that she would no more think of going to confession to that new pipsqueak of a chaplain than she’d fly. ‘With all respect, Sister,’ she’d said, it’s what he is. How old is he? A teenager?’
‘He’s an ordained priest, Sister.’
‘Well, they must be badly off for priests.’
‘They are.’
Sister Gilchrist made an effort to explain, although, with Sister Judith you never knew whether it was worth while. ‘There aren’t enough to go round the religious houses,’ she told her, ‘so we share him with the Dublin Juvenile Prison. It must be hard for him to change his style when he comes to us, and style,’ said Sister Gilchrist, speaking against her convictions, ‘is but a superficial thing.’
‘Poor Father Merryman, God rest him,’ said Sister Judith, ‘was helping me with my therapy before he died. He became very involved in helping me to track down my buried trauma.’
‘He had great patience,’ said Sister Gilchrist absently.
‘He was fascinated,’ Sister Judith corrected her. ‘He thought that it might turn out to be of National Importance if only I could remember it. It was a setback to me when he died. Recently, however, I’ve made some advance. I’m back on the track, thanks to television.’
‘I see you’ve been watching it a lot.’
/>
‘I watch the murders,’ said Sister Judith. ‘I get a fizzle in my extremities whenever I watch an axe or sword murder. Ha!’ she cried in a muted shout and shook her fingers at Sister Gilchrist. ‘A tremor in the tips,’ she said, ‘like in a diviner’s rod. What do you say to that, Sister? I watched The Seven Samurai again last night and afterwards my dream was several degrees clearer. Almost understandable.’
‘How do you know the television didn’t cause the dream in the first place?’
‘I’ve been having my dream for fifty-five years, Sister Gilchrist, as you know right well, and for how long have we been allowed to watch television? Tell me that? I told you that they gave me shock treatments years ago to destroy my memory.’ Sister Judith managed to nod her head and at the same time roll her eyes. ‘What do you say to that?’ she insisted. ‘Was there a plot or was there not? I see blood,’ she added, ‘in all my dreams. Gushing in a jet, Sister Gilchrist. Red.’
Sister Gilchrist had other things on her mind. Poor Sister Judith was in her manic mood, as she had been before, but more important things were going on in the convent. ‘Maybe,’ she said repressively, ‘you’re remembering a visit to a butcher’s shop? Or you might have lived on a farm? People slaughtered their own animals in your young day.’
‘And the guilt?’ Sister Judith demanded. ‘What about the guilt?’
‘Were you ever a vegetarian?’
Sister Judith would not dignify this by a reply. She continued to flap her fingers and nod.
Sister Gilchrist signed. Something would have to be done about her. ‘Are you coming to the meeting?’ She hoped Sister Judith wasn’t.
‘I may. Depends what’s on “Children’s Hour”.’
Reverend Mother had decided a year or so back that Sister Judith might as well spend her days in the television room as getting in everyone’s way. There was merit to the argument, though things had perhaps gone too far, for the poor thing was becoming detached from reality. But what could one do? The old mechanical tasks like lace-making and pea-shelling had been abandoned and she was too old for heavy work. Best leave her to her hobbies.
Unfortunately, recent developments in the Order as a whole were threatening such individual arrangements. A new Savonarola had arisen and instead of being burnt at the stake was being allowed to disrupt a great number of lives.
*
Sister Judith’s life had been disrupted before. Her lost memory was disruptive and the ones which did come to mind were of being bundled from pillar to post without having much say in the matter. Her mother had died when she was small and Judith had been boarded out early. Between the ages of five and seventeen, she had attended a school with the ugly name of Mucklea. It was run by nuns and housed in a sharp-angled, Gothic structure built of Victorian brick. Her clearest, least-troubled memories went back to the time spent there where not much had happened. The grounds were kept in rigorous trim. Topiaried trees and slices of lawn contrasted with the surrounding landscape which was a bog. This region was as active as a compost heap and here the millennial process of matter recycling itself was as disturbing as decay in a carcass. Phosphorescent glowings, said to come from the chemical residue of bones, exhaled from its depths. ‘Bog’ was the Gaelic word for ‘soft’ and this one had places into which a sheep or a man could be sucked without trace.
The bog was pagan and the nuns saw in it an image of fallen nature. It signified mortality, they said, and the sadness of the flesh, for it had once been the hunting ground of pre-Christian warriors, a forest which had fallen, become fossilized and was now dug for fuel.
Sometimes, in later life, Judith would say ‘my memory is a bog’, referring as much to its power of suction as to its unfathomable layers.
*
The dog’s nails scratched on metal and Judith’s first thought was: guns. A truce with England had been signed in July and there were caches of arms all over the country. Her brother and her sister’s fiancé would certainly not tell her what they’d got hidden in the backyard. The best strategy was ignorance if a house was raided and – suddenly it came back to her – the reason nobody had noticed the fresh softness of the soil before this was because she herself had taken a flagstone from on top of it two days ago to make a tombstone for her pets’ graveyard. There had been nobody to notice or stop her because Seamus was off drilling men in the hills, their elder brother, Eamonn, had been killed two years before and Kathleen’s fellow, Owen, was in prison. Probably Kathleen didn’t know.
Cover it then? Yes. Quickly. Her throat contracted painfully at the danger, for a neighbour could burst in, someone who’d been drinking in her father’s pub, a spy, someone pretending to need the privy and be lost. At the same time – she recognized Eve’s and Pandora’s evil curiosity in herself – she knew she’d never sleep peacefully in the house again if she hadn’t satisfied herself as to what was there. It was twilight, misty, as good a time as any to be digging here among the crazy pavement. Why should anyone see? Bran would alert her if they came.
‘Who’s there, Bran? Get him, boy,’ she whispered, while her Pandora fingers scrabbled in wormy soil. Better get a spade. The dog’s ears pricked. He moaned questingly, ran round in a foolish little circle, then came back to the hole.
The metal was part of a tea chest. Inside was a fisherman’s bag lined with rubber and inside that were wads of green notes. American dollars. Twenty-, fifty-and hundred-dollar bills. Big wads of them. How many? There must be thousands there. Terrified, as though she were handling sin – guns would somehow have been better after all – she stuffed them back into the bag, the bag into the box and the box into the hole. Then she got her spade and spread the soil over it, tamped it down and covered it up again with the flagstone. She threw withered leaves over the edges of it, then made a quick survey of the points of access to the yard to make sure she had not been seen. After that, she went into the kitchen and collapsed in a chair. Her grimy fingers on the arm-rest were beating a wild tattoo. That kind of money – there must be thousands – frightened her. Had she misread the figures? So much! Why here? How? And whose?
After a while, she began to see the thing differently and to upbraid herself for being a silly convent girl. Of course the lads would have to have large sums of money if they were to get guns and run a revolution. Money was power. Not guilt. Not temptation, not something from which you learned to turn away your eyes because it was above your station. Nothing was. Nothing would be. Not now. It was the slave mind the English had bred in us that thought that way. They didn’t think money was crass or dirty, you may be sure. Oh, not they. We’d have to take a leaf out of their book. Get fierce, and greedy for the goods of this world.
That night, though, she had a nightmare that she was digging in the hole and gold coins had stuck to her skin so that she couldn’t remove them. They blinded her eyes. They choked her mouth, and spies whom she couldn’t see came from behind and drew a bag over her head.
JAMES
The bump of wheels on the runway set off a corresponding bounce in James Duffy’s spirits. A capriole. A positive gambolling. He was alone, free and in search of a neglected aspect of his youth.
Dublin. Duv linn. Having just filled out his landing card, he remembered that his name shared a syllable with the city and that ‘duv’ meant black.
They taxied in. Time pleated like a fan. The city was a mnemonic. Something was said about seat-belts. This was Molly Malone’s city – she of the cockles and mussels and hot-blooded fever from which none could relieve her. It was Molly Bloom’s city too and the second city of Bostonian Molly Osgood whose husband had been shot by an Irish Free State firing squad and whose son lived to become the State’s president. James had been boning up on the history of this island to which, in his wife’s view, he had no call to have come. Crossing the Atlantic from West to East struck Therese as a regressive act. Her own people had come from Poland.
‘You don’t think I’d go there?’ she had challenged. ‘What for? To chase up old memo
ries? Furs?’ she derided. ‘Vodka bottles with grass in them? Knick-knacks made from straw? Rotting dinner-jackets? It’s easy to feel good where your dollars put you at an advantage.’
Her family got begging letters from cousins in Cracow and her mother sometimes sent money but Therese wouldn’t.
‘They’re not my people,’ she said, ‘I want no part of them. Yours are unlikely to be better.’
‘I’ve got a job to do there, Therese.’
‘In films!’ She dismissed it. ‘Stay here and I’ll stake you until you get another academic post.’
‘Later,’ he bargained. ‘This is a chance to travel a bit. See something of the world. Live.’
‘Live it up, you mean? What about me?’
‘Come with me.’
But Therese had a job and jobs were scarce. ‘I belong to a pension scheme.’ Overwhelmed, Therese began to cry. ‘We can’t both be grasshoppers!’ she sobbed. ‘Besides, why Dublin?’ She had heard that Irishmen were all priests or homosexuals or both and their women driven to the ruthless entrapment of foreign men. ‘My body’s gone off, hasn’t it?’ she’d said at one point. There had been several replays of the conversation. Once she pulled up her skirt and asked whether he didn’t think her thighs were getting lumpy. James felt aggrieved. It seemed unfair that only the husbands of women with lumpless thighs should feel free to travel.
‘Do you deny me the right to go where my job takes me?’
‘James, it’s not a job. It’s not serious. You’ve been given a chance by a guy who happened to be on the same football team with you at college. OK. Great. But if you can’t do it you’ll be out on your ass.’
‘And now where am I?’ He had a job at the University but his contract had not been renewed.
‘Are you too proud to let a woman keep you? I’d hate to think you were, because machismo of that sort …’
The word made him roar. His roar made her cry. Later she informed him soberly that, according to Erik Erikson, every woman’s basic motivating emotion was the fear of being abandoned.
No Country for Young Men Page 1
