by Orna Ross
“Give us a look,” said Crean, snatching her away.
In the dim light, they huddled close to see. Cackling whoops of laughs were passed around. “Jaysus. Look at that.”
“What I wouldn’t like to give her.”
“In your dreams, Delaney. What would a one like her want with a thick like you?”
The jeers were forced, a matter of making any noise rather than admit to the cramped urges the pictures stirred. Their laughter was lined with fear: fear of the sin of looking, but under that and stronger, fear of their own need.
Jem and Jamsie Crean retired to the back of the shed with their pictures and nobody was under any illusions about what they were doing back there. Barney sat alone, as was his custom now, watching the grey light outside fade to darker grey. They had no lantern. The faces of the men around him blurred to moving shades, then disappeared altogether, as day become evening. Then, almost immediately, it was night. A night black as tar. Nothing but the palpitating rain, falling, falling. No more ogling now for Jem and the boys. No more anything, except empty conversation into the damp darkness, for anyone who could be bothered. They were sick of talking to each other: anything any of them had to say had long ago been said.
Nothing to do and fourteen hours of night to do it. It would be near eight o’clock in the morning before they saw daylight again. He got up off his upturned bucket, stiff and cramped, the damp of the rain in his bones. In the dim light, he felt his way across the straw, moving as far as he could from the others to the far corner of the shed. Settling there, heaping some straw under his head to make a pillow, he huddled down into his coat and took out his last cigarette, which he had been hoarding.
The match rasped loud and bright in his cupped hand and he dragged deep, ferociously, on the cigarette. Fortune’s pictures had unsettled him. He couldn’t stand much more of this. Only what was he supposed to do? He couldn’t walk away from it either. The six men sharing this shed would see to that and, if they let him off the hook, he’d soon be hung back on it by the females at home. Jesus, the glitter in Peg’s eyes that night on the bridge in Donore. But his mother too and even gentle Norah.
What he saw in Norah O’Donovan’s eyes when she looked at him in Enniscorthy, that was what had taken him, all unknowing, to this place and now they’d put so many eggs into the basket of the Republic that they couldn’t drop it.
Sometimes he felt like the world was drowning in human blood. Their own country’s troubles were trifling compared to what other parts of the world had seen – the Great War, the revolutions in Russia, the goings on in Africa and China. All those men killing and being killed because that was what made him a man in his own eyes, or in the eyes of some girl. It was madness, especially when it meant you didn’t get to see the girl enough to enjoy her admiration.
He had started out feeling like the hero of the show but, somewhere along the line, he turned out to be the fool.
The rain drummed down, relentless. Even his thoughts felt pallid and unconvincing, like his brain had been bleached. He squashed his cigarette butt out on the ground beside him, careful – with all the straw around – to ensure that it was extinguished. Then, hours earlier than usual, hours earlier than was good for him, he gave himself over to the squirms and spaces of the night.
He woke to find the rain had stopped and he pushed himself up off his bed of straw, stepping over the bodies of his comrades still slumped in sleep. His bones were sore but, as usual, morning thoughts were brighter and outside, the air tasted new and clean. He stretched, breathed in deep. The heaviest of the clouds had parted, allowing a gleam through the grey, and the grass was plump with rainwater. They’d get their man today, then he’d get to go home for a night or two.
He walked up the roadway that skirted the field to stretch his legs. He hadn’t gone far when he saw Doyle’s daughter on her bicycle, a pail over each handlebar, and he turned back. “Breakfast is on the way,” he called into the shed.
Jem Fortune was out the door in an instant. He let a loud wolf whistle at the girl as she drew near. She dismounted from her bicycle and he moved to help her with the buckets and did his best to engage her in conversation. She was having none of it. A surly lump of a girl she was, with none of the hero-worship for freedom fighters that they liked to read in female eyes. And no time at all for Jem’s brand of talk.
At the shed, she handed them two loaves of bread wrapped in a tea towel and a copy of the Wexford Weekly. “Mammy said you might like a read of that?”
“Thank your mother for us,” said Jem. “And thank her too for sending the vision of your fair self to open the morning for us.”
She threw him a look that would wither a bush.
“If you can, bring the buckets back down to the house when you’re finished,” she said. “If not, I’ll collect them later.”
She turned away to pick up her bike.
“You look even better from this side,” Jem shouted after her, his gaze pasted onto her rump.
After breakfast, it was down to the business of the day. Barney sent Tipsy and Bronco to the hideout to retrieve the army uniforms. They were found to be dishevelled from their time in the ditch so the column set to scraping the worst of the dirt off and brushing them down with damp leaves. If they were not smart looking, they wouldn’t convince. While doing that work, they argued again about shooting the spy.
“I think what we should do is put a good fine on him,” said Barney. “And send him out of the county, as we did with the Rathmeelin robbers. Let’s not sink to the level of the Staters.”
“Robbing is one thing,” said Lama. “Informing is something else entirely.”
“I’m in agreement with that,” said Jem Fortune.
Barney combed his head for words. Even if it was Browne who gave them away – and that was what he expected – who was going to do this execution that they all claimed to want so bad? Not Jem Fortune, surely, who was known to have swallowed his lit cigarette the one and only time he saw action, at the Ardnacree ambush. Not Tipsy Delaney, who kept to the back of the firing in any encounter. Maybe Lama might have it in him, but what if he didn’t? What if he funked it? Or worse, did it and never got over it?
“It’s one thing to take a man out in an ambush,” he said, “quite another to shoot him at close range.”
“But if he’s a spy…”
“I won’t be doing it, anyway.”
“What’s wrong, Parle?” jeered Lama. “Not up to it?”
“I don’t see the need for it.”
“It makes sure Browne never gets the chance to inform again. It frightens others who might be tempted to do the same.”
“Sending him out of the county won’t send the same message,” said Jem.
“What do HQ say?” asked Tipsy.
“Oh, HQ. Do those lads even know we’re here?”
The argument lapsed into spiny silence. They finished brushing the uniforms and laid them out to dry. Barney picked up the paper that the farmer’s girl left behind. When Jem Fortune blasted the left ear off him with one of his wolf whistles, he took no notice, thinking it was the girl come back for the dishes. He was stuck in an article about a lecture Father John gave at a meeting in town, disparaging the immodest style of dress now worn by women. All that was going on in the country, and this was what the man chose to lecture people about…
He was jolted by a nudge in the ribs.
Jem said, “Your visitor, Parle, I do believe.”
He looked up and across in the direction of Jem’s nod.
Norah. Norah, alone, standing behind the far gate as if she dared not come any farther.
His heart jumped, jerking him to his feet. Ignoring the jeers that were starting up behind him, he crossed the field to her, breathless. Lord, the force of his feelings! Lama showed no sign of being cuffed in the stomach whenever he set eyes on Cat Hayes. But then neither did he, Barney, let on. Did everybody feel this way and go around pretending they didn’t?
When she saw him coming acro
ss the field, she pulled back behind the hedge, away from the inquisitive eyes behind him. He climbed over the gate and landed with a jump beside her but she was off, already walking down the lane, not giving him a chance to get near her, to kiss her hello as he would have liked.
“Are you all right, Norah?” he asked when he caught up.
She shook her head, like she was shaking out a dirty rag.
“It’s great you’ve come,” he said. Something had happened. That shut face again, tight as a tomb. He pulled her into a gateway. How different this was to the sensations brought on by those pictures last night. Entirely different, even if it did bring on what seemed like the same stirring. The shocking beauty of Norah up close, every single time it knocked him over. The bones under the white skin of her neck were that fragile. He put his lips on the skin there and held the kiss. Dear God, the softness of her. And her glorious smell…
It was some moments before he noticed she was not responding. There was no reaching toward him today, no acquiescence even. She was gone, leaving him only the shell of her lovely face, her perfect body. He stopped kissing her. He took a step backwards. “What is it, Norah?” he said, but she just shook her head again.
He felt himself getting irritated: they didn’t have the time for this, not when they only got to see each other once in a blue moon. She was stricken with some grief or fear, he could see that much. But why wouldn’t she share it?
Peg had told him of this inclination of Norah’s, lately, to retreat into silence. A quiet as cold as the grave was how Peg, with her liking for the dramatic, had put it. She said she could talk to Norah for whole minutes without being heard. Call for her attention, even wave her hands in front of her face. Then, after a while, Norah would surface, like a swimmer coming up from under water, looking around with pure puzzlement. Well, Barney couldn’t be doing with that; they didn’t have the time for it.
“What’s wrong, Norah? You have to tell me.”
No answer.
“I’ll help you, whatever it is. Why don’t you stay here for the night, forget about going back.”
“Oh, Barney, don’t talk daft.”
“It’s not so daft. What tie do any of them have on us if we don’t allow it? We could go wherever we want, you and I. We could survive like men on the run until we got ourselves away from here.”
“And the cause?”
He shrugged.
“Ireland needs all her men now,” she said. “Especially men like you.”
“Oh, Ireland.”
Shocked at his tone, she looked up at him, took a step backwards. He’d said the wrong thing and now she was pulling back down inside herself, as if she shrank from her own skin. “It’s all for you, Norah, do you not know that? I’d walk from it tomorrow if you gave the word.”
Again, that shake of the head. Yet she had come to him, come all the way out here, eight miles on her bicycle with, no doubt, the threat of her family questioning her whereabouts when she got back. What was the point if they weren’t going to speak truly to each other?
“All I want is you,” he said. Maybe a man wasn’t supposed to say a thing like that, but there, it was said. No sign of it melting her, though. “Come here, m’sweetheart. Tell me what’s wrong. Come in here to me, my darling girl, and tell me what’s wrong. I’m certain sure we can put it right.”
1922
Diary 26th December
What a miserable Christmas Day we had yesterday. I keep comparing this year with last. The bonfires, the songs and celebrations, the vote on the treaty yet to be taken, that ballad of mine celebrating Dan and Barney coming home from the English prison. We could do anything, was what we thought then, for hadn’t we already achieved the impossible? Only here we are this year, living in the “Free” State, as beholden as we ever were to the English Crown.
This year, Christmas is Barney absent from our table. It’s Mammy trying to let on she’s not as sick as she is. It’s Dan estranged and Norah isolated.
All we have to hold to is the knowledge that our cause is true and right. Mammy gave us a small speech as we sat down at the Christmas table: “If Kevin Barry’s mother could keep her eyes fixed on the tabernacle while the hangman’s rope was round her boy’s neck, and if Terence MacSwiney’s sister could endure his agony as he starved himself to death in Brixton jail, and if Cathal Brugha’s widow is instilling into her children the policy their father lived and died by, then surely to God we can put up with not having our boy to Christmas dinner.”
All of which sounded twice as inspiring when you thought about it and realised she may not even see another December 25th.
We would probably have taken the chance of having Barney here yesterday, only a rumour went round that the Army were going to use Christmas Day to do a big round-up. So the lads broke up into small groups, and while we were eating our meal, he was not a million miles away, eating dinner in a friendly hay-barn. In the event, nothing happened. It was probably a rumour started by the army to ruin Christmas for us. Even the Germans and Allies were able to acknowledge the spirit of Christmas across the trenches. But not the “National” Army, no.
And to cap it all, Norah never got down to see me. Dan is home for the holiday and she will have to endure her people fawning over him and the gibing he loves to give her. Is it any wonder she hasn’t been herself lately?
* * *
Diary 28th December
Still no sign of Norah and it’s very awkward for me to call up her way. I thought about it, even set out this morning in my hat and coat, but I turned back. I’d manage her mother easy enough and maybe even her father. But Dan. If he’s still up there on his Christmas leave, that I just can’t face.
* * *
Diary 2nd January
I finally took courage in hand and went up to O’Donovan’s and how I do wish I’d gone sooner, especially as it was pure cowardice kept me away, nothing else. When I didn’t see Norah at Mass on Sunday, I knew something was wrong but I thought only of sickness. Up I went to their place.
Norah’s mother saw me crossing the yard and came to the back door and then just stood there with a face on her.
“I’ve come to ask after Norah, Mrs O’Donovan,” I said, as if we’d no national question between us.
“Have you indeed?”
“I was worried she might be sick.”
“She isn’t.”
“Can I see her for a minute?”
“No.”
“I won’t keep her long.”
“She’s not here. She’s gone away.”
“Away?”
“Away, yes. Now would you mind? There’s work to be done in this house.”
“When will she be back?”
She looked at me, hard, and when I didn’t budge, she picked up the sweeping brush that was standing by the door.
“Will you not tell me?”
She let out a bitter laugh as she kept sweeping. “Norah’s got herself a fancy job in Dublin. She left two days ago.”
“But she never said goodbye. And she never mentioned anything about a job to me…”
“Enough! Now you listen to me, Peg Parle. We’ve had as much trouble as we can take from your family. You think about what I’ve just told you. Go home and think about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to see you or your brother near any of our family again. You should be ashamed to come near this house. Get yourself gone before her father comes back, for if he finds you here, I can tell you, he won’t be as light on you as me.”
Oh dear mother of God, I’m sitting here now with the most awful feeling. Would Norah not have told me? That is what I ask myself. If it was me, would I tell her?
Please God, please Holy Mother, let me be wrong. Let there be another explanation entirely.
Oh, my poor friend. Whatever the truth, you could have told me. I wouldn’t have thought less of you. Never.
Not for anything.
* * *
Diary 9th
January
This morning I was feeding the hens when two cold hands came round my face, covering my eyes. I knew straight away who it was. “Barney!” I cried, delighted first, then fearful.
Did he know something…? As soon as I turned round, I could see that he didn’t. He was smiling a smile that broke my heart to see because I knew what I had to tell him would wipe it away.
“We’re below in Colonel Taylor’s,” he said. “So near that I said I’d have to come home.”
I bombarded the poor fellow with questions. “Are the boys around here now? You look thinner, have you been eating all right? Did ye get my despatch about the barracks job? Have ye a plan for it? Are you hungry?”
He laughed. “Which do you want me to answer first?”
“All, all. Oh, Barney, it’s great that you’re here. Christmas was awful miserable. And Mammy — ”
“Is bad.”
“Bad, yes. But she’ll perk up now. She’ll perk up now.”
“A perk-up is what I’m in need of myself. I need a wash and some clean clothes. What I’m wearing is stuck to me and the itch is back.”
I threw the last of the meal in a heap in the middle of the yard and the fowl leapt on it, clucking like the children over Father John’s sweeties, beating each other away.
“Come on inside,” I said to him, wiping my hands on my apron. “I’ll put on the kettle. How does a feed of rashers and eggs sound?”
Only three weeks since we last saw him but he’s grown even thinner. And he was filthy from face to foot. “Have a bit of a wash there in the barrel before I bring you up,” I said, “Else Mammy will think you’re the devil himself come to visit.”
While he was doing so, I put on water to boil for a proper soak in the tub and got in food from the shop. Then the two of us went upstairs together. “Ah, son,” was all Mammy said when she saw who it was. Two thin arms came up from the blankets as he went to her and they held each other in a way neither would have done six months ago.
When they parted after a long closeness, we each sat on the bed, one on either side of her, while she asked him questions that came slow out of her soreness, about the talk we were hearing that surrender might be imminent. He tried to fob her off, to talk of other things, but not a chance. She dragged herself up in the bed and gave us one of her speeches.
