by Orna Ross
* * *
Diary 13th January
The military gave us a bag yesterday, with the things they took from Barney’s pockets. Mammy asked me this morning would I go through it, as she was unable. Am I ever glad she did, for what was in it, only notes and letters from Norah, rolled up in string? I don’t think Mammy would have been able to stop herself reading those letters if they fell into her hands, so it was good for Norah that they didn’t. I was curious myself but of course I didn’t give in to such a low feeling. I’ve put them away where they won’t be found by anyone else and will return them to her when I see her. Whenever that will be. Maybe she’ll turn up for the funeral? Or maybe she doesn’t even know he is dead? That’s the worst to think of.
Tipsy was our first visitor this morning. He came to the back door before daybreak, knowing we’d be up all night. He asked for me and, when I went out, he said he had something for me. In his arms, he cradled a canvas bag like it was a baby. When I asked him what was in it, he opened it to me much as a mother might allow you to peep under a blanket at her child. It was a gun, a Webley pistol. The minute I saw it, I knew what it was. “Barney’s,” I said.
“I thought you might like to have it.”
“It was a good thought, Tipsy. Thank you.”
He took it out of the bag and handed it to me and I held it, the weight of its handle heavy in my palm. With two hands, I raised it, pointed it at the ditch, fondled the trigger with my index finger.
When Barney joined the volunteers, back in ’17, before Daddy ever knew he was involved, he kept this gun and a rifle that Mammy bought him under a loose floorboard in his bedroom. As I stood there, pointing his gun at the wall, I tried to call up his face the way I remembered it that night and I couldn’t. I could recall the bright, bursting expression he had on him but not the face itself. I reached for it in my mind – the arrangement of his nose and eyes and mouth, the real look of him – but they were no longer there, wiped out by the image of that leering corpse above. Only dead a couple of days and already his physical features were going from me.
“It’s not loaded,” I heard Tipsy say, and his voice sounded a long way off. I dropped my arm. The tears that are only barely held down were welling in me again. I was grateful to him for bringing me the gun, knowing how short they are of arms at this time, but he brushed away the thanks. “One pistol will hardly be missed,” he said, but I knew better.
Outside the family, nobody cared about Barney more than Tipsy. That makes him dear to us in these dark days. He stayed for breakfast and we talked about the military account of the inquest published in the paper this morning – a pack of lies from start to finish. After he’d eaten, he helped us transport the coffin across to the chapel.
Barney will lie there for the rest of today, on a catafalque in front of the altar, giving those who have not paid their respects in the house an opportunity to see him and pray for him. Two of the boys stand to attention in front of him with their arms reversed. They are taking turns at it so he won’t be left unattended between now and the funeral at 11 o’clock tomorrow morning. We’re assuming the Free Staters will allow us to bury our dead unhindered but a ring of armed men surrounds the village on all roads, in case they get any ideas about calling by.
* * *
Diary 14th January
We’ve just got rid of the last of them from after the funeral – Lama and Andy White were last to go as usual. I thought they’d never shift.
Never in my life have I felt as tired as I am in this moment but still I can’t sleep. Everything that has been said today about Barney is buzzing around in my head as if the words themselves were living things. And buzzing even louder is what’s not being said at all. Nobody mentions Dan O’Donovan, though we all spent the morning wondering whether he would show up.
It was one of the largest funerals Mucknamore had ever seen. We are not the only ones spinning from the shock of how my brother died. Many you wouldn’t expect to be there at all turned out to honour him. We held our heads high, didn’t let our sorrow overcome us, even when Father John made that speech. Who’d have thought he’d turn up so forgiving? It’s true what he said, some things are bigger than a man himself.
Mr and Mrs O’Donovan were at the church, standing at the back with their younger children, but no Dan, thank God. And no Norah. People say to each other (not to us) that it was brave of the O’Donovans to come, given the circumstances. Behind their fists, they talk about the two who couldn’t be there, the two who had most reason: Barney’s sweetheart and his old comrade.
The secret of Norah and Barney’s love affair is known to all now, common knowledge, passed around like an unaddressed parcel, together with recollections of what happened to James Tracey and Nellie Shiels two years ago, when the Shiels boys tarred-and-feathered James’s private parts and Nelly was sent away to England to an aunt. They’re saying that it is not unusual for the menfolk of a family to set upon a young man, if he’s thought to be interfering with a girl of theirs. That it’s not unknown for such a young man to have the life near beaten out of him. That such might have been in Dan’s mind when he fired the shot that killed my brother.
The burial was the worst, desperate altogether. It was I who let the volley off over the grave, using his own gun, three shots of promise and warning. I didn’t flinch from the task, kept my eyes open as I let the fire and didn’t screw up my face to one side as I have seen others do. Oh, the sounds. The three loud cracks of the Webley. The cry Mammy let out of her as the coffin went into the ground. The thud of the first sods of clay hitting the wood. The sea-chant of the prayers, breaking in a holy wave across the headstones, down to meet the sound of the sea itself.
* * *
Diary 20th January
I can’t write.
* * *
Diary 28th January
I want to, but I still can’t write.
* * *
Diary February 4th
Dear Diary, Help me. I sit before your empty page and I feel you are censuring me. But I don’t know how else I could have done any of it. Help. Help me to understand. If only Norah was here. Finding her, making up to her for all she’s been put through, feels like the best way to commemorate Barney and make amends. But how, that’s the question? How?
* * *
Diary February 14th
Dear Diary, I swear as I sit down here tonight that I’ll stay seated until I manage to capture something of my wretched feelings, that I won’t get up from this chair until I manage to write down something that comes close to the truth.
* * *
Diary February 15th
Another night of nothing. Blank. It’s not like I don’t have anything to say, but as soon as I hold the pen over the page, the opposite thought pushes itself up just as urgent. The page is not blank due to any blankness inside. Inside is a morass of nonstop sorrows and angers, a horrible sucking swamp of black that’s pulling me down into it. Help me. Mary Mother of God, pray for me. Pray for us all.
* * *
Diary February 20th
I’m shaking so hard I don’t know if I’ll be able to write this and it’s more than a day since it happened. He came down to us, down to the shop, and in, into the grocery. What he would never do in the days we were supposed to be courting, today he did, without a by-your-leave. I was up the step-ladder dusting down a shelf when the shop-bell went. When I turned and saw it was him, in his hateful uniform, the height and width of him filling the whole doorframe out, I nearly dropped off the ladder, my heart took such a wallop. Mammy was behind the counter, bristling like a feral cat, and I got down, with care and attention, and took my place beside her. I was glad it was one of her good days and that she was able to be downstairs and with me for this. Then the next minute I was regretting it, for it was sure to be bad for her.
In fairness, he didn’t enter with any bullyboy tactics, just took off the military cap and said all formal: “I’d appreciate five minutes of your time.”
What he wanted quickly became evident: that we would use Parle influence with Republican troops — higher than ever since our boy’s sacrifice — to call a halt to activity. Mammy said immediately we’d do no such thing and launched into an explanation, to which he responded with the evil intentions of the Free State Army, how they intend to execute all those who go against them, especially ringleaders. Mammy said it should fill him with shame to stand there in that uniform and say such things and then the two of them were off, back down the back lanes of the sorry year we’ve just put in, the rights and the wrongs, the ins and the outs, with one of them saying black was white and the other the opposite.
White is white! I wanted to shout at them. Black is black!
Only I didn’t know what I meant by that.
I switched out because it was pointless argument and, anyway, what I was most concerned about was Norah, whether I might be able to find out where she was. Or at least that she was getting on all right.
Next thing I knew, Dan was putting his hat back on, retreating. “You’re right, Mrs Parle. Of course you are. Everything you say is right. You must be happy, so, with the outcome thus far and you’ll be only over-the-moon with what’s coming. Enjoy it all, then. I bid you both good-day.”
And out he went.
“Yes, get out!” Mammy shouted after his back, so loud I’m sure the men in the bar heard her. “And don’t show your face in here again.”
I ran for my coat.
“Where are you going?” She looked alarmed.
“He needn’t think he’s going to get away with that,” I said to pacify her, but that wasn’t my thoughts at all. He had come to us and Mammy had blown it. He had come to us, and that felt like an opportunity to me, though for what I wasn’t sure. Norah? Persuasion? Resolution? Maybe, maybe. I wasn’t sure. All I knew was I couldn’t let him go like that.
When I caught up with him by Duggan’s, he didn’t look at me, just carried on walking in a temper down towards the sea, but I knew it was okay because he slowed his pace a small bit so I was able to keep up. We took the old way down to the back strand, across to the shoreline, then westwards, towards Rathmeelin where fewer people go. We needn’t have worried, only two crazy people would be out on the day that was in it, freezing cold and with a sharp wind that didn’t look too strong but would whip the ears off you.
We met no-one and were up nearly as far as the old cemetery before he’d calmed down enough to say, “Thanks for following. It was you I went to see anyway, not her.”
“Nobody wants any more bloodshed, Dan. But that will need both sides to give in, not just one.”
“You had the power to prevent all this from the start, Peg. Do you never stop to think on that? God Almighty, Peg, it wasn’t like you didn’t know where lazy talk of honour and principles led. You saw that young lad in Enniscorthy.”
Denis Heffernan, the sky in his pale eyes. The cry of his mother up to the same dead sky.
Dan was still talking. “You were a good person, Peg, I thought that would stop you in your tracks. That was your warning from God. But no. Hyenas in petticoats.”
“‘Hyenas’…? What?”
“That’s what the men call you. Even on your own side.”
Hyenas in petticoats?
“A woman’s job is to care and nurture. It’s the greatest calling there is on this earth, but Republican females want to be men instead…”
Hyenas in petticoats. He’d shocked me to silence with that one. Were we as misguided, as ugly, as ridiculous as that? Every bit of my body and soul was outraged by this slur.
I wanted to think about it, what he was saying about goodness and nurturing and caring, which I did think of as the finest calling, which was what I had thought I was doing with Barney and the boys. But if that was right, why had it all gone so wrong? I couldn’t think it all through there in front of him and his certainty.
What I didn’t want was to get into angry argument. That, I was positively sure, would solve nothing.
So I swallowed the insult. I let it go. “Dan, I would like to see Norah,” I said. “I’d like to visit her, wherever she is, and let her know that we have not deserted her.”
“Jesus, you’ve a nerve, woman. I’m not going to bargain over peace using my sister.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Norah is where she can come to no more harm from Parles or anyone else. That won’t be changing, no matter what happens with the Irregulars.”
“Dan, it’s me. I would never, ever hurt Norah. You know that.”
“Do I?” he said, in a voice I’d never heard from him before, soft and quiet as a flick knife.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You won’t even admit to how your family has hurt her already.”
Was he saying what I thought he was saying?
“And —” he went on quickly when he saw I was about to speak, “that lying verse of yours that’s doing the rounds, that’ll be remembered and sung in mouths long after you and I are gone, that makes out I killed Barney.”
“It doesn’t. You’re not even mentioned.”
“It does and you know it. ‘The last one turned and witnessed the shot that saw him fall’. Do you think I don’t know what those boys of yours are claiming? Only it’s all twaddle. And you lap it up and spew it back out, though --.”
“Oh God,” I groaned, but he went on.
“—Though you weren’t even there. The truth is, if they had surrendered that morning, as they said they would, there would not have been one shot fired. And the shot that killed him was not fired by me. I never even saw him.”
“I believe you,” I whispered.
“What you can’t face is that you are the ones to blame for his death, not me. You and your mother and my sister, twisting his head round till he didn’t know what he thought himself.”
“Stop…Dan.”
“You’re at fault as much as the man who shot him.”
“Please.”
“Your mother, especially. She knows it too, under her bluster. She’ll see her last days out in torment over what she has done.”
“Dan. Stop. Have mercy.”
“Yet you show none, Peg. As if you’re the only one with feelings.”
“Do you mean you? You grieve him?”
“Jesus, girl, he was my best friend.”
I bowed my head. “I’m sorry, Dan,” I said. “Truly. I’m sorry.”
He left off then.
“Thank you Peg. It means a lot to me, so it does, to hear you say that.”
We did more talking — but that was the gist of it. He explained how my determination to make contact with Norah was also selfish. She was much better off where she was, happy and well cared for and glad to be away from Mucknamore. The kindest thing I could do for her was to leave her be. She had expressly asked not to be contacted by the Parle family.
“And I think you can see why she would need to make such a request,” he said. I bowed my head when he said that.
So it was true. Poor, poor Norah.
Her family, at least, have not disowned her, but obviously got a good place for her with some nice nuns and she’ll come back, probably, in time. Changed forever. And the child, all she has — all we have — left of our boy, will go to strangers. That too I must now take onto my conscience.
I thought the urge I had to find her, and be with her, and make her part of our family — given that Barney would surely have married her if he’d lived — was good and true, but I can see now how it looks from an O’Donovan perspective.
So I bow my head. Not to Dan O’Donovan, no, but to the truth in what he said to me today. I have thought wrong, I have spoken wrong, I have done wrong. The talk going out of this house has to change.
As the Free State unleashes its worst on us, I have to work to cool the flames in the country.
And the flames in myself. I have to let Norah be.
Unless I want to leave this life looking as an
guished as my brother, I have to make amends.
1975
Breasts tender as bruises. Nausea squirming in the pit of me like a nest of snakes. And tears, rivers and rivers of tears.
Hormones, I tell myself, mopping up. Just hormones. Once I have done the deed, they will disappear with the rest.
Deirdre thinks it is breaking up with Rory that makes me cry. I have not seen him for three days. I am home, snuffling around the flat in my dressing gown, or sobbing under my blanket. What happened? Deirdre wants to know. Are we finished? Can’t we make up? Why won’t I tell her? I want to tell but I can’t. The word curdles in my throat: I cannot get it out.
I know I am (relatively) lucky, to have England next door. To have a safe, legal option to flinging myself down stairs with fingers crossed. To all the whispered things you hear that women do. Gallons of gin and a scalding bath. Wire coat-hangers. Knitting needles. I am lucky, I won’t die of it.
If I could just get it organised.
I spend Monday hovering for hours outside the clinic where I got my ineffectual pills, walking up towards the door and walking away, like I am dancing a grim minuet. I can’t go in. Every time I imagine myself telling that helpful girl at reception and that kindly doctor what I want, I balk.
On Tuesday, I go looking around campus for a girl I have seen before handing out leaflets about “Women’s Right to Choose”. Beneath her alarming (green) hair, she looks kind, the sort of person who will listen, who will not judge. I find her and track her to the restaurant, the bar, the Students’ Union. I even follow her into one of her lectures, sitting behind her for an hour of social policy, rehearsing the choice of words I will whisper to her when class is over.
I’ll be direct: “I need an abortion. I thought you might know where I could arrange one.”
