by Amy Harmon
The road, narrow and rutted, was more suited to a horse and a buggy than a convoy. There was a hilly rise on one side and an overgrown hedge on the other. Daylight was slinking away, and a brewery cart missing a wheel lay tipped on its side in the middle of the road. Beyond that, a donkey, freed from the cart, grazed benignly. The convoy slowed, and the touring car veered into the ditch to avoid the obstacles blocking the road.
A shot rang out, and Sean O’Connell yelled, “Drive like hell! We’re in trouble.”
But Mick told the driver to stop.
He picked up his rifle and tumbled out the door, eager for the fight. I followed him. Someone followed me. Shots rained in from the left, high above us, and Mick whooped, ducking behind the armoured car where we crouched for several minutes, punctuating the steady stream from the Vickers machine gun with shots of our own.
The back-and-forth continued, riddling the air with volleys that thunked and whistled over and around us. We had the firepower on our side, but they had the better position. Mick wouldn’t keep his head down. I kept pulling him back to the ground. He kept popping back up. For a moment there was a lull, filled only with the ringing in our ears and the echo in our heads, and I dared hope.
“There they are! They’re running up the road,” Mick yelled, standing to get a better shot at the party of ambushers scurrying up the hill. He ran out from behind the car, and I immediately followed, shouting his name. A single shot rang out, clean and sharp, and Mick fell.
He lay crumpled, facedown in the middle of the road, a yawning hole at the base of his skull. I ran to him, Sean O’Connell at my heels, and we dragged him by his ankles back behind the car. I fell to my knees and began tearing at the buttons of my shirt, needing something to make a compress. Someone said an Act of Contrition, someone else began to rage, and others ran down the road, firing at the fleeing shooters. I pressed my shirt to the back of his head and rolled Mick towards me. His eyes were closed, his face young and loose in repose. Night had fallen, and the Big Fella was gone.
I cradled him in my arms, his head against my chest, his body across the seat as we headed back to Cork. I was not the only one weeping. We stopped for water to wash the blood from his face, and shell-shocked and unaccustomed to our surroundings, we got lost again. We were caught in a hellish maze of felled trees, blown up bridges, and railroad crossings, and we drove aimlessly in the dark. At one point, we pulled over to ask for help and direction at a church. The priest came within several feet of the car, saw Mick propped against my blood-soaked chest, and turned and ran back inside. Someone screamed for him to come back and threatened to shoot. The weapon discharged, but thankfully the priest didn’t fall. Maybe we misjudged him, but we didn’t wait for him to return.
I don’t remember finally coming into Cork, only that we eventually did. Two members of the Cork Civic Patrol led us to Shanakiel Hospital, where Mick’s body was taken away, leaving us covered in his blood and stranded in the corner of the world that should have loved him most. He had been so sure they were his people.
A cable was sent, warning London, alerting Dublin, and informing the world that Michael Collins had been brought down just a week after Arthur Griffith was laid to rest. They sent his body by boat from Penrose Quay to Dún Laoghaire. They wouldn’t let me go with him. I took the train, crowded among people who talked of his loss, of Ireland’s loss, and then talked of hats and the weather and the neighbour’s bad habits. I became so angry, so irrationally livid, that I had to get off at the next stop. I am not fit to be around people, yet I don’t want to be alone. It took me two days to get back to Dublin.
They buried him today in Glasnevin, and I was there among the mourners, huddled with Gearóid O’Sullivan, Tom Cullen, and Joe O’Reilly. Their love for him is a balm to me; I won’t have to carry his memory by myself.
I am selling my house in Dublin. After today, I have no desire to return. I am going home to Eoin, to my little boy. Ireland has taken everyone else, and I have nothing left to give her.
T. S.
26
A MAN OLD AND YOUNG
She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.
—W. B. Yeats
The last day in August, I returned to Ballinagar and climbed the hill behind the church, my breath hard to catch, my lungs crowded by my ever-expanding abdomen. My doctor, an ancient ob-gyn practicing in Sligo, said I was due the first week in January. At my first appointment, the nurse had tried to calculate my pregnancy based on my last menstrual cycle. I couldn’t tell her it had been in mid-January of 1922. I’d had to plead ignorance, even though I suspected I was about twelve weeks along when I returned to the present. My first ultrasound confirmed my estimate, though the dates did not align. Time travel or not, I would still be carrying this child for nine months, and I had four months more to go.
I crouched in front of Declan’s stone and ran my palm over the surface, saying hello. Anne Finnegan’s name was still engraved beside his; that had not changed. I pulled the weeds around Brigid’s grave. I could not find it in my heart to be angry with her. She’d been tangled in a web of deceit and impossibility, and none of it was her fault. She thought she was protecting Eoin, protecting Thomas. My eyes kept flickering to the stone with Smith written on the base; it was set back from the Gallagher graves, a slim shadow covered in lichen. With a deep breath, trusting that Maeve had not been mistaken when she told me Thomas was not buried here, I approached it and knelt beside it, raising my gaze to the words on the rock.
Anne Smith—April 16, 1922—Beloved wife of Thomas.
The grave was mine.
I didn’t gasp or cry out. I simply sat, barely breathing, looking at the monument he’d erected for me. It was not macabre or frightening. It was a memorial to our life together, to the love we shared. It testified that I was, that I had been, and that I always would be . . . his.
“Oh, Thomas,” I whispered, resting my head against the cold stone. I cried, but the tears were a release, a relief, and I made no attempt to staunch their flow. He was not there in Ballinagar. He was not in the wind or in the grass. But I felt closer to him in that moment than I’d felt in months. The baby fluttered inside me, and my stomach tightened in response, drawing around the new life that bore witness to the old.
I lay down at the base of the stone, talking to Thomas the way I’d felt him talking to me through his journals, telling him about old Maeve and young Kevin and Eoin publishing our stories. I told him how the baby was growing and how I thought it was a little girl. I discussed names and what color to paint the nursery, and when the sun began to set, I said a tearful goodbye, wiped my eyes, and made my way down the hill again.
I began reading the journals in small pieces, opening the books to random pages the way Kevin had done. I read Thomas’s final entry first, dated 3 July 1933, and could not read another for days. I kept going back to it like a moth to a flame; the pain I felt when I read it was almost joy.
Eoin turns eighteen next week. We booked his passage last spring and made all the arrangements for his room and board. He was accepted at the Long Island College of Medicine, though he’s quite a bit younger than most of the other students. I bought myself a ticket as well, intending to go with him. I want to get him settled, to see the streets he will walk and the places he will be, so that when I think about him, I can picture him in his new surroundings. But he is adamant that he go alone. He reminds me of Mick sometimes. An iron will and a soft heart. He promised me he would write, but we both laughed at that. I won’t be getting any letters.
In many ways, I have been given more than a parent could ask for; I have the reassurances Anne gave me. I know the pattern of his days and the path his life will take. I know the kind of man he is and what he will become. The adventures of Eoin Gallagher are j
ust beginning, even as our time together has come to an end.
There were some entries and dates I avoided completely. I couldn’t face 1922. I didn’t want to read about Michael’s death—I’d been unable to save him—or about the continual collapse of the Irish leadership on all sides. I knew from my earlier research that after the death of Arthur Griffith and the assassination of Michael Collins, the scales tipped violently, the way they always do, and the provisional government granted special powers to the Free State Army. Under these special powers, well-known republicans were arrested and executed, without appeal, by firing squad. Erskine Childers was the first to be executed, but he was not the last. In a period of seven months, seventy-seven republicans were arrested and executed by the Free State Army. In return, the IRA began to kill prominent Free State figures. Back and forth the pendulum swung, leaving the earth scorched with every swath.
I spent most of my time in the years from 1923 to 1933, soaking up every mention of Eoin. Thomas loved him well, and his entries revolved around him. He reveled in Eoin’s victories, took his cares personally, and fretted like a father. In one entry, he talked about catching sixteen-year-old Eoin kissing Miriam McHugh in the clinic and worried that Eoin would lose focus on his studies.
There is little that is more intoxicating than being in love and in lust, but Miriam isn’t the girl for Eoin. And this is not the time for romantic attachments. Eoin sulked a little when I counseled him to talk to Miriam instead of kissing her. Kisses can fool a man but deep conversation seldom does. He scoffed and questioned my experience. “How would you know, Doc? You never talk to women. And you sure as hell aren’t kissing them,” he said. I reminded him that I’d loved a woman who had excelled at conversation and kissing—a woman who’d ruined me for all others, and I damn well did know what I was talking about. Mentioning Anne always makes Eoin contemplative. He didn’t say much after that, but tonight he knocked on my bedroom door. When I opened it, he put his arms around me and embraced me. I could tell he was close to tears, so I just held him until he was ready to let go.
I had to put the journals away for a few days after that, but I found more comfort in them than pain. When it hurt too much to think of Thomas and the little boy I’d left behind, I sifted through the pages and turned back the years, reading their triumphs and troubles, their joys and their struggles, and I watched them go on together.
I found an entry written on the day that Brigid died. Thomas wrote about her with compassion and forgiveness. I was grateful she was not alone in the end. I read about illnesses and deaths in Dromahair and about new treatments and advances in medicine. Sometimes Thomas’s journals felt like a patient log, detailing a myriad of ailments and remedies, but he never wrote about politics. It was as though he had divorced himself entirely from the fray. The patriot heart he spoke of in his early years had been replaced by a nonpartisan soul. Something died in him when Michael was killed. He lost his faith in Ireland. Or maybe he just lost his faith in men.
There was one entry in July of 1927 where Thomas mentioned the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins, the minister for home affairs. O’Higgins had been responsible for the implementation of the special powers in 1922 that had created so much bitterness. The assassination came on the heels of the establishment of a new political party, Fianna Fáil, which was organized by Eamon de Valera and other prominent republicans. Public sentiment was with de Valera. Someone had asked Thomas which party he would support in the upcoming election. His failure to publicly support any of them had upset more than a few candidates who sought his approval and his financial backing. His response had me gasping and rereading his words.
There are some paths that inevitably lead to heartache, some acts that steal men’s souls, leaving them wandering forever after without them, trying to find what they lost. There are too many lost souls in Ireland because of politics. I’m going to hold on to what’s left of mine.
The first few lines were the words Eoin had quoted the night he died. Any questions I’d had about Eoin’s knowledge of the journals, of his intimate understanding of the man who had raised him, were gone. He’d only taken one journal with him when he left home, but he’d read them all.
I bought Maeve a stack of romance novels in Sligo after my doctor’s appointment, along with an assortment of little cakes in pale pastels. I showed up unannounced; I didn’t have her phone number. She came to the door wearing a royal-blue blouse, yellow slacks, and cheetah-print house slippers. Her fuchsia lipstick was fresh, and her pleasure at seeing me was genuine, though she feigned irritation.
“It took you long enough, young lady!” she scolded. “I tried walking to Garvagh Glebe last week, and Father Dornan dragged me home. He thinks I have dementia. He doesn’t understand that I’m just old and rude.”
I followed her into the house, pushing the door shut with my foot as she prattled on. “I’d begun to think you were rude too, Anne Smith. Not coming to see me when I asked so nicely. Are those cakes?” She sniffed the air.
“Yes. And I’ve brought you books too. I distinctly remember you telling me you liked big books best. The ones with lots of chapters.”
Her eyes grew wide and her chin wobbled. “Yes . . . I remember that too. So we’re not going to pretend?”
“If we pretend, then we can’t talk about the old days. I need to talk to someone, Maeve.”
“So do I, lass,” she murmured. “So do I. Come sit down. I’ll make some tea.”
I took off my coat and set out the cakes—one of each kind—and left the rest in the box for Maeve to nibble on later. I stacked the new books near her rocking chair and took a seat at her small table as she returned with the kettle and two cups.
“Eoin insisted you weren’t dead. He said you were just lost in the water. Everyone was worried about him. So Dr. Smith had a stone engraved, and we had a small service for you to give us all some peace and comfort. Father Darby wanted to have your name taken off Declan Gallagher’s headstone, but Thomas insisted it be left alone, and he refused to put a birthdate on the new one. The doctor was stubborn, and he was rich—he gave lots of money to the church—so Father Darby let him have his way.
“Eoin threw a fit when he saw the grave. It didn’t comfort him one whit to have his mother’s name on a marker. Thomas didn’t even stay for the service. He and Eoin went for a long walk, and when they came back, Eoin was still crying, but he wasn’t screaming, poor mite. I don’t know what Doc said to him, but Eoin stopped saying daft things after that.”
I sipped my tea, and Maeve smirked at me over the edge of her cup. “He wasn’t daft though, was he?”
“No.” Thomas wouldn’t have told Eoin everything. But he would have told him enough. He would have told him who I was and that he would see me again.
“I’d forgotten all about Anne Smith. I’d even forgotten about Doc and Eoin. It’s been seventy years since I last saw them. Then you showed up at my door. And I started to remember.”
“What did you remember?”
“Don’t be coy, lass. I’m not twelve years old anymore, and you are not the lady of this house.” She thumped her slippered foot on her carpeted floor. “I remembered you!”
I smiled at her vehemence. It felt good to be remembered.
“Now, I want to know everything. I want to know what happened to you. Then and now. And don’t leave out the kissing scenes,” she barked.
I refilled my cup, took a huge bite of a frosted pink pastry, and I told her everything.
In September, I awoke to news that the Twin Towers had fallen, that my city had been attacked, and I watched the television coverage, clutching my growing belly, sheltering my unborn child, wondering if I’d returned from one vortex only to be plunged into another. My old life, my streets, my skyline, was forever changed, and I was grateful Eoin was no longer alive in Brooklyn to witness it. I was grateful I was no longer there to witness it. My heart was incapable of holding more pain.
Barbara heard the planes—they shook the ag
ency as they passed overhead—before they hit, and called me in a state days later, repeating over and over again how glad she was that I was safe in Ireland. “The world has gone mad, Anne. Mad. It’s upside down, and we are all holding on for dear life.” I knew exactly what she meant, but my world had been spinning for months, and 9/11 just added another layer of impossibility. It distracted Barbara from her worry over me, from my midlife crisis, and I could only retreat further into the corners of Garvagh Glebe, unable to absorb the magnitude of such an event, unable to process any of it. The world was upside down—just like Barbara said—but I’d been falling when it tipped, and I already had my sea legs. I turned off the television, begged my city for forgiveness, and pled with God to keep us all—even me—from losing ourselves. And I continued on.
In October, I ordered a crib, a changing table, and a rocking chair to match the old oak floors. Two weeks later, I decided that the floor in the nursery needed to be carpeted. The house could be drafty, and I had visions of my baby tumbling out of her bed and onto the unforgiving slats. The carpet was installed, the furniture assembled, and the curtains hung, and I told myself I was ready.
In November, I concluded that the soft-green paint on the nursery walls would look better with white stripes. Green-and-white stripes would work for a girl or a boy, and it would give the room some cheer. I bought the paint and supplies, but Kevin insisted that pregnant ladies should not paint and hijacked my project. I made a halfhearted protest, but my enormous belly made a mockery of my ambitions. I was thirty-two weeks along and could not imagine getting any bigger or being any more uncomfortable. But I needed something to do.
