by Leon Uris
"Are you telling me it's natural for a fine person like Conor to just pick up and roam for five years, disappear big from his home, leaving word to no one?"
"It's natural enough for my brother," he answered. "He's a different sort, Millie, with strange sides to him no one ever gets to know. When I first heard he was coming, I was scared. All my life I had lived under his shadow. But seeing his pain, it's me who's sorry for him. I don't know if he'll ever find what we have here."
Mildred paddled to the wood-burning stove, stoked it, then oversaw the brewing pot, stirring all within to her satisfaction. They were brothers but they were not brothers. Conor had given off sunshine to them but as he did he betrayed a darkness in himself. Five years of smoldering. What sort of man would do that? She returned to the table Liam wore an apologetic expression to say that Conor was beyond his reach.
"Maybe after he's here for a time," Mildred said, more hopeful than practical and with female calculation. "The loveliness of this place will come to him as it did to you and all the other Irish boys."
Liam shook his head. "Don't go making plans."
A week passed and another. One night Conor announced he would be going into Christchurch to inquire about finding a berth on an incoming ship. There was always a shortage of blacksmiths afloat, so something suitable would not be long in coming. Gloom fell on the house.
*
Liam rode his horse up a florid hillside to a place crowned with a giant spreading oak. He had gone there five hundred times, when he got his first parcel, when he wooed Mildred, with his children. He had whiled his time beneath it fishing the stream but never daring to dream that nearly everything in view would be his one day. He hitched up his horse and examined Conor's creel. It was empty.
"You're not giving it much of a go," Liam said.
"I think the fish here are a little smarter than back home," Conor answered.
"You'll not find another trout stream like this, even in Ireland. Let's see," he said, examining the flies. "This here Taihape Tickler never fails to do the job this time of day." Liam rolled up his Wellington boots and within minutes hooked a rainbow, and in New Zealand fashion worked the fish to the bank, set his toe under it and flipped it ashore.
"Well done."
Liam laughed, content, and the two settled against the tree trunk. "Put this in your jug and jiggle it," he said, passing a bottle to Conor.
Liam was the portrait of a happy man. Conor smiled for it. "I can say things to you now that choked on their way out before," Liam said. "I envied you going off with Daddy or Seamus O'Neill sitting under trees like this. Having a tree of my own on a stream of my own, I know how comforting it can be. We've changed places in a way, you and me."
"Aye, it's good to see you like this, Liam."
"We don't want you to leave, Conor," Liam said abruptly. "Any feeling of jealousy I've had for you is gone. I want you to have the happiness I've got. I want you to stay."
"I don't think it's for me," Conor whispered.
"What's to go back to?"
Conor didn't answer but his silence was loud.
"I owe this land everything," Liam said. "Sure, my wife is English and my wanes are New Zealanders. Sure, I celebrate the King's birthday but so what? I love this place. Funny, everybody loves the Irish outside of Ireland and England."
"That's the story of our people," Conor said.
"If you ask me, I say fuck Ireland. What has it ever given either of us but pain?"
A flash of anger came and went over Conor. He was speaking rightly for Liam and for all those who had left. It hadn't worked for him. Five years of trying to purge Ireland from him had made no difference. Conor came to his feet very weary. Liam gaped, sorry and a bit frightened for his brother. "I didn't mean all of it," he said.
"It's the story of our people," Conor repeated.
"Conor, don't go down, not just yet. I've something weighty on my mind. I've done a bad thing. Over the years I've heard from Seamus O'Neill, who's been searching the world for you. I promised if you ever came here I'd let him know. This letter arrived before you did. After seeing you, after seeing how you needed rest and peace, me and Mildred decided to hold it in case it said something to bring you sorrow again. We kept on holding it in the hopes you would agree to stay. Well, now that you're going in to look for a ship . . ." He handed the envelope over. "I'm sorry."
Conor stared without opening it. As though he knew what the words would read, Liam slowly unhitched the horse and left his brother alone.
… each day Dublin grows more alive with the spirit. Theater and meetings and associations and pamphlets. It's a swelling wave you can now see with the naked eye. I'm in the middle of it and so many brilliant and dedicated people are coming forth. I can say for the first time in my life I am proud to be Irish in Ireland . . . it's coming, Conor. It may take a few years, perhaps even a decade but nothing can stop the tide now . . . I remember the booley house and all the trillions of hours we talked about the moment. Oh, the moment, the moment, the moment. Can you be gone when it arrives?
… the Brotherhood is born again. Sure, it’s small and weak but it's on the rise. Can you repeat the very words, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, without a chill? … for God's sake, Conor . . . come home . . .
CHAPTER FOUR
The night had been talked through but Conor had only given off hints of his odyssey. We paused for a moment, catching the first light as it broke over the flat roofs of Georgian Dublin.
My digs on Cornmarket High Street had been institutionalized as a writers' and actors' quarter situated between the infamous Dublin Castle and the St. James Gate Brewery of Guinness renown and fringing the Liberties, which had been one of Europe's most ghastly slums. The Liberties was a long-standing womb of insurrection. Within my triangle there was the omnipresence of the Crown, the wellspring of revolution, and endless kegs of brew. I was immaculately situated for any eventuality.
Conor let the curtain fall across the window. I had waited patiently for him to let it pour out. A day and a night of drink and groping had brought him once again to the brink. With the dawn he had grown lucid and less cautious of hearing the sound of his own ordeal.
"After the fire, when Father Pat McShane told me of the deal Kevin O'Garvey probably made, it wasn't possible to remain in Derry. All his life Kevin had tried to play the game by their rules, in their courts, in their Parliament, the same as Parnell and O'Connell. In the end he was cheated by the British the same as all of us have been cheated. Oh, they're lofty-worded, high-minded cheaters, they are, but cheaters nonetheless. It exploded before me with utter clarity that the O'Garveys and the Parnells can only take us so far along the road. Armed insurrection and only armed insurrection is the only reality the British will understand. I left Derry for that somewhere in Ireland where the Republican Brotherhood still lived.
"For a solid year I walked the roads from Donegal to Cork, from Galway to Dublin, from Belfast to Kerry, from Wexford to Sligo. There was no Irish Republican Brotherhood.
"Even as it had stripped us of our manhood, destroyed our dreams and dispersed our seed, fear of the famine lingered on like a mighty black cloud into a second generation. I saw the Irish people broken, shorn of the will to protest, obedient, subjected, semi-comics. I wanted to grab them by the thropple and shake them and scream for them to be men but they were dogs. They played dogs' games, yapping false courage, courage they did not possess. Dogs content to scrounge their fields for scraps and send their children off to the city as beggars. Don't educate, don't strive, don't anger. Live in foggy visions.
"Aye, Seamus, there was no Brotherhood, no ability to rage. I became so broken with frustration I did what I swore would never happen. I was driven out of Ireland. Ah, not by the British but by the apathy of our own people."
Conor had sunk to the edge of my cot, his shoulders hunched over, staring down at the floor. For a moment he lifted his head and searched the room as though he were still seeking that miracle. I lowe
red the gaslight and let in the gray light of day.
"All of Ireland was one large Bogside. I could no longer shout from empty mountaintops to unhearing ears, so I had to leave. You understand that, don't you, I had to leave?"
"Aye."
"And I found our people again . . . out there . . . The sewer keepers of the world, fighting other men's wars, eternal wanderers of the universe, tucked away in little Bogsides all over mother earth, the quaint folk, a breed of cursed men and women, so dear, so gentle, so precious, yet so weary and so broken.
"I saw Bogside after Bogside of the colonizer's creation. Black Bogsides in Africa, red Bogsides in the Caribbean, yellow Bogsides in Asia, brown Bogsides in India. We were them and they were us. How long could we be held in the bloody grip of British arrogance? And I would run back to sea with a fever in my brain.
"I lit for a time in Australia. It's a decent enough place. Yet wherever I felt a measure of comfort and peace I began to smell turf fires and hear singing from Dooley McCluskey's and I'd end up in a sweat in the middle of the night. I tried, Seamus, I tried, but the world was not large enough to dim the vision of Ireland or purge the curse of it from my soul. I had become a traitor to myself and I fled back to sea.
"When I was out there on the late watch I could be alone at last. I could suddenly feel the sensation of myself standing still and looking inward and I could see the world beyond the horizon going mad."
He walked back to the window, drew the curtain aside and blinked. I shuffled about to fix breakfast. "I can't say that I don't hate this place in many ways but I can say I'll never leave again."
"The Brotherhood is so small you can barely see it but they are men whose feelings run as deeply as your own. It may take years but I swear to you, Conor, that we are mounting up on the wings of a golden phoenix."
*
Barrymore was there from County Cork. Butler was there from Clare. O'Bourne and Nolan were Dubliners and Cannon came from Kerry. Madigan was there from County Kildare and Larkin and me from Ulster. We had been painfully hand-picked and assembled in a room above the bakery on Marrowbone Lane in the heart of the Liberties. The room was starkly revolutionary.
The man who stood before us had once been a giant, a minor folk hero and a relic of the Fenian Rising. In '67 he had been captured in a raid on a Constabulary station. He was only sixteen at the time but he was a big kid and despite his age he was jailed in Brixton in England. After escape and recapture he took up residence in half a dozen prisons as guest of the Crown and for the next two decades underwent every sort of humiliation they could impose. As a student at Queen's, I remember seeing drawings of him being forced to eat on his hands and knees like a dog with his arms shackled behind him.
After release and exile he showed up from time to time where two, three or five old Fenians would listen in Canada, Australia, England and finally in America with its two million Irish-born.
He was a full-blown revolutionary. He was a man who rebuffed the passion of women, if any had ever reached in that close. He would not touch liquor, for he wanted a clear mind to handle men, explosives and decisions. Realities of prison cells and rooms "on the run" like this one had made him acid to slogans and banalities. Yet a crucifix dangled above the headboard of his bed as some ancient reminder from boyhood not to break the final thread with a church that had denounced and disowned him. He was reality in revolution and his entry into the scene in Dublin marked the serious attempt to resurrect the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
His name was Long Dan Sweeney.
No man among us had not been raised on the blood he sacrificed.
Long Dan's hair was completely white by his twenty fifth birthday. His skin had an unhealthy reddish pallor as one who had been denied sunlight. His face was in crags and slits. Time and the British had knocked him up to a point where he often doted on cynical eccentricities. But we listened, for he was revolution that was.
"I hope you're not in a hurry," he said with a voice almost devoid of quality. "Just because Brother Seamus O'Neill over there and some of his fellow writers and the politicians are blowing out words like an Aran storm doesn't mean the Irish people are going to run out into the streets and rise. The Irish people," he said with unmistakable disdain, "are almost as much our enemy as the British. They have been subjugated for too long. When you leave this room, leave it knowing that most of them will hate you and everything you try to do. The British are supreme masters at manipulating Irish against Irish."
He reached beneath the pillow of his bed, pulled out a Webley revolver and waved it so each of us would get a whiff of the muzzle. "Informers are the bane of our existence. Take a good look at one another and trust no one else."
Click, click went the pistol as he cocked and aimed it. "Informers will be destroyed without mercy." We all winced and ducked as he pulled the trigger. It was empty. He threw it on the table with a thud, "Without mercy," he repeated.
"We are a people of notorious barroom courage. Them, across the water, fancy themselves Irish by decking themselves in green on St. Patrick's Day and marching boastfully up and down the world's boulevards. We are without peer in passing out unmitigated shit about our longing for the old sod. But they really don't care. Ask yourselves, you with brothers over the water . . . do they really care beyond that yearly token tear? We are alone, you and me, alone. Alone here. Alone over there."
Long Dan Sweeney blew neither hot nor cold, bitter nor enthusiastic. He was merely telling it.
"We do have some support out of America, a handful of loyal who will pay our way. Without them, we'd be lost. With them, there are some goals we can accomplish. What we must do is build some kind of organization and have some kind of contingency plans ready for that day when the Irish people decide they've had enough. Some of you may live to see the day we rise but don't count on it. And don't fart higher than your ass. We are, of now, a totally ineffective group representing a totally ineffective people. No one is as disorganized as the Irish. You'll tear your hair out trying to execute a simple plan.
"So, you're asking yourselves, what are we wasting our time for? What have we got to go on? After all, we're a weak, subject, disorganized, informing people. I'll tell you what we've got. We've got British hatred. They fear us no less than they hate us. Why? Because, so long as a single Fenian continues to be restless, as long as three men like us meet in rooms like this, their Empire is never entirely secure. The British know that the Irish will be the first to rise against them and therefore must be the first to be stopped. We, you and I and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, are the tip of a poison arrow and if we break the British skin, our struggle and our ideas will spread to their colonies around the world. That's what we've got."
As we reeled on his powerful thoughts, he rubbed his hands together. These, too, were as wrinkled with premature age as his white hair but they still had their legendary size, measuring almost ten inches from the heel of the fist to the tip of the middle finger.
"The enemy sits in mahogany rooms and makes up rules. By their rules they declare their legality to colonize people who don't want to be colonized, rules to conduct warfare by, rules to legally starve people to death, rules to carry out whatever they want to carry out. They say, with enormous pride, these rules come from the mother of Parliaments so obviously they must be right and anyone who goes against these rules must be wrong. We are expected, as a subject people, to live by their rules, fight by their rules, and obey their rules. But we don't have an army or arms and cannot fight by their rules and as this struggle develops we will have to make up our own rules. Now, according to their rules, we are depraved . . . killers, fanatics, anarchists, gunmen, or whatever scum they so designate, and therefore fit to be destroyed by their self declared legality.
"Not only do they own the rule book, they own the press and the journalists to expose us to the world and denounce us as lunatics and we have no voice to argue back. We must be prepared to accept the denunciation and wrath not only of our own p
eople but also the world at large. Their press will hound us vehemently and viciously. They will scream that we aren't playing by their rules."
He leaned over the table his fists rapping it with his first show of emotion. "If you remember nothing else, remember this. No crime a man commits in behalf of his freedom can be as great as the crimes committed by those who deny his freedom. We will not starve English bodies in a famine, we'll not scatter their seed around the earth, we'll not deny them ownership of English land. Our armies will not patrol the streets of London. Our courts will not hang them.
"We engage in a fight vulnerable to scathing propaganda, unloved by most of our own people, but God and God alone will eventually decide which side was just in its aspirations and which side was evil.
"Sure, we'll never see the day we can meet them in open warfare and match them gun for gun, so they'll denounce our tactics as cowardly. But we are not without weapons of our own. Remember that the British have nothing in their entire arsenal or imperial might to counter a single man who refuses to be broken. Irish words, Irish self-sacrifice and, ultimately, Irish martyrdom are our weapons. We must have the ability to endure pain to such an extent that they lose the ability to inflict it. This and this alone will break them in the end. Martyrdom."
I know he was sizing us up. Who might break, who might inform, who would boast without delivering. Who had the tools of martyrdom.
He jolted us with a crack of a smile and took a seat behind the table. "That's your first and last lecture," he said. "Now I know you're eager to learn about that rumored cache of weapons stashed away in England. It's true."
Long Dan went on to tell the story of the ships returning from the Boer War, most of them landing in Liverpool. One, in particular, carried a cargo of small arms and rifles and landed during a dockmen’s strike. An army unit was called in to unload it onto waiting freight cars. In a typical bureaucratic mess-up, Irish Fusiliers were used as longshoremen and some of them tipped off the Brotherhood in England.
