Only with Blood

by Therese Down

  The tea was cold when Caitlin came downstairs again, dressed in one of her old frocks and hair tied back, a thick woollen jumper over her dress. She was frowning. The feeling of detachment had subsided a little and the old resentment and anger were returning. She observed him, slumped and awkward, unable to hold her gaze, and contempt was unsluiced in her breast.

  “Well, what now?” she challenged. Startled by the invective in her tone, Jack stiffened.

  “What?”

  “What now?” she repeated, louder. “Well, you surely had a plan for what we do now?” When he didn’t answer, Caitlin grew bolder, began to give vent to her fury and grief. “But no, actually, it doesn’t even look like you made any plans for today, does it?” He frowned darkly, the familiar pain and urge to cough becoming intense as he lifted his head to meet her eyes. “This house is a filthy tip, so it is!” She was almost shouting. “And there’s not even a bit of food ready – is there any food here at all? Is this what you think I should live like, is it? Are you waiting for me to start cooking and skivvying from the moment I set foot in the place, is that it?” Jack fought the urge to put his hands over his ears. He was so stupid! Why hadn’t he thought to prepare some breakfast, get some fresh bread in? What had he been thinking? He was so nervous and so ill, had so little appetite himself, and was so unused to caring for anyone other than himself that these simple demonstrations of comfort had not even occurred to him. He leapt to his feet, knocking his chair backwards so it almost fell. Unable to answer her, he strode across the kitchen and went outside. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning. He would drive to Dunane and buy food. It was, in any case, a blessed relief to be doing something.

  * * *

  In the days after Caitlin’s appearance in his father’s barn, Donal Kelly could not get her out of his head. The story Pat Maher had told when he and Deirdre had returned his pony was remarkable in every way. The farmer up the road, a Mick Spillane, had matched his seventeen-year-old daughter to another farmer his own age for a tidy sum of money, though Maher did not know how much. The girl had stolen Maher’s pony in a bid to escape her fate. Maher couldn’t be precise about the wedding date, though he knew all three banns had been read, so it could be any time. He asked Deirdre whether she was the girl, got closer, and squinted at her. She assured him she was not. On their way back to Golden in their donkey cart, Donal and Deirdre had discussed the horror they would feel if either was matched in this way against his or her will. However, the practice itself was not shocking to them, for it was still common enough. Deirdre was less than a year younger than Caitlin, pretty with light chestnut hair and her father’s blue eyes. She empathized particularly.

  “Sure how could anyone sell his own daughter like that?” she wondered aloud as they bumped in the cart and took turns to walk, in order to rest the donkey. “Daddy would never do that to Jacintha or me.”

  “No, he would not,” agreed Donal, “but it’s not a bad idea, now.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it would certainly get me out of a fix,” added Donal, then grinned at her. Increasingly, he was applying himself to the problem of how to get away from life on his father’s farm, not least of all because the shadows from the secrets he inhabited were rolling over it like storm clouds. But the dependence on his help not only of Dan Kelly but of Deirdre and Jacintha also, was an anchor to Golden.

  He wondered if the pretty girl he had found in his father’s barn had managed to get away, though where she thought she was going on foot, in the January cold and darkness, he could not imagine. Perhaps she had relatives or even a lover who would conspire to liberate her from the marriage her father had arranged? As he lay in bed in the minutes between turning out the light and falling into exhausted sleep, Donal tried to remember any glimpses he had caught of Caitlin Spillane on that morning. Apart from an impression of beauty and courage he could recall nothing clearly. If he had known what she was doing, he mused, he would have helped her. He knew plenty of people across many counties from Tipperary to the North who would have taken her in if Donal had asked them; IRA safe houses masquerading as ordinary homes, occupied by apparently ordinary people who were well used to harbouring fugitives. He might have got to know her. A spirited, rebellious beauty with a mane of black hair emerged from the dim recesses of his father’s barn and stepped into the light of Donal’s imagination; a fitting partner indeed for a young man forced to flit from shadow to shadow by night, yoked and bent to the routine of his father’s farm by day. “Where are you now, Caitlin Spillane?” he had asked aloud of the darkness at the same time that Caitlin, captured, had cried herself to sleep next to Maureen.

  When Jack got back from Dunane on his wedding day, he brought in from the cart a sack he had been given in the post office shop. It contained his butter and sugar rations, two loaves of bread, potatoes, bacon, cabbage, and a quart of milk, for he could drink none of his own. He had also bought a pot of jam and a few sweets – things he would never have contemplated buying as a rule, but he thought Caitlin might like them. He tipped the contents of the sack carefully onto the table and was disappointed she was not in the kitchen to see.

  The house was very quiet and cold. The clock ticked in the semi darkness, for the lamps had burned low, then out, and the range had not been stoked. Afraid she had run away again, Jack climbed the stairs with heavy tread and walked determinedly to the room he had prepared for Caitlin’s arrival. He knocked on the door. After a few seconds, there was a sullen response and Jack closed his eyes in relief.

  “What?”

  “I’ve bought food,” he said through the door, but he couldn’t go on. He had wanted to add, “Come and eat something”, but the imperative seemed too indelicate. He could not trust his tone, so unused was he to modulating utterances to elicit cooperation. His world was one where short declaratives and imperatives issued to beasts mainly sufficed to get things done. There was no answer to his announcement. He felt foolish outside her door, was about to turn away but was suddenly irritated. She had been here the whole time and the range was almost out, the lamps unlit.

  “The range is cold, below.” There was another silence and then he heard the bed springs creak as they gave up Caitlin’s weight. She opened the door and stared at him resentfully. The rebuke implicit in the statement about the range had stirred her; she knew better than to ignore such remarks if she did not want trouble. Jack took a step back so she could emerge from the room and she passed him, made for the stairs.

  While Jack coughed and moved around the gloomy kitchen, putting away groceries and filling the kettle, Caitlin trimmed the lamp wicks and topped up the kerosene from a can Jack kept under the sink. Then she fuelled the embers of the range with briquettes of turf and sticks until it was roaring gamely once more and the kitchen began to warm up. Mechanically, Caitlin brought the peelings pail to the table and sat down to peel potatoes, prepare cabbage. There was a joint of bacon already in the press and she sliced it and lay the pieces on a plate, which she first scrubbed as best she could using water made hot by the kettle. She put the potatoes on to boil, placed the plate over the mouth of the kettle pan, and put another plate over the meat so it would warm through. The cabbage would go in with the potatoes when they were half cooked. She sliced soda bread and put the butter on the table. She was ravenously hungry.

  Jack watched his new wife moving around the kitchen and marvelled at her dexterity, her youth and good looks. He could hardly take in that this lovely girl was in his house, making his dinner. Caitlin glowered at him, reddening under his scrutiny, and he looked away quickly, coughed his way to the kettle, made more tea. The thing she feared more than anything else seemed to be taking shape as the afternoon wore on. The dark angel of the annunciation seemed to have followed her here and was metamorphosing into something even more sinister in the shadows and corners of Flynn’s house.

  They ate in silence. When he had finished, Jack pushed away from the table, announcing that he was off to get his cows for m
ilking. Caitlin was hugely relieved, for she had barely been able to chew and swallow her food in his presence; she planned to wolf the remains of her dinner and eat some of the bread and jam.

  “Do you know anyone in Dunane?” The night before Caitlin’s wedding, Donal was in a safe house halfway between Dunane and Cashmel. A man named Michael Kilty, a prosperous farmer and main supplier of the depot in Cashmel where Joe Morgan and Des Corcoran worked, had picked up Donal in his car. Des and Joe had come with him.

  “I know a few farmers out that way, all right,” replied Michael. “Why?”

  “Do you know a Spillane?” “I do – shifty yoke, would skin you as soon as look at you, boy. I have sold him pigs a few times – he’d try anything to get the price down. Told me once a sow was ‘squinty-looking’ and wanted a fiver off.” Michael hmphed and topped up his poteen, knocked it back.

  “Squinty-looking?” echoed Donal with amused incredulity. Joe Morgan laughed and shook his head. “Was she, though?”

  “What?” Kilty put down his glass and fixed Donal with a look of mock indignation. “A finer looking sow you never beheld! I almost fell in love with her that day, boy, I looked so long and deep into her eyes. It fair broke my heart to sell her to that runt Spillane.” The men laughed. The door opened, and a young, ruddy-cheeked man came in. He removed his cap and nodded to the woman of the house, who smiled and gestured to the table where Joe, Donal, Michael, and Des sat. They made room for him.

  “How’re ya, Pat?” Joe greeted the young man, slapping him on the back as he sat down. “So it’s just Conor we’re waiting on now, then? Will he be long, Missis?” The woman whose house it was answered that her husband had business to settle with a man in Clogheen, from whom he was planning to buy a horse. If the deal involved much drinking, there was no telling when Conor Rourke might be home.

  The meeting was to discuss IRA tactics in the continuing campaign against English occupation of the North and to effect the overthrow of de Valera’s Free State government. Hugh McAteer, the IRA Chief of Staff, had escaped from Derry jail in March 1943 by tunnelling out with twenty other men. They had surfaced like moles in a Derry back garden as a family sat down to their breakfast. A few weeks later, McAteer had mounted “The Broadway Cinema Operation” on the Falls Road, Belfast, at which Donal had been present. But by the time of this meeting between Joe and a few members of the revised Tipperary flying column, in January 1944, McAteer was recaptured and languishing in a Belfast jail. Joe Morgan and other senior IRA leaders now took their orders from McAteer’s replacement, Charlie Kerins.

  Kerins’ distinguished service record included the murder of Detective Sergeant Denis O’Brien in September 1942 – the detective who had fooled Paddy Davern into revealing the whereabouts of Michael Devereux’s body in June 1941. Kerins had mown down O’Brien with a machine gun as he left his house to go to work, then cycled past as the policeman’s wife cradled her dying husband in her arms. Since then, the IRA Chief of Staff Officer had been robbing factories and committing whatever crimes were necessary to arm and organize the dwindling numbers of Irish men who reported to him. Kerins was holed up in a safe house in Waterford but due to move. Joe Morgan was key in ensuring the Chief of Staff’s safety and in taking instructions from him to effect the next IRA cross-border attack. Tonight’s meeting was seminal in the formulation of a plan.

  “How’re ye, lads?” At last, Conor Rourke came home. Ruddy faced from too much drink as well as the stinging wind, he nodded a little sheepishly to each man at his kitchen table. His wife took one look at his complexion, glowered at him, removed from the table the one empty glass, and began making tea. Rourke avoided her eye, didn’t argue.

  “Sorry there, now, lads,” he began as he sat down with them. “That man drives a hard bargain.”

  “Did you buy his horse?” asked Donal.

  “I did.”

  “Does it squint?” rejoined Joe and the men laughed. Rourke looked confused. His wife all but slammed a cup of tea in front of him so that the liquid lurched from one side of the mug to another. The men exchanged glances, stopped laughing. “To business,” pronounced Joe, “if you’re capable, Rourke, you dog, ya.”

  There was a moment’s silence while each man marshalled his thoughts, came under command. Rourke’s wife went upstairs to bed and slammed shut her door. “End of February or beginning of March – date to be decided – we make our way in two legs to Roscommon and then on to Buncrana. On the command, we cross the border to Derry where we meet up with a few of the lads who got out of jail with McAteer last year. Waterford and Kilkenny columns will be going via Dublin to Dundalk, then on to Belfast.”

  “What’s the MO, Joe?” asked Donal. “Can we know what we’re to do?”

  “No details yet.” Joe shook his head, glanced briefly at the table as though gathering thought, then looked at each man in turn. He continued, “But this is a big push, lads. McAteer is on hunger strike. We need to do everything we can to support him and the boys back inside. Kerins will travel with the Waterford lads as far as Dublin and I’ll meet him there. The rest of ye will wait for us in a safe house in Roscommon. We’ll travel up to Buncrana in separate vehicles. Michael, you’ll take your car. Des, you and Pat will travel up in a lorry as if ye were on a depot run.”

  “Is there just us in it, Joe?” Pat wanted to know.

  “No, no,” said Joe impatiently. “There’s more of us. You will see when we get to Buncrana.”

  Pat O’Meara was clearly very uneasy about the whole thing. Just nineteen, Pat was the youngest son of ageing parents and least likely to inherit on their deaths, for his four brothers – two of whom were married – would make sure they got their shares of the farm sale when their father died. The most he could hope for was a labouring job on another farm or maybe manual work in a factory or depot. Tall and good looking, with a shock of blonde hair rare in Tipperary, Pat had been an easy recruit to the IRA, for there was not much in his life to look forward to and little prospect of marriage. Even if he had been courageous enough to approach a girl with a view to courtship, he could not envisage a time when poverty would not prevent the trading of his dreams for something more solid. The IRA, on the other hand, gladly exchanged dreams of heroism and intellects seduced by rhetoric, for guns, explosives, and chances to kill people. When it finally came, the weight of a gun in the hands was the ultimate challenge to abstract notions of allegiance. Pat was now confronted for the first time with the reality of his pledge to the IRA. Donal watched him swallow hard – how he shifted in his chair to relieve mounting nervous tension – and remembered well the moment his own bluff was called. There was a silence. The kitchen range was quiet, its embers sleepy. A wind whistled past the windows and made them shudder in their frames.

  “I’ll give ye a lift back, lads,” offered Michael Kilty.

  “Will we just wait, so?” asked Conor, rubbing his face tiredly and stifling a yawn. “What’s the word?”

  “‘Holiday’,” came the reply and the others looked at him askance. “Sure doesn’t everyone go to the seaside on their holidays?”

  “I’ve never seen the sea,” said Pat wistfully. “Will we see it, Joe?”

  “It’ll be hard to miss in Buncrana, Pat,” replied Joe. “When ye’s get the signal, someone will find you and tell you ye’re off on your holidays and give you a date. Be ready for the knock on the door. We’ll see you in Roscommon. Good luck, now.”

  In the car back to Dunane, Donal sat with Des in the back, for which he was grateful. Des hardly ever talked. Stockily built, always with a neat haircut, clean shaven face, and clean shirt, he watched the world and listened to how it went without much comment. Donal had often amused himself with the thought that Molly Corcoran spoke enough for both of them. Joe and Michael talked quietly in front. Donal was less occupied with thoughts of what might await him in Derry at the end of February than with how he might liberate Caitlin Spillane from her fate and perhaps entice her to a life of covert vigilantism.

/>   When he had finished the milking Jack washed off the worst of the mud from his boots under the stream of icy water from the outside tap then made for his kitchen. That this was his wedding day and Caitlin Spillane was his wife would not be real to him. He had existed so long in solitude he could not emerge from the state of mind necessary to endure it. He observed the tremor in his hand and noted how red and old looking his fingers were. The anxiety that arose in spite of himself as he turned the door handle was as out of his control to quell as joy was his to summon. That she was actually there when he went in, scrubbing and scouring the sink with a brush, was almost absurd to him.

  “This place is disgusting!” she snapped without turning around as the door banged shut. “How could you live like this?” She was scrubbing furiously, leaning on the brush and pushing it forwards and backwards in a froth of carbolic suds. He stood and watched her, not yet reacting to the rebuke. “What’s more amazing, though,” she shouted, the momentum of the brushing movements increasing with the fury in her voice, “is how the hell you expected me to live like this!” Throwing the brush down hard in the ceramic sink, she turned on him. Her eyes were swollen with crying but the anger shone blackly in them. She had twisted her hair and pinned it up.

  Wisps of it fell across her face, stuck to her wet cheeks. She lifted a hand and used the back of it to push away hair from her eyes. Her dress was spattered with suds and streaked with grime. In spite of her evident hatred for him, Jack’s heart filled with compassion for her. “Have you nothing to say?” She was sobbing with such ferocity that she could barely get the words out. “Is this what you wanted?” She stood before him, arms outstretched. He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. He was going to cough. There was nothing he could do to stop the tidal wave of convulsions which racked him and the pain was more than he could stand.