“So what was the problem?”
“Later in the week, after one of Aunt Deirdre’s Sunday dinners, we were sitting on the front porch—Uncle Fergus, Uncle Eamon and me—when suddenly, out of the blue, Uncle Fergus turns to me and says, ‘Kevin Donnelly told me that he saw you coming out of the Antrim jail last Tuesday with Mr. Westerfield. What the hell were you two doing there, Liam? Selling whiskey?’
“I hesitated. I couldn’t tell him the real reason. I tried to bluff my way through it, but I must have had guilty written all over my face. ‘Nothing,’ I said quietly.
“‘Nothing?’ he said. ‘Nothing at a jail? You weren’t sitting in there talking to Seamus, were you now?’
“I don’t know how he knew. My uncle had deep contacts everywhere, so he must have found out. ‘I can’t tell you about it,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
“Uncle Fergus stared at me. He looked right inside of me. He bowed his head and slowly shook it back and forth. ‘How long, Liam?’
“My charade was over. My disguise was gone and I stood naked before my uncles. And even then, at that moment, I couldn’t own up to it. I was too afraid to answer, too afraid of losing their respect, their love. Too afraid of being cast out, as indeed I would be.
“‘How long for what?’ I stammered.
“‘C’mon, son. The U.S. intelligence service. How long have you been snooping for ’em?’
“I let out a deep breath. There was nowhere to hide. ‘Since I got here,’ I said. ‘Since 1994. Seamus McManus was a killer. He told me an attack was coming down in Portadown. He knew everything—the time, the location, the names of all the raiders and where the arms were stashed. I was planted to get the information and I got it. And I’m not sorry. I saved a lot of lives, Uncle Fergus. People would have died. I interceded and that’s what I’ve been doing here in Northern Ireland.’
“‘No liquor distribution?’
“‘No, sir. I lied to you.’
“My uncle closed his eyes. ‘All this time you’ve been gathering information, your so-called intelligence, from me and Eamon and Robert?’
“I nodded.
“‘And using it to arrest republicans?’
“‘The bad ones.’
“‘For all these years, Liam, you’ve been dishonest with us?’
“I nodded again. What could I say?
“My uncle pursed his lips, looked at Eamon and stood to dismiss me. There were tears in his eyes. “Of all the people I know … I never thought it would be you, son. I don’t think you and I have anything more to say to each other, Liam. You best be off now.’ I walked off the porch, turned around, looked back and saw him hanging his head. That was the last thing he ever said to me.”
Catherine took a seat at the end of the couch, tucked her legs and patted the cushion for me to come sit beside her. Her blond hair lay gently on her white cable-knit. Her smile was warm and kind. I looked into her blue eyes and drew comfort from them. I’ve been enamored of this woman since we were in high school and I considered the fact that she was now my wife and the mother of my son to be an ongoing daily miracle. “Come sit,” she said.
“‘You best be off now,’ my uncle said, and I lost the best friend I ever had. The only father figure I can really remember. He was the only link to my early childhood, back when we all lived within a few blocks of each other in Belfast’s Lower Falls.”
“Before you moved out to the farm?”
I nodded. “I left the Falls when I was four and I don’t have many memories of those days. I can barely remember my house and the room I shared with my sister. We all lived in terrace houses—narrow town houses all linked together with common walls on each side. They were called ‘two up, two down’ because they had two rooms on the first floor and two bedrooms on the second.
“The Lower Falls was a battlefield, but I was too young to know what was going on. I remember hearing gunshots, seeing British soldiers running down the street with their rifles and watching as they busted down our door and screamed at my mother. I didn’t know why. I just knew it scared the hell out of me. In 1975, my dad died, my mom was hospitalized and I was sent to live with Uncle Fergus on his farm outside of Antrim.”
“You said you had a sister. What happened to her?”
I shook my head and sighed. Memories buried away were now bubbling up. Catherine was opening too many floodgates. I got up from the couch, put down the coffee, grabbed a beer from the fridge and stood at the windows watching the neighbor water her parkway.
“I did have a sister,” I said after a few minutes. “Her name was Molly. She was a couple years older and she died the same year as my father. I don’t know the circumstances and my mother never wanted to talk about it. It was a subject I was never permitted to raise with my mother. I don’t have many memories of Molly, but I do recall she was a happy child. She danced around the house and giggled a lot. She had long, curly red hair. She died before I moved out to Antrim.”
Catherine’s eyes glistened and she blinked away a tear. Simpatico. Cat and I share the same wavelength and it didn’t take much imagination for her to surmise what had probably happened to my sister.
I tried to shrug it away. “It was Belfast, Cat. Life was cheap and fragile. That’s why we all ended up in Antrim. But the grass wasn’t much greener and relations between Catholics and Protestants weren’t any more cordial. My mom finally gave up and packed us off to Chicago.”
“But you didn’t come to Chicago right away. You said you lived with your uncle,” Catherine said.
“That’s right. For six years. My mother was sick and didn’t come out to the farm for several years. When she did, it was just to get us ready to move to America. We moved in 1981. She had cousins in Chicago, in the Bridgeport neighborhood. She closed the door on Ireland and never looked back. She didn’t take any furniture, any pictures or memorabilia. Nothing. She put it all behind her like a bad dream. She cut off all communications.”
“How did he die, your dad?”
“I don’t really know the details. I was only four. They said he died in an accident. He was visiting someone and was killed in a car accident.”
“And your Uncle Fergus was his brother?”
I nodded. “There were five Taggart siblings. Eamon was the oldest. Dad was second. Then Fergus. Aunt Nora was four years younger than Dad and died in 1999. Robert was the baby. I remember being scared, lost and alone when I was sent to Antrim but they took me in and loved me like a son, Cat, all of them.
“When I came back to Antrim in 1994, we reconnected like we’d never been apart. The love was still there, strong as ever. But five years later, my duplicity destroyed it all and I left under bitter circumstances. As the years went by, I should have made amends. At least I should have tried.”
“Liam, don’t beat yourself up. You made a courageous choice to accept a post in Northern Ireland and you did it for the right reasons.”
“I don’t know if it was courageous or foolish or ambitious. Are any of those acceptable reasons for lying? I betrayed my family.”
“You did what you were sent to do. You were a spy. By definition, spies deceive people. Surely, you knew what you were getting into. The fact that it ended as it did, as we lawyers would say, was an assumption of the risk. Your motives were good, but you had to accept the possibility that members of your family were active in the Troubles. I mean, isn’t that why you got the job?”
The Agency sent me to gather information, which made me professionally dishonest. Had I told my uncles the truth, they would have kept me out of the loop. I had no business taking the assignment. Nothing justifies lying to your family. Was I filled with some mixture of arrogance, conceit and self-importance? I had just come out of the marines, spent a year at Langley, and put in for the transfer, certain that I could help make a difference in my native land. Didn’t I consider the possibility that I would be lying to my family? I shrugged at Catherine. “I didn’t give it as much thought as I should have.”
She reached over and gave me the medicine that only she could dispense. She hugged me tightly. “I understand,” she said softly. “And it’s okay. I still believe you did the right thing.”
“I loved my uncle Fergus, Cat, and I don’t think he ever forgave me. We never spoke again.”
Catherine squeezed my hand. “I know you feel guilty, but they called you today, Liam. They want you to come to the funeral. Maybe they realize, like you do, that it’s time. You’re letting sixteen-year-old bygones get in the way. You should go. Go see your family. Go say good-bye to your uncle Fergus. Go see your aunt Deirdre. Make your amends. I know wherever Fergus is, he’ll be listening to you. You’ll be sorry if you don’t go.”
She was right.
“Want to go with me?” I said. “I could use the moral support.”
She gave me an I’m sorry smile and shook her head. “There are too many arrangements I’d have to make. It’s too sudden for the baby and me.”
“It’s too sudden for me too.”
She gave me a kiss to end the conversation. “You should go.”
TWO
THE SEVEN-HOUR AER LINGUS flight gave me time to reflect and compose responses to the questions I knew would be coming once I arrived. Why did it take a funeral to get me back here? Why haven’t I called? Am I still with the CIA? Or maybe they’d get right to the point—why did you do it, Liam? Why were you a stool pigeon? How could you turn on your own people? Or, maybe they’d put it more graphically: how could you sleep with the flippin’ RUC? By the end of the flight I’d come up with no answers.
The phone rings and life’s direction changes. What if I hadn’t picked up the phone? Would Uncle Fergus still be alive? What if I had called first? Would that have changed history? Would he have answered the phone? Could I have made amends? Damn you, Fergus, for dying before I could make amends.
Uncle Fergus knew me in diapers. People like that—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles—they are the repository of precious memories. They are the keepers of family history. Now who will remember for me? Who will prompt me about the time I got the fishhook stuck on my leg and I cried and cried, not because it hurt, but because I had put a hole in my new trousers? With Fergus gone, who will engage me in conversations about the time I was chased by a baby goat, and who will laugh until his sides hurt? My father was gone, my mother was gone and now my Uncle Fergus. Family deaths cut off the highway to treasured memories.
“I don’t think you and I have anything more to say to each other, Liam. You best be off now.”
I should have made amends.
* * *
WE CIRCLED DUBLIN BAY and set down shortly after 6 a.m. I was tired. I hadn’t slept and I was dreading the reunion and how to explain the vagaries of my past behavior. Most of all, my heart was heavy with the loss of my beloved uncle. What did Janie mean when she said we’d talk about his death when I got here? Why was she evasive? I hate to think of the alternatives.
I picked up an Audi at the rental agency and reacquainted myself with driving on the left side of the road. A few tire scrapes on the shoulder curbs and I was good to go. Actually, I didn’t need to rent a car at all. Janie had offered to pick me up. But I respectfully declined, wanting to preserve the freedom to come and go on my own. I was unsure of the upcoming reception and I needed the ability to claim exhaustion or some other lame excuse and not be tethered to Janie.
My route to Antrim took me up the coast and through the middle of Belfast, capital of Northern Ireland, second largest city on the island and ground zero for the Troubles. I was taking my time. I didn’t want to be the first one at the church, standing there greeting my estranged relatives one by one as they arrived. I intended to keep a low profile, sit in a back pew and fade into the woodwork.
I arrived in Belfast at eight thirty and Antrim was only forty minutes away. To kill time, I parked the car and strolled over to the Titanic Quarter, Belfast’s sparkling waterfront development, all new since I’d last been here. Gone were the old shipyards where the White Star Line built its storied ocean liners. In their stead were high-rise apartment buildings, tony shops, cafés, offices, a harbor marina and a ten-thousand-seat indoor arena. Rising above it all was the Titanic Museum, ninety feet high and covered with brilliant metal panels.
I strolled along the walkway and stopped in a café. “I’d like a cup of coffee, a little cream, a little sugar.”
“Americano?” said a young girl in a green T-shirt and matching cap.
“Who, me?”
“No, the coffee. Do you want a cup of Americano?”
I groaned. Welcome to Europe. “Can’t I just get a cup of regular coffee? A little cream, a little sugar?”
She closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose. She was dealing with an idiot.
“An Americano is a shot of espresso with hot water added.”
“I don’t know why they call it Americano. No one in America drinks espresso and hot water.”
She shook her head. “Here’s a cappuccino. It’s the best I can do.” She didn’t wait for me to answer. It was one pound forty.
I pointed to the museum. “When does it open?”
“The Iceberg?”
“Iceberg? I thought it was designed to resemble the prow of the Titanic.”
She nodded. “It was, but everyone calls it the Iceberg. It doesn’t open until eleven.”
I thanked her and took a walk around outside of the museum. Because I would soon face my family, I felt a kinship with the Titanic. Both of us were fated to sink soon after leaving Belfast. I took a seat on a park bench to watch the seagulls and ruminate over hurtful discords exchanged before I left. All these years and not a word. Out of touch. Systems down. All connections lost. Sixteen years and it suddenly felt like yesterday. Of all the people I know …
I retrieved my car and took a slow ride through the old neighborhood, just to see if it had changed as much as the waterfront. It was a quiet sunny morning, but the serenity was deceptive. There was a turbulent undercurrent beneath the still waters. To emphasize the point, the ominous Peace Wall stood before me, twenty-two feet high, marking the border—Falls Road to the left and Shankill Road on the right. Mostly ornamental now, the wall divided the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. Forty-eight so-called “peace walls” still stood in Belfast, Derry and Portadown, with the majority of them right here in Belfast. Supposedly, plans call for their demolition by 2023, but as I made my way through the Falls, there they stood. Still operational if the need arose.
On either side of the wall, symbols of allegiances were boldly displayed, letting you know, should you be amnesic, upon whose turf you were treading. On the Shankill side, the Union Jack flew from lampposts and front porches, loudly proclaiming, “You are in loyalist territory.” Murals on the sides of houses still depicted armed and hooded UVF soldiers with shoulder patches reading, “For God and Ulster.”
Turn the corner onto the Falls Road and the Republic of Ireland’s tricolored flags of green, white and orange fluttered in the morning breeze. This is nationalist turf, they said. Murals on this side depicted IRA martyrs, like Bobby Sands.
I pulled over at the corner of Albert and Falls Road. Here in 1997, Westerfield and I failed to prevent a unionist firebomb that took the life of a Catholic family. We knew about it, we phoned it in, but the RUC couldn’t get there in time. It was a failed mission that resulted in the arrest of four unionists, but didn’t prevent the slaughter. The black residue from the firebomb still stained the bricks beneath the front window, metaphorically reminding me that the Troubles cannot be washed away.
I drove slowly through the Lower Falls and stopped in front of my childhood house on Cairns Street. Here, on the sidewalks where I rode my trike, my memories came out to greet me. The Reilly twins next door. The ice-cream cart in the late afternoon. My dad coming home from O’Shea’s with a metal bucket full of Guinness. I could see them all and they brought a smile to my face.
Then I remembered the armored t
rucks that came speeding around the corner and the packs of soldiers who jumped out with rifles pointed. And the mothers who rushed out of their houses to kneel on the sidewalk and bang their galvanized garbage can lids as hard as they could on the concrete to sound the alarm—the Brits, the RUC, they’re here, beware.
I could hear the neighborhood melodies, the cacophony of the Lower Falls: Irish tunes, portable radios, childhood chants. And the ominous sounds as well: claps of rifle fire, women and children screaming and the uniformed members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary standing over cowering mothers shouting, “Tell us where the guns are stored and we won’t hurt you or your babies.” I remembered my mother holding me close and burying my head in her body so I would not see. But I could hear. I hear still.
I drove out of the Lower Falls, out of Belfast, and meandered along the southern route toward Antrim, through the pastoral countryside, all in an effort to waste more time before arriving at the funeral. It was August and the fields were awash in in hues of barley, wheat and oats. I pulled off and stopped for breakfast at Grainger’s Mill.
A pretty young waitress with a loose ponytail and a flowered apron set out a place mat and silverware and smiled. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she said. “I can tell, you know. What I recommend to you is the Irish breakfast. It’s what the locals’d order.” She bit her bottom lip in a cute, coy expression.
The Trust Page 2
