After Kennedy died, Lemass had phoned. “Come back to Ireland,” he told his old friend. And he did: Kavanagh ran for the Dáil as an independent in the South Dublin district he had been born in and ended up sitting in the opposition aisle to his friend, the Taoiseach. “You’re nothing but a troublemaker,” Lemass laughed after Eoin Kavanagh was sworn in as a Teachtaí Dála (TD): Deputy to the Dáil, the Irish parliament.
“Jack,” Kavanagh deadpanned, “how could you t’ink such a thing?” (Eoin had known Lemass even before he Gaelicized his first name, for political reasons, to Seán. To Eoin, he would always be plain old Jack.)
And a troublemaker he was. In 1971, after Lemass died, Deputy Kavanagh began running guns to the North after internment without trial was instituted by the British government. When Liam Cosgrave became Taoiseach in 1974, he was indicted. He refused to resign his seat in Dáil Éireann and stood trial, where he proudly declared his guilt—and was found innocent by a jury of his delighted peers. “This is a great day for Ireland,” Kavanagh declared on the steps of the Four Courts, where he and his wife of fifty-two years stood before the assembled media, “and a bad day for Liam Cosgrave and those other Fine Gail eunuchs who are trying to turn the Irish government into the subservants of the British imperialists! What a bunch of pussies! Mick Collins would be appalled!” When infuriated, the New Yorker in Eoin Kavanagh had a tendency to surface with a bang. Mrs. Kavanagh looked straight into the gutter, hoping her feminist friends back in New York would not see the smile on her face.
Johnny Three had been with him when he crossed paths with Eamon de Valera for the last time. It was at a function at the Gresham Hotel in O’Connell Street in June 1975, just months before Dev’s death. The two old antagonists had literally bumped into each other at the reception. De Valera, blind as a bat, was as sharp as ever. “Eoin Kavanagh,” he said, looking down at the diminutive Kavanagh, “I see young, respectable Cosgrave doesn’t like you.” Dev had had his own run-ins with the father, W.T. Cosgrave, during the Civil War.
“Well, Chief,” said Eoin, “neither did his old man!”
De Valera laughed, enjoying his first conversation with Kavanagh since 1922. “God be with you, Eoin Kavanagh.”
De Valera wasn’t going to get off that easy. “Chief,” Eoin said.
“Yes.”
“Mick was right.”
De Valera looked down with unseeing eyes through his thick glasses and sighed. “Perhaps,” he responded. “Perhaps.”
“God bless, Chief,” were the last words Eoin Kavanagh said to his former antagonist.
De Valera slowly moved through the room on his way out. “Look,” said Eoin to Johnny Three. De Valera had extended his supine hands to the side, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, so people could touch him. “Look at that old bastard work the room!” said Eoin with genuine admiration. “Goddamn it, Johnny, Jack Kennedy couldn’t have done it better.” Eoin Kavanagh appreciated political talent when he saw it.
Diane joined Johnny Three at the Stag’s Head. “Man, you look good,” he said as he rubbed her hip, sliding his hands across the back of her black mourning dress.
“Poor grandpa,” said Diane, “and you’re feeling me up.”
“Funerals make me horny,” said Johnny. “It must be something to do with stiffs.”
“You Kavanagh men are all alike!”
His cell phone rang. It was the City Hall. The Taoiseach had arrived for the trip to the Pro-Cathedral for the funeral mass. “Time to go, honey. Bertie’s waiting for us.”
Diane and Johnny retraced their steps back along Dame Lane to the City Hall. When he got to the coffin, Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach, was waiting for him.
“My condolences,” said Ahern in a flat Northside Dublin accent.
The old man never could stand Ahern. But like him or not, Eoin Kavanagh had insisted the Taoiseach and the American ambassador show up. He figured it was the least they could do. The Irish president and head of state, Mary McAleese, would also join them at the Pro-Cathedral for the funeral. Johnny Three introduced Diane, then told Ahern: “My grandfather would be proud that the Taoiseach of a free Irish nation had the time to attend his funeral. Let’s get moving.”
Johnny watched as they closed the lid on the old man for the last time. The soldiers hoisted the narrow pine box on their shoulders and slowly marched out of City Hall and down the front steps, then carefully lowered the casket and placed it in the old-fashioned, horse-drawn glass hearse for its short trip to the cathedral on Marlborough Street. The black horses snorted and snapped their heads, making their funeral plumes dance a spastic jig. The old hearse was Eoin’s idea, perhaps remembering the Dublin of his youth, when his Mammy, younger brother, and infant sister had prematurely made this same, sad trip to Glasnevin Cemetery.
Johnny Three and Diane climbed into the trailing limousine with the Taoiseach and the ambassador. Slowly they followed the hearse as it made its way down Dame Street. Citizens stopped in their tracks, stood at attention, and removed caps as the old rebel began his final journey. Johnny looked around for a banshee, without success.
First they came to South Great Georges Street, and it reminded Johnny that his great-grandfather’s barber shop, set up by Michael Collins himself, was only a few blocks away on Aungier Street. To the left, they passed Temple Lane, where his great-grandmother had lived before she married in 1900. Further up was Crow Street and building number three, where Eoin had worked in Collins’s intelligence office, compiling the dossiers that would culminate in the assassination of the British Secret Service in Dublin in November 1920.
Suddenly there was a dry lump in Johnny Three’s throat, and the color left his face. Diane asked if he was alright, and he shook his head. Then he knew what it was—the body of Eoin Kavanagh was slowly drawing him back to another time: a time of sickness, revolution—and freedom. As he followed his grandfather’s casket, he was slowly, but ineluctably, being transported back to his grandfather’s time—the terrifying rebel Dublin of 1916.
EASTER WEEK, 1916
. . . THEN . . .
. . . AND NOW
2
EASTER MONDAY
APRIL 24, 1916
The hacking cough of his mother woke Eoin Kavanagh from his holiday sleep.
Morning was Eoin’s favorite time of the day. He knew it was the only time you could talk to God, and when He might have time to listen. But that persistent cough kept interrupting his conversations of late.
Another hack. Eoin winced.
The cough was getting worse by the day. He had seen his mother spit blood into a dish rag just the other day and then toss it in the dust bin, turning to see if anyone had caught her. She didn’t know he’d been watching. She had lost so much weight—gone were the round hips and the full bust.
She was disappearing before his eyes.
It was the consumption, he had heard the neighbors whisper. Rosanna Kavanagh was being consumed by it, whatever it was. Although Eoin was only fourteen, he was no fool. He knew his mother was a goner, and it broke his heart.
It was his brother Charlie’s fault. It really was. If he hadn’t died last year, maybe Mammy wouldn’t have gotten sick. Diphtheria was the word they’d used for Charlie when all was said and done. He died down the lane at the Adelaide Hospital. Dead as a doornail, and they had trouble breaking the Glasnevin turf in January as they laid Charlie in his lonely grave. But Eoin knew that Charlie would not be lonely for long.
The last couple of years had been hard on all the Kavanaghs. Gone were the happy, prosperous days at 40 Camden Row. Bad times had caused Da to lose his hairdressing business, and it was now a move a year as the finances continued to crumble. Handouts from the St. Vincent de Paul Society, neighbors, and relatives had barely kept the family afloat. His father prayed for the odd haircutting job, just to make a few bob. They had gone from the comfort of Camden Row to Golden Lane and the terrible, filthy Piles Buildings. More truth than mirth in that terrible name.
Eoin heard
that the buildings had been named after a “Lady Pile.” He didn’t know if it was truth or only the locals having a laugh. “We’re stuck at the bottom,” was his father’s joke, which always embarrassed his pious mother. But the joke was on them, with six Kavanaghs crammed into two small rooms. A cold-water scullery the size of a closet completed the flat. The water closet was outside on the landing, shared with neighbors. He learned early on that a piss-pot under the bed was often a boy’s best friend.
When his frustration overwhelmed him and he couldn’t take it anymore, Eoin’s father would declare, “These buildings are a sore on the arse of St. Patrick’s Cathedral!”
Eoin couldn’t understand it either. There, just across the road, was the jewel of the Church of Ireland, St. Patrick’s beautiful Protestant cathedral. He had seen all the fine carriages and automobiles arrive at Christmas carrying their precious cargo of handsome fur-lined women and top-hatted gentlemen. We are here, thought Eoin, and they are there. And there was no in-between. Eoin rose and wondered why it was so quiet. Usually there was roughhousing with his younger brother, Frank, and the screams of the kids, Mary and young Dickie. It was as if the children knew that Mammy needed quiet.
“Mornin’. How ya?” said Eoin to his parents. “Where is everyone?”
“Out in the street, playing,” said his mother. “It’s a beautiful morning.”
Beautiful, indeed.
Eoin’s father, Joseph, sat at the kitchen table with his empty pipe and yesterday’s Freeman’s Journal, musing over its contents. Joseph was a dandy. He didn’t have a job to go to, but he was fully dressed, down to the turgid white collar he wore every day. Unlike Eoin, the senior Kavanagh loved good clothes. But now the threads were growing old and shabby, as if recording the downward economic spiral of the family. Toast fragments hung from his waxed handlebar mustache, and Eoin was forced to smile. “Bad days for the Brits,” said Joseph with some satisfaction, commenting on the war news.
“Oh, Josey,” said his mother, using her pet name for her husband. “Why do you enjoy the British and their misery so much?”
“And why shouldn’t I?” came the quick reply.
Rosanna smiled but then remembered her brother, Charlie Conway, who was a corporal in the Royal Field Artillery over in France. “Charlie,” she said softly.
For a moment, Joseph thought Rosanna was talking about their dead son, whom she had named after her favorite brother. “Corporal Charlie,” said Joseph, shaking his head. “What was he t’inkin’?”
“I don’t know,” replied Rosanna.
They were talking about Charlie Conway’s affinity for the Crown. He had served in the Boer War, then secured a job as a policeman at the Guinness Brewery upon his return to Dublin in 1902. But at the age of forty-six, he had joined up again and marched off to war in September 1914.
“I worry about him,” said Rosanna.
“I do, too,” said Joseph, “but what the hell was he t’inkin’, especially at his age?”
“Love of country.”
“England is not his country,” Joseph said definitively. “Ireland is Charlie’s country. Why doesn’t he realize that?” He kept talking. “It will be conscription soon. The British are down, almost out, and what do they do when they are in that situation?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “They turn to Irish bodies for sustenance and fodder!”
“No conscription,” she replied, stifling a cough. “Seven hundred years. We’ve given enough. Especially in this family.”
The conscription and the consumption. The big Cs of the moment.
“Where’s Frank?” asked Eoin, wondering about his younger brother.
“Gone out,” said his father. Eoin grunted. Frank was still marching to his own tone-deaf drummer. At least he didn’t have to endure Frank’s endless slagging this morning, either about his build—Frank was almost as big as he was—or his name. “Hey, Ian,” he would yell out, purposely mispronouncing his name, purposely making it sound English and soft.
“It’s Eoin,” he would remind his brother. “Pronounced O-W-E-N. Irish for John.” Eoin would pause before adding, “You got that, Francis of Assisi?” Frank didn’t like to be called Francis of Assisi, especially when Eoin put the emphasis on “sissy.” That usually shut Frank up.
Eoin was Frank’s complete opposite, from looks to temperament. Eoin, Rosanna often thought, was a smaller version of his father. He had the Da’s oval-shaped face, prominent Kavanagh nose, silent hazel eyes, and beautiful dark-brown hair. If he weighed eight stone, it would be a shock. Eoin, unlike Frank, was easygoing and respectful, almost to a fault. His sincerity, however, was punctuated by a sly sense of humor. Both Rosanna and Joseph knew they couldn’t ask for a better son than their Eoin.
“Will you take the childer up to the Green?” asked the Mammy.
“Of course,” replied Eoin, and he was immediately out the door looking for them. They were in Arthur Lane, a tiny patch of street that reminded all how omnipresent the Guinness family was to the city and to this neighborhood in particular. Young Mary, only seven, and baby Dickie, barely four. “Would you like to go up to the Green?” he asked, although he knew what the reply would be.
“Yes, yes,” said Mary, and little Dickie jumped up and down, his curly locks animated.
“Wait,” cried Dickie as he ran back to the house and returned, clutching a rock of bread in his little hand.
“Come on then,” said Eoin as he took one in each hand and headed towards Peter Street.
“That’s where Charlie died,” Mary said, pointing in the direction of the Adelaide Hospital. The three of them stood in their tracks for a moment, quietly sandwiched between the majestic tower of St. Patrick’s Cathedral behind them and the back of the dull, thick, concrete-gray Carmelite Church before them.
Eoin looked at little Mary Bridget. She reminded him of her twin sister, Mary Josephine, who had died at three months. No one in the family knew about little Josephine, except Eoin and his mother and father. Brother Frank was too young to remember her, and Charlie now occupied the same grave in Glasnevin with his baby sister. Eoin looked on the death of baby Josephine as the beginning of the breakup of his family. Everything had been good until Josephine up and died, and his parents had never been the same. Sometimes he would hear his mother sniffling and wiping a tear away, with a whisper of, “Poor Josephine, my beautiful, sweet lost baby.” Now they called Mary Bridget “Mary,” to honor both of the twins.
“Yes, that’s where Charlie died,” said Eoin finally, not wanting to dwell on it. Soon they were into Aungier Street and traveling up York Street by the terrible, high, dark tenements, until the bright sunshine of St. Stephen’s Green rescued them.
They walked along the Green by the Royal College of Surgeons, where small cliques of Irish Volunteers in their green uniforms were already gathering. They crossed the street to the Fusiliers Arch, a memorial to the dead British of the Boer War and the official entrance to the Green.
“Traitor’s Gate,” said a pointing Dickie, getting it correct even at his young age.
There were more men in green uniforms blocking the gate, and their numbers spilled out to both sides of the Green. Something was up.
A man with a bucket, brush, and posters under his arm stepped up to the left wall of the gate and started splashing paste on the gray stone. “Hot off the presses from Liberty Hall,” he shouted as he posted the declaration:
POBLACHT NA H ÉIREANN.
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
OF THE
IRISH REPUBLIC
TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND.
Civilians and Volunteers rushed up to see the proclamation, pushing against each other to get the first glimpse. The man with the posters went to the opposite wall and plastered another proclamation. Eoin and the children followed him. “Can I have one of those?” asked Eoin.
“I don’t see why not!” said the man as he stripped one off his arm and handed it to him. Eoin rolled his own personal copy up and began readi
ng the posted one as others began crowding around him:
IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.
“Eoin, Eoin,” said Mary, “what’s it’s all about?”
“Hush,” said Eoin as he continued to read:
We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people.
Dickie kept pulling at Eoin’s arm, wanting to get to the lake to see his ducks and swans. Eoin skipped to the end of the proclamation:
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour, the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.
As both kids pulled at him from opposite sides, Eoin read the signatures:
Signed on Behalf of the Provisional Government,
THOMAS J. CLARKE,
SEAN MAC DIARMADA, THOMAS MACDONAGH,
P.H. PEARSE, EAMONN CEANNT,
EAMONN CEANNT, JOSEPH PLUNKETT.
By now, the crowd around the two proclamations was getting rowdy, some cheering and others cursing the insurgents. A man went up to a Volunteer and shouted in his face, “Ya Fenian gobshite!”
The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising Page 2
