Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Later that night, after I had driven Ethne home and checked one last time on the two rugrats, both of whom were sleeping peacefully, I tiptoed into our bedroom.

  “’Tis yourself?”

  “’Tis.”

  “Come to bed quickly, Dermot Michael. Don’t I want to sleep in your arms?”

  So I took off my clothes and slipped into bed. We embraced each other happily—love tonight, deep love, no sex required.

  “Falling asleep in one another’s arms,” I whispered, “is in its own way as sweet as making love.”

  “If you’re over thirty,” my wife said as she drifted off to sleep.

  5

  IN THE United States a perfect spring day is a pretty fair promise of one not too different the next day. Not so in Ireland. When I woke up the next morning, Nuala Anne had left our bed, the wind was rattling the windows, rain was beating down on the roof, and a thick fog blotted out everything more than ten yards from our house.

  I dressed in a sweatshirt and pants and shuffled down to the nursery. Fiona had decamped, doubtless to run with her crazy mistress. The rugrats were playing contentedly on their respective pallets.

  “Daddy,” my daughter complained, “change Mick’s diaper. He stinks.”

  “Right away, ma’am.”

  I changed the diaper and carried the two of them into the kitchen for breakfast. My daughter devoured hers with prim table manners. My son slobbered happily and covered his face with dire orange-colored stuff.

  Then I turned to the preparation of breakfast for herself so it would be ready when she thundered in—Nuala Anne does not so much walk as bolt—muesli, bacon (Irish), orange juice, bagel, and toast.

  Just as I was about to dig into my own raisin bran, the front door blew open and the wind rushed into the house, along with it my wife and faithful wolfhound, both soaking wet.

  “Isn’t it a grand day?” she shouted as she picked up our son and swung him through the air. “A fine soft day!”

  “You went swimming!”

  “Naturally! Didn’t we, Fiona girl?”

  The wolfhound barked in agreement and shook her wet fur, as always, so as to transfer the water from herself to me.

  “You’re both out of your friggin’ minds!”

  “T‘was glorious.” Nuala embraced me. She was almost blue with cold. “Not lukewarm like your friggin’ Lake Michigan.”

  Ice cold or not, I was not about to break the embrace.

  “Here’s your morning tea!”

  “I have to jump into the shower first. Keep it warm!”

  A typical scene of matutinal bliss in the Coyne family.

  An hour later, her long black hair still wet from her swim, dressed in gray slacks and blouse, Nuala received the Gardaf in full solemnity in our parlor, regardless of the fact that the gentry might be upset by our using their domain to receive mere cops.

  “Commissioner Keenan sends his very best, Ms. McGrail,” Declan McGinn began, “and hopes that you will visit him in Dublin before you return to America.”

  My wife nodded, now in her archduchess role despite her plastered hair.

  “We surely will.”

  “We wanted to inquire, Nuala Anne,” Constable Peig Sayers continued, “whether you have noticed anything while you’ve been here in Renvyle that might explain the explosion down the road.”

  If either of the two cops thought it was strange that they should be asking this hoydenish aristocrat for help, they did not show it. They knew that she was “one of them as knows.” The Irish have no trouble accepting such people’s insight, though they were also profoundly skeptical of such folks.

  “Well.” Nuala sighed. “When I first heard the explosion up above in Letterfrack, I thought it might be the lads, but sure, it wasn’t them at all, at all, was it now?”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “This is Republican country and all and your man has always supported the lads as much as he can. Besides they wouldn’t waste good plastic explosives on blowing up an empty bungalow.”

  “Precisely,” the Chief Superintendent agreed.

  “Maybe,” Nuala Anne continued, “someone else is trying to send someone a message.”

  “’The Russian Mafia,” I suggested.

  All three people looked at me as though I was out of my mind.

  “There’s a couple of fat Slavic types up at Renvyle House,” I continued. “With all those Russian planes landing down below at Shannon—twenty-five hundred last year—some of them might have seen money to be made in Irish real estate.”

  The idea was crazy. Patently so, as the little bishop would say. I was playing games.

  “We have looked into them, Mr. Coyne,” Peig said, continuing the custom of addressing us as Nuala Anne and Mr. Coyne. “They seem to be honest businessmen.”

  “There are no honest Russian businessmen,” I countered.

  “Why would they blow up a T.D.’s house?” Declan McGinn asked.

  “Beats me. If they’re trying to send a message, they’ll probably try again.”

  Nuala frowned.

  “I think you may have the right of that, Dermot Michael.”

  The two Gardaf paid their respects to Fiona, who waited for them at the door. We promised them that we would stay in touch and report any further insights.

  A few minutes after they left, the doorbell rang again. It was our angry little silver-haired leprechaun of the night before, Sean O’Cuiv, hat in hand with an attempt at a genial smile on his face. Nuala Anne politely asked him to come in out of the rain and even brewed a cup of tea for him.

  “I hope you were not offended by my overloud comments last night, Mr. and Mrs. McGrail,” he said anxiously. “Sure don’t I always lose my temper when the subject is Colm MacManus?”

  Before I could comment on Chicago, my wife took over.

  “Ah well, ’tis a terrible thing altogether to have your house blown up even if you’re not in it, isn’t it now?”

  “It is that, Mrs. McGrail,” he said smoothly. “And I asked myself when I came home last night and began to say my prayers how I would feel if the same thing happened to me as happened to poor Colm.”

  “Did you now?”

  “I did, and I realized what a frightening experience it would be and actually prayed to God to help him through the crisis. Even if he has another house in Dublin and rarely uses this one, it must have been terrible to lose all the things he had here.”

  “Did he have that much?” Nuala wondered.

  Fiona wandered in, curious about the strange voice. She sniffed Sean O’Cuiv, who squirmed nervously and murmured, “Good doggie, nice doggie.”

  Fiona was not convinced. She curled up next to Nuala and watched O’Cuiv intently.

  “Beautiful dog,” he said nervously.

  “Isn’t she a grand lady altogether?” Nuala agreed. “Wasn’t I after wondering about how much of his worldly goods poor Mr. MacManus had in his house?”

  “Not all that much, I suppose. All the valuables, I’m told, are in Dublin. Still it’s home, isn’t it now?”

  “’Tis,” she said with a loud and phony sigh.

  Fiona continued to stare suspiciously at our visitor. Nuala patted her massive head.

  “Well, I just wanted to tell you that I am as horrified as anyone else at this terrible outrage. I hope it doesn’t cause you to leave Ireland. We don’t want to frighten off any of our American friends.”

  “Ah no,” my wife assured him. “We’re not afraid at all, at all.”

  Speak for yourself, Nuala Anne.

  YOU GUYS OUGHT TO PACK UP AND GO HOME RIGHT AWAY. WHY TAKE ANY CHANCES?

  “She’d never agree.”

  YOU’RE THE BOSS, AREN’T YOU?

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Well, I’m delighted to hear that,” he said as if the purpose of his visit had been achieved. “I hope you have a grand time during the rest of your stay here at home.”

  “I’m sure I will, Mr. O’Cui
v, though my home is really in Chicago these days.”

  ZAP!

  Fiona and my wife conducted Sean O’Cuiv to the door and bid him a courteous good day. Well, my wife was courteous. The wolfhound was silent and skeptical, as I was.

  “Well,” she said after she had closed the door, “sure I hope the wind doesn’t sweep him into the ocean.”

  “Won’t he find it warmer outside than he did inside the house!”

  “We showed him, didn’t we girl?” she said to Fiona, who had stood up and placed her forepaws on Nuala’s shoulders.

  Nuala hugged her.

  “I love you too,” she assured the delighted dog.

  We returned to the parlor and sat on the couch. Me wife seemed deep in thought.

  “It’s bad, Dermot Michael, very bad. There are wicked people here in Renvyle. There is worse to come … . Now you better go see Father Lane and see what he knows about Maamtrasna.”

  “Jack Lane, Nuala Anne. Doesn’t herself tell me that he’s a brilliant priest, but he doesn’t use the word ‘father’ or dress in clericals?”

  “Isn’t that because of all the sex-abuse scandals? The eejits probably deserve it for all the cover-ups. Still, most priests are good men, like his rivirence and the little bishop.”

  His reverence is my brother George, who thinks he knows everything, and the little bishop is his boss at the cathedral, who may well know everything.

  Unlike some American priests who dress in T-shirts and jeans, Jack Lane looked like a respectable yuppie businessman—gray trousers, blue blazer, light blue shirt, redand-blue tie, neatly trimmed black hair. Not a commodity broker, more likely a corporate mortgage manager.

  He was a big guy, broad shoulders, not as tall as me, low forehead, quick grin.

  “Hurling?” I asked.

  “Rugby, actually, though I’m a bit long in the tooth for it … It’s nice of you to stop by, Dermot. I’ve seen you and your family at Mass. I hope you’ll let me take you to supper down in Clifden some night … . Should I turn off the disk?”

  “I’m never tired of hearing her sing,” I said. “Finish this song and then let’s talk.”

  We were both silent for a minute, listening to the end of “Shenandoah.”

  “She’s seen the river, I assume? She sings about it with so much love.”

  I decided that I liked this priest.

  “Neither the Shenandoah nor the wide Missouri. Nor for that matter the Erie Canal or the Mississippi, save from the air. And she’s never walked through the Streets of Laredo.”

  He sighed, shifted his position, and turned off the disk player.

  “Let’s sit around my coffee table. I don’t like to hide behind a desk, though many of my parishioners would rather keep me at a distance.”

  “As for me wife,” I finished my comment on her relationship with the places about which she used to sing, “she imagines all the places she sings about and makes them more real maybe than they really are.”

  “The river behind the river, I suppose.”

  “You have the right of it, Jack Lane.”

  “Let me put the kettle on … . You’ll take a cup of tea?”

  “I will.”

  “And a biscuit or two?”

  “I’ve been known to have a weakness for a biscuit on the odd occasion.”

  “Good. Excuse me for a minute …”

  “Jack Lane?”

  “Yes, Dermot Coyne?”

  “I don’t pollute my tea with milk.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Well, I’m a multiculturalist, so I won’t pass judgment.”

  He came back in a few moments and devoted himself to the ancient (and often, it seemed to me, timewasting) Irish ritual of steeping and pouring the tea. He did so with the grace of a bishop presiding over a solemn liturgy.

  “How can I be of any help to you, Dermot?”

  “First of all, you must extend your tolerance to my shanty Irish custom of dunking the biscuit in my milkless tea.”

  He laughed again. “You’re a desperate man altogether, Dermot Michael Coyne … . Now, what is it you want to know?”

  “You can tell me about Maamtrasna.”

  “Ah,” he said, shifting uneasily. “In the five years I’ve been here, no one has asked. Yet it is a grand story, one that ought to be told … . Would you be after thinking about telling it yourself?”

  “I might, if you don’t mind … . You said it ought to be told … . Why?”

  I dunked a cookie, as I still insist on calling it, into me tea. My tea.

  “To show how corrupt and cruel and incompetent British rule was here. I’m not one of your revisionist historians who want to pretend that, all things considered, the British were pretty benign folk in nineteenth-century Ireland.”

  “You’re a historian?”

  “Every Irishman is a historian of a sort. Maybe I’m a little more systematic than some of the others. I try to distinguish between history and legend, though sometimes it’s not easy. As a storyteller, of course, your intentions are a bit different, aren’t they?”

  He also dunked his biscuit, a man after me own heart.

  “I have no objection to history so long as it makes a good story.”

  He laughed, a rich, generous, and happy laugh.

  “Well, Maamtrasna would make a great story. Briefly, it was the early eighteen-eighties, and it was clear to everyone who had sense that English barbarism in this country had to come to an end. Unfortunately, most of the leaders in the English government had no sense. In the Land League, Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell hit on a brilliant strategy that the earlier nineteenth-century revolutionaries, filled as they were with wild rhetoric and romantic incompetence, could not have imagined. The Land League tapped into the agrarian discontent that had produced local violence for two centuries, the violence of men who cared less about a free Ireland and more about owning their own property.”

  “The twentieth-century leaders didn’t quite get it.”

  “Collins, the bloody eejit, got it, but then he got himself killed … . Anyway, the various secret societies had been burning houses, stealing cattle and sheep, killing agents and even an occasional landlord, for at least a century and a half. Generally they are called ‘Ribbonmen’ because they wore various colored ribbons. They were clumsy, crude, and often brutal. But they did scare the hell out of the English. Davitt and Parnell had the idea of focusing this discontent in a massive refusal to pay rents. Their tactics were mostly nonviolent, anticipating Gandhi by sixty years, just as Collins anticipated urban guerrilla war by a couple of decades. Astonishingly enough, they managed to win much of what they wanted. However, out here in North Galway and Mayo, they had a hard time controlling the violent men, just as the Sinn Fein leaders have now up above. Like some of the IRA, the violent men mixed personal feuds with their political causes. At the time of our story, they had killed a couple of agents and even one English Lord. The Brits in this part of Ireland were scared stiff, as well they might be. Didn’t the lads burn Gogarty’s hotel down the road in 1922 and himself as Irish as I am? … More tea?”

  “Yes, please … So the killings were the result of revolutionary activity?”

  “Not exactly.” He sighed as he refilled my teacup. “There were accusations that John Joyce had stolen money from the local secret society. More likely, however, his reputation as a sheep thief was the real motive. He was a big, hulking man, strong and determined. It was said that whenever he saw a sheep he stole it. Sheep were important property in those days. A man with a reputation like his could expect trouble. However, the violence of the killings was out of proportion to the crime of stealing sheep. Why kill three innocent women and a boy because the father of the family stole sheep?”

  “Five killings?”

  “And another boy barely survived injuries.”

  “For sheep?”

  “My guess, formed perhaps by some evidence I’m going to give yo
u, is that the men involved had discussed it for some time. August seventeenth, 1882, was a hot and humid day. A lot of the drink had been taken, and a plot that had been fantasy suddenly became real. Then, when the killers had disposed of John Joyce, in a mix of fear and fury, they felt they had to kill everyone else, including a lovely sixteen-year-old girl.”

  “It’s hard to believe that anyone could have been so cruel.”

  I waved off another cup of tea. My thirst and appetite had dried up.

  “Only if you don’t understand the extreme poverty of the region. You were out here several years ago, weren’t you, Dermot?” he asked, reaching into a drawer in his desk.

  “Six years ago.”

  “We were poor people even then, before Ireland became, much to everyone’s astonishment, richer than England. There’s still some poverty out here, but not like the early nineties. Imagine, if you will, this part of Ireland a hundred years ago as the most densely populated section of Europe even after the famine. Most of the poor people were eking out an existence that was not much different from that of the Stone Age. They were destroying the environment too. The picturesque Connemara countryside, at which you Yanks marvel, is the result of overgrazing and deforestation. The English thought the people here were no better than savages in Africa, in fact probably worse. That they were reducing a people with a rich and ancient culture to savagery never occurred to them.”

  “It’s the Ireland my father’s parents left behind.”

  “A lot changed in the four decades before the Great War. However, at the time of the Maamtrasna killings, life was cheap here. Famine always threatened. Most people did not live very long. If it wasn’t for their Catholic faith, there would have been a lot more killing. Moreover, the Church didn’t have much influence up above in Maamtrasna. The five murder victims were buried in open ground without a funeral or a priest to bless their graves. In those days the Irish-speaking folk had only a frail connection to Catholicism. Most of the victims and the accused and their families were illiterate, except for the very young like Peggy Joyce, and herself with golden hair the records say, and could neither speak nor understand English. They could no more grasp the rules of English civil society, so-called, than the people Stanley and Livingston met in Africa.”