Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

Everyone was treating me gently, as though I had been the intended victim.

  “Aren’t you grand at the water-skiing, Ethne?” Nuala asked. “The next time you’ll be after doing it on one ski!”

  Next time, indeed.

  Then, with considerable noise, a large delegation of the Galway Garda arrived on the scene—cars, vans, and swarming blue-clad officers. Peig Sayers and Declan McGinn in the lead. At the sight of all the constables, Fiona went mad with delight.

  “We’ll get the focker,” Nuala Anne informed them. “Don’t I know what he looks like?”

  “He was on the island?”

  Chief Superintendent McGinn wondered how she could have seen him.

  “He was … hiding in the bushes … and look what I found in the boat!”

  She opened her hand.

  A spent rifle slug.

  I ALMOST FEEL SORRY FOR THE FOCKER.

  “It’s a miracle he missed you.”

  “He wasn’t trying to hit me. The only danger was that he’d hit me by mistake.”

  Declan McGinn tried to take that in.

  “How do you know he wasn’t trying to hit you?”

  “Because he didn’t … . These people, whoever they are, don’t want to murder anyone. Why blow up an empty house? Don’t they want to scare us?”

  “Why shoot at a world-famous singer?”

  “Retired singer at that. But did they know it was me?”

  Later in bed, during our afternoon nap, and after a frantic bout of love in which we both grasped desperately for life, my wife was busily kissing me. All over.

  “Och, Dermot, aren’t you still practically frozen to death?”

  “Woman, I am not. Didn’t you set me on fire?”

  “I mean inside. It was a terrible thing that happened to you.”

  “They weren’t shooting at me, Nuala Anne.”

  “But I knew they weren’t trying to hit me.”

  “So did I. Our daughter kept telling me.”

  The kissing paused for a moment.

  “Did she ever? Ah, that child is really one of the dark ones, isn’t she? Still, she’s a good little girl and she’ll be all right.”

  I offered no comment.

  She began to kiss me again. Frantically, as though she were afraid of losing me.

  Outside the rain and the winds had returned. Gardaí swarmed around our house. Better late than never. We had invited them inside, but they declined. Fiona wanted to join them, but we kept her in the house “because of her condition, Dermot Michael.”

  “I thought to myself when the first bullet went by me ear, poor Dermot! If he only knew that night at O’Neill’s pub on College Green when I decided that I wanted him, he would have run away in the fog.”

  This was revisionism, pure and simple. Long ago, however, I learned not to disagree.

  “I said to meself as I fell into the water, the poor dear man, he didn’t know he would end up with a bitchy wife with a nasty mouth and like as not to be depressed and too fey altogether, and meself never loving him properly.”

  “Bossy too …”

  “Be quiet, Dermot Michael. I’m talking.”

  “Yes, ma’am. If you continue to kiss me that way, you’re likely to get assaulted again.”

  “Isn’t that the general idea? … Now be quiet so I can finish what I’m saying. Wasn’t I saying to God as I swam towards the boat, if you let me live, won’t I try to be a perfect wife all the time? Won’t I keep me bitchy, bossy mouth shut? Won’t poor, dear Dermot be happy he married me?”

  “And what did God say?”

  “I’m not sure, Dermot Michael. I think he laughed at me.”

  When I woke up later, the sun was shining through the blinds and I was alone in our drenched and savaged bedsheets. I tried to figure out where I was and what had happened. Then I remembered the shots out on the lake. I sat up with a start … . No, my wife had survived. So, come to think of it, had I, though with little of my dignity left.

  Then I remembered what had happened to our sheets and my troubled mind caught up with my complaisant body.

  God had laughed at her, had he?

  Well, good enough for God, but what did God expect me to do with her?

  LAUGH TOO, YA FRIGGIN’ EEJIT!

  “Then what?”

  I struggled out of bed as the memories of our amusement flooded back. Well, I couldn’t complain to God about her as a bed partner, could I now?

  YOU’D BETTER NOT!

  What would it take to persuade her that I didn’t regret my choice at all? Or maybe she knew it already but thought I should.

  I picked up the Fitzpatrick manuscript.

  I looked up and saw a drawing of a man’s face on her easel.

  The man with the rifle?

  Who else?

  7

  I SAT down, opened the Fitzpatrick manuscript, and began to read it.

  Galway, August 14, 1882

  I have decided to keep a diary of this trip. I’m not sure why. Perhaps to remind myself as the years go on how I felt in the depths of my soul, as distinct from the dispatches I’ll send to the Daily News.

  I have come here in search of adventure and romance and perhaps an Irish wife. I didn’t tell this to my family, though they might have guessed it. As my mother says, I am the romantic in the family.

  “Thank the good lord that we have at least one in the family,” my mother adds.

  I wish to test and to prove my manhood. I desire to develop the pure and upright character the Jesuits at St. Ignatius advocated for a man who wants to be a Catholic gentleman. I want to be the kind of steady, stalwart man my father is. I want to be reliable and dependable in time of crisis, a credit to myself and my family and my religion and my country. I want to be gentle and protective with women. Is that romantic? I don’t know. I do know that cowardice and concupiscence tear at my soul, putting my salvation in jeopardy. I will never be a brave and gentle man unless I can master these two demons.

  Now I feel very lonely for my family and my friends in Chicago. I’ve never been away from them for more than a weekend or two. I miss them terribly. I did not think I would. Add loneliness to cowardice and concupiscence.

  I also desire to have my way with a woman, in a fashion I never did when I was at home. I suppose that’s because I’m lonely.

  I am terribly depressed by the poverty, the misery, and the dirt here. Galway is a gloomy, depressing place—gray and ugly and foreboding. The people walk around with their eyes down. Most of them live on the edge of destitution. They are thin, emaciated, pale. I want to help them all.

  It is worse, I am told, out in the countryside.

  The help here at the Great Southern Hotel are better off, so polite and quiet and eager to please. They speak English, as do the shopkeepers and the publicans and the businessmen in town. Many of the ordinary people, especially those who come in from the country for market, speak only Irish, a fact of which they seem to be ashamed. The hotel manager told me that the country people will continue to be poor until they learn to speak English like civilized human beings. He, of course, is English. He also says that the country folk are the last of the white savages and that in another generation English rule will have ended the savagery.

  I don’t like him very much.

  The people seem to me to be very friendly. They avoid me because my clothes mark me as a gentleman. Yet when I ask for directions they smile shyly and give me elaborate directions that I can’t understand. They blush when I offer them a shilling for a tip and pretend they can’t take it. When I insist, however, they do, with much gratitude.

  In the pubs at night they guess quickly that I’m American and not English. Then, when they learn that my grandparents came from this city, though before the famine, I am made to feel most welcome.

  Were the people in Galway this poor when my grandfather and grandmother ran away? They never talk much about their lives here. They have no desire to return for a visit, though they certainly can afford
it. I think I understand that now.

  In the pubs at night, there is laughter and song and not too much drinking. I buy a round each night because I’m a visitor from America. How can people who live such sad lives be so happy?

  Maybe that’s what it means to be Irish.

  Still, we’re not poor at home and we sing and tell stories. Maybe the Irish don’t have to be poor to be happy.

  This morning a ferryman rowed me across the Corrib River—which runs through the city like the canals run through Venice—to a fishing village they call Claddagh, which means quay. It’s a most unusual place. The ferryman said that they consider themselves an independent kingdom with their own king and speak a very different kind of Irish. The tiny houses are made of piles of stone and thatch, and the streets of the village twist and turn. The people seem very different from those on the other side of the river, more confident and proud. They stared at me in my American clothes, more curious than unfriendly.

  The women wear red petticoats, which are quite striking. Some of them are very handsome, unlike the poor women in the city, who seem worn and old even when they are surely the age of my sisters. They sit at the doors of their huts, waiting for their husbands to return and either smoking clay pipes or singing haunting lullabies to their attractive children.

  I stood and listened to one woman singing to a newborn babe. She looked up and smiled at me, as if she thought I adored the child as much as she did. At that moment I think I did

  An Irish Madonna.

  “Strange people,” said the ferryman as he rowed me back. “There’s them that say it’s the way we all were before the English came. Fishermen make good money sometimes.”

  “Is it a dangerous life?”

  “They fish mostly on the bay, which isn’t too bad except when the big storms come in. Still, a lot of them die young.”

  It was a melancholy comment for a melancholy day. I would leave for home tomorrow, if I did not seem a coward.

  Galway, August 15, 1882

  Yesterday was another hot and humid day, with a haze over the city. Even with the windows open in my hotel room, it was stifling. I’m sure it is worse in Chicago this time of year, but somehow the heat in Chicago always seemed tolerable.

  There is a small college here for the children of the “better class,” the hotel manager told me. I found the college pub last night, on the banks of one of the streams which are the delta of the river. The young people—students and young women—were much better dressed than those in the pub on the square, where I was the night before. They were, however, just as relaxed and friendly and happy to meet an American. Some of them were Protestants, sons and daughters of agents and managers, and some were Catholics, children of doctors and lawyers and accountants, the first sign of prosperous Catholics I have encountered here.

  I was surprised that seemingly well-to-do young women were in the pub, as relaxed and confident as the young men. I found myself talking to a girl named Regina, a young Protestant woman (something which never happened in Chicago). Her father is an agent for one of the great landowners up in County Mayo. He has sent her to live with an aunt in Galway town because there is so much danger in the countryside. The Land League has organized the people into a campaign of refusing to pay their rents. The secret societies are active again, she says, murdering agents like her father and even one major landlord There is fear in her eyes as she says this.

  “We’re Irish too,” she tells me, “even though we’re Protestants. We’re entitled to rents from our land and to a life without terror. The rebels are brutal killers. They kill their own and they kill us. I wish we could go home to England, but England isn’t really home.”

  “Can’t the government stop the killings?”

  “Mr. Gladstone is afraid of Mr. Parnell and the Irish Nationalist members of Parliament. I’m afraid he’ll send in the army only after there are more killings. Then it might be too late for us … . My father is loved by the tenants, but that doesn’t mean he’s safe.”

  “What do the tenants want?”

  “They want to take our land away from us.”

  I did not argue with her. I was afraid to hurt her. Yet it seems to me that the land is not theirs but belongs to the starving people.

  She was an attractive young woman and pleasant to talk to. As we talked I imagined kissing her and taking off her clothes. She too was lonely. However, I could not fall in love with a Protestant, especially one who was caught up in the horror that apparently rules this poor land. We parted as friends. I promised her that I would come back to the pub, but I doubted very much that I would.

  I dreamed about her all night. I tried to protect her from masked men who were attacking her. I failed. They beat her to death with clubs.

  I wish I were home.

  August 18, 1882

  There’s been a brutal murder up in the mountains of the Connemara region. A family of five sheep farmers murdered in their beds at night. Roderick Doyle, the Chief Superintendent of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Galway, to whom the manager of the hotel had introduced me, knowing that I was a reporter, invited me to accompany him and his men on the ride up the mountains where the crime occurred.

  I don’t want to go. Five bloody bodies in this hot weather! I fear I am not much of a reporter. Nor, despite my mother, a romantic in search of adventure. I have the heart of a romantic perhaps, but the stomach of a stay-at-home.

  However, I must go.

  August 20, 1882

  The last two days have been terrible. The ride on horseback along the coast and then up into the mountains in the unbearably hot weather was exhausting. Connemara is an exceedingly sterile place. There are almost no trees, only bogs and rocks and sterile mountains in the distance. The ocean seemed sullen and menacing. Though I am an experienced rider, I was exhausted when we finally arrived at the “hut”—an iron building—just beyond the town of Letterfrack, a pretty little place where the Quaker influence is strong, I am told. Then we had to go into the hut for the coroner’s autopsy.

  Outside the hut a mass of people—several hundred at least—were gathered. The women, in their red petticoats and tattered shawls, were moaning a strange, unearthly dirge that cut at my heart with its despair and sadness and stayed there. The men, in old and rough brown clothes, stood, caps in hand, silent, passive, and grim. They reminded me of the sharecroppers along the Illinois Central tracks when my father took us to New Orleans. These folks were indeed sharecroppers too. That would be the lead of the story I would file in the telegraph office in Letterfrack before the day was over.

  Then we entered the hut. If hell is like that hut, I certainly do not want to go there.

  The heat inside was worse than outside, but I hardly noticed the heat because of the stench of the five bodies stretched out on tables. Mr. Bolton, the Crown Prosecutor from Tipperary, a lean, haggard man with a white beard and a derby hat, was presiding over the autopsy. He was accompanied by ten tall men who, I would learn, always traveled with him.

  “Pretty little picture, isn’t it, Chief Superintendent? Shows how creative our Irish savages can be. The doctor is finishing his report for us. Then I have some interesting information for you … . You were saying, Doctor?”

  I hope never to see anything like those five bodies ever again. Three woman beaten brutally to death, heads cracked open, faces purple and blood-soaked, bodies a mass of vicious wounds. One seemed young. She had golden hair that must have been beautiful. Grandmother, mother, and daughter, the doctor said. The fourth was a boy whose face had been bashed in beyond recognition. The man’s head had been torn by gaping bullet wounds.

  I rushed for the door to vomit.

  A sergeant, not one who had come over the barren mountains with us, stood next to me as I retched up everything that was inside me and then kept on retching.

  “Let it come, Eddie boy. There’s not a man among us who hasn’t done the same thing.”

  “What kind of monsters would do that to three wom
en and a child?”

  “Monsters who were probably drunk. Don’t worry, we’ll get them and they’ll swing for it.”

  Regina had told me the night before that many killers were still on the loose in Galway and Mayo. Somehow, it did not make me feel any better that the men who had committed such a terrible crime would suffer a horrible death themselves.

  “Will they really hang?”

  “Please, God,” he said, making the sign of the cross. Perhaps, I thought, he is not so certain.

  “Thanks for standing by, Sergeant …”

  “Finnucane, lad. Tommy Finnucane.”

  I shook his hand. We grinned at each other, despite the horror. Two Irishmen who understood one another.

  “You think this was a drunken brawl?”

  “The lads out here may kill one another in a brawl, but not women. There’s something deep going on.”

  “Will they catch the killers?”

  “Mr. Bolton always finds killers, lad. Not necessarily the real ones.”

  So he wasn’t so sure.

  “Everyone seems to be named Joyce,” I said.

  “’Tis confusing to an outsider, I’m sure. This is Joyce country up here, lad. There are three Joyce families in the Maamtrasna valley: the Johnny Joyce family that was wiped out, though they have relatives and allies around here still, the Myles Joyce family, at the other end of the valley, and the Anthony Joyce family, which has informed on the Myles Joyce family, though your man George Bolton isn’t telling anyone that yet. To make matters more obscure, they are all intermarried, so it’s hard to tell which of the three clans someone named Joyce might belong to. None of the three get along with each other.

  “Myles and the late John are big, strong men. They’ve fought in public for a long time. No one around here, however, thinks that they would kill one another, even though Myles has said often enough that John was the worse sheep thief in the whole West of Ireland. Tony Joyce, on the other hand, is a weakling, but with a loud mouth. His branch of the clan and the Myles Joyce branch have been at war with one another for generations, bitter war at that.”