Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Unless there is a pardon.”

  “I wouldn’t wager on that.”

  “I promise you this, Martin Dempsey: If Myles Joyce hangs he will become one of the great Irish folk heroes of this century. George Bolton, the Crown Prosecutors, Dublin Castle, and the whole system of English justice in this country will pay a heavy, heavy price.”

  “You will see to that?”

  “One way or another,” I said grimly.

  I was astonished at myself back in my room. I realized that the commitment I had made to Martin Dempsey had been building up within me for a long time.

  Nora?

  In the absence of an unlikely pardon, her husband would die. Would her life end soon?

  Perhaps. Yet somehow I would try to take care of her.

  17

  November 15, 1882

  Each day I think that the corruption cannot become worse and yet it does. Murphy in his summation this morning gratuitously introduced the motive for the murders into the trial. The Crown had never addressed the question previously. The absence of motive was a glaring hole in their case. So Q. C. Murphy plugged the hole by attributing the violence to the secret societies in the West of Ireland. He was clever about it. He talked about the evil of such societies, of their ruthlessness, of their brutality. He insisted that a guilty verdict would be a rebuke to them and a warning that they could not escape punishment for their violation of civilized law. Not once did he say that members of a secret society had killed the Joyce family. He knew he couldn’t prove that. All he had to do was to suggest it indirectly and he would have won over whatever hesitant jurors might, improbably, remain.

  I knew that Ribbonmen were the killers. So did most everyone in the valley of Maamtrasna, including the police. But the Crown had no proof of this, had not tried to obtain proof, and doubtless felt that no proof was necessary. Now Murphy was simply stating the motive as a known and proven fact.

  Malley and Stritch, the defense counselors, simply repeated their argument that the testimony of the Crown’s witnesses was both dubious and contradictory. I wished that they had been more spectacular in their attack, but they knew they were beaten.

  Mr. Justice Barry’s instruction to the jury was equally corrupt. He virtually insisted they bring in a guilty verdict.

  “Whatever horror you may entertain, however you may desire that the guilty perpetrators should be brought to justice, recollect that the law requires no victim. The question you have to consider is, has the guilt of the prisoner been established by testimony that satisfies your conscience and judgment of his guilt? A true verdict finds according to the evidence. If you have a doubt, it must be the doubt of a rational reasonable man—no crotchet, no chimera, no cowardice. I cannot believe you would be capable of such a state of mind as I have now suggested. I have no doubt you will do your duty as becomes highminded citizens of this great city, that you will discharge your duty between the prisoner and the country, faithfully, calmly, impartially, and regardless of consequences and may God direct you to a right conclusion.”

  After an absence of eight minutes the jury returned.

  The verdict, however, could not be announced because Mr. Justice Barry was taking his lunch. Pat Joyce, handsome, calm, by far, as one of the papers said, the most likeable of the accused, waited patiently for the better part of an hour. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind, least of all Patrick Joyce’s, about the verdict.

  “They could have given the impression that they debated a little,” I said to Dempsey.

  “Why? After the charge of the Judge what was there to debate about? Their friends and neighbors would have been angry at them if they had shown any signs of hesitation.”

  When the Judge returned, he expressed some surprise in his fidgety movements that the jury had already reappeared and arranged himself at the bench with a fussy sorting of papers. The Clerk of the Court began the hollow litany:

  “Gentlemen, have you agreed to your verdict?” There was a deep hush of expectation.

  The Foreman: “Yes, we have.”

  The Clerk of the Court: “You say that Patrick Joyce is guilty of murder?”

  The Foreman: “That is our verdict.”

  The Clerk of the Court addressed the prisoner: “You, Patrick Joyce, heretofore stood indicted for that, on the eighteenth of August, 1882, you feloniously and willfully and of your malice aforethought did kill and murder one John Joyce. To that indictment you pleaded Not Guilty, and for trial put yourself upon God and your country, which country has found you guilty. What have you now to say why judgment of death and execution should not be awarded against you, according to law?”

  With haunting calm, Pat Joyce replied, “I am not guilty.” This he said in a voice firm and without tremor.

  Then the Crown formally dropped the case against the two approvers, Anthony Philbin and Thomas Casey. Debt paid

  Pat Joyce’s expression did not change. I wondered if perhaps he wasn’t one of the killers after all. Or maybe he thought of himself as a soldier in a war and would be brave until death. A nice young man with a new wife. How could he have become involved in such a brutal crime?

  The Judge put on the black cap and said:

  “Now, Patrick Joyce, after the most patient trial, a jury of your countrymen has convicted you of the crime of murder—a crime committed by you and your confederates under circumstances so horrible that I cannot endure to recapitulate them. In form, you have been convicted of the murder of John Joyce, in fact, you murdered him, his wife, his mother, his son, his daughter, and it was the accidental interposition of Providence that prevented you adding another victim to that scene of slaughter. It is not for me now—possibly it would be useless, indeed, to attempt to awaken you to a sense of the position in which your enormous criminality has placed you. Mercy in this world you have none to expect. Mercy at the hands of man you have none to expect. But you shall have what you did not permit to your poor victims—time to endeavor to seek the forgiveness of the God whom you have so grievously offended. And, we are told that even sinners whose crimes equaled yours will not turn to Him in vain.

  “It only remains for me now to pronounce the sentence—the dreadful sentence of the law. And dreadful as your crime has been, I am not ashamed to say that I feel the position of a man who is sentencing his fellowman to death.”

  The old faker began to cry.

  “The sentence of this court is, and I do judge and order that you; Patrick Joyce, be taken from the bar of this court where you now stand, to the place from whence you came, and that you be removed to Her Majesty’s prison at Galway, and that on Friday, the fifteenth day of December next of this year of our Lord, 1882, you be taken to the common place of execution, within the walls of the prison in which you shall be then confined, and that you shall be there and then hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that your body be buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall be last confined after your conviction.

  “And may God have mercy on your soul.”

  I pushed my way by Martin Dempsey and ran from the courtroom, out into the street and into the dreadful alley behind the courthouse, where I vomited my breakfast and last night’s dinner. I leaned against the rickety wall, gasping and sobbing.

  I admit that I’m not much of a man. Such behavior is deplorable in a professional journalist. I wonder whether I will ever be able to sit through such a trial again. I had formed my lead for my dispatch that night. “Judge invites verdict; Jury agrees in eight minutes.”

  Such words restored a little of my manhood.

  I walked a quarter mile or so in the rain and then, thoroughly soaked, returned to the courtroom. The Crown had already begun the trial of Patrick Casey.

  He is a middle-aged man, rough and tough looking, the kind of man who might possibly commit a brutal murder. If his young predecessor in the dock had not aroused any sympathy in the jury or in the mostly Protestant courtroom, this man surely would not. To emphasize his dangerous appearance,
two guards stood at either side of the dock. Since he could not understand or speak English, a policeman deputed to translate for him, a policeman who was Welsh, not Irish!

  I knew it would be more of the same. So I did my best not to listen.

  Mr. Justice Barry told us at the end of the day, after the jurors had been selected, that he hoped to finish the trial in a single day.

  Outside the court, the reporters gathered in two groups to discuss the trials. In one group there were the representatives of the English papers and the Irish Protestant papers; in the other the men from the Catholic and the American press. In the latter group the consensus seemed to be that the Crown wanted to get to Myles Joyce and then force guilty pleas out of the other five men still accused.

  “Was Myles there?” asked a man from Brooklyn.

  There was some debate among us. I remained silent.

  Finally Marty turned to me, “What do you think, Eddie? You’ve been out there in the valley. Myles Joyce looks like he may be a killer. Is he?”

  “He looks more like an Irish chieftain to me,” I said. “There is not a man or a woman in the valley that thinks he was with the killers. They believe that the accusation against him is based on Anthony Joyce’s malice.”

  They were silent for a moment. Though I was the youngest of the crowd, somehow I had earned their respect for my work out in Galway.

  “He’ll swing anyway,” someone said.

  “Perhaps he will,” I said. “If he does, it will not only be a grave miscarriage of justice, but a grave mistake by the English. He will become one of the great folk heroes of Ireland, like Wolf Tone and Robert Emmet. He will never be forgotten.”

  Again they were quiet. I turned and walked away and then back here to the Royal Hibernian.

  I had said the same thing last night to Dempsey. The words had sprung to my lips without reflection both times. Yet, I was sure that they were true.

  That truth, however, would not save Myles Joyce, Nora Joyce, nor their unborn child.

  Who was this Myles Joyce to whom I had never spoken, whom I had seen for the first time only at his arrest, and for whose wife I hopelessly lusted despite my best efforts not to? Why was I so certain about him?

  Because the people in Maamtrasna were certain about him? More likely because Nora Joyce loved him. About that love there could be do doubt. A mere child, she had no choice but to marry this gruff man twenty years her elder if she wished to avoid starvation. Could there have been any love at the beginning of such a strange marriage?

  Perhaps not. There was certainly love now, however. Therefore Myles Joyce must be a remarkable man. If he was hung, if the English Crown murdered him, Nora would be free. I wanted her, but I did not want her at such a cost of suffering. Even if she lived—and I was not sure she would—she could never possibly love anyone else.

  Now I feel ashamed of that calculation. How much I wish I were not so weak.

  Dublin, November 16, 1882

  Today was a replay of the Pat Joyce trial. If anything, the Defense Counsels were weaker and the Crown stronger, as well they might be given the quick verdict in the previous case. They knew that they could not possibly lose. I wondered if they knew how weak their cases really were. Or if they cared how later history would evaluate their work. O’Brien and Murphy would surely be rewarded with judgeships for their zeal. Perhaps they care only about winning.

  After Murphy’s summation the courtroom rose in a standing ovation, everyone except most of the reporters.

  Last night I dreamed of Nora on the scaffold with her husband.

  Perhaps, I tell myself, I will take the early train to Galway on Sunday morning, ride over to Maamtrasna to visit her, and then return early Monday morning.

  For what purpose? To look on her again? That would be sinful. To offer her hope? That would be a lie.

  No, I will not do that. I hope I have some small trace of honor left.

  Dublin, November 17, 1882

  I had assumed that Pat Casey was one of the killers; but now I am not so sure. He was found guilty, of course. It took the jury three minutes longer than the jury who had convicted Pat Joyce, although the Judge’s charge to them was even more blatantly biased.

  When the Clerk of the Court asked him if he had anything to say in response to the verdict, Pat replied briefly but with considerable dignity in Irish. The Welsh police officer translated, “I have to say that I had nothing to do with it.”

  Almost eagerly, Mr. Justice Barry donned his black handkerchief and repeated the sentence. Pat Casey asked the interpreter the date. The man told him December 15.

  Pat nodded and said, “I have still my experience of heaven.”

  The translation was almost lost in the hubbub of the courtroom. Would a guilty man say something like that? Perhaps not. In any event, he had given me the theme for my dispatch tonight.

  Immediately, Mr. Justice Barry proceeded to the case of the Crown versus Myles Joyce. There was a stir of excitement in the courtroom. Somehow everyone knew that this was the big case.

  Myles sat in the dock as would a king who knew he was under the judgment of a mock court. His eyes surveyed everyone in the courtroom with an even, intense scrutiny. He knew in his heart that they were all guilty and he was not. Some people turned away from his gaze in fear, perhaps in guilt. I thought he favored me with a brief, friendly smile, but I am sure I deceived myself. He paid little attention to the proceedings, often resting his head on his arms folded on the dock. Such contempt could hardly win a jury’s sympathy, but it might haunt them, just a little bit for the rest of their lives. Though Myles did not know a word of English, the court did not see fit to provide him with an interpreter. He was in much the same position as a Sioux or an Apache who did not know a word of English in an American courtroom without an interpreter. I would make that comparison in my dispatch.

  Defense Counsel again asked for a postponement so they could study the allegations of the two approvers. Crown Counsel did not seem greatly opposed. Perhaps they wanted a Saturday and Sunday with their families. I knew that if the Judge granted the delay, I would catch a late evening train to Galway. However, Mr. Justice Barry, in his squeaky voice said that he could not allow such a delay and the trial must continue.

  The formal charge that Myles Joyce had butchered his pretty blond cousin, Peggy, was read. Jurors were selected, the insane dance of death began.

  I sit here in my room at the Hibernian and wonder. Why is this the most important of the trials? Because everyone assumes it will be the last? Or because the Crown wanted two convictions before it battled with this dangerous-appearing foe? Or because everyone who looks at this man knows that he is a man of substance and character, even if, in the English view, little more than a savage?

  I wonder if I should leave for Galway tonight. There is still a train that would put me in the Great Southern by two o’clock Sunday morning. Maybe I could find some new evidence out in the valley. I dismiss such temptations. Who would believe a callow young American reporter? I was deceiving myself.

  The fate of Myles Joyce was sealed.

  Dublin, November 18, 1882

  I slept not at all last night. I searched in my pockets for my rosary and said all fifteen decades of it for Myles and Nora. I tried to explain to God that, although I wanted her, I wanted her husband to live even more. I could never make her happy and he had and would I begged for a miracle. I insisted to God that I meant it.

  The trial proceeds on its eerie way. Everyone in the courtroom is awed by Myles’s contempt for a process that he not only cannot understand but does not want to understand. There is a look of a curse in his eye as he periodically lifts his head from his arms and glares around the courtroom, as if he is remembering our faces so that he can deal with us on a later day.

  Once again, I had the impression that I was favored with a faint smile. Had Nora told him about me? Did he approve of me? How could he possibly approve if he knew what I felt about her?

  “Didn’t
he smile at you, Eddie?” Martin Dempsey asked.

  “Hardly,” I said, dismissing the possibility with a wave of my hand.

  So I had not imagined it. Had he entrusted Nora to me? That was an absurd and dangerous thought. Nonetheless, I reveled in it.

  At the lunch break, someone among the journalists lamented that Myles’s pregnant wife was not in the courtroom.

  “If Eddie here is right that he’s a kind of Irish king, she certainly would appear to be an Irish queen, and herself pregnant at that.”

  “Does she speak English?” someone else remarked.

  “Eddie?”

  “I believe she speaks it and reads it.”

  “Would she look like a trollop to the Brits?”

  “I know nothing about English sensibility,” I replied. “She certainly would not to an American sensibility.”

  “Are you going to write about her? It might help his cause.”

  “I had not thought about it,” I said. “It would certainly win sympathy for him in the States. However, nothing will help him in this courthouse.”

  “What happens to her and the baby?”

  “I suspect they both will die.”

  That was the end of the conversation.

  Now, at the end of this appalling day, I work on my dispatch about her. It is respectful and restrained. I doubt that she will ever see it. If she does, I hope she is not offended. My thesis will be that if Myles is an Irish prince, Nora is an Irish princess, a literate and intelligent woman who, if the English did not oppress this sorry country, would radiate intelligence and goodness and beauty for the whole world.

  I will be more restrained than that. I find that I can skillfully hint and let the readers draw their own conclusions.

  During the trial today, I wondered about the affect on the court of trying a prisoner who did not know the language of the trial process. If he were a Sioux in Minnesota, the fact that he could not speak our language would mean that he was a savage and therefore suspect. If you do not speak English, you are an inferior being. Similarly here. The English wish to stamp out the Irish language because it is inferior. If the Irish could be forced to speak English, they would become more civilized. It is Myles Joyce’s own fault that he is a savage because he has not learned English.