A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

“I was born in America of Irish parents,” Captain O’Hickey replied. “They told me enough about British justice to prevent me from ever surrendering a fugitive to its vengeance.”

  Up in the bow, Dan McCaffrey shouted an order. The sailors lined the rail, their rifles leveled at the frigate. We could see the ugly snouts of the British cannon through their open gunports, the crews standing ready to fire. It was hardly a contest, if they chose to attack. But after another minute of indecision, smoke belched from the frigate’s stack and her bow swung away from us, back toward Ireland. Captain O’Hickey ordered the helmsman to set a westerly course, and we were on our way to America.

  That night in Captain O’Hickey’s cabin we celebrated royally. The John Jameson’s flowed, and we toasted the United States of America more than once. We had been saved from the gallows by the American flag, and I was mightily disposed to love it and the man who flaunted it as his emblem. I did not understand the divided feelings Dan himself bore for that flag. I was scarcely aware of the effect of these feelings on his heart and soul. It was enough, at first, that we were safe and free and on our way to rally the Irish of America. I vowed to redouble our joy with a love that lived up to the promises I had made to him when I lay in his arms for the first time.

  Double and redouble we did, on the stout ship Manhattan. Our voyage was a kind of dream. The sun shone on us every mile of every day. Even the creatures of the deep seemed kindly disposed. Great whales surfaced one day off Iceland and spouted mightily into the blue sky, flipping their tails like children at play. The wind bowled us along at a brisk ten knots, and Captain O’Hickey was soon saying he had never seen a better passage. He had always thought women were bad luck at sea, but he was ready to change his mind.

  A ship is a kind of island, a separate world with its own ways and customs. We fit smoothly into it, almost forgetting any other kind of world existed. It was a little like the land of the Ever Living, the heaven of the old Irish heroes, where there was nothing to do all day but sing and feast and recite poems and make easy love without fear of babies or bill collectors. Captain O’Hickey was like a laughing God the Father with his great beard and his stories of shenanigans in a hundred ports around the world. Michael was our poet and musician. Dan was Oisin, son of Finn, noblest of the old Fenians. I was Niamh, queen of the Country of the Young.

  I remember best the night that a full riding moon spread a hush over the face of the ocean. There was only the lazy sigh of the ship’s prow in the rushing water, the faint creak of the masts and booms, the occasional rustle of a sail. Michael and I sat on the deck surrounded by the crew, save the helmsman, and told Fenian stories from the heroic days.

  The night ended with Michael speaking our favorite Irish poem, the first he had recited to me when he came home from the university. In it, Red Hugh O’Donnell, the greatest hero of the sixteenth century, addresses Ireland.

  O my Dark Rosaleen

  Do not sigh, do not weep!

  The priests are on the ocean green,

  They march along the deep.

  There’s wine from the royal Pope,

  Upon the ocean green,

  And Spanish ale shall give you hope,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  My own Rosaleen!

  Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,

  Shall give you health, and help, and hope,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  Woe and pain, pain and woe,

  Are my lot, night and noon,

  To see your bright face clouded so,

  Like to the mournful moon.

  But yet will I rear your throne

  Again in golden sheen;

  ’Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  My own Rosaleen!

  ’Tis you shall have the golden throne,

  ’Tis you shall reign, and reign alone,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  I prayed that those noble words would take root in Dan McCaffrey’s soul and lift his fight for Ireland above crass hope of gain or lure of profit. I believe for a while it did work a change in him. He felt the pull of his Irish blood. He asked me to recite the poem to him again the next day and wanted to know what happened to Red Hugh O’Donnell. “The British poisoned him,” I said. “He went as an ambassador to seek help from Spain, and the British sent a secret agent there and poisoned him.”

  Instead of awakening Dan’s anger, as I hoped it would, the story of Red Hugh’s fate only seemed to make him sad. He began talking in a disconsolate way about the hard luck of being on the losing side in a war. I realized how little I knew about his American life and asked him to tell me the story.

  “Like I said, my father left Ireland in 1831. He went to Boston, like most Irish at that time. But he hated the place. He called the Protestants ‘the icicles of Yankee-land’ and said they were worse than the English in Ireland. They despised Irish Catholics. While he was there, they burned a convent full of nuns. They called Irishmen ‘white niggers’ and never gave them work if they could help it.

  “Dad saw there was no future in New England and went south. He ended up buildin’ railroads in the Louisiana swamps, up to his neck in freezin’ water, bitten by a million insects, never knowin’ when some snake would finish him.”

  “I thought the Southerners had slaves for such heavy work,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t risk a slave in them swamps. Slaves were too valuable. Worth a thousand dollars a head. An Irishman was worth nothin’ but the five or six dollars you paid him each week. When he died you just buried him there in the swamp. A lot died. A lot came out like my dad, shakin’ with malaria. He went north and laid more track into Tennessee. He broke down with malaria there. While he was sick he met my ma. Her people had come down the Cumberland from Virginia when there was nothin’ but Indians in the state.

  “They got married along about 1840. Ma’s people had some money, and Dad borrowed some to add to what he’d saved on the railroad and opened a tavern with another Irishman in a town named Pulaski about a hundred and fifty miles from Memphis. That’s where I grew up.”

  “Tell me what’s it like,” I said.

  “Beautiful country. Rollin’ hills. Stands of trees along the river bottoms. Dad says he settled there because it reminded him of Ireland. And because he met an Irish beauty. Ma’s maiden name was O’Gara. Our grass ain’t as green as Ireland. Bluegrass, we call it. But it’s rich soil, good pasture for cattle and horses. Dad started raisin’ horses with the money he made from the tavern. Then he built a sawmill. Pretty soon he was close to the richest man in Pulaski. He got into politics with the Democrats and went to the legislature at Nashville. He decided he wanted me to be a gentleman. Wanted me to have a good education. So he sent me to the University of Virginia. I was there a year when the war started.

  “Dad didn’t see nothin’ wrong with ownin’ slaves. Most of his friends in the legislature were from West Tennessee, down around Memphis, where they owned ’em by the hundreds. He said he’d never seen a slave treated as bad as he’d seen the Irish treated in Boston. So he threw in with the Confederates and told me to do likewise in Virginia.”

  “So you were in it from the start.”

  “Right from Bull Run,” he said. “One of General Stuart’s cousins was in my class. He introduced me to him and I got a commission in his cavalry brigade. That’s where I spent the war, in Virginia with Stuart. He was the bravest man and the finest officer I ever saw. For a while we had a good old time. The ladies couldn’t do enough for us. General Stuart made sure we had the best of everything. We whacked the Yankees almost every time we felt like it. But they wouldn’t quit. They kept findin’ more men, no matter how many we killed or captured. Pretty soon they had officers, veterans, who knew how to maneuver cavalry as good as General Stuart. Our last fight was at Yellow Tavern, about six miles from Richmond. There were only four officers left in our regiment. The men and horses were half starved. The Yankees tore us apart, and one of their troopers
killed General Stuart with a handgun. I carried him back to his tent. That was the saddest day of my life.

  “The second saddest was the day I came home to Pulaski. I’d known what was happenin’ in Tennessee. The state split up, the east end goin’ with the Union, the west with the Confeds. In Middle Tennessee, where we were, people split off both ways. That made for a mean war, sometimes brothers from the same family goin’ on opposite sides. Old friends turnin’ enemies. But I never expected what I saw when I got off the train. Our tavern, our house, just heaps of burnt-out timbers. A Union mob’d done it, right after the Union Army come through, in 1862. Dad never told me. He figured I had enough trouble of my own. Then the Union politicians went to work on him. They dragged him in front of some court and convicted him of being a traitor and confiscated our horse farm, our sawmill, everything we owned. It broke Dad’s spirit. He died just before the war ended. His friends had to bury him with borrowed money.”

  “Dear God, Dan, what you’ve been through,” I said. “How did you come to the Fenians?”

  “I didn’t have a cent. A friend of Dad’s sent me to John O’Neil, in Nashville. He was a Union officer, a cavalryman, runnin’ a pension agency for the Yankee army and recruitin’ Fenians on the side. He said I was just the sort of man they wanted and sent me to New York.”

  We were alone on the Manhattan’s bow as Dan told me this story. My heart swelled with a great pity for him, as well as a kind of awe. He was only twenty-five years old, but he had seen more death and tasted more bitterness than most men of fifty. No wonder he dreamt of a great estate in Ireland if we were victorious. Life had raised him up and cast him down. Without the Fenians he would have to go back to where his father had begun, toiling at hard labor for a few dollars a day. How could I find fault with him when I compared my soft safe life with his perils and sufferings? I put my arms around him and vowed to love him more wholeheartedly.

  “’Tis time surely for your luck to turn,” I said. “And with it, Ireland’s. You may be a good luck charm, without knowing it.”

  “You’re the first piece of good luck I’ve had in a long time, Bess,” he said. “In fact, you’re too good to be true.”

  “I’m true as the oak of this deck,” I said, stamping my foot on the solid wood. “Will you be?”

  I said the words lightly, but my mind flashed to the broken promise to the woman at Priest’s Leap. For a moment a darkness fell on his face, as if he sensed what I was thinking. But he only laughed and kissed me and said, “What do you think?”

  Later that day, I climbed into the rigging to contemplate the sea from the crow’s nest. For this kind of exercise, I wore my sailor’s costume. High above the water, I gazed at the world’s immensity and felt very small. I thought of Dan’s story and brooded on how little we controlled our lives.

  I was so absorbed, I scarcely noticed the arrival of my brother. He had a similar fondness for this perch. Dan, on the other hand, seldom joined me here. He disliked heights. They gave him “the creeps,” he said, an American word that needed no translation.

  “Are you going to marry him?” Michael said.

  “If he asks me,” I said.

  “What if I ask him?”

  “I’ll have your head,” I warned him. “I haven’t gone through the grief of defying Father, for all my love of him, to discover another father in you. Contrary to your assumption, the mere fact that I’m female and you’re male gives you no authority over me.”

  “He’s not worthy of you, Bess. He has no education, no spirit but that of a mercenary.”

  “If you knew his life, you wouldn’t be so quick to find fault,” I said, and told him the story of Dan’s past. It shamed him into temporary silence, but he refused to change his mind.

  “Remember how the song ends, Bess,” Michael said.

  “What song?” I said, trying to pretend I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “‘Donal Ogue,’” he said, and recited the final verse.

  “For you took what’s before me and what’s behind me

  You took east and west when you wouldn’t mind me.

  Sun and moon from my sky you’ve taken

  And God as well or I’m much mistaken.”

  “It won’t end that way,” I said. “God won’t let it.”

  How strange it was, that while I was sinning my soul and defying my father and the precepts of the Catholic Church, I remained convinced that I was doing a holy thing to risk my salvation to free Ireland. Revolutionaries are strange creatures, and Irish revolutionaries perhaps the strangest of all.

  That night, Dan bought a bottle of John Jameson’s from Captain O’Hickey and got drunk. It was the kind of drinking I had never seen before, a dark plunge into whiskey as a kind of oblivion, without laughter or pleasure. But it loosed his tongue to speak to me for the first time with his feelings. Even when he took me in his arms, he said little by way of endearment. He never used the word “love.” “You’re a beauty, Bess,” he would murmur. He let me do all the talking about love.

  Now, as he reached the bottom of the bottle, he looked at me and shook his head. “Go ’way, Bess. When we get to New York, go ’way from me. I specialize in lost causes. Always on the losin’ side. This thing—Ireland—losin’. There’s nothin’ there, Bess. No spirit. No hope.”

  “’Tis my cause more than yours,” I said. “You can’t tell me to go away from it. Any more than you can tell me to stop loving you.”

  “Lovin’—me?” He shook his head. “You keep sayin’ that. You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I haven’t got a dime, Bess. Girl like you—can get anyone she wants, almost.”

  “I’ve got the only one I want,” I said, putting my arms around him. His obsession with money, with his poverty, both touched and appalled me.

  At this moment bad fortune brought Michael into the cabin. “Excuse me,” he said with heavy sarcasm when he saw my arms around Dan.

  A lopsided grin on his face, Dan lurched to Michael and threw his arm around him. “I’m tryin’ to tell your crazy sister to stop lovin’ me. You agree?”

  “Definitely,” Michael said.

  “Whaaat?” Dan said. “You jokin’?”

  “I am not,” Michael said, with a courage that was close to madness, considering Dan’s size and strength. “I’d like to see you part. I think you’re ill-matched.”

  The arm of friendship around Michael’s shoulder suddenly became a vise of rage. Dan seized the back of the collar of Michael’s shirt and flung him across the cabin. His head struck the wooden bulkhead with a sickening crack. Dan lunged after him, his fist held high.

  I caught his arm, crying, “He didn’t mean it, Dan.”

  He shook me off as if I were a fly, but I dodged past him and threw myself in front of Michael, who was crumpled against the wall, groaning and holding his head.

  “Will you strike me first?” I said.

  “What kind of a goddamn game are you two playin’ with me?” Dan snarled.

  For a moment I thought he might kill us both. I saw nothing but blind drunken hatred on his face. All trace of the buoyant, reckless warrior had vanished. He looked old, with his eyes squeezed and his mouth clenched; old or possessed of some evil spirit. I shuddered, remembering the curse the woman had laid on us at Priest’s Leap.

  “We’re playing no game,” I said. “Go to bed now, and tomorrow we’ll laugh at it all. Michael spoke without thinking. It doesn’t alter in the least my feeling for you.”

  Two lies in one breath, I thought. But Dan lowered his fist, seized his bottle, and lurched out of the cabin onto the dark deck. I put Michael to bed with a cold cloth on his forehead and the next day forced him to shake hands with Dan. Neither displayed much enthusiasm for the gesture, but it was done in a manly way on both sides. I hoped that I had buried the enmity. It was just as well that I did not know it was a bitter seed and burying it meant only a later and more terrible harvest.

  The next day, we sighted several ships on
the southern passage to the West Indies. Captain O’Hickey said it meant that we were drawing near New York. Dan began preparing a report of what he had found in his journey through Ireland. There was not much good news in it. Although the Fenians had been secretly organizing for three or four years, they did not have more than ten thousand members. The movement was built around the local circles led by a center. Many circles had lost membership recently. In some cases, the center himself had quit. Few of the circles had guns. When they met, they spent most of their time talking about revolution and little of it in drilling. What worried Dan most was the lack of strength in the countryside. The active circles were in cities like Limerick and Dublin. But Ireland was a country of villages. Most of the people lived upon the land. Dan lamented the crushed and fearful state of the peasantry, almost all of them terrified at the thought of arousing the landlord’s wrath.

  “I remember the stories my father told me about Mayo—the Molly Maguires had the whole county paralyzed,” Dan said. “Anyone who evicted a farmer or arrested a man for debt wound up with his throat cut or his cattle maimed. What happened to them?”

  “They’re all in America,” Michael said. “Or in Australia or Canada. I’ve heard my father talk of the Mollies. They were the poorest of the poor, fellows with nothing to lose. Those that didn’t die in the great famine of ’48 fled the country.”

  “Mollies, Ribbonmen, Lady Clares, Whiteboys,” Captain O’Hickey said. “They had different names in the different counties. But they weren’t revolutionaries. All they thought to do was protect their own little bit of soil.”

  “With all due respect for your father,” Michael said to Dan, “I think he was exaggerating the Mollies. Distance and time tend to expand the imagination at the expense of the memory. You can’t blame the peasantry. They see no leaders but the parish priest, whose bishop tells him to damn all revolutionaries, and men like my father, who have taken the King’s shilling, in his case from honest conviction.”

  Far from lending enchantment, the more we looked at Ireland from a distance, the more difficult our task became. We were in far from sanguine spirits as we approached the American coast.