A Passionate Girl (4 page)

His lips were on my mouth, sealing my dark loosed passion with his man's desire. I was living the old poem; I was the girl in “Donal Ogue,” mad with love for the warrior who had returned to the land of his ancestors from across the water. He lifted me and carried me across the room to the bed. The blanket dropped from his shoulders, and for a moment I saw him all golden and bronze in the firelight, his yellow hair gleaming. He raised the nightgown above my head and lay down beside me, his hand on one of my breasts. With a soft cry I drew him to me, wrapped him with my arms into my dream. I was Ireland, dark Rosaleen welcoming my hero-lover; he was one of the Fianna, blindly embracing his hope and his doom. But above all he was Young Dan, Donal Ogue, with promises of love and glory, gifts and treasures, on his lips. Joyously I whispered to him.

So we loved half that May Eve away, while the Bel fires leaped on the hills and the old kings rumbled above or beneath the earth. But in the morning it was the real world of Ireland in 1865 that confronted us again. The landlady glared at me when I opened the door and wanted to know why I had not slept in the bed she had made up for me. I gave her a story about Dan being my girlhood love who had come home to marry me. I'm sure I was not very convincing. Her angry old eyes were like a reproach from my mother, awakening guilt in my Irish Catholic soul. I suddenly saw our pastor, lean old Father Dennis McHugh, glaring down at me from the pulpit of our parish church, warning us against “the dirty filthy sins of the flesh.” I heard Father's farewell.
Take your slut of a sister with you.

Worse, Michael's reproachful looks all but shouted the truth as I spoke. Only with the greatest difficulty did we persuade the landlady to lend us her son, who led us into the Ballyhoura Mountains on the border of Cork and Limerick counties. It was a rough track, and the lad left us in the late afternoon with little more than the hope that we might find shelter for the night. We found a goatherder's hut as the dusk came down and were offered the hospitality of the bare floor and whatever was in the pot for dinner. Dan played the mute and Michael said as little as possible while I produced a Kerry brogue to explain our journey. We took food from the pot though it almost choked us. The new crop of potatoes was not yet ready for digging, and the poor people were living on stirabout, made from the siftings of flour more than half bran. There were the man and his wife, three children, and six goats in the cabin. In the morning we spent the better part of an hour picking the fleas and lice from our hair and clothes.

Around midday the rain began to pour again, and we decided to seek shelter for the night in a public house outside Mitchelstown. Once more, I was sent ahead to reconnoiter. As I entered the front door, I found the landlord talking to a policeman. The constable took one look at me and said in a rich Cork brogue, “Sure that's one of them.” I whirled and ran for the open road. The rain had slackened to a drizzle. I reached Michael and Dan as the policeman and a half dozen supporters emerged from the town. “There's where we'll spend tonight,” I said, pointing to the blue mists of the Mitchelstown Mountains a good four miles away.

We set off on the run and kept a half mile between us and our pursuers until night fell and the policeman quit the chase. Had the old lady informed on us? Or had the police noticed my absence when they searched our house, and surmised our plan of escape? Either way, it meant we were now a hunted trio.

The rain drizzled down in the chill dark, and Michael began to shiver and sweat with fever. He had always been a delicate lad growing up. We found an empty cabin on a mountain slope and spent the night in it, our clothes soaked, the wind creeping in at us from a hundred cracks in the walls. By morning, Michael was so weak he could barely stand, and still the rain came down. We ate the last of the food we had taken from home and half carried, half dragged Michael through the mountains toward Kilworth.

Toward the end of the day, we came down from the mountains and crossed the River Funcheon about a mile above Kilworth. The river was in flood, and the only bridge was a great fir tree that had fallen across the stream. We teetered across it in single file like Indians and trudged onward in the rain. No shelter was to be found until eleven o'clock, when we all but forced our way into another lonely cabin. This one had man and wife and two children in it. The inevitable pot of stirabout was on the fire, but Dan could not eat another mouthful of the disgusting stuff. Looking up, he saw a hen perched on a beam overhead. He offered to buy it, but the owner, angry at the way we had pushed through his door, said no. Dan took out his pistol. The hen was promptly sold for two shillings and consumed within the hour.

The next day brought rich sunshine. Michael felt better. We decided to chance the road again and found a farmer driving a wagonload of corn to Cork. He spoke only Irish, and I had to act as our interpreter. I liked the look of the man—he was young and burly, with a great shock of red hair—and told him who we were. He immediately offered us his wagon and corn crop, if we but told him where we would abandon it, that he might go claim it when we were safely at sea. Dan McCaffrey was so touched by his patriotism, he insisted on giving him ten guineas in case he could not recover his wagon.

We put Michael to rest beneath the corn and turned the horse's head west from the Cork road to Bantry. When we grew hungry, we took some of the corn and roasted it by the road. At night we drove the wagon off the road and slept in it. Our fears vanished, and the journey became as gay as a vacation jaunt. I chanted a poem by Doheny, one of the rebels of the rising of 1848, as we rode along.

Beyond Dunmanway, approaching County Kerry, we drove through the pass of Ceimenagh in the Shehy Mountains—one of the most majestic routes in Ireland. The road wound into the very bowels of the mountains. Dark rude outlines of rock masses rose hundreds of feet above our heads on either side. Dan McCaffrey saw the scene with a soldier's eye. “A hundred men with repeatin' rifles could stop an army on this road,” he said.

“'Tis the beauty of it I love,” I said.

We came down from the pass to Ballingeary, on the banks of Lake Lua. There, I insisted on halting to show Dan one of my favorite spots—the island in the center of the lake where the poet Callanan wrote some of his loveliest poems. We walked through the ruins of an old monastery, past gigantic forest trees, bowing their aged limbs into the clear water, while the shadows of the frowning mountain fell awesomely across the lake. From the distant crags came the eagle's scream.

I asked Michael to speak the lines Callanan wrote here. Softly he repeated them.

Dan interrupted Michael with a gesture of impatience. “Bess, when we take Ireland, I'll build you a mansion here. We'll clear the land along the shore and turn the whole place into a park. It'll be the biggest and best estate you ever saw. Dukes and duchesses will fight to visit us.”

“No, no,” I said. “It should stay exactly like this, wild and lonely and ruined.”

“That's an Irish way of lookin' at things,” McCaffrey said. “You're goin' to America, Bess, where people take a practical approach to life. You know why I'm doin' this—riskin' my neck over here?”

“To free Ireland, I thought.”

“Sure. To settle my old man's score with the goddamn lime-juicers. But the men who free Ireland, Bess, the Americans who free her, expect to get a slice of it—a damn good slice—as their reward. An American don't risk his life—an American like me—for an idea.”

He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a leather purse. Yanking the drawstring, he showed us a heap of glittering gold sovereigns. “There's what America teaches a man to respect. There's tens of thousands more where these came from. The Irish in America will pour them into the pockets of any man ready to fight for Ireland.”

I saw disgust on my brother Michael's face. I felt it in my own heart. But I refused to yield to it. I told myself that I would teach Dan McCaffrey the power and the glory of the idea of a free Ireland, the nobility of sacrifice for it. I would teach him to love poetry and the wild beauty of lake and mountain—gifts I thought as natural to an Irish man or woman as breathing. America seemed to have strained them from his blood.

A day later we were approaching the town of Bantry. We planned to leave the wagon on the outskirts and hire a boat to cruise the bay in search of the ship that was to meet Dan. We felt secure in our wagon, while the constabulary watched the roads for three runaways on foot. There was also no reason for them to think we would strike for Bantry, a petty port compared to Cork or Kenmare.

A half mile from the town, security vanished. From a wheat field sprang a sergeant and a half dozen policemen with rifles at the ready. The Irish-speaking farmer had decided to collect the hundred-pound reward to add to the ten guineas he had gotten for his wagon.

The sergeant was a perfect twin of my mother's nephew, Barry MacNamara, tall and red-faced with a button nose and a big square chin. He was as Irish as I was. So were the rest of the Peelers, as the police were sometimes called. “Divide and conquer” had been the British motto ever since they came to Ireland, and these men were living witnesses to how well it had worked.

Dan handed the reins to me. “Whip that nag when you see me drop,” he said. I didn't know what he was talking about. My heart thumped in my body like a fist pounding a drum. I looked back at Michael, who was spread low in the corn. “Get ready,” I said.

Dan jumped off the seat and walked toward the sergeant with his hands held high. Slowly, carefully, I fastened my hand around the handle of the whip on the seat beside me. Now! Dan dropped to a crouch and shot the sergeant in the middle, and two of the policemen behind him. I never saw him draw his gun. It leaped to his hand like a magical thing. The others blazed at him, but their bullets whizzed past him and me, except for one that struck the metal rim of the wagon's right wheel with a clang like a blacksmith's hammer. All in the same instant I was wielding the whip on Dobbin's back. The big plow horse sprang forward like a cavalry charger.

Michael jumped up to fling a volley of corn ears at the surviving police, a brave gesture to disrupt their aim. Dan leaped for the rear of the wagon as we rumbled past him and vaulted into the corn. The policemen scattered like chickens before our rush, but they quickly reformed and trained their guns on us. Dan dropped another one with a single shot from his pistol, and the rest fled for shelter.

Our one hope now was to put distance between us and our pursuers. Through the town of Bantry we rampaged, while strollers gaped in amazement. Michael gaily bombarded them with cornstalks, and Dan sent them scampering with a wave of his gun. For another mile or two we raced bravely along the shore of Bantry Bay. Without warning our gallant steed stumbled, strove once to right himself, and came crashing to earth. A bloody froth bubbled from his nostrils. One of the police bullets had struck home. Dan put him out of his misery with a bullet in his head.

We fled into the mountains above the bay. A fog rolled in with the dark, and we wandered through it like lost souls, utterly ignorant of our direction but for the needle of Dan's compass, which he said had saved his neck more than once in the Civil War. We groped along, climbing up and sliding down for hours, Dan ahead and Michael behind me. Michael finally persuaded us to stop. His legs were like cornstalks, he said.

Morning found us a good five miles from the town of Bantry. As the sun rose and burned away the fog, we saw a lonely cabin tilted on the bare rock, high above the bay. Michael, who had visited the coast with friends from the university, said the place was called Priest's Leap in honor of a priest of the previous century, when the Catholic clergy were hunted like criminals in Ireland. According to the legend, the priest was trapped on the cliff and bounded above his pursuers with the aid of divine grace to land on the deck of a Spanish man-of-war in the bay.

“We sure could use legs like that,” Dan said, gazing out at the tossing water. Far to the west, the dark green Atlantic heaved. Below us curled whitecapped Bantry Bay, with its waves dashing against stupendous cliffs. On this coast, Ireland was like a great rock-fanged monster facing the enemy ocean. It was hard to believe anyone ever could have conquered her.

We approached the cabin and found within it a man, a woman, and a single child. The man wore shreds of flannel, which might once have been drawers, and a tattered shirt of unbleached linen. The woman had an old blanket drawn around her shoulders, and her skirt was a mass of shreds, but she carried herself with uncommon pride. The way she touched her matted hair and rearranged the rags on her body announced that she had once fired men's hearts and eyes. Her bare feet and ankles were as faultless as a Greek statue of Diana, but her lofty brow was furrowed and wrinkled, her eyes dilated with despair and disdain.

The child, however, was well dressed. She wore a homespun jacket and skirt of sparrow color and good laced-up boots. Although she was no more than seven, her face was clenched and fierce, giving it a strange look of age, even of evil. Her name was Moira.