All Our Yesterdays (7 page)

“Grand,” he said.

“We’re not going to let them hang the only man they’ve arrested for Bloody Sunday,” the Old Gunner said. He took the enamel basin and went for more water.

At teatime Conn’s soldier came into Conn’s cell and closed the door. He unbuttoned his tunic and took out a package, and gave it to Conn. It was heavy and Conn knew it was the bolt cutters.

“Here’s something else you’ll like,” the soldier said.

He took a revolver from his pocket. It was a Smith
& Wesson .38, blue steel, with walnut grip and a three-inch barrel. It was loaded. Conn put the revolver in his belt under his shirt. The bolt cutters had two detachable three-foot handles, for leverage. He wrapped them in a shirt and tumbled two other shirts over it in a corner.

“Your sister brought it,” the soldier said.

Conn had no sister. It must have been one of the Cumann na mBan girls.

“She’s a good girl,” Conn said.

The soldier pushed his cap back on his head and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“I don’t hold with boxing a man around when he’s got no chance.”

“Don’t care much for it myself,” Conn mumbled.

“Don’t like to see a man hanged either,” the soldier said.

“Specially me.”

The soldier nodded.

“You ought to try boracic acid on that face,” he said.

“I’ll go right to the chemist,” Conn said with difficulty, “and buy some.”

The soldier nodded at the package hidden under the pile of shirts.

“Maybe soon,” he said.

During the day, at exercise time, Conn hung the bolt cutters over his shoulder under his shirt when he went to the yard. He padded the cutters with torn strips of underclothing so that they wouldn’t rattle. He carried the .38 in his pocket. Cells were often searched when they were empty and the safest place to hide his tools was on himself. In the yard Conn and the Old Gunner scouted the gate, studying the bar-and-padlock
setup, locating the likely places where a night guard might be. They paid as much attention as possible to the patterns of night-guard behavior—when the guards slept, when they went to the jacks, how often they patrolled. There were two sets of night guards: a group of five in the cell next to Conn, and four more around the corner in the corridor next to the Old Gunner’s. They slept restlessly, their weapons beside them. But they rarely stirred from the cell they slept in after lights out.

Alone in his cell Conn rehearsed with the Smith & Wesson. He practiced quick draws from his belt under his shirt. He got his hand used to the grip. He sighted along the barrel, and felt the weight of the gun and six bullets. Everything still hurt when he moved. And he still couldn’t breathe through his nose. Conn had tea with the Old Gunner in his cell, and their soldier came in. He had his tunic unbuttoned, and his cap pushed back.

“Mick Collins said your name will go down in Irish history,” he said to Conn.

“’Specially if I’m hanged,” Conn said. “Causes love martyrs.”

“You’re a cynical bastard, Conn,” the Old Gunner said. “They won’t hang you. We’ll get you out of here.”

“If the bolt cutters work,” Conn said.

“They’ll go through that bar like it was butter,” the soldier said.

“And if they don’t we can fight,” the Old Gunner said. “You’ve got the revolver, Conn. We can disarm the guards, and rush the main gate, bayonets fixed.”

“Two of us?”

“Three,” the soldier said.

“What three?” Conn said. “We can’t trust the others. You never know who’s going to be a pigeon.”

“I’m your third, Ga blimey,” the soldier said.

The Old Gunner put out a hand and the soldier shook it. Nobody spoke for a moment.

“Good soldiers make bad jailers,” the soldier said. “Nobody’ll try that damned bloody hard to stop you.”

“And when we get out,” the Old Gunner said, “there’ll be lads from the Fourth Brigade to support us.”

“So when do we go?” Conn said, speaking thickly, his mouth still swollen from the beating.

“Soon as you’ve healed enough,” the Old Gunner said. “And we’ll let Lloyd George explain to Parliament why they couldn’t hold the one man they’d caught for Bloody Sunday.”

In a week, the swelling around his eyes had receded enough so that he could see normally. His lip was still puffed, but less so, and his speech was nearly normal. A week and three days after the bolt cutters came in, they were ready to try.

That afternoon Conn said to the soldier, “Lend me sixpence for the tram.”

“I can give you five shillings,” the soldier said.

“No, sixpence will do. I’m tired of this place.”

The soldier laughed and handed him the silver.

“If it only cost sixpence all of us would go,” he said.

The soldier would leave the Old Gunner’s door open—the padlock closed but not locked, so that it looked secure. The Old Gunner could reach through the peephole and unlock it. Conn’s door had no padlock, but the lock could be opened from the outside by pressing against the jamb with the handle of a spoon.

An hour after lights out, the Old Gunner walked in stocking feet past the soldiers sleeping near him and came to Conn’s cell. His boots were slung by the laces around his neck. He struggled silently to pop the bolt on Conn’s cell door. In the silence Conn could hear the soldiers in the nearby cell. One of them muttered in his sleep. Several of them snored. He was listening so intensely in the darkness that Conn could hear the sound of the running water that never fully shut itself off in the toilet down the hall.

The bolt clicked back. They edged the door open, slowly, so that it wouldn’t squeak. Conn too had his boots around his neck. He gave the cutters to the Old Gunner, and held the .38 in his hand. They moved silently down the corridor past the guardroom, up the iron stairs. The iron door at the top was not locked. They went through it to the exercise yard. The ground was damp and the exterior walls were clammy in the night. The gravel was thunderous as they crunched across it in stocking feet. And the moon glared down like a spotlight.

At the gate the Old Gunner worked with the cutters while Conn stood pressed into as dark a corner as possible with his .38 drawn. He heard the Old Gunner laugh.

“Like butter,” the Old Gunner said.

They pushed half the gate open slowly. It groaned as they did so. Then they were out in the bright night. They pushed the gate slowly closed behind them. In the darkness to their left they heard movement and Conn saw the outline of a soldier’s peaked cap. Conn put his left hand out to stop the Old Gunner, and crouched a little and brought the .38 up. Had they been tipped? Were they waiting? A shot would wake
up the garrison. Another figure stirred beside the soldier and Conn realized it was a woman. He could smell her perfume in the soft, damp Dublin night. Conn edged closer. The soldier and the woman were locked in an embrace. The soldier was fumbling beneath her blouse. Conn smiled. It might be a trap, but it wasn’t a trap for him. He edged back to the Old Gunner.

“Love,” Conn said.

A different figure appeared, wearing a tweed scally cap.

“Liam Sullivan,” the figure whispered. “Fourth Brigade. Catch the tram on the South Circular Road. Well keep the soldiers busy.”

“Are the girls yours?” the Old Gunner said.

“Hired for the event,” Sullivan said.

“Fucking for Free Ireland,” Conn said. “How sweet.”

“Actually it’s your freedom they’re fucking for,” Sullivan said. “But it’s still a good cause.”

As they moved silently along the outside of the jail wall they passed other soldiers and women, in various degrees of intimacy, and then they were away from the jail. Sullivan vanished into the darkness. They boarded a tram on South Circular Road and mingled with other people. Around them Dublin spread out as if it had no limit. The dun brick looked bright, there were people with colored scarfs and laundered clothes. The signs on stores and taverns seemed sprightly and amusing, and the air seemed to breathe very easily. They listened to the talk around them, and laughter. With senses sharpened by deprivation, they smelled food, and the pleasant yeastiness of the Guinness Brewery, and the fertile wet scent of the river.

“Y
ou were born to be shot, Conn,” Michael Collins said. “They’ll never hang you.”

“I’m through with it, Mick,” Conn said. “I’ve no heart for it anymore.”

“You swore an oath, Conn. Just like I did. We’d not rest until Ireland was free.”

Conn shrugged.

“I’m not the same man,” he said.

Collins looked at him thoughtfully. His round, smooth face showed nothing.

“It wasn’t the jail,” Collins said after a moment.

Conn shrugged.

“It’s the woman,” Collins said.

“You know about her?”

“It’s my profession.”

“Doesn’t matter what it is, Mick. I’m through. I have no more heart for causes.”

Collins nodded.

“Amazing,” Collins said. “You are one of the hardest men I ever knew. In a fight. Facing death.”

Facing death
. Conn smiled to himself. Collins’s rhetorical flourishes would have seemed laboriously stilted in most men. In Collins it was so much a part of who he was that it seemed normal speech.

“You’d go up against anyone,” Collins went on. “One man or ten. But one woman”—Collins shook his head—“she broke you.”

“She betrayed me.”

They were silent.

“Thanks for getting me out,” Conn said.

“I like you, Conn. Or I used to. But we got you out because it was good for Ireland that you escape. The only person arrested for Bloody Sunday. In their strongest jail. It weakens them, Conn. That’s the point.”

“There’ll be reprisal,” Conn said. “Somebody’ll hang for my freedom.”

“And we’ll have another martyr. It’s not an adventure, Conn. It’s a war.”

“Well, it’s neither one for me, Mick. I’m out of it.”

“Then go away, Conn. Go far. South Africa, Australia, America. It won’t help us if they catch you. It’ll help us if you disappear.”

“I don’t want to stay here,” Conn said.

“Good. A lot of our boys don’t like quitters much.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Conn said.

“Nothing matters, does it?”

“No.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Collins said. “Where do you want to go?”

Conn had never thought of where to go. He’d only thought of leaving.

“The United States,” Conn said. “I’ll go to Boston.”

Collins grinned suddenly.

“Fancy that,” Collins said.

“Y
ou walk along the River Liffey,” I said, “which cuts right through the middle of the city, and there’s a bunch of barrel-arched bridges. And the arches reflect in the water and make a circle. You walk along the river, past Guinness Brewery, and veer up past Heuston Station and go up a hill and there’s Kilmainham Jail, this—Christ, I don’t know—Stonehengean pile of granite block, right in the middle of a bunch of neat small houses with neat small yards. So I went in. You can’t go except on a tour, so I tagged along. And, Jesus … abandon all hope ye who enter here.”

Grace waited, her gaze resting on me, calm and guarded so that it felt heavy. Though it seemed a little less guarded to me than it had. Always when she listened, she gave you her full attention and you felt as if you were saying things of absolute grace and significance.

“It felt like you’d think a prison would feel: ponderous, unyielding, and hopeless. There was a light rain the day I was there. Actually there’s a light rain most days in Dublin, I think. And the rain didn’t make it more cheerful, but even in the present day, you know, now, when I was walking around in there, and now it’s just a museum, I felt”—I looked for the right word—“like despair. I felt buried underneath this atrocious heap. It wasn’t a cold day, maybe fifty-five, sixty, but inside the walls it was freezing. You knew what it must
have been like to be caught in the gears of the British Empire. They were entirely indifferent, and they must have ground exceeding fucking fine.”

“And yet he escaped,” Grace said.

“He was an indomitable bastard,” I said.

The thick snow had begun to pile up along the bottom of the window, its whiteness making the night storm blacker.

“Except that it sounds like he didn’t care about anything.”

“There’s freedom in that.”

“There’s freedom and there’s freedom,” Grace said.

“True.”

She looked at me again for a time.

“There’s indomitable and indomitable too,” she said.

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

Grace shrugged.

“We’ll see.”

I waited but she didn’t say anything else. Lightning startled outside the window, and thunder rolled in after it. The space between the light and the sound had narrowed as the heart of the storm moved toward us.

“A little after Conn left Ireland, they had stopped fighting England and started fighting each other. Michael Collins was killed by some other Irishmen, on the other side of the treaty issue.

“But Conn cared no more about that. He was over here. He arrived late in 1921 and joined the cops. The police strike was only two years before, and the force was pretty much starting over, and so was Conn. It was a match made in heaven. He was a charmer. I’ve seen pictures of him. Tall, strong looking, black curly
hair, bright eyes, with a kind of go-to-hell look in them, you know? Like Errol Flynn. In fact much like myself.”

Grace smiled.

“And one of his missions in life was to score every woman in Boston. Sort of a fuck-you to Hadley, I suppose.”

“I thought Irishmen were sexually inhibited,” Grace said. “Hung up on their mother and the Blessed Virgin, whom they quite often confused with each other.”

“You shouldn’t generalize,” I said. “Anyway, he started out walking a beat in the West End with a guy named Knocko Kiernan. I’ve actually met Knocko. I was a little kid, and he was a fat old guy drinking beer in his undershirt, when my father took me to see him once. But he still had funny eyes—like Robert Benchley, you know? Eyes that know life’s secret, and it’s funny? Lot of Irishmen like him, about half of them, the other half thinks life’s secret is tragic. I’m not sure yet which kind I am.”