Leon Uris (75 page)

Father Dary Larkin and Rachael Fitzpatrick walked a quay of the river Liffey as a priest would with a family member, envying the soldier boys and their girls, affectionately entangled.

They took a bench, probably not far from where Molly O’Rafferty had once bade farewell to Jeremy Hubble. They were still shattered that she had had an early miscarriage of their child.

Yet, it served to awaken them from their short, forbidden excursion into dream places. It was the medieval year of 1916 and they were now face to face with a firestorm of hard truths.

Truth was that Dary, in a moment of madness, grasped white hot iron and nearly burned himself up. He was again in the clutches of his vow, a vow as strong as Conor’s had been to the Brotherhood. Rachael’s tender years and his putting her on the edge of disaster drove home the impossibility of their situation.

“What did Bishop Mooney tell you?”

“He told me that there is no greater blood sport in Ireland, more vicious, than destroying a defrocked priest.”

“It sounds like the same kind of intimidation you’ve had all your life, first from your mother, now from everyone else. Can’t you see now how she passed her sexual
agony on to you? Women are not images of the Virgin Mary,” Rachael said softly.

“We’ve problems that won’t be solved by telling the Church to go to hell,” he said. “We’re in love, Rachael, like Conor was in love with Shelley. Shelley knew Conor could not live outside Ireland, and I’m not certain I can or want to be a fleeing coward. The price they paid is in my mind all the time, us being lepers, you being savaged.”

“And can you go on serving a church that will bring something like that on us?”

“It’s not only the Church, it’s the nation. I’d be doing you the favor of your life if I give you up.”

“Are you filled with guilt now?”

“No, but I’m so frustrated. All my days I’ve been stuffed, saturated with the sin of man and woman. I loved so many things the Church stood for. In our middling way, we provided some kind of faith for the Irish people so they wouldn’t give up. Without us, Ireland would be a land of beaten curs. Rachael, I have believed with all my strength in the love of Jesus. Yet from the beginning, in seminary, the novices were stealing looks at girlie magazines we found hidden in the cells of the Christian Brothers. For some priests, chastity is a suitable way of life. So be it. But I’ve seen the best of our breed become drunks and worse…what has bloody torn me up is that a priest can be an alcoholic, he can play with little boys, but God forbid he touches a woman. That is our ultimate sin. And the bloody hypocrisy of the Church’s covering it up and even turning on our victims.

“When you touched me, Rachael, it was the most powerful truth of my life. And the truth was, THEY HAVE LIED TO ME. It cannot be God’s will that man be celibate. God tells me that you and I are right. The love of a man and a woman is the highest order of giving praise to God.

“Each probe to each question I ever made was met with dogma that I must accept without question. But God kept rattling me, telling me, ‘Dary Larkin, they are perpet
uating a lie.’ They turned us into neuters so the Church would own us, body and soul, and we could not have families to share our lives because it would take time away from the Church.

“They have stolen God’s most precious gift…you, Rachael…in order to keep me in total servitude. Well, seeing this for the lie it is…a lot of other things began to unravel in me. Still, I cannot come to terms that I’ve wasted my life. I cannot believe that my work as a priest has not made things better. I want to be a priest—but to be the best priest I can be, I need you as my wife. We can’t bear another pregnancy, Rachael.”

“What are you telling me, now?”

“You’re young. In time you’ll get over me. The other way out is a road not worth taking.”

“Dary, you’re lying to yourself. You’ve never given in to them, totally. You’ve had the scent of freedom and, with me or without me, you’re going to have to stand up and face all their inquisitions and black magic and damnations and whatever else they throw at you. But don’t do it for me. Do it for Dary Larkin. This is what has been dealt you. If you can’t be the priest they want, then get out before they make you into a priest you’ll hate. I’ll take all the rotten garbage they’ll throw at me, because I know what God means for us. Otherwise I want to walk in the sunlight with you. No more of the hiding and shame.”

“Don’t curse me as well, Rachael.”

“Did you learn nothing from Conor and my mother? Or Conor with that Shelley girl? Don’t you believe God smiled on them?”

“Then you’ll wait for me?” Dary asked.

Rachael was her mother’s girl. She knew instantly what he meant. But now, her fright was in common with every woman. She could not bring herself to ask the question.

He took her hands in daylight. “Look at me, Rachael, now there’s my girl. I want to go to France because this is the best my church has to give. The trenches are filled
with Irish lads who desperately need me. I’m not trying to play the Lord’s game from both sides. I am not guilty about one minute with you. I know God approves of our love. Yet my own heart needs healing and I must earn my passage in the trenches.”

“You’re right, Dary. We need to stake our claim. It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? I’ll be waiting.”

“And when I come back, I’ll take on anything they throw on us. I love you so, my Rachael.”

“I take it you’ll be leaving shortly?”

“I need no further training for my job except to harden up a little. I’m off to England and have been promised a newly formed Irish unit.”

“When?”

“Three days.”

“Oh, thank God. I was terrified you were going to leave right now.”

“Saying good-bye to Rory was very hard. But I feel a contentment, a happiness in knowing that I’m a Larkin. I’m happy that we have already been united.”

“Don’t you think we ought to go to our room?”

“I was wondering about that. I’m worried about getting you pregnant again.”

She leaned up and whispered into his ear. “Mom told me there are lots of ways we can do it without actual, well, you know, official fornication.”

Roger Casement was an off-horse in the republican movement. His role in the Easter Rising, as his role in life, had been one of a loner.

Born to an Ulster Protestant family, this brilliant and compassionate soul joined the British Consular Service where he won international renown as a humanitarian and was ultimately knighted as a Commander of St. Michael and Knight of the Realm.

Casement’s struggle was to break through bureaucratic bulwarks to expose conditions in the Belgian Congo Free State. Native workers on the rubber plantations were starved, killed, or had their ears cut off. Women and children were punished by amputation of their limbs.

Casement found more of the same in British-owned plantations in Brazil, where a common punishment was fire-branding the genital openings of both men and women.

Like many good Irish missionaries who went into places that only Irish missionaries would dare, Sir Roger finally wrecked his health and returned to Ireland and retired.

Having fought the cruel treatment of colonials all his career, he was inexorably drawn to protest the centuries of bondage of his own country. Casement joined a long list of Anglo-Protestants from Wolfe Tone to Charles Stewart Parnell who took up the cause of republicanism.

The Brotherhood took advantage of his years as a skilled diplomat and assigned him a number of overseas missions. As the time for the Rising drew near, Casement was dispatched to America to obtain Irish-American support and money. The mission was a failure.

He was then sent to Germany to obtain arms. The Germans had been supplying vast numbers of arms to the Ulster Volunteers before the war and at the same time, keeping an open line to the Brotherhood, their main purpose to embarrass the British.

To test the waters now, the German Staff came up with a clever plan. They had captured a few thousand Irishmen on the Western Front. Casement was given the offer to try to form an Irish Brigade for the German army from these prisoners.

Casement was only able to enlist fifty-two men to fight the British, and some of those were of questionable background.

The bloom was off the rose. Instead of the hundred thousand rifles that Casement insisted were necessary to support the Rising in the countryside, the Germans agreed to send one shipload of twenty thousand, just to keep their hand in.

These arms on the converted freighter
Aud
ended up at the bottom of Tralee Bay due to missed signals. Casement had been returned by submarine and was turned in to the Constabulary by an informer from the “Irish-German” volunteers.

As the Easter Rising was bombarded into submission, the countryside failed to join in. Sir Roger Casement was whisked away to London to be separated from the run-of-the-mill Catholic rebels. Here, indeed, the British had bagged the traitor’s traitor, one of their own who could be tried in London and held aloft as a name to be reviled for all times.

He had been a man of six feet, greatly handsome, bearded and with extraordinary, seeking dark eyes. His imprisonment singled him out for humiliation. Without a belt and losing weight rapidly, keeping his pants up had become a major problem. Symbol of symbols, the Tower of London was
his final internment place. No one could miss the point. What was left of Casement’s health deteriorated rapidly.

The British added the acid of homophobia. Casement had lived quietly with his homosexuality, rendering harm to no one. Yet how lovely to be able to make a link to the case of another Irish homosexual, Oscar Wilde, who had been imprisoned after a withering prosecution by Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster loyalists. Could not a case be drawn that Wilde and Casement were afflicted with the same diseased flaw in the Irish race?

Casement was refused a trial in his own country; he was denied access to bathing facilities, and his broken body became scaled with open sores. With his energy bled dry and in a deep depression, Casement yet managed to keep the great Irish weapon,
words
, and indeed, he had the last word.

Unlike the rebels of Dublin whose crimes were not clear and who were tried and killed in secret, Roger Casement had committed treason under British law. The showcase trial was staged to vindicate British justice.

Yet it was the words, piercing from the lips and pen of Roger Casement, that were to immortalize the affair and ring out to a world of small peoples who were listening intently.

The dead martyrs of Stonebraker’s Yard in Kilmainham Prison reached out from their graves, crying out in concise measure that no other armies nor leaders of wars nor rebellions in all of England’s history were taken out and executed.

The Irish legacy threading from generation to generation
was not much more than the grace of words from the dock, and few were more profound than those of Sir Roger Casement.

Irishmen, who yesterday seemed content with the status quo, awakened these days to view their national personality that ranged from compliance to cowardice. The most legal of all the Easter Rising trials now clearly seemed the instrument of British revenge. But open public trials have their risks, and even in the end when he was sentenced to be executed by hanging, Casement was granted the “fair play” of the last word:

The British Cabinet floundered. If they could only convince Casement to say his real purpose in returning to Ireland was to stop the Rising, then they’d have an out to reducing the death sentence to a prison term without losing face. He wouldn’t hear of it. Casement’s compassion for humanity was what emerged from that courtroom, above the charges, above the sentence itself. The smears of his homosexuality were lost in the man’s eloquence.

Casement smashed his glasses in his cell, cut his wrist, and tried to rub in a poison powder he had hidden in his jacket. He was found, rushed to the hospital, and saved for another day.

Sir Roger Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison on August 3, 1916.

In Ireland there was a nationwide introspection and facing up to centuries of denial. In truth, as a people, they had not shown the stuff of free men. The moment had come in their history to redeem themselves as a people.

An answer had to be forthcoming quickly to the death of the Easter Rising martyrs.