Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (47 page)

It seemed that he could change his outward behaviors, but not the beliefs he’d held most deeply since he’d been able to draw together his own opinions. The belief that men were born with equality in their souls, that some rights were intrinsic to the human condition. These things were the foundation of his spirit, and as such could no more be abandoned than the color of his eyes, or the set of his jaw. Somehow this stubborn defiance in the face of terrible odds—this feeling that a man could rise above the circumstances of his birth, his streets, his tribe—was inherent to his very ability to get up and face the world each day. These things were like a dark tide that raced in his blood, making him long for and believe in things that, to another man, might seem pure madness. Could such things be genetic? He looked down to where his hands lay braced against the windowsill. In the shape of them he could feel his father’s touch, the strength that could both cradle and kill. He sighed and shut the window, then made his way down the stairs to where the kitchen’s wood floors and new sinks glowed dully in the fading light.

He checked that the windows and back door were locked up. He’d a busy stretch of days ahead of him at the center and it wasn’t likely he’d get back until the weekend. He paused on the doorstep, the serenity of the landscape stirring a quiet melancholy that sometimes caught him unawares.

He stood for a long time watching the soft smoke of twilight drift over the yard. In the dim the outlines of the buildings were muted, blending into the grasses and trees that surrounded them. Over the hill that crested up and away from the house, he could hear a cow lowing plaintively and the cawing of a lonely crow somewhere in the trees.

The first few stars were visible above the crest of the pines when he closed the door behind him and took the path that led home.

THE GENESIS OF THE IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY could never be pinpointed to a particular place on the map, nor an exact date in the history books. It had been the culmination of disparate ribbons of movement that had spread across the country in the eighteenth century, each ribbon eventually crossing the path of another and slowly forming a braid of cohesive movement.

Many felt the movement stemmed from the tragedy of the 1916 rising, in which poets and teachers and labor leaders had been shot down in the flower of their manhood, thus reaffirming the wheel of blood sacrifice on which the Republican movement ran. Casey felt the roots ran back much further though, certainly to the time of Theobold Wolfe Tone.

Wolfe Tone was an Irish Protestant, and the first man to marry the poor to the ideal of a Republic of equality in Ireland. Like many who would follow in his footsteps he ended his life in shame and disgrace in a filthy prison cell. The seeds had been planted though, and the harvest could not be prevented from coming to bloody fruition. Though it seemed at times that both man and nature had conspired to prevent anything from taking root in the soil of independence. For where man failed, the famine had almost succeeded in wiping out Ireland’s hopes for freedom.

In a country where seven out of every eight people were entirely dependent on the potato for survival, three seasons of blight meant a doom that was incomprehensible. In the summer of 1845 the fields of Ireland were lush and filled with the dark green leaves of an abundant crop. People looked forward to a quiet winter in which rents would be paid, children fed and the pig nicely fattened. Doom came quietly, a silent fog stealing over the land, within weeks the crop of potatoes was destroyed.

The tenant farmers held short-term leases that were payable every six months in arrears. If the tenants failed to make their rent they were jailed or evicted, their homes burned to the ground to prevent them from attempting to shelter there.

Starving men with dying children didn’t have the means to make rent, and yet the evictions just kept coming. The hills were aswarm with the hungry, whose wee homes had been tumbled to the muck by the landlord’s battering rams. Then came disease to join its black hand with the spectral one of hunger. What hunger alone could not accomplish, typhus and cholera swiftly did. Death seemed to fly in the very molecules of the air the people breathed, stealing across lake and land with an ominous silence.

The roads were adrift with beggars and vagabonds, men, women and children who already resembled the ghosts they would soon become. The entire country had become a living illustration of the book of Revelation, with the black horse of Famine running neck to neck with the white horse of Death. For indeed it seemed that the very stars of heaven itself must fall to the ground in witness to such a catastrophe, just as the book of Revelation had said they must. But they didn’t.

The carcasses of bled livestock littered the ground, skeletons picked clean of the little meat that had been left on their bones. Such sites would carry the taint of so much slaughter for decades to come, and would be known as the hollows or moors of blood. The beaches too would yield up bones for many years, of those who in their hunger had eaten food that was poison when raw, or when eaten in the amounts that a desperate man would take.

Hunger lent fuel to the underground movements, hunger and the impotent rage of seeing food leave the harbors for a country that viewed the Irish as subhuman at best, as illiterate beasts at worst. Landlords who chose to pay their debts rather than save the lives of the peasant tenantry upon whose backs their fortunes had been built. To flee seemed the only way to avoid a certain and painful death. And so the Irish fled to England and to the Americas, in one last desperate bid for salvation. If they survived the perilous journey, they found themselves in nations that resented them and the disease and poverty that trailed in their wake.

Most Irish had never been further from their homes than the next village, many had not even ventured that far. Now they were on the other side of the wide world in the role of reviled strangers, caricatures for the newspapers and society who saw them as a burden on the taxpayer. Many men who’d managed to escape the violence that rode the hills and dales of Ireland, were conscripted fresh off the boat to fight in the American civil war and would die on the bloody fields of the country where they had sought salvation.

In Ireland a new crop was rising, for starvation had sown hatred with a bountiful hand and the harvest of it would last more than a hundred seasons.

Wolfe Tone’s rebellion of 1798; Robert Emmet’s insurrection of 1803; the Young Irelander’s Outbreak of 1848; and the failed Fenian uprising of 1867. Then came Easter of 1916 and a handful of men who knew they could not possibly win and yet sought to declare Ireland a free nation despite the odds against them. They stood on the steps of the General Post Office that fateful Easter morning and proclaimed the Republic in the face of intractable British might.

‘We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years have they asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare and of its exaltation among the nations.’

The nation did not immediately rise to their cause, in fact they were the focus of much derision and laughter, until the British executed sixteen of them, one—James Connolly—so badly wounded that they had to tie him to a chair to kill him. The executions were a fatal mistake for it aroused the ire of the country and made of the motley crew of poets and politicians, martyrs in the blood tide of Ireland’s history. The terrible beauty, that would keep the hatred and the IRA alive for another century, had been born.

The British rule in Ireland would always show a complete lack of understanding for the Irish character. That men would continue to rise, without the support of country, without the hope of victory, without often the support of friends and family for an ideal that seemed destined to fail again and again, was beyond the realm of conventional thought. Such ideas were illogical, insupportable and furthermore—unconstitutional. And it was in these assumptions that England would always underestimate and misunderstand Ireland.

It was a mistake they kept making, time and again.

Revolution is always a dicey business, especially when a war lasts close to a millennium and both the British and the IRA would have done well to heed the words of Yeats,

‘
Too long a sacrifice, can make a stone of the heart.’

JAMIE’S HOUSEWARMING GIFT CONSISTED of an eight place setting of Belleek China smattered with pale green shamrocks, and a matching set of Waterford vases. For Casey there was a case of Connemara Mist. Lawrence’s gift was, at present, soundly and justly asleep under the kitchen table, having disposed of a boot, an umbrella and having been indicted in the knocking over a pail of hot water. The lad had christened the knobby kneed, puff-cloud gray pup Finbar, and the two had fallen as desperately and unequivocally in love as only a boy and a puppy can. Knowing that Casey viewed any overture of Jamie’s with a jaundiced eye, Pamela had worried that the dog wouldn’t be welcome.

“’Tis alright,” Casey said gruffly, “the man asked if I minded first. I think the whiskey was by way of a sweetener though.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No, a dog will do the lad good. He’s a bit closed off like, havin’ a dog will teach him about love and caring.”

It was their first evening in their new home and though she stood in a welter of boxes, tired, grimy and with a sneaking suspicion that Lawrence was currently out stealing a forbidden smoke behind the shed, she surveyed her surroundings with great satisfaction.

Upstairs their bedroom was ready for the first night in their new home. Casey had presented her with the bed for their anniversary in April, and though at the time the ancient four-poster had looked rather rickety and worm-eaten, he’d somehow managed to find the time to restore it. It was a lovely cherry-wood red and was piled deep and snug with a featherbed and three handmade quilts. As the chimney ran up through the bedroom Casey had built them a small fireplace there as well, which would be very welcome on chill winter nights.

Presently she stood in the kitchen where, despite her lack of talent in that area, Casey had gone to special pains to make a warm and inviting space. There was a large work area, big windows that caught the morning and early afternoon sun, open beams to hang pots and herbs from, and broad windowsills for all the greenery she insisted on growing year round. The left-hand wall was dominated by the fireplace, built from smooth round fieldstone that held a warm umber glow. The floors were broad laid pine planking, stained to a ruddy gold that was slightly paler than the cabinets.

One morning a week earlier, they had come with paint buckets in hand to put the finishing touches on the upstairs bedroom. On the front stoop they’d found a solid mahogany sideboard that had been painstakingly restored. A tiny scrap of blue paper had a short message, ‘
For the lady of the house’
.

“That’ll be from Mr. Guderson, I expect,” Casey had said, “Owen says the man has a rare hand with furniture. Will be his way of welcomin’ ye to the place.”

Pamela had raised her eyebrows at this. She’d only had two encounters with the taciturn Mr. Guderson and both had been largely silent, other than her own ‘hello’ and his curt lift of an extremely grubby cap.

The sideboard stood now opposite the fireplace, adorned with their every day blue delft plates and mismatched teacups. Pride of place, however, was held by Pamela’s Neptune tea set, a gift from her father on the last Christmas he’d been alive. The translucent china was the same color as the interior of an oyster shell—delicate pinks and grays, with opaline tints of rose, lavender and green. It was, other than a few books and some oddments, the only thing she’d brought with her when she’d come to Ireland. No house was a home to her until the tea set was unpacked, and the first pot of tea brewed in any new home was always made in it. After that they went back to the brown betty that served for their everyday use.

Casey came in just then, bringing with him the lush green smell of an early summer night. “That’s the last of the boxes then. I put yer books in the bedroom, near to killed my back with that last lot.” He sat down and sighed, stretching his legs out in front of him.

“Do you want a bite of something?” she asked.

“No—too tired, though a cup of tea in the quiet would be nice.”