Of Irish Blood (62 page)

“Thank you, but I won’t,” he says.

He looks over at the parish priest. Dear God, they’re giving what little food they have to us. What to do? So I say, “Mr. Jenson, I have this money I was given to spend for dinner in Dublin and since I dined with friends perhaps…” Cyril catches on. “Give it over, Nora. I’ll use it to stand our hosts a few rounds of sandwiches and even perhaps a drop of the
créatúr
as they say, out here.”

He’s off into the kitchen. I like Cyril more every day. He comes back smiling. “Nora,” he says to me, “you won’t believe what I saw out the kitchen window.”

“What?”

“The sun. Why don’t you take a dander outside while we finish listing all the crimes.”

I walk out and there it is, Galway Bay. The sunlight hits the waves. Very like Lake Michigan really, except here I can see across to the other side. Wait, hills. Yes. Those are the green hills of Clare that Granny told us about.

I stand on a swath of empty ground in front of the bay. Only green grass, no houses. Strange, that, because there are cottages behind me and to the right and the left. Just none here.

Fishing boats are coming up to the pier. Small, compact little crafts with red sails.

“Púcáns,” a voice says. One of the fishermen come to stand beside me.

“Púcáns,” I repeat. A word I somehow know.

“My granny was born on the shores on Galway Bay,” I say.

“Where would that be?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“How can you not?” he asks.

Cyril, Mr. Jenson, and the other men come walking out of the pub.

Cyril says, “Decent weather for our trip to Connemara. A bleak enough place in the best of times, but desperate in the rain.”

The five men climb into the back of the big touring car. Cyril driving. Me next to him and a new guide sitting in the front seat with us.

“Meet John O’Connor,” Cyril says.

Very handsome, tall, early thirties I’d say. Dark hair, blue eyes. He could be one of my own uncles. The fellows in Galway are bigger than the Irishmen I’ve seen in Dublin. He doesn’t listen to Cyril, who talks away, but looks out the window. Then turns around, watching the road behind us.

“I don’t think the Black and Tans will be out yet,” Cyril says to him. “Sleeping off their hangovers. Drunk half the time. What do you expect? Only convicts after all. In jail for snatching some little old lady’s purse and all of a sudden they are soldiers. Given guns and the chance to do real damage.”

“Well enough to keep an eye,” John O’Connor says.

“The old Bog Road,” he tells us as we turn straight into a circle of mountains. “The Twelve Bens,” he says.

Peter’s mountains, I think.

Glorious now against the blue sky, points of green amid the brown land splashed with white sheep and the yellow bushes.

“What is that bush?” I ask.

“Furze,” Cyril says.

“Whin,” John O’Connor says.

“Beautiful,” I say.

“Too bad we can’t eat scenery,” John O’Connor says.

Cyril snorts but John smiles. Not immune to this startling landscape, I think.

“Turn up this lane,” John says. “Something I want you to see.”

Cyril’s not pleased. “We don’t have time. I don’t want to drive these roads in the dark.”

“It’s important, Cyril,” John says.

“A detour, gentlemen,” Cyril says to the committee.

Cyril pulls up to another cottage that’s black and charred, the roof falling in and the walls nothing but a few stacked stones. Abandoned, no one near. A great view though, the sea below and not far away a lake.

“Lovely and destroyed. All right, let’s go,” Cyril says.

“We should get out. This is Pádraic Pearse’s cottage,” John O’Connor says.

“Oh,” Cyril says.

Peter was here when the young Dublin schoolmaster built this retreat, I think. “I watched Pearse fall in love with Ireland,” Peter told me.

The committee members are out of the car. Walking up to the cottage.

“Made a party of destroying it, the Tans did,” John O’Connor says. “Drinking porter and singing and cursing us all. The local farmers saw it, could do nothing to stop them.”

“Poor Pearse,” Cyril says.

A few of the committee nod.

“Now gentlemen,” Mr. Jenson says. “You know that we can’t be in any way political. This is a humanitarian mission.”

“Ah but Mr. Jenson,” Cyril says. “A country needs its heroes.”

I walk around to the front of the cottage that faces the lake. I notice bouquets of red and yellow flowers set in the doorway.

John O’Connor follows me.

“Primroses,” he says. “Used to grow wild all around the cottage. This is the time they bloom, but the Tans dug up the flower beds. Can’t let anything Irish grow free.”

“Somebody’s tried to replace them,” I say. “I had a friend who used to spend time here with Pearse. Peter Keeley from Carna, would you know him?”

John O’Connor shakes his head. “I don’t,” he says. I hear Cyril calling for us.

The committee members are in the car.

“We’re staying with John and his wife Maura tonight,” Cyril says as we turn back on the road.

“Good,” I say to John. “I want to stay in a cottage, not in another fancy hotel.”

Dark by the time Cyril stops in front of a very big house. I wonder where the O’Connors’ cottage is. But John gets out of the car and opens the back door for the committee fellows, who are half asleep.

“You live here?” I say to John O’Connor.

“I do,” he says, and laughs. “My wife and I look after the lodge for the Berridges. When they’re here I do gilley, take him out fishing. Maura cooks.”

“And they’ve invited us? How nice,” I say.

“In a manner of speaking,” John says.

Maura O’Connor, blond and almost as tall as John, leads us into a room with a blazing turf fire, big soft chairs, and a wall of books. No ancestral portraits on the wall. Rather an array of watercolors, all of wildflowers. I walk over to look closer as the men settle down by the fire with hot whiskeys. Maura joins me.

“Mrs. Berridge paints. Loves the countryside. She’s a Lesley.”

Here it comes—the Family Tree. “And he was born a MacCarthy. So.”

“So what?” I ask.

“Sympathetic,” she says. “They’d be delighted that you were staying here. But better not to bother them. They’re over at Ballinahinch.”

Now that’s a name I think I know.

“Is that a famous place?”

“It is. Grace O’Malley’s Castle sits on an island in the lake. And the Martins were there forever. Had to sell to some company. Berridges bought it from them.”

“I think my granny had some story about Ballinahinch.”

Oh why hadn’t I listened, I think, for the hundredth time since I’ve come to Ireland.

“The Berridges rarely come here,” Maura goes on. “I told them the lodge would make a wonderful hotel. A place for Irish Americans like you to come when the Troubles are over and Ireland’s free.”

“And you think that will happen?” I ask Maura.

“I am sure of it,” she says.

The parish priest from Carna, Father Michael McHugh, joins us for dinner. I’m sure he knows Peter, so I say “I studied at the Irish College” to draw him out. Cyril kicks me under the table. I’m quiet as Father McHugh tells the same story we’ve heard. Shops destroyed, cottages burned, and the creameries, always the creameries targeted.

“Diabolical,” he says.

Mr. Jenson writes down his words. The others ask questions. Quakers, all of them, quiet men, plainspoken, but appalled at what they are hearing.

“I expect you’re an early riser,” Maura says to me as she shows me to my bedroom. Solid with its mahogany furniture, canopy bed. “Your window faces Lough Inagh. The sunrise will be beautiful. Great for photographs. I think you’ll want to go out into it, see the lake and have a look at the mountains.”

“I thought I might sleep in,” I say.

Maura shakes her head. “I’ll knock on your door with early tea,” she says.

Oh, well.

“Any chance it could be early coffee?” I say.

Still dark outside my window when the dawn comes. I open the door to find a scone and a pot of coffee. I drink it as I dress. Yes, I should go out for the sunrise. I take the Seneca.

The sky’s lightening as I walk down a small dock and look into the lake. So clear. A mirror, reflecting the brown mountain surrounded by streaks of clouds. A red sun rising behind me. Quiet. All alone for the first time in days. I frame the mountain. Start shooting. In the lens I see a man coming slowly down the mountain across the lake. Checking his sheep, I think. How do the lambs manage to climb so high? Must be chasing one, he’s moving fast. I watch as he reaches the base of the mountain then gets into a boat. A curragh? Part of Granny’s stories, too. He seems to be rowing right to this dock. A message? The boat’s closer now. The man waves at me. I think I hear my name. A trick of the wind in the mountains.

Then again, “Nora, Nora.”

Oh, dear God.

“Peter,” I call back, “Peter,” because it is Peter Keeley, coming to me right out of the Connemara mountains.

I grab the bow, and pull the boat in to the dock. He jumps out.

Thinner then when I saw him last and with a thick beard. He rubs his hand along his face. “I’d have shaved if I knew. John only just came up to us. I couldn’t believe you were here.”

“Oh, Peter” is all I can think to say.

We stand apart staring at each other.

“So you’re not alone,” I say.

“A good few of us up there,” he says, “the remnants of the Galway Brigade. Hiding out mostly but we’ve picked off a few of the Tans. We have two of the rifles the Childerses sailed into Howth.”

So matter-of-fact, my gentle Peter. But after what I’ve seen, I understand his fierceness.

“And are you well?” he asks me.

“Me? I’m fine.” This small talk is ridiculous. “I’ve missed you, Peter,” I say. He nods.

Now I, of course, want to throw myself into his arms but have even seven years of world war, revolutions, millions dead, and a world turned upside down loosened the inner bonds that hold Peter Keeley?

Finally I say, “For God’s sake, Peter, I’m your wife more or less. Are we going to stand out here chatting until a load of Black and Tans arrive?”

I take his hand, rough now and hard. Not the scholar’s hand that touched me so gently in my room over the place des Vosges. I turn him toward the house.

“Late sleepers, my American colleagues,” I say. “A very good chance no one is stirring and my room’s near the door.”

Peter shakes his head.

“Too dangerous. Informers everywhere, Nora. There’s a hunger for money in this country now and the British pay big rewards for information. Someone passing by might see me go in. Even one of your own crowd.”

“We’ll find some place right now, Peter Keeley, or I’ll turn you in myself. I haven’t waited for seven years only to shake your hand and wish you well,” I say.

“There’s a hut a bit up that mountain behind us,” he says, pointing down the road. “A shepherd’s shelter,” he says.

I pull his hand up the narrow sheep trail into the hut.

We have only an hour together but I find I remember every curve of that long body. He’s a bit awkward at first but relaxes until the two of us move together easily with no effort at all. How I’ve missed him. Longed for this connection, the ease, the flood of feelings. The seven years go away, so does the hut, the mountain even. We are in the place I’ve imagined so often, far away from war and Black and Tans and burned-out villages.

“Ah Nora,” he says. “I’ve been so unfair to you. Even this…”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m stuck here, Nora, until I get arrested or worse. No future at all for us.”

“What sure future for anybody, Peter? None at all for the boys slaughtered at the Somme or Belleau Wood. You’re alive. We’re together. More than I ever expected.”

“You must go back to America. Tell them what you’ve seen. Help the Cause from there. Be safe.”

“I can’t go home now. I owe something to Ireland. I’d be betraying Granny and Mam—all the Kellys and Keeleys—if I left. I’ll finish my job with the committee then I’ll come back to you,” I say. “I’ll photograph every wrecked cottage and creamery in the country and publish them in so many American newspapers the British government will be too ashamed to stay in Ireland.”

Peter smiles.

“Hard to shame the Sassenach. They won’t go easily and if they do, they’ll leave bitter dissension, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, Peter, why do you always expect the worst?”

“You are such an American, Nora,” he says.

He lets me take his photograph and then I stand in the shed and watch Peter Keeley down to the shore into his curragh and away. I’ll return in a month, I think. Set up an office of the relief committee here. Work with the Irish White Cross. Use the lodge as my base. I’m an American. What can the English do to me? I’ll be representing an organization with clout. Didn’t the president himself endorse us? What had Maud said? We Americans didn’t know our own power.

But Maura O’Connor shakes her head.

“Come back and stay here? But, Nora, the Berridges may return. You can’t stay here.”

“Then there’s surely a hotel somewhere nearby,” I say.

“There surely isn’t,” she says.

The rest are ready to leave. John’s loading the suitcases.

“Come on, Nora,” Cyril says. “We’ve dozens of places waiting for us.”

“I’m not leaving,” I say. “Unless I’m sure I can come back. This is where my people are from. This…”

“You won’t be returning as a representative of the Committee for Relief in Ireland, you must be appointed. The board would never approve,” Mr. Jenson says.

I should have kept my plans to myself, I think. Will I never learn to keep my mouth shut?
Ná habair tada.

“All right,” I say. “Forget it. Let’s go.”

“About time,” Cyril says. “Already getting a late start. The Tans could be out now.”

“No ‘could’ about it,” John O’Connor says. “There’s a lorry full of them turning in the drive now.”

“Oh, shite,” Cyril says. “John, we best leave by the back door. You talk to them, Mr. Jenson. And you, Nora Kelly, keep your trap shut.”

This is a very different group from the army officers who raided Maud’s Dublin home. These are thugs. Pure and simple. Splintering the old oak door with their rifle butts before Maura can open it. And the uniforms, if you can call them that, dirty khaki pants, old police jackets such a dark blue as to be black. The Black and Tans in the flesh. They all need a shave and a bath from the smell of them. Not young.