A Star Called Henry (26 page)

—The uniform didn’t do me much good.

Piano Annie’s dead husband was the speaker and he was waving his stump. He’d joined up a couple of weeks before, a heart-stopping event when I looked up from the green book to take his name and gun money, until I was reasonably sure that he didn’t recognise me.

Archer spoke again.

—A man with a gun is a criminal. A man with a gun and the uniform is a soldier.

—Hear hear.

—True for you.

—A man with a uniform is a target.

Ernie O’Malley was the speaker this time. He was several cuts above the other young lads. I liked him. There was an intelligence about him, a twist to the lines on his forehead that impressed me. He was a saint who hung up his halo now and again.

Archer spoke again. He’d stood up and walked to the top of the room, put himself in charge.

—There are men in this room, he said,—who wore the uniform of the Empire and they now feel qualified to give us advice on what we should wear.

—I wore no uniform, said O’Malley.

—You have a brother, said Archer.

—I have several brothers.

—Serving the King of England, said Archer.

—This is ridiculous, said O’Malley.

—I needed the work, said Annie’s dead husband.—I couldn’t get work anywhere in Dublin after the Lockout.

I looked at Annie’s dead husband again. I tried to remember him, in a different place, four, nearly five years before, in the corridors or the soup kitchen in the basement of Liberty Hall, or up around Drumcondra at night, on the hunt for scabs. But I couldn’t see him in that time. He’d have been a young man back then, not the man I was looking at now, nothing like him.

There was no support at all in the room for Annie’s dead husband, no sympathetic nods or True for yous. Dinny Archer filled the gap.

—You and the likes of you were put out of work by unions controlled from England, he said.—They set Irishman against Irishman. And then off you went and did exactly what they wanted. You joined the King’s army, you and thousands like you too stupid to be called traitors, and you put back the real struggle by years.

—True for you, Dinny.

Annie’s dead husband wasn’t the only old soldier in the room.
The trenches are safer than the Dublin slums
, the recruitment poster had claimed, and it was true if it referred to the chances of your children getting a good meal. There were men in the room who’d gone to France to survive. Yet no one interrupted Archer. They were vulnerable, even frightened.

—The unions are there to deflect us, he said.—Larkin’s an Englishman. We don’t need or want their unions. Or Labour. If you want that, well, Russia’s the place for you. This is a fight for all Irishmen, not just a couple of west Britons.

What was I doing there?

There was a portrait of Connolly, another west Briton, on the wall behind Archer.

What the fuck was I doing there? Now, according to Dinny Archer and the True-for-you men behind me, that was what Connolly and Larkin had been up to: setting Irishman against Irishman, colluding with the Empire, forcing young men to become fodder for the King. I’d lived in Liberty Hall during the Lockout; I’d been taught to read, write and stand up straight by James Connolly himself; I’d been one of the first and certainly the youngest to join the Citizen Army, and I’d watched my comrades - there was a word I hadn’t used or thought of in a long time - I’d watched them being mown down on Moore Street as they ran at the barricades for Irish Labour. And now, I sat there and listened and left Annie’s dead husband stranded. I watched him shrink deeper into his threadbare jacket. I was tempted to hand over mine - his - to him; it was in much better condition. I let Archer insult him and me and the only people and everything I’d ever believed in.

Why?

And why did I come back the evening after?

Jack Dalton.

—Let them have their uniforms.

—What about secrecy—

—Listen, man, he said.—The half of them are spies, anyway. Remember that every time you open your mouth. Say what you want them to hear. And the other half are eejits. Let them buy their uniforms and then let them march up and down every bloody street in Dublin all night and all day. The more of them the better. And while they’re doing that and the peelers and their spies are following them, we’ll be somewhere else doing the real work. There are wheels within wheels, Henry. Cells inside cells. Put your coat back on. It’s time you met someone.

It was one o’clock in the morning when we went back out onto the street. We looked for the shadows of men hiding, we listened for scraping shoe leather before we moved off. And, as I always did in the real quiet of night, I listened for the tap tap of a wooden leg. We were alone on Cranby Row, as far as we could know.

We took a crazy route, across and back across Dorset Street three times before we headed north and east.

—Where are we heading?

—Someplace nice, said Jack.—
Oh he slipped through the night, did the bold Henry Smart.

We slid over a back wall, onto empty barrels and crates of empty bottles. Jack gave four raps and another one to a black back door. It opened and we were in.

Phil Shanahan’s pub. Not far from Dolly Oblong’s. Shanahan’s was one of the centres of the revolution. No pub ever did more for Irish freedom. There was no Phil or even a curate behind the counter but the place was full of men making smoke and quiet conversation. I followed Jack across the low-ceilinged room. There were faces I knew, that I’d last seen blackened and charred as the G.P.O. fell on us, and others I’d never seen before. Then Jack stood aside and I found myself looking at the broad, straight back of Michael Collins. The coat fit him well but it was ancient; his shoulderblades were coming through. There was a tear at the back of his trousers, below and behind the right knee.

He sensed us there and turned, a hefty lad with a face that was very pale, even in the half-dark of the room. He brushed back a lock of hair from his forehead.

—Well, mister, he said in that accent of his.—Are you ready for the next round of the fight?

—I am, I said.

He looked at Jack and back at me.

—The best of men, he said.

Before I went back to my bed that night I’d been sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the secret society at the centre of the centre of all things. I was a Fenian. I was special, one of the few. And before the end of the week, by late Saturday afternoon, I’d murdered my first rozzer.

A
protest meeting, proscribed, as we’d hoped it would be. Beresford Place, in front of the ruins of Liberty Hall. We were demanding prisoner-of-war status for the remaining Easter Week prisoners in Lewes Gaol. Things got ugly - we made sure they did, although the police never needed much help. During the scuffling and shouting I took a running swing at a Castle rozzer with my father’s leg. The papers the day after said it was a hurley. He hit the ground at the same time as the wooden smack came back at me, and the leg stung nicely in my hand. We were off the street and gone before the dead man, an inspector, was noticed. He was in plain-clothes, so the uniformed lads thought that he was one of us at first. They stepped over or on him in their efforts to get at more people and I was well away, making plenty of noise in a very public bar, whingeing about a horse out in Leopardstown that was chewing one of the fences instead of jumping it earlier in the day, before they noticed the elegant cut of the rozzer’s jacket and turned him over. And they saw the dent in his forehead.

That was the plan: one dead man.

—A taste of things to come, said Jack.—A little prologue.

One dead man. I wasn’t to shoot or knife him. Nothing too murderous; that was the order. The whack of a piece of wood, almost an accident.

—Only the lads in the Castle will be able to read the message properly, said Jack.—They’ll see the intention in the hollow.

And the British would hit back; they’d over-react. They always did. Over the next four years, they never let us down. It wasn’t that they made bad judgements, got the mood of the country wrong: they never judged at all. They never considered the mood of the country worth judging. They made rebels of thousands of quiet people who’d never thought beyond their garden gates. They were always our greatest ally; we could never have done it without them.

Count Plunkett, the non-sitting Member of Parliament for Roscommon North and father of executed Joseph Mary of Easter Week, an old man with a broken heart, was grabbed and arrested at the Beresford Place meeting. The Defence of the Realm Act - Big DORA - was swung threateningly all over the country. There were to be deportations, court martials for illegal drillings and marching and for the making of speeches likely to excite the populace. Swinging a hurley became an act of rebellion; being Irish was becoming seditious. We were forcing the issue and nobody knew who we were. And by the time the one hundred and twenty-two released men of Lewes, with de Valera looking well and sane again after his rest in jail, by the time they sailed up the Liffey and disembarked in exactly the spot where they’d been shoved aboard the year before, they were ready-made heroes: they’d sailed home into a new country. They were greeted by thousands and carried on eager shoulders through the streets to Exchequer Hall, where they signed a linen scroll, designed by Jack Dalton, embroidered by two fast-fingered girls from Cumann na mBan, a message for President Wilson and the United States Congress.

—We’re making history, said Jack.—Not just acting it out, man. We’re writing it. D’you know why there were thousands down at the docks today?

—Because I whacked the rozzer.

—Yes. That’s why, exactly.
We’re
deciding what’s going to happen next. Not them. If we do something, they’ll do something. If we do something else, they’ll do something else. It took us hundreds of years to figure it out but that’s what we’re doing now. Writing the history of our country. That’s what. We’re going to change the course of history, man. There’s only one future. The Republic. All others are going to be impossible by the time we’re finished. Fate, Henry, is my arse. We’re the gods here, man.

I believed him. One swipe of the da’s leg and the gobshites in the Castle had hopped. We had them on strings.
Now Henry Smart was a Dublin boy, a lad without equal or peer.

—It was your daddy’s leg decked the polis, wasn’t it? said Annie.

—Ask no questions, Annie, I said.

—I’m being ridden by a killer, she said.—Help, help.

And Collins sent me back to work on the docks.

—We need strong men and true down there, boy, he said.

He was sitting up on the desk in his new office on Bachelor’s Walk. The rip in his trousers had been nicely stitched. He nodded towards the window and the Liffey below it and the docks, and the world beyond them.

So back I went, past the nod of our little ally, the stevedore. I picked up a crate marked BIBLES - NO COMMERCIAL VALUE - Annie’s dead husband led me to it and winked - and I carried it back past the stevedore, around the corner, past Store Street D.M.P. Station and the morgue beside it, to Coolevin Dairies, a café under the Loop Line Bridge on Amiens Street, through the empty café, past the owner and his sister, into a back room, another of Collins’s offices. The man himself was there.

He looked at the crate in my hands. I was sweating.

—For me? said Collins.—Ah, Henry.

He yanked the lid off the crate without help from a crowbar or the skinny end of a hammer. He pulled back some straw and showed me the neat row of rifles, Smith and Wessons, new and beautiful, greased like things just born.

—We have friends all over the world, boy, he said.

From Sheerin’s they’d be carried under Cumann na mBan coats and petticoats, on trams and bicycles, to Kingsbridge Station and on down to the country, and across the road to Amiens Street, on up to Belfast and the north. I never met or saw any of the couriers. Collins kept his friends and contacts well away from one another. I delivered bibles, machine parts and fancy goods to Sheerin’s, the Bookshop on Dawson Street, even Harry Boland’s tailoring business on Abbey Street, off boats coming from Liverpool and Boston and strange places where there was no branch of the Gaelic League: Lagos, Bombay, Nairobi. I did this two and three times a week, carried my death sentence through the spy-filled streets of the city, and no one ever as much as brushed against me.

—Some of the peelers are ours now, said Jack.—Mick’s making friends everywhere.

—There’ll be no one left to fight, I said.

—We’re not home yet, man. A couple of crates of bang-bangs isn’t going to win it. They’ve two million squaddies in France and that war isn’t going to last for ever. And another thing.

He punched my arm.

—Only a few of those peelers are ours. Remember that the next time you’re delivering a crate of bibles.

—I’ll just leave this crate over here, Granny, alright?

—What did you steal this time? she said.

—I’ll come back for it tomorrow.

—Suit yourself, she said.

She blew the dust off the cover and devoured the first page of my latest offering,
Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House
, by Elizabeth Keckley.

—Is it any good? I asked.

—Remains to be seen.

She liked it.

—Tell me more about Gandon, Granny.

—Killing, she said.

—Killing?

—Killing. The hoppy fella did the killing for Gandon.

—What killing?

—All of it. There’s not much reading in this. I want more. There’s a Yank called Wharton. Get anything by her.

—I’ll keep an eye out for her.