After the Lockout (24 page)

‘Aye, it's bullshit and you're nothing but a dirty fucken crippled Tommy fucken liar, you and your fucken king.'

‘Calm down now, Victor,' says Turlough.

‘Don't tell me to calm down. What was he doing when I was fighting for Ireland? He was bayoneting fellow workers and singing about how the sun never sets on the British fucking Empire. Hoping to get himself an OB fucken E.'

‘There's no call for that now, Victor,' says Jerry McGrath at my shoulder.

‘Charlie Quinn is a traitor to his country,' I say. ‘He joined up because he's loyal to the king of England and he thanks God the surgeon saved his knee because that's where he lives, on his knees.'

Father Daly appears at the back of the crowd and calls on everyone to break up the scene. The mob parts and I see Ida, still standing in the doorway across the street, watching. ‘Stand aside there, let me through,' Father Daly commands. ‘What's going on here?' he demands when he reaches the front.

‘Look at what they've painted, Father,' Kate McDermott shrieks, pointing to the hammer and sickle.

‘That's just a squiggle. Ignore it,' says Father Daly.

‘Are you siding with him?' Charlie snaps dementedly.

‘I'm siding with no-one, now all of you go home,' barks the priest.

‘You're siding with this dirty fucker who has been in and out to Ida Harte every night since he got home?'

‘Shut up now, Charlie,' said Father Daly.

‘Every night he's in to see that little kitty. Sure half the street hears her moaning like a banshee.'

Aidan Cavanagh turns to me. ‘Victor, it's not true. Is it?'

Every night, indeed. Charlie's a liar. I don't suppose people will appreciate the distinction if I tell them it was only once, though. But they aren't even looking at me. They're turning to Kate McDermott's doorway, where Ida stands. The crowd is satisfied of her guilt. A stone the size of a chestnut thuds savagely on her breastplate. She puts her hand to her throat and her impish face screams but no sound comes out. A smaller stone hits her shoulder and she makes a pathetic appeal for mercy, but a rock the size of a whiskey tumbler cracks sickeningly against her temple, and a jet of blood flashes across the street as she falls to the ground. Aidan Cavanagh leaps over the wall into the crowd and throws punches left and right, his face contorted with hate. No more stones are thrown but cries of whore and slut and jezebel rain down on Ida with as much ferocity, if less injurious an impact. Father Daly is unable to rein in the mob as they shout for Ida's hair to be hacked off and for her skin to be tarred. Ida is a ball curled in Kate McDermott's doorway, her head and face covered. They might kill her and I won't be able to stop them. Thank God Benedict sweeps into view, cassock swishing and cane clicking with menace. He stands over the visibly trembling girl and faces her tormentors. The mob shrinks from him.

‘All of you. Home,' he hisses. No-one moves until Benedict slaps his cane against the ground. ‘Now!' he roars, and on both sides of the Poor Ground wall the crowd thins in an instant. Through the dissipating mass I watch Benedict crouch over Ida. She clings to his garments. Aidan Cavanagh comes up and tells me I'm a filthy whoring I-don't-know-what, but I'm looking past him, watching Benedict wrap his cloak round Ida and help her up, like a bird protecting its young. Kate McDermott
shamefacedly bows and waits for the bishop and the jezebel to vacate her doorstep. Benedict looks at her with contempt. Aidan spits in my face but I can't take my eyes off Stanislaus Benedict as he leads Ida away. So
that's
how you do it.

Maggie exchanges glances with Charlie as he walks away, and soon everyone is gone but she and I, face to face across the Poor Ground wall. Her eyes sparkle like dew. I'm about to speak when her nose wrinkles and I feel her palm crack across my left cheek. It's loud and it burns. Her shoulders shudder as she hurries away. ‘I'm sorry,' I call after her with the half-heartedness of one who knows the insufficiency of the words. ‘I'm so sorry.'

I am alone in the Poor Ground now. Every house has its curtains pulled, as if a funeral is passing. I look at the People's Hall. It was supposed to make a proletariat of these peasants. The hammer and sickle paint is the same colour as Ida's blood. All revolutions are baptised in blood.

‘Jaysus, Victor, I've seen shooting, I've even seen a hanging, but never till I came to Armagh did I ever see a stoning. Youse are worse than Mohammedans in these parts,' says a voice behind me, an accent exotic in its broadness. Arthur Fox and Bat McClatchey are standing across the street dressed in long tan coats with trilbies pulled low over their faces. ‘They should never have let you out of Fron Goch,' Arthur adds, smirking.

‘We need to talk,' says Bat.

 

When we get to the house Pius is suspicious. Bat demands to know who this man is. ‘Who am I? This is my house! Who are you?' roars Pius, so incensed that he spills a drop from his cup. Bat looks at the spillage and shakes his head. I tell them Pius is my da.

‘We're sorry to intrude, Mr Lennon. My associate and I have business with Victor here. I'm afraid I can't elaborate. I'm sure you'll understand, sir, that it's better for everyone if you don't know any more than that,' says Bat, with a conspiratorial wink, and Pius seems mollified; Bat and Arthur carry with them a seriousness that demands respect. I give him a little nod, and he withdraws to the next room.

Bat sits down at the table but Arthur waits till I take a seat before he does. Arthur's eyes dart left and right, up and down, taking in every detail of the place. I don't like having him here, in the house I grew up in. It looks good, now that we have tidied it up, and we're sitting on furniture that would have been expensive in its day. We're in a big, bourgeois house, my comrade and I, one that testifies to money, and I just know he's sitting there, contrasting it to the purity of the squalor he comes from.

‘The Big Fellow wants to see you,' Arthur says.

The Big Fellow? That's what the Volunteers call Mick Collins. We don't. Arthur's one of us, Citizen Army to the backbone. We weren't fooled by that hallucinating poet Pearse and we aren't about to be fooled by some bourgeois bogger with gombeen pretensions. Not Mick Collins and not that strutting Spanish peacock DeValera either. Connolly was a big fellow. Collins doesn't measure up. Not to us.

‘You never showed at Shanahan's,' says Bat.

‘I was there. Phil threw me out.'

‘All right then. But a few weeks pass and still no word. A man starts to wonder,' says Arthur. ‘And then we get wind of this.' He reaches inside his coat and takes out a newspaper. It's this week's
Armagh Guardian
. I haven't seen it yet. He sets it on the table so I can see the headline.

SINN FEIN COMMUNIST DECLARES ‘MADDEN SOVIET'

‘TP, you bastard,' I mutter under my breath.

‘This confuses the issue, Victor,' says Bat.

‘Am I in trouble?'

Arthur holds up his hands and Bat shakes his head, as though the very thought is ridiculous. ‘I told the Big Fellow you probably just needed some time at home, back on the home patch. Back on home soil,' says Bat.

‘Back to see the family,' says Arthur.

‘It's understandable. Perfectly understandable.'

‘See some old friends. Maybe a sweetheart?'

‘Everyone understands. You'd need a heart of stone not to.'

‘The Big Fellow doesn't blame you.'

‘Nobody blames you.'

‘You're not in trouble.'

‘We all have families.'

‘But it's time to come back.'

‘Back into the fold.'

‘The work is only getting started.'

‘He wants to see you. We need good men.'

‘You've proved your worth. Everyone respects you.'

‘But this,' says Bat, pointing at the newspaper headline, ‘this sort of shite only confuses the issue.' He sits back in the chair. Arthur leans forward and fixes me with a stare that, I suppose, is meant to convey a guarantee. I meet his stare.

‘I never heard one of us call Mick Collins the Big Fellow before,' I say to him.

‘Fool around with me and I'll fucking bury you, Lennon,' Arthur replies.

‘Cool down, both of you,' says Bat. ‘Victor, it's going to be different this time. No more fighting on their terms. We have a new strategy, like what Zapata's doing.'

‘And if we succeed, what kind of Republic will it be? Good and Catholic.'

‘There's Protestants with us,' Bat says.

‘Not from around these parts there's not.'

‘They'll fucken learn.'

Arthur seems anxious to avoid this particular blind alley. ‘It's not about religion, Victor, it's about escaping from the empire so we can build socialism.'

‘A revolution without a social programme is no revolution at all, it's just a sleazy wee coup. Tell me about Mick Collins's social programme, comrade.'

‘First the political revolution. Then the economic and social revolution.'

‘Fucken Menshevik.'

Arthur reaches across the table for me in a rage but Bat stands up and holds him off. He gives us a moment to cool down before he turns to me. ‘Lookit, Victor, fuck the social programme. This isn't some high-stool debate, this is war with the British Empire. We are tearing down the butcher's apron and kicking king George out of our country, that's our social programme. Support around the country is growing every day. We have the numbers now. What's needed is leadership. And anyone who was out for Easter Week qualifies. A thousand lads will die for you, just because you were there. You're an Easter veteran, Victor. People see magic in that.'

‘So we're all Volunteers now, are we?'

‘Sinn Féin is the new vehicle,' says Bat.

‘Those Austro-Hungarian fruitcakes aren't even republicans.'

‘They are since we took them over. The press all over the world called our rising the Sinn Féin rebellion.'

‘Sinn Féin had nothing to do with the Rising.'

‘There'll never be another one without somebody calling themselves that. It might as well be us. Right or wrong, the name has currency now,' says Bat.

So a tone-deaf, know-nothing sub-editor in London, knowing little of politics and less of Ireland, makes a stupid mistake, and now we're all Sinn Féiners. I suppose that's mostly what history is: morons messing up the details.

‘Is Peadar O'Donnell with us?' I ask.

Arthur nods. ‘And he's ten times the socialist you are,' he says, looking round the room with feigned admiration, really making a show of it, like he has never before seen such opulence. I suppose to a man from the tenements it seems big, but he's acting like he's in the Palace of fucken Versailles or somewhere. ‘Some of us didn't get to choose our class enemy. You don't know what it is to watch your child go hungry for the sake of your principles, Victor.' He stops glancing around and looks me dead in the eye. ‘The lockout was easy for you.'

I dive across the table and before I am able to remind myself that he'll make mincemeat of me, I smack his rotten mouth. He falls back off the chair and I move towards him, but Bat steps between us and pulls a revolver out of his coat pocket. I stop dead. The barrel of the gun points me a few steps back. ‘I told you to stay calm,' he says. Behind him Arthur gets up and wipes a tiny sliver of blood from his lip. The look he gives me is terrifying. He grabs my lapel and I try to shrug him off but he's strong as a piston. I await the blow but it doesn't come. He thrusts an envelope inside my jacket. ‘That's your train ticket,' says Bat. ‘Now start walking.'

Behind me the door swings open and Pius steps in slowly with the shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm and pointed straight at Bat's chest. ‘Stand aside, Victor,' he says, directing Bat and Arthur to the door with the gun.

‘Please, Da, you don't know who these men are,' I say.

‘You: you set that gun down,' Pius says to Bat, ignoring me.

‘I'd do what he says,' Arthur mutters tersely to Bat. They both seem respectful of the violence they imagine Pius to be capable of.

Bat sets the revolver on the ground and steps away. ‘Just so you know, and just so you can't say you don't know, that weapon is the property of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Someone will be back for it,' Bat says.

‘You know the OC in this area?' says Pius.

Bat and Arthur exchange glances. ‘Maybe,' says Arthur.

‘Well, maybe you can tell him I'll meet him tonight. Tell him to watch for me at the Poor Ground. I'll return it to the ranking officer. That's the way you're supposed to do it, isn't it?'

‘All right.'

‘You two had better not be anywhere near.'

‘Fair enough, Mr Lennon. But if the OC doesn't have the gun by tonight, well, we'll be back soon enough. That fair?' says Bat.

Pius nods. ‘And if ever I see you again, I won't ask your business, I'll just start shooting. That fair?'

Stanislaus laid Ida on the couch in the kitchen and cleaned out the nasty cut to her left temple. She braved the icy sponge and the sting of the vinegar with the stoicism of a nun. When the wound was cleaned and dressed with a sticking plaster he pressed a large cut of rump steak into her hand and guided it to her eye. ‘To prevent the swelling,' he said. After a while he lifted the steak and examined the eye. ‘I've seen a lot worse,' he told her. Mrs Geraghty gave Ida a cup of tea, and Ida scrunched up her face as she sipped it.

‘Sugar for the shock,' said Mrs Geraghty.

Ida fell asleep, and Stanislaus followed the housekeeper into the hall. ‘Thank you, Mrs Geraghty,' he said.

‘She didn't deserve that. But it was bound to happen. She has every married woman in this parish driven to distraction, Father.'

Father Daly spent the afternoon walking the parish and gauging the mood. He came back and told Stanislaus that some thought Victor Lennon was a living prophet, that it was all lies about himself and Ida and by God they'd be at the dance; others, a majority, thought he should be run out of the parish and Ida Harte too, and anybody going near the Poor Ground Hall should be excommunicated or shot, or both. The second group included some who had helped build the hall, and had walked out of the chapel with Victor. Stanislaus went to the couch and woke Ida. He told her it would be safer if she waited for darkness before he brought her home. She insisted she wasn't afraid of anyone, but he told her to hush. ‘It's time I heard your confession, child,' he said.

Ida shrank and shook her head violently, her hair moving like a nest of serpents. ‘I confessed the other day, Father.'

‘You will not address me as Father. I am Stanislaus Benedict, Auxiliary Bishop for the Metropolitan See of Armagh, retired, Titular Bishop of Parthenia, Bishop Emeritus. You will address me as Your Grace and I will hear your confession, child.'

At length she wilted beneath the bishop's implacable stare, and slowly, she blessed herself. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six days since my last confession.'

‘Tell me all.'

‘I used the Lord's name in vain. So that's blasphemy. I was disrespectful to my parents, so that's – what commandment is
that again? And wrath. I feel wrath.'

‘Against whom?'

‘All of them.'

‘Tell me about the fornication.'

‘Not since my last confession.'

Stanislaus hadn't thought of this. If Ida had already confessed her fornication she was under no obligation to confess it a second time. He could ask Father Daly what she had confessed to him, but that would mean breaking the seal of the confessional and it would be better to let the whole world fall first. He tried another strategy.

‘Ida, is fornication something that you have confessed more than once?' She stayed silent. ‘I'll take that as an affirmative. You know, Ida, any absolution a priest might grant is merely provisional, and dependent on whether it's a good confession. A good confession is when you're truly sorry and resolved not to repeat the sin. I don't think your previous confessions qualify.'

Deep in her abysmal eyes Stanislaus saw a weakening. Tears formed, as if the weight of her wickedness was wringing droplets of remorse out of her. He waited patiently. ‘I don't want to do it any more, but sometimes there's no food in our house and you'll do anything when you're hungry,' she said. Stanislaus put his hand on her shoulder, the rock of patience. ‘I lay down and opened my legs for money,' she went on.

‘Who?'

‘In Monaghan, before we came here. Soldiers, mostly.'

‘And here, in this parish?'

‘No soldiers here,' she said, putting up her hands as though she expected to be slapped at any moment. Eventually she nodded. He could see she needed reassurance.