Ellis Island (8 page)

He threw his cigarette onto the ground and crushed it under his boot. “No, Ellie, I don’t.”

I sensed he had wanted to fight, but had suddenly lost the will. I threw my arms round his neck and said, “I love you, John—more than anything else—more than all the money in the world.” His arms were weak around my waist, his hold loose. I kissed him, with the reassuring affection of a mother more than the longing of a wife. “Let’s go back inside—I’m frozen.”

“Go on,” he said, “I’ll follow you.” As I turned, he bent and rescued the half-smoked cigarette butt from the ground, studying the shreds of tobacco in his palm before dropping them into his pocket.

Chapter Fifteen

In the January following that Christmas, our lives changed forever.

The British government opened its prisons and sent over troops of violent thugs to quash our revolution. We called them the Black and Tans, because of the color of their uniforms.

I was in town the day they arrived. I had cycled in to do my messages. Maidy and Paud had given us five more laying hens for Christmas, and I had two dozen eggs in a basket to barter with or sell. Dear Maidy had also given me an old coat of her own; I had nipped it in at the waist, shortened it to my calf and sewn on a green tweed collar and cuffs torn from an old coat of John’s. I thought I was all style, and was looking forward to showing myself off.

The hill down to the main-street shops was steep, and I got off my bicycle at the top and started to walk, carefully holding a cloth over the eggs to protect them from the bounce of the rough road. The low whitewashed cottages on the outskirts of the town gave way to the two-story buildings of the merchant class, with the grand spire of the Protestant church presiding over them. I was just thinking how I would wrap the eggs up better next time, when a group of men, about eight of them, came out of the police barracks—a gray, imposing building a few doors down from the church. They were not policemen, and they were wearing uniforms that were not of the British army. They had jaunty little caps with bobbles on them that made them appear almost local, and they were carrying rifles. It crossed my mind that our own lads might have got themselves uniforms. They stopped outside Doherty’s pub, then two of them went in, leaving the others standing around outside. Almost immediately four town lads come out with their hands above their heads. They were Tommy Condon—Kathleen’s older brother, who was something of a simpleton; Padraig Phelan, a pleasant schoolteacher and a friend to John; the new curate, a nervous-looking man who had on a scarf covering his collar; and Cahill Murphy, a freckle-faced, cheeky lad whom I remembered as a small boy in school, and who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. A uniformed man was prodding Cahill Murphy with his rifle and screaming in a Scottish accent, “Move—you fucking Irish scum!”

The sound of his shouts made my insides tumble, and yet I was drawn closer to them. I propped my bicycle against a wall. There had obviously been some kind of mistake. As I approached, several other women of the town joined me, among them Mary Murphy, Cahill’s mother—a fierce, substantial woman who would tan his hide surely for getting caught in the pub at his age. She walked straight over to the group, and said, “I’ll handle this.”

As she pushed through them, one of the men turned and knocked her, hard, to the ground. I thought maybe it had been an accident, and ran forward to help her up. Yet another man held Mary down with his foot on her chest, and said, “The whore probably has a gun on her. Take her inside and search her.” As Mary struggled to escape like a trapped dog, the young soldier ground his foot into her abdomen until she stopped. I had not thought it would be possible to silence Mary Murphy, and her humiliation was terrible to witness. A crowd was beginning to gather, and she carefully curled her body into a ball and held her hands up to her face. Cahill’s insolent expression had crumbled into confusion. Tommy Condon was crying.

“Let her up!” a man shouted from the back of the crowd.

Another called, “Let her go, man!”

Nobody moved forward because the men had their guns trained on us. The anger and fear emanating from them were palpable; the air around them fizzed with danger. It felt as if there was no reason in them, or sense. I was terrified, not just for myself, but for what they might do to Mary when they got her inside, so I spoke out. “I’ll come in with you, Mary,” I said.

The one in charge, a short, thickset man of no more than forty, nodded at the young soldier to release the poor woman. As I helped Mary up, she clutched her stomach and yelped in pain. Cahill cried out, “Mammy!” but the soldier behind him whacked him across the head with the butt of his rifle and sent him tumbling to his knees. By this time, the whole village had gathered. We all called out “No!” in unison, and some of the crowd pushed forward.

“Get back, get back, you Irish fuckers!” the soldiers shouted, as if they were being attacked. Then, clearly thinking better of conducting their business in the street, they marched the four young lads across into the barracks, training their guns on the boys’ backs and also at the crowd, as they shouted at everyone to back off. “It’s all right now, everyone,” the new curate called back to us, his voice high-pitched in terror. “Just a misunderstanding, e-everyone go on home and about your business now . . .”

In the confusion, the soldiers left Mary behind. I persuaded her not to follow her son over to the barracks. “There’s no sense making it worse, Mary. He’ll be out in an hour when they realize he’s only a young lad.”

“He was in the pub,” she said, “and he’s only fifteen. I’ve told him a thousand times he’s not to go near the pub. He’ll get us all in trouble . . .” Mary’s two brothers came to take her from me. I handed the elder one her shawl and they wrapped it gently around their shattered sister’s head, guiding her hands up to her chin that she might hold it in place. As I watched the two men take her off down the road, I still was not sure exactly what I had witnessed.

The following day it was Maidy who came to tell me that Cahill Murphy had been beaten to death in the police barracks. “He’ll be out in an hour,” I had said to his mother. Standing in my kitchen, dry-eyed with disbelief at that innocent boy’s death—that was the moment my war began.

That night, Padraig Phelan came to our house and asked John to captain a unit. “We need you,” Padraig said. He reached under his long coat and pulled out a rifle. John took it and, across the safety of our hearth, he looked for my permission. He was tall and broad, his waistcoat stretched across his ribs, his white shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. The gun sat across his chest as natural as a woman cradling a baby. He was born to fight. I didn’t want my husband in danger, but a child had been murdered. I took the gun from John, kissed the cold gray steel of its barrel and handed it back to him. “You’ll stay for dinner, Padraig,” I said.

Later that evening, I sent John outside to fetch some turf and while he was gone I turned to Padraig. “I’m happy to do my part as well, Padraig, but feeding you all before left us nothing for the winter.” John came back into the room before Padraig could answer me, but I held Padraig’s eye as he rubbed his mouth and chin with his long, gentleman schoolteacher fingers, then finally gave me a small, serious nod. I knew John would be angry if he ever discovered I had put a proviso on our loyalty, but we’d be no use to anyone if we were hungry.

In bed that night, I could not sleep. The moon glared through the window, casting a gray pallor over my sleeping husband’s face—it was a cold light, the color of death. I reached across and touched the broad softness of his mouth with my fingertips, then held the back of my hand to his cheek. His skin was warm and the fact of his aliveness leapt through me, and I had to take my hand away and bring it to my mouth to suppress a sob.

Padraig helped us out. He lent us a few cows and sent his nephew—a skinny, pasty boy called Liam—to help me care for them, allowing John to captain his unit full time. For the next three months my husband left the house early in the morning and came back late at night. I did not ask where he was going when he left, or what he had done when he came home. I spent my days working in the house with only young Liam for company. Mid-morning I would call the boy in for a breakfast of bread and milk, and as the days passed his embarrassed silence gave way to easy chat. All Liam wanted to talk about was war—who had got shot, who was in what unit, what the Black and Tans had done to this one and that one. Shootings, death, injury: every day I was subjected to the bravado of a teenage boy anxious to brandish a gun, until I banned all talk of war in my house.

Every night I fed the men whom John brought back to shelter, and treated their cuts and bound any ankle swollen after a fall. His unit was training out in the rough bogs—crawling on the sodden ground like animals, if their boots and coats were anything to go by. Each man left his boots at the door for Liam to clean, then washed his hands in a tin bucket before coming into the house. Each had with him his own tin plate, which I piled with hearty stews full of old, rich meat and earthy vegetables. I never saw a gun again after that first night. John had the men leave their weapons in the sheds, and they followed his lead by never discussing matters of war in front of me. I was proud that these men respected John, and deferred to him. Some of the younger boys called him “Captain.” On one occasion, when I was out of the room, I heard John talk down a young hothead keen on revenge. “It’s as important to know when to lay down a weapon as when to pick it up” was all he said. I hoped it ran true to him, because despite the pride of being married to such a big man, I was afraid for John every moment of every day. I held on to the thought that the Irish Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and the British would come to an arrangement before too long, and life would return to the way it had always been.

John tried to keep my fears away—always saying, as we kissed in the mornings, “See you later—the usual time,” to reassure me that he would be home safe. But in my heart, I knew that one day soon the training of his unit would end and the fighting would start.

There were so many coming through the house by now—thirty laid out on our kitchen floor one night—that our neighbors started calling in with food and turf to help us out. “I’m too old to fight,” said one old man as he handed me an enormous ham, “but there’s hair on that pig will help keep them English bastards at bay surely.”

One fine Thursday not long after, I was sitting plucking a chicken by the back door. John had killed and bled it from the neck before he left that morning, so its skin was still warm enough to pluck easily. The sun was moving across the wet grass, causing spangles of light to shoot up from it so that I had to shade my eyes. It was a pure, clear day, and the land spread out in front of me, sloping out and down toward the horizon. The sky was blue and the clouds white and the world looked perfect, like a picture postcard.

I had sent Liam into town on the bicycle with some eggs not an hour beforehand and was enjoying the peace of being on my own. Even though the day was fine, there was a slight breeze, and as I plucked the feathers started to scatter all over the place. They flew all about my face, sticking to my lips and hair, and I became annoyed with myself for not having had the sense to hang the chicken until it was cold, then immerse it in warm water before plucking, as was my usual method. With the feathers damp, it gave a much tidier finish. As I made this mental note, Liam came running suddenly round from the front of the house, causing me to jump up and drop the cursed chicken, with all its feathers flying in a messy cloud.

I was raging. The stupid child had clearly run my bicycle into a ditch and broken a week’s worth of fine eggs. “Where’s my bicycle? Where are my eggs?” The ludaramaun—and I was the worse eejit, to have trusted such an important mission to him.

Liam had collapsed in a heap of panic and exhaustion, breathing so hard he could barely speak. Between gasps, he pushed out, “Captain’s been shot, Ma’am. Captain’s been shot . . .”

The world changed. My head was full of terrible noise, and yet somewhere at the center of me was that calm, cold place where I had known all along this was going to happen. From the moment John had told me about the dying boy, on the first day we had kissed, I had feared losing him. The waiting was over—the worst had happened. It was almost a relief. “Where is he, Liam?”

Liam was panting and pawing the air with exhaustion.

“Where is he?” I grabbed the stupid boy by his collar.

“Up beyond Pat Sweeney’s bog . . .”

“Show me!” I pulled him up on his feet and thrust him, stumbling, along in front of me. At the road, he pointed across Sweeney’s fields. “Go for the doctor!” I screamed at him, then lifted my skirts and scrambled across the ditch, into the open field, and ran faster than I had ever run in my life. I ran through two fields and would have run a dozen more when I saw two men coming rapidly toward me down the slope. It was Padraig and three other lads, and they were carrying a body with them.

As soon as he saw me, Padraig started shouting, “Go back, Ellie, get back to the house! Get a bed ready! Go back, go back!”

But I flew on, tripping over my petticoats. “John! John!” I ran beside the men screaming his name. He was unconscious, silent, swinging limply between them. From the waist down his body glistened black in the bright sun, dripping blood. Then I knew Padraig was right—there was nothing I could do here. I had to make things ready in the house. I raced back home ahead of their procession.

I covered the bed with our cleanest, crispest sheet, and when they brought him in I had them lay him down. The cotton turned red in an instant. They all stood around, caps in their hands, shocked, white faced, like around a coffin. I wanted to howl at Padraig, “This is all your fault!” Instead, I ordered them from the room to lay a fire, to boil water, to watch for the doctor. The wound in my husband’s side was a mess of pumping blood. I ripped the skirts from my one good dress, which was hanging on the back of the bedroom door; I thrust the material into the wound and pressed tight. “John, John—wake up!” Maybe he was better unconscious, out of pain, but I feared he was falling into the sleep that comes before death.

Suddenly Doctor Bourke was beside me. “Here’s a nasty business, Ellie.” The familiar understatement of our family doctor’s voice sucked relief out of me, and despite my best efforts to restrain myself, tears started pouring down my cheeks. As the doctor removed the wadding I had made with my skirt and checked the wound, John’s eyes flashed open with the shock of pain. Doctor Bourke said to me, “This won’t be nice, Ellie. I have to get that shot out. You can go into the kitchen, I can manage this.”