The Devil's Due: An Irish Historical Thriller (9 page)

“They told me you had gone to London.”

There was no hiding the accusation in Liam’s voice. He and I sat in the kitchen of his brother’s house. Cold and wet from my ride—it had started to rain again shortly after my encounter with the British—I was only too glad to be inside. But even with the fire in the stove, the smell of peat filling the room, I shivered as I stared into Liam’s eyes.

When I arrived, I almost didn’t recognize him sitting at the table, thinking him a stranger, a relative of Tara, Seamus’s wife. Liam, someone I had known since we were both lads, was different now. He’d always been thin, but now he was gaunt. An ugly purple scar ran down from his ear to his nose, a slash from a British bayonet no doubt. But it wasn’t the scar that made him different. It was his eyes—they were those of an older man and betrayed the harshness of the last year and the bitterness that had been left behind.

While Tara fixed us tea, he told me about the eleven months he had spent in a British
gaol.
Daily, he was beaten and tortured. At first, the British were convinced that he knew more than he did. Later, it seems, they beat him for fun. His hand shook when he picked up the tea, and I could see the ugly scars where his fingernails had grown back crooked and deformed. That was a favorite of theirs, the civilized British, taking the pliers to the fingers of a boy who had already told them weeks earlier what little he knew.

I shook my head. “I went to New York.”

He stared at me for a moment. “Is that what you’re telling people now?” He paused and when I hesitated, he continued, “Is that what you’ll be telling Dan’s wife? And Sean’s mother? And Tom’s?”

I sighed. When I opened my mouth, the things I had wanted to say, the words I had rehearsed on my ride over were lost.

He slammed his fist on the table. “Don’t lie to me, Frank!” His cup spilled and crashed to the floor. “You owe me more than that!”

Not sure what to say, I waited while his brother’s wife cleaned up the spill. Without a word, Tara swept up the broken cup, then wiped up the tea that had splattered all over the stone floor. She put a new cup in front of Liam, but he ignored it. Once again, I found myself staring into the eyes of a stranger.

“Liam,” I began softly. “The stories you heard about me aren’t true.” Before he could say anything, I held my up hands. “At least listen to me first before you condemn me.”

Eyes still dark, he sat back, folding his arms across his chest. I told him the story as best as I could remember and felt myself slipping back to a quiet road in Adare on a dark night just over a year ago:

Two miles from the manor house, we stopped, hid ourselves in the heather along the side of the road and waited. Dan, the only officer amongst us, had seen the most action of our group, but we had all tasted the fear and excitement of battle. I felt a hollow pit in my stomach, a nervous feeling brought on by adrenaline and fear. I did my best not to let the others see my nervousness.

We hadn’t been there for more than ten minutes when we heard the bicycle. A moment later, the scout appeared then passed us by. Dan ordered us to stay where we were while he cautiously made his way down to the road. We could see a distance in both directions. The road was quiet; the scout was alone. We heard a short whistle, and I turned in time to see the scout stop. He climbed off the bicycle and walked slowly back to where Dan was standing in the middle of the road. We watched the road, Sean one direction, Tom and I the other. We were close enough to hear their words. The scout, a boy of sixteen, told Dan that the road ahead was clear; that a British patrol had been sighted an hour earlier but was miles from the manor house now.

We waited until the scout climbed on his bicycle and continued on his way. Then Sean, Tom, and I climbed out of the heather, lugging our haversacks and supplies with us. Forty minutes later, I was crouched behind the wall near the manor house while Dan and Tom broke in. Fifteen minutes after that, I was standing in front of the burning house, my own clothes smoldering, as I listened to the muffled screams of my friends dying inside.

“We never had a chance, Liam. The Tans were lying in wait for us. It was a trap. They knew we were coming.” I shook my head. “And, we made a mistake. We should have taken more men, maintained surveillance on the house for a couple of days before we went in. We should have had lookouts.” Forever short of men and supplies, so many of our operations were like this: a hastily crafted plan, a few men with a couple of revolvers taking on the British Army.

Liam said nothing, and I found myself wondering what was going on in the head of a man I once thought I knew as well as I knew myself.

“If it was me,” I persisted, “if I was the traitor, would I have allowed Sean and Tom to spread the paraffin while I set the mine, knowing that the Peelers would be busting in any second and with me standing right in the middle of it all?”

Liam continued to stare but said nothing.

“If it was me, would I have killed the three Peelers too?”

I saw something flash over his eyes.
Doubt?

“If I was a traitor, would I have come back, especially now with the threat of civil war? Me?” I said, my voice rising. “Of all people, me? A traitor? If anyone knows what happens to traitors, it’s me, Liam.” I paused and stared hard at my friend for a moment. “I’m guilty alright, but I’m not guilty of that.” I sighed. “I’m guilty of killing Sean and Tom and Dan”—my voice broke—“but they were as good as dead already. I’m only guilty of killing them before the British had a chance to finish the job.” My voice was a whisper now. “Liam, I had no other choice.”

My friend stared at me for several long moments. Eyes still dark, he reached up and rubbed the scar on his cheek. I sighed again as I realized that my words had no effect. It was a mistake to have come. I pushed my chair back and stood to leave. He coughed, a spasm, and I hesitated, turning back for a moment. He wiped his mouth, and I noticed the glisten in his eyes but whether it was from the coughing or from my words, I wasn’t sure. Then he looked up at me, and his face softened. He pointed to my seat. As I sat again, he said something to his sister-in-law, and a moment later two glasses and a bottle of poteen appeared on the table.

We sat silently for several minutes. I took a sip, felt the burn in my throat, felt the heat rising in my chest and thought of all of the years we had between us, Liam and myself. A moment later, I put my glass down, and Liam’s sister-in-law quietly refilled it. I nodded my thanks but left the glass where it was. I didn’t want the whiskey to tell the story that I had to tell myself. I told him about my escape, about my journey to Cobh, about the voyage to New York, and about my life in America. I told him about Kathleen and our daughter. I told him everything.

He listened quietly, nodding now and again. When I finished, I took another drink.

“That was the last operation, you know,” Liam said after a while. “The rest of the company was reassigned.” Billy, he said, went on to become OC—the Officer in Charge—of another company within the brigade, the boys that remained joining him.

“And what about you?” A glass of poteen wasn’t enough. I needed to hear the words from his mouth.

He sighed. “I spent the last year thinking about you, about why you did it. Every time they took their clubs to me, I cursed you.” He held up his mangled hand, “every time they took their pliers to me, I cursed you.” He rubbed his scar. “Every time they took their knives to me, I cursed you. But through it all,” he paused a moment, his eyes on mine, “I never told them about Kathleen. I never told them about you.”

Then, for the first time that night, he smiled.

We talked till the wee hours, and I didn’t leave till the following day, the poteen helping to mend our friendship but demanding a penance all its own in the morning. As I made the journey back to Limerick, the storm raging in my head to match the one in the sky above, Liam’s warning continued to ring in my ears.

I had just climbed on my bicycle when he suddenly reached out and grabbed hold of my arm.

“If this is the price for a free Ireland,” Liam had said, holding his mangled hand up in front of my face, “it’s a price I’ll gladly pay. But, things are different now. Soon it is we’ll be fighting each other. Another war’s coming, Frank, and there’s nothing can be done to stop it.” He stared at me for a long moment. “There’s nothing here for you anymore. There’s nothing for anyone. Take Kathleen and go back to America.”

___

A land of dreamers we Irish are, and many a night it was when Liam and I, just lads, would listen to the old folks tell their stories and talk of the better times to come. We would sit on the stairs while the men gathered in the kitchen, chairs arranged in front of the fireplace. They’d talk about Wolfe Tone and the uprising in ninety-eight. They’d talk about Robert Emmett and the uprising only a handful of years later. They’d talk about the Fenians and the land wars and Charles Parnell. They’d talk about how different life would be when the British finally granted us Home Rule.

But dream was all they did. The centuries of living under British rule, with its brutal policies, left them struggling day to day. We were Catholic, which meant we were tenant farmers and had no rights to the land we lived on and toiled over daily. Our land had been stolen centuries before, and we had been reduced to mere peasants, forced to work the fields that we once owned. Sitting around the fire, while Liam and I listened at the top of the steps, my grandfather would talk of the
great hunger
. Then a young boy himself, he remembered the mound of black, rotting potatoes—a mountain taller than the stables—and wondering why God was angry at them. He remembered his father telling him he couldn’t eat the few good potatoes—the ones that somehow had survived—because they were all the family had to pay the rent. He remembered the constables forcing neighbors from their homes, while angry landlords burnt down their cottages. No crop meant no rent.

My grandfather’s stories both mesmerized and haunted me. His voice dropped as he described the sharp angles of his own father’s face, of his chest, of his arms, the bones all but poking through the skin. He remembered seeing his sister and his mother, both overcome by the famine fever, die within hours of each other, too sick to lift themselves off the floor. He remembered going to bed and praying for a few hours of sleep, a few hours of relief from the constant pain in an empty belly, only to lie awake for hours, crying silently so his father wouldn’t hear. And for years to come, he remembered the fear in his father’s eyes and in those of his neighbors, all wondering if this would be the year when the
great hunger
would return.

Liam’s conversion from dreamer to soldier had come earlier than mine. His father, himself a farmer, had been brutally beaten by British soldiers when he was slow to move his cart off the road so their lorry could pass. While his father lay bleeding in the dirt, they set fire to his cart. Liam, then only sixteen, joined a newly formed company of Volunteers. My own conversion came later, a few years after my mother remarried.

Sixteen years then myself, I’d spent two years running the farm, and my mother’s new husband didn’t like having someone else around the house making decisions. An ex-British soldier, he had been wounded in Verdun. It was because of his wounds, perhaps, that he liked his poteen, a way to ease his constant pain. Many was a night when, in a drunken rage, his anger at the life he had been forced to live was taken out on me.

One night, my lip split and my nose broken again, I ran out the door, tears in my eyes at the injustice. I walked and walked and with each step my anger grew, the hate filling me with a rage. When I returned, I found him asleep on the floor in front of the stove, the empty bottle on the table. Grabbing the irons from the fire, I was prepared to beat him to death. My mother, God bless her, threw herself on top of him. Two men couldn’t live below the same roof, she told me. It was time for me to leave. My mother had made her choice clear. Without a second thought, I left. I met Liam that evening at the crossroads and decided that was the last time I would let anyone—my drunk stepfather, the Peelers, the British—take from me what was mine. The farm my stepfather could have—we were only tenants anyway—but my blood was mine to give, not his to take.

It was two years I was gone. Traveling around the country, taking odd jobs where I could. I found jobs tending to the sheep and pigs or working the stables and minding the horses—work I knew. Many a night it was when I went to sleep hungry for no work was to be had. And many a night it was where I begged or stole what I needed to survive. I wandered the country, from Galway to Tipperary, from Waterford to Dingle. The whole while the mood of the country was changing, slow at first then building, and I often thought of my father’s final words.
Promise me, Frank!

The Easter Rising, as it was now being called, was initially met with both shock and contempt, labeled an act of treachery, of anarchy, perpetrated by criminals. The Brotherhood and the Sínn Féiners, men who had taken up the cause, had been met with open hostility by a citizenry who feared the retribution that was sure to come more than they desired freedom. The former was something they had seen with their own eyes while the latter was something they had never known. But when the leaders of the Rising were court martialed and executed—a rushed farce that the righteous British called justice—the very same citizenry was shocked. And as dozens more were sentenced to death and thousands of others were arrested and sent to prison—all the while London pushed to conscript Irish men to fight the Germans in France—the British charade was laid bare. Dirty and uneducated we were, a lawless people, good for nothing but cannon fodder for the British Empire.