Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “Major,” he said, and then looked beyond at Mike and saluted again. “Lieutenant.”

  I put down my window and waved to the man. He stepped toward us, looked into the back seat, and saluted one more time. “Welcome, Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said. Then he smiled. A tall, well-built young man. His skin a shade lighter than his brown uniform. “I didn’t believe the fellows when they said you’d be coming, but here you are.”

  “What fellows?” Major Duggan asked.

  “I bet it was the men we met in London. Right, soldier?” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It’s lunchtime. The men are in the mess tent and I’m sure the cooks would be very happy to make up plates for you.”

  He pointed us down the center thoroughfare toward the largest tent in the camp. When we arrived at the tent there were five soldiers lined up ready to meet us. Major Duggan got out of the car, followed by Mike.

  “Good afternoon, Captain,” he said to a Negro man. Bill Dawson had been a lieutenant when I’d met him in Paris in the last war. I was glad Negro soldiers were moving up in the ranks. Would there be colonels or even generals before this war is over? This fellow reminded me of Dawson. He had that same look of authority. Erect. Broad-shouldered. At ease in his body. The captain opened the car door and the three of us got out.

  “We’re honored to welcome you, Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said, “I’m Captain Davis.” He offered her his arm and escorted her into the tent. There was a wooden floor, though I couldn’t feel much heat. About 150 men were seated at the tables. They immediately stood up and began applauding.

  Eleanor Roosevelt raised one hand. “Please, please, I don’t want to interrupt your lunch.” But the men wouldn’t stop cheering.

  Finally Captain Davis hollered “Attention!” and gestured for the men to sit down.

  “Such enthusiasm,” Eleanor Roosevelt said to Captain Davis.

  “The men are proud to serve, though most of the fellows would prefer if we were a combat unit. We’re quartermaster troops. We handle supplies for the main camp.”

  “Very important work,” Eleanor Roosevelt said, “after all an army travels on its stomach.”

  “Except these men signed up to fight. As Frederick Douglass said about the Negro troops in the Civil War—‘Once a man carries a musket on his shoulder in the defense of his nation, he cannot be denied full citizenship’—though we’re still waiting.”

  “But progress has been made, Captain,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “I’ve been working with the NAACP on the Double V campaign—victory abroad, victory at home.” Captain Davis nodded.

  I noticed that four men sitting near a back table were waving at us. “Look,” I said to Eleanor Roosevelt, “the men from London. May we go and speak to them?” I asked the captain.

  “Of course,” he said, and escorted us to the back of the tent. Eleanor Roosevelt beamed, put out both her hands, and I think she would have hugged the men then and there except they took her hand and began shaking it.

  “Did you get your hot dogs and mustard?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” the tallest of them said. “Mac has them for us.”

  “That’s a pub in the village,” another one said. “Mac’s the owner. As soon as he found out we liked hot dogs he got a bunch in. They’re sausages really, but close enough and somewhere he found mustard and buns.”

  “That was considerate,” I said. The men laughed and the captain smiled.

  “Considerate is not the right word,” the tall one said. “The people of Carrickmore treat us as if we’re members of their own families. There used to be only one pub in town but now four houses have turned their parlors into shebeens—that’s what they call the bars here.”

  “They even made a big shed into a dance hall and there’s music there every night. They’re the friendliest people I’ve ever met,” another man said.

  “So no…,” Eleanor Roosevelt began.

  “Discrimination?” the captain asked. “Not a bit. Though we did have an incident.”

  “What happened, Captain?” Duggan asked.

  “Well, as I said, as soon as we arrived the town put on a big welcome. There was even a sign across the main street saying ‘Hello Yanks.’ Nobody seemed to care what color we were. People would stop us on the street to thank us for coming. They said they were sure we’d end the war soon. One man told me he felt as if we’d stepped off a movie screen and marched in to save them. He also said that the people of the village had a hard enough time making ends meet and were glad to have a chance to bank some American dollars, which I told him we were happy to spend. They especially enjoyed learning our names. We’ve got a good few Murphys, O’Neills, and O’Briens among us. In fact I have some Irish roots myself.”

  “Very interesting, Captain, but what was the incident you were speaking of?” Major Duggan said.

  “Well a few days ago a group of white soldiers came to town. They couldn’t believe how well we were being treated. They came into the shed and when they saw my soldiers dancing with local girls they went crazy and started fighting with us. It turned into a real brawl. My men held their own and I called the MPs in. Headquarters wanted to make the whole town off-limits but a delegation of townspeople complained. They said it was the white soldiers had started all the trouble and that my troops were gentlemen. So headquarters relented. The next day the people put signs in the window of every pub and hung a big banner over the dance hall. All of them said ‘No whites allowed.’”

  Tommy laughed first. A sound that came from deep within her. Eleanor Roosevelt joined in and then we were all laughing.

  “Wonderful,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “Just wonderful. Carrickmore. I must remember that name. Franklin will enjoy this story.”

  7

  “Let us now add your name to “An Banshenchas,” Seán MacBride said as he opened our car’s back door.

  “What’s he saying? Who is he and where are we?” Eleanor Roosevelt asked me.

  She and Tommy had fallen into a doze I can only attribute to some fairy intervention soon after we left the Army camp in Carrickmore.

  Major Duggan had kept the big car moving along fast in spite of high hills, narrow roads, and sheep that trotted in front of us. We cut diagonally across to Galway and in less than three hours were at General McGrory’s house, which was about twenty miles from Barna, where my granny Honora had been born, and sixty from Connemara and Peter’s homeplace.

  “An Banshenchas is the chronicle praising famous women listed in ancient Irish manuscripts—including the Book of the O’Kellys. And you’re in Galway, home of the Kellys though it’s a MacBride from Mayo greeting you,” I said.

  “What are you talking about, Nora?” Tommy said. “Galway. We can’t be in Galway. That’s in the Free State.”

  “It is,” I said.

  I stepped out of the car and let Seán reach in to take Eleanor Roosevelt’s hand and help her out. Standing in the doorway of the general’s house was Maud Gonne, well into her seventies, I thought, but as straight as ever.

  Maud came down the walk, her long black veil blowing in the wind. I heard Tommy gasp. She was part Irish after all. Here was the crone from one of her mother’s stories come to life.

  “I’m Maud Gonne MacBride,” she said as she stuck out her hand to Eleanor Roosevelt, who took it. “A great honor, Mrs. Roosevelt. I think of you as the First Lady of not just the United States but of the world,” she said.

  Always could turn a phrase, our Maud, and Eleanor Roosevelt smiled.

  “Nora,” Maud said turning to me. “Nora.” And I got a full-on hug. “Twenty years since we last met. How can that be?”

  “It can be,” I said. “I’m more aware of that every year.”

  “True enough at our age,” she said.

  You’re a good thirteen years older than I am, I thought but didn’t say. Still traces of the woman who’d hurt Yeats into poetry and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, the very year I’d left Europe for Chicago. Those verse
s! How prophetic the words I’d heard from his own lips had become. “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity,”—the War, a most horrific second coming.

  I’d been staying with Maud and Yeats at her villa in Normandy when he wrote the words, “Changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.” In this poem, “Easter 1916,” he evoked the men executed as rebels by the British, among them Maud’s husband, John MacBride, Seán’s father.

  He’d recited the poem for us on that beach in Normandy in front of the villa, the rocky face of La Pointe du Hoc in the background. Yeats had been dead nearly four years now—resting in peace, I hoped, spared the need to find meter for horrors that were beyond thought.

  Maud seemed to know what I was thinking because she said, “Willie came to visit me a few months before he died. ‘Old and full of sleep’ both of us, though he was wiser than me. He let go. Ah, Nora, shouldn’t have to live through more than one world war.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt heard this last bit and said, “Although your country has chosen not to participate…”

  “Our country,” Maud said, “but not our young fellows. Thousands enlisted in the British Army and if you added all the Irish-American young men fighting with you, Mrs. Roosevelt, I’d say Ireland is punching well above our weight.”

  “Yes, well,” Eleanor Roosevelt began but Seán was moving her up the path with Maud on the other side and Tommy coming up behind. I dropped back to Mike and Major Duggan.

  “What is going on, Aunt Nonie?” Mike asked.

  “We’re on a secret mission,” I said, and Major Duggan laughed.

  There, standing in the doorway, was the Chieftain—Taoiseach in Irish, Éamon de Valera. The prime minister of Ireland. Leader since 1922. Seán brought Mrs. Roosevelt up to him. He was very courtly to her. But he hardly looked at Mike or Tommy or me when Seán MacBride presented us.

  “This is providential,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “I’ve wanted to speak to you.”

  He pointed Eleanor Roosevelt to another room and left the rest of us standing there—Maud, Seán, Tommy, Major Duggan, Mike, and me. What now?

  “Welcome. Welcome.” The man was dressed in the uniform of the Irish Army—the youngest yet oldest force in the world, “A nation once again,” with a crucial battle being fought in the next room.

  “I’m General Michael McGrory,” he said. “I have a meal waiting for you in the pub down the road. An Taoiseach doesn’t mean to be rude but he’s very aware of security.”

  “Neither he nor Eleanor Roosevelt would want the details or even the fact of their meeting leaked out—the British would not be pleased,” Seán said to us as we walked the short distance to the village. “But if de Valera could convince Mrs. Roosevelt that we had no choice but to be officially neutral, and if her husband would make some statement acknowledging this new nation’s right to abstain from the war, that would be helpful. Your president certainly knows that, unofficially, we’re with you.”

  General McGrory said that the Irish government was already assisting the allies by allowing US planes to fly over Donegal, and quietly sending aircrews downed in Ireland back across the border to the North. “A whisper of this to the Germans, and the Nazis would invade and be goose-stepping down O’Connell Street,” he said. “And there are factions in the British Army who wouldn’t mind driving a fleet of Saracens down from Belfast to reclaim what some of them still think of as their colony.”

  Not sure what Tommy made of this. Maud had placed Tommy beside her in the Galleon Bar where a table had been set up for us.

  “Eleanor Roosevelt would like this,” Tommy said. “Rustic.”

  “Local pottery,” Maud said, “and handcrafted furniture. You’ll be eating fresh salmon caught in the Corrib that runs through Galway City.”

  Major Duggan and Mike went up to the bar. After a time they returned with pints of Guinness for all of us. Tommy took a sip and gave a thumbs-up. She was Irish, alright.

  I’d been watching Seán, waiting for a signal. When are we going to Peter’s grave? Finally, I leaned across the table and tugged on his sleeve. “Don’t you think we should leave to visit that friend of mine? You did speak to Cyril, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Seán said. “But I’m afraid the news isn’t good.” He looked over at Maud.

  She said, “We’ve sad news for you, Nora.” Then she looked at the others. “A dear friend of Nora’s and mine died a number of years ago, and…” She looked at me. “Shall we go outside, Nora?”

  “No, Maud. I’ve been waiting twenty years to visit Peter Keeley’s grave. Tell me where it is—”

  “But, you can’t visit him, Nora. Peter Keeley has no grave.”

  “What?”

  All the others were waiting to hear what Maud was going to say.

  “Come outside, Nora.”

  “No. I’m tired of all this Irish evasion. Tell me directly.”

  “Alright,” Maud said. “When he was shot, his body fell into the sea—and it was never recovered.”

  Silence at the table.

  “And that’s all you can tell me?”

  Maud shrugged. “Many others at rest in the Atlantic Ocean, Nora. ‘Full fathom five,’” she started to quote.

  I got up. Walked out. Stood in front of the pub, looking west.

  Ah, Peter—no chance now that I’ll find the place where you are lying and bend and tell you that I love you, as the song says. And wasn’t it you yourself told me that since before history began the Irish have felt duty-bound to honor the graves of their dead? “Crucial to mark their passage to the other world,” you’d told me, “a way of asserting our faith in life after life.”

  I remembered how excited Peter had been to show me photographs of the monumental tomb called Newgrange that had been uncovered in the Irish countryside. Built five thousand years ago, he’d said. Older than the pyramids, and Homer. Boulders weighing tons had somehow been transported twenty, thirty miles, then carved with intricate designs.

  “Newgrange is called Brú na Bóinne in Irish, which means ‘the mansion on the river Boyne.’ The home of the Celtic gods in our mythology. But during the last century when aristocratic English antiquarians examined the site, they were sure the Egyptians or Phoenicians must have washed up on our shores and built the thing, because the mere Irish couldn’t possibly have constructed such an extraordinary monument,” Peter had said.

  He’d shown me a slot above the doorway in the photograph. At the winter solstice the rising sun sent a spear of light through this opening into the tomb, he’d explained, “Illuminating the darkness.”

  Now I prayed that perpetual light was shining on Peter, his spirit somehow alive, even though his body was lost to the sea.

  Only a few minutes until Mike joined me. “Is there anything I can do, Aunt Nonie?”

  “There isn’t, Mike. Nothing at all,” I said.

  “While I was waiting for our drinks I met this fellow at the bar. He’s the prime minister’s pilot,” Mike said. “He’d be willing to take us up. Would it help if you could look down and…?”

  I nodded. Time to let go once and for all. To accept. Maybe now I’d stop recalling that Ojibwe ceremony, wouldn’t hear Bridget say “He’s not dead.” He was. Confirmed now. Peter was dead.

  De Valera’s pilot wore the same kind of leather jacket Mike had on. A matched pair. If the Great Starvation hadn’t forced Granny Honora to make a run for it so her children could live, maybe Mike would be an aviator in the Irish Air Force.

  “His name is Michael J. Kelly, too,” Mike said.

  The man nodded to me. “This lad told me he’s never seen his home place,” he said.

  “We’re from Barna. Just west of the city on Galway Bay.”

  “I know it well,” the pilot said. “Aren’t I from just up the road in Salthill?”

  “Not near the Silverstrand?” I asked.

  “Played there as a boy. Walk it now.”

  “That’s where your great-
grandfather, the first Michael Kelly, came swimming out of Galway Bay and met Honora, who was a Keeley,” I said to Mike. “A fisherman’s daughter. They married and began their lives there.”

  “Would you fancy a flyover?” the pilot said.

  “Could we also go along the coast toward Carna?”

  “We can, of course,” he said.

  Cold and dark at the bottom of the sea, with so many lost to its depths. All those fishermen who had drowned, Aunt Máire’s husband among them, along with those who died on those long terrible voyages to America. And now Peter had joined them. Some joy in showing Mike the homeplace of his ancestors. Sunshine and shadow.

  I took a breath and followed Mike to Dev’s plane.

  * * *

  “Look, Mike,” I said. “Straight over that stretch of beach—the Silverstrand.”

  Mike was sitting in the copilot’s seat. A good-sized aircraft—six seats in the back—but I was standing with them in the cockpit. Bright enough below with the last of the light turning the water beneath us red.

  “Another name for that stretch,” our pilot said, “Trána gCeann. Place of the Skulls because the O’Flahertys battled the O’Cadhlas there and left bones under the sand.”

  “O’Cadhlas—the Keeleys—Lords of Connemara until the O’Flahertys arrived,” I said.

  “You know your history,” the pilot said.

  “My grandmother, Honora Keeley, was born right there,” I said, pointing below.

  The pilot nosed us down through the clouds. Only a swathe of grass was visible where there had been thirty cottages—a whole community of fisher families.

  The pilot circled and went down lower. “Look, Mike. Look. See just above the rocks? What’s left of a road.”

  “Mag’s Boreen,” said the pilot. “My gran said that was a haunted place. No one has ever built there though it’s right on the bay. She said that the landlord tried to sell the land to make a seaside resort during the Great Starvation when bodies were lying unburied in the roads. He evicted the fishermen in that village to make a playground for the rich. But he didn’t succeed,” the pilot said, “and now the people of Ireland own the land of Ireland for the first time in eight hundred years.”