Not easy to get up from those comfortable chairs. Only eight o’clock but I would have been very happy to go to my bed. Instead she’d led us down a long hall and then opened a door.
“Oh, Maura,” I said. “How did you ever manage this?”
They had created a pub in what must have been some kind of a storage space behind the kitchen. But this was a dream pub. Polished wood walls. A stone floor. A floor-to-ceiling fireplace, cushioned benches along the wall, round tables with stools scattered across the floor and a carved bar that curved along the far side of the room. A wall of bright bottles behind it. With two shiny brass spigots. The whole thing would have seemed unreal, a stage set, if it wasn’t for the crowd of people within it. No actors these. Locals. Farmers and sheepherders I’d say with their wives and children. Little kids too. All in their Sunday best. The men in suit coats. The women wearing woolen skirts and hand-knit jumpers. There was a circle of stools near the turf fire, and sitting in the middle was a fiddler.
“Now, Joseph,” Maura said. “We’re going to take you to the hidden Ireland. Beyond history and oppression. The deep-down real source.”
The fiddler played us into another place outside of time. Maura pulled Ed and Joseph and me into the reels. I half remembered the steps from childhood celebrations in Granny Honora’s parlor.
Maura and John’s daughter claimed Joseph, grabbing his hands, crossing one over the other, his partner in reel after reel. Are we all possessed? I wondered. Had the fairies crept in from hollows in the dark mountains or from under the still, deep lakes? Invaded us. As good an explanation as any for Ed, who was leaping and ducking like a young boy. Laughing as I hadn’t seen him do since before Ed Junior’s death.
But at least the reels had borders. Set pieces, which the other dancers knew and through which they guided us. But all limits dissolved when Dominic O’Morian, Maura’s brother, brought out his bodhrán. That round narrow drum covered in goatskin. Invented in time beyond memory. The dancers had been walking away from the reel toward the bar where John was pulling pints. Laughing, talking, glad for a break. Then the beat began. The rhythm was so intricate that we all stopped and turned. Two young men, fifteen or sixteen I’d say, and barefoot, moved to the center of the floor.
“Seán nós dancers,” John said.
They didn’t keep their bodies stiff in the style I associated with Irish dancing. They were completely supple and fluid. Swinging and dipping—shoulders and arms and hands moving together. And their feet! Slap, slap, slapping against the floor. Not exactly keeping time to the bodhrán’s drumbeat but talking back, setting up a kind of counter beat, the dancers and the drummer communicating with each other. Expressing something beyond words. Beyond thought really. Some deep down reality every person in the room understood.
Ed said to me, “Like the Ojibwe.” Here was something older even than language. I can’t explain how but each one of us in that room was suddenly connected and almost compelled to form a circle around the dancers. Moving side to side, back and forth, imitating the dancers’ steps. We went faster and faster and then joined arms, elbows pressed tight against the body on either side until we were a tight collar around the dancers. I don’t know who started the chant. It was in Irish of course. One word repeated over and over. “Saoirse. Saoirse. Saoirse.”
“It means free,” I said to Ed. “Free. Free. Free.”
Here we were in the very house that the Black and Tans had invaded, ransacked, where that sergeant’s filthy hands had grabbed my shoulders, pulled down my dress. The oppressors had stood with their boots on our necks for eight hundred years. They were gone, gone, gone.
“Saoirse. Saoirse. Saoirse.” Ed, Joseph, and I shouted along with the rest. If only Granny could be here, I thought, and I swear I heard a voice soft under the tumult “I am a stór, I am.”
* * *
“Two women and a load of children in a currach? I heard that story as a boy told in the same breath as Finn McCool’s building the Giant’s Causeway,” Dominic said. We were in Carna now and glad to have Maura’s brother Dominic as our guide. Every person we passed in the street nodded at him. He was a O’Moran after all. A family well established in this village set on fingers of land that reached out into the bay. And Dominic was a handsome young man with a great smile.
He took us into the church that he said was dedicated to St. MacDara, where we lit candles at the altar. “I wonder did our granny come here,” Ed said.
“This place is only recently built, but there was always some kind of a chapel here where she surely prayed.”
He pointed out the coves and inlets carved into the coast.
“Your Keeleys lived across about three miles distant in Ard. No roads in those days. The only transport was by water. So a currach was life, not only for fishing but for any kind of contact with the neighbors. And so the story of two women who were such powerful rowers that they flew across the sea all the way to Amerikay was very appealing. Fanciful though it might be,” Dominic told us.
“But the story is true,” I said. “Our granny and Aunt Máire did escape with their children, our fathers among them.”
“They flew across the sea?” Joseph said and laughed.
“My father told me that his mother had got them aboard a sailing ship,” Ed said.
“They could have managed to get aboard,” Dominic said. He pointed. “Just out near that small island named for St. MacDara, the sea meets the bay and sailing ships did slow down there. So it’s possible they were taken on board.”
“But, how could they even know a ship was coming?” Joseph asked.
“Well now,” Dominic said, “in those days signal fires served the same purpose as telephones do today. Sometimes the coast would be lit up as far as Sligo when a vessel was coming. In the tale of the two women the ship had come from Derry. A winter passage to—”
“New Orleans,” I said, really excited now. “Aunt Máire told me they landed there and that a Negro nun helped them. They were headed for Chicago and had to come up the Mississippi River to the I & M Canal.” I looked at Ed. “Why didn’t we listen more carefully to their stories?” I said.
“But what about when you came here twenty years ago. Why didn’t you inquire?” Ed asked me.
It was Dominic who answered. “As I understand it Nora was running from the Black and Tans. Not much time for sightseeing or tracking down family legends.”
“No,” I said.
I’d spent my last night ever with Peter Keeley at Lough Inagh. My husband had died on a mountain that bordered the sea.
Dominic had arranged for us to meet Peter’s brother in the pub that his family had owned for generations. It was called O’Morian’s, of course—Moran’s, in English.
“It was only a little shebeen where fishermen gathered for a nip on cold mornings,” Dominic said. “But two years ago we built a proper structure. Kept it where it always had been, only yards from the church. Always have been great sessions here after Mass on Sunday. It was music kept us alive in the worst of times. Thank God a singer only needs a voice. Even the most rack-rent landlord never found a way to charge for the use of your own vocal cords.”
I expected, hoped, I guess, that Peter’s brother might resemble him, but this short squat man looked nothing at all like my tall wiry love. He had the same blue-gray eyes as Peter but the rest of his face had been scored by years of wind and rain. There were pouches under his eyes. Younger than Peter, he would be about sixty. There was a glass of whiskey in front of him on the bar but he was glad to accept Ed’s offer of another drink.
“No bird ever flew on one wing,” he said.
Dominic had told us that this man, James Keeley, had good English.
He waited until the bartender had poured him another whiskey then picked up both glasses and walked toward the corner of the bar where there was a small table and four stools. Joseph didn’t follow.
“I’d like to take a look at one of those currachs,” he said to Dominic. “After
all I am a sailor.”
“I’ll be glad to show you,” Dominic said.
So only Ed and I and James Keeley sat together. There was silence for a good few minutes then James drained his first drink and then the second.
“If you’ve come for the land, you’ll have to show me some proof,” he said.
“Pardon me,” I said.
“Dominic tells me you claim to have been married to my oldest brother. A thing I find very hard to believe since he never spoke even a syllable to us about having a wife.”
“He was protecting me,” I said. “He was on the run. A wanted man. He was afraid if the English knew about our relationship they’d try to use me to get to him.”
“Your relationship, is it?” James said. “Where are your documents? Don’t think you’re the first American who’s come sniffing around here talking about family claims. It was your lot who deserted us and now that we finally have some little chance at making a go of it, you’re back trying to take it away. My neighbor down the road was sued. Taken to the High Court by some distant cousin from Boston trying to get the land. You ran. You cannot come back and expect a big welcome and the keys of the kingdom turned over to you.”
“Look, pal.” Ed was mad. He never called anyone pal unless he planned to demolish them. “The last thing we’d do is trade Chicago for this place. My cousin came for a friendly visit and you insult her. Come on, Nora, let’s go.” He stood up.
“Wait. I only wanted to see Peter’s hometown.”
He nodded. Fair enough.
“And now you have,” James Keeley said.
“For years I imagined visiting Peter’s grave but…”
“His grave is out there.” He pointed through the window out to the sea. “The fellow who shot him threw him over the cliff about five miles from here. The man who saw it happen came and told us.”
“Was he called Cyril Peterson?” I asked.
Now James Keeley spoke directly to Ed. “I meant no offense. But while you were living the soft life in Amerikay we continued the struggle here. Ireland is still a poor country and none needier than Connemara. But we finally have a chance and so when so-called relatives appear, well, you understand why I have been a bit touchy.” He turned to me. “Whatever you were to my brother I see you truly cared for him and you have my sympathy, but I suggest you go back to where you came from. I’ll say goodbye. Slán abhaile. He stood up and left the pub.”
Geeze Louise … families!
But Dominic had promised that he’d put the word out for information, and that night a man came to the hotel pub. Very late. Joseph and Ed were in bed. I half recognized him from the wild session of the night before. Younger than I was though. In his forties. So only a boy when Peter had been ambushed. But Dominic assured me that this man had been with the IRA in the mountains.
“I knew the professor surely,” he said, lifting the Guinness Dominic set before him. “They pull a good pint here for all their airs and graces,” he said to me. Dominic nodded and walked away from us to the far end of the bar. “And I saw him shot. Took us all by surprise. The gunman only a young student. He claimed to have a message for the professor from his wife that was also a shock because we didn’t think the professor would have bothered with the women. A teacher through and through. And even in camp he held classes in Irish history and had us local lads try to teach the Dublin jackeens an Gaeilge. We had a spy in the Free State garrison to warn us if the army was on the move. Very suspicious we were. But this boy seemed harmless until he took out that pistol and fired at the professor.” The man leaned forward. “Hit him square in the chest. As the man said, there are no bad shots at five yards’ range. The professor had taken the student to the side and by the time the rest of us realized what had happened the fellow was dead and the professor was unconscious. Only Cyril Peterson was there. Said the professor got him.”
“How could the gunman throw Peter’s body into the sea if he’d been shot himself?”
“The sea? Our camp was right there on Derryclare Mountain. Nowhere near the sea.”
“What? I was told Peter’s body was lost in the ocean.”
“You were told wrong,” he said. But Maud and Peter’s brother had both said the same thing. And then I realized they’d each gotten their information from Cyril Peterson.
“So what happened to Peter’s body?”
“I don’t know. I was sent out to see if the Free State army was coming. When I came back the professor’s body was gone and so was the redheaded Dublin man, Cyril. I heard later he took the professor’s body to Kylemore Abbey and they buried him in the graveyard there.”
“Buried? A grave?”
“What I heard,” he said.
Finally—Peter’s resting place.
The next morning I told Ed that I was staying. He and Joseph were ready to leave at six a.m. so John O’Connor could get them to the airport by seven. Still more events in London and a dinner that night hosted by Adlai Stevenson, head of the US committee on the UN. I explained what the man last night had told me.
“And you believe him?” Ed said.
“I have to see,” I said. “I’ve waited so long to kneel at Peter’s grave, that if there’s the slightest chance that he’s in the Kylemore graveyard, I have to check. And I know some of those nuns. Today’s Monday. The plane from London to Chicago doesn’t leave until Tuesday night. I’ll take the train to Dublin this afternoon, catch the night boat to London, and be there tomorrow morning.”
“Alright, Nonie. I hope … I don’t know what I hope.” He reached into his pocket, took out some folded bills, and handed them to me. “Just be there Tuesday night by departure time.”
13
KYLEMORE ABBEY
NOVEMBER 26, 1945
“Mother Abbess doesn’t entertain random visitors,” the nun said to me.
“But I know her,” I said. “More than twenty years ago I came here and—”
“Twenty years!” she laughed. “Do you know how many Kylemore girls have passed through school in twenty years. Hundreds. Thousands. We are one of the top schools for young women in all the world. Our students come from Europe and America as well as every county in Ireland. I presume you are the mother of one of our alumna or the grandmother?”
“No, I’m not. But I must see Mother Columba.”
“A spiritual crisis then? Father Brian is very understanding. He comes in for daily Mass so perhaps you’d like to attend the service tomorrow morning and then afterward—”
I interrupted her. “I have to see Mother Columba now.” Why was this nun being so difficult? Maura had told me that she was a local girl who regarded her position as porteress as a license to control the abbey. The nuns were Benedictines and semi-cloistered, teaching the girls and supervising the dormitories where the boarders lived, but not seen out in the area.
The convent had quite a history. The Benedictines had been expelled from Ireland in the seventeenth century by Cromwell, as had all the Irish religious orders. The nuns had established themselves in Belgium, planning to come back to Ireland. It only took 250 years. In Belgium the school of Les Dames d’Irlandaise offered Irish women a chance for the education that was denied them in Ireland. For two centuries, no Catholic was allowed to attend school, and girls were especially deprived. The remnants of the old Gaelic aristocracy sent their daughters abroad to the sisters. Some of those girls had remained there as nuns.
A peaceful enough life until the Germans invaded Belgium during World War I and bombed the convent. These women, who had spent their lives in the cloister, found themselves walking thirty miles to safety. I’d heard the story when we’d escaped to the abbey after the Black and Tans attacked Lough Inagh Lodge. Brave women and good at business too. They’d raised enough money to buy this abandoned estate with its castle-like building and a miniature gothic church, built by the first owner as a tribute to his dead wife. The nuns had just opened the school when I’d been here. It seemed to have thrived. There was nothing
ramshackle about the place now. The buildings had been restored and the lawns were green, even in November. The lake in the center reflected both the mountains and the castle.
“Sister,” I said, lowering my voice and setting out each word. “I must see Mother now. It’s a matter of life or death. Tell her Professor Keeley’s wife is here and I’m not moving until she agrees to see me.”
It didn’t work. The nun only stared at me. “Good morning,” she said and turned away.
“Please,” I said. I couldn’t keep my voice level, desperation breaking through. “At least speak to Mother. If she says no, I’ll leave and never come back I promise.”
“Are you in that much need?” she asked me.
“I am,” I said.
“Alright. I thought you were another one of those Yanks who expects everyone to drop everything to accommodate them. But you do look a bit shattered.”
“I am. You are my last hope. Please.” She nodded. Gestured me toward a chair and left.
It was a good half hour before she returned. I found myself praying “please God” as I stared at a huge oil painting of the Sacred Heart. I’d never had any devotion to the Sacred Heart with its dripping blood and the vacant look on the face of Christ. But now I was imploring Him.
Finally, the nun stood before me. “Mother is in the church but she said I could bring you there. I’d say a bit of prayer would do you no harm.”
Mother Columba seemed unchanged by the past twenty years. Not a wrinkle in the face framed by the white linen wimple and black veil. She turned to me and smiled. She has to be eighty, I thought. She was sitting in the first pew of the church, a miniature gothic cathedral with walls of green Connemara marble and an altarpiece that showed Mary holding the Child Jesus. A more appealing picture than the Sacred Heart.
“Thank you, Sister,” Mother said to the young nun, who seemed in no hurry to leave. But now she gave a quick bob of the head and walked out. Mother Columba gestured for me to join her in the pew and I sat down. A faint odor of rosewater from her habit.
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