Only with Blood

by Therese Down

  “Home? Are we going to your house?”

  “We are.” Then Donal added, “Don’t worry, Pat, all will be revealed. Trust me.”

  During the journey, Donal explained that Pat would be staying at his house and helping out on his father’s farm. Pat would be helping the cause by freeing up Donal to work with Joe on Operation Holiday, and without Pat’s help, much of what was being planned would not be possible. But, urged Donal, he must not breathe a word to anyone in the Kelly household, for they all thought he was bringing in Pat to help out on the farm while Donal pursued a teaching career.

  “So I am not coming to Buncrana with ye?”

  “I don’t think so, now, Pat, no,” answered Donal. There was a long silence.

  “Is it because I am too young?”

  “No.”

  “Not good enough, is that it?”

  “Away with you, O’Meara!” chided Donal. “I have told you why we need you. You know, you are supposed to follow orders – no matter what. Did you forget that?” He shot Pat a stern look. The young man coloured. “Just do as I say,” said Donal finally, “and you’ll be right.”

  It was evening by the time they got to Golden. Donal saw to the horse’s comfort then brought Pat into the kitchen and introduced him to his family. Jacintha had just cooked supper. A steaming pot of rabbit stew stood in the middle of the table and she had cut a fresh loaf into thick slices. There was butter and a bowl of flowery potatoes, their skins split and the steam from them melding with the steam from the stew so the combined aroma filled the kitchen. Donal and Pat were ravenous.

  “This is my sister, Jacintha,” said Donal warmly, but as he spoke and his eyes met Jacintha’s, he tried to hold her gaze to convey that he understood how raw she would still be feeling after the earlier unpleasantness. Pat nodded and smiled, then held out his hand in greeting.

  “How’re ya?” she said, shaking his hand and nodding briefly in return. She did not hold Donal’s gaze or seek to meet it again but turned back to the range and began wiping it down. There was a long pause while Jacintha removed her apron and hung it over the bar of the range. She said nothing. Donal was grateful at least for her restraint.

  “Where’s Daddy?” he asked at last, kicking off his boots. A sideways glance of disapproval from his sister encouraged him to pick them up and place them neatly on a mat behind the door.

  “With Deirdre. One of the cows is lame. They brought her up to the first field so they could treat the foot. They’ll be here any second. Sit down. Help yourselves.”

  A few moments later, Dan and Deirdre came in, flushed from the February chill and talking animatedly about how they had identified an abscess on the underside of the cow’s foot. They had sterilized a knife and lanced the black spot on her sole and pus had shot out, then oozed for ages. Deirdre was reliving the moment and Dan was laughing at her graphic rendering of the drama. They both stopped talking when they saw Pat O’Meara’s blonde head at their table.

  “Daddy,” said Donal, “this is Pat. Pat, this is my father, Dan Kelly – and my sister, Deirdre.” Pat coloured, turned towards Dan, and extended his hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, Sir,” he said. Deirdre looked him up and down and raised an eyebrow.

  Dan held the young man’s hand and looked steadily into his clear blue eyes for a long moment.

  “Hello, Pat,” he said, withdrawing his hand and smiling. “You’re very welcome.” Jacintha waited for Deirdre to catch her eye, smiled knowingly at her, and raised her eyebrows. Deirdre feigned confusion, mouthed “what?”, but her blushes denounced her as disingenuous.

  Pat remembered his lines well. He knew Donal because he was related to one of his friends in Cashmel. They had met when Pat had gone up there for the weekend. The rest was truth. Pat was the youngest of five brothers and would get nothing of the farm. He was not likely to be missed, for though two of his brothers were married they were reluctant to relinquish any entitlement to the farm and worked there every day. There were frequent fights in the yard and around the table about who should get what. And it was hard on his mother cooking for six men and she almost sixty. Since Pat had turned sixteen three years ago, there had been an unspoken and increasing pressure on him to move on.

  Donal and Pat slept in Donal’s room that night, Pat on the floor. The next morning, Donal got up for work and drove Spillane’s horse to Dunane. None of his family was more sorrowful than he as he pulled out of the yard.

  It was raining when Donal encountered Caitlin. His heart lurched, and he urged the horse on faster when he was sure it was she.

  She was holding her scarf tightly around her face with both gloved hands as she walked, and leaning slightly to her right to balance her school bag where it hung from her left shoulder. She turned as he drew up beside her but looked back to the road when she saw who it was. He kept abreast of her.

  “Caitlin,” he urged, “get up on the cart. I’ll drive you as far as your father’s place.” She ignored him. “Ah, come on now, Caitlin, ’tis foolish to walk in the rain when I’m offering you a lift – with your own horse!”

  She stopped and shouted, “You have no right to that horse and you know it! What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, reining in the horse, squinting at her through the rain. “I want to be friends.”

  “Friends?” She began walking again. “You nearly killed himself the other day! He’s terrible sick.”

  “He was sick anyways from what I hear.” The horse walked on again slowly. “I didn’t ask him to attack me!” She shook her head. “Anyway, would it be so terrible if he died, Caitlin?” Donal shouted above the rain and the noise of the cart wheels on the stony road. “You’d be free.”

  She stopped again. “What for?” she asked, as she walked towards the cart, got close enough to look into his eyes. “For you, is that it?” Donal looked down at her upturned face. Even shrouded in a grey shawl and wet with rain, it was lovely. As her eyes searched his and her full mouth fell partially open with the effort of looking upwards at him, he felt a longing in his heart.

  “Get up on the cart, Caitlin,” he said gently. “I wish you only good.” She was surprised at the warmth in his eyes and the gentleness of his voice. She had not heard words of such kindness for as long as she could remember. And his eyes… they were almost a red-brown, warm and liquid as if there were heat in them. He put out his hand and she took it, allowing him to pull her onto the cart. When she was sitting beside him he held her gaze a while before urging the horse onwards to Spillane’s yard. Caitlin would not accompany him onto her father’s land and got down to walk the last ten minutes to school.

  “Tell me,” asked Donal before she walked away, “are you coping all alone up there?”

  “I’m not alone,” she answered. “Pat Maher’s wife is helping me. She only lives a mile up the road and they have a pony…”

  “So they do,” said Donal, laughing suddenly. Caitlin frowned at him as though he had lost his wits. “And do you know how I know that? Because I took the pony back to Maher when you left it in my father’s barn!”

  “You!” she cried. “It was you… in the barn!”

  Donal winked at her and laughed again. “Small world, Caitlin, wouldn’t you say?” She could not speak. “I’ll see you at school. I hear you’re very good at maths. Good luck.” He drove the cart into Spillane’s yard where he would dismount and lead the chestnut into the barn for a feed. Caitlin watched him till her father emerged from the kitchen. She shook her head in disbelief and hurried on to school. “Alice in Wonderland was never in it,” she muttered to herself.

  A couple of days later, Joe Morgan stood on Mick Spillane’s threshold, tall and jauntily turned out in a waistcoat and chequered cap to match. He hitched his thumbs behind the armholes of his waistcoat and smiled, though his eyes remained serious. “We are going on our holidays!” Donal closed his eyes and bowed his head. He had been expecting the call but it could not have been more unwelcome. He had busine
ss here to settle now which had become more important to him than trying to frighten regiments of RUC men and troops of British soldiers. He could no longer pin down precisely what the point of it was. “What?” enquired Joe with mock disappointment. “Not excited?” Donal noted Kilty’s car for the first time; its sleek cream fenders and chrome bumpers were out of place in a farm yard. He returned Kilty’s stern salute with half a smile and a nod.

  “What are you doing here, Donal?” asked Joe. “And more to the point, what is Pat O’Meara doing above at your place?” Donal stepped into Spillane’s yard and shut the door behind him. Mrs Spillane craned her neck and bobbed her head up to the moment it shut, in an effort to see past him to the strangers in the yard.

  “I got a teaching job,” he replied quietly, “in Dunane school. I’m boarding here because I can walk there from this house. Pat O’Meara is helping my father.” Joe stared at Donal. “Listen, Joe, can we go someplace else? It’s not safe to talk here.”

  In Kilty’s car, driving north-west out of Dunane, Donal leaned forward in the back seat, extending an arm over each of the two front ones, and explained his thinking about Pat O’Meara.

  “Listen, Joe…” Donal sounded friendly, earnest. “Let Pat O’Meara off this one, will ya?” Kilty looked swiftly towards Joe, who met his eye and then turned his attention back to Donal.

  “Why?”

  “If anything happens to me while we’re up there, sure there’ll be no one to help my father here. Please, Joe – Pat can be blooded on the next operation, can’t he? Sure he’ll be precious little use to us if the going gets hot in Derry. He’s just a snotty kid.”

  “You were a snotty kid once, Donal,” replied Joe. Kilty guffawed. “And not that long ago, either.” Donal nodded fast and pulled himself further forward till he was almost wedged in the gap between the driver and passenger seats.

  “I know, I know that, Joe. But my first mission was easy compared to this. All I had to do was give McGinty a message. This… this is different. This is war. Let him sit this one out. He can stay with my father while I’m away.”

  “And what if he talks?”

  “He won’t! He’s not stupid. He already has a story – he knew me from Cashmel days, is related to someone up there. He’s fine. What do you say, Joe? I’m desperate here.”

  “So desperate to help your father you took a teaching job miles away?”

  “I knew I would have to leave him again,” Donal said sullenly. “This makes it easier.” He easily summoned the resentment he had felt the first time Joe Morgan had prevented his returning home for the summer. “If there’s no one around for him, it’ll kill him, Joe. I think that when I didn’t go home… that first time… well, I’m just saying that it might have helped bring on the heart attack.” There was silence. Kilty’s car groaned with the effort of transporting three men up a steep hill. He changed down a gear.

  Joe considered. He had not missed the rebuke intended in Donal’s reference to his not being allowed home because of IRA business. Indeed, it was highly likely he would require Donal for further duties. Kelly had the makings of a good soldier: clever, brave, not too principled. And of course, it was true that Operation Holiday could lead to the death or internment of them all. Added to all this, and most salient, was that Joe had had a few qualms about initiating Pat O’Meara at such a level. He had juggled a fair bit with the possible advantages of O’Meara’s obvious naivety and the possibility the boy might be a liability under fire. Joe had intended to make Pat travel up to Buncrana with Corcoran, posing as a warehouse trainee learning the routes and routines. If they were stopped, the two made unlikely accomplices in an IRA campaign. Corcoran’s lorry would be full to the brim with sacks of sugar. But in the middle of alternate layers would be gelignite bedded in sacks of calcium hypochlorite. It had been easy enough to get the chemicals; calcium hypochlorite was used to bleach linen. One of the lads worked in an industrial laundry business in Limerick. It was loaded on no problem with a consignment of flour at the Limerick depot.

  The plan was to park the lorry up close to the barracks and lob a fire bomb in the back of it. The whole thing would go up like the explosion Guy Fawkes intended, taking the barracks with it. Pat O’Meara would know nothing of his cargo. Joe sighed, nodded. “OK, Donal,” he conceded. “This once. But only because O’Meara is an unknown quantity and, as you say, this is big guns.” Donal looked relieved.

  “Thank you, Joe,” he said. “I am very grateful.”

  “I know you are.” Joe stared ahead through the windscreen. “And you’ll get plenty of opportunities to show it.” Kilty stopped the car, turned it around on the deserted Limerick road, and gradually accelerated back to Dunane.

  Joe wound down a window and lit a cigarette, passed one to Kilty. “You wanted to know the MO, Kelly. Well, it’s this – calcium hypochlorite and gelignite.” Donal tried to disguise his horror. Kilty looked in the rearview mirror, watching Donal’s struggle to maintain a neutral expression.

  “What’s the target?”

  “RUC barracks, Derry. The others will be going for the Recruiting Office, Belfast.” Joe flicked the ash from his cigarette through the open window. “All right?” The interrogative was a challenge.

  “Yes, of course,” he replied, staring straight ahead and pretending not to notice as Kilty glanced again in the rearview mirror. “Isn’t that what I signed up for?”

  “It is,” affirmed Joe, nodding. “It is indeed.”

  At Spillane’s yard, Donal got out of the car and waved at both men.

  “See you tomorrow, so.” Joe directed his voice at Donal through the open car window, did not turn his head. “Bright and early,” he added. And Kilty’s car pulled away, sprays of thick mud churned up by its wheels, spattering its shiny fenders.

  “Now that’s a very fine vehicle,” exclaimed Mick Spillane, crossing the yard towards his lodger, an empty metal pail swinging from his hand. “Who owns a car like that, now, tell me?” He was all smiles and there was that glint in his eye which came when he savoured the possibility of social advantage.

  “A couple of friends of mine from my college days,” said Donal. “Just turned up to say hello and take me for a spin.”

  “Is that right?” persisted Spillane. “They’ve done well for themselves, I’d say.” To his disappointment, Donal did not elaborate on the men’s fortunes.

  They were at the kitchen door. “That is a wonderful smell, Missis!” exclaimed Donal enthusiastically as they stepped inside. “What can I smell? No, let me guess… chicken stew?”

  “It is, Donal!” cried Mrs Spillane delightedly, bringing her hands together as though she would clap them. “And potatoes and cabbage, and there’s a milk pudding in it for afters.”

  “Afters?” Donal sounded as excited as she did. “Sure you have us all spoilt, Missis! I’m starving so I am – I could eat a scabby cat.”

  “Well, it’s another of my chickens you have instead,” remarked Spillane dourly. “Eggs’ll be as rare as money around these parts at this rate.”

  “Oh, whisht, Mick,” rebuked his wife. “Sure there’s five hens left and three of us. How many blessed eggs do you want?”

  “I’ll away up and clean out the pigs after this,” said Donal, sitting down as Mrs Spillane ladled a huge portion of chicken stew into a bowl for him. Two of the sows had farrowed and were penned in the barn. “And I’ll check on the ones in the field – make sure they’re all right.” He tucked into the stew, making noises of appreciation so that Mrs Spillane blushed and shrugged her shoulders in girlish joy. Mick eyed him over his own spoon. He raised an eyebrow at the noises; they were not, he deemed, manly. “Delicious,” said Donal, apparently unaware of Mick’s withering glance. “And then,” he added, “I’ll clean out the milking parlour ready for when it starts again – make sure everything is spick and span.”

  Mick could not suppress a smile. Donal Kelly really was an answer to prayer.

  Jack Flynn occupied a sort of twilight wo
rld in the days after his collapse. He could not regain full consciousness for long. In spite of Herculean efforts to remain awake, he would find hours had elapsed since his last thought and he could not account for them. He was feverish and very troubled in his sleep. Caitlin checked on Jack every morning, brought him tea if he was awake, and held his head so he could sip it. She left water by his bedside and emptied his pot. Mrs Maher agreed to look in each day from mid-morning, when her own family had gone out to work and her kitchen was clean again. It was she who removed Flynn’s filthy clothes and washed his body. Once, when Jack fouled the bed, she pushed with all her might to roll him out of the mess and onto his side, cleaned him up and wrenched the dirty sheet from under him before he could wake up and be ashamed. Caitlin was inestimably grateful to her neighbour, for without her help, she could not have gone to school.

  Caitlin looked after the horse; she had grown very fond of him. As the evenings had become a little lighter she had taken to walking him around the roads to exercise his joints as Flynn had instructed. She was soothed in his company and loved him for his biddable, gentle nature. At the conclusion of one such walk, Donal Kelly found her again.

  After he had scoured Spillane’s milking parlour, as he had promised he would, Donal went upstairs to clean himself up, planning to walk down the road to Flynn’s farm. On his bed, recently occupied by Caitlin and Maureen, he found an envelope on which was scrawled his name in Spillane’s laboured handwriting. There was a hundred and fifty pounds in it, in notes. Donal stuffed the envelope deep inside a compartment of the briefcase he took to work. He had also rolled up a pair of trousers and an old shirt and put them in the briefcase, along with his passport and a few other things he would need on his travels with Joe Morgan. Anything which did not fit in that briefcase, he did not need. When he had had a wash and changed his shirt, swapped his rubber boots for shoes, Donal announced to Mick and his wife that he was “off out” and winked conspiratorially at Mick. Mick smiled behind The Irish Press, puffed on his pipe.