1916

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Constance Markievicz barked a laugh. “You could say the same of me—though my sister Eva writes poems.”7

  “I confess to being perplexed,” said Henry. “This is delightful company to find myself in, but I am curious as to what brings you together.”

  Pearse replied, “We share an enthusiasm for the Irish language and culture. Eamonn met Tom and me through the Gaelic League, and Tom taught Joe Irish.”

  “Is that all?” Henry asked.

  The headmaster gave him a long, thoughtful look. “For taking such good care of our Ned, perhaps you do deserve a more complete answer. Besides, if I read you correctly, you share many of the feelings which unite us.”

  Ceannt took a step forward to lay a hand on Pearse’s arm. “Are you sure, Pat? It’s best to be careful.”

  Pearse turned to Ned. “Will you vouch for your friend?”

  “Mr. Mooney may have saved my life. I trust him implicitly.”

  The headmaster nodded. “The faith of a Scoil Eanna boy is good enough for me. Your articles speak well for you, Mr. Mooney, and Ned has earned the right to hear what we are discussing; he paid for it with his blood. Please take seats and join us, gentlemen. You have come upon”—he smiled, though his eyes were solemn—“a conspiracy of poets.”

  September 5, 1913

  50,000 ATTEND FUNERAL OF WORKER

  KILLED BY POLICE

  September 24, 7973

  SERBIAN TROOPS MOBILIZE IN

  THE BALKANS

  Chapter Thirteen

  Caitlín, a chara,

  Some weeks ago I went into Dublin to meet my friend, Henry Mooney. While I was there we accidentally witnessed a riot involving Jim Larkin, the leader of the labor movement, and the police. Several innocent people were killed. It’s now being called Bloody Sunday.

  Ned felt no need to tell his sister of his own injury. Geographical distance allowed a desirable blurring of certain details one would prefer not to share with family.

  The next day we were present when a group came to discuss the current situation with Mr. Pearse. Like him, each of them feels a passionate commitment to make things better.

  Among the group was a woman, Countess Markievicz. Her husband is a Polish count, but her maiden name was Gore-Booth and she comes from an Ascendancy family with estates in Sligo. She grew up in a big house and has a posh accent, but she’s as Irish in her heart as Mr. Pearse. She was even arrested in 1911 for “revolutionary activities” during the visit of King George and Queen Mary to Ireland—and she doesn’t seem the least bit embarrassed about it!

  In 1909 the countess and a man called Bulmer Hobson founded a youth corps called Na Fíanna Éireann after Fionn MacCumhaill’s army. They wear uniforms and have parades and do all sorts of exciting things. She even teaches them to shoot. She is a crack shot and has her own rifles. The Fianna love the countess; they call her “Madame.”

  A young apprentice teacher at Saint Enda’s, a fellow called Con Colbert who also works part-time as a bakery clerk, organized a company of Fianna here. After I met the countess I decided to join, and I’m proud to say I have been accepted. We go on maneuvers in the Dublin mountains with other companies. One of the friends I have made in the Fianna is a lad my own age called Seán Heuston. Seán has just come up to Dublin from Limerick and works in the Fianna headquarters in Hardwicke Street.

  Seán has told me more about the countess. She has spent years trying to teach tenement dwellers basic health care. She is always fighting for the working class and the poor. That has made her unpopular in certain circles, as you can imagine. Seán says her husband calls her a “floating land mine.”

  She is a most remarkable woman, Caitlín, and not the least bit pretentious. She’s full of fire and spirit like the Irish warrior-women in the old legends.

  Full of fire and spirit. Irish warrior-women. Frowning, Kathleen folded Ned’s letter neatly along its creases and put it back into her pocket. His phrases seemed to condemn her.

  “In Ireland there are women struggling against poverty and injustice,” she subsequently bemoaned to Father Paul, “but what have I done? I live in more luxury than most Irish people could ever imagine.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” counseled the priest. “You’re a good wife and someday you will be a good mother. What more do you think God asks of you?” Yet something in his voice as he phrased these questions made her wonder if the conventional answer was the right one.

  Kathleen had been raised to believe that priests were as sexless as angels. Since meeting Father Paul she had begun to suspect otherwise. Alexander had not awakened her, but awakening was as inevitable as the coming of spring.

  In her next letter to her Aunt Norah she wrote:

  One thing I do not miss about Ireland is the hypocrisy. There is no sex in Ireland; the church forbids it. The babies of decent folk are the result of Immaculate Conception. Anything else is Original Sin. No wonder we go through life crippled by guilt and fear.

  I blame the priests, though they must suffer, too. Until recently it never occurred to me that they had bodies beneath their cassocks. Yet surely they have feelings like the rest of us, for all they try to deny them.

  KATHLEEN blushed as she wrote the words, but she wrote them, digging the nib of her pen into the paper.

  Her trips to the presbytery were becoming more frequent, always when she knew Father Paul would be there. He shared the house with two other priests, and kept a schedule as regular as the rising of the sun. “May I speak privately to Father Paul? I have a problem and need his advice,” she invariably said when the Irish housekeeper answered the door.

  Clucking her tongue over Kathleen’s unidentified problem, Mrs. Flanagan would usher the young woman inside and seat her in the parlor. Father Paul usually joined her within a matter of minutes. Then the ritual began: steaming coffee and soft-voiced conversation. Kathleen discussed everything with the priest from Alexander’s Freemasonry to her worries about the family back in Ireland.

  As the months passed she began to speak of even more personal matters.

  In the most delicate of phrases she alluded to her dissatisfaction with the physical side of marriage. “Alexander is very good to me,” she insisted, “and gives me whatever I ask for. But he is not…tender. He does…what is necessary for making babies, but…”

  “But?”

  “Afterward I feel, well, lonely. I know God tells us marriage is for procreation, but surely there should be other satisfactions, too. It isn’t all just about having children, is it?”

  Father Paul’s blue eyes studied her face. “The institution of marriage was founded to protect the family,” he said. “And in the broader sense, to safeguard property.”

  “Do emotions not matter?”

  “Surely you love your husband.”

  “When we married I was quite certain I did, but now I think—I don’t know what love is.”

  He struggled to recall the phrases so glibly learned in the seminary. “Love develops within the sanctity of marriage, Kathleen.”

  “But how?”

  “You must be patient,” he replied, knowing that was no answer.

  As she lay in bed beside Alexander, with his back turned to her like a mountain, Kathleen found herself trying to visualize Father Paul without his clothes. The first time this happened she throttled her imagination and whispered a hasty Act of Contrition. But the next night she felt less guilty. And the next night…

  He would be slender, she decided, but more muscular than he appeared in clerical garb. Unlike Alexander, he would have little body hair. As for his private parts…

  A girl raised in the country could not be ignorant of male anatomy, but Kathleen had never seen her husband naked. A combination of tactile evidence and brief, embarrassed glimpses as he crawled into bed in his nightshirt informed her that his penis was stubby and thick even in repose, with ruddy, coarse-grained skin that reminded her of turkey wattles. He used an erection like a battering ram, as if both it and
she were insensitive.

  Paul would be different, she thought. His would be a spear, long and smooth and clean.

  She did not notice that she had ceased thinking of the priest as Father.

  In America, as in Ireland, the parish priest fulfilled a variety of roles from confessor to marriage counselor to surrogate parent. Paul O’Shaughnessy was second-generation American, but still close enough to Ireland to understand the sense of the alienation many immigrants felt. He had cousins in both Galway and Dublin, and occasionally received letters from them which depicted a society quite different from America—so different he wondered how anyone ever made the transition.

  At first he simply gave Kathleen the support he would have extended to any of his parishioners and took an innocent pleasure in listening to her lilting Clare accent. But as time passed, something changed. When he was serving Mass and Kathleen knelt at the altar rail with her hands folded and her eyes downcast, Paul was intensely conscious of her. Once he was privy to the problems in her personal life he should have discouraged any emotional attachment she might be transferring to him.

  Yet he had not.

  One morning she looked up and met his eyes as he held the chalice toward her. Through the miracle of Transubstantiation the liquid in the cup had become the blood of Christ, the ultimate sacrifice, but for one moment it was wine again, and he was offering it to the woman he desired.

  The hand that held the chalice trembled.

  For a young seminarian from a devout Catholic home, the celibacy the church imposed upon its priests had contained its own romance. Rejecting the sensual life in favor of the spiritual had been an act of love. Over the ensuing years he had suppressed the urges of his body like every other priest he knew, a lonely struggle taking place in the dark. Until Kathleen, he thought he had won.

  Chapter Fourteen

  AUTUMN wind rattled the casement windows, but inside the classroom the air was warm and moist with the exhalations of two dozen boys. In spite of himself, Ned yawned.

  At once he felt Pearse’s eyes upon him. The headmaster did not speak, yet the weight of his gaze was enough to snap Ned to attention.

  The subject, as so often, was duty. Pearse never described duty as an obligation, but as an opportunity. “Anything worth having,” he was saying, “demands a sacrifice. It may be hard work, or it may be the last ounce of your heart’s blood. But all life comes at a cost and at the end of life we die. How much better, then, to spend ourselves in a noble cause!

  “I shall never have a wife and children of my own. You are the sons I would have loved and cherished, had God given me sons. Instead I educate and cherish the sons of other men. When the great opportunities come to us we must seize them, seize them with joy and never look back, never regret we did not take another path. Then when the sunset comes we can say, ‘I did my best.’”

  “I did my best,” Ned whispered to himself in echo.

  He began to daydream about devoting himself to some great cause. The labor movement, perhaps, like courageous Jim Larkin.

  After Bloody Sunday the battle between employer and worker had intensified. Determined to break the unions, large firms refused to deal with members of the I.T.G.W.U. Thousands were thrown out of work in what came to be known as the Great Lockout.

  Soon outright starvation was widespread in the tenements. Dublin union leaders attended a congress of British trade unions in Manchester and asked the members to support their Irish colleagues. The British unions refused a sympathy strike, but sent more than sixty thousand “family boxes” to feed Irish workers. When all the boxes had been given out a soup kitchen was set up in Liberty Hall, the union headquarters, and Constance Markievicz was among those who worked long hours providing food to Dublin’s hungry.

  The Great Lockout hardened and intensified something in Pádraic Pearse.1 The gentle Gaelic scholar dreaming of ancient Ireland was transformed into an angry man outraged by current injustice. He wrote, “The tenement houses of Dublin are so rotten they periodically collapse upon their starving inhabitants, and if the inhabitants collect in the street to discuss the matter, the police baton them to death.”

  While Jim Larkin was in Mountjoy Prison the government let it be known that any association with him would be suspect. He was branded a dangerous troublemaker, and as a result no school in Dublin would accept his children. Yet Pádraic Pearse did not hesitate to take the older boys—Jim, Denis, and Finton—into Saint Enda’s.2 The baby, Barney, was too young, but Pearse assured Mrs. Larkin there would be a place for him too when he was ready. “Saint Enda’s is not run by Dublin Castle,” Pearse said simply. “We will be honored to have the boys here. Jim Larkin has done more in six months than the politicians and ourselves with all our talk.”3

  Pearse did not discuss contemporary politics in the classroom. Students at Saint Enda’s were inculcated with patriotism and a love of country while being sheltered from the rough-and-tumble of current political reality. Yet the history Pearse taught his students was undeniably political history.

  “For eight hundred years,” the headmaster lectured one storm-swept morning, “this once-rich island has suffered from attempted conquest by her neighbor to the east. The Anglo-Normans, led by Strongbow, arrived in the twelfth century.

  “Then in the sixteenth century England undertook what was called ‘plantation,’ giving huge tracts of Irish land to Englishmen loyal to the Crown. Through this method Queen Elizabeth rewarded her favorites such as Essex and Raleigh. The rightful owners of the land were driven from it by whatever means was deemed expedient.

  “Naturally they fought back. But they could not withstand the growing military might of England. At the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 the Gaelic aristocracy was defeated and plantation began in earnest. In 1649 Oliver Cromwell, a fanatical anti-Catholic, undertook to punish the ‘rebellious’ Irish, most of whom remained steadfastly Catholic, and bring them to heel once and for all. Using the twin weapons of gunpowder and terror, his army drove thousands from their homes and depopulated great tracts of land. Those who resisted were slaughtered outright.

  “Ulster, the Ulster of Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell, was arguably the most Gaelic part of Ireland, and it was Ulster that bore the worst of Cromwell’s fury. Catholics in Drogheda, for example, were locked in their own church and burnt alive.”

  Pearse closed his eyes for a moment as if he could not bear to look upon that blazing memory.

  Cold rain fell on Saint Enda’s, drumming against the tall windows. Pearse roused himself and went on.

  “By 1653 Ireland was subjugated. Almost the only land still under Irish control was the barren, stony soil of Connacht in the west. Cromwell had vowed to send the Irish ‘to Hell or to Connacht,’ and so he did.

  “At the Battle of the Boyne in 1689 two claimants to the English throne fought—on Irish soil. The Dutch Protestant, William of Orange, defeated the Scots Catholic, James Stewart. Religion was not the real issue, however. As always, the war was about territory and the power that goes with it.

  “As a result of the Orange victory, northeast Ulster in particular was given over to plantation. Protestant colonists were sent there to uphold English interest, English honor, and the Protestant faith against any and all resistance. In return they were granted not only land but extraordinary privilege. Superiority over the natives was taken as their established right.”

  As he listened to these words Ned felt an ancient anger come to life within him. The enforced subservience of centuries scalded his soul. He was gritting his teeth so hard his jaws ached.

  Pearse went on, “With the domination of Scotland, England took on a new identity. She became ‘Great Britain’ an empire was in the making. But the empire suffered a setback when in 1776 British colonists in America staged a revolt and won their independence.

  “The French staged their own revolution only thirteen years later. The Bastille fell, republicanism was in the air and the universal cry was for freedom.

  “Bri
tain had been allowing the Irish at least a semblance of self-government with their own parliament in Dublin, but now resolved to bind them with chains of iron. The British had no intention of losing their nearest colony as they had lost America.”

  America, thought Ned. They got their freedom. Why not us?

  Pearse continued, “By the Act of Union in 1800 Ireland ceased to be a separate political entity. For good or ill, she was subsumed into the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland. The parliament in Dublin was effectively dismantled and elected representation was transferred to Westminster.

  “At about the same time, the Orange Order was organized to commemorate the triumph of the Protestant minority in Ireland. Around Belfast, as nowhere else in Ireland, the descendants of the colonists outnumbered the native race.4 Understandably, Belfast became the stronghold of the Unionist Party.

  “The Irish Parliamentary Party of today is little more than a rubber stamp in the halls of Westminster, where British self-interest always takes precedence. John Redmond, the current leader of that party, began as a political moderate of the nationalist persuasion. He once said, and I quote, ‘For us the Act of Union has no binding moral or legal force. We regard it as our fathers regarded it before us, as a great criminal act of usurpation carried on by violence and fraud.’5

  “Unfortunately, over the years Redmond has lost touch with the people of Ireland and become anglicized. Thus has this island been welded in a loveless marriage with Britain.”

  Ned wrote that last sentence in his copybook, then added, “It is not a marriage of equals.” The headmaster, walking between the desks, looked down and read those words.

  NED enjoyed his membership in the Fianna. Con Colbert, who was a member of the Gaelic League, drilled the Saint Enda’s company three times a week. The uniforms were a strange mixture of Celtic fantasy and Robert Baden-Powell’s recently formed Boy Scouts. The rank and file of the Fianna wore kilts with double-breasted dark green tunics, but senior officers had breeches and leather leggings.6 Their hat was the same as the Boy Scouts’, their badge a gold sunburst with a white pikestaff head on a green field. Mr. Pearse heartily approved of the uniforms, particularly the kilts.