“Well, if you’re going, you’d better get your skates on. The day’s almost gone.”
When she looked out through Mrs. Murtaugh’s lace curtains, Betsy took heart from observing that not a single person in view was carrying an umbrella. When she stepped out, the skies were still sullen but the air was crisp.
On the bus to Merrion Square, she began composing a letter to her sister in her head. Gina shared her appreciation for the work of Oscar Wilde. Her timing as Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest had been exquisite. After watching Gina in that and other college productions, Betsy thought her sister talented enough to head directly to Broadway, but was grateful that she hadn’t.
The bus stopped and all the other passengers rose from their seats. “Excuse me, where are we?” she asked the woman who had been seated next to her.
“That’s Merrion Street right up there. At the crossing. Looks like we’re in time.”
“Oh. Thank you. I guess the Square must be nearby? I didn’t realize that Merrion Street was the end of the line.”
The woman raised her eyebrows but was already swept up in the queue to the door. Betsy glanced outside and gasped. The window framed a churning sea of humanity surging like the waves that had tossed the ferry on its crossing. Even the crowds in Florence were nothing compared to this. They couldn’t all be Wilde or Yeats fans or interested in museums and government buildings. As she stepped off the bus, she was launched in the direction of a barricade. Segments of metal fencing and what looked like bicycle racks held together by chains bisected the street. A phalanx of police formed a second wall on the other side. “Is there a parade today?” she asked the man in front of her as she tried unsuccessfully to backpedal against the forward motion of the throng. He replied with a low laugh, dry appreciation of her dry humor. He was carrying what looked like an elongated axe handle. Glancing around, she realized that many of the men and some of the women, too, carried something in one hand or the other—pickaxe handles, shovel handles, bats, bricks, golf balls, bottles. She saw one crowbar and several men in a cluster holding what appeared to be fence pickets.
Betsy felt panic rising in her like an incoming tide. She tried to turn around, to move against the current, but the mob carried her along. There was no place to go but forward or down. “What’s happening?” she asked of no one in particular. Then louder, “What is this?”
The crowd had been muted enough, grim enough, for a funeral march. Now shouting erupted as they neared the barricade and the sound traveled back like a wave. A roar. Betsy began to grasp how large the surging sea of bodies was. There were hundreds—thousands?—behind her still turning in from Northumberland Road. The bus had deposited her less than a block away from the makeshift barricade at the very front of the protest. “Let me through! Please!” she begged hopelessly as she felt shoulders and elbows jostling her forward. The crisp air was suddenly thick with insults and threats fired across the barricade at the uniformed men, followed shortly by the primitive, impromptu weapons. Bricks and bottles hurtled over her head. There were cries of “For the Blanketmen!” She saw the barricade collapse under the human deluge. A chant of “Burn it! Burn it!” rumbled up all around her. She watched for several minutes as the front row of uniforms and their handheld plastic shields crumpled unevenly to the pavement. Then she watched as the next line of police took their place and advanced toward the crowd—toward her—with batons swinging. The noise grew impossibly louder. She was amazed that she could separate sounds out from each other—the tattoo of heavy shoes on concrete, the thud of wood on flesh, the shrieks, the grunts. When a sudden sharp pain seared through her arm, Betsy involuntarily joined the chorus. “Oh!” and then “Ohhhh!” The men on either side of her dropped, one screaming, one silenced. As she stumbled and went down, legs tangled beneath her, she thought, This is such a stupid way to die, not even knowing why.
She was caught—miraculously—before she sank all the way to the pavement and then—astoundingly—lifted and carried, her injured arm dangling, her other arm around the neck of her savior, her face buried in the smooth cloth of his jacket, all of her shaking uncontrollably. Biblically, he managed to part the roiling sea of humanity that continued to swell and surge past them and over the fallen barricade as if irresistibly drawn to the swinging batons.
It seemed to her that they navigated through the mayhem for hours, but later he told her their voyage lasted only minutes.
They came to a sudden stop and a voice thick with worry inquired, “Can you manage the latch?” Eyes kept downcast to spare herself the sight of broken bodies, she had known him to be tall by how far away the ground was and strong by how easily he carried her. Betsy twisted her leg and lifted the handle with her foot and he shouldered them through the door. It was only then that she stole her first look. She gasped and was instantly embarrassed until he saved her with a murmured apology, assuming that the awkward passage through the door had caused her pain. It wasn’t that he was so good looking—she thought his nose had been broken, maybe from the same adventure where he’d acquired the line etched into his forehead—but that his scars made him look fearless. She guessed this wasn’t his first time marching on Merrion Street.
He deposited her gently onto a chair. “You all right? Should I be getting you to hospital?”
The realization that he felt an obligation to take care of her flowed through her like warm milk.
“I know you’re injured, but I’m not sure where exactly.” He looked away, reddening at being both indirect and still, perhaps, indelicate.
“My arm mostly,” she reassured him of the decorousness of the location. “I don’t know if I was hit by a policeman’s baton or one of the bats in the crowd.”
“You’re a Yank!” he exclaimed. Then, focusing, “Is it broken?”
Betsy gingerly lifted her wounded wing. “Ow!” She slowly turned it this way and that. “No,” she said, wincing. “Nothing’s broken, I think.”
“Ah, that’s fine then.” He turned on his heel and made his way over to the bar. That was when Betsy realized she was in yet another pub. This one was nearly empty, only the bartender and one other customer, and that patron had his head against the wall and was snoring with mouth gaping wide enough for Betsy to see he was missing several teeth.
“Is there someone waiting for you?” her rescuer called back over his shoulder. “Someone we should give a ring?”
“There’s no one,” she said, feeling the pathos of that admission. “Speaking of no one, where is everybody?” she asked as he returned with chunks of ice wrapped in toweling. The pubs she had previously wandered into never seemed to lack for customers no matter the time of day.
Amused, he said, “Everybody is out there on Merrion Street.” Then his face darkened. “I should be getting back meself.”
“’Hooligans!” contributed the barman.
Her companion turned his attention back toward the bar. “You’d better get that rot out of your system before the lads come in or you’re likely to see this place reduced to matchsticks. Or,” he smiled sweetly and inclined his head toward the snorer propped up by the wall, “your man there will make up your entire clientele for a long time to come.”
The barman mumbled something indecipherable and went back to polishing glasses.
“But weren’t they hooligans?” Betsy asked as he wrapped the towel around her throbbing arm.
“No more than I.”
“So you were with them?”
She had his full attention now. “You weren’t? You were there in support of the gardaí?”
“What are gardaí? I came to see the building where Oscar Wilde lived.”
“A tourist,” he shook his head, marveling.
“I’m done with sightseeing. I’ve seen enough sights now, thank you. A memorable last day.”
“Your last day in Dublin?”
“The last real day of
my trip, period. I fly to Paris tomorrow to catch my return flight to Montreal and then home to Milwaukee. This was quite a grand finale.” She grimaced in pain, perhaps more than necessary. “So what was it all about?” She wanted to keep him there talking to her—she did like looking at him—cleft chin, watchful eyes above the skewed nose, and dark blond waves that tumbled Prince-Charmingly across his marked forehead—and she liked listening to his voice, but also for his own sake. She felt sure if he thought she had recovered, he would abandon her and return to his comrades in arms. Where anything could happen to him. And none of it would be good. “You know, there’s a Chinese proverb that says if you save a life, you are responsible for it.”
“Ah, but I’m not Chinese and neither are you. And then there’s this to be considered: no one ever died of a bruised arm, even a badly bruised one.”
“Maybe not. But plenty of people have died from being trampled underfoot. Or from being beaten by batons.” She shivered.
“You’ve had a fright,” he said sympathetically.
Away from the chaos, she could still feel the bewildering rage that had flooded the street. Her eyes brimmed and her chin quivered as she nodded. She watched him waver between duties. Betsy sighed with relief when he went back to the bar and returned with two whiskeys.
“Medicine. For the shock,” he said. “First you sip, then I’ll talk.” He waited until she obeyed. “You were caught up in a demonstration.”
“That must mean something different here than it does in the States.” He pointed to her glass. She took another sip and continued, “I’ve been to antiwar demonstrations and civil rights demonstrations—I marched with Father Groppi when I was in high school—and some workers’ rights demonstrations. I even got to meet César Chávez when I organized the grape boycott at the A&P near campus.” She saw that he didn’t recognize the names she proudly dropped. “Anyway, nobody came to those demonstrations armed. Except the cops.”
“Our lads are dying.”
She was puzzled. “I’m not following. I mean, our lads—our boys—were dying too, in Vietnam and in our inner cities and across migrant worker camps. But we weren’t carrying bricks in our hands.”
“The best of us are dying in prison. As we sit here. In the Haitch blocks. And it’s killing the rest of us.” He looked at her blank face with some irritation. “Do you know what’s located on Merrion Street aside from the digs of your man the playwrighter fella?”
Betsy frowned. “The home of Yeats. The National Gallery,” she ticked off. “Maybe not exactly on the Street? In the Square? Or nearby? I don’t have a clear picture of the geography. Oh! The seat of your government.”
He shook his head impatiently. “The British Embassy. The plan is to tear it down or burn it up.”
The light dawned. “This is about your civil war.”
“This is about centuries of oppression by an imperialist nation.”
“And what are the Haitch blocks? I’m not familiar with that word.”
“It’s not a word, it’s the letter Haitch.”
“Oh! H blocks.”
“The blocks are these Haitch-shaped units in a filthy prison called the Maze up near Lisburn. It’s where Maggie Thatcher incarcerates political prisoners and has them stripped naked and tortured and beaten. Have you not heard of Bobby Sands?”
“The name sounds familiar,” she lied.
“At Bobby Sands’s funeral in May there were one hundred thousand mourners.”
“A hundred thousand?” Her eyes widened. “I should know about him.”
He jabbed at the base of his glass with one finger, pushing it away incrementally. She saw that he was again weighing the decision whether to stay with her or rejoin the fray. “I’m Elizabeth Baumgartner. But most people call me Betsy. I’d like to know the name of the man I have to thank for snatching me out of harm’s way and who is about to become my tutor in matters Irish.”
“Declan Jones,” he said.
“But Jones sounds English.”
“It is. I’m not. Leastways not the Republican half that carried you into the pub.” He smiled for the first time. Betsy took note of the crinkles that puckered the skin around his startlingly intense eyes and was surprised to realize her champion was several years older than she was. Late thirties, she decided. She shifted on her chair to reposition the ice pack and the movement sent a blade of pain twisting through her.
Watching her wince, Declan seemed to come to a decision. “I can’t leave you wandering about, not with that wing,” he sighed. He set about fashioning a sling of toweling and ice, suspended it from the back of her chair, and gently lifted her arm to rest in it, then he reared back on his chair, arms folded, eyes closed. Betsy took advantage of the opportunity to stick the tip of her finger in the glass and apply several drops of whiskey as an antiseptic to her abraded knee. Declan began, “Bobby Sands lived in Belfast. He was just eighteen the first time he was arrested. Four handguns were found in the house where he was staying. After he was charged with possession, Bobby spent four years in the cages of Long Kesh. Back then, the Republicans had the status of political prisoners. They were deprived of their liberty, but they still had freedoms. They wore their own clothes; they could associate with each other; they had access to books and time for study. Bobby was a great one for the books. He even taught himself Irish.
“When he was released, he went back to his family. He was home less than six months before he was arrested again. There’d been a bomb attack on the Balmoral Furniture Company at Dunmurray. And after, there was a gun battle. Bobby was riding in a car near there with three other men when the RNC stopped them and found a revolver in the car. They were taken to Castlereagh and subjected to interrogations that were only brutal for six days. No matter what they did to him, Bobby would answer with his name, his age, and his address. Not a word more. He didn’t put up a defense at the trial. He refused to recognize the authority of the British court. And there was no jury. Just the one judge who admitted there was nothing to connect Bobby or any of the other three to the bombing. So his honor”—Betsy watched a sneer transform Declan’s open face—”sentenced all four of them to fourteen years apiece for possession of the one revolver.
“In the short span betwixt his first incarceration and his second, the bloody Brits stripped the Republican prisoners of their political prisoner status including their right to wear their own clothes. Most of the men refused to wear the prison uniforms seeing as they weren’t thieves or rapists or killers but soldiers in the Irish Republican Army, so they went naked except for their blankets. So Bobby joined the blanketmen.”
Betsy interrupted, “That’s what they were shouting out there—‘Blanketmen.’”
His eyes narrowed. Betsy couldn’t decide if he was surprised that she wasn’t familiar with the term or surprised to find himself sitting there relating this history to her while current events outside unfolded or combusted.
“The screws clubbed and kicked the blanketmen every time they left their cells, so the lads refused to wash or slop out and the shite was piling up in corners. The stench was ungodly but the lads wouldn’t give in. Somebody had the bright idea to paint the walls of their cages with their own excrement to get rid of the stink. Conditions were pure brutal so, on the first of March, Bobby began refusing food.”
“Oh! Of course! Bobby Sands was one of the hunger strikers.”
“He was the first. At the end of March, he was nominated for a seat in Parliament for the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election. When Bobby won, the thinking was, ‘Done and dusted, they’ll have to grant the status now and the strike can end.’” He shook his head.
“After sixty-five days on the hunger strike, the right honorable Bobby Sands, duly elected Member of Parliament, died in the prison hospital at Long Kesh, just twenty-seven. He’d been a beautiful buck. You’ve seen the poster of him—it’s only everywhere—long hair
, big smile, full of life—you probably thought he was a rocker or a film star. He was just a bag of bones when he died. Blind as well. Starvation is brutal.”
Declan sat bolt upright, as if he had been prodded from behind. “Come here to me,” he ordered.
Betsy was bewildered. They were sitting at a right angle to each other, their knees almost touching. “I’m right here.”
He frowned, then saw her confusion. “Ach, it’s only a local expression. It just means ‘Listen to me now.’”
“I am listening, Declan. I’m all ears.”
“It’s that the hunger strike in the Haitch blocks is still going on.” Declan’s voice caught. “There’ve been five more died since Bobby. And still more languishing in the prison hospital as we speak. That is what it’s about today. We’re dead sick of it. Of being on a deathwatch. Waking up each morning and wondering who died in the night.”
He cocked his head toward the voices that suddenly boomed outside and then the door burst open and the voices came crashing in, followed by dozens of bodies.
Declan laid his hand on the arm of a man headed toward the bar. “What’s the story, Terry?”
Terry looked from Declan to Betsy. “It’s all over but for the mendin’ of the bones.”
“We didn’t make it to the embassy, but we gave better than we got,” the man behind Terry nodded grimly. “There’ll be lashings of gardai takin’ up beds in the wards tonight.”
“Declan,” said Terry, “what happened to you? I thought you was down. One minute you was at me side, the next you was gone. I looked for yeh.”
“I’m afraid I happened,” Betsy hurried to explain. “I did go down and somehow he managed to rescue me. I don’t even want to imagine what would have happened otherwise.”
“A hero,” Terry said flatly.
“To be sure,” the second man seconded.
“You the damsel in this dress and him your knight hiding in the armoire,” said a third who suddenly appeared.
The Opposite of Chance Page 16