Ashes In the Wind

by Christopher Bland

  Tomas still thinks about Kitty O’Hanrahan. He remembers the touch of her lips on his cheek when he left Cork City for the first time, their gentle kiss on Patrick’s Hill, her low, firm voice, her brown eyes and, guiltily, her slender legs and ankles. He is still a virgin; he has flirted with some of the Cumann na mBan girls, but Kitty remains the only girl he has ever kissed.

  He has had no reply to his letter – given the erratic nature of the post it may never have arrived. Or perhaps Kitty did reply, perhaps her letter was lost. Tomas knows the only answer is to go to Cork, but he remains unsure of his reception, frightened that a confession to Kitty might not be treated in the same way as his confession in the cathedral. Had she married Frank before he was killed? Had his child? Remarried? He isn’t sure he wants to know the answers.

  He makes regular visits back to see his mother in Drimnamore.

  ‘Tomas, it’s a terrible thing, you a district inspector and not yet spoken for. You could have your pick of the Drimnamore girls if you stayed here long enough to look them over.’

  ‘Ah, Mother, leave me be. There’s time enough.’

  ‘For you, maybe, but not for me. Perhaps I’ll set the matchmaker on to you.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ and he silences his mother with a hug.

  After this visit Tomas returns to Ennis via Mallow, where he has to change trains. He sees the Dublin–Cork train pull in, and on an impulse crosses the platform and climbs on board. An hour and a half later he is in Cork. Happy not to be in police uniform, he walks to Station Road, stops on the doorstep of the O’Hanrahan house for a long minute, then knocks hard twice. There is a delay, he hears footsteps, the door opens, and he is faced by a young man of about his own age.

  Dry-mouthed, he asks, ‘Is Mrs O’Hanrahan in?’

  ‘Ah, they’ve been gone from here these nine months.’

  ‘Did they leave an address?’

  ‘They did not. We moved in two months after they left, we never saw them.’

  Tomas goes next door to try and find out more, but there is nobody home, and the house on the other side is empty. Tomas’s carefully rehearsed speech to Kitty dies on his tongue.

  He goes back to Ennis depressed, and that evening finishes the best part of a bottle of whiskey to dampen down his mind. You’re a man obsessed, he tells himself, and by what? A girl you met three times, kissed twice, and then she turned you down for a man ten years older.

  His hangover the next morning is bad, but he hasn’t given up. There is only one telephone directory for the whole of the Free State, and eleven O’Hanrahans in the book. He calls them all in the next week. No one can help, save for a distant cousin, who says, ‘Wasn’t Michael O’Hanrahan executed after the Rising? The widow will be on a pension. The pension people in Dublin will know where it goes, and maybe they’ll tell you.’

  Tomas visits the Government Pension Office in Dublin, tries to pull rank, and when that fails confesses to the young woman in charge the romantic reason for his search.

  ‘You’d have saved yourself a deal of trouble if you’d told me that at the start,’ she says, pushing across a piece of paper. ‘Here’s the address, but that’s only the widow. If the daughter’s taken you can give me a call.’ She smiles, Tomas hugs her and goes back to Ennis happy.

  Tomas now knows where the O’Hanrahans live – Macroom is only thirty miles from Ennis – but he still does not know what Kitty has become since their last parting.

  It takes him three days to decide to travel to Macroom. He wears his policeman’s uniform – she’d best know what I’m doing from the beginning, he thinks. He arrives in Macroom and asks the way to Mafeking Street. At the top of the street he sees a woman walking towards him, and realizes at once that this is Kitty. She doesn’t recognize Tomas in his uniform until she is three paces away, when she stops, putting her hand to her mouth in the same gesture that Tomas remembers from their last unhappy meeting in Cork.

  ‘Tomas, Tomas Sullivan,’ she says, holding out both hands. Tomas takes her hands in his, wants to embrace her, holds back.

  ‘I came to Macroom to seek you and your mother out, to see how you were going on,’ and adds, not entirely accurately, ‘I heard you had moved here from Cork.’

  ‘I’m on my way to the market. Walk with me and you can tell me about your uniform. And carry some vegetables back home.’

  ‘Did you get my letter?’ says Tomas.

  ‘Indeed I did, three weeks after you sent it. I wanted to reply, but I didn’t know what to say. So in the end I sent a postcard with our new address in Macroom.’

  ‘It never caught up with me.’

  They walk along side by side, each wondering where to begin.

  Back from the market in Mafeking Street, Kitty says to Tomas, ‘Come in for a cup of tea and say hello to my mam. She’ll be back soon, she’s the housekeeper to the parish priest at St Benedict’s.’

  They sit, still quiet, over a cup of tea in the kitchen. The silence presses heavily on both of them, until Tomas asks, his voice unsteady, ‘Did you get married?’

  ‘We did not. Our wedding was to be the month after Frank was killed. I was pregnant, and we moved away from the knowing looks and pursed lips in Cork. I’m known as Mrs O’Gowan here. But I never was.’

  ‘And the baby’s here?’

  Kitty begins to cry quietly. ‘There was no baby. I miscarried on the night of Béal na mBláth. Michael Collins and Frank O’Gowan weren’t the only ones who died that day.’

  Tomas moves to kneel beside her chair, takes her hand in his and says, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I had to ask.’

  ‘That was part of the reason I took so long to write back. But you’re here now, and I’m glad you came. But don’t expect...’

  ‘I expect nothing.’

  Tomas is still kneeling beside Kitty’s chair when Mrs O’Hanrahan comes into the room.

  ‘Lord save us, is it Tomas? And what get-up is that?’ she says. It is not clear how pleased she is to see Kitty’s visitor.

  ‘Mam, Tomas is a policeman now. I wrote to tell him we had moved to Macroom, and here he is to see us both. Sit down now, will you, and have a cup of tea.’

  The conversation is stilted; Tomas soon gets up to go, says goodbye to Mrs O’Hanrahan, and Kitty sees him to the front door.

  ‘May I see you again?’

  ‘If you wish.’

  ‘I do wish,’ and with that Tomas gives Kitty a quick kiss on her cheek and makes his way back to Ennis.

  On the train Tomas is happy that Kitty seemed pleased to see him, but he is confused by Kitty’s story. To have become pregnant by Frank, to have slept with him before they were married, didn’t match his idea of her. Had Frank forced himself on her? Was she what his mother would have called a loose woman, no better that she ought to be? He goes to bed beset by second thoughts, but by the morning he knows that he is going to see Kitty again.

  Tomas visits Macroom twice a month; he and Kitty go for walks along the river, have tea with Mrs O’Hanrahan or in Driscoll’s Tea Rooms, occasionally have lunch in the County Hotel in Macroom’s main street.

  During one of their walks along the river Tomas tells Kitty everything that he had told the priest in the Dublin Pro-Cathedral.

  ‘I was there at Béal na mBláth,’ he says. ‘I saw Frank’s body. I closed his eyes. He was killed instantly. I didn’t kill him, I’m sure of that. But I didn’t have the courage to come and tell you that night, and I was off to Dublin with Michael Collins’s body the next day.’

  Kitty shakes her head, says nothing as they walk to the station. When they part she says, ‘I’m glad you told me. It’s better to know, and it’s in the past now.’

  Tomas takes this as an absolution, and kisses Kitty’s cheek as the train pulls into the station. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

  25

  TOMAS’S COURTING OF Kitty is slow and careful. It is difficult for him to get away from Ennis to Macroom, and it is clear Kitty does not want to be hurrie
d.

  ‘Tomas, I’m happy for you to come and see me. But my head’s still spinning from all that’s happened to us, and around us. I’ve lost a father, I’ve lost Frank, I’ve lost a baby.’ They are sitting having tea in the County Hotel in Macroom.

  ‘I know that,’ says Tomas. ‘I thought I’d lost you, and I don’t plan to lose you again.’

  Walks, endless cups of tea, the occasional supper and chaste kisses when they meet and part mark the slow progress of their relationship. Kitty’s lips are as sweet to Tomas as when they first kissed on Patrick’s Hill above Cork City.

  They are both again devout Catholics; both have had to confess and seek absolution for mortal sins, Tomas for murder, Kitty for going to bed with Frank. Tomas doesn’t see that they are equivalent.

  ‘You were about to get married. It wasn’t down to you that Frank was killed.’

  ‘That’s not how the Church sees it. It’s done now, but I’m not letting it happen a second time.’

  They are lying on the grass by the river, and Tomas, who has put his hand gently on Kitty’s breast, finds it just as gently removed. There are moments when he thinks it strange that Kitty insists that he treats her like the innocent eighteen-year-old he had first met in his mother’s front room in Station Road. But such moments are rare, offset by the pleasure of being with, talking to, looking at, and kissing, however gently, Kitty O’Hanrahan.

  ‘I’d like to take you to Kerry, to Drimnamore, to see where I come from. And to meet my mother.’

  Kitty looks thoughtful. ‘Tomas, that’s a big step for me.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time you took it. Did you ever meet Frank’s parents?’

  ‘It’s time you put Frank behind you. I’ve told you that’s past and gone, so don’t go back there again. And just so you know, Frank’s father disappeared off to England before the Great War, and his mother, may she rest in peace, was dead by the time I met Frank.’

  Tomas returns to Ennis angry with himself for mishandling the idea of going to Drimnamore, and doesn’t raise the question again for some time. His job as inspector involves regular visits to the police stations in his division, disciplinary hearings, promotion boards, complaints from the public, disputes between his own men. He misses, although he doesn’t admit this to Kitty, the excitement and danger of the years between 1919 and 1923.

  ‘It’s well and good for you to look back on it like that,’ says his mother. ‘You came through alive, thanks be to God,’ and she crosses herself. ‘You could easily have been killed at Staigue Fort, or hanged in Kilmainham, or shot dead on the Quays. It gives me the shivers. Every time I see Brigid O’Mahony I think you could have been where Patrick lies, rotting in quicklime.’

  ‘I know that,’ says Tomas. ‘I’d not speak like that to anyone but you. I’m lucky to be alive, lucky to have a decent job and a good wage. And I’m walking out with a girl from County Cork.’

  ‘Cork, is it?’ says his mother as if it were Vladivostok. ‘There are plenty of good girls in Kerry.’

  ‘Not as good as this one,’ says Tomas, and gradually Annie Sullivan extracts the story of how Tomas met Kitty and how they were reunited. Tomas doesn’t feel it necessary to go into detail about Kitty’s relationship with Frank O’Gowan.

  ‘She’s from a Republican family all right, I’ll give you that. And you say she’s a good Catholic. Father Michael told me how happy he was that you took Communion this morning.’

  ‘She’s a good woman. And she’s beautiful.’

  ‘I hope she’s strong.’ Annie Sullivan means strong enough to cut turf, draw water, herd cattle, bear children.

  ‘She’s nearly as strong, nearly as beautiful, as you,’ says Tomas, hugging his mother.

  When she frees herself from his arms, she says, ‘Very well, so. The sooner I see her the better.’

  Back in Ennis there is a formal inspection of the division by General Eoin O’Duffy, the Commissioner of the Garda. Tomas had known O’Duffy during the War of Independence , an energetic and successful commander who became deputy chief of staff and close to Michael Collins. O’Duffy is his own man, with a flair for personal publicity and a vanity that is barely held in check.

  The tour of Tomas’s division goes well; afterwards they are sitting over a glass of whiskey in divisional headquarters when O’Duffy unburdens himself to Tomas.

  ‘Fianna Fáil are out to get me, call me “Yo-Yo Duffy” and demand that I be sacked. They think I was in Cosgrave’s pocket, that I hate Fianna Fáil.’

  ‘It’s down to you we’ve got a strong police force in this country.’

  ‘We’ll see. De Valera pays no attention when I tell him there’s a real Communist threat in this country, that they’re infiltrating his beloved IRA.’

  Not long afterwards O’Duffy is sacked. Tomas finds the news unsettling, and wonders whether a wholesale purge will follow.

  He says to Kitty one afternoon, ‘I’m sick of the lot of them. I sometimes think we were better governed when the Brits were in Dublin Castle. The Civil War was bad enough – the endless bickering between Cumann na Gael and Fianna Fáil is almost worse.’

  ‘I’d rather have inefficient Irishmen than efficient Brits. And if they were so efficient, how did they manage to lose the War of Independence?’

  ‘They were tired, we were lucky, and we had Michael Collins. By God, I wish we had him now. He’d never have started the Economic War. It’s killing the country slowly. My mother told me the Drimnamore farmers couldn’t sell a single cow in Kenmare market last month, had to bring them all back.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because we never got our Republic.’

  ‘Kitty, I was a Volunteer in the Irish Republican Army, I took the oath. The IRA today are small-minded, trigger-happy gunmen who can’t come to terms with peace. I miss the old days, right enough, but these little acts of violence make no sense. They shot John Egan last week, a former Volunteer, to what end? It’s not the IRA we were part of, it’s a different beast altogether.’

  Tomas, depressed by the state of his country, starts drinking again heavily most weekends when he is not visiting Kitty. On one of his visits to Macroom he is still showing signs of the night before, his eyes bloodshot, his hands shaking.

  ‘Tomas, I can still smell the drink on you. I’ll not have it. What’s it to be? Whiskey, or me?’

  ‘It’s you, it’s you. But I hardly ever see you, and I’ve a lonely job in a lonely place. We’re meant to be together. It’s time we set a date for the wedding, became man and wife.’

  Kitty kisses Tomas passionately for the first time.

  ‘That would have been even better if it wasn’t for the taste of the whiskey,’ she says. ‘You’re right. We’ve courted long enough. It’s time I went to Drimnamore to meet your mother.’

  Back in County Clare the next day Tomas is called out to the market in Ennis. The Garda are organizing the auction of three horses for the non-payment of rates. There are a hundred and fifty farmers present, determined to stop the auction, keen to spot the government agent who is there to bid if a real bidder fails to emerge. The superintendent knocks the first two horses down for a pound apiece amid cries of ‘Who’s the bidder?’ and ‘Get the bailiff’.

  When the third horse, a good half-bred by Royal Academy, is brought forward, its owner snatches the halter, saying, ‘This is still mine,’ smacks the horse on the rump and sends it trotting through the crowd. Someone identifies the rate collector, who is knocked to the ground and kicked. Tomas pushes forward, draws his revolver and fires three shots overhead. He pulls the frightened man to his feet and escorts him back to the safety of the main body of Garda, revolver still drawn.

  Back at Divisional Headquarters, Tomas says to his deputy, ‘This isn’t what I joined for. I’m on the side of those farmers. Since Dev launched the Economic War there’s been no market for cattle at all.’

  ‘You can’t give good beef away in Munster,’ says his deputy. ‘The Brits can live without selling us their coal; we can’t
survive without selling them our bullocks.’

  ‘And now the government wants farmers to slaughter their cattle. Three pounds for a dead cow, thirty shillings for a dead bullock or calf. I think it’s madness.’

  A week later Tomas and Kitty make the trip over to Drimnamore. Annie Sullivan is lukewarm at first, but Kitty is undeterred, helps in the kitchen, praises the soda bread, and tells Annie what a good job Tomas is doing over in County Clare.

  ‘The men like him, you can tell that,’ she says. ‘It’s not because they can do as they wish. He’s good on the discipline, and he’s fair. O’Duffy said Tomas’s division was the best in Munster.’

  Tomas takes Kitty to meet Father Michael and the O’Mahonys, thinks about calling on Josephine, but decides against it. He wears his uniform to Mass, Kitty’s arm through his, and afterwards they are surrounded by a group of Tomas’s friends and relations.

  ‘You’re the big man in Drimnamore right enough,’ says Kitty. Tomas laughs; he likes the welcome, enjoys being teased by Kitty.

  They go to one of the bars in Drimnamore after church, where Tomas refuses a Guinness. ‘Not while I’m in uniform,’ he says.

  ‘Nor at any other time,’ Kitty whispers in his ear.

  Afterwards they walk through the Derriquin demesne and pass the skeleton of the castle on their way back to Ardsheelan. ‘Kerry is a beautiful county,’ says Kitty. ‘Would you ever come back to the farm?’

  ‘That would depend on you. But not for a long time yet; I’ll stick with the Garda. A well-paid job is rare enough in these times.’

  Their wedding takes place a month later in Macroom. Father Michael comes over to share the duties with the parish priest, and Emmet Dalton and Michael McGarry come down from Dublin for the ceremony at noon and the long lunch that follows in the County Hotel. Emmet Dalton is best man; he’s now making films in Bray, and in his speech says Kitty is pretty enough to star in his next film. Tomas agrees.

  Tomas and Kitty have a four-day honeymoon at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin. Kitty has never been to Dublin, and Tomas’s experience of the city was as a member of The Squad and the Protective Corps. They visit both cathedrals, Trinity College and the Guinness brewery, where Tomas refuses the free sample. They look at the ruins of the Four Courts.