My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  While Dermot and I stood just within the doorway, Rory’s mother crossed the room and kissed Rory’s widow. It was a cold perfunctory kiss, and suddenly I knew that Sheila’s heart was burning with hate for Maggie. I knew, too, that Maggie felt this. She turned upon Sheila a shy propitiating glance which seemed—to me at all events—to cry aloud in the room: “I know! I know! And I don’t even ask you to understand. I don’t blame you.”

  Tears grew in her eyes, flowed out on to her cheeks. She wiped them away and said: “I mustn’t cry.”

  “It doesn’t do much good,” Sheila said. “I’ve lost two children, and I know.”

  “No,” said Maggie. “No good at all. I’ve lost a father and a husband. I know, too.”

  She was composed after that. Eileen and Guy had come in, and we all sat round the bed. She told us of Rory’s death. “They came to a house we used sometimes. The whole place was surrounded. There was no getting away at all. They shot him down.”

  Just those few bare words. She had no more to say.

  “What became of—of his body?” Sheila asked.

  “The boys would see him buried at Ballybar,” Maggie said. “I couldn’t stay.”

  “I should have liked to attend the funeral,” Sheila said in a low voice. “Couldn’t you have telegraphed to us?”

  “Oh, Mrs. O’Riorden, you wouldn’t have liked it,” Maggie burst out. “’Tis a terrible country. ’Tis half burnt to the ground and the bridges blown up and the roads with trees cut down across them. You don’t know the waste...”

  Sheila muttered to herself: “The waste... I know it...” and at that the tears welled up in Maggie’s eyes again.

  Dermot took her hand. “Lie down now,” he said, “and try to sleep. We’ll have another talk later.”

  Eileen stayed in the room with Maggie. The rest of us went downstairs. Sheila’s eyes were hard and rebellious. That was the only visit she made to Maggie.

  A few days later I called alone, and found that Maggie was up and dressed. She was well enough to be left; Eileen and Guy had gone to town. So I took her out to lunch, and then we went for a walk in Richmond Park. We had not been walking for long when she put her hand shyly on my arm and said: “Rory was very fond of you.”

  “I believe he was,” I said, “and I’m glad of it.”

  “Do you think I was—good enough for him?”

  “I knew Rory well enough to know this: that he wouldn’t have chosen anything second-rate.”

  “His mother thinks I’m a coward—that I ran away.”

  “I believe she does, but I should think it’s difficult just now for Rory’s mother to be as fair as she usually is.”

  Suddenly Maggie sat down on a seat and buried her face in her hands. “I did run away,” she sobbed. “I did. I did. I was a coward.”

  I tried to comfort her. “My dear, who can blame you? What you told us the other day—it must have been terrible. You have been through so much, and with that at the end of it—”

  “Oh, that—that was all lies. It wasn’t like that at all. It was far, far worse than that. Listen—”

  *

  Most of the boys worked all day long in the fields. Mick Slaney drove the butcher’s cart and Ken Conroy was at the sawmill, behind Doonan’s garden. There was a well in the garden, but some time ago a false bottom was put in, just above water-level. They kept their guns and ammunition there. Ken Conroy was a slip of a chap. He could stand in the bucket, holding the rope in his hands. Then they would lower him, and he would fetch up the guns a few at a time. They kept a tarpaulin sheet over them in the day-time. Doonan got his water from the priest’s well, and Father Farrell very well knew why.

  At night the boys gathered in the barn to get their orders from Rory. They came one at a time, three minutes between each arrival. A loft ran over the extent of the barn. It was very big. All the walls were wooden, and at one end there was a false wall. The planks that made it were as old and crazy as the rest of the building. One or two of them were loose and you could squeeze through into the secret chamber that was no more than a yard wide but a good twelve yards long. One of the boys always lurked outside. When he thought it necessary, he pulled a piece of tarred string that even in daylight was invisible from a few yards’ distance against the tarred side of the barn. The pulling caused a cotton reel to dance on the table before which Rory sat. Then talk ended and the dim light was extinguished till the cotton reel rattled again.

  Every man, at every meeting, had to show his gun to Rory, demonstrate its cleanliness and efficiency, check over his ammunition. This was the time, too, for bringing in cotton-wool, lint, splints, bandages, iodine, which Maggie kept with scrupulous care and cleanliness in a box at the end of the long room. She had there, too, a few elementary surgical instruments; scissors and forceps and so on; and a spirit stove and saucepan for boiling water to sterilise them and to wash wounds.

  Sometimes she spent a whole day with her patients who lay on straw mattresses. Sometimes she came to cheer an hour or two of the night. Sometimes it was possible for Mick Slaney to take them, hidden under the bloody sacks in the floor of the butcher’s cart, to some place where they could get better attention than here. And Tuohy, the butcher, knew about that.

  There was nobody in Ballybar who didn’t know all that was going on. And if in the day-time, when there might be strangers about, they were surly to the stocky, grey-eyed deep-shouldered young man who worked in Donohue’s grocery, there was policy in that.

  A law-abiding, decent little place was Ballybar while day-light lasted; but strangely empty of young life at night. Then, one by one, at three-minute intervals, a shadow here and a shadow there detached itself from the darkness of the country night till all the shadows were hung like bats in the darkness of Rice’s loft.

  Then there was no surliness to the young leader.

  “Slaney!”

  “Yes sir.”

  Slaney laid revolver and ammunition on the table. Rory examined them carefully, approved them, pushed them back.

  “We have long suspected Sir George Winter of giving information to British soldiers. Yesterday he was seen in conversation with a major of the regular army and with a captain of Auxiliaries. These men had three lorries of troops drawn up in the road outside Sir George Winter’s house. Sir George walked down his drive with them and was heard to give them directions for avoiding an ambush. He shook hands with them and said: ‘Good luck to you, boys. I wish it was your ambush and that you could wipe out some of these swine. This place is a nest of them.’”

  “I suppose Pat Hickey was working in the hedge,” Slaney grinned.

  Rory frowned. “Conroy!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have heard what I said to Slaney?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, Slaney supposes things. I want this job done by a man who supposes nothing and can keep his mouth shut.”

  He held out his hand, and Conroy pushed across revolver and ammunition.

  “Sir George Winter will give no more information to the enemy. After dinner, he sits in a room on the ground floor, and he never bothers to draw the blinds. I suppose he thinks God Almighty is looking after him. When you have taught him better, pin this on his front door.”

  Rory handed Conroy a rolled piece of paper on which was printed: “DON’T OPEN YOUR MOUTH TOO WIDE.”

  “That’s all.”

  Conroy saluted and went.

  “The rest of you boys can go. There’s nothing else tonight.”

  One by one, at intervals, the shadows detached themselves from the barn and disappeared by a dozen routes into the darkness.

  Maggie and Rory faced one another across the table in the dim light. “Let’s have a look at Dan,” Rory said.

  Maggie took up the lantern and they went to the end of the long chamber. Dan O’Gwyer, lying on his pallet of straw, grinned.

  “Well, how’s this feller?” Rory asked.

  “Ach, to hell with keepin’ me here,�
� said O’Gwyer. “Let me be now. I want to be hobbling about again.”

  “You’ll stay here, Dan, my boy, till you’re told to go. If the wrong people see you hobbling they’ll want to know what made you hobble. Let’s see his leg, Maggie.”

  Maggie unrolled the bandage, and held down the lantern for Rory to examine the bullet-wound that went through the flesh of O’Gwyer’s calf.

  “That looks all right. Fix him up again. You’re going on fine, lad. Don’t think I’m keeping you here for fun. I want you, and plenty more like you.”

  “I’m ready, when you say the word.”

  “That’s the chap. You being well fed?”

  “Ach, they’re stuffin’ my guts fit to bust. How’s Mary Clarke? She’s not about with Slaney?”

  “Ach, now, don’t you be worrying about Mary Clarke. She’s a good girl and she thinks you’re a hero.”

  O’Gwyer grinned. “So I am then.”

  “And now I’ll read to you a bit.”

  O’Gwyer settled down quietly on the straw, the pin-point of his cigarette glowing in the dusk. Rory took up a book and began to read:

  Queen Maeve summoned to her to Rath-Cruhane all her captains and counsellors and tributary kings...

  “He was very quiet on the way home,” Maggie said to me, “and seemed to be thinking a long way back.”

  *

  The next day a lorry-load of Black-and-Tans drove into Ballybar. A few stayed in the lorry; the rest clattered into Donohue’s grocery and demanded drink. Rory served them and when they had had a drink or two they began to serve themselves. The sergeant in charge asked, with no particular show of interest: “Is there a chap called Sir George Winter in these parts?”

  “Yes; lives four or five miles down the road.”

  “Seen anything of him lately?”

  “No. I don’t get about much.”

  “What sort of feller would you say he was? Is he liked about here?”

  “Oh, yes; I should say so.”

  “This is the nearest place to his house, isn’t it?” the sergeant persisted.

  Rory considered. “Yes, it would be, unless you went across country.”

  The sergeant took a pull at his drink. “News seems to travel slow round here, young feller.”

  “All the wires are down,” Rory pointed out reasonably.

  “You haven’t heard that Sir George was shot dead last night by some bloody skunk, have you?”

  “Good Lord! That’s a bad do.”

  “It’s going to be a bad do for this bloody village if we find a gun in it,” the sergeant declared savagely. “There’s one thing. Sir George shot back. I hope he hit something. Have another drink, lads, and then get on with it.”

  The Black-and-Tans laid their hands on the first bottles they could reach, drank deeply, and then got up with a clatter of arms. “This place first,” the sergeant ordered.

  The scum got busy. With rifle-butts they smashed and hammered. They swept bottles from shelves and stamped the broken glass underfoot as they poked at cupboard doors, pulled open drawers, scattering the contents to the floor, tried to pull up the floor itself. From a search they passed to wanton wrecking. They knocked the pictures from the walls, tore down curtains, tramped upstairs and hacked the beds to pieces. Rory accompanied them upstairs. Maggie was sitting in an easy chair in one of the bedrooms. A lout, unsteady with drink, advanced upon her. “Boys, look what I’ve got!” He laid a hand on Maggie’s shoulder, then found a painful grip on his own. He swung round to find himself gazing into Rory’s cold grey eyes.

  “Maggie, get out into the street,” Rory said. When she was gone, he released his grip. “If you want to rip up the chair get on with it.”

  The chair was ripped up, and in the interests of thorough search gun-butts were swung against walls, smashing down the plaster lest some hiding-place be behind.

  Half the men had by now gone downstairs and were drinking what was left of the liquor. They took some bottles out to the lorry. Then the last of them staggered and stumbled out into the cold light of the dying winter day.

  “Any more, Sarge? Shall we do another house?” one of them demanded.

  The sergeant, none too steady himself, looked at them contemptuously. “Christ!” he said. “And we won the war! Get into the bloody lorry.”

  They began to pile themselves in when Maggie, who was standing by Rory’s side, felt his hand clutch her arm with a sudden painful pressure. “O God!” he said under his breath.

  Limping round the corner at the village cross-roads, unsuspecting messenger of doom to all the boys at Ballybar, came Dan O’Gwyer.

  “The fool! The fool!” Rory groaned.

  Too late, Dan saw that he had walked into a raid. Father Farrell’s house was there on the corner. Dan lurched towards the deep embrasure of the doorway, hoping to obliterate his fatal being. The sergeant, emptying a last bottle, let the bottle drop to the ground. “What the ’ell!” he cried. “Come on, some of you.”

  Rory and Maggie moved forward with the rush of Black-and-Tans. Mick Slaney was there, too, and Ken Conroy, and most of the lads. When they came to the priest’s house, the door had been opened, and O’Gwyer stood there with Father Farrell’s arms about him. You could see right into the little hall, with the ebony crucifix on the white wall at the back. The priest’s hair was as white as the wall. From his hale, ruddy face blue eyes looked out fearlessly at the sergeant’s. The sergeant seized O’Gwyer and with one strong heave landed him sprawling in the road.

  “Where did you get that bloody wound?” he demanded.

  O’Gwyer lay face downwards at the cross-roads in the darkening evening and did not answer. Mary Clarke came running up from Tuohy’s where she worked, and when she saw Dan lying there she let out a great shriek. A soldier struck her across the mouth, and she fell to a quiet sobbing, with a shawl drawn over her head.

  “Have a look at that wound,” the sergeant ordered.

  “Pull his pants off. That’s the quickest way to get at it,” a soldier suggested; and they pulled off O’Gwyer’s trousers and left him naked from the waist. Then the bandage was savagely pulled off, causing the wound to bleed.

  “Can you beat that!” said the sergeant. “That’s a bullet-wound. In there. Out there.” He jabbed with his finger at O’Gwyer’s leg. “Still bleeding.”

  The Black-and-Tans stood in a circle round the prostrate man, clumping their rifle-butts restlessly into the ground. Outside them the villagers stood in a wider circle, gazing at the naked legs and the ooze of blood. And round about them all was the quiet countryside, fading swiftly to dusk, a few bare elms, a few rooks, cawing homewards. The priest’s servant lighted a little lamp in the hall, and the crucifix stood out plain.

  Suddenly the priest spoke. “That’s an old wound. You’ve broken it open by brutal treatment.”

  “New or old, it’s a bullet-wound,” said the sergeant. “What the ’ell d’you know about it, anyway?”

  He stood up and faced the priest truculently. “If you know it’s an old wound, p’raps you know when ’e got it, and ’ow.”

  The old man said deliberately, “He got it while defending his country from drunken barbarians like you.”

  The sergeant struck him hard in the face, and the men with the rifles closed in menacingly.

  Father Farrell bent over Dan O’Gwyer. “Get up, my son,” he said, and helped the boy to his feet. “Come into my house.” Leaning on the priest’s arm, the boy, keeping his face, for shame of his nakedness, buried in the old man’s shoulder, limped towards the open door.

  The sergeant leapt before them, raised his stout arms, standing there outlined against the light in the hall. “I’m going to have that man shot. I advise you to stand aside from him.”

  The women in the crowd set up a wailing, and the men with the rifles stood back, half-way across the road, their fingers itching on the triggers. The priest’s voice said calmly: “If you must shoot, shoot.”

  “Gawd ’elp you,”
said the sergeant. He sprang away from the door. “Men,” he shouted. “Don’t shoot the parson. Fire!”

  The rifles cracked; the flames were apparent on the darkening air. Father Farrell and O’Gwyer fell together, crumpling very slowly beneath the crucifix.

  Following the shots, there was a moment of intense silence. Then the women knelt in the road and their wailing filled the air. The sergeant said curtly: “Get back to the lorry.”

  The men of the village took up the bodies and carried them from the hall into the priest’s bedroom. The women followed. Only Rory and Maggie remained to go back in the trail of the soldiers to the lorry which still stood outside the grocery. Maggie was crying quietly. Rory’s broad shoulders were rock-like, stubborn, his eyes hard as grey granite. The men clattered into the lorry. The sergeant climbed up last into a seat alongside the driver. The lorry was vibrating, ready to be off along the road that was now lost in darkness. The headlights flamed out, revealing nothing at the cross-roads but a black smudge that must have been O’Gwyer’s boots and trousers.

  “Get some more drink in by tomorrow,” the sergeant shouted. “We’ll be back about the same time.”

  Rory gazed at the bragging brute without speaking. The engine roared suddenly and the lorry moved off. The men in it began to sing.

  Rory took a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to Maggie. She looked a question; he nodded grimly and slipped into a ramshackle shed in the grocery garden. He hastily pulled away the pile of junk that hid the switch. His hand on the switch was as steady as a rock; his eye watched Maggie through the small window. She knew what to look for. As soon as the headlights touched the blazed tree she dropped the handkerchief.

  The explosion of the mine lit the night, shook the village. There was still no haste in Rory’s step as he walked to the spot where the remains of the lorry lay half in and half out of the crater. He looked contemptuously at the dead and drove away the women who would have cared for the wounded. “Go!” he said. “As far as you can. As quick as you can. It’s our turn now.” All the boys were gathered round. “And if any of you want to go too, do it now.”