Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  That will be another dispatch. Many in Chicago will not like it because they would agree that English is the only civilized language. Still they’ll have to read it.

  Anthony Joyce testified that he knew Myles’s voice very well. They were cousins after all, were they not? He had heard him talk to the other members of the crowd. Myles was, Anthony thought, in charge of the killers. He heard him distinctly giving the orders.

  “’We have to do it,’” he said. “‘We have to get rid of all of them. They are thieves and traitors.’”

  “In those very words?” Crown Counsel asked.

  “In those very words.”

  “Was Myles Joyce a leader in the valley?”

  “The most powerful and feared leader,” Anthony said with a scarcely contained shudder.

  Defense Counsel did not think to ask how Myles could have used those very words in English when he did not speak English.

  When Anthony walked up to the witness stand, Myles lifted his head from his arms and stared at him, not malevolently, but rather with steady contempt. Anthony saw the stare and did not look at his cousin again. When Anthony’s testimony was over, Myles once more rested his head on his arms.

  Anthony Philbin, the slimy little traitor, testified today that he clearly saw Myles Joyce enter the room by the light of the full moon. He knew it was Myles because he recognized his face. The demoralized Defense Counsels did not rise to point out that the full moon had long since set and that Patrick, in his testimony, had said that he could not recognize the killers’ faces because they were covered with dirt.

  Court was finally adjourned at five o’clock in the evening till Monday morning. The Crown will present Tom Casey as its last witness. The Defense will offer its same pathetic arguments. Both sides will present their summations. Mr. Justice Murphy will, in effect, instruct the jury to find Myles Joyce guilty of the murder of Peggy Joyce. They will do so promptly. Mr. Justice Barry will put his black cloth on his head and condemn Myles Joyce to hang by his neck until he’s dead.

  I hope I am able to sleep tonight.

  Dublin, November 19, 1882

  I must have consumed half a bottle of Irish whiskey last night before I collapsed into my bed. At least I slept, though when I finally awoke this morning, I was not refreshed and suffered from a terrible headache, which has persisted all day. I was fortunate enough to find a church before the last Mass this morning. As best I could, I tried to pray for everyone involved in the crime, especially for the repose of the soul of Peggy Joyce, for Myles Joyce, and for Nora Joyce and their unborn child.

  I wondered whether God heard the prayers of those who drank too much the night before. My mother has always insisted that God hears everyone’s prayers. I hope she’s right. She usually is.

  Then I wandered aimlessly around the wet and dreary city. I tried to order my thoughts without much success. Finally, I came back here to write my dispatch about Nora. The words flowed freely. I was pleased with the result. The readers would understand that this journalist respected the woman, as did everyone in the valley. They would, I was confident, not realize that he was in love with her.

  I have thought all day about Myles’s smile at me. Did that smile mean he was entrusting his wife to me? Did it mean he knew that I loved her and did not mind? Did he expect, indeed demand, that I take care of her?

  How could any of those messages possibly be accurate? What right did I have to read them into his smile? Were they the products of my besotted imagination?

  To my surprise, I find that I do not want to take responsibility for Nora and her child. Assuming that Myles is offering both of them to me, do I want them? My answer is that I do not. Or rather that I am afraid of that responsibility. What would I do with Nora Joyce? She would be too much for a young and inexperienced man like me. I am not ready for a wife and a family.

  I would much rather have her as a sad memory than a living woman!

  18

  Dublin, November 20, 1882

  On this last, tumultuous day of the trial of Myles Joyce, the defendant sought out my face as he entered the courtroom. When he found it, he smiled more broadly than he had before. He had given me my commission. He had said, in effect, I can face the end of this foolishness so long as you take care of my wife and child.

  On what grounds, I wondered? Had he seen me watching her at the eerie wake by the Church on the Hill? Had my mouth fallen open with awe when she tried to resist his arrest? Or had he merely decided that I was a nice, honest-seeming young American who could be counted on to accept his gift and demand.

  I shivered at the challenge he had given me.

  Tom Casey was a slippery witness. He said everything in response to the questions of both Crown and Defense that the Crown wanted. Yet, he gave the Defense certain openings on which they might have seized. Again, he raised the names of the mysterious eleventh and twelfth men, Nee and Kelly. He claimed that it was a fine, clear night, but quite dark by the time of the murder.

  A juror interjected a question. Who were the three men who forced the door and entered the house? He had apparently missed the point that the Crown has subtly changed the number of murderers from three to five.

  Casey replied, “There were five in the house, the two men already convicted, Kelly and Nee, and the present defendant.”

  “Whom you could see despite the darkness?” Defense Counsel Malley demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Five will get you ten,” Martin Dempsey whispered to me, “that he was one of those inside himself.”

  I had not thought of that. Perhaps that suspicion would be useful later.

  “He has said as much repeatedly,” Mr. Justice Barry snapped.

  “Yes, m’lord.”

  “Did you count the number of shots that were fired, Mr. Casey?”

  “I believe I counted nine, sir.”

  “Nine!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I believe that Anthony Joyce testified he didn’t hear any shots.”

  “I can’t help that, sir. There were at least nine shots fired. All of the men who went into the house had guns.”

  A constable had previously testified that the Royal Irish Constabulary had found nine bullets, three of them in the bodies of victims.

  “He said nine,” Mr. Justice Barry intervened. “Stop badgering him.”

  There was no point in pursuing the contradictions in the testimony against Myles Joyce. He was doomed.

  Murphy received another standing ovation for his summation. Several of the jurors slept through Malley’s.

  The key hint in the Judge’s charge to the jury were words I scribbled down: “Gentlemen of the jury, notwithstanding the difficulties suggested by the able and eloquent counsel who addressed you on behalf of the prisoner at the bar, I feel confident that you will discharge the duty imposed upon you at once with firmness and accuracy.”

  “Ignore the defense’s arguments and find them guilty,” I said to Martin Dempsey.

  “He hardly had to tell them that, boyo.”

  The jury was out six minutes. Thus did English law mete justice to Irish-speaking chieftains. Not for the first time.

  The clerk asked Myles whether he wished to reply to the verdict. Not having understood the words (though he must have known its meaning) he continued to stare at the Judge.

  The interpreter was asked to explain the sentence.

  Suddenly the bored, resigned man was transformed. His face began to glow, his eyes to shine. He spoke in fluid, musical Irish, slowly, confidently, and with enormous power. He gestured easily and smoothly, a druid or a priest or maybe both. Or maybe a king bidding farewell to his loyal people. Could Moses coming down from Sinai, I wondered, have made more of an impression in the courtroom? No one stirred, few had the courage to look at him, everyone knew that, even if they did not understand the words, this was the plea of violated innocence.

  The translator strove to capture his meaning:

  “He says that by the God
and the Blessed Virgin above him that he had no dealings with it any more than the person who was never born, that against anyone for the past twenty years he never did any harm, and if he did, that he may never go to heaven, that he is as clear of it as the child not yet born, that on the night of the murder, he slept in his bed with his wife, and that he has no knowledge about it whatever. He says he is quite content with whatever the gentlemen may do with him, and that whether he is hanged or crucified, he is as free and as clear as can be!”

  Later, an Irish-speaking reporter told us that the interpreter had not come even close to capturing the fervor and the beauty of Myles Joyce’s last words in the court. Won’t they be reciting them in poems and songs for a thousand years, he promised.

  I understood for the first time why Nora loved him.

  If the passion, the musical beauty, the grandeur of what Myles said had an impact on Mr. Justice Barry he did not show it. He shuffled among his papers, found his prepared sentencing speech and recited it as though Myles Joyce had not suddenly transformed himself, the courtroom, and the trial.

  “Myles Joyce, after a most careful trial, you have been convicted of a crime committed under circumstances of aggravation so dreadful that I do not care again to recapitulate them. Although an opportunity has been afforded you of addressing the court in that language which is more familiar to you than any other, (clearly Barry thought that Myles, at least, understood English), yet, you have informed us that you understand what I am saying, and if I refrain from making observations to you on the enormity of your guilt and the fearful position into which that guilt has now brought you, it is because I cannot but feel that to address such subjects to a man who went out at the bidding of some unknown, unseen authority, to slaughter his own cousin and that cousin’s family—to address, I say, upon topics such as I referred to a man guilty of that crime, it would be indeed a waste of language and an assumption of a possibility of weight and authority, that I do not pretend on such subjects to possess.

  “I believe no piece of evidence ever given in a court of justice produced a greater impression than that statement of the witness, Anthony Joyce, yesterday elicited by one of the jury, when he announced the fact that the witness against you, this respectable, honest, truth-telling man, you, the convicted murderer and the man the head of the house whom and whose family you slaughtered, were all united by ties of blood of the closest kind. It has communicated a peculiar significance, I may say, a peculiar horror to this case, that such a state of society should exist in that apparently primitive and remote part of the country—that, at the bidding of this unknown authority, as I have said, you should go out without remonstrance or hesitation to do that work of slaughter upon the young woman, who, perhaps, above all others in the community you should have stood up to protect.

  “It only remains for me now to perform, for the third time during this commission, the dreadful duty of condemning my fellow man to doom. It is a dreadful duty, and I am not ashamed or afraid to own that I feel it to be so. But, if there were a case in which feelings of distress or pain or hesitation at the performance of that duty should sink into abeyance, it is in a case like yours, where the guilt has been so enormous, without a particle, even a shadow of any mitigating or even reasoning circumstances connected with it, to justify, I cannot, of course, say to justify it, but even to palliate or excuse your dreadful act.”

  Mr. Justice Barry then put on his black cap.

  “The sentence of this court is, and I do adjudge and order, that you, Myles Joyce, be taken from this court, the place where you now stand, and that you be removed to Her Majesty’s jail in Galway, and that on Friday, the fifteenth day of December next, you be taken to the common place of execution, within the walls of the said prison, and that you there and then be hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that your body be buried within the precincts of the prison in which you were confined after your conviction, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

  Myles remained standing rock-stiff in the dock in total incomprehension of those lofty sentiments of the learned Judge. He deliberately reached over for his hat and then turned slowly away, and with a step, lingering and sorrowful, and a heavy sigh with which there was an indistinct exclamation in Irish, audible only to a portion of the courthouse, he left the courtroom.

  Quite by chance I encountered Mr. Justice Barry as he was leaving the courthouse.

  “Mr. Justice Barry,” I said briskly.

  “Er, yes, son?”

  “Myles Joyce will have no need of God’s mercy. Someday you will. May God have mercy on your vile soul.”

  He gasped and ran away from me.

  How childish can I be!

  Dublin, November 21, 1882

  It is finished now, save for possible appeals. The five remaining prisoners appeared in court this morning and pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to death, but their case was submitted to the executive committee of the court with the understanding that the sentence would be commuted to twenty years in prison. While Myles Joyce was declaring his innocence before God, Jesus, and the Blessed Mother, George Bolton was in jail in the basement of the courthouse browbeating-with the help of a priest and the Solicitor for the Defense—the men who had yet to be tried to make a guilty plea. The journalists here have learned that only one of the five, a sixty-year-old man named Michael Casey, was in fact in the raiding party. The others were victims of either the malice or the ignorance of Anthony Joyce. It had taken only eight days for the Maamtrasna trial. George Bolton, Crown Solicitor for Limerick had wrapped it all up in a neat little package.

  What was the score? Only three (perhaps only two, if one grants Pat Casey the benefit of the doubt) of the accused had actually participated in the crime. One innocent man (and perhaps two) had been condemned to death. Four innocent men would spend twenty years in prison. Two men, one of them—Tom Casey—perhaps guilty, had won their freedom by lying to save their skins.

  If one counts Pat Joyce and Pat Casey (both sentenced to death) and probably Tom Casey as actual killers, then three of the five murderers were still at large, perhaps including the mysterious and sinister Nee and Kelly.

  The Crown had convicted seven completely innocent men and one guilty outside observer. Three killers were still free to wander the lanes of Connemara.

  That will be the theme of my dispatch tonight.

  19

  “THE POOR sweet boy.” Nuala, reading glasses perched on her nose and wrapped in an all-encompassing robe, was sitting upright in our bed, finishing the last pages of the first segment of Ed Fitzpatrick’s journal. She was weeping. Naturally.

  After coming back from our golf match, we had set about cleaning the bungalow to prepare for the advent of her parents the next day. It was inconceivable to my wife that the house should be anything but uninhabitably neat for a parental visit, an obsession she had not inherited from the good Annie McGrail, who was relaxed about neatness—not slovenly, just not as obsessed as her daughter. Ethne had been banished for the weekend (with pay) because she ought to celebrate her successful exam, but also because Nuala feared that the presence of even an apparent servant would embarrass her ma and da.

  As if the outspoken Ethne gave the slightest hint of servility.

  Finally, she judged that the bungalow was as clean as it could possibly be, “under the circumstances.” The kids were long since sound asleep (with the monitor next to her on the nightstand to report the slightest extra breath). So, to relax a little, my wife had turned to Ed’s journal.

  “Thank goodness,” she said wiping her eyes, “that kind of trial can’t happen in the United States.”

  “What do you mean, can’t happen?” I replied, turning away from the computer screen on which I was recording a description of a real storm like the one which was threatening just now to wipe out the whole of the County Galway—and maybe Clare and Mayo too for good measure. “Haven’t you and I experienced ambitious and unscrupulous prosecutors like George Bolton? Don’t
African Americans feel about the white criminal justice system exactly what folks like Nora Joyce felt about the English system, a century and a quarter ago?”

  “Och, Dermot.” She sighed. “Don’t you have the right of it like you always do!”

  A fearsome gust of wind threatened to drive our house all the way back to Loch Corrib. The gentle breathing on the monitor continued unperturbed.

  “You did sprinkle them with holy water, Dermot Michael, when you sprinkled the rest of the house?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Isn’t water the source of life and isn’t it supposed to keep us alive?”

  “And counteract the effects of the rain?”

  She mumbled something, apparently unconcerned that the rain, to say nothing of the hysterical ocean, was composed of water. The doorbell rang.

  “That isn’t the doorbell, is it Dermot Michael?”

  “Sounds like it?”

  “Whoever would be out on a night like this?”

  “Maybe some evil spirits?”

  “They have sense enough to come in out of the rain … . You aren’t going to answer it, are you?”

  “I think I’d better. It might be important.”

  “Take a golf club with you!”

  Yank shillelagh.

  “Which iron?”

  “Five iron of course!”

  So equipped with my trusty five iron, I ambled out to the door. Huddled outside in rain slickers were the two members of our faithful Gardai and someone else also in a rain slicker.

  I opened the door. It was Jack Lane, covered with a massive oilskin.