Return to Killybegs

by Sorj Chalandon

  Tremors. Women holding hands. In the first row, the officer who had come to see me had tears welling in his eyes.

  —Danny Finley is not dead. His name is Mary, Declan, Siobhán!

  Our flags were flapping at the foot of the platform. I looked out over the radiant faces.

  I killed Danny Finley.

  —Our revenge will be the life of these children!

  A woman dressed in red stood up. She waited till there was silence. Dozens of empty bottles and pint glasses sat on the tables. I looked around me and I knew every one of them. Jim O’Leary, the bomb-maker who had watched over my bedside, and Cathy his wife. Pete ‘the Killer’ Bradley, the Sheridan brothers. Every time my eyes met someone else’s, a glass was raised to me. Mike O’Doyle, Eugene ‘the Bear Cub’, their faces drawn after years in prison. They left those cells only to go straight back in again. They were holding on between life and death.

  The woman in red brought the microphone to her lips.

  —A brave son of Ireland was shot on Dholpur Lane tonight ...

  The pints were left down on the tables. From the first few notes, the pub fell silent. Just that voice at first, then accompanied by dozens of others, like a crowd setting off together. The woman turned to face me. So did all the faces in the room. It was for Tyrone Meehan that the residents of the Thomas Ashe were singing ‘The Ballad of Danny Finley’, dead one year to the day. That song had been written a week after his passing, then published in the Republican papers and taken up across the whole country. Some friends had heard it in a pub in London, and even in an Irish bar in Chicago, where the Americans cried as they sang of exile. So I sang it softly as well.

  At the chorus, the room stood up to sing ‘Farewell my friend’.

  —Slán go fóill, mo chara ...

  I had pushed back my chair and was standing up in the centre of the big room, my arms straight at my sides and my fists clenched. Danny Finley had joined his dead heroes, Pearse, Connolly, Thomas Dunbar, Tom Williams. He used to sing about them often, but it was him we’d be singing about from now on. I felt Sheila’s hand on my arm. Jack was there beside me. He had just turned nine. He was watching me, watching the crowd. That image of pride is what I will keep of him my whole life.

  I lifted my hand at the cheer and sat down. More pints were squeezed on to the table in front of me. The Guinness my father drank had the taste of tragedy. For the past year, I was like a dead man. My name had got around too much for me to take up arms again. I was retired. It was temporary, but necessary. During the day, caps were raised at my passing, people smiled at me, offered warm words. At night, Danny gave me that look. I had lasted one year. I would last my whole life. It was too late to talk. To whom would I confess? To Father Donovan? To the IRA? To Sheila? To Jim? To my son who lived for me? To whom? And for what reason? For my soul to find peace? Or my heart? Or my gut? I had killed Danny and I had hidden it. I carried his coffin, I honoured his name, I called for revenge. It was too late for dispelling the smoke from Dholpur Lane.

  Towards midnight, Frank Devlin and his wife came to shake my hand. Everyone called him Mickey. He was smiling. He handed me a pen. Nobody understood this gesture, it was a secret, just between us. Mickey had caught me out twenty-eight years ago, and he was still taking advantage of it. It wasn’t out of malice, just a kid teasing. And I was blushing. He placed his hand on my shoulder.

  —It’s been a long old road, eh? he said before going back to his table.

  I raised my glass to eye level to say goodbye in turn.

  It was at Crumlin, the day after I arrived. My first time in prison. Before being locked up, I had asked to go to the bog. I’d kept a stub of pencil in my sock, a dusting of lead wrapped in a splinter of wood. I don’t know what came over me. I must have believed I was still free, behind the closed door of a pub urinal. The wall was a dirty grey and I wrote ‘IRA’ in large letters. And then I went into my cell.

  The following day, our division could talk of nothing else. The lads were in hysterics over it. But who had done it? Who could really have boasted about belonging to the IRA when everyone in the place was there for being in it? Who had thought they were in a Dublin public toilet? Who had shown off to frighten future bladders?

  Mickey was in charge of our washing. He found the pencil, forgotten in the turned-up end of one of my trouser legs. I made him promise not to tell. So he promised. But for him, Tyrone Meehan would always be that kid from the Crum who boasted about the IRA on a toilet wall because he was the only one in the place who didn’t belong to the secret army. Frank was guarding the memory of my youthful foolishness.

  That evening in the Thomas Ashe I felt like I was in their club. For the first time I wasn’t at home, but in their space. I felt I had intruded on the beauty of the brave.

  —We’re going, Tyrone. Do you want your jacket?

  Sheila was standing. Jack was asleep on the table, his head on his arms. The Thomas Ashe was emptying slowly.

  —See you, Tyrone!

  —Safe home, Meehan!

  Chairs were being piled up and tables dragged across the floor; there was the sound of glasses being stacked, the iron shutter of the bar being noisily lowered. The murmur of drunkenness, of laughter, of beer, of overly loud voices. I put my jacket on. My cap. I staggered across the room. On a wall was a framed portrait of Danny, crossed with a black veil. I paused. The sudden neon lights splashed across his forehead and expression.

  Lieut. Daniel ‘Danny’ Finley

  1924–1969

  2nd Batt. C Company

  Óglaigh na hÉireann

  His eyes were raised. He wasn’t looking at me. He had decided to leave me in peace. I felt Jack’s hand in mine. We went out into the night that smelled of rain. I raised my collar and looked at the street, the low houses, the dark windows, the heavy shadows staggering home drunk. I dropped Jack’s hand. I raised my fist and roared.

  —Éirinn go Brách!

  —Éirinn go Brách! shouted my son in turn.

  And then I let out a long braying. A dreadful wail, the cry of the donkey.

  11

  Killybegs, Thursday, 28 December 2006

  Jack came for nothing. He had promised his mother he would come, so he did, end of story. An icy visit. It was just two strangers in the room.

  —How are you?

  He raised his eyes from the ceramic mug he was holding in both hands to warm himself up. He looked at me. He drank the last drop of tea.

  —Are you speaking to me?

  I got up. The fire was dying with the cold.

  —Are you speaking to Jack Meehan, is that it?

  I turned my back on him and poked at some embers. My words were quiet.

  —I’m speaking to my son.

  —Your son? Do you mean that I have a father?

  —You have a father, yes.

  I placed a damp log on the flames.

  Jack shouted.

  —I had a father for twenty years, and then he died.

  —No. He’s in front of you, he’s stirring the fire.

  He pushed his chair back. It fell over. He brushed his mug aside with an elbow. A broken crash. He was standing.

  —Stop it! You’re no longer anything to me, understand? Nothing! You’re a traitor! You’ve been a traitor for twenty-six years! You admitted it, twenty-six years! It was a traitor who came to visit me in prison! Do you remember when I got out? Can you remember? I was beside you in the car and you told me you were proud of me. Remember? Proud of me!

  I took my place again at my father’s table.

  —Proud of me? I spent twenty years in your British friends’ prisons! Twenty fucking years! And you’re proud of me?

  —Do you want some more tea?

  —You betrayed Mam, betrayed Ireland, betrayed every living thing close to us. You are my traitor. You no longer even have the right to be living here!

  I looked at Jack. There was so much Meehan in him. I nearly smiled in weariness. I told myself that he was al
l that was left to me.

  —How can you look me in the eye? Huh? How can you?

  —I’m looking at my son.

  —Never say that word again, never! I forbid it.

  As a child, Jack loved Killybegs. He used to carry the water from the well, sit dreaming in front of the candles, make fantastic shadows against the walls in the light from the storm-lamp, walk down by the harbour and laugh delightedly at the boats. For hours on end he would climb up and down the bare hills, over endless low stone walls, battling with reddish-brown bracken that came up as far as his waist. He would dream of islands as far as the eye could see, rising like froth on the ocean. Sheila would want to go home after three days, but Jack would beg her to stay a little longer. For him, it was a house of trappers, of Indians, a cottage from before the Famine, when people hadn’t yet begun having to count the steaming potatoes on their plates. Even once he was a Fianna, he remained a child. In Belfast, he had the furrowed brow, hands calloused from holding bricks, he smelled of petrol and rage. I recognized the same intensity as Tom Williams in his eyes and I was afraid for him. But here, back in Killybegs, he’d throw a fishing rod over his shoulder, stalk mullet and come back along the bog, whacking the thickets with the branch of an oak to keep the bad fairies away.

  One day in 1979 with Dave ‘Snoopy’ Barrett, Jack shot down a policeman on Castle Street. Jack was driving the getaway motorbike. Snoopy shot three times at the uniforms barring their path. Farther up on the Glen Road, they ran into some of the army’s armoured cars. Jack decided to spin off to the left, into a narrow street. A Republican taxi was following close behind. Snoopy stretched out his arm to warn the driver they were turning, the gun forgotten in his outstretched hand. The soldiers gave chase. Jack and Snoopy hit a kerb and surrendered without a fight. They waited there, faces against the ground and hands behind their heads. When they were arrested, the death of the policeman Jack had shot was not yet known. Dozens of residents had come out of their brick houses to watch. Snoopy shouted his name to the small crowd. Jack cried out, ‘Meehan! From Dholpur Lane!’ The British didn’t shoot. They left them alive. They were forced to try them. Because that day, in that little back street off Glen Road, dozens of nationalists saw that Dave Barrett and Jack Meehan had been arrested by the army. And that they had climbed into the armoured cars alive. The British would shoot to kill. That fact horrified some people on our side. Not me. I’ve never known the enemy to be honourable. I’ve tried to kill him, he’s tried to shoot me down. War has never been any other way.

  My son was sentenced to a life behind bars: twenty-one years. He was freed in 2000 with the last remaining Republican prisoners and he left prison in a sadder state than he went in.

  —Where’s our flag?

  That had been the first thing to come out of his mouth. We were driving back from Long Kesh. Sheila was in the back seat and Jack was beside me. She was holding his hand over the armrest and we were silent. Ireland was welcoming my son home. A cloudless sky, a desert sun and a gentle breeze. Jack had his forehead against the glass. He would have to heal twenty-one barbed-wire years. And there on the side of the road, in a wire-fenced yard, in the shadow of a school, the British flag was rippling. Large and brand-new.

  —Where’s our flag? Jack asked.

  He was trying to catch his mother’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

  —All of that for this?

  Sheila murmured. The peace process, the negotiations, compromises. Our flag would soon fly freely. The important thing was that our children be set free and their fathers stop dying.

  Jack looked at me. I kept staring at the road. All of that for this? I responded that it was a beginning. Everything had to have a beginning. There were no more armoured patrols on our streets, no more raids, no more checkpoints. The British were dismantling their barracks, and their watchtowers on the border. The police were putting parking tickets on badly parked cars on the Falls Road. Did he understand? Those slips under the windscreen wipers, like in London or Liverpool. And did he know that Jacky Nolan, John McIntyre, his pals from school, had joined the police? It’s not only Protestants any more, Catholics can wear that uniform, too. And that, well, that changes everything, didn’t he think? He raised his hand, asked me to be quiet.

  For a long time Jack ate with his back to us, facing the wall. He found sitting down to a meal obscene. He had spent nine years in solitary confinement. He talked to himself at first. His movements were more limited than they had been. In his room, he put the mattress on the floor. He tried to build a life with Fiona, a childhood friend. Then with Lucy. Then with us. He came back to the house at forty-seven years of age. A lookout, then a Fianna, óglach, lieutenant, captain of the Irish Republican Army, and today he is a night porter in a Belfast pub. He separates drunken kids who ask him who he thinks he is. Who remind him that the IRA is no longer around to back him up. That he’s only a penguin in a black suit with a white shirt. A nothing. And he doesn’t reply.

  Jack got up at last. He looked at me. He put on his anorak, his gloves. The hour wasn’t yet up. Sheila hadn’t beeped the horn from the road.

  —At least wait till your mother’s here.

  —My mother? For all those years she woke up beside a stranger, my mother. You know that? Do you understand that? She’s like a dead woman!

  —I understand.

  —No! You don’t understand anything. You don’t get anything at all. You can’t know what it’s like to find yourself without a father, without a husband, without anything any more! My father? He was Tyrone Meehan! The great Tyrone! Hero of fuck all, yeah! We gave you our love, our trust, our pride. We gave you everything! And you have betrayed those who loved you, those who protected you! You remember when I was a kid, every night I helped you to barricade our door so that those bastards wouldn’t get into our house? Those bastards, they were you!

  —I understand.

  —You know what they’re calling you in Belfast? ‘That man’. That’s all. Nobody will speak your name. We are the traitor’s relatives.

  —I know that.

  —What are we going to do, Mam and I? How are we going to cope?

  —You’re going to carry on without me.

  —There will never again be cheer in our house.

  I lowered my head. Since that morning, an old question had been banging around in my head: ‘Is there a life before death?’ Tom Williams had taught it to us to keep hope alive.

  Jack made for the door.

  —I need you, son.

  He stayed standing there facing the latch, the lock, the double chains I’d installed. His back was turned to me, his shoulders drooping. He sighed. Then silence. It lasted a long time, that silence. He placed his fist on the wall and buried his head in his arm. He didn’t cry.

  —I can’t. It’s too painful. What you’ve done to us is just too awful, Da.

  —I need you both.

  He turned to me one last time. He was as beautiful as pure rage. I knew that once he walked through that door, he wouldn’t come back. I searched for a line, a word. He stepped out into the frost. Standing in the doorway, his hands in his pockets, tiny against the forest.

  —Jack?

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  —I love you.

  That was all I had.

  He looked at me, flummoxed, head leaning to one side like he used to do as a child.

  —I love you, I said again.

  He frowned. He looked as though he didn’t understand. Backing away, he took the path leading back to the road. Without a word. He walked away from the house, his childhood, the old well, the soft flame of the candles, the pixies, the forest; he left the village of his ancestors, his father, all the Ireland I’d given him. He was walking with his arms spread wide, stumbling because he couldn’t see where he was going. My child, my son, my wee soldier. He was crying. His mouth was open in a mask of suffering. He was fleeing, running away from me. His steps crunched over the wood, the stone, the frozen earth. I placed
a hand on the icy wall; there was nothing else I could do. Not for him, or for me. I wasn’t even a traitor any longer. I was dead. And so was he. And all of us. And all the others to come. I was no longer waiting for anything. And I still didn’t know where our flag was.

  12

  On 20 October 1979, I was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. A grass from the ghetto had informed on me. For security reasons, he was hidden behind a curtain when he testified before the judge. Just his voice condemning me.

  —Meehan struck the youth while telling him that the IRA punish dealers. That if he came back to the ghetto with his gear, he’d put a bullet in his knee ...

  I closed my eyes. I knew that fearful way of speaking. Maybe it was Paddy Toomey, given a hiding by our guys for having made a mess of his wife after coming home from the pub. Or Liam Moynihan, who’d been forced to leave the ghetto after an attempted rape. I leaned forward slightly, trying to find out. A tweed shoulder, a shadow of an arm behind the curtain ...

  —Sit up, Meehan.

  I shrugged indifferently. One after another, we passed through these Diplock courts. A single magistrate, no juries, hidden witnesses. To send me to prison for having threatened a dealer? The British were wide of the mark. Our army was restructured, organized into closed units. I was smiling at the magistrate. He was avoiding my eye. After having been the leader of the 2nd Battalion, then of the Beflast Brigade, I had just been appointed to the IRA Army Council. The wee chap in black hadn’t the least idea who he was trying. Fifteen months? A gift. And yet it turned out to be a nightmare.

  Since 1 March 1976, the imprisoned Republicans and Loyalists had lost their status as prisoners of war. Overnight, through the violence of the Special Powers Act, we became bandits and were forced to wear the same prison garb as the common criminals. On 14 September 1976, when I arrived in Long Kesh, Kieran Nugent demanded to remain naked in his cell. He wrapped himself in his blankets. He was nineteen years old and he was the one who started it. A second followed suit, then a third. Frank ‘Mickey’ Devlin, the guy with the pen, was the ninth.