Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Now, darling, you shouldn’t say that. I’m sure there’s some lovely girl there just waiting for an American like you.”

  “Scores of them. . . . Mom, did Pa and Ma leave any papers or anything?”

  “Well,” Mom replied, “your grandfather was not one for writing much down. But your grandmother kept all kinds of paper, she’d never throw anything out, you remember. There must be five or six crates down in the basement. I don’t know what we should do with them.”

  So Mom, being Mom and believing that if you wait long enough, all problems, including a problem son, will solve themselves, had done nothing.

  “Mom, could you ask George to wrap them up and ship them to me at Jury’s in Dublin, Federal Express? Today if he can. I’m trying to write a book about their early days here in Ireland.”

  “Why, darling, what a wonderful idea. I’m sure Father George will be glad to help. . . . Will the book take long?”

  George thought me a little less useless than the rest of my siblings did. He even professed to believe that I had some talent as a writer.

  “Not too long. I’ll be home soon. Would you ask George to send the boxes Federal Express today?” I repeated my instructions, lest Mom forget them in her concern about me finding a nice little Irish girl. “I’ll mail him a check.”

  “Of course, dear. And keep your eye open for some nice, sensible Irish girl.”

  “There aren’t any, Mom. There isn’t a sensible woman in this whole island.”

  “Your grandmother came from Ireland, dear.”

  “That was a long time ago, Mom.”

  And she wasn’t all that sensible.

  Rather Nell Pat Malone Ready was passionate—she threw herself into things with a mix of determination and abandonment, Grace O’Malley storming down out of the mountains.

  If I were like her, I would have then and there purchased two (first-class) tickets for Chicago, rounded up Nuala Anne McGrail, and brought her home to Mother.

  No, Grandma Nell was not what you’d call sensible. Shrewd maybe, clever maybe, cute in the Irish meaning of that word, but sensible? No way.

  Mom was as pretty as Grandma Nell and as sweet and loving but neither sensible nor shrewd. She didn’t have to be.

  I half expected another attack that day, or another phone call. Nothing happened. Maybe they thought my absence from the library was a message. Maybe they were amateurs. So I wandered out into the fog and, my ribs still aching, into O’Neill’s, looking for a quick one—and maybe a sympathetic womanly shoulder.

  And found Nuala. Not a druid maiden, as it turned out, but a virginal Catholic agnostic from the West of Ireland who sang and acted and did not object to my kissing her and rather liked snuggling close to me under my umbrella.

  Later that night, dazzled by the young woman who had sped off in the fog, I walked up Dawson Street towards the green, listening for footsteps behind me and fantasizing about holding Nuala in my arms.

  Respectfully, of course.

  Not that I would have any choice in the matter, except to be respectful.

  I was almost at the bottom of Dawson Street when I thought I heard footsteps behind me in the dark. I stopped. They seemed to stop too. Maybe I was hearing my own echo.

  My mind still on the luminous—and numinous—Nuala Anne McGrail, I foolishly cut across the green instead of skirting it. I would walk up Lesson Street to the canal and then back to Pembroke Road. The mists and fog were now so thick that I could only see a couple of feet ahead. The green seemed deserted. The footsteps now were right behind me and coming faster.

  I ducked off the pathway and hid behind a bush next to the pond. This time I’d get the jump on them.

  Two people emerged from the darkness. I yelled like a banshee and jumped. I grabbed both of them in a mighty bear hug and prepared to throw them into the pond.

  Then I heard my prisoners whimper in fright and looked at their faces. Two kids, a boy and a girl, younger even than Nuala. Young lovers walking arm and arm in the park.

  I released them. “Don’t ever sneak up on a man in the fog,” I warned them, trying to sound gruff.

  The girl screamed and rushed off in the fog, still screaming. The boy—he seemed half my size—paused as if he were pondering a thorough thrashing of his assailant. Then he turned and ran after his love. “Eileen! Eileen,” he shouted. “Wait for me!”

  I hurried away before the Guards had a chance to sweep the green.

  The next morning a headline in the Irish Independent announced, “Couple Assaulted in the Green by ‘Bigfoot’!”

  According to the story, the couple had told the Guards that some “terrible monster creature” had grabbed them in his arms—a bear or a gorilla or maybe even Bigfoot—and shouted at them in a foreign language. “He was certain to kill us both,” Eileen McGovern had told the Independent. “And done horrible things to me before he chewed off my head, but sure didn’t Henry chase him off.”

  Lucky Henry to be the recipient of such love.

  The Guards had searched the green and found no trace of the assailant, except for large footprints near the pond. “They were very big prints,” said Garda Sergeant Tomas O’Cuiv. “No ordinary human could have made them.”

  Size eleven, Sergeant? You must have too much of the drink taken.

  The Guard sergeant also noted that the attack seemed to be similar to that of an unknown assailant who the previous night had thrown three young men through the plate-glass window of a tea shop on Lower Baggot Street.

  “This Bigfoot person has been quite active this week,” the Garda had said.

  The story concluded with the observation that no zoos or circuses reported any missing animals.

  Doubtless there would be more sightings of Bigfoot around the city and the country. I had started a crime wave.

  The last Bigfoot of the Western World.

  What would Nuala think if I told her?

  First I would have to find her.

  And kiss her again. Naturally.

  I waited a few days and went back to the Berkeley Library at Trinity College, my eyes searching the face of every woman with long black hair to see if she was Nuala, and hunted up newspapers from 1922. When I returned to Jury’s I found that the boxes had come from America, six large cartons stuffed with memorabilia. It occurred to me that the materials might be useful for an immigrant archive somewhere. I ought to put them in order or maybe hire someone to put them in order. I didn’t sort through them myself, because I didn’t know yet what I was looking for.

  I was more certain than ever that Professor Nolan had turned me in. I half made up my mind, as the locals would say, to corner him in his office and offer to toss him through the first plate glass that was available.

  –– 5 ––

  NO LOST GOLD, R.I.C. SAYS

  Chief Superintendent Roderick McShane of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Galway Barracks, gave assurances today that there was no gold missing in the West of Ireland following the arrest of Sir Roger Casement, who is now awaiting trial for treason in the Kilmanhaim Jail.

  “Treasure hunters may amuse themselves with such legends,” the Chief Superintendent said. “However, the plain truth is that we confiscated all the bullion that Sir Roger attempted to smuggle into the country from an enemy submarine. Rebel leaders should not deceive themselves or others into thinking that there are any funds available to finance their seditious plans.”

  The clipping, brown with age and crumbling at the touch, was not dated. But the time had to be late winter or very early spring of 1916. Nell Malone was only eleven years old. Why would she save this bit of a Galway newspaper—and put it on the top of the little stack I had found in her archives?

  Was it the beginning of her story?

  Sir Roger Casement, an agent of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, the IRB, later hanged by the English after they had released his “black diaries,” which told tales of sexual perversion, had tried to smuggle German weapons and money into Irelan
d to support the “Rising” that the Irish Volunteers were planning for Easter 1916.

  (Some distinctions: The shadowy secret society called the Irish Republican Brotherhood—condemned by the church—was the real power behind Irish revolutionary agitation. The Volunteers—later to become the Irish Republican Army—were the fighting force that was manipulated, without knowing it, by the secret society. Michael Collins would become the head of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1919, and it supported his peace treaty, but by then it had lost control of the IRA.)

  An informant had tipped off the English of the attempt to land the cargo from a German submarine. The identity of the traitor had never been learned. There were always Irish informers ready to betray revolts.

  In a country where there was so much poverty and suffering and so little hope, informing had become almost a cottage industry.

  The next several clippings were accounts of the Easter Rising in Dublin in April of 1916 and the executions that followed. Knowing that their cause was hopeless without the German weapons and money, the leadership of the IRB had tried to cancel the planned rebellion. However, the Dublin branch, convinced that a gesture would stir the souls of the Irish people, went ahead with the plan. The Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army seized the General Post Office—because it dominated Sackville (or O’Connell) Street, the main street of the city—and other strong points in Dublin on Easter Monday. After several days of artillery bombardment, the rebels surrendered. Most of the Irish people were horrified by the revolt and by the bloodshed in Dublin during the fighting for which they blamed the leaders of the Rising.

  However, the English, in one of their many classic miscalculations about Ireland, promptly executed the leaders and turned them into martyrs. Willy Yeats’s “terrible beauty” was born, and the final battle for freedom was launched with the now-overwhelming support of the Irish people.

  THE WEST HAS RISEN!

  June, 1916

  The West has Risen! Irish Volunteer forces in the West have continued to fight despite the surrender of their colleagues in Dublin. A communiqué was issued by Domhnall O’Ceallaigh, commandant of the Galway Brigade.

  “We have no intention of surrendering,” the communiqué said. “We shall continue the fight until the last soldier of British imperialism is driven from the sacred soil of Ireland. In Dublin poets became fighters. In the West all we have is fighters. There is nothing else for us to do but to fight. We shall fight and we shall win.”

  Chief Superintendent Roderick McShane of the Royal Irish Constabulary dismissed the manifesto. “It represents nothing more than the drunken ravings of a handful of romantic dreamers. There is no rebellion in Galway or anywhere in the West.”

  Daniel O’Kelly, as his name would be spelled in English. Could I remember Ma or Pa ever mentioning his name?

  I didn’t think so. Yet his manifesto was important to her, or it wouldn’t have been included in the stack.

  McSHANE SHOT DEAD

  December 1919

  Bulletin! We have just learned that Chief Superintendent Roderick McShane of the Royal Irish Constabulary was shot dead this morning in the Claddagh while returning from Sunday Mass. R.I.C. officers suspect the work of the republican rebels.

  Shot coming home from Mass? Catholics now were killing other Catholics. It would get worse. And in the Claddagh, the ancient thatched-roof section of Galway city, near the docks (and hence its name, which means “key”). It was always a wild place. What was an RIC officer doing there on Sunday morning?

  The guerrilla war had begun.

  The next several clippings, from 1919 to 1921, recounted the so-called Anglo-Irish war between the British army and its notorious mercenary Auxiliary Police and the hated “Black and Tans,” and the Irish Volunteers, who were soon being called (by themselves) the Irish Republican Army. Britain was tired from the Great War and had no stomach for a long and perhaps useless campaign in Ireland. This time it looked like the Irish meant business.

  The headlines didn’t leave much doubt about that.

  THREE MORE HOMES BURNED

  April 1920

  Constabulary officers said today that three more houses had been burned last night, all of them homes of landlords. The irregulars are running wild, destroying every home owned by the gentry. Many landlords are leaving for England. The countryside, particularly in North Galway and South Mayo, according to some, is as desolate as it was in the time of the “Little Famine” forty-five years ago.

  AUXILIARIES SHOT DEAD

  November 1920

  The bodies of five members of the Auxiliary Force were found this morning outside the Harp and Shamrock public house in Oughterard. Townsfolk professed to know nothing of their deaths, but Constabulary officers suspect that the five dead men had been drinking in the pub when they were set upon by the flying squad of irregulars directed by “Commandant” Daniel O’Kelly.

  The Harp and Shamrock had been badly damaged in the course of the night. The publican said that he did not know what had happened to it or whether the Auxiliaries or the irregulars had laid it waste.

  The motorcar used by the auxiliaries has disappeared from the village. The latest report, on the phone this afternoon, from Lord Crowe’s home, is that the Constabulary had yet to recover the vehicle.

  Army reinforcements are reported on the move from Cork to Galway to put an end to Kelly’s depredations.

  AMBUSH IN CLARE

  May 1921

  According to reports received late yesterday, an army convoy was ambushed on the road between Limerick and Ennis. Several transports were destroyed as well as two Crosley tenders. There were no reports of army casualties. The rumors in Galway last night attributed the ambush to a joint attack by the Clare and Galway brigades of the irregulars, said to be operating under the leadership of Commandant Daniel O’Kelly.

  TWO MEN HANGED

  July 1921

  The bodies of two men were found yesterday hanging from a gibbet at Maam Cross in Connemara. The identity of the victims was not learned immediately. However, there is reason to belive that their deaths are another brutal deed of Commandant Daniel O’Kelly of the Irish Republican Army flying squad that has been operating in Connemara.

  IRA DESTROYS FISHING BOATS

  August 1920

  In its most daring assault yet, the flying squad of the Irish Republican Army’s Galway Brigade stove in the hulls of five fishing boats in the Corrib River yesterday. It is believed that the fishermen had refused to pay the “tax” levied on them by Colonel Daniel O’Kelly, the leader of the Brigade.

  R.I.C. officers admit they are powerless to prevent O’Kelly’s brazen raids. “They are singing ballads about him in every pub in the West of Ireland,” one of them remarked. “As long as the people not only tolerate but admire such crimes, we will be unable to stop them.”

  The IRA, now led by Michael Collins, one of the great military and political geniuses of the twentieth century, had learned the truth that Chairman Mao later articulated: The guerrilla must swim in the sea of the people.

  Had Pa, Billy Ready, the genial, gentle hero of my youth, a man of story and song, a daily communicant till the day he died, burned English manor houses, shot Black and Tans, hanged suspected traitors, ambushed English convoys, stove in the hulls of fishing boats, and helped bring the British Lion finally to its knees when he was younger than I was the year I flunked out of Notre Dame?

  Was he what today we would call a terrorist, and perhaps a brutal one at that?

  Ma had hinted vaguely to me that Pa had been involved somehow in the Troubles. But as a killer? I could hardly believe it.

  Yet why else would she have saved this little treasure trove of clippings?

  Surely she was not ashamed of his involvement; she was never ashamed of anything her man did or said.

  I tried to picture what it was like in Galway after the Great War, a time that had more in common with the remote past than it does with our era. There were no radios, no TV, n
o electricity, only a handful of telephones, a few motor vehicles—buses and an occasional rich man’s auto. Newspaper stories were brief because, especially in provincial cites like Galway, there were no teams of reporters and the editor could do little more than report rumors. One moved by walking or by horse or perhaps by bicycle (invented in Belfast a couple of decades earlier). One communicated by word of mouth.

  And if one was young and educated in a secondary school, one perhaps dreamed of doing great deeds for Irish freedom. In our more sophisticated day such dreams might seem like patriotic nonsense—though not to terrorists in many parts of the world.

  Ma and Pa terrorists?

  How could they have been?

  Yet who was I to judge? What would I have done if I came upon a squad of Black and Tan rapists and murderers terrorizing a defenseless town?

  The IRA invented guerrilla war, it is often said. It invented modern terrorism too, or at least perfected it.

  Were Pa and Ma involved in such deadly inventions?

  How could I deny it?

  The Sinn Fein (“We Ourselves”) party, running on a platform that promised an Irish republic, had won the 1918 election in Ireland. Its delegates had refused to go to Westminster but constituted themselves the Dáil Eireann in Dublin and proclaimed the independence of Ireland. Astonishingly, the British permitted them to meet. In late 1920, however, the issue was still very much in doubt. If the British were not able to defeat Michael Collins and the IRA, neither did the rebels have much hope of driving the British out of Ireland.

  Worn out by the Great War, Britain had no stomach for a long campaign in Ireland. General Sir Neville McCready, the British commander, had candidly informed Prime Minister David Lloyd George that he saw no prospect of a military victory. McCready was the first general, but not the last, in this century to discover that a small band of men, if its members are brave enough and dedicated enough, can hamstring a large modern army.

  Collins and the more moderate leaders of the IRA realized that they were running short on men and munitions and that they could not sustain their campaign at the same level much longer.