Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Naturally.”

  “In fact,” he said, his eyebrows contracting, “but for a few mischances, this new relationship could have been established in the middle 1920s. Many experienced men and women on both sides of the Irish Sea did not expect the Free State experiment to work. They assumed that the resulting chaos would lead to a demand from the Irish themselves that the island be reoccupied by British troops. It was a near thing for a while, but eventually the Free State leaders, much to the surprise of many intelligent Irish as well as English observers, were able to put their house in order. As you yourself can certainly see, however, the Free State/Republic of Ireland experiment has hardly been successful. It would have perhaps been much better if it had failed early. Then this new relationship of which I have spoken could have developed in the first part of this century instead of in the first part of the next.”

  “A near thing.”

  “The young revolutionaries were really not capable of government—surely that is obvious to anyone who has read history. If De Valera had been able to hold out in the West for another year or two at the most, the Free State would have collapsed, much to the benefit of Ireland, I might add.”

  I’d have to sort this out later, but I could now see where Patrick was headed. I didn’t much like it. “Yes, I understand.”

  “I might say that these men and women—to use a term with which you might be interested—friends of my friends, were quite involved in the recent Anglo-Irish Agreement. While it is publicly praised as the beginning of a solution to the Ulster problem, it is in fact the beginning of a British Union Civil Service.”

  “How clever of the friends of your friends.”

  Where I came from the term referred to the Outfit, the Mob, the “Boys on the West Side.”

  “Yes, wasn’t it?” he agreed amiably. “I thought you might be interested to learn of this body of thought—rational, sensible, and fully aware of the past mistakes, the historical trends, and the present possibilities.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  He finished his Guinness. Why would Langley—or wherever—want me to know about these ideas? Patrick was a charming man, but I shouldn’t trust him any more than I had trusted Angela Smythe with a “y” and an “e.”

  “So it has been very nice discussing it with you. I’ll stay in touch, more or less.”

  “Patrick.” I rose from the table with him. “It’s the biggest pile of shite in all the world.”

  He laughed cheerfully. “Why?”

  “It ignores seven hundred years of history and the conviction of the Brits that they are better than the Irish.”

  We ambled towards the door.

  “Does it now?” He grinned at me.

  “Haven’t I said that it does?”

  We both laughed together.

  “Well, did I ever say it wasn’t shite?”

  “You did not.”

  “Shite, Dermot. is where you find it.”

  As I rode the DART back to downtown Dublin—service every fifteen minutes even at half ten—I tried to analyze my conversation with Patrick. A lot of the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. I saw the general outline but not the complete picture. I didn’t much like what I saw.

  The theme was the same as it had always been: The Irish are not capable of taking care of themselves so the English will take care of them.

  As I said to Patrick, shite!

  But why should the CIA—or whoever Patrick represented—give a damn?

  Irish-American voters? Maybe. But were we that important?

  I abandoned my analysis as we rode by the darkened villas and the semidetached homes and the golf courses of South County Dublin and the three yacht clubs at Dun Laoghaire. Instead I thought of Nuala and hoped she’d still be in my rooms when I returned.

  The lights were out in my suite. A neat printout waited next to the computer with a cover page note:

  Dear Boss,

  This is the second passage. It’s quite astonishing. God help me, but I identify with her, wild little woman that she is.

  I did not go beyond your warning note in “Nuala.doc” but I was sore tempted.

  Thank you for the opportunity to swim. And for everything.

  Love,

  N.

  –– 23 ––

  March 9, 1920

  I met himself yesterday. The Big Fella. Mick Collins. And himself telling me about traitors trying to steal away our victory.

  At first I was unimpressed. Well, at first I didn’t believe it was him. Then I was unimpressed. Then I realized that everything my Liam says about him is true.

  At first you think here is just one more of your smooth-talking, good-looking, charming gombeen men from Cork with wavy hair and twinkling brown eyes. Then you see a look in those eyes, a turn of his head that tells you that he’s someone special, as great a hero as Ireland has ever had—and himself all the time winning your heart with his smile.

  I was taking the laundry back from the stream to the house at the end of the day, with the summer sun still high in the sky, when this fella comes strolling along the road in a tweed suit, cap pulled down over his face, black thorn stick in his hand.

  “God and Mary be with you,” he says to me in Irish.

  “God and Mary and Patrick be with you,” I says back to him.

  “Could I be giving you a hand with your baskets?”

  “I’m thinking that it would be a right kindly favor.”

  “Might I ask the name of the young woman whose red hair makes the sun look dim?”

  “Like all Cork men,” says I, “you swallowed the Blarney Stone, and isn’t my name Nell Pat Malone?”

  “Ah, so it’s for Pat Malone’s house I’m destined this night. It must not be far on?”

  “ ’Tis not . . . and I didn’t hear your name when you told me.”

  He laughed like I said something terrible funny. “It’s Michael O’Coileain,” he says, pronouncing it the Irish way.

  “And I’m Kathleen Ni Houlihan,” says I, just as bold as I could be.

  He laughs again. “Well, Ireland could not find a better symbol than you, young lass.”

  “You’re not Mick Collins of the Irish Volunteers, not the Big Fella?”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Nell Pat Malone.” He laughed yet again, but his eyes were taking me in, watching me every move. “But I’m afraid I’m that poor fella.”

  When I say that he watched me, I don’t mean that he was looking at me hair and me face and me body, though he didn’t miss those either. He was making up his mind about me as a person. For just a wee moment I felt that not only were all my clothes off but my whole soul was bare.

  It was scary. It was also very nice.

  “Glory be to God!” I shouted out. “I’ll run ahead and tell me da and me ma!”

  He grabs my hand with a grip of steel. “Ah, Nell Pat Malone, you’ll be doing no such thing. The last thing we want is to have unfriendly eyes see your da and ma making a fuss about a poor weary traveler.”

  I blushed for shame. What an eejit I was.

  “I’m only a beginner in this secret service thing, Mr. Collins,” I says, terrible ashamed of meself.

  He laughed again, always laughing and such a warm and appealing laugh. “There’s none of us that are very good at it, Nell Pat Malone, and won’t it be a grand thing when the killing is over and we give it all up?”

  “It will,” I agreed with him, “and isn’t that what my Liam says?”

  “Your Liam?”

  “Captain Liam Tomas O’Riada, adjutant to Commandant Daniel O’Kelly of the Galway Brigade.”

  “And he’s your Liam, is he now? Faith, and here I am thinking that maybe I’ve been meeting the love of me life and I hear she’s already spoken for.”

  Pure Cork Blarney and best ignored altogether.

  “Ah, sure, Mr. Collins,” says I, my face burning again. “I misspoke. He’s my Liam, but I don’t think he knows it yet.”

  This time
he laughs louder than before. “Ah, you’re a strong woman, Nell Pat, and isn’t Captain Liam Tomas O’Riada a lucky man and himself not knowing it? Maybe not knowing it. And don’t you be calling me Mr. Collins, heaven save us all. When I help a young woman carry laundry back to her cottage, shouldn’t she be calling me Mick?”

  “I never could!”

  “You don’t believe in obeying orders?” He winks at me.

  So doesn’t my face catch fire again? And doesn’t Jim Tom O’Kelly, all two and a half years old of him, save me and himself running across the road like an eejit without looking in either direction and charging right into the Big Fella?

  And doesn’t he sweep the gosson off the ground and swing him to the air and Jim Tom laughing like the great terrible eejit he is?

  “A fine young Irishman.” Mick Collins puts him down on the road, pats his little rump, and sends him home to his ma. “It’s for the likes of him that we’re fighting, isn’t it now? And for their future?”

  “As free citizens,” I chime in, “in a free republic!”

  “Ay,” says he, “a free republic if we can stop the enemy and their allies in this country from stealing it away from us with their secret societies.”

  “Like the Irish Republican Brotherhood,” says I, still bold and meself knowing that he’s the head of the IRB.

  He doesn’t laugh this time. “Aye, Nell Pat, they’ve lifted an idea from us. Let them win the war, they say, and think they’re independent, we’ll still run Ireland.”

  I don’t know what to say to that at all, at all, so I return to Jim Tom.

  “You like the wee ones, Mick?” says I, and proud of myself I am that I call the general by his first name.

  “I do,” he says sadly.

  “You have none of your own, then?”

  “Ah, no. Neither child nor wife. Not yet anyway.”

  “But you have a sweetheart, don’t you now?”

  Wasn’t I the terrible bold one?

  “Well,” he says, winking at me, “there is a lass in Granard over in County Longford named Kitty Kiernan that I’m thinking of as me Kitty, just like yourself and your Liam Tomas. The trouble of it is that me best friend Harry Boland thinks she’s his Kitty Kiernan too. You see the problem, do you not?”

  “I do indeed. But who does she favor?”

  “You give a man no peace, do you, Nell Pat Malone?” And he winks again. “If you’d be asking Harry, he’d say she favored him. Most of them that know the both of us would say the same thing. But if you’d ask Kitty herself, well, now I think she’d say that Mick Collins is such an awful amadon that she’d better take care of him for the rest of his life.”

  “I’m thinking she’s a very lucky woman.”

  “And I’m thinking Liam Tomas is a very lucky man.”

  And I hardly have time to blush again because aren’t we at the cottage?

  So we walk in, and Mick puts down the laundry basket and Ma and Da and Tim and Liam are all waiting for us. Liam looks terrible angry at this stranger who is walking down the road chatting with me. So maybe I’m his Nell after all.

  “This is Mick Collins,” I says, real casual like. “I met him on the road. He has business with you and the commander, Liam, and, Ma, himself perishing with the hunger after a long walk on the road.”

  Well, didn’t that make them all open up their eyes wide?

  So that gombeen man Daniel O’Kelly shows up when it’s dark and he and my friend Mick go down by the strand and talk for a long time.

  Liam was not on guard duty, so doesn’t he take me by the hand and lead me out for a walk along the lough? Pa frowned at us, but Ma nodded her head, knowing that we are young and Liam could be dead tomorrow, as could I if a stray bullet from one of the Tans should find me.

  It was not really dark, a kind of summer twilight. When Liam took my hand, I gave it to him without a word.

  “You’re prettier every time I see you, Nell Pat,” he said, “and myself not seeing you nearly enough.”

  “You look all tired and worn, Liam,” says I. “ ’Tis terrible hard work, isn’t it?”

  “If a man were working in a field for himself and his family it would be harder work and more purpose in it too. But this is something we have to do.”

  “We’re winning, aren’t we, Liam?”

  “I don’t know, Nell. We don’t have many bullets for our guns or any money to buy the bullets. The general is wondering if our commandant knows where the gold that Roger Casement brought over from Germany is.”

  “Does he know, Liam?”

  We were on the lough strand now, the lights of the bay flickering on the water and the moon peeking up over the rocks and peaceful quiet of heaven above us.

  “If he does, he’ll tell the general, won’t he now?”

  I didn’t think that Liam really believed the truth of what he was saying. So maybe he has begun to see through the wee gombeen man. Yet they all still worship him, me brother Tim worse than the rest.

  We walked along quietly, himself holding me hand for dear life.

  “I miss you something terrible, Nell Pat,” himself says to me. “I go out of me mind thinking about you.”

  Well, didn’t I think I’d die for joy? But, sure, you can’t admit right off that you feel that way, can you now? Even if it’s a time of war?

  “Little enough you have to do,” I says with a sniff and a toss of me head, “if that’s all you can think about, Liam Tomas O’Riada.”

  So doesn’t he take me in his arms and kiss me?

  As long as I can remember I’ve been hoping he’d do that. But he catches me by surprise and wasn’t I resisting him at first?

  “What kind of a woman do you think I am, Liam Tomas?”

  “Me woman,” he says, real fierce like.

  Then I’m collapsing altogether. I let him kiss me as long as he wants. Then, just to let him know I have a mind of me own too, I kissed him a little longer.

  ’Twas glorious altogether.

  I could have stayed there the rest of the night with him, but he said we had to go back. He and Ma and Mick and I went to Mass this morning before the general left to go back to Dublin. I thought that maybe we had committed a terrible sin last night, and then I decided that God wouldn’t mind because He was loving us as much as we love one another.

  The young priest said Mass. He recognized Liam, and himself being no fool at all, at all, he probably recognized Mick Collins too. But nary a word from him.

  We all lighted candles after Mass and Mick said to me, “If you find time in all your prayers for Liam Tomas, would you, Nell Pat Malone, say a wee prayer for meself?”

  “And for Kitty Kiernan too.”

  The Big Fella laughs and kisses me on the forehead, and isn’t Liam dying to do the same thing and Ma watching all the time, so he can’t do it?

  So that’s how I met Michael Collins and was kissed for the first time on the very same day.

  And as I write this I’m thinking that Daniel O’Kelly probably told me friend Mick that he didn’t know where the gold was. I wonder if Mick believed him. If he did, he shouldn’t have.

  Daniel is still around, smiling at everyone and leering at me, which I don’t like at all, at all. He’s leaving tonight to travel north on some secret mission.

  I’m thinking two things.

  First, Captain Liam O’Riada can have me any time he wants.

  And second: I know how to find out where the gold is hidden.

  –– 24 ––

  “I WANT to read you some of these letters,” Nuala announced.

  She had brought In Great Haste, the letters between Michael Collins and Catherine “Kit” Kiernan.

  “I’m not illiterate,” I pleaded.

  “You listen just the same.”

  That settled that.

  “This one is from October 1921. The poor man is dead tired.”

  As she read the letters to me, she became Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan. It was a remarkable performance
as she brought back to life a young couple torn between war and love, a woman who could not understand the complexities of war and peace, and a man, increasingly enchanted by her, who could not find enough time to love her the way he wanted and she needed.

  “October 12, 1921

  “Kit dear,

  “Have just returned from the Brompton Oratory. I was late for Mass a little, but the car hadn’t come and I didn’t know the way very well. Lit a candle for you, a very big one. I did the same yesterday morning.

  “I was so glad you liked that note written in the Gresham. That was most spontaneous on my part and came from a very great longing. We must, I think, make that arrangement more binding, but just as you desire. I feel somehow that it will work out and work out well.

  “Slan leat,

  “M.”

  “I think he’s in love,” I observed.

  “You think he’s in love? But wasn’t he a religious nan now?”

  “He was.”

  “Kit, my dear Kit,

  “Am hastily scribbling a note before going out to Mass. I know there will be no chance afterwards, for I already see ominous signs of work here. I wonder if you’re sleeping soundly at this moment or are just awake and thinking of me. It’s 7:50.

  “How do you feel about it all this morning? Did you really enjoy yesterday? I do wish I had been nicer to you, but perhaps I wasn’t too bad after all.

  “I’ve just said my rosary for you.

  “Slan leat for the day;

  “With my fondest love,

  “Michael”

  “So she went to London.”

  “She did.”

  “Were they lovers?”

  “Not at all.” Nuala tossed her head scornfully. “This one makes me cry.”

  “My dear Michael,

  “With me nothing seems to matter except that love between the two of us. In my opinion what else matters? And there the tragedy lies. I must try and be more matter of fact and sensible in the future and I’ll see how it works with you. As you know by now, no matter what happens or what you could give me. I want your love more than anything else. . . . God gave us the biggest thing of all in life. . . . You are the first who made me believe in love.