O’Higgins once said, “I have done nothing without asking what Michael Collins would have done under the circumstances—which is as though I were to say I have written nothing without asking myself what Shakespeare would have written.”
—Frank O’Connor, The Big Fellow (1937)
Frank O’Connor, the great Irish short story writer, was on the other side in the Civil War. He wrote the book, as he himself admits, as an “act of reparation.”
–– 46 ––
“I’D VERY much like to have a private chat with you, Dermot.”
Lady Liz was on the phone, just as Nuala and I had anticipated. Her voice was low, discreet, breathy.
Oh, boy! “I would certainly like that too, Liz.”
My fantasies exploded. A wild romp with an attractive older woman, a young man’s delicious dream!
“Perhaps a drink in your suite or here at our town house.”
“It would have to be there,” I temporized.
“Grand. Martin is in London, as you know, for the weekend.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“It is rather important that I have some very private words with you.”
“I’d like that, Liz, but I’m afraid I’m leaving town this weekend. I’ll be back Monday. Perhaps I can give you a ring then.”
“I’m so disappointed.”
“So am I, but I’m afraid I’m committed for the weekend.”
“Irrevocably?”
“Irrevocably.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I’ll call you first thing Monday morning.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to be quite busy on Monday. I’ll ring you up in the course of the day.”
“I’ll be looking forward to our tête-â-tête.” I hung up the phone, sweating and exhausted.
Well, damn it, I had been virtuous.
I was sick of virtue.
Fock virtue, as Nuala would probably say.
That worthy Irish goddess came rushing into my suite in her robe.
“Sorry to be late,” she said. “I did an extra quarter mile. Glory be to God. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Liz called?”
“Damn you, mind your own focking business!”
She was not in the least offended. Quite the contrary, she kissed my forehead before she went into the bathroom to change into her work clothes. “You’re an astonishing person, Dermot Michael. The last of the gentlemen.”
“Her bed is the enemy camp!”
The bathroom door had slammed shut. Nuala did not walk through life, she galloped.
Then I realized what seemed wrong about the list Patrick had given us.
I pulled it out of file and studied it carefully.
Yep, that’s what had troubled me.
It was wild! So that’s what’s going on!
Well, Nuala hadn’t figured that out.
Yet.
–– 47 ––
September 1, 1922
We saw the gold last night and now Liam believes me completely. We’ve got to protect ourselves from O’Kelly till we can prove he is a traitor.
Liam has a wonderful plan for doing it, though he’s running a terrible risk.
We’re betting that the traitor will take his time before he comes back to Galway. I’m thinking that he’ll be leaving Ireland pretty soon and I’m thinking to myself that he probably reckons he has a score to settle with me.
I tell Liam the whole story about the gold and the man in the touring car and the meeting out at Lettermullen. He listens real careful and doesn’t say anything for a moment.
Then he sighs and says, “Well, I’ve learned one thing anyway.”
“And what would that be?”
He smiles sort of sadly. “To listen carefully always to what me woman says!” And he hugs me and kisses me and takes me breath away.
“Thank God for that,” I says with a sigh of me own.
We’re sitting on the strand watching the seals and the cloud banks that will move in with rain before the day is over. ’Tis truly the end of summer. In a few days we’ll be longing for the time when we were perishing with the heat.
Liam is sad. I’ve argued that he didn’t kill Mick Collins and that he was as much an innocent victim as Mick was. He half believes me and he’ll mostly believe me in a couple of days, but for the moment he has to suffer. So I’m sympathetic and myself biting me eejit tongue every few minutes so I don’t say something stupid.
“He’ll be murdering you, Liam, just like he killed me poor Tim.”
Me man scowls something fierce. “He did that too?”
“I’m sure of it.”
He’s thoughtful again. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing: He won’t be killing me.”
“What will you be doing?”
“I’ll avoid him, till we go to America.”
“That’s definite then?”
“ ’Tis. If you’ll come with me.”
“I’ll go wherever you go.”
“I’m thinking”—he scowls again, thinking real hard—“that the man who paid him off may come back. That fella wouldn’t give him all his money before the murder, would he?”
“Not if he knew Daniel at all.”
“Then I’ll tell a couple of the lads—and the Brigade is down to a handful anyway—what happened and they’ll be keeping a close eye on him. Then there’s the garage in Galway that takes care of touring cars and fills them with petrol. One of our friends works there. He’ll be watching for the car. That way we can capture your man and Daniel together and we’ll have proof.”
I’m thinking we already have enough proof.
“We could ask the young schoolteacher man who takes pictures with that big camera of his to take a picture of the two of them, couldn’t we now?”
He smiles, pleased with me. “I hope you’re always on my side, Nell Pat.”
“What other side would I ever be on?” I wrap my arms around him and hold him close and the poor dear man weeps in my arms. I weep too—for all those poor men who have died during the Troubles. While I’m weeping I pray for them. I include the Tans and the Brits and all our enemies.
And I’m thinking that it’s terrible ironic that Mick Collins, who drove the Brits out of Ireland by ambushes, himself is killed in one. He who takes the sword, the young priest has said grimly, dies by the sword. That’s not a law of God, Nell Pat, that’s rather the way things seem to happen among us poor humans.
Ah, sure, he’s right, isn’t he now?
“We should go see the gold,” I says to Liam.
He hesitates. “Why should we see it, Nell Pat? I believe you that it’s up there.”
“I want you to see it with your own eyes.”
So we saddle up Dotty and Liam borrows a pony from the next farm over and we ride up to Maam Cross and tie the ponies down the road from the path to the shrine. I haven’t told Liam but I have me knife again, in case Daniel appears, though I’m thinking he’ll stay away for a while—at least until he finds out whether Liam is still alive.
I’m not as fast climbing up to the old shrine as I was the first time. The lad or lass inside of me is beginning to slow me down. I’m not unhappy about himself or herself, mind you. I love the little person almost as much as I love its father.
“You’re not as quick as you were when you were a child,” Liam says to me.
“Sure, I’m thinking I’d better climb slowlike so you can keep up with me and myself carrying this kit bag with the torches.”
I have another use for the kit bag, but it’s a secret and it’ll be a secret till we get to America. I’ve thought about what I plan to do and I’ve decided that it’s right and proper. Liam might not agree till I explain it to him, so the explanation will have to wait, won’t it now?
I haven’t told me man yet that I’m carrying his child. I better tell him soon, so that we’ll be married, not that I have any doubt about that. At least I’m not sick in the morning and mys
elf not telling me ma either.
I’m plumb exhausted by the time we get to the shrine so we sit for a while and say a rosary in honor of St. Patrick who will be our patron even when we go to Chicago, which is where me man says he thinks we ought to go.
“In America,” he says, “you can still be Irish and be American too.”
“Sure, how could we ever stop being Irish, Liam Tomas?”
Then we go up to the crevice in the rocks and I light the two torches and we slip into the cave.
“From what the young priest is telling me,” I say, “they probably dug this little hole in the mountain to store poteen before the ‘patterns’—themselves being festivals in honor of St. Patrick.”
“Sure, there’d be less trouble from the poteen than the gold, wouldn’t there?” He laughs as he squints at the crates that line the wall.
“A little less trouble,” says I, though Liam drinks less than any of the other men his age.
“Glory be to God!” he says as his eyes adjust to the darkness. “There’s a fortune in here!”
“A million pounds, Liam Tomas, less what your man has taken out of that open crate.”
“How did they get it up here?”
“Brought it up one night, I suppose.”
“It would have taken a dozen men at least and themselves working all night long.”
I have to be careful because I don’t want me man to think I’m a know-it-all—though God knows that’s exactly what I am.
“The way I sees it,” I say, “Sir Roger Casement, God be good to him, and himself being on the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, actually wants to land gold at two spots, one in Kerry where the Germans will also be landing the guns and the munitions and one up here off Galway Bay. He trusts Daniel O’Kelly so he puts Daniel in charge of the landing here. Then Daniel, who is an informer even then, informs the Brits about the Kerry landing but neglects to tell them about the one here.”
“Glory be to God! He betrayed Casement too, did he?”
“I’m not certain about that, Liam Tomas”—I touch his arm, gentlelike—“but it seems to fit, doesn’t it? We know there was an informer and we know that there was more gold, like the rumors back then said there was, and we know that your man knows where the gold is and himself the only one, except us.”
“He betrayed the men of 1916.” Liam sobs. “If they had the guns. . . .”
“If they had the guns, the Brits would still have destroyed them altogether. They were eejits, Liam Tomas. ’Twas the younger ones, like Mick Collins, God be good to him, that knew how to fight the Brits.”
“And neither the Free Staters nor the Republicans having enough guns now.”
“You know what I’m thinking, Liam Tomas O’Riada?”
“What are you thinking, Nell Pat Malone?” He puts his arm around me and rests his head against me breasts, so naturally I snuggle closer to him.
“I’m thinking”—I sigh my best sigh, even though me poor body is already on fire for him—“that we ought to leave all the gold here.”
“Do you now?”
“Liam, it won’t do anyone any good in Ireland. If the Republicans find it out, they’ll use it for guns; and if the Free Staters take it, they’ll be buying more guns too. The Civil War will just drag on.”
“You’re right, woman,” he says. “Let someone else find it in the future.”
“I’m pregnant, Liam Tomas,” I says, quite calmly.
“Glory be to God,” he shouts, “and all the Holy Saints in heaven! I’m going to be a father!”
“You are that!”
“Sure, do you want to marry me as soon as we can announce the banns?”
“Sooner. The young priest says there are times when you don’t have to announce them.”
“I’ve been afraid to ask you all these months, Nell Pat, for fear you wouldn’t want me.”
“Why would I never not want you?” The poor eejit, I think to myself.
“I’m such an eejit.”
“You are that, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love you something awful. . . . Sure, did you think the woman you made love to last night could live without you?”
“I know”—he holds me very close and caresses me—“that I can’t live without you. And our child will be born in America, born free.”
“He will indeed.”
Liam is playing with me breasts and now I’m out of my mind with love. He starts to take off me blouse.
“Liam!” I says, on fire with love.
“Do you want me to stop?” the poor eejit asks. “ ’Tis a strange place to make love, isn’t it?”
“I’ll make love with you, Liam Tomas,” says I, “anywhere you want me, anytime you want me, till death do us part.”
Well, it’s not easy to make love in a rocky cave on top of a mountain and it being pitch black, but to tell the truth me and me husband, for sure, he’s that now, don’t mind at all, at all.
Did I mean what I said to him before we made love?
I surely did, as God and the Mother of Jesus be my witnesses. I’m Liarn’s, body and soul, for the rest of me life.
He falls asleep, poor dear man, when we’re finished. So, with all me clothes off, I sneak over to the open crate of gold and take out a bar of gold and put it in me kit bag. We’ll take it to America with us so that we won’t starve to death and me man won’t have to labor in the ditches.
The money, I tell myself, doesn’t belong to anyone anymore. It won’t be doing anyone any good sitting here by a broken-down shrine in the County Galway. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, not to use a little bit of it so we can begin well in America?
And haven’t I asked the young priest about it?
Well, not about the gold, poor man.
What I did ask him went something like this: “Suppose I find a treasure, your Reverence, I mean like a twenty-pound note lying in the road, and I don’t know to whom it belongs or how to return it: Do I have to give it to the church?”
He laughs as he usually does at me. “Sure, now, Nell Pat, aren’t you the great casuist?”
“I don’t know what a casuist is, your Reverence, but if you say so.”
He laughs again. “It’s someone who works out deep moral problems. Well, the answer is that of course you don’t have to give it to the church unless you want to, and you probably need it more than the church, don’t you?”
“I haven’t found a twenty-pound note, your Reverence.”
What I have found is a million pounds in gold, and I wouldn’t be trusting the church with that, would I?
Like Mick Collins is supposed to have said when the Free Staters beat the Republicans in the election, “We seem to have won everything. I wish at least the bishops were against us.”
“You can keep whatever you find under similar circumstances, Nell Pat.”
“It wouldn’t be mine, would it?”
“Ah, but it would. As we say in Latin, ‘Res nullius fit primi occupantis.’ “
“Do you now?” I pretend I know what he’s talking about.
“It means”—he sees through me fakery—“that which belongs to no one becomes the property of the first one who finds it.”
“Finders keepers?”
“In the circumstances you describe, yes.”
I write down the Latin words so I can quote them to Liam later on.
Actually, I’m thinking that if the young priest is right (and why wouldn’t he be?), the whole treasure belongs to me so I’m being very restrained by copping only one bar of gold.
And itself heavy in me kit bag as me man and I ride back to Carraroe to tell the young priest we’re going to be married.
And what does that eejit with the pretty brown eyes do?
He laughs and says, “Well, isn’t it after being time for that?”
–– 48 ––
“YOU WOULDN’T be focking in a cave filled with gold, Nuala Anne McGrail?”
She pounded my arm. “We don’t use t
hat language in me office, do we?”
Note whose office it had become.
“Yes, ma’am.” I began to reread the latest chapter in Ma’s astonishing diary.
“Promise me you won’t talk that way in front of me mom?”
“She wouldn’t be offended by my fantasies about you in my story but she would be offended by my language?”
“We don’t talk that way at home, Dermot Michael. We may think that way but we don’t talk that way.”
“So you start to talk that way when you come to Dublin because that’s the way a shy girl from Carraroe protects herself from being considered a greenhorn?”
She glared at me and then smiled. “And yourself taking off me psychological clothes. . . . Anyway, I’m trying to stop because you want me to act like a lady.”
“I never said that!”
“You think that!” She jabbed her finger at me, still grinning.
“Anyway, has your friend Nell Pat finally shocked you?”
“She has not.” She rose from the chair at her desk and picked up the phone. “Nora, would you mind sending tea for two to Mr. Coyne’s room. That’s right, Earl Grey, he’s very particular about that, poor man. . . . Ah, no, himself doesn’t want any sherry. Well, he does, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be good for him at this hour of the day, would it? And a double order of scones for him and a double order of clotted cream and raspberry preserves. . . . Ah, sure, Nora, he’s not the worst of them.”
That settled that. Sweets instead of the creature.
“Mind you.” Nuala pondered the question of Ma’s behavior. “I wouldn’t exclude the possibility of fock—uh, lovemaking in a cave filled with gold if I were pregnant and the man was going to marry me in a week or two. But I can’t imagine such circumstances.”
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