And depressed I was. Too late, I kept telling myself. I’d missed an opportunity of a lifetime. I’d lost the one great love of my life.
Then one day I was working on the disks she had sent me with further translations from Ma’s incredible diaries. By mistake, I erased a character on one of the disks. I used my Xtree Gold unerase utility and discovered there were four other unerased files on the disk. I restored them too and discovered Nuala’s conversations with Nell Pat.
Spooky nonsense!
I found myself weeping for my loss and her pain. I felt sorry for myself for about a week—one of the great Irish indoor sports.
Then one bright, sunny March day I woke up with a big smile on my face.
–– 67 ––
AS I have said before, I need time to think before making a decision. I’ve had a lot of time for thinking in the last few months.
I have discovered that there are worse emotions than guilt. Such as regret. And loss. And the sense that one has been a total eejit and a terrible amadon altogether.
Today I will mail the completed first draft of Nell Pat, translated by Nuala McGrail, edited by Dermot Coyne, to my publisher. I have checked the account in gold futures into which I put our advance. My trader, the most skilled in the precious metals pit, tells me that it has already doubled in size. A nice bar of gold for someone coming to America.
Marie Fionnuala Anne McGrail will arrive at O’Hare International Airport at five twenty-five this lovely spring afternoon on an American Airlines flight (information courtesy His Gracious Lordship, Bishop of Galway and Kilmacduff and Apostolic Administrator of Kilfenora). A half hour or so later she will clear immigration and stroll into the arrivals lounge. She will be dressed smartly and will carry two impressive bags and will walk with the self-confidence of the experienced world traveler. Even the guitar case slung over one shoulder will not diminish her image as a sophisticated woman of the world. No greenhorn this beautiful woman, the observer would say.
Chicago will, nonetheless, not be ready for her. It won’t know what hit it. No way. Soon she’d be solving crimes for the Chicago cops. I could sign on as her Dr. Watson if I wanted to.
There will be not the slightest hint that she’s scanning the waiting crowd in the remote hope that someone might be there to welcome her to Chicago, perhaps even to take her home to his mother’s house. Yet her shrewd, fishmonger eyes will be taking in everything, a shy child, hinting at a God who is also a shy child.
And she’d be wondering whether there would be mysteries to solve in Chicago, with or without me as her spear carrier.
Then she’ll see me.
She’ll drop her bags and rush, like a Connemara hoyden, into my voracious, waiting arms.
I’ll beg for forgiveness. I will be told that I’m an eejit for thinking that’s necessary and myself perishing with pneumonia. How would she know about my pneumonia? George, of course. Then I’d tell her that I loved her and would always love her. And she would hold me very close and say, sure, hadn’t she known that from the first night at O’Neill’s? Then I would take her home to Mom.
Alive, alive oh!
Alive, alive oh!
—– NOTE —–
THIS STORY is an exercise in historical speculation. In all probability Michael Collins died as the result of a tragic accident of which so many happen in war. I have no evidence that Winston S. Churchill was directly involved in Collin’s death. However, Tim Pat Coogan reports in his biography of Collins that it was widely believed in Ireland at the time that Churchill was somehow responsible. My fantasy, I believe, is justified by the attitude of British leaders past and present towards the Irish people. Churchill may not have been the worst of them, but his anti-Irish sentiments were nonetheless vile. To protect British power, he was quite capable of doing anything to the Irish.
In a larger sense, the British government and especially Churchill and David Lloyd George were responsible not only for the death of Michael Collins but for the deaths of all those who perished in the Irish Civil War and of those who have died in terrorist violence since then even up to this day. Their adamant refusal to grant Ireland the full independence to which it had a right in 1922 (and for centuries before) and their stubborn clinging to the six counties of the truncated Province of Ulster, the last remnant of English imperialism in Europe, set the stage for all subsequent violence in Ireland.
Their grudging concession of limited independence to the Free State guaranteed that Ireland would continue to suffer the effects of centuries of imperialistic English colonialism for years that are yet to come.
But to be fair as Nell Pat was in her later years, Lloyd George and Churchill probably had conceded all they could. When their government fell shortly after the treaty, their “concessions” to the Irish were one of the reasons. Thus the guilt for all the killings in Ireland from those times to this goes beyond the Lloyd George government.
Like his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill supported “home rule” for Ireland, but it was a home rule in which Ireland was still very much subject to Westminster. In a speech in support of home rule in 1912, he made almost the same case as Patrick—tongue in cheek, no doubt—makes in this story: “What of all this vain and foolish chatter about separation? The separation of Ireland from Great Britain is absolutely impossible. The interests of the two islands are eternally interwoven. . . . The whole tendency of things, the whole irresistible drift of things, is towards a more intimate association. The economic dependence of Ireland on England is absolute. And quite apart from naval, military and constitutional arguments and quite apart from all considerations of the Imperial Parliament, of the flag, and of the Crown, none of which ties will be in any respect impaired, the two nations are bound together till the end of the time by the natural force of circumstances” (Speeches of Winston Churchill: The Young Tribune, p. 235).
Alas for such an imperialist vision of “home rule,” the Irish wanted more and still do.
Churchill was charmed by Michael Collins, as were most people who met him, and repeatedly offered him patronizing advice. Collins for his part did not think much of Churchill but kept his opinion to himself. (“Will sacrifice all for political gain. Inclined to be bombastic. Full of ex-officer jingo or similar outlook. Don’t actually trust him.”)
Churchill’s savage contempt for the Irish is evident in his personal writing. See, for example, his letter to his wife in April of 1920: “What a diabolical streak they have in their character! I expect it is that treacherous, assassinating, conspiring trait which has done them in the bygone ages of history and prevented them from being a great responsible nation with stability and prosperity” (Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, p. 449).
A half millennium of exploitation by a foreign nation was apparently not at all to blame for the problems of Ireland!
Tim Pat Coogan’s recent biography, The Man Who Made Ireland, is the best book yet on Collins. While Coogan leans to the Sonny Neill theory, he quotes someone who was there as saying that Neill had already left the combat scene and hints at possible revelations still to come. He also doubts the charge of screenwriter Eoghan Harris that Collins had an affair with the Chicago-born Hazel Lavery during the treaty negotiations in London. That it was any more than a flirtation, Coogan suggests (in agreement here with Nell Pat and Nuala), is highly improbable. Coogan also flatly rejects Harris’s assertion that Collins was a homosexual, a position, one hears, that is to be central to the possibly forthcoming Kevin Costner film.
The opening in 1993 of the files of documents of the British government from 1923 apparently confirms the rumor that there were elements in the British government which seriously discussed plans for reimposing British rule during that year.
Nuala’s cousin, Father Michael McGriel, insists that I tell readers that in fact there is no gold anywhere near the shrine at Mamene. But he adds that you’re always welcome to climb up there and say a prayer.
The visit to Ireland of
the mayor of Chicago occurred several years before the time of the present story.
As for Nuala and Dermot, God willing, they will appear in subsequent stories to be titled Irish Lace, Irish Linen, Irish Stew, and maybe even Irish Whiskey. Will Dermot accept his Dr. Watson role as Nuala figures out solutions for American puzzles? Will they sort out their relationship and perhaps even marry one another (as they surely should and in my priestly judgment as soon as possible)? Does the title Irish Lace suggest wedding garments?
Ah, that would be telling now, wouldn’t it?
Chicago—Grand Beach—Dublin—Tucson
1989–1994
CHRONOLOGY OF
THE TROUBLES
April 21, 1916 (Good Friday)—Betrayed by informers, Sir Roger Casement is arrested in Kerry after coming ashore from a German U-boat. An arms shipment from Germany is seized as is a shipment of gold. Casement is executed in August.
April 24, 1916 (Easter Monday)—Despite certain failure (because of the loss of the German weapons) the Irish Volunteers seize the General Post Office and other strong points in Dublin. The British easily put down the Rising and execute the leaders. “A terrible beauty is born!” (Yeats)
December 14, 1918—Sinn Fein (“We Ourselves”) wins the first postwar election. Its members refuse to attend meetings of the British parliament and form their own republican parliament in Dublin, the Dáil Éireann. De Valera becomes president.
1919–1921—Anglo-Irish War. Hit-and-run tactics keep the British army at bay. Michael Collins becomes de facto head of the Irish guerrilla war.
1921—General McCready, the British commander, advises London that the war cannot be won. Collins realizes that he is running low on arms and that popular support for the bloody war is ebbing. Truce is proclaimed in June. Negotiations begin in July.
December 6, 1921—Collins—maneuvered into being a delegate to the peace conference by De Valera, who does not want to be responsible for compromise—signs the treaty establishing the Irish Free State (and by his own admission his own death warrant) as the best deal Ireland can get under the circumstances. De Valera and a diehard minority of the Dáil reject the treaty.
June 16, 1922—Pro-treaty forces win a majority in elections to the Ddil. Antitreaty forces seize strong points in Dublin and other cities.
June 28, 1922—Under pressure from Britain, Collins’s new National Army shells the Four Courts building, on the Liffey, where the leadership of the anti-treaty forces (now called the Irish Republican Army by themselves and the Irregulars by the Free State) have been holed up. Civil War begins.
July 28, 1922—Fall of Limerick and Waterford to Free State armies.
August 12, 1922—Arthur Griffith, nominal chief of state, dies and is replaced by Collins, who is now both head of the Free State and commander of the army. Emmet Dalton captures Cork in a single day’s battle.
August 22, 1922—Collins, perhaps on a peace mission to Cork, is killed at Bealnablath, near his home in Cork. Civil War rages for another year.
May 13, 1923—“Cease fire” and end of Civil War.
Irish Gold Page 47