A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  “My Grief and Ireland’s grief, to have lost such a son.”

  At length her lamentation ceased, and we knocked on the door. Mrs. Malloy met us with her rosary in her hand. It always amazed me to see how easily the peasantry mingled the ancient pagan traditions and the Catholic faith. Old Malloy’s face was like a withered apple now, but she still dressed herself with care. A fresh frilled cap was on her head, her homespun gown was spotless, and her plaid shawl was as fine as when she wore it on her wedding journey.

  “Oh, Miss Bessie and Mrs. Fitzmaurice. I was hopin’ ye’d come,” she said. “And bring me a bit of bread and meat, too. I hadn’t the heart to touch a match to a fire with the thought of poor little Peter dead over there in America. He was me youngest and best, ye remember the last letter he sent me with the draft for twenty dollars in it. I’ve been sittin’ here thinkin’, will he be waked and prayed for by a priest to lay his soul at rest? If not, ye know his fate will be to join the army of the old kings and live underground for all eternity as a slave to them heathens.”

  “I’m sure his friends said their prayers for him and a priest was at his side, Malloy,” Mother said. “He was in an Irish regiment; you remember he said that in the letter he wrote you.”

  “Yes,” Malloy said, dabbing at her eyes. “I do remember and thank God for it. But it’s still a strange fate, isn’t it, Mrs. Fitzmaurice, to go over the ocean to be killed by the bullet of a man you never had a quarrel with in your life?”

  “America is a strange country,” Mother said. “I’m not at all sure it’s the best place for our young people to go.”

  “But they must go someplace, there’s no work for them in their own land,” Malloy said.

  “Yes, that is Ireland’s shame,” Mother said with a sigh. “Our best young men—and women—leave us.”

  There was a sad story behind Mother’s sigh. My older sister Annie had gone to America six years ago. She left as the bride of an Irishman who had come back to Limerick a rich man from twenty years in New York. He drove about the country in a Dublin coach pulled by four fine black horses. One of our Limerick town aunts, Mother’s sister, had brought him calling on us, supposedly to show him the best-run farm in Ireland. He had been far more interested in Annie. His name was Kelly. He was hardly the sort of man to stir romance in a young girl. He was at least forty-five and fat in the neck and red in the face. But the offer of a wealthier, more interesting life than any local suitor could promise a bride persuaded Annie.

  She arrived in New York to discover the stunning fact that her husband was already married and the father of four children. Kelly assured her that his political friends would have no trouble obtaining a divorce for him. The priest whom Annie consulted told her that the state of New York could do what it pleased, but the Catholic Church would never recognize such a decree, which meant that Annie would sin her soul—commit a mortal sin—every time she lay with him as his wife. She left him, but she could not stand the thought of returning home to be the laughingstock of our village.

  For a while her letters were frequent. She seemed to like America in spite of her awful disappointment. She made new friends who seemed to please her as much as she pleased them. She wrote of grand parties with enough silver on the table to buy dowries for all of Limerick county. Lately, though, her letters had dwindled. I knew that Mother often thought of her with that heavy sigh on her lips.

  Listening to Malloy lament the hard necessity that had driven her son across the water, I found myself biting my tongue to prevent spouting angry words about what must be done to keep our youth in Ireland. The musket and the pike, the bullet and the shell, will do it, I wanted to say. Not prayers that God ignores or promises the British break. I found myself fearing less for Michael’s fate and wishing only that I could share it with him.

  “Has Mr. Dolan called upon you again this month, Miss Bessie?” Malloy asked, changing the subject with her usual disconcerting dexterity.

  “No,” I said, silently adding, Thank God.

  “He’s coming this afternoon,” Mother said. “I thought it best not to tell her, because it would only give her more time to think of spiteful things to say.”

  Patrick Dolan was the merchant and moneylender of our village of Ballinaclash. We called him the gombeen man, from the Irish goimbin, meaning usury. He had inherited the business from his father, who was a Protestant like my own father. Patrick Dolan was no more than twenty-five or twenty-six and considered the catch of the countryside. Girls swooned at the mere sight of him, and more particularly at the thought of living in his house on the hill above the village, with Waterford cut glass on the table and a fireplace in each of the five rooms. But few had the dowry he could rightfully expect, except people as well off as the Fitzmaurices.

  This was easy enough to understand, but I was amazed when he fixed on me as his choice. I thought sure it would be my sister Mary, who almost melted every time he looked at her. But he soon made it clear that I was more to his taste. He liked my “maturity,” he called it, the confident way I carried myself. He carried himself in much the same fashion, I should add. He was a big, broad-shouldered fellow, with a wide brow and brown eyes that were clouded by a certain sadness yet retained a resolution to resist the envy and hatred that were often flung at him in the village. The people had no love for a gombeen man. In hard times when they could not pay what they owed him, he could take their land from them, seize their crops, their very furniture.

  I told Patrick Dolan that I would never marry a man who made his living by tricking money from the pockets of poor men who needed it to feed hungry wives and children. “You may call it lending at interest, but I call it robbery,” I said.

  He smiled at me as if I were a charming child and said he was glad to see I did not accept him at face value. He assured me that he could dispose of my prejudices, if I would give him a chance. His money fed women and children who would otherwise starve when a man’s crop failed or his cash ran short. His money sent younger sons and daughters to America, where they found jobs that supported half the families in the village.

  I scoffed at his pretended benevolence and remained as disdainful as a duchess. I insisted he was part of the British system, an enemy of Ireland. He continued to call once or twice a month, while Mother, Mary, and Malloy urged me to be sensible. Lately Father had joined the campaign, telling me in his brusque way that I would never get a better offer. Malloy, perhaps prompted by Mother, returned to the charge now. “Sure I haven’t a doubt you’re to wed a rich husband. I’ve always seen it in your tea leaves. Get up tomorrow first thing and catch yourself a snail and your happiness is assured.”

  On May Day young girls were supposed to get up before sunrise to look for snails. If the creature was still entirely inside its shell, the finder could expect a rich husband. If the snail was outside his shell, beware poverty, if she married before the next May Day.

  I told Malloy I would be sure to get up and find my snail. “But if he’s inside his shell I’ll pull him out by the nose to make sure I have naught to fear for another year.”

  Malloy laughed and said she always knew I had the devil in me. We left her looking through her food basket. Mother gently lectured me all the way back to the house. Where did I expect to find a decent husband? she asked. Did I want to end up married to some ignorant tenant farmer? Or an old maid like my Limerick aunts, her sisters? By the time we got to the house I was feeling quite desperate, and my turmoil was not alleviated by the sight of Patrick Dolan’s assured smiling face. A sense of doom descended on me. I could see that it was only a matter of time before my resistance would crumble before the combined assault of his confident persistence and Mother’s realistic logic. It was unquestionably true that eligible bachelors did not abound in our vicinity, especially bachelors who had some education and would not take to drink at the sight of a wife reading poetry.

  Patrick Dolan suggested a walk. I said I had just walked my feet off. He suggested a ride. He had his jaunti
ng cart at the back door. Mother said she had no objection, and we were soon jogging down the lanes past the green, sun-drenched fields. Mute Mick, son of Conn the plowman, waved to us as we passed. Down we went to the shore of the lake, a mile beyond Malloy’s house, and across the causeway to Knockadoon Island, where the ruins of Earl Garrett Desmond’s castle stood like a monument to Ireland’s sad fate.

  According to the legend, Lord Desmond made a pact with the devil to keep his power when the English came and the old gods put a curse on him. Once in every seven years he was doomed to gallop over the water and around the lake on a milk-white horse shod with silver shoes. Not until the silver shoes were worn out would be he loosed from the enchantment.

  Patrick Dolan helped me down from the cart. We gazed up at the castle’s battered walls, and I told him that this was a seventh year and time for Lord Desmond to circle the lake once more.

  “You don’t believe that old trash, do you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I think it’s good for the people to remember the great old names. It will encourage them to fight for Ireland when the time comes.”

  “What time will that ever be?” Patrick Dolan said. “Do you think that men can fight riflemen with pitchforks? Will they make battleships out of the fishermen’s curraghs and duel the British fleet? Face it, Bess, we’re a conquered people and must make the best of it.”

  “Never!” I said. “I will never make the best of it. And I will never marry a man who thinks we should.”

  “Bess, Bess,” he said, seizing my wrist and turning me to him. “Can’t you see I’m dying for a kind look from your eye? Do you think a man with as much pride as I’ve got in me would come back again and again to take your insults and your temper if it wasn’t for the love that was eating his insides?”

  For a trembling moment I almost surrendered. But he made the mistake of carrying us back to the argument. “It’s only common sense I ask of you, Bess,” he said. “The common sense to see that there’s no help for Ireland anywhere but in lifting herself up by slow degrees to where the British will respect us. I want to do that as much as you do. I honor your love for Ireland. I share it.”

  This was Father’s thesis, almost to the word. My gorge rose all over again. “What kind of thinking is that for a man your age?” I said. “Isn’t there a wish to strike a blow now, to right the wrongs of centuries instead of letting them go on and on? Sure I think you’re as bad as Lord Desmond. You’ve made your pact with Satan, too. But for you his name is Usury.”

  “I loan money but I’m no usurer,” he said, his own temper rising at hearing that slur on my lips. “And I’ve made no pact with Satan. Unless his name is Love.”

  He picked up a piece of the shattered masonry from Lord Desmond’s wall and flung it into the lake. “All right,” he said. “Here’s my last offer. I’ll sell the business and we’ll go to America. Forget Ireland.”

  “If I go to America,” I said, “it will be to join the Irish there, the tens of thousands of them that are ready to fight for old Ireland. Some of them are already here, guns in hand. My brother Michael is with them this very moment in Limerick.”

  “God help him,” Dolan said. “And God help me.”

  I didn’t see, I wouldn’t see, his torment. “It’s from America that the help will come,” I said.

  “The kind of help your sister Annie got? Get the poetry out of your eyes, Bess. See the world as it really is.”

  “’Tis the poets who help us see the glory and the tragedy of life. See courage, faith, beauty, all the things money can’t buy.”

  “Jesus God, Bess, will you stop seeing me as a man of money? Do I have the queen’s head stamped on my face like a sovereign? I’m a man, Bess, a creature of flesh and blood, and I love you.”

  “You want to buy me,” I said.

  The word “love” aroused a blind anger and fear in me. I see now it was not fear of his love but of my idea of it as a prison that would turn me into a meek forgiver, like Mother.

  “I would buy you if I could,” he said. “I’d buy you to stop the thing that is destroying my sleep and my waking. But I know you can’t be bought. It’s what I love most about you, Bess.”

  A great dark thundercloud was moving down the lake from the direction of Limerick. I chose to look at it rather than at him. I would not let him buy me, either with his pleas or his money. I told myself the cloud was an omen; it carried within it the hosts of the air, the armies of the old kings and heroes. “Take me home,” I said. “Can’t you see it’s going to thunder and rain?”

  In front of our house, I sprang from the jaunting cart without a word of good-bye to him. I watched him drooping at the cart’s head until he disappeared around the bend in the road caused by the cairn. This burial mound of the old kings had stood beside the road, covered with bright quartz stones, untouched for two thousand years for fear of the curse the ancient dead could lay on you. The conjunction of Patrick Dolan, the sad collaborator of defeated Ireland, and this silent symbol of our glorious past stirred wild thoughts in my head and wilder feelings in my heart.

  A moment later I noticed how the sun was dwindling as the thundercloud mounted over lake and farmland like the frowning forehead of an angry god. Suddenly I knew what I wanted, what I must have, a love as wild and reckless as the one in the song that every Irish girl sang in her secret heart, while her mother frowned on her. “Donal Ogue,” which is Irish for “Young Dan,” was its title. I began to whisper it as the first drops splattered on the grass around me.

  “Donal Ogue, when you cross the water

  Take me with you to be your partner.

  And at fair and market you’ll be well looked after

  And you can sleep with the Greek king’s daughter.”

  Behind me came squeals of fright from the maids and the slamming of windows. They were rushing around in a terror, certain that one of the old gods was riding the thundergust. Let him, I prayed, let him, and went on with the song, with the words of the long-dead girl to her warrior lover, whom she knew to be faithless but whom she loved nonetheless.

  “You said you’d give me—’tis you talk lightly

  Fish skin gloves that would fit me tightly

  Bird skin shoes when I went out walking

  And a silken dress would set Ireland talking.”

  “Miss Bessie,” bawled Bridget, the fat maid, “For the love of God come in. Lord Desmond himself could be in that wind, ready to seize your very soul.”

  I ignored her, letting huge drops of rain dash against my upturned face. “I’m not afraid of Lord Desmond,” I shouted. I clung to the white pickets of the gate and chanted:

  “To lonely well I wander sighing.

  ’Tis there I do my fill of crying

  When I see the world but not my charmer

  And all his locks the shade of amber.”

  A hand seized my arm. My sister Mary pulled me off the gate. “Good God, Bessie,” she said. “Can’t you let poetry alone for a bit? Hasn’t Mother enough to worry about this day without you catching pneumonia?”

  I whirled on her. “Let poetry alone? That’s just like you, Mary, you keep poetry in a cage like your old bullfinch and let it hop out now and then. I’ve got it in my inside, all through me, and it comes out and in like breathing.”

  A tremendous bolt of lightning split the sky above the lake, and a crash of thunder followed it. “You can breathe in the house as well as out,” Mary said. “Come on or I’ll lambaste you one like I used to do when we were little.”

  “I’ll submit to your pedestrian spirit,” I said, holding out my arms to her. “Place the manacles upon my wrists and lead me to your dungeon vile. Tomorrow or the next day, Donal Ogue will come to liberate me.”

  Mockingly I chanted another verse from the poem:

  “I saw him first on a Sunday evening

  Before the Easter and I was kneeling

  ’Twas about Christ’s passion that I was reading

  But my eyes
were on him and my own heart bleeding.”

  “That is the worst yet,” Mary said. “Pure blasphemy. Pride rules your will, Bess.”

  Mary fled back into the house, abandoning me to Lord Desmond or pneumonia. By now the rain was starting to splash down in a torrent. I followed her into the parlor and felt contrite. Mother bustled in the kitchen, and Father read his paper by the oil lamp. I dried my hair and offered Mary a game of dominoes. We matched pieces while the storm beat on the roof and windows of our sturdy house. Hearing the wind howl, Peggy, the thin maid, wondered if it was the dwarf, Fer Fi, who haunts the lake, playing his magic music on his three-stringed harp. “Let’s hope it’s gentraighe,” I said, using the Irish word for “laughter music.” Fer Fi only played three tunes, ceolsidhe, wail music for mourning, suantraighe, sleep music for dreamers, and laughter music.

  The door burst open and Michael reeled into the room, soaked by the storm, his boots streaming, his black hair in a wild tangle. “Father,” he said. “You must help us. I have a man with me from America—”

  The man himself stood in the doorway. He had the ripest curl to his smile and the whitest teeth and hair of the softest golden-yellow amber and the most reckless gray eyes I had ever seen. He stood well over six feet and carried himself like a soldier, his back straight and his shoulders squared.

  “Dan McCaffrey,” he said.

  He wore expensive clothes, a stone-gray cloth-lined raglan coat and a dark gray suit that fit him beautifully. He closed the door against the storm and stood there while Michael told Father what had happened. McCaffrey was a major in the Fenian army in America. He had come to Ireland to help organize a rising. They had called a meeting of the Fenian circle, as their groups were called, in the cellar of a pub in Limerick. Only thirty men came, though a hundred had taken the oath. As they talked, a pounding of feet was heard outside, and the Peelers—the Royal Irish Constabulary—burst in through doors and windows. Someone had turned informer. McCaffrey had seized Michael’s gun—the only weapon the circle owned—and cut down the first man who came at him, then drew a pistol and fought his way to the stairs, with Michael on his heels using the old hunting gun like a club. Only a few followed them; most of the circle were now captives.