A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  Father groaned aloud and held his head in his hands. “Michael, Michael, you’ve ruined us,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Michael said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “We need horses, Mr. Fitzmaurice,” McCaffrey said. “There’ll be a boat in Bantry Bay in five days to take me back to America. I’ll take Michael with me.”

  I listened, fascinated. It was the first time I ever had heard an American talk. It sounded utterly strange. He said “hosses” and “Baantry Baay.”

  “Take him with you?” Father said bitterly. “Just like that? Take a man’s only son, and leave him in his old age with a wife and daughters to support and no farm to his name?”

  “What do you mean, no farm?” McCaffrey said.

  “They’ll take this farm and any other I can get.”

  “Where my father’s people came from, County Mayo, they had men who wouldn’t let that happen. The Molly Maguires.”

  If he had tried for a month, Dan McCaffrey could not have chosen a more offensive topic. The Mollies, so called because they sometimes wore women’s clothes on their midnight forays and signed the single name Molly Maguire to their warnings, were a menace to the peaceful, law-abiding Ireland Father yearned to see. He had denounced them at our dinner table more than once and now proceeded to do so again, in even more sulphurous terms.

  “In my most desperate hour, I’d never turn to the help of such scum,” he roared. “I’ll have nothing to do with men who murder their fellow creatures and maim cattle in the dark.”

  “My Dad said they fought for Ireland,” Dan McCaffrey said. He was angry but also puzzled. As I soon discovered, his knowledge of Ireland was nothing but a patchwork of his father’s nostalgic memories.

  “They fight for their own empty pockets,” Father shouted. “Lazy tinkers, most of them, who wouldn’t do a day’s work for double a blacksmith’s pay. Like every Connaught spalpeen I’ve ever hired.”

  I shuddered to hear from my father the terrible prejudice that the different parts of Ireland bear against each other. The men of the west, like the day laborers (spalpeens) from Connaught that my father was talking about, were regarded with severe disfavor by us of the south. But we reserved our worst words for the “Far-downs,” as the men of the north were called.

  McCaffrey looked like he wanted to avenge Father’s insult, but he was in no position to do so. “Will you give us the horses, Mr. Fitzmaurice?” he said.

  “Yes,” my father said. “Of course I’ll give you the horses. You’ve taken my son. You can surely take my horses.”

  “You must have food for the road,” Mother said. She drew me and Mary with her to the kitchen and put us to work with the maids. I could see that she did not like the way I was staring at Dan McCaffrey. Another verse from “Donal Ogue” leaped into my mind.

  You might as well let him have me, Mother,

  And every penny you have moreover;

  Go beg your bread like any other

  But him and me don’t seek to bother.

  Slicing meat by the door, I was able to hear the conversation of the men in the parlor. Michael tried in vain to impress Father with the certainty of victory in the crusade that McCaffrey and others were launching. The Civil War had ended in America, and there were fifty thousand Irish veterans ready to fight England. There were Irishmen of wealth, with mansions as great as any English lord’s, ready to pledge their fortunes for Ireland’s freedom.

  “And how will the fifty thousand men get to Ireland?” Father asked. “Will you launch a navy strong enough to fight the British fleet?”

  “Could be we’ll get the American fleet, now that the war’s over. The Union government’s real sore at the lime-juicers for the way they backed the Confederacy. There’s talk they’re goin’ to sell us half their fleet for a few bucks,” Dan McCaffrey said.

  I’m sure Father had never heard “sore” or “a few bucks” before, but he got the general meaning. He shook his head. “The cost would beggar any group of men. None but a government can pay the monstrous expenses of a fleet and army.”

  “We got a government,” Dan McCaffrey said. “The Fenian Brotherhood’s got a headquarters on Union Square in New York, a mansion big as the White House. The head center and the council operate from there, like the president in Washington, D.C. They’re raisin’ money by the ton.”

  “It’s the love of Ireland working in their hearts,” Michael said. “Major McCaffrey says if anything it’s stronger among those born in America like himself.”

  “Our fathers taught us to hate the lime-juicers.” McCaffrey said. “My old man saw four brothers and two sisters die in the famine of ’31. He was half dead himself when he got to America, but free air and good money made a new man of him. What can be done for one man can be done for a country. Stick a pin in that.”

  This last, a favorite American phrase, baffled Father. He asked Major McCaffrey what part he had played in the Civil War in America.

  “I was a major under Jeb Stuart,” he said. “The best cavalry in the Confederacy.”

  “The Confederacy?” cried Father. “You, an Irishman, fought to keep slaves? And now you’re coming to free Ireland. What sense can a man make of that?”

  Dan McCaffrey admitted it sounded confusing, but the war had not been fought over slavery, he said. The Irish in the Southern army were supporting their section of the country against the oppression of the North. Now the South was an occupied land, like Ireland. This was hard for the South but good for Ireland. It made the war hardened Irish veterans of the South ready to throw in their lot with Ireland’s army of liberation.

  Father was unimpressed. He talked passionately of his youth, when he heard the greatest Irishman of the century, Daniel O’Connell, denounce slavery and hold out the hope of an Ireland in which Protestant and Catholics could live as equals. From O’Connell Father also came to believe that Irishmen could win their fight against England without bloodshed, if they united and relied on moral force and legal protests against injustice.

  Dan McCaffrey scarcely knew what he was talking about. Daniel O’Connell was a dead forgotten name to him. “Here’s the only force that England understands,” he said.

  From within his coat he drew a great black revolver. I never thought that in our modest parlor I was seeing the argument that has broken heads and hearts not just in Ireland but the world over. Now I know that my father and McCaffrey stood for two different ways of thinking and feeling, two different attitudes toward the world. All I knew at that moment was how irresistible that gun looked in the fading light of May Eve. Within me a voice began whispering:

  Donal Ogue, when you cross the water

  Take me with you to be your partner.

  Hurrah for the Outlaw’s Life

  In the same moment I saw that Michael’s plan of escape was all wrong—to leap in the saddle and gallop to the shore of Bantry Bay was folly. The sleepiest village policeman could not fail to notice two men on fine horses, and there was no hope of any horse outrunning the steam engine and the telegraph. I flung aside my bread knife and strode into the parlor.

  “Listen to me,” I said to Michael. “You must forget the horses, if you don’t want to end in a dungeon in Dublin Castle.”

  Michael turned scornfully on me. “We’ll settle this without any help from you, Bess. ’Tis a man’s business.”

  “It’s Ireland’s business,” I said. “And a man on the run can’t think clearly.” I turned to Dan McCaffrey. “Will you listen to me?” I said. “A man as well dressed as you will have as little chance of escaping notice as a donkey in a cow herd. Add the thunder of a fine horse and you might as well take along a brass band to guarantee your capture. Don’t you know there’s a policeman in every village and a telegraph in every railway station? They’ll have a regiment waiting for you at Bantry Bay.”

  “Bessie, your mother needs you in the kitchen—” my father said.

  “Wait a sec,” Dan McCaffrey said. “What do you th
ink we should do?”

  “Go slow instead of fast,” I said. “Take three or four days to reach Bantry Bay. Shed your fine feathers and go off as a spalpeen with a spade on your shoulder. Michael should do the same. I’ll go with you and scout the towns and find the guides we can trust to take us safely to Bantry by mountain tracks and byroads. Neither of you will be able to show your faces in a town by morning. There’ll be descriptions of you posted up in every pub and post office.”

  “We sure could use you,” Dan McCaffrey said. “But will your dad let you go?”

  “He will not,” my father said.

  “I’ll go, with or without his permission,” I said.

  Father sprang up in a rage and ordered me to my room. I refused to move a step. For an instant Father’s hand twitched at his side. I thought he was about to strike me, something he had never done since I was born. Michael stepped between us. “She’s right, Da,” he said. “We do need her help.”

  Suddenly the bad blood that had been thickening between Father and Michael and between Father and me was no longer a desultory quarrel. It was a deep, blazing difference, into which all our resentments poured like boiling lava. Michael’s resistance to Father’s determination to make him a farmer, my anger at his curt advice to take Patrick Dolan’s offer, fused with our detestation of his passive attitude toward Ireland’s agony. “It’s time you faced up to something, Da,” Michael said. “We’re not like your cattle, to be disposed of as you see fit. We intend to live our own lives.”

  For a long moment we stood there, frozen in opposition. Father glared from Michael to Dan McCaffrey. It was his American presence, his massive physique, that made the difference. Suddenly Father was no longer master in his own house. He stumbled back to his chair by the fire. “Do what you please,” he said.

  “Get them old clothes,” Dan McCaffrey said to me. “We need to put some miles between us and this place by dawn.”

  I took his coat and ran down through the storm to Conn the plowman’s hut. Lightning danced across the twilit face of the lake. Thunder crashed overhead. At the door a clap that sounded like the fall of a hundred tombstones made me tremble. I suddenly remembered the day they had carried poor Conn to this door, broken and moaning after the plow horse had suddenly gone mad with the heat and trampled him. My old horror of violence and wounds awoke in me. For a good year after Conn’s death I could not even see a galloping horse without feeling a sticky weakness spread through my body. I told myself I was breaking the bonds of these childish feelings, leaping the pasture where I had toiled and obeyed and feared and trembled. Was I trampling those I loved? I thrust the question aside.

  In the hut, I found Conn’s sons, Mute Mick and Johnny, enjoying a bit of poteen. They started back, sure I was a banshee in my black cloak. The terror made them obey me without question, even when they saw it was my familiar self. I was soon on the way back to the house with an outfit for Dan McCaffrey, complete to a pair of ruined boots.

  As I came back into the house, Michael was talking to Father. “All will end well, Da,” he said. “I’m sure of it. We’ll come back here a victorious host and install you in the mansion house as lord of Ballinaclash.”

  “You mean install yourself,” Father snarled. “That’s what’s behind all your poems and your talk, a greed to get your hands on enough money and land to save you from honest toil. You’re nothing but a lazy book-dreaming lout. Get out on the road where you belong, and take your slut of a sister with you.”

  A great wound was inflicted with those words. I felt it like a knife thrust in my throat. I saw it strike Michael like a bludgeon in his face. In the kitchen, Mother, her face like a grave, stuffed food into knapsacks and handed them to Michael and Dan McCaffrey. Michael had put on the ragged pants and red shirt that he wore when he worked with Father in the fields. Dan McCaffrey was wearing one of old Conn’s shirts, a riddle of rips and patches, and trousers that were as dirty and torn as those on the poorest spalpeen walking the roads. I borrowed a filthy house cleaning dress of peasant homespun from Bridget and took my old calico shawl and slashed it with a scissors until it was little more than a rag around my shoulders.

  I told Mother I would be home in a week and kissed her. She saw the lie in my eyes and wept. I was torn by a terrible weakening love for her and almost lost my resolution. But I thought of what Father had called me and knew I could not stay back now. In the parlor, Father stared into the fire. His face was like the stone visage on a tomb. But I was shocked to see that slow, bitter tears were trickling down his cheeks.

  I had never seen Father weep, never seen him in a situation where he was not in command of himself and others. Later I realized our farm beside Lake Fergus was a kind of enchanted island. We had grown up here surrounded by Mother’s love and Father’s strength only hearing like distant thunder the groans of the dangerous suffering world of the real Ireland that surrounded us. Father wept out of fear and knowledge of this world. In the end it had made him weak when he most wanted to be strong. Then I only knew the wounding words he had inflicted on me and Michael. I did not speak as we went out the door.

  The storm was dying away as we reached the road, but it served its purpose for us, driving everyone indoors until the twilight had deepened into dark. We trudged along, Michael and Dan McCaffrey hefting spades on their shoulders to better play the spalpeen. I warned McCaffrey that his American speech would give us away in an instant. It would be better if he pretended to be mute, like Conn’s son Mick.

  “So much for precautions. Henceforth we shall enjoy ourselves,” I said.

  My heart was soaring like a wild hawk in the night. With one stroke my love of Ireland had burst the bonds of daughterhood and the polite, safe, boring future offered me by Patrick Dolan. I was launched on a wild gamble, and for the moment I knew only its strength, its excitement.

  The thunder rumbled distantly in the west, the direction we were taking. “Do you hear it?” I said. “It’s the army of the old kings. Perhaps we’ll hear their cry.”

  Dan McCaffrey did not know what I was talking about. I explained that according to the country people, once or twice in a decade, over the mountains from south to north rolled the old kings’ cry, shaking the ground like an earthquake. From east to west the land heaved and broke. From the clay rose the army of the dead, old warriors on their great horses and trumpeters and harpers and foot soldiers by the thousands in ghastly array. They raised their shields and spears and gave an answering shout to the kings’ cry. They were calling on the living to come out and fight for Ireland.

  As I told the story, Bel fires began to leap on the surrounding hills. I explained these to Dan McCaffrey, linking them to the old kings. Bel was the god the kings had worshipped, the pagan lord of the sun. I did not believe in Bel anymore than I really believed in the kings or their ghostly host. I knew those shouting warriors were a dream in the minds of the peasantry, born of poteen and the wind that howls up the Shannon from the Atlantic. But the turmoil of the day had loosed my mind and heart and made me ready to accept every kind of magic.

  “Listen now,” I said to Dan McCaffrey. “Any moment we’ll hear the rattle of the warrior’s spears.”

  “Spears ain’t gonna help Ireland,” Dan said. “We need repeatin’ rifles. Carbines. And fightin’ men.”

  He spat out his disgust at the condition of Ireland. The well-off were like Father, too ready to bow their knee to Queen Victoria and praise her for their prosperity. The poor were so wretched and beaten down, it was impossible to believe that they could stand in the field against trained British troops.

  “But they believe in Ireland,” I said. “Give them a green flag and they’ll die for it.”

  “A soldier’s got to believe in himself first,” McCaffrey said. “He’s got to have some pride, some honor, to give him the courage to stand and fight.”

  “We’ll have to give them Ireland’s honor,” I said.

  “How in hell do you do it?” McCaffrey said. “That’s the que
stion.”

  “Were there Irishmen who fought beside you in the war in America?”

  “Thousands of them.”

  “Where did they get their pride, their honor?”

  “From the free air of America. From their leaders, men like my commander, Jeb Stuart, who had pride and honor bred into them from the cradle.”

  “I want to go with you to America and find a way to bring those ideas back to Ireland.”

  “What the devil are you talking about, Bess?” Michael said. “There’s no place for women in this work.”

  “No place for women? If it wasn’t for this woman, you’d be riding down this road to your own sure destruction.”

  Dan McCaffrey likewise shook his head. “I’m not goin’ to give your old man a chance to say that I—”

  “What my old man says no longer matters. You heard what he called me as we went out the door. I’ll never go back to him, no matter what happens. If you won’t take me, I’ll go to London and sell myself on the street until I get the passage money to America.”

  Dan McCaffrey laughed. It was a great dark gust of sound, as black as the night from which it came. In spite of my brave words, I felt a momentary fear at the recklessness I heard in that mirth. For a moment I wondered if he were one of the ancient warriors, returned to earth to live with the same mad courage as of old. I remembered another verse from “Donal Ogue.”

  Black as a sloe is the heart inside me

  Black as a coal with the griefs that drive me

  Black as a boot print on shining hallways

  And ’twas you that blackened it ever and always.

  “All right,” Dan said. “You can come with us. Contrary to what Michael says, a woman with good nerves can do plenty for us. She can make friends for us in high places, play the spy in London and Dublin, carry messages between America and Ireland.”