Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “It’s not blood money,” Casey said in a low voice, “d’ye think I’m so daft as to do that to ye? It’s me own money, an’ now it’s yers.”

  “It’s your money,” she said, tilting her head at him in mystification. “What the hell do you mean? Casey there’s thousands of dollars here.”

  He sighed, “Aye, there is an’ it’s mine to give or to burn as I see fit.”

  “You told me the Riordans hadn’t so much as a pot to piss in for the last fifty years.”

  “The money was meant for the cause, each generation has put aside what they could. When Ireland was liberated it was to be used to help pull her up out of the muck that civil war was likely to leave behind.”

  Pamela sat down hard, completely dumbfounded.

  “And the money was not to be used for anything else, no matter how desperate the situation, was it?” she asked, the knowledge of the answer making her feel far older than her years.

  “No it wasn’t.” he replied so quietly she had to strain to hear the words.

  “But you were willing to give every last cent to me?”

  “Aye, I was.” He met her eyes, his gone dark and sad, the merciless light of the room seeming to pull the bones up to the surface of his skin, to create shadow and the multiplications of pain the years will bring.

  “Sweet Jesus, why would you do that, Casey?”

  “Love,” he replied, “it’ll be a strange an’ desperate thing at times, won’t it. Ye’ll do things ye’d never have imagined yerself doin’ an’ it’ll seem like the only road open to ye.”

  “You’d do this for me? You’d pay for my freedom with your ancestor’s dreams?”

  “Aye, I would. I’ve chosen a certain way of life; it doesn’t mean that ye have to live it as well. I want yer happiness Jewel, an’ if this money will give it to ye then yer welcome to it.”

  “But the money was never meant for this sort of end.”

  “No, but darlin’ Ireland is never goin’ te see the sort of freedom my family dreamed of. I think my Da’ was beginnin’ to see that near the end of his life. Maybe someday there will be peace an’ some sort of unity but it’s not likely to be the sort the Riordans have fought for.”

  “Then why pursue this madness, if you don’t even believe it’s possible, why stay?”

  He smiled sadly. “To give Ireland the best sort of freedom that can be provided under whatever circumstances are existing when an’ if that freedom should come.”

  She shook her head hopelessly and smudged angrily at the tears, hot and futile, that welled up and poured down her face.

  “You make me so sad man, do you know that? You make me so damn sad.”

  “I told ye I would,” he said and then pushed himself wearily onto his knees and across the breadth of the tiny room, so close she could feel the heat of his skin.

  “Ye’ve forgiven me my sins in the past an’ ye’ll have so many to forgive in the future darlin’, there are no chains bound around ye, when ye decide ye cannot take another day, another moment of this, I’ll let ye go.”

  She watched him for a moment. Such a big man to humble himself so. Such a small man compared to the cross he’d been designated to bear. Her own man, in all the ways that mattered.

  “I need ye to touch me, Jewel, I cannot touch ye first, not tonight.”

  Damn him, she thought wearily, closing her eyes, taking the only refuge available to her at present. He knew what it was for her to be close to him, that his mere presence would begin the craving in her fingertips, the purely sensate bliss of skin, how soft the unsullied ivory of his shoulders was compared to the roughness of the black whorls of hair that ran the width of his chest. The scars and bumps and ridges she could trace with perfect precision in the dark, what it was to have him tremble and shake in her arms, all that power in the daylight, all that need in the dark.

  She touched him, stroked her hands firmly up the contours of his face, felt beard on the cusp of rough to silky, then the baby-fine edges of his shorn hair. Smelled the smoke of close, dark meetings, the whiskey of their aftermath, the iron of sweat, the blood of fear, the bitter wine of despair. Touched his mouth with her own, lightly, the fragility of forgiveness, hard, the anger of loneliness. Heard him moan and smiled, just a little, to herself. There was a place, a cocoon she could create for him, a refuge bound in rough cotton sheets and silhouetted by sulfurous streetlights, that he would never be able to find elsewhere, even if he should try.

  She opened her eyes, found dark eyes invading her, saw what his self-control was costing him and what it was saying. Make love to me, the words were silent but no less forceful in their muteness. Make love to me and make me forget, forget with skin and hair and teeth and tongue, with dance and drum and bone and blood, make me forget that I found you seeking solace with another man. A stranger to this room, this bed, this sacrament of two. Lover, make me forget.

  And forget he did, as she took away his clothes and with them his fatigue, with the shedding of her own she pushed away any world beyond the bed and her touch. She shut out the light, brought darkness down and then on the bed, body to body, she became a map for his fingers, Braille for the blindness of emotion. On the collarbone, read vulnerability, on the swelling upslope of breast, read succor and rest. Down then to the swift glide of ribcage, the smooth upthrust of hip and belly, in these read the foreshadowing of the next chapter, bound in gold leaf and roses, in salt and dark, damp earth, in the parting of the thighs find velvet, fecund and warm. Upon entry into the body, find oblivion, red and swaddling. Know the final chapter is about the road home, the finding of peace, the communion of one under God’s loving eye. Lover, make me forget.

  The afterword, the aria, the female’s song that is sung for herself is reassurance, to lie in the lover’s arms and be soothed, to be the child as he was only moments ago. To believe for a fragile space, that those arms that curve protectively around her can hold the world at bay, that God loves lovers and will not tear them apart. To believe with eyes closed that love is all sweetness, that bodies are all fire, that life is more than a coursing of blood through too precarious veins. Talk, if small, is possible then.

  “Casey, what’s to become of us?” she asked quietly.

  “We fight an’ we win where we can,” he answered sleepily, the words his last bit of consciousness before the death-like slumber of true exhaustion found him.

  “And if we lose?” she asked the empty air around her, relieved that Casey could not answer her.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  May the Lord in His Mercy Be Kind to Belfast

  For the British the history of the Irish had melted rather conveniently into the Celtic mist after the civil war of 1921. Ireland had been put back in her place and quite soundly so. The Irish memory, however, was much longer and less forgiving. Fifty years were as nothing to the Irish memory. They had learned the first commandment of history the hard way; it had happened before and thus it could happen again.

  The summer of 1969 opened with unease in Belfast. Protestants and Catholics who lived on the edge of tribal boundaries quietly packed up and began the retreat from the undeclared frontlines. If the government couldn’t admit that trouble, real trouble, was coming, then the people whom it affected most deeply wouldn’t be so foolish. In Belfast, the threat of violence was very real, with its tens of thousands of working class people, many unemployed and with the prejudices and old hatreds that straddled both sides of the divide. A small scuffle could easily turn into a pogrom as it had done before in the city of blood and steel. And so, in the stifling summer air, tension reigned supreme, waiting for only a sign, some small skirmish, to break the entire city open.

  Since January’s long march, the country had been priming itself for a blowout. The People’s Democracy had staged a series of protests, against unemployment rates, which in the Catholic population always ranked as some of the highest
in the western world, against discriminatory housing practices, against iron clad electoral boundaries and against the oppression of a people who were too angered to be kept down any longer. In the streets of Derry, the Catholic youth were ripe for a fight, the marches and demonstrations that had channeled their frustrations were now banned, and so their rage simmered and bided its time.

  On the Orange side unease was brewing as well, from the well-heeled Unionists of Stormont to the hard-liner on the streets, there was a sense that the tide, with two hundred and fifty years of history to their advantage, had turned and was about to run against them.

  In March and April of that year there were several explosions that destroyed an electricity substation and a reservoir in the Mourne Mountains that fed the water pipes going into Belfast. Orange extremists blamed the IRA and everyone else blamed the Orange extremists. The Protestant Telegraph, an organ of extremist propaganda said the bombings were proof of a reactivated IRA and were an ominous warning of what lay in wait for Ulster under the aegis of a shadow army reborn from the ashes of rage and blood.

  On April 22nd though, a much larger bomb was dropped in the form of the election to Westminster of Bernadette Devlin, one of the founders and leading lights of the People’s Democracy, a miniskirted, raucous-voiced force of nature that turned the Mother of all Parliaments on its bewigged ear with one of the most electrifying maiden speeches the rarefied walls of Westminster had ever heard. The second shock of the day, rather appropriately, was the announcement by Prime Minister Terence O’Neill that the one man, one vote issue would be put into law. The next day his cabinet began to resign in protest, feeling that he was opening the gates of their world to the rabble of angry Catholics. More bombings of water mains took place and on the 28th of April, O’Neill resigned, figuratively and literally bombed out of office by the very people who’d once supported him. He had failed his own people, had never had the support of the Catholics, and had now angered Britain who’d expected him to toe the old line and keep Ulster’s contentious house in order.

  Lured by the scent of chaos that was slowly building and leaking its way through the streets, activists and student protesters began to fly in from around the world, as if the coming conflagration were some sort of social event, a stamp on the passport of professional protest.

  April in Derry saw fierce rioting after the police banned a march from Burntollet Bridge to Derry and, in the ensuing fight, the police rushed a house, mistakenly believing that stone-throwing youth were sheltering there and batoned the innocent occupants. Samuel Devenney, a forty-two year old taxi driver, died from internal injuries caused by the batons. Through the oracle glass of hindsight, he would be claimed as the first death of the Troubles. But then under a sweltering summer sky, the troubles were not yet spelled with a capital T and people had no way of knowing that a middle-aged man’s death was only the first of many.

  Summer brought the marching season and with it the torch of sectarian hatred and Belfast, with eight hundred years of rage, was more than ready to burn.

  Father Terence McGinty had not been to the city by the lough for many years. And though much was familiar, much had also changed.

  There were always the inevitable landmarks, the things innate to a city that even a visitor would recognize. The long velvet sweep of the grounds at Stormont, the Romanesque pillars of city hall, the greening gates of Queen’s University. And then there were the things that one who has gone and come back will know. The crowded streets, the dingy brick lines of the rowhouses, sprouting the ubiquitous two, three and four potted chimneys, the well-scrubbed pavement stones outside the homes, the open doors, the neighborhood pubs where only the locals drank, the shops run by three generations of the same family, the people who had left and those that had stayed.

  And what had changed? The tension in the streets was not entirely new but it was of proportions he’d never known before. People hurried about their business, didn’t linger over back gates and in laneways chatting and there was a feeling in the air of dread expectation that made it hard to breathe. Belfast was a city in waiting.

  He’d arrived on a mid-August afternoon, with the intent of staying with his old friend Father Joe Swinney in the monastery of the Resurrectionist Church. The red brick colossus stood like an ancient guardian over the dividing line between what was unofficially acknowledged as the Catholic and Protestant areas. Over one wall was Sandy Row, an area that was famous for Protestant militancy and behind it stretched the predominantly Catholic enclaves of the Lower Falls and the Clonard district, both Republican strongholds. The Resurrectionist Church had provided refuge and succor for people of both faiths and during the second world war when German bombs rained down with impunity upon Belfast, people of each denomination had huddled in its shelter.

  Father Terry arrived in time for afternoon tea, a worn carpetbag tucked under one arm and a burly oak walking stick at the end of the other.

  Father Joe, as he was fondly known to his parishioners, greeted him affectionately, kissing him on both cheeks, a habit he’d picked up during his years in Rome and never dropped. He was a short, rotund man with a rosy beaming face, twinkly blue eyes and a balding head, fringed now with faded blond hair. Father Terry had always thought he looked exactly as one might imagine Friar Tuck to look.

  “I’ve got the kettle on; we’ll sit and take a break then. Are you tired from your trip? No, well that’s probably best as we’ll need all the hands we can get soon enough.”

  “Why?” Terry asked mildly, watching as the cherubic priest took down the familiar green box of Lyons tea and shook a few crumbly digestive biscuits out onto a plate.

  “Because this city is a stick of dynamite and the fuse has already been lit, we’re all just awaiting the explosion now. Did you hear the news out of Derry?”

  “Could hardly avoid it,” Terry took a sip of his steaming tea and a bite of stale biscuit. Monday night in Derry, ‘Roaring Meg’, a siege gun used by the Protestant defenders in 1689 against the Catholic forces of James II, had bellowed out over the city signaling the beginning of the Apprentice Boys Day March. On that same evening, the RUC had been given permission to gas the Bogside just before midnight. Derry was a city under siege. The defenders wrapped their faces in wet rags, built the barricades even higher, pried up streets for stones to throw and took to the top of Rossville flats, where they were above the choking gas and could rain their fuselage down on the police below.

  “There’s talk of the British Army being called in,” Father Joe said and sat down heavily. He paused to put sugar in his tea and take two biscuits before continuing. “There’s been attacks on the RUC stations here and there’s barricades going up. Stormont has lost control and knows it; calling in the British Army is throwing in the white towel. Bit ironic isn’t it, a police state that doesn’t have enough police? Have another biscuit, will you, you’re still thin as a sideways rake.”

  “The church is in a rather vulnerable position here,” Terry said waving away a third biscuit.

  “We are,” Father Joe agreed, “but I try to look at it from the angle that we’re in the best position to help any and all when the trouble breaks.”

  “An’ ye believe it’s inevitable that it will?”

  “Terry my old friend, you’ve seen some trouble in this old country over the years, have you ever felt the tension the way it is now?”

  “No,” Terry agreed quietly, “ye’ll have to forgive my naïveté Joe, it comes from having seen it all come to naught before. I can’t countenance blood on the streets again an’ see it make no difference.”

  “You still grieve Brendan, don’t you?”

  “Aye an’ Brian. I don’t particularly want to outlive Brendan’s grandsons.”

  “And how are the boys?” Father Joe asked, absentmindedly taking a fifth biscuit, the crumbs of the previous four speckling the front of his cassock.

  “Good, the oldest go
t married a few months back an’ the youngest is doin’ quite well at university.”

  “Married?” Father Joe sighed, “I remember baptizin’ him, roared like a banshee when the water hit his head and then peed down the front of my soutane.”

  “Well ye know the Riordans never did feel kindly about water.”

  “True enough. Well then, Terry, are you ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work? I was just itemizing the contents of the medical cabinet when you came.”

  “Aye,” Terry sighed and pushing back his chair, stood, “let it never be said that in Ireland we aren’t prepared when the blood starts to spill.”

  Contrary to Father Terry’s words, Casey was not, at present, faring very well at all.

  “We cannot,” he said for the third time, “put armed men out on the streets, we’ll have an all out bloodbath if we do.” A semi-circle of hostile, stubborn faces looked back at him. “Be reasonable boys, ye know the state of our arsenal is extremely limited we’ve had every old Republican an’ his mother out diggin’ up weapon caches from the fifties an’ we still are only lookin’ at a handful of guns an’ ammunition. They have automatic weapons, armored vehicles and an unending supply of bullets.”

  “But we can’t stand back an’ leave our own people to fend for themselves,” protested a fair-haired boy named Sean.

  “I never suggested that we should. There’s us an’ every old republican who can still stand an’ the lot of us’ll be out in the streets in force. We have to keep the peace as best as we can though. We’re not equipped to go to war, we don’t have the numbers an’ we don’t have the weapons an’ that is final. Any aggression on our part is goin’ to provoke a backlash against our own neighborhoods an’ families that the RUC will only be too happy to provide.”