Valiant Gentlemen

by Sabina Murray

  “And are you well?” asks Sarita.

  “Happy within reason,” Paz replies. She smoothes her skirt, which responds with a soft rustle, then turns the full strength of her dark brown eyes upon her former mistress. “I once had ambition of a kind that I would never realize. And now I don’t.”

  One evening, Paz comes by for a glass of wine before dinner and the presence of Herbert adds a much appreciated levity. Herbert recounts the entire event of Cricket’s birth, complete with an enactment of Paz’s pulling the sheet from around the Scottish doctor’s neck.

  “Herbert,” says Sarita, “that’s not polite conversation.”

  “But it’s only Paz here, and she’s family. Well, like family. Besides, she’s seen it all, hasn’t she?”

  There’s a good chance Paz has. Oh, the horror of Herbert. But no doubt this insensitivity is a form of sensitivity.

  “That Doctor McIntyre became very successful,” says Herbert. “We were lucky to get him when we could afford him. He certainly thought highly of you,” he adds, nodding to Paz.

  The following day, as she’s taking her on-deck constitutional, Sarita sees a man who closely resembles Dr. McIntyre. How strange. Should she say hello? But why would she do that? He’s an obstetrician. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize her face, which is a joke, of course, and one that sounds more like Herbert’s humor than her own. She positions herself in the shade, behind a pillar. The more she watches the man, the more she’s convinced that it is indeed the good doctor himself. And then, surprise, Paz appears at the far end of the deck, now in a habit of deep rose. Paz draws to him—­definitely McIntyre—cautiously taking his elbow. Perhaps this is not so much a surprise as an explanation. Sarita sees it now, all the blanks filled in, even that of Mrs. McIntyre, back in England, aware or unaware of the nature of this journey, but certainly at farther distance to the good doctor than Paz.

  XIII

  Ireland

  October 1904

  Casement skirts the cottage, passing inches from a narrow window ledge, and wonders if he’s made a mistake. The clochan should be right here. He ducks beneath the clothesline and its flapping drawers. He’s having a hard time summoning that romantic frame of mind that will let him truly appreciate what it might have been to be a monk trying to come closer to God through this feat of exile. Sure enough, the clochan is no more than a fortified badger hole and when he peeks in through the broken roof, his feeling is more of disappointment. Had he expected the monk to still be there? Casement is thinking like a child, although he just turned forty last month.

  Casement has a couple of weeks on the island of Inishmaan, which is as far to the west as Ireland can manage. This is at the recommendation of Alice, who thinks he should indulge his recent interest in the Irish language, and seems to have no shortage of activities to occupy his time. He’s come in the shoes of Synge, and all those Irishmen who had their language stolen somewhere in the past and now have to go retrieve it. He’d be happy listening in on people’s conversations, but that requires getting two people together in the same place, when the majority of the time the men are working alone in the fields, hanging in their required locations like planets in the sky. And the women, well, they are often grouped together about the hearths and washing, but what’s his excuse to find their company? How would he enter their houses?

  Casement tracks back up the curving path. There is Dún Chonchúir, the great cheese-wheel of it, sitting on the windswept mound, hairy with grass. An escaped sheep crops growth drunkenly by the entrance, sidestepping when Casement comes near. Inside the quiet is the kind you can almost touch. A set of stone steps leads up to the top of the fort and to a view of the island, and from the island out to the sea. The blanket of fields rolls out to the flatlands, out to the pounded, gray brim of sand. A few currachs dot the water. Birds wheel and drop.

  Casement wanders past fields marked off by wobbling walls of flat rocks. They don’t use mortar here because the walls would be toppled in the first gale, which is practical, but gives a sense of impermanence, or at least struggle. He’s just gone through a gap into a field, then into another, but there’s no exit other than that so recently serving as entrance. Casement, pacing around like a fool, has gained the attention of the farmer, who was busy at his rows but is now standing with his knuckles resting on his hips. He takes his hat from his head and puts it back and Casement wonders what this action has accomplished.

  “Dia dhuit,” says Casement.

  “English, are you?” says the farmer.

  “No,” says Casement. “I’m from up North.”

  “Ah,” says the farmer.

  Which says a lot, but makes self-defense impossible.

  “Where are you needing to go?” asks the farmer.

  “Nowhere in particular.”

  “The pub’s just down the road,” the farmer offers. Suddenly this seems like a good idea. That he’s not actually lost doesn’t seem worth arguing. He listens out of politeness, then follows out of inertia. Besides, it looks like rain.

  The wind picks up and palms the surface of the island. A brisk breeze rattles at the karst, sings through the walls, makes Inishmaan feel as if it is alive, shivering. A breath of wet chill blows over and the first handful of raindrops rattles on the packed dirt. He has barely time to pull his scarf up to his ears when the rain drifts over like a windblown drape.

  The weather changes minute to minute here, as does his mood. The rain does not last.

  Two girls walk towards him on the path, their arms linked. In this sparsely populated place, he knows he’ll be recognized. And the girls look familiar to him. One, dark, is chattering ferociously. The other, light-haired and with heavy cheekbones, listens, pausing to adjust the bundle of sticks tucked under one arm. They wear the big skirts. They have the shawls wrapped across and knotted at the back.

  “Dia dhuit,” he says, as they meet.

  The girls smile in return. The blonde says something that translates as Where’s your wife? But he’s not sure if he’s translated correctly, and even if he has, how to respond? The other, wild-eyed, says something else—­something he has not been taught—and the girls erupt in laughter.

  Casement had thought this trip would bring him closer to ordinary people, but everywhere he is met with respectful reserve. He thinks of the farmer in his field. Beyond pleasantries, he hadn’t known what to say to him, and if he had, the man could not afford the time to hear it. Would that farmer want to hear about the latest political developments? Does he know that Gladstone himself supported the Home Rule Bill? The Irish State could be a reality and discussing it is not lofty talk. But this farmer spends his day digging in a field. He has a wife. He has children. Some live, some die. Those are buried in the dirt. And the potatoes come out. Casement is not sure what he wants from this man, these farmers, other than some abstracted approval. Although why he wants this is a sentimental thing. Lofty.

  The pub is a low-ceilinged, flagstone room with a narrow bar on one side and some benches set around. A turf fire sends its warming smoke into the air, fortified with coal that he senses from the prickling of his nose and the heat. Inside there are four men along the bar, the smell of damp wool and their plain, unwashed selves steaming in the air. Casement takes a seat by the fire and waits for Flaherty to appear. Flaherty owns this place and is the closest thing Casement has to a friend on Inishmaan. And there he is, smiling in a way both welcoming and judgmental. He raises his ginger eyebrows to Casement. Casement responds, “Just a pint.” Casement should have used his Irish because he could have used his Irish, but Flaherty has traveled, has confident English, and enjoys speaking it.

  Up at the bar, they seem to be talking about the best way to cook fish, which is not what he’d thought they’d be talking about, but there it is. The conversation then peters out entirely, which is what happens here. The men are content to sit with their own quiet pints, side by side.
r />   The shoulders at the bar swivel to and back as Flaherty sets down Casement’s glass, and his own, which is only three-quarters filled. “A rough crossing today,” he says. He means to the mainland. Casement takes a slurp from his beer. They chat about this and that, about the boy who drowned last month, of how the currach slid into a deep trough of sea, of the wave that shattered it with a thousand brutal pounds of water, of how the boy’s body washed up on the mainland. “He was a handsome boy,” says Flaherty, “and when he washed up a week later, he was untouched, still pink, as if he might wake up. Of course he didn’t.” He nods with a look of accomplishment. “I know you learned types like the fairies.”

  “Sometimes I get the feeling that you’re making things up,” says Casement.

  “And what about your stories of the witch doctors and cannibals? People cutting off the hands of the black fellows?”

  “It is a terrible world we live in.” Although the world right now seems very small and manageable, his wool pants slowly steaming dry.

  “That’s why I came back,” say Flaherty. They raise their glasses in a wry toast and drink. “My bit of traveling makes me special. Most of us have never even been to Galway, although once we get going, we can’t seem to stop and often end up in Canada.”

  “Were you there?”

  “I was.” He glances around the walls of his business to explain. “I spent time in Connemara too. My wife’s people are from Screeb. That’s how it’s done, of course, or the children get a bit simple.” Flaherty tugs his face into a droll look, giving a backward nod to the bar. “Once, must have been ten years ago, I was cutting the turf and, what do you know, I found a body in there. I sliced it in two with the slong.” He raises his hands as if he’s holding a paddle. “Boom.” He drops them. “Right across the middle of him. Nearly stopped my heart. So we dug him out and he some sort of bog man chief from the old days. He had a necklace and a cape, and some red hair. His hands were blackened, but other than that, looked as if he’d just curled his fingers the day before. His teeth were all there, which is more than I can say for them at the bar. A lot of him was just skin, leathery you know, clinging to the ribs.”

  There are Flahertys in America. There are Flahertys in Canada. There are quite a few on Inishmaan, and there’s a cousin in Galway, and an aunt who married and moved to Mayo and hasn’t been heard from since the 1860s, who might have emigrated or just died because Mayo was hard hit by the Great Hunger and has but a scanty population.

  Flaherty is like that after the first pint: talks less of fairies, more of evictions. One of the men at the bar pulls himself to standing, and then, with wobbling steps, heads for the door. Flaherty’s eyes follow him. “Him with the black hair,” he starts in a whisper, “is older than he looks.” The door slams behind him. “At the height of the Famine, he was fourteen. His family scraped together what little they had and sent him off to Galway so he could make it to America, find a way to make a living, and save them all. And he’d never been off the island. He’s not a stupid man now, and was probably sharper then, but still, he was just a boy. He had a younger brother that he was close to. And he had two sisters, one just a baby. And a grandmother along with the parents.” Flaherty consults his glass, but it’s empty. “So off he goes to Galway, waving goodbye to the family. He took the one pair of shoes still left among them. And of course the story doesn’t end well. He gets to Galway with that look of total ignorance written on his features and shortly thereafter someone comes along pretending to have a boat ticket and just like that relieves him of his money. He didn’t come back for five years. He was too ashamed. He took to wandering, worked on one of them walls for the government until he realized that carrying the rocks was making him more hungry than the food it could buy, and also that the wall was for nothing, just going up the mountain. So he left the west and went east, stealing what he could. He sold the shoes. He came back five years later, when the worst of the Famine was over but everyone was still on their knees from it.” Flaherty sets the hollow glass down. “His family were all dead, the parents, the brother. Cottage was still there. Someone had shown up for an eviction, but apparently the Famine had done it for them. So, in our man goes and there are none of his loved ones around, just the skeleton and skin of his dog, lying before the fireplace. The dog must have outlived everyone. It’s possible. Hunger did a lot, but the cholera made quick work, and that leaves the dogs alone.” Flaherty’s eyes flicker up towards the bar. He lowers his head near to Casement’s. “That story was kept secret for a long time. We all thought he’d been to America. Why not? He’ll tell it when he’s had some whiskey, just one set of ears at a time, and the next day he doesn’t remember having done it. So he thinks we still don’t know, but we all do, each of us, and told by his own lips.”

  Casement takes his supper there and it’s late when he makes his way back up the street to the cottage. The black sky is stretched to full capacity. The wind makes a soft lullaby among the grasses. A night bird calls in some confusion and then shuts up. There’s the crunch of his leather soles on packed dirt.

  Casement is supposed to return to Lisbon to take up the consulate, but he’s not eager to go back. He feels his true purpose is here in Ireland. Maybe the Foreign Office will let him extend his leave. After all, his doctor has warned him that he is most likely going to need another surgery. How he will pay for all of this, he is not sure. What little money he does have, he can’t seem to keep from giving to others. Of course, this is all under the guise of loans, but you only loan money to people with no other means of coming by it, so how can any of these people—by definition—ever pay him back? And Nina too is coming up short each month, so what little can be scraped together goes to her.

  He has written to Ward.

  He has written asking him for money.

  He has not yet heard back.

  Politics. That’s what Ward calls it. Don’t talk about politics, Roddie, or Why would I be thinking about Ireland? And this last classic statement, Casement, you’re practically English. You were just a boy when you left home, and you’re not even Catholic. Ward, who manages matchless sympathy for the natives of the Congo, has nothing but derision for the Irish, or rather Irishness, which he sees as some degraded form of Englishness. And it’s not only Ward. ­Others too make a big production of saying that he is as good as English, and what does one do about that? There he is, Roger Casement, British consul, honorary Englishman. To deepen the joke, now he’s received the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George. That makes him Sir Roger Casement. That is funny and he finds a smile for himself. He hadn’t wanted this bauble. He didn’t need this thing about the neck to remind him of all his efforts on behalf of the less fortunate. He hadn’t wanted to accept it, but others had urged him to. Even his Republican friends had desired that he take this honor, take whatever you can from the English, make the quick grab and tally it later.

  Casement is back in Ballycastle visiting cousins and will soon head to Belfast. Why is it that visiting family can so undermine one’s sense of self? The walls of the room he occupied as a child close in on him, having shrunk as he matured into adulthood. He looks through the battered footlocker at his old belongings—exercise books, Latin primers, yellowed clippings from the Freeman. A lark’s nest—in with the papers—attests to some long-ago interest in birds. And here’s an old poem in the stilted writing of his child hand. A poem! All those things he would choose to leave stilled in the past begin flying around like unsettled moths. There is his loneliness, his spotty education. There is his unwanted self, living with an uncle who feels bad not only that you’ve lost your father and mother but also that you had such parents in the first place. There is his father’s angry assertion that with family it was duty to support each other, not charity, and his mother’s veiled expression as she processed his statement, her packing the family’s meager belongings yet again. There are his brothers brawling in the London streets, coming home bloodied
and dirty. And at her end, Mother presenting the full belly of a woman with child, but it was just a ghost sack of toxins at work as the drink killed her.

  Casement escapes the house and heads to the shore. This is old behavior. His long strides towards the sea feel a function of muscle memory, his pacing makes him wonder if he could be stepping in place with the planet revolving beneath him.

  He stands on the cliffs, feeling the wind’s insistent nudging, watching the waves shoulder the unyielding granite. These great rocks cooked in the cauldron of prehistory make him feel the simultaneous joy and terror of insignificance. A sadness starts to spread through his limbs, which he realizes is actually a larger, abstract sympathy. He turns his back to the cliff edge to see that same terrible wind now delicately riffling the grass in liquid shadow, creating pools of deep green light. Scudding clouds flock past the sun. He feels at one with all of it: the sheep, the grass, the cliffs, tree arms winding up the wind, splash of light, water roar. There is an urge to fling himself into the sea, to leave the matter of his days. Would he be the foam whispered by the waves? Or merely a man floating facedown, a bloated corpse torn at by fish? But this is mere fancy. There is so much to do that he has little time to dig around in his own sorrows. The maw of his ontological angst has become, thank God, something of an indulgence, and one he doesn’t care to feed.

  Casement turns the corner to Ardigh. Frank Biggers is expecting him and, if nothing else, the excuse of helping out with the Feis will provide accommodation free of charge for the next few days. His funds are wrung to naught, just a few pounds left of the money that Ward finally sent after his concern for his friend at last outweighed his disapproval. He makes the steps of the Biggers’ house and rings the bell.