“Come meet my grandfather,” the boy said as they released the hug.
The man was shaking his head as the boy approached, but in a fond manner. When they got close enough, he swept the boy into a fierce embrace.
“Jamie, what were you thinking? I’ve been out of my mind since I got home to find you missing.”
“I just went for a couple of days,” the boy protested.
“You were climbing those damn cliffs again, weren’t you?”
The boy didn’t reply, which Brian thought was wisest for now, though he imagined the trip back to Belfast was going to contain a long conversation between this man and the boy he still held tightly. He held the boy out at arm’s length, then ruffled the golden hair with one hand and shook his head. There was no small amount of exasperation in the man’s expression, but there was no small love as well. Clearly, these disappearances were not rare occurrences.
The boy named Jamie turned back to Brian with a slightly embarrassed smile.
“My granddad,” the boy said, and it was clear he was relieved this was the person who had come to retrieve him.
The man put out his hand, and Brian took it. His handshake was firm, but not overtly so; he was not a man who needed to prove his strength to anyone.
“James Kirkpatrick,” he said.
“Brian Riordan,” he replied.
“Thank you for looking after our Jamie,” the man said. “I only just got back from a business trip to find he has been gone for three days.”
Suddenly the name penetrated Brian’s cold-fogged mind. He looked at the boy.
“A still of sorts, is it?”
The boy grinned, a quicksilver expression that was entirely infectious. Brian grinned back.
“Can we offer you a lift home?” the grandfather asked.
“Thank ye for the offer, but I’ve my car here.”
“Again, thank you for looking out for Jamie.”
“He saved my life, truth be told,” Brian said, wondering if this family understood just how exceptional their boy was. “Ye take care of yerself, laddie.”
“Yourself as well,” the boy said, as his grandfather gently touched his shoulder to turn him toward the car that waited for them.
He watched the boy walk away, bare foot, but straight-backed and walking easy as a cat on a sunny day. Then he walked off in the opposite direction, his own bare feet cold on the pavement, to his car.
His family was waiting.
Another Man’s Country
The hut sheltered in the hollow of a pass high in the Wicklow Mountains. There was a thick wood at its back and a rarely used path that led to its front door. It had been a shepherd’s croft originally, used for the summer months when the animals were brought high into the hills to feast upon the rich mountain grasses. It had long been abandoned by the time Brendan Riordan found it, one spring when he had been on the run from the police and the Black and Tans. It had been the work of a week to make the place habitable for it had not been home to any other than bees and birds for a long time. He had come back many a time since, with his sons, sometimes all of them, sometimes only his eldest, Brian.
This year though, there was no Brendan, only Brian and his father’s lifelong friend, the rebel priest, Father Terence McGinty. Brian’s father had been killed five years before, shot in the street in front of his home—shot for his name, and his history. This was the first year Brian had the heart to make the trip into the mountains; it was a sort of pilgrimage, a final goodbye to the father he had worshipped and with whom he had spent so many lovely summer days and nights, here high in the twilit realm of a mountain far removed from people and their worries and troubles.
It was their place, this shambling cottage with its tin chimney bent over like a drunk on his way home from the pub and its wavy glass windows and thick wooden door that didn’t hang straight and would never fully shut. It was a half-day’s hike in, uphill every inch of the way but the beauty of the mountain and the end objective made it worth every step. True, it wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but it wasn’t so much the aesthetics as the freedom this small hut had given the men in their family over the years. It was time out of time, away from the roil and bloodletting of the country below.
It was late August and the air held a silver-blue light that spoke of the autumn that lay just over the lip of the mountain. There was a soft chill to the air, as though the land breathed deep of the stones below and exhaled the first breath of the winter that lay ahead. They fished a little in the stream down from the hut and caught three trout for dinner. It was well into the evening when they returned to the hut with their catch, damp through, with the sweet aroma of pine sap and running water in their lungs.
They got a good fire going, and Brian cooked the trout and potatoes in a pan over the flames. Around them the cottage glowed in the firelight, and Brian was grateful for the warmth and shelter after the day of mists and swift-passing rains they had encountered. He had always loved coming here with his da, for Brendan had been entirely present on the mountainside, his attention wandering only to the stars and the direction of the wind and the philosophical sorts of things that those elements stirred in a man.
He and Father Terry ate well and had stout after dinner that they had chilled in the stream. It tasted peaty and gold all at the same time, and Brian wondered why it was life had more tang here in this mountain fastness, why it tasted both more sharp and sweet at the same time. This year the sweet held a full measure of bitter, like blackened lead trapped inside a glass of golden mead. For his father and all his brothers were gone, and there was nothing that could ever bring them back to him here on this blue hillside. He was the last of the five males in his family. The lone survivor. He felt a great and terrible guilt that it should have been him that survived the massacre of his family, for Francis had been a far better person than himself, Daniel had been so alive and on fire with the seeds of the rebel in him, and wee Peter had barely tasted life. And his father, Brendan Riordan, legendary rebel, hero of the Irish War of Independence, survivor of the Civil War and second only to Michael Collins, the Big Fellow himself, in importance in the Irish Republican Brotherhood. But to Brian he had simply been his Daddy, his hero, the big man who made the world seem a safe place, whose voice had soothed him to sleep at night, and whose life cast such a long shadow, that Brian wasn’t sure he could ever measure up to it.
After dinner, they sat outside to watch the sun melt slowly down toward the sea that was invisible up here, though a night mist was sweeping onto the mountain, and Brian thought he could smell salt in its silken threads. He remembered the last time he had been here with his da, and how Brendan had stood silhouetted against the night, as the sun sank deep into the beyond. His father had been big, broad in the shoulders, deep-chested and long-legged, standing six-foot-four in his stockings. He had been a man people paid attention to, even when he hadn’t so much as uttered a word.
He looked over at Father Terry now, a man he had known from the time he was just a wee lad. His father had trusted no man more than this one and that had been true long before Terry had sworn vows to the Church. Terry had kept Brendan’s counsel and his secrets all his life, and Brian knew he would take them to his grave. The priest looked quietly contemplative now as he watched the air around them turned from gold to amber, and from amber to blue.
“Father Terry,” he said quietly, “my da an’ yerself never spoke of the time durin’ the Civil War. I’ve heard tell that the two of yez were friends with the Big Fellow.”
Terry’s profile was so still that it was like oak, immovable and without expression. Then he turned to Brian and though it was too dark to really see the priest’s expression, Brian could feel the man’s eyes searching his own face, looking for something there. When he spoke at last, his voice was very quiet.
“Brian, laddie, why do ye want to talk of these things? That water flowed under the bridge to the sea many years ago now.”
“Because it’s my f
ather’s history, an’ I would know it.”
“A man’s past is another country, Brian, an’ sometimes it’s one that is best not traveled by others.”
“I want to know,” he repeated, soft but stubborn.
Father Terry sighed. “Ye’ve certainly got the Riordan tenacity, lad. Let’s go in though, it’s just a bit chill out here an’ I could use a drop of somethin’ stronger an’ a fire to warm my bones.”
Inside, the fire had burned down to cherry-bright coals and the stone walls of the hut, the simple furniture and ancient tin stove were washed red and warm in the light. Brian poured each of them a good slug of whiskey into the tin mugs that served as vessels for everything from water to uisce beatha, the words in Irish for whiskey, which translated meant ‘the water of life.’ Brian poured an extra wee bit into Father Terry’s mug, for a storyteller needed a wet throat and perhaps the man would need the fortification of it as well. Irish stories, especially the personal ones, were never easy nor short in the telling.
Brian put more wood on the fire. It had been the last thing they did each fall—he and his father and brothers—cutting the deadfall wood and stacking it in a wee lean-to out back of the hut to dry over the winter and spring months. It was there for their return, and also for anyone who might come across the hut in their wanderings and need shelter and warmth for a night. This year, he would be cutting the wood alone.
The fire reared up bright and hot, flames licking eagerly at the dry wood, a small pocket of pitch flaring and sending sparks up the chimney. Brian sat down beside the priest, and the scent of woods and earth and water came with him.
Father Terry was quiet for a few moments, staring into the flame, seeking the path into the story, finding that one point along the road that was the right place to begin.
“We did know Mick Collins, yer daddy an’ I, an’ that cost us somethin’ dear, though yer da would hear no word said against the man long years after his death. But before we knew Mick, we knew the men of the Easter Rising. Some better than others, but all of them we admired. We fought with them, after all, though we were both a wee bit wet behind the ears at the time. We were lucky we weren’t executed along with them, though we did a bit of jail time over it. I think Dublin Castle believed we were just a couple of eejits who got caught up in the madness of it. They spared our lives, an’ sure didn’t they have cause to regret it later for yer da caused them no small trouble in the years to come.”
Father Terry smiled, the memories scrolling out now, taking shape in front of them. He rolled his mug between his hands, and Brian could smell the whiskey, the heather and peat scent of it and under it, faint, the scent of his own father—fresh like cold winter air and newly turned earth. He shivered a little, as if the big man had suddenly stepped into the room with them, a shade whose presence was unmistakable, conjured by the words of his own history.
“Their deaths were a debt we owed, those of us who had known them, admired them, loved them in some cases. Their names might have disappeared into the mists of history, seldom mentioned, had the British not killed them as they did. That act put them on the roll call of martyrs, an’ so we owed them a blood debt, we owed them so that their beliefs, their stand, their rebellion wouldn’t go for naught. Mick understood we couldn’t meet the British in static warfare, seizin’ a buildin’ an’ makin’ a stand against an enemy with endless troops an’ heavy artillery was pure suicide an’ little more. Sure it gave us more heroes an’ martyrs, but didn’t we have enough of those already? We had to fight differently, we had to operate in small units, we needed an intelligence-gathering unit, an’ the structure so that the intelligence could be acted upon. He was right too, nothing else was ever going to work; we had neither the money nor the manpower for it.
“Mick taught us what the fight meant, an’ he also taught us what the cost of it was likely to be. The man saw things clearly, in a way I’ve rarely encountered in this life. In the Rebellion, we were together all of us, as brothers, fighting shoulder to shoulder, wanting the same things.
“An’ then came the Treaty. We all knew there was a reason Dev was so anxious for Mick to go to that conference an’ do the negotiating, an’ that was because he didn’t want the stink of it on him later. He knew there was no way the British were goin’ to give us what we wanted, an’ that we were goin’ to have to compromise ourselves into the ground, an’ he didn’t want to be remembered as the man who did it. Mick wasn’t a politician, an’ he knew it himself. He knew someone had to go face the British, though, an’ so he did. Signed his bloody death warrant by goin’ an’ I think he knew that too. It was only a matter of when an’ how, not if, after that. Pro-Treaty, Anti-Treaty, war was inevitable once he had put his signature to those papers, for when there is no center, the center cannot hold.”
He sighed. “An’ there we were in a civil war, an’ what a terrible time it was, make no mistake of that. There was naught romantic about it, brother killin’ brother, women raped in their own homes, children left to starve in the laneways. It was as though a great black wind had swept the country. But then we were still bleedin’ from the Famine, for the cuts of that went so deep there was no simple manner of healin’ from it.
“Mick had done the best he could, but it wasn’t enough. We needed more; we needed to be free for good an’ all. We wanted our country back; we wanted the right to rule our own selves an’ not be made to feel that we were inadequate to that task. Many of the English saw us as beasts, barely literate, poor, livin’ in hovels, unable to feed ourselves, and most certainly not fit to have our own government an’ laws, even though we’d had the Brehon laws long before they had their Magna Carta. We were a civilized people, with our poets an’ kings, our bards an’ chieftains, or as civilized as we Irish were ever likely to be. We even had a law for the recompense of a man injured by a bee sting. Now, how many nations can claim that?”
“Not many,” Brian said, understanding only too well the frustration well interlaced with humor that he heard in the man’s voice. It was the Irish way to laugh in the face of tragedy and make jokes at Fate, for what good had railing at it ever done a man?
“Yer daddy was the bane of the British durin’ the war. Mick they could keep tabs on for the most part because he’d been roped into a political role, whether he wanted it or not, but Brendan they could not. They hunted him for a long while before they caught him. Oh the mad situations we got in as a result. Brendan went underground, literally, at one point. Dug a hole in the ground with his two hands and hid from the Black an’ Tans for a week that way. They walked over his head more than the once, with no notion that the man they wanted was literally right beneath their feet.
“It was all a very long time ago an’ yet in the way of memories, no time at all. Oh, but the passion an’ the certainty we had then an’ how the moment hung there for us, golden an’ perfect. There was a time when everything seemed possible. We believed, all of us wet-behind-the-ears fools that it would really happen, that we would be the generation that would witness Ireland become a united, peaceful nation with its own government. But there is, my boy, no fool like an Irish fool. For aren’t we the world’s biggest dreamers, to be sure? It’s our greatest asset, an’ in the end it’s our biggest downfall.”
He paused to take a swallow of his whiskey and then he turned and fixed a rather intense look on Brian. Combined with the two different colors in his eyes, and the distant tone his voice had taken on, his gaze was more than a little disconcerting.
“Ye’ll be old enough to know, Brian, that there are times in life that, even as they happen, ye sense irrevocable changes are occurrin’, an’ sometimes those changes are good, an’ sometimes they aren’t, but regardless there’s always a strange sense of sadness that comes with such times. For ye know that the change can’t be stopped, but ye lose somethin’ in the transformation itself. What I’m about to tell ye of was such a time.”
For a second Brian wanted to tell Father Terry to stop, not to tell the story Bri
an had asked him to tell, not to bring the past to stand here with all its ghosts on this dark mountaintop. But it was too late, for the story had begun and could not be halted. Stories were like that, once begun they had a life of their own that belonged only in small part to the teller.
“The weather,” he began, eyes fixed once again upon the fire, “was foul that day…”
February 1921
The weather was foul that day, as it had been for the six days prior. Foul weather was certainly not unknown in this land, but generally a man could wait it out near a fire with a cup of hot tea in hand. Forty men and six days of lying in the heather, through sleet and hard rain and sweeping winds that left a skim of ice on everything it touched. The convoy they were waiting to ambush had failed to appear yet again. An ominous silence lay over the entire group because every last man jack of them knew what it meant. There was an informer in their ranks, possibly the man lying next to you, or the one you’d shared confidences with over a pint two weeks back. The tension amongst the group was palpable in the air and like an itch right in the middle of a man’s back, irritating and unrelieved.
They were going to need luck today and if the weather was any indication, it wasn’t in plenteous supply just now. They had two Lewis guns and a handful of old rifles and even more ancient pistols. The British were refusing to admit there was a war on, even though there had been fighting and tit-for-tat reprisals for over a year now. The most to which they would admit was that certain counties were ‘in a state of disturbance.’ It was as though the British could never acknowledge there was really a war in Ireland, as if it would cost them something dear to admit it even as they shot men in the streets, burned out entire towns and stocked the police force with thousands of their own unemployed veterans from the Great War. Veterans who showed a casual disregard for property or rights, including homes, wives and children.
Spindrift (Exit Unicorns Series) Page 4