Cass always sounded as though he had a grin in his voice, cocky boy that he was.
“Me, I am goin’ to court beautiful girls an’ have all my ties made of silk an’ get my hair barbered at least once a month.”
“What about you, Brendan?” Terry asked, for their tall friend had been quiet as the grass that waved soft around them.
“To be free,” Brendan said simply and quietly and Terry and Cass had fallen silent at his words, feeling suddenly that their aspirations were poor benighted things in comparison.
“Aye, if the feckin’ Brits would have left years ago, imagine how it all might be now,” Cass said a moment later.
“No,” Brendan shook his head, “I don’t just mean the British an’ their endless interference, or the politics. I mean free, just to go places an’ not even need to have a name. To not be known as someone’s son, or a bogtrottin’ Paddy, or as poor. To just be yerself, the part of ye that has no name, but is the core of ye nonetheless. I’d like to get on a ship an’ sail off on the sea, maybe come back some day, but maybe not.”
They had been quiet after that, thinking about what Brendan had said, until Brendan had pelted them both with mushrooms to lighten the mood and they had torn off across the field, Brendan in the lead as he always was. They had been young, and right there in that moment, they had been free.
Here they were again, the three of them in a field and Terry saw them from above as though the moment were suspended in a snow globe, an Irish scene sold to tourists, but this one gone terribly awry. For there were the component parts—the gently rolling emerald hills, the wee stone cottage with smoke curling from its stone chimney, the thatch on the roof glowing umber in the afternoon sun. And there was the brook, peat-brown, humming to itself on its way from hilltop to the sea, and the men in their tweed caps and the narrow winding roads running on forever. If it wasn’t for the gun, and the beaten man, they might have been frozen into that idyllic scene inside a glass ball, fated to make their way to another land, one softer and kinder to its sons.
“Today,” Cass whispered, “today I die, but it’s you an’ him, Terry, that will bear the brunt of it. It’s you an’ Brendan who will be haunted.”
“Aye,” Terry said, “that’s as may be true, but it makes no difference to what happens here.”
Brendan’s patience had run dry. “Terry,” he said, “get the hell out of the way, before I end up shootin’ you as well.”
“I forgive ye, man, go with God,” Terry said and took his hand from Cass’ and stepped back from his childhood friend, who was now a man and someone he did not know as he had believed he did. The confession had made him understand that in a few short moments.
“Yer a hard man, Brendan Riordan,” Cass shouted, though his voice trembled as much as his knees. “Sure as I’m standin’ here today, one day you too will face yer own firin’ squad. May they have as much mercy on yer soul as ye’ve had on mine.”
The shot rang out against the spring-green hills, echoing back to them even before Cass slumped down into the waving grass. It only took one bullet; Brendan had deadly accurate aim, after all. It was the only mercy he could offer Cass, and so he had given it to him.
Brendan stood there for a very long time afterwards, gun in hand, and Terry knew Brendan was waiting for him to look Brendan in the eyes. He couldn’t do it though, and he knew in one of those strange epiphanies life sometimes presented a man, he had failed Brendan in that moment, in a way no one ever would again.
Standing there with the long grass waving all around, Terry finally understood exactly what Brendan had meant that day so long ago and knew the man would never have the freedom of which he had once dreamed.
August 1922
The Riordan cottage was the finest one in the narrow country lane in which it claimed its address. Set back from the road with a beautiful flower garden in front and window boxes filled now with late blooming geraniums, it was a picture of well-kept contentment. Terry leaned a moment on the gate, bone tired, and wanting nothing more than to lie down here on the verge and go to sleep. He took a breath and unhasped the gate. He was partway up the path before he realized something wasn’t right about the familiar scene. There was dirt on the path and bits of broken plants, flowers crushed, their stems snapped and tossed to the side. Brendan and Marie always kept their home in perfect trim, and even the advent of two small children in the household hadn’t changed that.
The door was battered, long slash marks running the length of it and the latch was bent badly. He knocked on the door with more force than he had intended, panic shooting small bolts through his exhaustion, like lightning before a bad storm.
The door opened slowly, creaking on its hinges and a white face poked out.
“Jaysus Murphy!” Terry exclaimed, before he could stop himself, for the woman in front of him was bald, or near enough to it. Marie normally had a full head of curls, mahogany dark, thick and lustrous. Beautiful hair really, even if he usually only saw it bound up in a sensible fashion.
She had the baby in one arm, her free hand going self-consciously to the round of her scalp. It was cut in several places, small raw wounds glistening through the remaining tufts of hair. Holding onto her leg, his dark eyes big with worry was her oldest son, Brian, only eighteen months, still just a baby himself.
“Come in, Terry,” she said in her quiet fashion, turning back in toward the kitchen.
He stepped in, his chest so tight with anger that he couldn’t catch his breath.
“Who did this?”
He glanced around her into the house, and felt ice move through his belly. Marie usually kept the wee cottage immaculate, everything in its place, floors so clean a man might comfortably eat from them. Right now, though, there was a broken chair lying half in the hearth, a bag of flour that had been upturned over the floor, tea leaves scattered and crushed under booted feet and torn clothing and blankets scattered about. The curtains were shredded so that they hung in tatters, providing no cover from the outside. She saw his expression and said, “One of them took his bayonet to them.”
“Oh, Marie,” he looked around at the devastation and felt the fury flood from his chest to rush through his veins. Then he realized her face was still turned away from him, and he went to her and took her shoulders, turning her toward him.
“Marie, what have they done?”
She shook her head, her face white and set. “Only what ye see, ‘tis just a wee bruise an’ nothin’ more. Don’t be after thinkin’ they’ve done anything beyond that, one of them slapped me with the flat of his palm. To be fair, I’d brained him with the soup ladle just before.”
The anger billowed out through his blood until he had the sense of standing outside himself and watching the scene from a distance. Damn them all to hell, damn every last one of the miserable pricks. She had given birth to a second son only a month ago.
“Marie?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, “they didn’t do that, Terry.”
He breathed out a little. When the Tans had still been here, more than one woman, unwilling to give up the whereabouts of her menfolk, had been subjected to a variety of sexual humiliations during a night raid. He knew of one woman who had lost her baby as a result. The wives and daughters of Republicans hadn’t slept well at night for a long time, for that was the time the Tans made their raids, dragging women out of their beds in their night clothes and subjecting them to all sorts of abuse. He had heard of British officers who refused to work with the Tans, from disgust at the acts they had committed. But he had not expected his own former comrades to treat a woman so, to shave her head to mark her out and shame her in front of her entire community. This was civil war though, brother against brother and civility of any sort be damned. There were times it made the Irish Rebellion seem simple in its moral parameters, in comparison.
He picked up the chair from the hearth, and leaned it against the wall. He would mend it before he left. He took the broom then, from where
she had left it propped next to the fire, and began to sweep the remaining flour from the floor. There were tiny handprints and footprints scattered through it, and when he looked over at wee Brian, he saw a dusting of flour on his soft baby curls.
“Ye’ll not tell him what ye found here, when ye go see him,” she said low and fierce, joggling the baby in her arms. “Don’t bother to deny it. I know ye stopped by here to check on us before ye go to tell him the news.”
“Marie, I can’t—” he began, but was halted by her grabbing his shirt front urgently with her free hand.
“Oh, yes you can, Terry. If ye tell him he’ll come home, there will be no stoppin’ him, an’ these bastards will be only too happy for it. They’re huntin’ him like he’s a rabid beast. I can manage. I’ll go to my mother’s if it gets any worse.”
“Marie, he asks me every time I see him, an’ ye know how he is. I’m a dreadful liar an’ the man has always read me like I’m a crystal ball an’ he’s a fortune teller. He’s half-sick with worry over the three of yez.”
“I know it, but nothin’ will be improved by him comin’ home now.” She let go of his shirt front, went to the stove and stirred something highly aromatic in a big black pot. His stomach rumbled loudly. Even in crisis he was constantly hungry. “Sit,” she said, nodding at the kitchen table. He sat; the woman was not unlike her husband, such was the force of her personality that a person simply obeyed when she gave a command. She passed the baby into his arms and he took him in the crook of one elbow. He was well familiar with babies, being the youngest brother in a family of girls. He was uncle to eight ankle nippers, or was it nine? He hadn’t been home for several weeks and his second oldest sister had been due to give birth any time when he’d left.
He looked down into the baby’s face. It still astounded him occasionally that Brendan was father to two sons. They were both comely wee lads, this one with a fine skiff of dark hair adorning the round of his head, and big dark eyes gazing solemnly up at Terry now, as though he understood all the secrets of the universe, if only Terry knew the right questions to ask.
“Well then, wee Danny, how’s yerself today?” he asked and the baby responded by chewing vigorously on his tiny clamshell of a fist. Brian came and stood by his knee. There was no fear in the boy, small as he was. He would have the Riordan character one day, which was, as Brendan said ‘all fool courage with not a lick of sense to leaven it.’ Terry put a hand in his pocket and brought out a small top he had bought for Brian a week ago.
Marie put a hot bowl of stew in front of him, thick with gravy and chunks of lamb. Beside it she put a plate of soda bread, big slices, and mealy the way he liked it.
“The stew is scorched; it was near ready to bring off the stove when they came in the door.”
“It will taste like ambrosia to me,” Terry said and meant it sincerely. It might have been stringy meat boiled in a boot, and he would have been grateful for it, he was that hungry. He ate one-handed, though Marie offered to take the baby back.
“No, ‘tis all right, he’s sleepin’ fast, we don’t want to disturb him.”
Marie took Brian into her lap, and fed him from his own small bowl. He ate with an impressive concentration. He had the top that Terry had given him clutched tight in his left fist, while he held a chunk of bread in his right.
Terry emptied his bowl and Marie, knowing he would not ask for more, refilled it without saying a word to him. She had put a pot of tea on when they sat down to dinner, and she poured it out when Terry finished off his second bowl. Being a man on the run didn’t do much for one’s feeding; he couldn’t remember the last time he had sat down to a hot meal and company. It seemed he spent most of his life on the bike, racing down laneways, hiding in hedgerows while patrols passed by, or traveling the country by moonlight, gathering a wee bit of sleep during the days. To sit here quiet for a moment, well fed, warm and with a baby snug in his arm felt like utter bliss.
“Does he see her anymore?” Marie asked. Terry, absorbed in the baby’s sleeping face, startled a little at the question.
“See who?” he asked blankly.
“Peg, of course,” she said, tone slightly sharp as if she thought he was playing the fool. He likely looked one, staring at her with his mouth open. Brian seemed to sense something in his mother’s tone, for he looked up at her, eyes big with worry. She kissed the top of his curly head and set him down on the floor, and then opened a box that contained a set of blocks and spilled them out on the floor around the small boy’s feet. Gaily colored, with beautifully carved letters on them, he knew them to be a product of Brendan’s hands. The man had a rare gift when it came to shaping things from wood.
“I’m not a fool, Terry,” she said softly, “I know what he can give me an’ what he cannot. He loves me, but he hasn’t forgotten her an’ I am not naïve enough to believe he ever will.”
“It’s yerself he married though, Marie. She would have married him in a heartbeat if he had ever said the word, but he didn’t.”
“Why do ye think that is, Terry? Why wouldn’t he marry her? He loved her, I know he did, still does, I sometimes think.”
Terry shrugged, feeling like his sweater was suddenly too tight and far too warm. He wasn’t comfortable with this conversation, but he couldn’t really blame the woman for asking.
“I don’t know entirely, but I think he believed that the life he’s chosen, or that chose him, would break her eventually.” He looked up, worried that he had said too much, only to find that disconcerting gaze meeting his head on.
“Aye, I thought it was something like that.” She stood from the table, gathering the crockery and casting a glance at the baby. He still slept soundly in the crook of Terry’s elbow, tiny mouth pursed up as though in disapproval of their conversation, as well he might, Terry thought.
“He loves you, Marie.” He said it because he felt perhaps she needed to hear it, but also because it was true. Brendan did love her, it was a love different in its parts than his love for Peg had been, but it was the sort of love that would wear well over time, while what Brendan had shared with Peg had flared white hot and would have left both of them in ashes eventually.
“I know he does, an’ it’s all right, Terry, I just wondered if he sees her now an’ again, that’s all. I know what sort of hold she had over him, an’ he over her, an’ that sort of thing doesn’t die easy. My own da, God rest his soul, didn’t want me to marry him. He said ‘Marie, that one is haunted by another woman, an’ ye don’t want to spend yer life competin’ with a ghost.’”
“But ye married him anyway,” Terry said, gently joggling small Daniel who was beginning to snuffle in his sleep.
“Aye, he might never forget her entirely, but it’s me that has the bearin’ an’ raisin’ of his sons,” she said, with a sudden fierce triumph in her face that passed as quickly as it appeared. For that moment, though, her beauty flared like a star blazing across the heavens and it took his breath away.
“She came to me the night before the weddin’ an’ asked me if I was certain about marryin’ Brendan an’ I told her I had never been more certain of anything in my life. She said, ‘Well, then take good care of him, because he’s not one to look after himself.’ Before that, Terry, I thought it was a dalliance, but that night I realized how much she loved him an’ it frightened me.”
“Frightened you?”
“Aye, because a love like that is hungry, isn’t it? It doesn’t go away, it can’t. It’s like a fierce growl in the belly, remindin’ ye all the time of what it is ye need.”
Terry didn’t say anything, for what Marie said was true and he knew it even better than she did, for he had actually seen Brendan and Peg together.
Marie waved her hand in front of her face, as if she was wiping away the words of the last few moments. She returned to her usual practical self, moving about the kitchen, putting together food and clothing for him to take to Brendan.
He tidied what he could before he left, fixing the b
roken chair for her and fashioning a new curtain rod so that she could cover the windows again. He filled the hod with peat and checked the locks on the windows and doors. He did everything as Brendan would do it, but he couldn’t take the woman in his arms and comfort her as her husband would. This woman and these wee boys needed their husband and father home though Terry knew, with the situation as it was, Brendan wouldn’t be able to come home for some time.
He checked out the property thoroughly too, walking the perimeter and then zig-zagging the width of it, just to be certain there was no one lingering, waiting for him to leave. When he came back in the house to make his goodbyes, Brian had been put to bed, and Danny was tucked up in the cradle in the kitchen.
Marie handed him a large canvas rucksack, packed with food, as well as warm clothes and a pair of well-oiled boots. She expected Brendan to still be in the mountains when the snow came, that much was clear. Brendan had said Marie was a realist, and Terry saw it was true. It was part of why Brendan had chosen her and not Peg.
The dark was setting in and it was time for him to be on his way. Marie saw him off in the doorway, the warm light of the lamp haloing her, making her look terribly young and vulnerable. He felt a lurch of guilt at leaving her, for what if those who hunted her husband came back?
“Please Marie, go stay with yer mam, or one of yer sisters, Brendan will rest far easier if he knows yer safe an’ he’s far less likely to endanger himself by comin’ back to check on ye.”
She merely nodded, but he saw the stubborn set of her chin and knew it wasn’t likely she would leave the home Brendan had built for her. She was the man’s match, to be certain, in more ways than one.
“There’s food in the bag for you as well, be sure to eat. There’s sandwiches and a thermos of tea that won’t be good come morning, so ye’d best polish it off tonight. Oh, an’ tuck these in the bag too. I made them for him. His mother spun the wool, so they’re good and thick and should keep the cold out well.” She handed him a creamy bundle of woolen socks and he pretended not to notice the folded paper that peeked from the top of one. She would have things to say to the man, he knew, things she would not want relayed by him. He wondered, sometimes, what their marriage was like, her with her knowledge of what marriage to a rebel, albeit an unwilling one, was likely to be and Brendan haunted by another woman and by a country he should have left long ago, while there was still a chance the leaving wouldn’t kill him.
Spindrift (Exit Unicorns Series) Page 7