Tag: massacre

In Turbulent Times

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‘With Liam Dooley?’ Joe’s face took on a puzzled look. ‘You could have had your pick of every young man from here to Kerry. Why Liam Dooley of all people?’
‘Oh Joe, don’t say it like that. It just happened. I don’t know how. Something I said. We were both upset. And then we were consoling each other.’
‘In bed?’
‘Please, Joe. Don’t make it sound worse than it is. God alone knows how much I have paid for that one sin. And I shall go on paying for it till the day I die. God is very severe on sinners sometimes, Joe. His punishment seems out of all proportion to the sin. But He has His reasons, they say. And for some reason He has been severe in his punishment of the Carrick family.’
‘But Nora, going to bed with a man doesn’t mean you have to marry him. Nor does it mean that the one you might eventually want to marry is going to hold it against you if he knew about it.’
‘What if I was pregnant?’ Nora asked. ‘What if I was carrying the first man’s child? Wouldn’t that make a difference? Wouldn’t the man I might eventually want to marry hold that against me?’
Joe looked away and said nothing. A harshness, a bitterness, in Nora’s voice was new and discomfiting. But the more he thought about it the more justified it was. Fate—or God—had treated Nora cruelly.
‘Can you be sure?’ Joe asked. ‘Can you be sure you’re going to have a baby?’
‘I’m not,’ Nora replied.
‘You’re not sure?’ Joe cried. ‘Then why did you …?’
‘Oh Joe, please!’ Nora shouted in exasperation. ‘I didn’t mean I’m not sure. I meant I’m not going to have a baby.’
‘Nora, I’m confused. I’m not thinking too clearly.’
‘After I slept with Liam I was a month overdue with my period.’ Nora gushed out the words. She was embarrassed. It had been easier to put this in a letter. These were matters a woman did not discuss with a man. But Joe had rights to a full explanation. She had to tell him everything, if only to make herself feel less miserable by justifying what she did. ‘That never happened before. I was always regular. I was frightened, Joe. I was sure I was pregnant.’
‘Did you talk to your mother about it?’
‘I couldn’t, Joe. I wanted to. I tried to. But I was so ashamed, so frightened of what she’d think of me. I couldn’t do it. I suppose I kept hoping …’

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The Unquiet Land

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a while, but we don’t get along all that well. She’s a straitlaced Puritan like many here in the village. And I hate Belfast, don’t you? There’s a brother and his wife in Liverpool, but I’m never going to England. I have a good friend in Derry. You know her. Molly McEvoy. Her husband was killed last year. She has often said that she and I should live together.”
“Derry’s not much improvement on Belfast,” Finn pointed out.
“No,” said Mother Ross, “but it might have to do. I don’t have a great deal of choice.”
“Come home with me, Jinnie,” Finn said impulsively. “I need someone to look after the twins. They’re nearly six years old now, and Una Slattery’s finding them too much of a handful with four children of her own. Caitlin’s a self-willed little imp who needs some of the wildness spanked out of her. Hard to believe they’re sisters, let alone twins. My house is comfortable, and there’s plenty of room. Come on. I’ll take you up there right away. I’ve the pony and trap on the road beyond.”
That was twenty years ago—twenty-one come June—and Mother Ross had lived in Finn MacLir’s house ever since. Six months after moving in as the keeper of his house and the childminder of his two young daughters, six months of slander-scandaled tongue-wagging in the village of Corrymore, Mother Ross became the second wife of Finn MacLir. Arthur Hamilton, as justice of the peace, married them in the dining room of the large, stone house. A party began on that first Friday in December, 1898, that people still talked about two decades later. And the first Friday of every month since then, whenever he was home, Finn and his friends met to celebrate yet again the night he married the widow, Sinead O’Neill, otherwise known as Mother Ross. Though she was Mrs Finn MacLir by law, she was, and remained, Mother Ross by custom. Even Caitlin never stopped calling her by the only name she had ever known her by.
“My mother was Annie Hogan before she married Jimmy Ross,” Mother Ross once related to Caitlin. “She was the midwife here in Corrymore for many years. I was the youngest of her seven children and I used to help her at the birthing. I was with her that terrible night when you and Nora were born, Caitlin. When the arthritis crippled my mother’s fingers, I took her place. I never had any children of my own.” A sad, faraway look had come into her eyes. “I was pregnant when my husband was drowned at sea, and I lost the baby in a miscarriage. I survived on my own after Jimmy’s death using midwifery skills learned at my mother’s side. I not only took

over her job, I was given her name at the same time. Mother Ross. It has stuck to me ever since.”

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In Turbulent Times

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had been told what to do if Nora Carrick took one of these seizures. Yet they all stood back along the grey walls, and the children ran to a safe distance and watched with eyes and mouths wide open while the young girl’s legs jerked up and down, and her head struck the ground, and her mouth opened and closed expelling a kind of froth like a rabid animal. Joe saw what was happening as he reached the square on his way home from the harbour. He rushed forward, wrapped Nora in his jacket and placed his pen-knife between her teeth. He remembered Dr Alexander’s saying she could bite her tongue during this stage of her fit unless something like a fountain pen was thrust between her teeth on one side of her mouth. With one knee on the ground, Joe held Nora against the other while her convulsive movements began to subside. He wiped her face clean with a handkerchief. He had seen that face so many times before but never till that moment did he notice how pretty it was. Her eyes below the straight-cut fringe of hair were closed. She had rather prominent cheek-bones and a dimple at each side of her mouth when she smiled. She was not smiling then. Her cheek rested against his dark-blue jersey as if she were listening to his heartbeat. Her black hair smelled sweetly with a soft fragrance as if freshly washed with a scented soap. That smell lingered in his nostrils for days, and each time it came back to him it brought exciting new feelings, like those he used to feel in his stomach at the approach of Christmas or a birthday or at the prospect of an outing. And yet different too. More subtle, more gentle, and somehow infinitely sweeter. And he would recall the pale, round face framed in its black, shiny, scented hair pressed against his heart, and the eyes flickering open, so dark and deep and troubled those young, serious eyes. Joe could not remember if he had felt then the same exquisite feelings he had had later when, unbidden, the picture of Nora’s face returned to fill his mind for days on end. Nor could he remember if he had noticed then the rounded outline of her young breasts which he later recalled as having been in contact with his heaving chest.
How momentous those few minutes had been for him, and yet how many of the minor details he had been oblivious to at the time. Perhaps the significance of the scene had been a later invention. He remembered how the crowd had closed in around him, and everyone looked at the peaceful body in his arms as Nora awoke from her frightening ordeal. Had she taken his hand and held it till Dr Alexander came and led her to his car? Joe thought she had but now he wasn’t sure. He remembered standing in the square with his jacket hanging over his arm, watching Dr Alexander’s car drive away …

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The Unquiet Land

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“Damn!” Finn said and rose slowly to retrieve the bottle that had come to rest against the granite hearth. “Damn, damn, damn,” he repeated, lifting the bottle to the light to see what was left. “Did you ever witness such a clumsy old fool?”
After a moment’s awkward silence, Padraig said, “You were talking about Caitlin.”
“I was, wasn’t I?”
“Is there really something between her and Michael?”
“I think so. It’s usually called love.”
Padraig failed to stop the thought before its shadow fell across his face. “She’s in love with Michael?”
“She appears to be. And I think she could do worse. Michael’s a good, steady, dependable lad. A farmer to the depth of his marrow. He’s one of the Carricks from Kildarragh. Thomas Carrick’s son, but as different from Thomas as a ripple from a tidal wave.”
“I’m glad.”
Finn smiled. “You’ve heard the stories about Thomas Carrick then.”
“As much as I want to hear.”
“You’ll hear worse, Padraig,” Finn said. “You’ll have to learn to accept life and people as somewhat lower creations than the idealized figments of your Christian imagination. But have no fears about Michael being Thomas Carrick’s son. I took Michael in on the recommendation of Seamus Slattery, Michael’s uncle. And it has worked out well for everyone: for Michael himself, for me, for Caitlin. Even for Jinnie who loves him like a son. As he appears about to become. He sneaks in here on his midnight adventures and thinks we don’t know.”
“On his what?” Padraig asked with surprise.
Finn smiled. His eyes had the faraway look of one who had dived deeply into the river of memory and was swimming joyfully. “His midnight adventures,” he repeated slowly, his attention not fully on what he was saying. “When he thinks I’m sound asleep he creeps like a thief to Caitlin’s room. Lusty young stallion.”
Padraig’s disbelief was genuine that a father could allow such conduct. But none of his prepared texts on the subject seemed appropriate to this man who had no idea of morality. How could he begin to reach through to the soul of one who denied God, despised chastity, and did not know the meaning of sin and salvation. “We change the soul, if we change it at all,” Clifford Hamilton had said that evening, “with words, thoughts, ideas…

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In Turbulent Times

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‘And to an English girl,’ Caitlin added.
‘Oh it happens to the best people,’ Joe said.
‘You haven’t set your sailor’s sights on one of them flighty little Maltese chickens yet, have you, Joe?’ Michael asked with a wink.
‘What would Joe want with a Maltese chicken, Michael Carrick?’ Caitlin said.
‘Well, with Stephen bringing home an English wife, and Tom maybe landing himself a pretty, young girl from north Africa, if Joe brings one from Malta or Gibraltar or wherever, we could set up a minor League of Nations here in the village. Solve all the world’s problems.’
‘Cause more problems than solve more likely,’ said Caitlin. Then she lowered her knitting to her lap. ‘Joe, would you like a wee cup of tea? The kettle’s boiling.’
‘I would if you’re having a drop yourself. Thank you.’
‘Oh I dare say I could make room for another. Michael, reach me your mug. It’s down there by the fender.’
‘Is Nora not at home tonight, Mrs Carrick?’
Caitlin stopped on her way across the kitchen. She turned slowly to face Joe and cast a glance at Michael. Joe felt a sudden fear. He too looked at Michael, then back at Caitlin. For a moment no one spoke.
‘Nora?’ Caitlin said softly.
‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’ Joe blurted out.
‘Joe, didn’t you get her letter?’ Caitlin asked apprehensively.
‘The last letter I got was written a couple of months ago. The post is very uncertain. Tell me, is she all right? Why have you got that look on your face? Both of you. What’s happened?’
‘Joe,’ Michael said, ‘Nora’s married.’
‘Nora’s married? No, she can’t be. It’s not true. My mother would have told me.’ Panic wailed like a siren in Joe’s voice. ‘Say it isn’t true, Mrs Carrick.’
Before Caitlin could say, ‘Yes, Joe, I’m afraid it is,’ Joe was sobbing, his head turned away. He did not even hear Caitlin’s confirmation.
Michael rose and put an arm around the young man’s shoulder. ‘Joe, I’m very, very sorry. We both thought you knew.’
‘She wrote to you, Joe,’ Caitlin said. ‘I know she did. And it nearly broke her heart. For the life of me I couldn’t understand it.’
Joe turned to face Michael and Caitlin again. ‘I’m sorry for breaking down like that. But what a shock. My God, I was going to propose to her myself before I left again this time.’

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The Unquiet Land

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“That ideal has died, Padraig. The light has gone out. It goes out for many of us, I’m afraid. Because it’s only an idea, not a reality. The Greeks first had the idea when civilization was young. Didn’t they believe in the human community as commonweal? Didn’t they tell us we were all free equals linked by a shared concern for the common good? Come on, Padraig, you know more about these things than I do.”
Padraig swallowed a mouthful of wine and thought for a moment. He wondered if he really did know more about these things than Finn. “You mustn’t overlook the Christian component of your humanitas, Finn: humanity as a moral ideal rather than a biological fact. From Christianity, not from Greece, comes that conviction you mentioned that human life has value. Man was created in God’s own image and was precious enough in the sight of God for God Himself to become man. This is what gives human life its value, Finn, and human life must be protected, must be saved at all cost and returned to God transmuted into spirit, pure and undefiled.”
“Another ideal.”
“Another aspect of the same ideal.”
“But equally unrealistic.” Finn leaned forward and held Padraig in the grip of his eyes as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. “You are still young. The torch you hold aloft to light your way through life still burns with the fierce brightness that youth demands. You are just starting out. But as your journey proceeds and the day wears on, the idealism that fuels your torch burns lower. The light grows dimmer, Padraig, till you no longer see your way with clarity. And you stumble and fall. And every time you stumble or fall you spill some of the fuel you still have burning. And the light grows even dimmer. Long before midnight it’s all gone. And you can’t see your way anymore. You look back for some idea of where you were heading, and of course it’s all darkness there too. The light is gone. The darkness reveals the idealism for what it was: a figment of the human imagination, a fiction born of the unique human capacity for creative thought and nourished by the unique human need to believe.”
“It’s too pessimistic, Finn,” Padraig argued. “The light that guides us really burns; it really exists. You can keep it burning brightly right to the end if you have faith. Faith is the fuel, Finn. Pick up your torch again and find the faith to relight it and keep it burning. It will show you freedom, truth, justice, goodness. It will show you love. It will show you God.”
Finn smiled. “As I said, Padraig, you are young. You have a fire in your head and in your belly. I am old. My head is cool, and my belly …

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In Turbulent Times

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Petty Officer Joseph Ignatius Carney sat in an empty compartment, staring out sadly at the green and yellow countryside of England. The train chugged through it noisily and slowly. It looked so peaceful. Who could have believed that the country was at war, that it had just been fighting for its very survival like a fish on a hook? Now the worst was over and the battle for Britain won. But the battle for Europe was not going well. The German army had pushed into Yugoslavia and Greece. Yugoslavia had surrendered, and the future for Greece looked grim.
Here in England all of that was a world away. Cows lazily grazed the fresh spring grass. New-born lambs on new-found, nimble legs scampered after shaggy ewes. The first crops were growing in the ploughed fields, and women, girls, young boys, and old men joined farmers in waging their own war against the invidious invasion of weeds. In the few orchards that the train chugged by, the apple and the cherry trees were dressed in blossom like lovely, young spring brides. The April sun was warm, and the faces that turned to watch the train pass noisily by were tanned already. So few were young men’s faces. Many were the so-called Land Girls, thousands of them, recruited from the city to boost farm production to thwart the German blockade of imports brought to the country by sea. Barmaids, waitresses, maids, hairdressers and others working in urban female occupations proved themselves tougher in the fields than the sceptical farmers had imagined. They worked fifty hours a week in summer, forty-eight in winter, ploughing fields, driving tractors, making hay. They undertook the full rigours of harvesting, threshing, and thatching. They also reclaimed land, worked in orchards and market gardens, and though they had to steel themselves to do it, they caught rats as well. As for the men, most of England’s farming labourers were far from their fields and pastures. In other fields their tired, tense faces, rank on rank, were shaded only by their gun-barrels. They were strained and stressed and drained of colour. Or smashed to gory pulp. Or still, limestone grey, like the faces in church effigies, turned towards the blue sky, their eyes closed in the unsought peace of death.

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The Unquiet Land

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She used to stick up for Nora like an older brother. Fearless, she was. What a girl.”
Finn’s voice trailed away, but the wistful look remained. He was recalling scenes from long ago. “I was working on the boat one summer afternoon. Hot as an oven, I remember. Had been for several days. The children were playing on the harbour. Half a dozen of them. Boys and girls. They must have been ten or eleven years-old at the time. Clifford Hamilton was there. He was a bumptious young fellow even then. He started teasing Nora. I don’t know what he was saying because I was too far away. But you know Nora. Always sensitive, easily embarrassed. Whatever young Clifford said, Nora took it ill. It obviously upset her. That got Caitlin’s back up. Man alive, she lit into Clifford like a she-cat. Next we knew, Clifford was over the edge and into the water.” Finn chuckled. “It happened so quickly no one could do anything to prevent it. I saw it coming and I shouted, but I was too late. Even if they heard me, which I doubt. And Caitlin just stood up there on the lip of the harbour, hands on her hips, and continued shouting at poor Clifford who was swimming to the ladder to get out.”
“The tide was in then,” Padraig said.
“By good fortune it was.” Finn said. “Clifford would have been in one hell of a mess if it hadn’t been.”
Then the old man fixed his pale grey eyes on Padraig’s emaciated face for a few moments of silent but stringent admonition. “I hope you’ll leave Caitlin alone, Padraig. I hope you won’t try to force her to conform to your impossible Christian practices. Keep that nonsense for the saintly Nora. Caitlin’s different. She has pride in herself, and I want her to keep it. I want her to know that her accomplishments—and they are many—are her own, her very own. I would hate her to go through life thinking that she owed them to a non-existent god, that they were the hand-outs of divine charity. What pride can anyone derive from that? So leave Caitlin alone. Do you hear me?”
Padraig remained silent. He returned Finn’s unwavering gaze with a look of obdurate purpose. The two men sat in this dualistic pose for several seconds.
“So that’s how it is,” Finn said at last.
Still Padraig did not answer. He looked away from Finn with harrowing sadness and regret, his glance settling on the pale porcelain of the Victory of Samothrace.
“Damn you, Padraig,” Finn said with feeling but without raising his

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In Turbulent Times

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Then Liam was still. With a low moan his body relaxed, and she felt the full weight of it pressing on her. For a moment he lay upon her with his chin on her shoulder. Then he pulled himself away and rolled over on to his back with a sigh. Nora winced at the hurt of his withdrawal and burst into tears.
҂
Liam Dooley sat in his armchair by the fire reading an old, leather-bound copy of The Confessions of Saint Augustine that was old even when his grandfather bought it in Smithfield Market in Belfast many years before.
‘Grandda, if I was to ask you to name the book that most influenced you,’ Liam had once asked of the old man, ‘which one would you choose?’
‘The Confessions of St. Augustine,’ Grandfather Owen Dooley had replied with no hesitation. ‘That book gave me a whole new way to think about God and religion. It took me deep into the meaning of life, and continues to do so. He’s been the most influential thinker that I’ve ever read. I have an old copy in the bookcase there. Read it as often as you can. And when I die, I want you to have it and cherish it.’
When his grandfather died the book had indeed passed to Liam, the only physical keepsake Liam had of the old man whom he had venerated for as long as he could remember. Often he felt that his grandfather watched over him from Heaven, that everything he did had to be good because his grandfather was always there, watching. Liam’s great fear was that his grandfather could read his thoughts too. But he calmed himself by arguing that his grandfather would understand the often lustful thoughts of a young, single man. As long as Liam kept his lust on a tight leash his grandfather would appreciate the struggle and commend him on its victory. Only once had he surrendered; and since the day of his lapse with Nora Carrick he had taken to praying not to God, not to the Virgin, not to St Francis, but to his grandfather, asking his grandfather to forgive the humiliation he had caused him in the sight of God and begging the old man to intercede for him with the blessed saints, with God Himself.
‘I’m not like Padraig,’ Liam argued with the spirit of his grandfather. ‘I am not a priest. I have taken no vow of celibacy. Nora is an adult woman. She came to me of her own free will. Pressed her body against mine. I could not have done what I did otherwise. You know that. I would never touch a woman unless she encouraged me. And Nora encouraged me. It was she who suggested going to bed. She wanted to have sex with me.’
Liam looked up from his book. The fire was low.

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The Unquiet Land

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Finn MacLir dragged his feet back into the dining room after seeing his guests off into the night. He paused in the doorway, raised his outspread hands to his face, and drew them down over his cheeks. “Padraig, I’m tired.”
He was a tall man, over six feet in height. His broad, beefy shoulders were more rounded now, his waist wider than in his younger days. As Padraig remembered him, he had always been a burly, muscular man, full of energy and vitality. Now, at seventy-five years of age, that energy and that vitality had begun to ebb away.
He approached the table unsteadily, lifted the wine decanter and tipped it to his glass. But only a drop or two dribbled out.
“So much for that,” he said. He thumped the decanter down again on the table, and a few knives and forks jumped on their plates. Finn turned to face his remaining guest.
“These are troubled times to be returning to Ireland, Padraig.”
“When are there not troubled times in Ireland?” Padraig said.
“Ay, when indeed?” Finn sank into his chair with a sigh. “The last election left us in a pretty mess, didn’t it? A real shipwreck.” He paused in thought for a moment, tapping the empty wine glass with his finger. “Ay, a real shipwreck. The old ship of state, the S.S. Ireland—remember her?—she ran aground on rocks during a mutiny. A rebel crew tried to take her over. We didn’t know it then, but it seems this rebel crew, this Sinn Fein, had a lot of support on board. The passengers have since voted them into positions of command. Seventy-three of them no less, with Eamon de Valera, one of the old mutineers, escaped from the cooler and appointed captain. It could only happen in Ireland.”
Finn MacLir stared at the empty wine glass, silent, serious, disillusioned. “And half a dozen of the old crew, all that’s left of our old Irish Parliamentary party, cast adrift on a raft in very stormy waters. They’re doomed, I fear. But the situation doesn’t look too good for any of them; or even for the ship itself. They’ve renamed her the S.S. Republic but they haven’t got her off…

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