We lost the Arseless somewhere in Westmeath, at a bridge that crossed the Yellow River. We were under the bridge, padding the arch with gelignite, when the rumble above dislodged the stuff around us. An armoured car had stopped right on top of us. We grabbed hands and slid into the river. She smothered a gasp but I felt at home in the freezing water. Men got out of the car - a hinge squealed, feet hit the road. I held up the Thompson with my free hand and, together, we floated away from the bridge, under some hanging trees, carried by the river without help from hands or feet. Not a lap or splash, the river did it for us. The river and the night. And the sparks from the Auxies’ flare. They found the bike and Miss O’Shea’s empty gun rack. Their torch ran the length of the handlebars and, gradually, they knew what they were looking at. The one with the flare, making up for lost time, sent it up to the sky before he’d got properly out from under the arch. The sparks came back at him and landed on the gelignite that had dropped to the thin bank of earth between the wall and the river. It didn’t blow the bridge but it kept them occupied until we were well away and on dry land, mauling each other in the weeds to get our blood running again. She roared when her bad arm hit my head and I roared when her knee pressed my chest and we both roared when a mouse ran over my back but the Auxies were doing roaring of their own - they set fire to three farmhouses and shot a publican in Crookedwood - and no one important heard us.
We fucked our way across Slieve Gullion, bared our arses and wounds to the sleet that ran up the mountain after us and we never felt the cold. When we sneaked into Oldcastle just before dawn, a Sinn Féiner who owned a safe shop - he was later nailed to a tree after the Tans had been fired at as they drove through the town - told us that we had to go to Templemore.
So off we went.
A big peeler, the District Inspector, had been shot dead in Templemore and the Tans had shown their displeasure by setting fire to the Town Hall and other parts of the town. They commandeered anything they could find in a bottle and drank the lot before they went on to torch three of the nearest creameries. The locals took to the fields and stayed out there until the Tans were all back behind the walls of their barracks and sleeping. Except for the hardy and stupid, the town was deserted when a wee priest-to-be, a seminarian, home on his holidays, being fattened by his mammy for the winter, ran into a shop to buy his Independent and kept running when he heard the skid of a tender turning outside on the street, up over the counter, through the door, and he came to a halt in the shopman’s hall when he saw all the statues and the holy pictures bleeding. There was blood on every wall, in every corner, delicate lines of the red stuff running from every saint and son and mother of God.
And that was where we went, after our rest in the councillor’s attic, south to Tipperary, to stoke the miracle, on two new bikes, on the orders of Michael Collins. The councillor offered us his own bike.
—I could never get up on a bike that wasn’t stolen, I told him.—Thanks for the offer but it’s a matter of principle.
So we fecked two good bikes that were sitting against the kerb outside the R.I.C. barracks. They were solid enough to be peelers’ but, even if they weren’t, if they belonged to a couple of citizens who’d just gone into the cop-shop, we felt grand about taking them because they’d no business going in there at this stage of the national struggle. A nice one each, parked between a couple of armoured cars, both with crossbars.
We cycled the night, south through Fennor and Tevrin, away off the big roads. But the nights were too short for journeys of any length, so we buried the machine-gun in a wood beside Coralstown. We shook the muck off each other’s clothes and continued into the day, husband and wife, on our honeymoon, a cycling tour of the Midlands. I wore my suit and tie, my respectable credentials, and my arsenal under my coat. She put her weapons and ammo in a bag and we became a young middle-class couple from Dublin - and Protestant, to explain away Miss O’Shea’s trousers.
Rochfortbridge, Tyrrellspass.
—Name?
—Michael Collins.
We saw smoke from a burning farmhouse and got back onto the little roads. We spent a night in a barn outside Timahoe and another under a hedge near Templetouhy. We washed, I shaved and we got to the edge of Templemore with the morning crowds.
I took off the collar and tie. I ripped the right leg of my trousers at the thigh and tore around until the leg dropped to my boot. I threw the cloth into the ditch and Miss O’Shea helped me strap my now trouserless leg up with my tie. She tied a good knot that wouldn’t go until I wanted it to. And then, for the first time, I donned my daddy’s wooden leg.
It fit. It hummed.
—He must have been a big man, she said.
—I remember him being huge.
She helped me strap the leather harness onto my own leg. My leg was doubled, bent at the knee, two sets of folded bone, flesh and muscle. Yet the harness fit snugly, no adjustments needed.
—Like a glove.
—You were born to it, she said.
I buttoned up my coat and we were off again, no longer a honeymooning couple, but two out of the thousands of country people converging on Templemore to see the holy things that bled for us. We left the bikes in a field and walked. I leaned on Miss O’Shea; it added authenticity and the leg took getting used to. I missed not having a heel or sole and my real heel was digging a trench in my arse, but the wooden leg didn’t act up. It went where I wanted it to go. It stood up to my weight and stayed put, although I felt frail and wary of the distance between me and the ground, as I went forward on the real one.
—Is it this way to the miracles, mister? said Miss O’Shea.
—’Tis, said a man who was selling bottles from a crate of minerals on the side of the road.—There was a girl cured of her consumption yesterday, they say.
—It’s your turn today, Michael, she said to me.
—A new leg’d be harder than consumption, I said.
—It’s a question of faith, young fellow, said the man.—Not difficulty. Have you faith?
—I have, I said.
—And are you thirsty?
—I am, I said.—But I’ve no money.
—On with you, so, he said.—Good luck to you now and walk past this way again if the statues give you a new leg. Or a new wallet.
—I will, I said.—And I’ll kick those bottles of lemonade up your arse till the fizz comes out of your fuckin’ ears.
—Don’t draw attention to yourself, said Miss O’Shea.
—That’s exactly what I’m here to do, I said.
—But the right kind of attention, she said.—That man will remember more about you now than’s necessary. When he hears about it.
—You’re right, I said.—Sorry. We could always kill him on the way back.
—We could, but it seems a bit harsh.
We got in with the crowds descending on the town, a crawl of farm carts, bicycles, charabancs, motor cars and pilgrims like ourselves on foot. The walking wounded and men and women on stretchers, carried by their children, and children coughing blood, men carrying the damage of war, legless, armless, skinless. The slobbering brainless. And the best of Ireland’s freaks, they were all on the road to town - pin-heads, hunchbacks, dwarfs, a couple of bearded ladies - they were travelling together, in a battered Ford, hanging off it, on the roof or walking along beside it. We got in among them.
—An old soldier got his knee back working.
—I heard that one. And a lady from Thurles got her back straightened.
—There was a girl cured of her consumption yesterday, I said.
—Any news of little men made taller? said a dwarf, and him and his friends laughed and didn’t mind a bit when other people joined them.
And deeper into the town the rosaries started and, with the heat and the packing and excitement and news of the miracles, people started fainting and bodies were lifted over heads, to doorways, through upstairs windows. I’ll sing a hymn to Mary. The impatient sick made their ways along the r
oofs. A man holding a crutch in his teeth slid over the slates towards the shop with the statues. Mother of Christ, Star of the Sea. And the dwarfs sang hymns of their own. Pray for the midget, pray for me.
—A bald man went home yesterday with a head of hair.
—If it’s curing vanity She is, there’s hope for us all.
—Scalped he was, after the Tans set a fire to him.
—Still and all, a good cap would satisfy most men.
The best of the statues and a couple of the pictures had been moved out into a yard behind the shop. They were on a table, on top of a white cloth. When the yard was full, when the shopman’s cousin decided that there was room for no more pilgrims, the shopman’s wife led a decade of the rosary and the crowd were given two more minutes to have their fill of the statues. There was an untarred telegraph pole on its side across the yard, in front of the table, like an altar rail and the lucky ones at the front could kneel and rest their elbows on it while they waited for something to happen. The yard was emptied after the two minutes, measured out by the cousin on his own watch. There was only the one gate, so it was a push between those coming and going. When the yard was empty, it was filled again. Another decade, another push, screams and admonitions. Curses and last prayers.
—Mind the baby!
—What a place to bring a baby.
—It’s a dying baby, bad cess to you.
—Maybe the dying has been reversed.
—Maybe. We’ll see, the mite.
—There’s colour there in the poor creature’s cheeks, look.
—We’ll see.
—That’s fine colour.
—Please God; we’ll see.
This had been going on for five days. Not a peeler or Tan in sight. The town was in the hands of the pilgrims and hawkers. And the North Tipperary Brigade of the I.R.A. They were running guns and bombs through Templemore, under cover of the lame, in the carts and cars of the near-dead. There were crates of mineral bottles full of petrol, brown parcels of gelignite, being passed over the heads of the crowd and wanted men hiding in every second attic. The armoured cars and tenders were in the barracks yard, going nowhere because of the crush in the streets. The town was a free state. The seminarian who’d seen the first blood was at home, exhausted, sliding in and out of consciousness, and a grand layer of straw had been laid on the cobbles under the poor lad’s window, to swallow the noise that had been disturbing him and keeping him from his recovery. The street where his mother’s house was had been renamed Whispering Street. There’d been no miracles, only the rumours distributed by the men and women of the North Tipp Brigade. The statues had stopped bleeding and the seminarian wasn’t there to get them flowing again.
But I was.
We pushed through the silent people leaving.
—What did you see?
—The backs of many heads.
—No blood?
—No blood.
We shoved our way to the middle of the crowd. We stepped over stretchers, got tripped by crutches and little men. The shopman’s wife was looking cross and important. She had her daughters near her, in charge of the altar-table. A statue of the Virgin, a crucifix, a Sacred Heart, warped and stained behind the old glass. I saw no blood.
—I see it.
I whispered it, a tiny worm on a hook.
—What d’you see, young fellow?
—Oh God, I said.—I see the blood. It’s pouring from her eyes.
—He sees it!
—It’s pouring out of her! He sees it!
The shopman’s wife yelled hush; we were crowding into her rosary.
—The young fellow sees it!
They were turning and trying to turn, the crowd in front of me and beside. Someone fell, away to the left. There was shoving and counter-shoving, whispers and yells.
—I see it too! Miss O’Shea shouted, as she got her hand under my coat and pulled the tie.
—Something’s happening! I yelled.—The pain! Oh, Mother of God!
And it was fuckin’ painful. My leg had been packed up at my arse for hours. Released, it roared, the blood rushed as my foot dropped to the ground.
I fell.
I clutched my knee and unstrapped the wooden leg. I held it up.
—His leg’s after growing!
The new bare leg stuck out from under my coat. I gave it a twitch, and another few. All around me, the people fell to their knees. I hid a sharp stone in my hand. I cut the skin beside the knee and gave them running blood.
There was howling and more fainting. One of the dwarfs looked over the heads of the kneeling throng.
—It’s a grand long one, he said.—More power to you, young fellow.
He couldn’t hide the sadness on his face but he nodded across at me. Miss O’Shea pinched my thigh.
—Did you feel that, Michael?
—Yes! I felt it. It’s flesh, and sore with it.
—The Virgin’s after giving my brother the leg he lost when the fox bit him. Twenty years ago!
—It’s not in Our Lady’s power to give anyone a leg, said the shopman’s wife.—It is through her intercession—
But no one was listening to her. Even her daughters had abandoned the altar and were climbing over the telegraph pole and the kneeling pilgrims to get a good look at the fine man with the new leg.
—Twenty years he’s been without the leg, said Miss O’Shea.—Stand back, stand back!
She slapped two of the shopman’s daughters back against the wall of pilgrims that surrounded us.
—Can you stand up, Michael?
—I don’t know, I said.
She helped me to my feet. I put weight on the new leg.
—It’s just like the other one, I said.
I walked in the small circle left me by the crowd, then trotted, then ran. The pilgrims laughed and applauded, hugged one another, reached out to touch me as I dashed past, and others cried and shook and hit their own ailments. I stopped and lifted the wooden leg to the sky.
—I won’t be needing you any more, I yelled.
—Give it here, young fellow, said the dwarf.
I spoke to the leg.
—But I’ll keep you with me as a reminder of this day!
—Is the real one not reminder enough for you?
—And look! said an old lad who’d got to the front of the crowd.—Look at his foot. He got a boot with the leg that’s a perfect match for the other one!
—That’s Our Lady for you, boy. Who else but Herself would have thought of that.
They were stopped by a scream.
It was one of the daughters.
—I see the blood! I see the blood!
They turned and pushed for the next miracle and there was a man standing right against me.
—Dublin, he said, softly.
—I’ll need trousers.
—They’re all arranged.
—Will they match the jacket?
—They won’t. But we’ve a new jacket for you as well. A suit.
—Will it fit?
—Your measurements came down from Dublin with the order.
—Good Jesus, I said.—We can’t lose.
—Are you Jewish, Mister Climanis?
—Mister Smart, he said.
He put his pint back on the counter.
—Mister Smart. I am a Jew. But I am not Jewish.
—Stop messing, I said.—Are you or aren’t you?
—Mister Smart, he said.—I am. But I am not.
—Okay, I said.—You win. What are you then?
—It is very hard for me to explain. But I will endeavour. New word, Mister Smart. Two days old. I will endeavour to explain. After this.
He lifted his pint and took a wallop of it.
—I am a Jew from Latvia, he said.—I am a Jew and a Latvian. My father was a Jew. My mother, grandfather and everybody. Jews. But I am not Jewish. The Jews are a people. So I am one of the Jews. Jewish is a religion. I am not one of them. Mister Smart, I do not like religio
ns. There are no prophets or gods or the one the Irish people like so much, mothers of gods. My Maria likes that one. I say nothing. I am a very happy man.
—Are you a communist?
—Mister Smart. I am a communist but I am not a communist.
He was enjoying himself but I was still worried. Jack’s warning to me - Stay clear of him - had been at the back and the front of my mind for months, almost a year, and this was the first chance I’d had to talk to Mister Climanis since I’d heard it. The mere mention of a name, a name on a piece of paper, was often a death sentence. I’d been delighted to see Mister Climanis well and happy and sitting at the counter.
—I was a communist, he said.—But the Bolsheviks, they entered our shtetl. Our village, Mister Smart. They burnt my house and they murdered my wife.
I looked at him. I clung to my glass.
—Yes. I am sorry. They did this because I was a Jew. And my wife, she too was a Jew. She was in the house. I was not. So I am not a communist, Mister Smart. But I believe in communism. But not when it comes with the Russians.
—I’m sorry, he said.
He shrugged, and nodded.
—We will drink to the Bolsheviks, he said.—To their painful deaths. I have told Maria, my wife. She loves me more because I am a widow. But now I am not a widow.
—Did you have children?
—No. No. No more sad stories.
I left him alone for a while. I emptied my glass and lifted a finger to the curate behind the counter; the same again.
—Will you do me a favour, Mister Climanis?
—This is a question I can answer easily. Yes.
—Be careful, I said.—Will you?
For the first time, I saw him worried. He was even scared, and angry. He looked behind him. He looked at the curate delivering the drink. He stared at the glasses on the counter.
—Why are you asking me to do this thing? To be this thing? Careful.
—I don’t know, I said.
—Mister Smart. Please. I am careful. I am careful always. Please, explain. Or I will hate you.
Every word had been carefully selected.
—Your name was mentioned, I said.