And I? The implications couldn’t have been clearer or more dismaying: damned if I do and damned if I don’t.
When in extremis, talk or stay silent. Shrewdness is knowing when to do which. I didn’t know, so I turned my back on that gun, and on the three people in that house, and I walked out.
At the car, I halted and looked back. Nobody followed me. I opened the door, sat, closed the door. When I went to start the engine—no key. Jimmy Bermingham had taken it. I sat back, afraid once more.
These people had made their calculations. What could I do? Go to the police and tell what I knew? That I’d seen caches of guns in private houses? And that one of them had my fingerprints on it? Maisie and friends need only say, “He asked to join up.”
And even if the police did believe my story, how long would I, an informer, a squealer, live? At my waist, on my hipbones, and slipping down from under my arms, I felt the feary coldness of sweat.
Not knowing where I was made it worse. Driving in, I’d been so intent on finding the place that I hadn’t looked around. This area felt new to me. I got out of the car and went for a walk, and now that I could see the location, a sense of wonder eased my mood. Maisie’s cottage, surrounded by trees and shrubs, had been the steward’s house or the gate lodge of a great manor. I followed a high stone wall to a pair of huge, rusty gates leaning off their hinges. Lions, their proud heads wigged green with moss, squatted on the pillars.
The manor had long fallen. In the distance, piles of cut stone marked its collapse. To my left, the old garden opened up. How bizarre.
Twin trees marked where a wide door had stood. Beyond them, tall evergreen cones marched for hundreds of yards. From the feet of these trees radiated gravel pathways, like rays of gray light. I followed one; they stretched off into smaller enclaves, with smaller evergreens. Here and there, among these cones, deep circles had been cut into the ground—ornamental flower beds, perhaps. From God’s view it must have looked like a formal geometric drawing with circles and their tangents.
At the end of the garden I climbed two steep flights of grassy stone steps to a high terrace, and from there I looked down. The ornamental circles seemed like the pockmarks on the moon. Dusk had begun to fall. Shadows were sneaking into the greenery. Some of the evergreen cones began to hide themselves.
Behind me I felt something, a presence, not ghostly but defined. I turned to look. A deer stood five feet away, unafraid. No flinching; it didn’t even turn its head, not even when I walked toward it—because it was made of stone. Another illusion in my unreal life.
30
Back at the car, Jimmy waited, his elbows leaning on the roof, his face a white place in the closing darkness.
“Will we go, Captain?” he said. His tone sought to appease me.
“Where’s the key of the car?”
“Sorry, Ben.” He climbed in and, when I followed, handed me the key.
“You planned all this, didn’t you?” I said. “You set me up.” Moments later, I had this thought: Why didn’t I try to stop him from getting into the car?
“I did,” he said. “I did it deliberately.”
“Why me?”
“You’ll be invaluable to the cause.”
“And I could go to jail for life. Or even be hanged,” I said.
“That’ll never happen, Ben.”
“You don’t know that.”
“In every revolutionary movement, there’s a man who survives everything because of his own stature, because of the kind of man he is. You’re that kind of man, Ben.”
“There isn’t a movement!” I yelled.
“There is now,” he said. “You saw it back there.”
I shouted, “That madwoman, that manipulative bitch—that’s no revolution!”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” asked Jimmy Bermingham. In those days I could rarely distinguish calm from cold.
“Why me?”
“Who else collects our traditions? Who else understands our depth as a people?”
“What clowns you are. Clowns.” By now I was steaming.
The facts are these. Relics of the guerrilla squads who had fought in the War of Independence from, effectively, the 1916 rebellion to the treaty of 1921, and then against their sons and brothers and comrades in the civil war for two years, had continued to rage against the Irish border. Many of them, articulate, capable, and educated, felt horribly denied. In due course, they spawned new blood. Time, they said, to start again. Strike at the hated partition and the forces who patrol it. Get back our six counties—only the full thirty-two counties can restore the ancient nation.
They had money, they had guns, they had volunteers. Maisie, for all her mad wildness, had been a professor of political science. They’d removed her for her views; she’d retreated, then disappeared—to this remote place near enough to the border to kick-start attacks. Nothing or nobody could have been farther from any choice of mine—for anything.
Jimmy Bermingham spoke directions and I drove: east and north. No light anywhere, not a house, not a candle. When we’d reached civilization by way of a straggling village with a lamp on a lone pole, Jimmy said, “We have to make a little bit of a detour, Ben.”
“No detours. We’re going to Dublin, I’m dropping you off in the middle of the city, and then I’m going down home to see my parents.”
“Yeh, sure, Ben, after a detour.”
Something in his voice snagged me on a spike of worry. I looked across. He had put his hand inside his ragged coat.
“What are you doing?”
“We have a little errand to run, Ben.”
“No, we haven’t.”
He said, “Ben, we’re heading for a place you might be familiar with. Glenboy. D’you know it?”
He pulled out a handgun and laid it on his lap. Catching my breath, I detoured.
It’s difficult to call Glenboy a “place”—but it existed, north of Killarga, a nowhere cluster of houses at the edge of high scree. A retired schoolmaster who lived on Saddle Hill had interesting legends here about ladies with long hair who rose from the nearby waters of Lough Melvin and Lough Allen. On my last visit, the snow had come in, and I couldn’t get out of his house for two days; since he had talked nonstop, he’d nearly crazed me.
“What’s in Glenboy?”
“There’s a man I have to see, Captain.”
“Don’t call me that. Does he know you’re coming?”
The anger of the morning hadn’t yet dissipated. But it hadn’t remained at a high enough level for me to fight back. I caved again.
Jimmy Bermingham said, “He’ll know I’m there. Leave it at that.”
I can’t write down what I said to him—it’s too obscene. And using profanity enrages me further.
He countered, “Think of it as your job, Ben. Write us up.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “There’s a place in hell for your kind.”
Jimmy Bermingham flinched and caressed the ugly gun on his lap. We reached a main road, and I headed north. I should have headed south, found the police in Dromahair or Drumshanbo, but I didn’t. Wrong choice.
31
Clutching at straws and telling nobody, I decided to take Jimmy Bermingham at his word and keep a record. Here was my first idea: I know this is crazy and lethal, but treating it as history might one day somewhat justify my stupidity in not running from them. Next thought: Am I going to dignify this scruffy insurgence by keeping a record? And here is the actual extract from my first attempt; you’ll see why I didn’t file it for decades.
Verbatim account of James J. Bermingham (Jimmy) of his first involvement in the Border campaign of the IRA, December 12, 1956. Note: The IRA actions continued to February 26, 1962.
We left Kildysart when darkness fell. [This is J.B. speaking.] I felt proud and important—the designated assassin. Like one of Michael Collins’s men in the old days. [The War of Independence was run by the famous hero Michael Collins, later assassinated by his old comrades in the civil war
of 1922–23.] We knew about this B Special, Gilpin, we knew where he lived. Sammy Gilpin was his name. Maisie said as I was going out, “Two shots. Legs first, to immobilize him, then the head shot.” And she said, “Good luck. For God and for Ireland.”
The Webley was inside my coat; she was firing .455 slugs. We got her from a girl who smuggled it out of a British army barracks in Germany. Friends everywhere. You need that in a guerrilla war. Collins could have stayed in any farmhouse or cottage in Ireland and been safe. Maisie couldn’t talk about Collins and not break into tears.
Did I think about what it would be like to kill somebody? No. No point. And no worries on that score. The cause orders everything. The cause is my master. Get them off our island. Stop them persecuting native Irish people. Maisie says that the problem south of the border is that the people have gotten fat and soft, and as long as they’re comfortable they don’t care about anyone else.
Once we hit Belturbet I knew this was it. In deep. I’d been to a lot of the briefings, and I knew there was a big operation starting up that night. The boys were going after a transmitter in Derry. A courthouse somewhere else. And a radar station over on the Antrim coast.
The gun was warm from my handling it. I didn’t load it yet. And I had to be ready to throw it out the window if we saw a roadblock up ahead. We weren’t going to cross the border by an approved road, and there was a police barracks in Lisnaskea.
Maisie told us how to find the unapproved roads and we hit one or two that were blocked by barrels full of cement so we had to turn back, we couldn’t get across the Border that way. In the end our driver [that was me, Ben MacCarthy: I took my own name out of this report] got us over by going through the forest above Lisnaskea. When we came down onto the level road you could see in the light of the headlamps the water glinting on each side. A land of lakes.
I’d memorized the details Maisie gave me. Anyway we had a map and a torch. The driver swung into a wood, and we followed a small road along by a stream. This would lead us close to the bigger road that the B Special boyo would take from the pub to his mother’s house. He went that way every night. Our small road was parallel to his, with the stream between us. None of us knew was how wide was the stream.
They told us that he came home about half past ten. We sat there in that car. I loaded in the slugs and turned on the safety catch. Nothing went along his road nor ours. A dead-quiet night. Black as a cat in a coal hole. We knew that Maguiresbridge was over to our right. The Gilpin house was off to our left. We couldn’t see either.
At twenty past ten, I got out of the car and shone the flashlamp on the stream. I’d have to walk through the water to get at him, and I had only shoes on, not even rubber soles. But I went anyway. That’s what I mean by the cause. That water was freezing—a mountain river, I’d say, coming down into the lakes. The trouble was, if I went up on the road and the boyo had a light on him, he’d see me, and there was no bank to crouch on.
Maybe half an hour, maybe more, I stood in that water in my good shoes. God, it was freezing. Then I heard the footsteps, a strong heavy step, coming toward me along the road. Up I step out of the water when he’s right near, and I says, “Is that you, Sammy?”
“Who’s that?” says he, and I says, “A friend, Sammy, a friend who thinks you shouldn’t gouge out people’s eyes.” I shine the torch in his face, he shines a torch in mine, and I bring up the Webley and I squeeze off a shot. He dropped. I couldn’t see in the dark where I’d hit him but he was down at my feet and twisting.
I stood over him to fire the second shot into his head and didn’t the gun jam? Now, I’d never fired it before. And that was a mistake, not to practice with it, learn it, because it had a heavy, slow trigger. The handguns weren’t all like that.
So I was slow, and he was down and I heard shouts. So I was gone, running like hell back across the stream to the car. My shoes were ruined, never the same again, I had to get a new pair.
Sammy Gilpin didn’t die. He took Jimmy Bermingham’s bullet in the side of the head, and it paralyzed him for life. Not elegant, was it? Nor heroic; not the stuff of history books.
32
The following day, a hundred and twenty miles to the south, I drove slowly along the short avenue into my parents’ farm. Regrouping? Certainly. Seeking advice? No. I wouldn’t have frightened my mother with such a tale, and my romantic father offered no reliable common sense.
My father was one of those men whose reaction you could never predict. He blew with the breeze. I’d hear him one day praise an acquaintance to the skies, swearing undying respect; next day, he’d damn the same man as a knave.
Did he hold his opinions to please others, or did he always tell us what he thought we wanted to hear? One thing I do know about him: he lived from jolt to jolt; he should have had his own private Jupiter sending him lightning bolts. If I wanted to thrill my father, I’d find a story of great drama or tragedy—a man isolated halfway down a cliff; a child in a well—and tell him slowly and carefully. His eyes would grow amber, he’d run his hands through that mass of hair, the red now whitening but the waves still heaving, and say, “God-God-God above, boys.”
It took me many years to understand that this need for voltage had been the cause of his great truancy. Remember, children, that in 1932, when he ran away from home to pursue your mother, travel with her road show, I followed. And that deep infatuation notwithstanding, he still showed endless love for his own wife, my mother.
Venetia also told me that when he was with her he talked principally about me, his only child. I was then eighteen. So, in his mad mistake, my father had discovered that he was a family man, not some gallant from a Byronic age. In fact, you may recall that Venetia found herself first attracted to me in absentia because of the bonfire of talk Harry had built in my honor.
Alongside this need for lightnings, the other main feature of my father’s life drove me craziest of all. Whenever I visited them, I never knew what life-changing scheme to expect. For example, he had put the farm up for sale at least five times, and then withdrawn it at the first offer. Or I’d discover that he’d been buying racehorses, one of life’s more efficient devices for losing money.
Another time he was asking for a government grant to raise a statue to a blind poet who had stayed in our house two centuries earlier. The government, naturally, told him to pay for it himself. That brought on two years of Harry’s vituperation, red-hot letters and white-hot telegrams proclaiming “You disgrace us, sir”—and he once delivered his practiced tirade in full stammering volume to a politician passing by.
He sounds dreadful at my hands—but he wasn’t. Maddening, yes, and unsteady, and impulsive, yet superbly intelligent, and endearing, and funny, and sometimes so aware of his own shortcomings that he could, as he said himself, “Make-make-make God laugh” with tales of his mistakes.
Louise Hopkins MacCarthy, his wife, your grandmother, my dear and beloved mother—as a younger woman she was long and lean, and as neat and tight as a braid, and she took Harry in her stride. It needed many years and many tears to get her past the hurt he’d caused her by running away. And she never again allowed him to be alone with another woman.
His foibles, though, his schemes and opinions, his imagination and his brilliance as a self-sustaining farmer—that was her Harry MacCarthy, and, as far as she was concerned, when that Harry was on parade, there could be no better place than at his side.
By now, long after they’ve gone from the planet, it’s clear to me how their relationship worked. Each thought the other the best person they’d ever met. Their intimacy, a serene and bottomless lake, sent out signals. Touches and glances at breakfast, or at dinner after their Sunday afternoon nap—those two people had a skin-to-skin closeness. Who loved whom the most? I used to think that my mother was the lover and my father the loved; now I’m not so sure.
Children, you knew your grandmother, you got to spend more time with her than with your grandfather. You may not have seen—you may not
have been allowed to see—the iron in her. Yes, she felt shattered when her husband ran off. She had no warning—and no precedent, national, local, cultural, or personal. In hard terms, what in God’s name was a middle-aged, settled, respected farmer doing pursuing an itinerant actress from a road show?
Her steel, however, still chills me. And her ferocious instruction: “Go out and bring him back. For me.”
That same morning she fell into a despondence that changed her very appearance, but even as I looked at her face, gray, taut, and strained during those bad days, I also sensed that a river of fire flowed deep inside her. That’s what kept her ferocity intact.
For a time in that fracas they lost everything—their farm, their marriage, their place in the world. And yet she was the one who led their march back to normal life. She never discussed it with me, not in depth; nor did she denigrate him to me.
Nor did I see her make any savage assaults upon his heart; she never, so far as I could see, plucked the strings of his considerable guilt. I suppose she didn’t need to; in a constant mode of making reparations to her, he danced to tunes she never had to play.
My memories of her change every day: her tears of helplessness when laughing, bent double and breathless, often at something my father had said; her urgency to bring baskets of food and fresh linen handkerchiefs to an ill friend; her tact at a frail bedside; her unreachable concentration as she scrubbed her pigs with a long-handled, heavy-bristled broom.
She had little vanity that I saw, yet when she died I found in her possessions more than a dozen kinds of hand cream and as many eyebrow pencils, though my memory holds no recollection of ever having seen a trace of makeup anywhere on that face, with its high cheekbones and ivory skin. Now, as the house appeared around the bend in the avenue, it was her face that rose like the moon in my mind.