The Lost Soldier's Song, page 3
‘Would you like me to hear your confession?’ he asked Owney.
‘I have nothing to confess, more’s the pity. I always wanted to be a sinner but sin and myself never agreed. Now Philip there, fair play to him, looks like a sinner to me.’
‘Surely there’s something on your conscience?’ Father Delaney said meekly.
‘I wish there was. No sinning, no sainting. It’s a sorry state of affairs.’
‘You must try to be serious, my son.’
‘Serious about what? You’re serious enough for both of us, Father.’
‘You don’t mean to tell me that you refuse the sacraments.’
‘I’ll write it down for you if you like, so that you can show it to your bishop. It wasn’t your bishop who sent you, because he’s shouting for the other side, the bastard.’
‘I came of my own accord, I’d like you to know.’
‘And so late in the evening, too. You’re overworked. I hope they’re paying you well.’
Father Delaney got up solemnly from the chair and gave them a solemn blessing. He waited for them to say, ‘Amen’, and when neither spoke, he said it himself.
‘The messenger of death has been and gone,’ Owney said after the cell door closed behind him. ‘He’ll go back and tell Sergeant Bruff that I have no idea what’s in store for me. He’s only a child, poor man. To be a good prison chaplain you need to be corrupt without knowing it.’
Owney lay back on the mattress and closed his eyes. He had come to the end of whatever knowledge he’d been given to confront the world and now his burden had nothing to do with the prospect of imminent death or the possibility of further torture. After a while he opened his eyes and said, ‘Have you ever seen an apple tree drop fruit in June?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘It only happens to apples that won’t survive till autumn. Do they lose their grip on the tree or does the tree shed them because she doesn’t want the weight of useless fruit? Ireland is an apple tree and it will soon be June. You and I, we won’t be shed, will we?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with us. Our tree doesn’t shed her apples lightly.’
‘You’re a sensible man. I won’t tell you my real name, though. I’d just like you to know that I was born in Offaly. In my parish every farmer keeps a special pig. He takes the other pigs to market and never thinks of them again. The household pig is one of the family. He even has a pet name, like a favourite son. He gets every scrap that’s left over after dinner, and bits of him hang from the kitchen rafters through the winter, breathing in turf smoke for extra flavour. You and me, we’re special pigs.’
‘If they’re hoping to fatten us, they’re going about it the wrong way.’
‘Mark my words, we’re special.’
Owney closed his eyes again. For some odd reason he looked pleased. The night seemed long. They slept from time to time. Shortly before dawn Owney hoisted himself up off the mattress on one elbow. ‘Have you any sins on your conscience?’ he enquired gravely.
‘Nothing to brag about. Only one or two.’
‘You’ve been with a woman then?’
The question hung in the darkness between them. Owney asked questions to which no one else would expect an answer. He was not an ordinary man. He demanded and expected nothing but the truth.
‘Tell me about the first time,’ he pursued. ‘But don’t tell me anything except what you remember.’
‘She was dark-haired and strong and she always smiled for a second before she laughed.’
‘You don’t remember much, do you? Which of you made the first move?’
‘Neither of us. It just happened.’
‘But something must have led to it.’
‘It’s hard to say, it must have been in the air.’
‘That’s how I always figured it. Unless it’s in the air, they take fright. Women are a race apart, they speak their own language. I wanted to get to know a girl once but I said the wrong thing. She went off with a bowsie man I could have put in my waistcoat pocket. Some men are good at pretending and that’s why women think they understand them. It’s all beyond me, I could never fake a feeling I didn’t have.’
They both slept. Then suddenly the guards were in the cell. Owney knelt and said his prayers in stockinged feet. He was not to be hurried. It was something he had done every day of his life. When he had finished dressing, he reached down over the other mattress and winked. ‘You needn’t stir,’ he said, ‘it’s too early for milking. One day someone will ask you if you ever met a big man who could give and take a beating. Just mention Owney Mulligatawny. You might find out my real name.’ At the door he looked over his shoulder and said, ‘No feeling, no faking. Everything is real today.’
* * *
He knew what to expect because Owney had already told him. ‘The waiting is the worst,’ was how he’d put it. ‘Listening for the volley alone in your cell. It sounds a long way off, in another country. You live with the silence afterwards for weeks and weeks.’ Then he had spoken of his other three cell mates, giving an impression that their absence had meant more than their presence.
‘Two left in a hurry without saying goodbye. The third was a fisherman, he shook my hand. He used to sit there on that mattress, going from one pool to another in his mind. He’d travel miles and miles of an evening and fall asleep a happy man. “Cast a sprat to catch a mackerel,” he used to say. How can you tell a fisherman that he himself is the sprat?’
‘I’d rather be a sprat than a red herring, if there was a choice.’
‘I’ve never met a red herring here,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘I’ve had one oily pilchard but he wasn’t red.’
Owney’s conversation was unpredictable. No one could tell what kind of cat’s cradle he was weaving in his mind. He stood on Owney’s chair and looked out of the window. Grey light, grey stone, two sentries marching up and down. He’d been in a firing party himself once. He knew the drill, and knowing it didn’t help. The firing party would see a tall, broad-chested man. They would not see his face. A life would end and with it an unrepeatable way of looking at things.
‘We didn’t like the play, so we put on our own.’ That was how Owney had summed up the revolution. ‘We got caught without a licence and now we’re paying the penalty. That’s the long and the short of it. All this fucken ranting about Dark Rosaleen and wine from the Royal Pope is only trick o’ the loop and thimbleman stuff.’
Declan barely heard the volley. There was no echo, just muffled thunder over a valley at least three parishes away. The sentries kept on marching. A pigeon rose from the roof-ridge and flew off in panic. His legs were shaking and he tried not to retch. An execution was not just sudden death as in an accident but a violent, sickening sundering. He kept recalling the serpentine twists of Owney’s conversation and the disturbing clarity of his questioning in the middle of the night. He wondered if his guilt at being alive was perhaps a natural reaction.
He turned away from the window and laid the chair on Owney’s mattress upside down. A leaf from a jotter had been glued to the underside of the seat with blood. He unfolded the leaf and read the message, a last, proud cry against oblivion written with a blunt pencil in a large hand:
Remember this, I stood the test. Disley is a fox.
Bruff is a bastard. Cropper loves his tools.
Remember my name. Tom Bolger.
Tell my friends I didn’t break.
Breakfast came but he could not eat. His stomach had contracted into a hard little hazel nut with no kernel. He couldn’t face dinner either. When he tried to eat, he bent over the disgusting mess and gagged.
Part II
Chapter 3
He would remember him as Owney rather than Tom Bolger, and not just because he himself might one day be remembered somewhere as Philip Keegan instead of Declan Osborne. Remembered? With every fibre of his body he rebelled against the thought. He was too young to die. There was so much that he had not seen, so many flavours he had not savoured. Owney had had time to get to know himself. At least he’d had time to weigh life in the balance and find it wanting. That was enough: to have acquired a point of view and to go out with a sense of having done as much as one’s equipment enabled one to do. Like Owney, he was expendable. He wasn’t running the war, he would just be another casualty. Only the leaders on both sides could lie back in the evenings pondering the ifs and hows of history and their place in the national pageant, of which history was not an indifferent spectator. History was the dynamo that powered the war, and later a handful of wily and articulate survivors would cut the cloth of history to their own personal measurements. These men had a stake in the future. Their castles-in-the-air were built from the bones of Owney and other lesser men.
He was being sour and he knew it. There was more to it than that, and now there was no point in seeking refuge in self-delusion. Before facing death he would go back over the war, or at least the war that was his and his alone. He would discover the forces that had propelled him and why he was now in prison with comrades whose ideals and ambitions he did not necessarily share. It was not good enough to say that he was no more than the by-product of a geographical accident, the vexed and degrading relationship between two neighbouring countries that in a rationally ordered world would have been set poles apart. Within him was an adamantine core of detachment that caused him to observe both the colonist and the colonised from a telescopic distance. It was in that impenetrable core that he must now seek to find his strength.
Strength? Nothing could delude a man more than misconceived ideas of self-sufficiency. Now he had to concede that for better or worse certain people had influenced his natural trajectory: his father, his twin brother Philip, his old schoolmaster Mangan, his friend Tom Cronin, and Cronin’s sister Susan above all. If Susan hadn’t left him, he would never have become a soldier. If she had emigrated, he would have followed her. If she had jilted him for another man, he might have been jealous but only for a while. If she’d taken ill and died, he would have grieved and in time recovered. What she’d done was incomprehensible. She had drawn a thick double line at the end of his carefully composed page and turned it over without a single sigh of regret. There was no going back, no rereading. No grieving with hope of recovery. When he told her his thoughts, she smiled at him from another world and said that he was being far too dramatic for his own good.
For six months he went about in a daze. He lived at home with his parents and two brothers. His father had divided the world into manageable segments and he had weighed each of them separately to his own satisfaction. His elder brother Matt found his meaning in the soil and in making things grow in spite of the weather. Unlike Matt, Declan and Philip were ‘educated’. They’d been through university and had come home to look out for what Mangan called ‘opportunities’. Not surprisingly perhaps for twins, they lived a secret life within the family or rather they lived their real life in the spaces where other members of the family did not tread. Most days they helped out on the farm, and on Saturdays Declan worked in the village pub, pouring ale and stout and listening to more conversation than he was likely to hear at home. He was corrosively unhappy. Sometimes in bed at night he could have howled in his restless anguish.
Then one weekend Tom Cronin came home and gave him a glimpse of a larger, more exacting world. Tom and himself had grown up together. Tom had joined the Volunteers in 1919 and had taken part in some of the early engagements of the war. As soon as he entered the pub, Declan saw that he had acquired an authority and self-assurance that set him apart.
‘You have no idea of the excitement,’ Tom enthused. ‘And I don’t mean the excitement of being on the run. I’ve learnt more in the mountains in the past year than I ever learnt from Mangan at school. I’m fighting beside men who did time in Frongoch. The column is like a university. You get to hear about ideas you never dreamt existed. You’re wasting your time serving stout.’
Tom had always immersed himself completely in whatever he happened to be doing. He was given to exaggeration but, even so, Declan knew at once that he must expose himself to the world that had transformed his friend. The speed with which he made up his mind quickened his flesh with a sting of pleasure.
When he told Philip, he looked nonplussed. Philip was not a fighting man. There was something in his nature that placed him outside the world of planning and doing. ‘You’ll be the first soldier in the family,’ was all he said. Declan tried to make light of his decision but he could see that his brother viewed his going as desertion. He found his world within the family. All else spelt disruption and doubt.
Declan went up to his bedroom in the attic and put his personal belongings, including two poetry books, in an old flour bag his mother had intended for a pillowcase. That evening after tea he told his father while all the family were together. Of course he knew what to expect. There was silence in the kitchen for a whole minute while his father recharged his pipe. He rammed in the tobacco with his forefinger and tamped it round and round evenly before picking up a live coal from the hearth with the tongs. His mother, concentrating on her knitting, counted stitches with her ear cocked. Matt pretended to squint at the Weekly Freeman as if he were taking aim with one eye closed.
‘You’ve been talking to Young Cronin,’ his father said finally. ‘Tom Cronin is well able to look after himself.’
‘There are four of us here,’ Declan replied evenly. ‘It’s time one of us took up the cudgels for the cause.’
‘Keep the family out of it. If you must go shooting with vagabonds and vagrants, don’t come back here looking for lodgings. The Osbornes always made their own independence. Even at the height of the Famine we never went on the parish. The Cronins, like a lot of others, took workhouse soup.’
Always the same old argument. If your ancestors had taken soup, you were a souper, even though they hadn’t bartered their religion for a full belly. It was a harsh judgment, and he had no wish to give his father the satisfaction of warming to his favourite theme yet again. He went up to the attic and came back with the flour bag on his shoulder. His mother rose stiffly from her chair and took his hand.
‘Declan!’ was all she said.
‘Don’t you go worrying now, mother. I’ll be back as soon as it’s over.’
She followed him out of the house and held both his hands under the oak tree in the yard. ‘It’s Susan Cronin, isn’t it? She’s not worth it. The world is full of lively and comely girls.’
He gave her a little hug. He knew his mother. She would forget everything he’d said to his father and remember the hug. He smiled at her and then went into the stable to say goodbye to the mare. Her ears gave a little twitch as he entered. She recognised his step, she did not turn her head. He placed a hand on her firmly muscled croup. Then he shook her mane and traced a line with his forefinger down along her back. He laid his cheek against her right nostril which caused her to give a warm snort. He felt moved to speak to her. There was nothing she liked better than the luxury of munching her oats while he combed and rubbed her down. Philip was observing him from the doorway. ‘She’ll miss you, too,’ he said. Then he offered Declan his hand, as if a score had been settled between them.
He waved back to his mother from the gate. A thrush was singing sweetly in the garden, enlivening the nip of freedom in the spring air. It was April 1920. He was a year older than the century. His manhood was no longer in doubt.
At home he had lived with the daily awareness of his father and Matt. The farm demanded total allegiance which his father and Matt surrendered willingly. His weekend work in Duffy’s pub freed him for one day from digging, ploughing, turf-cutting and hay-making. He had a foot in two camps and both feet could be trodden on. No one could count on his undivided support, so no one took him seriously. Sometimes he looked at his father and Matt with envy. They had a stake in the land. They found fulfilment in work well done, and work was something that always lay conveniently at their feet. If they ever looked up, it was to mark the position of the sun; and if they turned to the horizon, it was to spot approaching clouds and redouble their labours before rain had time to fall. He was not of their way of thinking. He measured his life by the diversity of the choices it could not offer.
In going to university Philip and himself had already taken leave of farming. Philip, in particular, lived above the earth, somewhere in the upper branches of the oak tree in the yard. Declan had once seen him reclining with a book in the fork of the oak while his father and Matt swung their scythes below in the field. As a boy he used to carry fern seed in his pocket, thinking that it would make him invisible. Since leaving university, he had become more secretive and solitary. Declan regretted having to leave him behind.
All that was now over. At last he was his own man, and it did not matter that it was his personal freedom rather than the freedom of the country that stirred ripples of anticipation in his mind. As he climbed higher into the hills, he kept asking himself why it was the thought of Philip rather than Matt that pursued him. Philip and himself had always been allies, and he regretted that Philip should see his leaving as an act of betrayal. Honesty or perhaps self-doubt compelled him to admit that Philip’s defeated expectations could not be shrugged off lightly. He had planned a grand exit. Now he could not help suspecting that his father and Matt had seen in his leave-taking something that was faintly ridiculous.
* * *
After two days in training camp he had learnt the meaning of living rough. There were twelve recruits, of whom he was the youngest though not the rawest, if only because he could tell his right foot from his left. ‘You’d be better off at home writing ballads about heroes,’ his father had scoffed. He was determined to prove him wrong. The more he thought about it, the more he realised that he himself would have to become a hero.
