Ashes In the Wind (13 page)

Two days later they set off for the South. They arrive in Cork City late, delayed by blown bridges and blocked roads, but dinner in the Imperial Hotel sees Collins relaxed, expansive, playful. Donal Ryan has come from Ballincollig at Collins’s invitation to join them for dinner and Emmet Dalton is also there. Donal fights the battle of Kilmichael with peppers, salts, glasses and cups on the dinner table.

‘Kilmichael helped to turn the tide,’ says Collins. ‘The Brits had never seen us turn out in force, and we killed, how many?’

‘Seventeen Auxiliaries, captured a lot of ammunition, and lost only three Volunteers.’

‘The other turning point was taking out the Cairo Gang. Tomas here was part of The Squad. Different altogether, but after that the Brits hardly dared to poke their noses out of Dublin Castle,’ says Collins, looking at Tomas as he speaks. Tomas realizes he is getting a blessing and nods.

‘I hear de Valera’s in Cork County, but where I don’t know,’ says Emmet Dalton. ‘Our intelligence isn’t as good as it should be, isn’t as good as theirs.’

‘I don’t think there’s much point in trying for a meeting. He’s a brilliant man right enough, a spoiled cardinal if ever I saw one, but you never know what he’s thinking, except it’s not what he’s saying. Lloyd George told me that dealing with him was like trying to pick up quicksilver with a fork,’ says Michael Collins. ‘Dev could have a compromise tomorrow – he could have had one six months ago. But when he said, “The IRA would have to wade through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government” – that’s all of us here – those weren’t the words of a man we could do business with.’

They talk of the motives of the anti-Treaty leaders, and then Dalton lightens the mood by asking Collins to tell the story of the dog show. This is a set piece, one that the Big Fellow has told many times before.

‘Ah, that was something else entirely. You know I love the Kerry Blue terrier? Tomas here is going to get one, they’re from his county.’

‘I’m not sure I’m man enough. Your dog won’t do a thing I tell him,’ says Tomas.

‘Anyhow, it was a strange moment, like the truce in the trenches over Christmas 1914. We held a breed show in Langrish Place in the middle of October 1920. Con O’Herlihy and Dan Nolan from Kerry were the judges. The curfew was on, but there we were, Kerry Blue lovers all, the Under-Secretary, Sir James McMahon, Captain Wyndham Quinn from Vice-Regal Lodge, who gave the cup, and lots of Kerry Blues. My good dog won, entered under the name of Convict 224, my Frongoch number. Dawn of Freedom came second and McMahon’s bitch third.’

‘Did they know who you were?’

‘It wasn’t too hard to guess, given the names of the dogs – Trotsky, Markiewicz, Munster Fusilier. I had a moustache then, they didn’t have a good photograph of me, and besides we outnumbered them by five to one. But it was a real truce. Both sides suspended belief because they loved the Kerry Blue.’

After dinner Collins strips off his tunic for ‘a bit of ear’, wrestling with the commandant and anyone else who will take him on. Tomas doesn’t join in; he hasn’t got used to the sight of his chief rolling about on the floor, even though the bouts are good-humoured enough, with Collins usually ending up on top.

At breakfast the next morning the mood is different; Collins is subdued. ‘I had the news late last night that they hanged our two men in Wandsworth Jail.’

‘They could have blown the Treaty sky-high,’ says Emmet Dalton.

Collins doesn’t answer directly. ‘We tried hard enough to get them out, but the Brits weren’t going to let the killing of their CIGS go unpunished.’

After breakfast the small convoy, a motorcycle scout, two Crossley Tenders each with ten soldiers, an open Leyland tourer with Collins and Dalton in the back and Tomas alongside the driver, sets off for Bandon, Clonakilty, Rosscarbery, Skibbereen, Sam’s Cross. A Rolls-Royce armoured car, the Slievenamon, brings up the rear. It is part triumphal procession, part armed patrol; in the towns and villages they feel safe enough, but the country roads are dangerous.

They stop at Woodfield, opposite the house where Michael Collins’s mother was born, and go into the bar, the Four Alls.

‘The king, who rules all, the priest, who prays for all, the soldier, who fights for all, and the peasant, who pays for all,’ says Emmet Dalton.

Tomas laughs. ‘They’ve forgotten the Cork farmer, who drinks for all.’

From the outside the Four Alls looks like a prosperous farmer’s cottage, whitewashed, slate roofed, windows red-painted. Inside, a long room, its stone floor sprinkled with sawdust, runs the full length of the building. The bar is crowded; word had got round that Michael Collins was due, and some of the drinkers had been there since noon. They are mostly farmers – weathered, reddening faces with a day or two’s stubble above collarless shirts closed by a single stud, thick tweed jackets, dark corduroy trousers held up by a wide black belt or binder twine, the boots heavy and cracked. There are two or three shopkeepers or bank clerks from Rosscarbery in suits and ties, and in one corner the parish priest keeping a watchful eye on the hard drinkers. There is a warm, damp smell of spilled beer, wet sawdust, drying tweed and sweat.

Collins buys a barrel of the local beer, Clonakilty Wrastler, which he hoists onto the bar. He sends Tomas out to bring the soldiers in, Tomas insisting that four remain to guard the vehicles. They stay in the Four Alls for almost an hour. Tomas listens to the strong Cork accents, the passionate exchanges, and thinks these are good men. They may not be heroes or poets, not Cúchulains nor Blind Rafterys, but these are the ones we’ve been fighting for. As the conversation flows with the beer, Tomas contrasts their faces with those of the Anglo-Irish men and women he had seen coming out of the Protestant church in Drimnamore of a Sunday. The Prod faces were leaner, more elegant, but they never looked as though they belonged in the land around them. The gentry have flat ears and beaky noses and they don’t have curly hair, his mother used to say.

Tomas looks at Michael Collins’s reflection in the big Guinness mirror behind the bar, the square face, the strong, slightly fleshy, jaw, the thick dark hair, the generous mouth, the bright eyes, and notes the way in which those around him defer to him even when he is silent. He’s our Commander-in-Chief all right, thinks Tomas, he doesn’t look like a bank manager any more.

Just before they leave, Michael Collins jumps up onto the bar, his head almost brushing the ceiling. He shakes the thick lock of black hair out of his eyes, stamps his foot on the bar for silence. ‘I know I am among friends – I’m related to the half of you in this room. Not all of you are on the side of the Free State. I’m one of the men who signed the Treaty. Some of those who sent us to London called us incompetent amateurs...’

‘De Valera and Brugha,’ whispers Emmet to Tomas.

‘...tricked by a wily Welshman. Well, Lloyd George tricked us by withdrawing his troops from Ireland, he tricked us into victory.

‘Now listen. We are free to get back all that was taken from us, the freedom that was dreamed of by Wolfe Tone, the freedom that was foreseen by Thomas Davis. The Brits are going at last; they’d be gone already if Dev and his friends would let them leave. We will have our Republic, we will bring in the North, but only if we stop tearing ourselves apart. John O’Leary said, “There are things a man ought not to do to save his country,” and that includes Irishmen killing Irishmen.’ Michael Collins smacks his fist into his palm. ‘We’ve won our war; let’s show we deserve our peace. Let’s show we can use what we’ve earned by force of arms, what the Treaty gives us, the freedom to be free.’

He jumps down from the bar to cheers and is carried out to the car.

‘I’ve never seen him do that,’ says Tomas.

‘He’s a force of nature all right,’ says Dalton. ‘He has them eating out of his hand. But if Dev were to turn up tomorrow, and tear into Mick and the Treaty the way he can, there’d be more than a few would have changed sides by the time Dev was out the door.’

Three miles outside Clonakilty the road is blocked, and it takes half an hour to move the fallen trees out of the way. Michael Collins takes off his tunic and joins in clearing the road, ignoring Tomas’s suggestion that he should wait in the armoured car.

‘Show me that axe,’ Collins says to one of the soldiers. ‘It’s not the first time I’ve used one.’

Tomas and Emmet Dalton argue strongly for a different return journey from Bandon to Cork. They stop on the road and send out the motorcycle scout to check the two alternative routes. Both have been blocked. The road back alternates between open stretches of flat, boggy farmland and enclosed green tunnels where the roadside trees meet overhead. The verges are covered in ferns, cow parsley, yellow gorse, rushes, occasional clumps of purple foxgloves. They reach the valley of Béal na mBláth, the Mouth of Flowers, where the road is overlooked by low hills matching the curve of the valley. As the motorcyclist disappears round the corner, a volley of shots shatter the windscreen of the Leyland and ricochet off the armoured car with an angry whine.

‘Drive like hell,’ shouts Dalton.

‘Stay where you are. We’ll take them on,’ says Collins.

Grabbing his rifle, he jumps out of the car, waving to the men in the tenders to dismount. At first it is hard to see where the shots are coming from. Three or four men appear and disappear behind a high bank up the hill to the left; the machine gun in the convoy’s armoured car opens up and tears great chunks of earth from the top of the bank, jams and is silent for fifteen minutes, then starts firing again. The skirmish lasts no more than an hour – sporadic firing from the hill, returning fire from the soldiers on the road using their vehicles for cover. Tomas is alongside the Commander in Chief most of the time. Michael Collins is behaving like a Volunteer enjoying his first battle, dashing between the armoured car and the tender to encourage the men, trying to pick out the elusive targets of the men on the hill. He pays no attention to Tomas’s attempts to keep him down behind the armoured car.

The firing dies away, and suddenly flares up again as the men on the hill are seen to be retreating. Tomas sees a kneeling Collins, who has moved into the middle of the road, aim his rifle, then suddenly spin round and fall back. Tomas runs across; Emmet Dalton is already cradling Collins’s head, the back shot away, blood and brains staining his uniform and the road.

‘The bastards, they’ve done for him,’ says Dalton.

Collins’s eyes are still open, his lips move, then all is still. Dalton and Tomas, both in tears, say an Act of Contrition. Together they lift the heavy body into the back of the car. On the way back they stop in Crookstown. Dalton finds the parish priest, who blesses Collins’s body. Five minutes later the armoured car arrives.

‘We killed two of them,’ says the commandant.

‘Lay their bodies out. They can have the priest too,’ says Dalton.

Tomas recognizes one of the dead men; it is Frank O’Gowan, face undamaged, body disfigured by several bullet wounds. Tomas closes Frank O’Gowan’s grey eyes, the skin of the eyelids still warm. He crosses himself and thinks of Kitty O’Hanrahan. How can I tell her? Who fired the shots that killed him?

One of the soldiers nudges Frank’s body with his boot.

‘Get away out of that,’ says Tomas. ‘They were men as good as you.’

He helps to lift the bodies back into the tender when the priest has finished. Frank is half the weight of Michael Collins. The rest of the journey back is a nightmare; the bridge over the Cork–Macroom road has been blown up, and they have to cross fields to get back on the Cork road. The wheels of the Crossley Tender spin in the mud, and they make a carpet of blankets and coats to give the wheels purchase. It is after midnight when they unload the bodies at the Shanakiel Hospital in Cork. Tomas sees that Frank’s eyes are open again, staring up and past him to the dark evening sky.

The next day Tomas and Dalton go back to Dublin, accompanying Collins’s body. They travel by sea, as the land journey is no longer safe. Tomas feels this is the end of everything – the end of Michael Collins, the end of the Treaty, the end of Irish unity. In Cork the night before, burdened with sorrow and guilt, he hadn’t been able to call on Kitty and tell her the news about Frank.

Michael Collins lies in state for three days in Dublin’s City Hall. Tens of thousands file past the open coffin, and in Kilmainham Jail Republican prisoners kneel and say a rosary for the man they had abandoned as their leader. There is a funeral Mass at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral, and thousands line the streets and fill the cemetery at Glasnevin. Tomas sees Kitty Kiernan in widow’s weeds holding a single lily at the graveside, and watches Hazel Lavery throw her rosary beads on the coffin as it is lowered into the ground.

Michael Collins is succeeded as commander-in-chief by Dick Mulcahy; on the walls of Dublin someone has scrawled, ‘
MOVE OVER MICK. MAKE ROOM FOR DICK.
’

A
FTER
HIS
D
UBLIN
triumph, The Elector has plenty of breeders eager to send their mares and his book is soon full for the following year.

‘And that’s after putting the price up to fifty pounds – they’re not getting that at Mount Juliet,’ says Charles. ‘Sixty mares will do us – we don’t want to wear him out. You’ll need another pair of hands in the stallion yard, and we’ll call you the stud manager from now on.’

On the strength of this promotion and a salary of six pounds a week John buys his first car, an old Morris Oxford with a starting handle that kicks like a mule and a top speed downhill of forty miles an hour. He paints his car dark blue, and it is second only to The Elector in his affections.

Since the beginning of the new season John has begun to ride in point-to-points, at first on young Charles’s hunter, on whom he wins a couple of Adjacent Hunt races and finishes third in the big Open at the Ward Union in April. After these results he begins to pick up a few rides from other owners, not without risk. After a crashing fall and a mild concussion on a chance ride he becomes more selective.