Patricia Falvey (22 page)

“Dia dhaoibh achan duine. Agus fáilte romhaibh!”

As Collins welcomed the crowd in Gaelic, such a roar went up that it could have lifted the roof off the hall. And then he mesmerized us.

“We gather here tonight because a great change is coming over our land—over our beloved Ireland. For too many years we have suffered under the bondage of our oppressors. They have stolen our land. They have crushed our language. They have starved us. They have imprisoned us. But yet they have not broken our spirit. Our spirit today is as strong as was our fathers’ and grandfathers’. Every generation before us has fought to rid our land of English tyranny. I promise you tonight that we will not ask our children to take up the struggle. The fight stops here—with us—with every man and woman in this hall and all over this glorious country of ours. We are the ones who will finish the job!”

Cheers went up from the crowd. How Da would have loved this, I thought. When the noise died down, Collins went on.

“How many promises have we heard from Westminster that one day the Irish will be free to rule Ireland? How many promises have been postponed or forgotten or denied? How long must we wait for Home Rule? One year? Ten years? One hundred years? I will tell you. The waiting is over. We will wait no longer. We will listen to no more promises, no more excuses. We will act now. We will take up our cause and take our country back, by force if necessary, but take it back we will.”

Applause broke out, and people stomped their feet. I sat on the edge of my chair, drinking in every word.

“On Easter Monday of 1916, that action was begun. Valiant men stood up and declared a free Ireland. The oppressors herded them on cattle boats and into British jails. But they did not break their spirit. They executed their leaders. But still they did not break their spirit. Instead, they awoke the giant sleeping spirit of Ireland herself—her ghosts rose up, her mountains thundered, and her seas roared. And that roar will echo until Ireland is free.”

In answer, a deafening roar filled the hall. And then, as if the audience sensed what was coming, they bowed their heads.

“May the prayers of our saints and the wisdom of our scholars guide us. May the bravery of our great warriors stouten our hearts. May our poets inspire us. And may God bless our cause.”

Feet stomped, and hands clapped, and cheers roared around the hall. The man was brilliant. He preached revolution with the words of a poet. Like everyone else there that night, I came away in love with Ireland and with Michael Collins.

It was a fine late summer evening when we all poured out of the hall. Electricity ran through the crowd—an excitement that you could feel in your body as well as your mind. I had never known a night like it. It was breathtaking and frightening.

James came up from behind me and took my elbow. He was smiling.

“Come on,” he said.

“Where?”

“To meet the big fellow himself.”

The “big fellow” was the nickname many used for Collins. James pulled me through the crowd to where he was standing, a small group of men pressed close around him.

I was suddenly shy. “Ah, no,” I said. “Sure what would I say to him?”

James ignored me and strode up to the group, pulling me by the arm. When Collins saw him, he smiled and put out his hand to shake.

“James,” he said. “I’m delighted to see you.” Collins’s Cork accent was even more pronounced than when he was onstage. “I thought ’twas yourself I saw. And who’s this fine-looking woman now?”

“This is Eileen O’Neill, a friend of mine from Queensbrook.”

Collins gave me a brilliant smile. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss O’Neill.”

His hand was large and firm, and I felt my own trembling in his grasp.

“It’s her first meeting,” said James, smiling.

“And what did you think of it?” said Collins.

I struggled to speak. “I thought,” I said, “that it was pure poetry.” My face reddened, and sweat trickled down the back of my neck.

Collins beamed. “And poetry aside, do you agree with what I had to say?”

Sudden anger filled me. “It was Unionist bastards killed my da. We owe it to him and those like him to take our country back.” And then the devil danced into my head. “But you and your boyos would make a better job of it if you let the women fight instead of making fecking sandwiches!”

I was mortified once the words were out. They hung suspended in the air. I held my breath. For a second Collins said nothing, then his face broke into a wide grin.

“Ah, James, now there’s a woman with a head on her shoulders. I’d hang on to her if I were you.”

He gave us a nod and moved off to speak to some older men who were calling him. I was afraid to look at James. He was probably fit to be tied over my cheekiness to Collins.

“Come on, let’s find the lads,” was all he said as we pushed through the crowd to the street where the car was parked.

James was silent all the way home, while the other lads recounted every word of Collins’s speech. I think they would have taken up arms there and then if they could and made a run on Belfast—they were that carried away. Young eejits, I thought, out for sport. Did they really understand what this was all about? I was uncomfortable listening to them, but at the same time I sensed a great change was coming all over Ireland.

The driver let me off in Newry outside P.J.’s house. The young lads were up for making a night of it at the Ceili House. James said they could go where they wanted as long as they took him to Queensbrook first. If he said good night to me, I did not hear him. I climbed out of the car in a hurry. I needed to get away and think. Life was suddenly moving too fast for me, and I was afraid I was losing control of it. I could not do that. Control was all I had.

JUST AS WHEN
water floods the land it forever alters the landscape, so the tide of Republicanism in Ireland slowly eroded old beliefs and accepted orders. In the weeks that followed my meeting with Michael Collins, I began to see life around me through new eyes. I looked at the mill girls and saw the narrowness that bound their futures. There was no hope for them to make a life for themselves beyond the option of marriage and labor in the mill until they became too old or sick to go on. What opportunities did they have for advancement, education, a better life? None that I could see. And the hard truth was that I was one of them. I began to understand my brother Frank’s passion for owning land. Instinctively, even as a child, he had known that without land you had no control of your life. Anger stirred in me. What right did the English have to come all those centuries ago and put us off our land? And what right did they have to come and kill my da? The distinction between the English and the Ulster Protestant thugs who had come that night along with Billy Craig to burn down our house became blurred to me.

For the first time, rightly or wrongly, I put a face on all my troubles. It all stemmed from the actions of the English—taking away land, treating Catholics as second-class citizens, giving them no say over their own affairs. Michael Collins was right—we needed to get them out of Ireland once and for all. These thoughts fueled a new sense of purpose in me. I realize now that I feared my old dream of reuniting my family was fading and that I needed a new dream. The warrior in me had found her war.

I marched over to James Conlon one day and told him I wanted to join the Irish Volunteers.

“And don’t think I’m signing up just to bring tea and sandwiches to the meetings the way most of the women do,” I said. “I want to train, and I want to learn to fire a gun.”

James stared at me, and then he scratched his head and laughed.

“I can see you’ve your mind made up,” he said, “and if I say no, it’s another battalion you’ll be joining. You may as well join with me so I can keep an eye on you—I think it would be safer!”

Within a week, I was out in the fields at night, drilling with the men. I learned to shoot a rifle. As it turned out, I had a steady arm and a good eye. I could have blasted the head off anybody from two hundred yards away. James was careful, though. He must have sensed the force of my newly focused anger and realized I might be more reckless than was good for me or for anybody else in the battalion. And so I was forced to earn his trust through less risky assignments. At night I rode my bicycle over the small, dark winding roads of South Armagh and South Down, picking up and delivering messages to red-faced men in farmhouses, sallow men behind bank counters, and old, toothless women wrapped in shawls sitting on rocks beside rivers. I never read the communications, but I knew they contained information on the movements of the police, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and the British Army, as well as plans for Republican actions both in Ulster and elsewhere. During the day, I went to my work at the mill and kept my mouth shut. Theresa eyed me with concern, but I gave her a look that told her to keep the questions to herself.

IN NOVEMBER 1918
, World War I was declared over and there was great celebration around the country. Irish soldiers, wounded and able-bodied alike, returned in droves. Tommy McParland came home, and he and Theresa made plans to be married. Other women in the mill announced their engagements as well. The atmosphere was giddy. Mr. Sheridan, the mill owner, announced that the Spinners’ Ball, which had been canceled during the war years, would be held on Christmas Eve in honor of the returning soldiers. I wondered if Owen was among them. For the first time in two years, I allowed myself to think about him for more than a fleeting moment—to remember the heat of his hand on my back as he waltzed me around the floor, the tingle of his kiss on my burning cheek, and the gentle way he wiped the ice cream from my chin. It was only a foolish schoolgirl crush, I had been telling myself, and the truth was I was embarrassed by it. I didn’t have time for such foolishness. But now the memories resurrected themselves from their long slumber and pounded on my heart for escape. I thought about his letter. I had read and reread it so often, I could recite every word of it. I wondered if he was sorry he’d sent it. Would he be angry I had never written back? In spite of all my resolutions to forget about him, I was anxious to see him.

And so it was that I played again at the Spinners’ Ball on Christmas Eve of 1918, along with P.J. and the Ulster Minstrels. The scene was much the same as it had been five years earlier. Theresa once again led the committee. The hall was gaily decorated, and long tables were piled with food and punch and cider. As before, there were no spirits served, but this time it was more than just the band that smuggled in their wee drop of insurance in their pockets. James sat at a table near the front beside his mother, who beamed with pride at everyone who walked by. Young men home from the war were determined to erase the dirt, the fear, and the brutality from their memories. God help them, though; if they had expected to be treated as heroes, they were to be disappointed. Their sacrifice had dimmed to insignificance in the brilliant light of Ireland’s recent homegrown martyrs. Now they hovered in that bright but brief limbo between their escape from the past and their fear of the future.

I tried to imagine myself as I had been five years before—at sixteen—old in some ways and still a child in others. Now, at twenty-one, I knew I had changed. My dearest dream of returning to the Yellow House had grown dim, kept alive only by childish stubbornness and sweet, pale memories. I was infused now with a dream equally passionate but far less innocent. The resolute, brave child now slept within me, while the fierce O’Neill warrior took center stage.

I wondered if I looked different. I had already reached my full height of six feet well before my sixteenth birthday. My dark red hair still fell to my waist in a thick braid. I wore the same black velvet skirt and white satin blouse that I had worn five years earlier. But I sensed that I carried the clothes differently. The stranger who had crept into my body when the monthly curse first arrived was no longer a stranger. She was a woman.

As I played, I let my eyes wander over the crowd, searching for Owen Sheridan. The minute I saw him, a shiver ran through me. He came in through the door, as he had done before, shaking the snow off his coat and out of his blond hair. Then he lifted his face toward me and we held each other’s stares until I could stand it no more and looked down at my fiddle. People raced up to shake his hand, and he turned away from me. I watched him walk toward the front table where his family sat. Something was different, I thought, and then I saw what it was: He was limping. It would not have been noticeable if you were not staring at him closely, as I was. But it was unmistakable. He dragged his left leg a bit stiffly as he walked. So that had been what was wrong with his leg when he said in his letter that it throbbed with pain. He had taken a bullet, and now he had a limp. He sat down at the table with his parents and two young women I supposed were his sisters. I had seen one of them along with her husband at the last ball, but the other one, a pretty curly-haired blonde, had not been there. They all stood up to kiss him.