Tipperary (69 page)

It seems a preposterous tale. Would a father endanger his own son? Bernard O'Brien hadn't signed up for harming Charles. Nevertheless, I felt disinclined to believe the story when I first read it. But it kept nagging at me. It had an uncomfortable ring of truth.

So I included it in my “Items to Research”—this was before I had been given Charles's mother's journal. And then I found a paper in the
Tipperary Historical Journal,
by a Trinity College lecturer in history, Joachim Ryan, who specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Irish land disputes.

Dr. Ryan described the existence of numerous such cartels as the Tipperary one, and he explained their motives as “partly shrewd practice, partly emotional.”

“These farmers,” he wrote, “had struggled through generations to keep the farms that they tenanted, had perhaps taken them into ownership though the indulgence of a benign landlord, and then sought to own more land in order to strengthen and secure their income. They had seen the political winds blow, and knew that land might be acquired through a variety of means: via a direct landlord-to-tenant sale, via a Wyndham Act sale—when they would have been negotiating with the government—or via a default sale, where fallow land that seemed to have no promise of being farmed, for legal reasons, might one day be purchased upon application to the government.”

That's simple enough. Once the Tipperary cartel saw the Burke interest waxing, their only hope was to frighten people off. It didn't work. Charles survived and went on to his triumph. What a shield innocence can be.

But it still seems barely credible that neither Charles nor his mother would raise the matter with Bernard. Perhaps age really did count. Amelia wouldn't have wanted to end her days in acrimony. And Charles would never have brought that kind of turmoil into his family.

Therefore, Bernard got away with it. I wonder if Euclid knew—he seems to have missed little of what went on.

After the party, and the shooting of Michael Collins, Charles writes only one more entry. It's dramatic, and it closes the book, so to speak, in terms of his “History,” and its brief last sentence brings to an end over twenty years of agony. Harney described the same event, again differing in some significant ways from Charles—but it was by no means the end of Harney's involvement with Charles. The date relating to the entry is not specified, but my own further discoveries put it at Monday, 4 December 1922.

On the night before beloved Euclid died, I had a dream which I cannot now fully recall; I know that it had a tipped-up cart, and a mountain of cow-manure by the doors of the sheds. Unlike many people, I set no store by dreams; to me they are wanderings of the mind that occur because the body is at rest. That dream also came to me the night before I was shot, when Maudie, my young mare, died beneath me on that wet and cold road.

Not long ago, the dream came back—a tipped-up cart in a yard with whitewashed walls by cowsheds. This must be a yard that I know, yet I cannot place it in my memory. It did not distress me, yet I noted that, as I say, it had appeared in the past when matters of moment came by. I wondered, but in a mild way, what might now threaten.

Next evening, I had my answer. It had been a curious day; we'd had unseasonal snow. I have rarely seen snow; forty miles away, our coast is washed by the temperate waters of the Gulf Stream as it climbs up the Earth from the Gulf of Mexico. But on this day we had a snowfall about two inches high, and we piled wood high upon the fire in the Great Hall.

Then we stood at the doorway—and returned many times—looking out at this wonder. When I refer to “we,” I mean April, Harney, myself, and any number of people who came and went; we had a Miss Richardson and a Miss Hayes, seamstresses from Limerick, who had come to stay in the castle while they sewed vast masses of cloth to April's directives, for further draping the high windows.

At about half past nine, when April, Harney, and I had dined, I remarked upon the rising moon and, in order the better to view it, we strolled to the door. By standing just inside we could keep the heat of the Great Hall upon our backs, and the doorway had comfortable room for three people standing abreast. My shoulders almost touched Harney's (April stood on his other side), and I felt something curious in the air between him and me. It was almost as though he bristled, as a dog does when a fox or a foe is put up. Just as I was about to ask him, I heard the noise, and I heard Harney suck in his breath.

Down at the road, a vehicle of some kind turned into the avenue; we saw the big yellow eyes of its lamps sweep across the fields of snow. From Harney came a kind of grunt, and he moved as though to quit the doorway—but I halted him and questioned him by raising an eyebrow.

“Gun,” he murmured.

I shook my head—and shook it again for emphasis. He looked into my face.

“Never again in here,” I said.

“But—our protection?”

“Joseph, we'll protect ourselves.”

Patient as a maid, the truck came unhurriedly up the avenue and soon arrived into the gravel square before the front door. News or feelings of some primitive kind had spread, and soon the Great Hall behind us had filled with people—from the kitchens, down the Grand Staircase (our two seamstresses), and from all corners of the house. They jostled for position inside the windows, and behind us at the door.

Out of the truck, eight men stepped down into the moonlit snow. Most carried guns; two, who came last, reached back into the body of the lorry and fetched great cans, filled, I presumed, with petrol or kerosene or some kind of flammable liquid. The men moved slowly, as though they had all the time in the world; each wore the “uniform” that I had seen so often in our cellars—the day-to-day clothes, the cap, the diagonal bandolier across the chest.

The pair with the cans of liquid knelt in the snow; from their greatcoat pockets they took wads of rags and began to lay them out in neat lines. One went back to the lorry and returned with, strangely, two pairs of crude fireside tongs. I heard Harney swear beside me; I saw April look at them as though mesmerized; I saw the cooks and the maids stare with horror, their round eyes dark with fear. One of the men beside the lorry spoke an order of some kind; the kneeling pair poured the liquid on two rags and lit them; they flared on the snow, and the arsonists picked them up on the tongs, one each, and held them out. The flares illuminated every face of those gunmen, and threw the shadows of giants on the castle walls.

At another order, a young man stepped forward, ahead of the flaming rags, and aimed his rifle at us where we stood in the doorway. Now the leader came toward us, and I heard Harney mutter a name that meant nothing to me—obviously he knew the man, perhaps a former comrade-in-arms.

“Get everybody out,” the leader called.

Nobody moved.

“Once more—get everybody out.” He did not seem agitated; he did not seem afraid or nervous.

We stood still, and at an order the young man with the rifle fired. I do not know what strategy they had prepared—perhaps he meant not to kill or wound any human. The bullet hit the arch above the door; I saw the chip of stone fly down in front of my eyes. My thoughts—how we seek refuge—went to Mr. Higgins, his beautiful cutting and polishing, and his words if he saw this bullet-hole.

Nobody moved—at least nobody that the raiding party could see; but inside the Great Hall, girls scurried and squealed in terror; how I felt for them. The leader stepped forward some more paces, and the men with the flaring tongs kept level with him; now they stood no more than ten yards from the door, and we could see their eyes in the dancing flames. Behind them, the moon stood low over the snowy fields.

“For the last time,” called the leader. “Everybody leave this building.”

We did not move—not Harney, not April, not I. The rifleman pulled back his bolt, the metallic sound clacking in the bosom of the castle's echoing walls. His leader spoke an order, and the rifleman lowered his barrel some feet. He sighted the gun even more carefully than the first time and squeezed the trigger. I closed my eyes. Beside me, the wall chipped as though a powerful wasp bit at it and moved on. Something fell to the floor behind me, inside the hallway, and I looked back; there sat the slug of the bullet, death's little black nose.

In the Great Hall, panic was breaking out, and yet we three, who had put this place back together after the ravages of time and enmity—we stood in the doorway, three figures of loving solidarity. I think we must each have sensed at that moment how much we had come through in a short time.

As the boy prepared his gun to fire again, the three of us left the front door, and calmly, in no hurry at all, we walked side by side to stand directly in front of the boy with the rifle.

As he could not now fire at anything—except the sky—without hitting us point-blank, he did not know what to do and glanced across at his leader for direction. The men with the burning torches also grew uncertain; their flames seemed less robust than before. Their leader wore a disbelieving look—and I think it had less to do with this flouting of his authority than with genuine surprise that three people could be so foolhardy as to walk unarmed at a squad of men carrying and aiming guns.

Nobody moved, and nobody spoke. One man accidentally dropped the flare from the jaws of his tongs. As he bent to pick it up, I heard April snap at him, “Do not touch it.” The cool and educated English voice cut through the air—and I glanced again at the moon, which was brilliant and large.

Their leader stepped some feet toward where we stood — but he did not come near us; his men, whom we now faced no more than two or three yards away, did not know where to look. The second flare-carrier dropped his flames, and they fizzled out in the snow, leaving a black mark like a sin.
April broke our ranks, walked to the leader, and confronted him.

“Stephen Meehan, how dare you? How dare you come here?”

I felt Harney flinch. Meehan reached for his handgun; how had she known his name?

“Put that gun away—or are you shooting women these days as well as children?”

Harney beside me murmured, “No, stop, April, stop.”

Meehan stepped back and screamed an order—in Gaelic. But nobody moved. Again he reached down to his belt, and this time he pulled out the gun.

“Put that back,” April said in a voice so clear it could be heard on the mountainside. She turned away from Meehan and addressed the men who had not obeyed Meehan's orders.

“Listen! If you put this place to the torch—you are burning your own property. This estate has been handed over to the new Irish state—for the new Irish people to enjoy. It was built by the Irish. And it was managed by the Irish. And it was repaired and restored by the Irish. Is that the respect you have for your countrymen?”

She turned again to Meehan and pointed an arm to the heights of the castle.

“Your great-grandfather was the mason who built that turret.” And now she turned again to the men, standing transfixed in the snow. “If any of you—any one of you—if you come from near here, then you are probably here because this place kept your forebears alive. Gave them work. And will give you work—and your children. This estate is the largest employer in the county. Barbarians wouldn't behave the way you're proposing to do. What has this to do with the Treaty, you savages?”

She turned on her heel, walked back to the castle, went in through the doorway, and was swallowed by the yellow light of the lamps in the Great Hall. Meehan, revolver in hand, half-made a step to follow her, then changed his mind and walked away. The men with the guns sloped toward the lorry, changed their minds, and walked down toward the mouth of the avenue, where it disappears into the trees—and their young marksman ran to catch up with them. Both of the torch-bearers climbed into the front of the lorry; one started the engine, and they drove away.

This left Stephen Meehan, and Harney muttered, “We'll not take our eyes off this fellow.”

Meehan looked wild; the light caught his eyes' whites, and he stared at us in a fixed way. He began to wag the gun as though it were accompanying some remarks that he was about to make. Then, walking backward, looking at us all the time, he stepped a wide circle away from us and ran after the truck. The driver had stopped, obviously to wait for Meehan; Harney turned to the castle and made for the door at a trot. I, not knowing why, waited—and watched.

Under the moon I could have read a book that night; the reflection of the snows made it brighter. Meehan climbed into the back of the truck— but still it stayed, ready to enter the trees that overhang those reaches at the top of the avenue. I could see the men inside the truck—they sat like soldiers along each side; I could count them; I could see where Meehan sat, nearest the rear. But directly across from him there must have been a vacant seat—it wanted one more figure. As I watched, a man came out of the little beech grove, in what we called the Front Field, that leads down to the main road. He carried a gun, and even though he stumbled in the snow, I would recognize his walk anywhere. He saw me, and I am pleased to say that I believe he looked sheepish as he climbed into the lorry, and hammered the butt of his gun upon the floor as a signal to drive away.