Kiss the Bullet Read online

  KISS THE BULLET

  Catherine Deveney

  For my family, and all our loved and lost.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE DOCUMENT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY CATHERINE DEVENEY

  Copyright

  THE DOCUMENT

  I write this for my daughter Niamh Mary O’Brien, for my grandchildren Johnny and Pat O’Brien, and my grandchildren’s children, that future generations may know what has passed, and may understand their place in the long struggle for Ireland. Lodged with William K. Prentice, of Prentice and Turner Solicitors, this 16th day of May 1966, with the instruction that it should be passed to my family after my death.

  Mary Seonaid O’Connor

  I became a bride as a copper sun set in bands of burnished gold over Kilmainham jail; a widow before it rose again. Every bride tends her groom’s body on their wedding night, but in my case it was to gently dab the mud and courtyard dust from the cheek Michael grazed against the flagstones as he fell to his death, to comb the stray strands of hair that flopped soft and spineless against the hard grey pallor of his immobile face. I touched him slowly, tenderly, with all the contained passion of a lifetime never to be lived, while a prison guard watched the corridor furtively and urged speed. I hurried not, my finger lingering on his cheek like a quivering, soft winged butterfly come to rest on sculpted stone. I looked at him, lifeless, and I loved him still. I did not cry.

  “Time,” the guard said, his voice low and urgent. “Time.”

  He kept his eyes averted, as though embarrassed by the intimacy he witnessed. He risked much for me. But he had his own reasons. The year was 1916. The guard was married to a cousin of John MacNeill, who was with Michael in the O’Connell Street Post office on Easter Monday, who read the declaration of a free Ireland to his comrades and died days later at the hands of soldiers who squashed him like a moth on a burning light. Michael did not know John MacNeill, but they were brothers in their cause and the guard had some respect for that. Both help and opposition have come from the strangest places.

  Michael rose from his sick bed to go to O’Connell Street that day. His face was waxy, the whistle in his chest unabated despite several winter months in the heat of Italy. He would not hear of shirking the task, of leaving it for those who were stronger. There was a greater sickness abroad in Ireland he said, than the sickness in Michael O’Connor’s lungs, and a sickness that was in greater need of remedy. I knew, in my heart, that he spoke the truth; that while his body was weak, there was no man stronger than he in honour and conviction.

  When he was imprisoned in Kilmainham for the part he played in the rising, there were those who said the sentence of death imposed on him was the second Michael O’Connor had received in his life, one from God and one from man, that he would never, in any case, have lived past another winter. I like to think they were wrong. The greatest medicine a man can receive is a cause to live and Michael had two: Ireland and me.

  My brother Padraig introduced us. They taught school together and were united in a love of Ireland and a loyalty to the Republican cause. Michael had the head of an academic and the soul of a poet. The first time he came to our house he was in a group of teachers Padraig brought home to sample my mother’s soda scones and tea. I was darning socks, using an orange stuffed in the toe to keep the shape, the way my mother had showed me. I listened quietly as the talk turned to the freedom of the Irish people, but every so often my eyes were drawn back to Michael.

  He was not, in the conventional way of things, a handsome man. He was too pale and slight for that, a thin, almost wolfish face with sharp cheekbones that seemed to push through thin, translucent skin like rocks through paper, and blue eyes that glittered with the intensity of a hunger I could only guess at. I thought later that men who fear their lives will be short live with a ferocity and urgency the healthy have no need of.

  “Is it worth it?” cried Joseph Connerty, pouring a spoonful of honey onto a scone that was crammed thick with peel and currants. “We are small and poor and no match for an English army.”

  “An English army that is already at war elsewhere,” Padraig pointed out.

  Michael was lifted by soldiers two weeks after Easter Monday. When word came that he had been granted permission to marry before his execution, it was a moment of triumphant sorrow. My wedding dress hung, covered in an old knotted sheet, in my bedroom cupboard. It had hung there three months; our wedding postponed twice through Michael’s ill-health. It was a delicate dress of ivory silk and chiffon, and a crown of apricot flowers with a short embroidered veil. There was only one thing I did not have ready.

  I hurried along the side of Stephen’s Green and down Grafton Street just as the shops were closing. It was a chill evening for the time of year, the cold air sharp in my lungs as I ran. I headed for Connerty’s Jewellers, the light from inside the shop a warm, orange glow against a grey, ominous sky. James Connerty stood outside at the windows; I heard the rattle of the shutters as he pulled the grills down over the glass. He glanced up as I hurried past, a nod of recognition. I did not stop to speak, but hurried inside.

  The shop was warm, discreet, a soft, thick carpet beneath my feet deadening any noise. My breathing, ragged and uneven, sounded harsh in the stillness and I felt momentarily embarrassed at my inability to speak. I tried to still my gasps with big deep breaths.

  “Madam?” said the young woman behind the counter, looking up in surprise.

  “A wedding ring,” I said, with as much composure as I could muster. “I have come to buy a wedding ring.”

  She gawped at me but I heard a voice at my back, felt a tiny, comforting touch of a hand on my spine.

  �
�I will deal with this, thank you Mairi.”

  James Connerty passed round my back and disappeared behind the counter reaching into his waistcoat pocket for a key. He knew, from his brother I suppose, what the situation was with Michael. He unlocked a slim drawer full of gold rings and slipped it out on to the counter top. Then he unrolled a length of red velour, his long slender white fingers spreading it deftly over the glass top before placing a few rings on it.

  “You may go home now,” he said to his assistant, and she did not wait to be told twice. It struck me, as she moved so swiftly to put on her coat and hat, that this would be a normal evening for her – and oh, how I envied her that.

  “Perhaps this?” said James Connerty quietly. “Or this?”

  I looked at the rings blankly, unable to truly see them. Should I simply buy the cheapest? It was true the marriage would be short, and after all, a ring was only an earthly symbol. But what it represented, the feeling inside, would last forever. I would wear this ring for the rest of my life. Slowly I picked up a beautiful slim band, engraved with orange blossom and stared at it.

  “How much is this one?” I asked.

  He did not reply, but merely wrapped the ring in a box and put it inside a bag and handed it to me silently.

  “I must pay,” I said and he replied that I was paying more than most, which brought tears to my eyes. I thanked him, hurried from the shop and went to prepare. I wish I could tell you more about the ceremony but the chapel of Kilmainham jail has all but faded in my mind, though I do recall how tiny it was. I have only been in it once after all, and that for scarcely half an hour. I do recall, though, kneeling at the arched altar, staring up at the cross on the white washed wall and having a powerful sense that I fully understood the crucifixion, the nature of suffering, for the first time in my life.

  Just when it felt that it was more than I could endure, I felt Michael’s hand in mine. I looked up at him and he mouthed quietly, “Do not break. For me, do not break.” And he smiled and squeezed my fingers. I smiled back, determined that I would seize the joy of these brief moments of union, live them for what they were and not for what they would never become. When we were pronounced man and wife, Michael leant forward to kiss my cheek.

  “Mo chuisle mo chroi,” he murmured. Pulse of my heart.

  Afterwards, we were given just ten minutes before he was taken for execution by firing squad. Ten minutes during which the guards never left our sides. There will come a time, surely, when such barbarity will not be believed. I write this now in truth, in testimony that these events occurred. At first we were so overwhelmed by so many words to speak in such a short time that we fell silent and merely held one another. Then Michael said, “While there is breath left in you, fight for what we believe. For justice and for Ireland.” I clung to him and when the guards said time, he repeated quietly in my ear his words from the chapel.

  “Do not break. For my sake, do not break.” I did not.

  I heard the shots from the courtyard, felt them pulse in my own chest. In the morning, I quietly watched the sun rise, the sky pink and streaked, and I felt him then, felt him everywhere around me. It was as if he was beyond the universe, bleeding into the world, into that pink sky, his dripping wounds staining this dawn and every new Irish dawn that was to come.

  His words shone for me like stars in a deep, passionate sky. They switched the world on, made me feel I could see the universe better. What he was, guided them, what he felt, breathed power into them. His poetry was everything. Rebellion whispered through it like a breeze rippling gently through long grass. And pride and love and ferocity and hunger and ambition. Ireland, his Ireland. I fell in love with his poems and then I fell in love with him.

  I fell for the best of him, I am certain of that. I fell for what was inside him, the thoughts that lined his head. Maybe I saw that his body was disintegrating already, perhaps I looked for the smooth stone of eternity in the physical rubble. I only know that I found it, whatever it was I had been looking for, that the vague feeling of discontent that I had always carried melted magically away. I used to think I had too many questions without knowing the answers. But Michael was the answer to a question I didn’t even know I had posed.

  I lusted after his mind and he encouraged me to satiate myself with him. And everything else followed. Somehow he knew without being told that the key to my body was my mind. He had both. Forgive my bluntness. When you, my family, read this, I will no longer be able to feel embarrassment. But right now, I must tell you that in any case I feel none. As I came to discover, there were many who wanted me to wear my relationship with Michael like a badge of shame, the mark of the whore. I would not, and will not, do so. All these years later, I carry every part of him with me, including his glorious defiance.

  Let me tell also tell you that Michael was a religious man. He attended mass every day he was well enough. When my time comes, I too, will stand before God and answer to him without fear. No, I will not be meek about what happened. I will waste no time on regret or disingenuous remorse. My tribute to Michael is that he liberated my mind, that he freed me from convention. I am an old woman now and I have seen so many changes – my ‘revelation’ is tame indeed by the standards of many now.

  I lay with no man before Michael. My mother was uneasy about the free and easy nature of our time together, the way we roamed the hills all day and talked politics all night. Politics was not for women, my mother said. Dear mother. When I tried once, tentatively, to tell her that I had fallen in love with Michael’s poetry and his mind she raised her eyes and muttered, “Oh my God, girl. You’ll pay a heavy price for your dreams.” I was young; I did not understand her cynicism. Not then. Then she attacked the floor with a scrubbing brush. She could not fathom the equality that Michael and I shared. No man should countenance it, my mother thought; no woman should desire it.

  The day we took the picnic to the hills was at the height of summer, a day when the sun beat hot but was rivalled by a stiff warm breeze that cooled the sweat on our brows as we climbed. Michael rolled his sleeves up and I moved more slowly when I heard the soft whistle in his chest. I took off the primrose yellow cardigan mother had knitted to go with my summer dress, felt the rays of sunshine hit the pallor of my bare forearms. There was that special silence up there, the silence that is only broken by the sound of the breeze and the far off bleat of sheep. When we spread the blanket, we felt like we were on the edge of the world looking down.

  It was two weeks before the Easter weekend that was to become the Easter rising of 1916. Planning a wedding was unthinkable in those weeks, though we spoke often about our marriage and what it would be. That day we talked of how we longed to reach a time where we would be answerable to no one but ourselves, when we would go home to each other at the end of every day. We looked down over the hillside as if looking over the precipice into another world. Pretend, I said, pretend that the world is ours to own, to hold in our hands and spin. Will it spin into infinity, he asked, spin through darkness and light? Yes, I said, and I lay back on the blanket and let the sun soak into my face, felt the heat on my closed eyelids. I believed in infinity then. I still do. Will you be with me, he whispered, his mouth next to mine, so close I felt the vibration of his speech on my lips.

  “Will you be with me for all eternity?

  I opened my eyes.

  “I will.”

  He kissed me then, and the breeze carried the smell of burgeoning greenery to me as we lay, and it was translated into a bracken stained kiss, full of sun and promise and summer growth. When his fingers found the buttons of my dress, I did not demur. I knew this was a transition; a transition and a promise and a declaration. For my part, I have kept the vows that I made that day on the hill in the presence of God and Michael. And later, when the fire was still in my cheeks and he held me to him gently and whispered against my hair, “No regrets?” I answered honestly, none.

  A month later he was dead and I was pregnant. The knowledge took my breath a
way, left me gasping like a netted fish. I hugged the secret to me, let it grow inside me with the child in my womb. Then one day I was with my mother, chatting to her in the kitchen while she baked, making her tea. I went to the cupboard to get sugar and I saw her look up casually from putting floured scones onto a baking tray, then her eyes whiplashed back to me. I was standing sideways on to her and her eyes bore into my stomach. I looked at her and she glanced up at me, horrified.

  “Sit down mother,” I said quietly.

  She hesitated wiping a floured hand down her cheek.

  “Are you …?” she said, her eyes fearful, willing me to deny it.

  I said nothing but nodded.

  “Oh mother of God,” she said, and sat down suddenly at the kitchen table. “Mother of God,” she repeated and she began to rock gently back and forth, wiping her floured hands on her apron.

  Her reaction made me fearful but I tried to keep calm.

  “Mother,” I said, sitting beside her, “I’ll have a piece of him, a piece of him left, all of my own. D’you see? He won’t have left. It’s like he’s made sure I won’t be alone.”

  “Ah Mary,” she said irritably, despairingly, shaking her head and raising her eyes to the ceiling, “Mary, Mary, Mary, what are ye sayin’ girl? Not alone? You’re about to find out just how alone alone can be. Have you have any idea … have you any idea … what …?” and then she caught sight of me, the fear rigid in my eyes, my facial muscles turned to stone.

  “Come and sit down,” she said more gently, pulling out a chair beside her.

  “You’ll have to go away,” she said. “Y’undertsand? Away from here to have the baby before it’s adopted. Folks round here know about Michael, Mary. They know you weren’t together after your marriage. There’s a convent, takes girls in your position. I’ll …”

  “I’m keepin’ it.”

  She stopped.

  “Mary,” she said softly. “You have no idea. No idea.”

  “He was my husband.”

  “People are sorry for you right now. But believe me their pity will turn to something else when they hear this. I know. Believe me, I know what they’re like.”