What the Wind Knows(5)

Declan had made Anne promise to stay out of harm’s way. She, Brigid, and little Eoin were holed up in my house in Mountjoy Square when Declan and I joined the Volunteers marching through the streets, intent on carrying out our revolution. Anne joined Declan in the GPO on Wednesday, kicking in a window and climbing over the jagged edge to reach him. She hadn’t even noticed the blood streaming from a slice on her left leg and palm from the broken glass until I made her sit so I could tend to it. She told Declan that if he was going to die, she was going to die with him. Rage and threaten as he would, she turned a deaf ear and made herself useful playing messenger between the GPO and Jacob’s factory, since no one would give her a gun. The women were much more able to move about without being questioned or fired upon. I don’t know when her luck gave out. The last time I saw her was early Friday morning, when the flames creeping down both sides of Abbey Street made abandoning the post office unavoidable.

I had started evacuating the wounded to Jervis Street Hospital with a stretcher I’d begged off a St. John Ambulance worker. He gave me three Red Cross armlets as well so that we wouldn’t be fired upon—or stopped—as we moved south on Henry Street to Jervis and back again. Connolly’s ankle was shattered, but he wouldn’t leave. I left him in the care of Jim Ryan, a medical student who’d been there since Tuesday. I made the trip three times before darkness fell and barricades prevented two Volunteers—boys from Cork who’d come to Dublin to join the fight—and me from returning. I told the boys to get out of the city. To start walking. The rebellion was over, and they were needed at home. Then I went back to the Jervis Street Hospital and found an empty corner, folded my coat beneath my head, and collapsed, only to be awakened by a nurse, who was certain that the hospital was going to be evacuated due to the flames that had followed me from the GPO. I went back to sleep, too spent to care. When I awoke, the fire had been contained, and the rebel forces had surrendered.

The staff at Jervis Street Hospital told the British soldiers that I was a surgeon when they came to round up the insurgents, and miraculously I wasn’t detained. Instead, I spent the rest of the day attending to the dead and dying on Moore Street, where forty men had tried to secure a line of retreat from the burning GPO. Civilians and rebels alike had been mowed down by Crown forces. Women, children, and old men had been caught in the crossfire, and their dead faces were covered in soot. Flies buzzed round their heads, some of them burned beyond recognition. In my heart of hearts, I could not divorce myself from some of the blame. It is one thing to fight for freedom; it is another to condemn the innocent to die in your war.

That is where I found Declan.

I said his name, ran my hands down his blackened cheeks, and he opened his eyes to my voice. My heart leapt. I thought for a minute I might be able to save him.

“You’ll take care of Eoin, won’t you, Thomas? You’ll take care of Eoin and my mother. And Anne. Look after Anne.”

“Where is she, Declan? Where’s Anne?”

But then his eyes closed, and his breath rattled in his throat. I lifted him up, over my shoulder, and ran for help. He was gone. I knew it, but I carried him to the Jervis Street Hospital, demanded a place to lay him down, and washed the blood and grit from his skin and hair and straightened his clothes. I bandaged his wounds, which would never heal, and then I carried him through the streets again, up Jervis, across Parnell, through Gardiner Row, and into Mountjoy Square. Nobody stopped me. I carried a dead man on my shoulders through the centre of town, and the people were so shell-shocked, they looked the other way.

I don’t think Declan’s mother, Brigid, will ever recover. The only person who might love Declan more than Anne is Brigid. I am taking him home to Dromahair. Brigid wants to bury him in Ballinagar, beside his father. And then I’ll come back to Dublin for Anne. God forgive me for leaving her behind.

T. S.





2





THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE


I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping, with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

—W. B. Yeats

I flew into Dublin, smuggling the urn of Eoin’s ashes in my suitcase. I had no idea if there were international laws—or Irish laws—about transporting the dead and decided I didn’t want to know. My suitcase was waiting for me at the baggage claim, and I double-checked to make sure the urn hadn’t been confiscated before renting a car to drive northwest to Sligo, where I would stay for a few days while I explored nearby Dromahair. I hadn’t adequately prepared myself to drive on the wrong side of the road and spent much of the three-hour journey to Sligo weaving across the road and screaming in terror, unable to enjoy the landscape for fear I would miss a sign or hit an oncoming car.

I rarely drove in Manhattan; there was no reason to own a car. But Eoin had insisted I learn how and get a driver’s license. He said freedom was the ability to go wherever your heart called, and growing up, we’d driven up and down the East Coast on little vacations and adventures. The summer I turned sixteen, we spent July crossing the entire United States, starting in Brooklyn and ending in Los Angeles. That is when I learned to drive, traversing long stretches of highway between small towns that I would never see again. Over rolling hills, through the red cliffs of the West, across the expanse of nothing and everything with Eoin at my side.