What the Wind Knows(76)

Mick confirmed that peace talks had indeed commenced on 11 October, noting the date and asking me to bring Anne to London—or Dublin—when I could. He said, “I will be travelling to Dublin on the weekends as often as I can, trying to keep the leaders in the Dáil updated on the negotiations. I don’t want to be accused of keeping information from Dev or any of the others. I will do everything I can to make sure Anne’s prediction doesn’t come true. But she’s been right so far, Tommy. In a way, she’s prepared me. There’s a small measure of confidence and poise that comes when a man knows he is doomed. I have little expectation of a good outcome, and I think because of it, I am seeing things as they are and not as I wish they were. Bring her, Tommy. Maybe she’ll know what I should do next. God knows I’m in over my head. I don’t know what is best for my country. Men have died, men that I admired. They died for an idea, for a cause, and I believed in them. I believed in the dream of an independent Ireland. But ideas are easy. Dreams are even easier. They don’t require application.

“The British delegates are comfortable in their halls of power and confident in their position; Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament smell of authority and ages-old domination, neither of which the Irish have ever enjoyed. Lloyd George and his team go home at night and meet in their private studies, plotting how to divide and conquer the delegation here and the Irish leadership back home. Meeting after meeting, conference after subconference, we go round and round.

“It’s all a game, Tommy. To us, it is life and death; to the Brits, it is simply political maneuvering. They talk of diplomacy when we know diplomacy means dominion. Regardless, I know that my usefulness is expired. The way I’ve waged war over these last years won’t be possible after I return to Ireland. I am a known entity now. I’ve been undermined, and my methods of hide-and-seek, attack and retreat will no longer suffice. My picture has now been spread across the papers in England and in Ireland. If the talks break down, I will be lucky to make it safely out of London. Either this little ragtag Irish delegation comes to an agreement, or England and Ireland will descend into all-out war. We don’t have the men, the means, the weapons, or the will for that. Not among the regular folks. They want freedom. They’ve sacrificed a great deal for it. But they don’t want to be slaughtered. And I can’t, in good conscience, be the man that condemns them to that fate.”

The letter made me weep—crying for my friend, my country, and for a future that seems incredibly dim. I’ve gone to Sligo each day to read the Irish Times taped to the window of Lyons department store, but Anne has not pressed me or asked me about the proceedings. It’s as if she’s simply waiting, calm and resigned. She already knows what happens next, and her knowledge is a burden she has tried to bear silently.

When I told Anne that Mick asked for her, she readily agreed to help where she could, though I had to show her his letter before she believed it. She’s still half convinced he wants her dead. She shed tears when she read his melancholy summary, just as I did, and I had no words to console her. She stepped into my arms and comforted me instead.

I love her with an intensity I didn’t think myself capable of. Yeats writes about being changed utterly. I am changed utterly. Irrevocably. And though love is indeed a terrible beauty, especially given the circumstances, I can only revel in all its gory gloriousness.

When I’m not worrying over the fate of Ireland, I’m plotting a future that revolves around her. I’m thinking of her white breasts and the high arches in her small feet, of the way her hips flare and how her skin is like silk behind her ears and on the insides of her thighs. I’m thinking of the way she abandons the Irish inflections when we’re alone, and how her flattened vowels and softened Ts create an honesty between us that wasn’t there before.

Her American accent suits her. Then I begin thinking about how motherhood suits her as well and how her belly would look swollen with our child—someone for Eoin to love and look after. He needs a sibling. I imagine the stories she’ll tell the children, the stories she’s written and the stories she’ll write, and the people all over the world who will read them.

Then I start to think about changing her name. Soon.

T. S.





18





HIS CONFIDENCE


I broke my heart in two

So hard I struck.

What matter? For I know

That out of rock,

Out of desolate source,

Love leaps upon its course.

—W. B. Yeats

The boat Michael Collins was on was hours late docking at Dún Laoghaire; they’d hit a trawler in the Irish Sea and arrived a mere forty-five minutes before the eleven o’clock cabinet meeting with the Dáil. Michael had called Garvagh Glebe from London on December second and asked Thomas and me to meet him in Dublin. We’d driven through the night only to wait on the quay in the Model T for four hours, dozing and shivering while we watched for the boat’s arrival. Dublin was crawling with Black-and-Tan patrols and Auxiliaries again. It was as if Lloyd George had given them the signal to come out in force, a final visual reminder of what Ireland would be like indefinitely if an agreement wasn’t reached. We’d been stopped and searched twice, once as we arrived in Dublin and once when we’d parked on the wharf at Dún Laoghaire, waiting patiently as they shined their flashlights in our faces and down our bodies, inside the car, and through Thomas’s medical bag. I didn’t have papers, but I was a pretty female in the company of a doctor with a government stamp on his documents. They let us go without any trouble.