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—See you, Tyrone!

—Safe home, Meehan!

Chairs were being piled up and tables dragged across the floor; there was the sound of glasses being stacked, the iron shutter of the bar being noisily lowered. The murmur of drunkenness, of laughter, of beer, of overly loud voices. I put my jacket on. My cap. I staggered across the room. On a wall was a framed portrait of Danny, crossed with a black veil. I paused. The sudden neon lights splashed across his forehead and expression.

Lieut. Daniel ‘Danny’ Finley

1924–1969

2nd Batt. C Company

Óglaigh na hÉireann

His eyes were raised. He wasn’t looking at me. He had decided to leave me in peace. I felt Jack’s hand in mine. We went out into the night that smelled of rain. I raised my collar and looked at the street, the low houses, the dark windows, the heavy shadows staggering home drunk. I dropped Jack’s hand. I raised my fist and roared.

—
Éirinn go Brách!

—
Éirinn go Brách!
shouted my son in turn.

And then I let out a long braying. A dreadful wail, the cry of the donkey.

11

Killybegs, Thursday, 28 December 2006

Jack came for nothing. He had promised his mother he would come, so he did, end of story. An icy visit. It was just two strangers in the room.

—How are you?

He raised his eyes from the ceramic mug he was holding in both hands to warm himself up. He looked at me. He drank the last drop of tea.

—Are you speaking to me?

I got up. The fire was dying with the cold.

—Are you speaking to Jack Meehan, is that it?

I turned my back on him and poked at some embers. My words were quiet.

—I’m speaking to my son.

—Your son? Do you mean that I have a father?

—You have a father, yes.

I placed a damp log on the flames.

Jack shouted.

—I had a father for twenty years, and then he died.

—No. He’s in front of you, he’s stirring the fire.

He pushed his chair back. It fell over. He brushed his mug aside with an elbow. A broken crash. He was standing.

—Stop it! You’re no longer anything to me, understand? Nothing! You’re a traitor! You’ve been a traitor for twenty-six years! You admitted it, twenty-six years! It was a traitor who came to visit me in prison! Do you remember when I got out? Can you remember? I was beside you in the car and you told me you were proud of me. Remember? Proud of me!

I took my place again at my father’s table.

—Proud of me? I spent twenty years in your British friends’ prisons! Twenty fucking years! And you’re proud of me?

—Do you want some more tea?

—You betrayed Mam, betrayed Ireland, betrayed every living thing close to us. You are my traitor. You no longer even have the right to be living here!

I looked at Jack. There was so much Meehan in him. I nearly smiled in weariness. I told myself that he was all that was left to me.

—How can you look me in the eye? Huh? How can you?

—I’m looking at my son.

—Never say that word again, never! I forbid it.

As a child, Jack loved Killybegs. He used to carry the water from the well, sit dreaming in front of the candles, make fantastic shadows against the walls in the light from the storm-lamp, walk down by the harbour and laugh delightedly at the boats. For hours on end he would climb up and down the bare hills, over endless low stone walls, battling with reddish-brown bracken that came up as far as his waist. He would dream of islands as far as the eye could see, rising like froth on the ocean. Sheila would want to go home after three days, but Jack would beg her to stay a little longer. For him, it was a house of trappers, of Indians, a cottage from before the Famine, when people hadn’t yet begun having to count the steaming potatoes on their plates. Even once he was a Fianna, he remained a child. In Belfast, he had the furrowed brow, hands calloused from holding bricks, he smelled of petrol and rage. I recognized the same intensity as Tom Williams in his eyes and I was afraid for him. But here, back in Killybegs, he’d throw a fishing rod over his shoulder, stalk mullet and come back along the bog, whacking the thickets with the branch of an oak to keep the bad fairies away.

One day in 1979 with Dave ‘Snoopy’ Barrett, Jack shot down a policeman on Castle Street. Jack was driving the getaway motorbike. Snoopy shot three times at the uniforms barring their path. Farther up on the Glen Road, they ran into some of the army’s armoured cars. Jack decided to spin off to the left, into a narrow street. A Republican taxi was following close behind. Snoopy stretched out his arm to warn the driver they were turning, the gun forgotten in his outstretched hand. The soldiers gave chase. Jack and Snoopy hit a kerb and surrendered without a fight. They waited there, faces against the ground and hands behind their heads. When they were arrested, the death of the policeman Jack had shot was not yet known. Dozens of residents had come out of their brick houses to watch. Snoopy shouted his name to the small crowd. Jack cried out, ‘Meehan! From Dholpur Lane!’ The British didn’t shoot. They left them alive. They were forced to try them. Because that day, in that little back street off Glen Road, dozens of nationalists saw that Dave Barrett and Jack Meehan had been arrested by the army. And that they had climbed into the armoured cars alive. The British would shoot to kill. That fact horrified some people on our side. Not me. I’ve never known the enemy to be honourable. I’ve tried to kill him, he’s tried to shoot me down. War has never been any other way.

My son was sentenced to a life behind bars: twenty-one years. He was freed in 2000 with the last remaining Republican prisoners and he left prison in a sadder state than he went in.

—Where’s our flag?

That had been the first thing to come out of his mouth. We were driving back from Long Kesh. Sheila was in the back seat and Jack was beside me. She was holding his hand over the armrest and we were silent. Ireland was welcoming my son home. A cloudless sky, a desert sun and a gentle breeze. Jack had his forehead against the glass. He would have to heal twenty-one barbed-wire years. And there on the side of the road, in a wire-fenced yard, in the shadow of a school, the British flag was rippling. Large and brand-new.

—Where’s our flag? Jack asked.

He was trying to catch his mother’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

—All of that for this?

Sheila murmured. The peace process, the negotiations, compromises. Our flag would soon fly freely. The important thing was that our children be set free and their fathers stop dying.

Jack looked at me. I kept staring at the road. All of that for this? I responded that it was a beginning. Everything had to have a beginning. There were no more armoured patrols on our streets, no more raids, no more checkpoints. The British were dismantling their barracks, and their watchtowers on the border. The police were putting parking tickets on badly parked cars on the Falls Road. Did he understand? Those slips under the windscreen wipers, like in London or Liverpool. And did he know that Jacky Nolan, John McIntyre, his pals from school, had joined the police? It’s not only Protestants any more, Catholics can wear that uniform, too. And that, well, that changes everything, didn’t he think? He raised his hand, asked me to be quiet.

For a long time Jack ate with his back to us, facing the wall. He found sitting down to a meal obscene. He had spent nine years in solitary confinement. He talked to himself at first. His movements were more limited than they had been. In his room, he put the mattress on the floor. He tried to build a life with Fiona, a childhood friend. Then with Lucy. Then with us. He came back to the house at forty-seven years of age. A lookout, then a Fianna,
óglach
, lieutenant, captain of the Irish Republican Army, and today he is a night porter in a Belfast pub. He separates drunken kids who ask him who he thinks he is. Who remind him that the IRA is no longer around to back him up. That he’s only a penguin in a black suit with a white shirt. A nothing. And he doesn’t reply.

Jack got up at last. He looked at me. He put on his anorak, his gloves. The hour wasn’t yet up. Sheila hadn’t beeped the horn from the road.

—At least wait till your mother’s here.

—My mother? For all those years she woke up beside a stranger, my mother. You know that? Do you understand that? She’s like a dead woman!

—I understand.

—No! You don’t understand anything. You don’t get anything at all. You can’t know what it’s like to find yourself without a father, without a husband, without anything any more! My father? He was Tyrone Meehan! The great Tyrone! Hero of fuck all, yeah! We gave you our love, our trust, our pride. We gave you everything! And you have betrayed those who loved you, those who protected you! You remember when I was a kid, every night I helped you to barricade our door so that those bastards wouldn’t get into our house? Those bastards, they were you!

—I understand.

—You know what they’re calling you in Belfast? ‘That man’. That’s all. Nobody will speak your name. We are the traitor’s relatives.

—I know that.

—What are we going to do, Mam and I? How are we going to cope?

—You’re going to carry on without me.

—There will never again be cheer in our house.

I lowered my head. Since that morning, an old question had been banging around in my head: ‘Is there a life before death?’ Tom Williams had taught it to us to keep hope alive.

Jack made for the door.

—I need you, son.

He stayed standing there facing the latch, the lock, the double chains I’d installed. His back was turned to me, his shoulders drooping. He sighed. Then silence. It lasted a long time, that silence. He placed his fist on the wall and buried his head in his arm. He didn’t cry.

—I can’t. It’s too painful. What you’ve done to us is just too awful, Da.

—I need you both.

He turned to me one last time. He was as beautiful as pure rage. I knew that once he walked through that door, he wouldn’t come back. I searched for a line, a word. He stepped out into the frost. Standing in the doorway, his hands in his pockets, tiny against the forest.

—Jack?

He shrugged his shoulders.

—I love you.

That was all I had.

He looked at me, flummoxed, head leaning to one side like he used to do as a child.

—I love you, I said again.

He frowned. He looked as though he didn’t understand. Backing away, he took the path leading back to the road. Without a word. He walked away from the house, his childhood, the old well, the soft flame of the candles, the pixies, the forest; he left the village of his ancestors, his father, all the Ireland I’d given him. He was walking with his arms spread wide, stumbling because he couldn’t see where he was going. My child, my son, my wee soldier. He was crying. His mouth was open in a mask of suffering. He was fleeing, running away from me. His steps crunched over the wood, the stone, the frozen earth. I placed a hand on the icy wall; there was nothing else I could do. Not for him, or for me. I wasn’t even a traitor any longer. I was dead. And so was he. And all of us. And all the others to come. I was no longer waiting for anything. And I still didn’t know where our flag was.