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—Are you English? an old American asked my father one day.

—No, the opposite, my father replied.

When my father beat me, he was his own opposite.

In May 1923, the last of the IRA
óglaigh
laid down their weapons and my old man grew even older. Our people were divided. Ireland was cut in two. Pat Meehan had lost the war. He was no longer a man but a failure. He began drinking a lot, roaring a lot, fighting. Beating his children. He had had three of them when his army surrendered. On 8 March 1925, I joined Seánie, Róisín and Mary, all of us crammed together like sardines in the big bed. Seven others were still to emerge from my mother’s belly. Two wouldn’t survive.

I witnessed my father’s courage one last time in November 1936. He was coming back from Sligo. He and some old IRA members had attacked a public meeting of Blueshirts, the Irish fascists, who were going to fight in Spain under General Franco. After the pitched battle of bare fists and broken chairs, my father and his comrades had decided to join the Spanish Republican cause. For several days, he talked of nothing but leaving for combat. He was handsome, standing tall, feverish, marching around our kitchen with great soldier’s strides. He wanted to rally the men of the Connolly Column of the International Brigades. He said that Ireland had lost a battle and that the war was still being played out over there. My father wasn’t just a Republican: Catholic by happenstance, he had fought his whole life for the social revolution. He believed the IRA ought to be a revolutionary army. He revered our national flag but admired the red of the workers’ struggle.

He was forty-one, I was eleven. He had packed his bag for Madrid. I remember that morning. My mother was in the kitchen; they had been talking all night. She had cried. He had his face of stone on. She was peeling potatoes and saying our names one after the other, whispering them. It was a prayer, a sorrowful litany. She was there, at the table, her body gently moving back and forth, reciting us like the beads of a rosary. ‘Tyrone ... Kevin ... Áine ... Brian ... Niall ...’ My father stood at the front door with his back turned to her, his forehead pressed against the wood. She told him that if he left we would go hungry. That she’d never be able to look after us all. She told him that without her man, the earth would no longer provide for us. People’s eyes would turn when we passed. She told him the Sisters of Notre Dame of the Compassion would take us away. That we’d be sent to Quebec or Australia on Father Nugent’s boats, along with the street children. She told him that she’d be alone, would let herself fade away. And that he would die, would never come back. And that Spain may as well be farther away than hell itself. I remember my father’s movement. He punched the door, just once, as if calling on the fallen angel. He turned around slowly and looked at my mother with her lips shut tight, at the table covered in peelings. He took up the bag he’d made ready for the next day and hurled it across the room, into the fireplace. The fire itself seemed surprised. It drew back under the blast of air, and then the blue flames enveloped the cloth pouch and you could smell the peat and the fabric.

My father was transfixed. He sometimes lashed out like that, without grasping the meaning of what he was doing. One day he kicked me in the small of my back and then looked at me lying on my stomach, my arms folded under me, not comprehending what I was doing on the ground. He set me back on my feet, brushed down my legs grazed with gravel. He took me in his arms, telling me he was sorry, but that everything was my fault all the same, that I shouldn’t have looked at him with a challenge in my eyes and that smile on my face. But that he loved me. That he loved me as best he could. Another time, he saw blood in my mouth. I recognized the acrid taste and let it run down my chin and made my eyes roll like someone about to pass out. I think he was scared. He wiped my lips and neck with his open hand. He repeated ‘My God!’ over and over, as if someone other than him had just hit me. Sometimes, in the darkness, after having struck me, he’d run his fingers under my eyes. He wanted to check whether I was crying. I knew he’d do this. From the first blows, I’d know it. He’d always conclude his punishments by ascertaining my grief. But I didn’t cry. I never cried. ‘But cry, why don’t you?!’ my mother would beg. While I protected my face, I’d slide my fingers into my mouth, wet them with saliva and smear my cheeks. Then he’d take my spittle for tears, sure that his devil of a son had finally learned his lesson.

That morning in front of the hearth he had that same surprised look on his face. He didn’t understood what he’d just done. He looked at his bag, all his belongings, his life. His trousers, his collarless shirts, his two cardigans, his spare pipe. It was an abrupt inferno. The bag was smothered by the flames. Spain burned, along with his hopes of revenge and his dreams of honour. My mother didn’t move, didn’t say another word. Silence. Just the sound of my father’s shoes crackling like wood. And his Bible, which gave off a very blue flame.

My father took me by the arm and pulled me out of the house by force. He dragged me along like that as far as the lane and then let me go. He walked, and I followed him in silence. We headed towards the port. His eyes were nearly closed. When we came across McGarrigle and George the donkey, my father spat on the ground. The animal was braying under the old coalman’s shoves.

—
Éirinn go Brách!
my father roared after hitting the creature. ‘Ireland Forever!’ The war cry of the United Irishmen, the sacred phrase decorating their green flag with its golden harp. It was Friday, 9 November 1936. Padraig Meehan had just raised his hand to an ass, and I had simultaneously lost a father and a hero.

In Killybegs, my father ended up ‘the bastard’, a nickname whispered when his back was turned. The senior IRA member, the legendary veteran, the magnificent orator, the evening storyteller, the pub singer, the hurler, the greatest stout drinker ever born on this Donegal soil. He, Padraig Meehan, had become a feared man, avoided in the street, ignored in the pub, abandoned to his forgotten corner between the dartboard and the men’s toilets. He had become a bastard, that is to say, in the end, a man of no importance.

Pat Meehan died with his pockets full of stones. That’s how they knew he wanted to end his life. He left us alone in December 1940. He dressed in his Sunday clothes under one of my mother’s endless silences. He left the house one morning to sit in his spot in Mullin’s. He drank as he did every day, a lot, and wouldn’t let anyone clear away his empty glasses. He wanted them to pile up, packed together on the table to show what he was capable of. He drank alone, didn’t read, spoke to nobody. That night, we waited for him.

At dawn, my mother wrapped herself in her shawl to protect baby Sara asleep in her belly. She searched the deserted village for her husband. I went to the pub. The barman was rolling beer barrels along the pavement with his hands. My father had left the pub towards one in the morning, one of the last. Just before closing, he had wandered between the tables, trying to catch someone’s eye. Nobody would look at him. The owner showed him the door with a tilt of his chin. When he went out, he turned left, headed towards the port. He bumped against the walls of his village as he walked. Two witnesses saw him bend down close to the quarry and pick up something from the roadside. It was very cold. They found him on the village outskirts in the early hours, on a road leading to the sea. He was grey, lying on the frozen ground, ice for blood. His left arm was raised, fist clenched as if he’d been fighting with an angel. Before moving him, the gardaí thought his death an accident. Drunk, fallen over, unable to get up again, sleeping it off till morning arrived.

It was only when they turned the body over that they understood. My father had died on his way to death. He had filled his pockets with rocks. They filled his trousers, his cardigan, his jacket, his blue woollen overcoat. He’d even slipped stones into his cap. These were the shards of rock he was gathering the night before in the quarry. He was walking towards his end when his heart had stopped. He wanted to die like the ordinary men of Donegal, to walk into the sea until the water took him. He was leaving, stuffed with his earth, without a word, without a tear. Just the wind, the waves and the light of the dead. Padraig Meehan wanted this legendary end. My father left the world a poor wreck, his face pressed against the frost, and his rocks, for nothing.

2

When my father died, people turned away. Misery was contagious. It was bad luck to watch us walk by. We were no longer a family but a pale, straggly herd. My brothers, sisters and I made a pitiful troupe, led by a she-wolf on the brink of madness. We’d walk in single file, each of us holding on to the next by the end of a coat. For three months we lived on charity. In exchange for cabbages and potatoes, we helped out at the presbytery. Róisín and Mary used to scrub the floors of the corridors on their knees. Seánie, wee Kevin and myself used to wash windows by the dozen. Áine, Brian and Niall would help in the refectory and my mother would sit on a bench in the corridor, baby Sara nestled against her, hidden between shawl and breast. I wasn’t miserable, or even sad, or envious of anything. We lived off the little we got. In the evenings, my brothers and I used to fight the gang led by Timmy Gormley, the self-titled ‘king of the quays’. A dozen young lads, broken like us, pieced together. They were nasty, hot-tempered, and about as tough as toy soldiers, shocked when their noses would bleed. They called us ‘the Meehan gang’. Father Donoghue used to break us apart with a hazel rod. He had no time for our laughter and was even less tolerant of our after-dark shenanigans.

In the winter of 1940, I went to work on the bog with Seánie. Every day for two months. We used to help cut the turf with a spade and load the mules in spring and at Halloween, but this was the first time we had worked in the cold. The farmer needed extra hands for bringing in the harvest. The mud no longer sucked our shoes off but the cold water and ice turned them into cardboard. There were about twenty of us young lads in the ditches. The farmer called us his ‘hired hands’. It was nicer than calling us his orphans. We were frozen and shaking, our sods heaped up in our arms, heavy as a dead friend. In return for the work, the boss would give us some turf, bacon and milk. No money. He said that money was for men and we had no need to be drinking or smoking.

Joseph ‘Josh’ Byrne was the bravest of us all and the youngest, barely six years old. For nine hours a day, he carefully piled up his frozen sods and then ballasted the tarpaulin that protected them. And he sang, too. He gave us a little bit of heaven. With his singing we became sailors, our hands working with his voice, cutting the earth as we would have hoisted the sail. He sang in step with arms crossed, under the rain, in the wind, in Irish, in English. He sang while tapping the ground with his foot. He hadn’t yet learned how to read or write, so his words would stray at times. He’d invent rhymes and words and make us laugh.