“I know it,” he said, opening his heavy eyelids and regarding me solemnly.
“I don’t. I don’t know it. I love you so much, and I’m not ready to let you go.” I was crying in earnest, already feeling his loss, my loneliness, and the years that stretched before me without him.
“You’re beautiful. Smart. Rich.” He laughed weakly. “And you did it all by yourself. You and your stories. I’m so proud of you, Annie lass. So proud. But you don’t have a life beyond your books. You don’t have love.” His eyes clouded and searched the space beyond my head. “Not yet. Promise me you’ll go back, Annie.”
“I promise.”
After that he slept, but I could not. I stayed by his side, hungry for his presence, for the words he might say, for the comfort I’d always drawn from him. He awoke once more, panting from the pain, and I helped him swallow another pill.
“Please. Please, Annie. You must go back. I need you so badly. We both do.”
“What are you talking about, Eoin? I’m right here. Who needs me?”
He was delirious, floating in pain, beyond sentience, and I could only hold his hand and pretend I understood.
“Sleep now, Eoin. The pain will be easier to bear.”
“Don’t forget to read the book. He loved you. He loved you so much. He’s been waiting, Annie.”
“Who, Eoin?” I couldn’t hold back the tears, and they dripped on our clasped hands.
“I miss him. It’s been so long.” He sighed deeply, his eyes never opening. What he saw was in his memory, in his pain, and I let him ramble until the mumbled words became shallow breaths and restless dreams.
The night ended, and a day dawned, but Eoin didn’t wake again.
2 May 1916
He’s dead. Declan is dead. Dublin is in ruins, Seán Mac Diarmada is in Kilmainham Gaol awaiting the firing squad, and I don’t know what’s become of Anne. Yet here I sit, filling the pages of this book as though it will bring them all back. Every detail is a wound, but they are wounds I feel compelled to reopen, to examine, if only to make sense of it all. And someday, little Eoin will need to know what happened.
I intended to fight. I started Easter Monday with a rifle in my hands that I put down and never picked up again. From the moment we stormed into the General Post Office, I was up to my elbows in blood and chaos in the makeshift first aid post. There was very little organization and a great deal of excitement, and for the first few days, no one knew what to do. But I knew how to bind wounds and staunch blood flow. I knew how to make a splint and dig out a bullet. For five days, under constant shelling, that’s what I did.
I moved through the days in a dream, never resting, so tired I could have slept on my feet, my head bobbing in time with the artillery rounds. Through it all, I couldn’t believe it was happening. Declan was euphoric, and Anne was moved to tears when the gunboat started firing on Sackville Street, as if the use of big weapons solidified our dreams of a rebellion. She was sure the British were finally listening. I teetered between pride and despair, between my boyhood dreams of nationalism and Irish rebellion, and the sheer destruction being meted out. I knew it was futile, but I was compelled through friendship or loyalty to take part, even if my part was only to see that the rebels—the whole ragtag, idealistic, fatalistic lot—had someone looking after their wounded.
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.
I’d memorized “Baile and Aillinn” by Yeats as we drove, a narrative poem filled with legend and longing, death and trickery, and love that transcended life. Eoin had held the dog-eared copy of Yeats’s poetry, listening to me stumble through lines, gently correcting me, and helping me pronounce the Gaelic names of the old legends until I could deliver each line and verse like I had lived it. I had a passion for Yeats, who was obsessed with the actress Maud Gonne, who gave her love to a revolutionary instead. Eoin let me ramble on about things I thought I understood—but only romanticized—like philosophy and politics and Irish nationalism. Someday, I told him, I wanted to write a novel set in Ireland during the Rising of 1916.