“Will you open another one, please?” I asked.
“All right. Let’s see . . . this journal is from, eh, 1922 to 1928. It looks like they’re in order up here.”
My lungs bellowed, and my hands grew numb.
“Want to hear something from this one?”
I didn’t. I couldn’t. But I nodded, playing Russian roulette with my heart.
Kevin opened the book and flipped through the first section. His fingers whispered past the pages of Thomas’s life.
“Here’s a shorter one, 16 August 1922.” Kevin began to read, his Irish brogue the perfect narration for the heartbreaking entry.
Conditions in the country have disintegrated to the point where Mick and other members of the provisional government are at constant threat of being picked off by a sniper or shot in the street. Nobody goes on the roof to take a smoke anymore. When they’re in Dublin, nobody goes home. They are all living—all eight members of the provisional government—in government buildings surrounded by the Free State Army. They are young men constantly on the knife’s edge. The only senior member among them, Arthur Griffith, suffered a brain haemorrhage on 12 August. He’s gone. We’ve lost him. He’d been confined to his bed but kept trying to carry out his duties. He’s found the only rest available to him.
Mick was in Kerry when the news reached him about Arthur’s death, and he cut his southern inspections short to attend the service. I met him in Dublin today and watched as he walked at the front of the funeral procession, the Free State Army marching behind him, every face bleak with sorrow. I stood with him for some time at the graveside, staring down into the hole which held the body of his friend, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
“Do you think I will live through this, Tommy?” he asked me.
“I’ll never forgive you if you don’t,” I answered. I am terrified. It is August. Brigid remembers August from Anne’s pages. August and Cork and flowers.
“Ye will. Just like ye forgave Annie.”
I’ve asked him not to say her name. I can’t bear it. It makes her absence too real. And it makes a mockery of my secret hope that someday I will see her again. But Mick forgets. He has too many things to remember. Stress is eating a hole in his gut, and he lies to me when I press him about it. He’s moving slower, and his eyes are dimmer, but maybe it is my own pain and fear I’m seeing.
He is insisting on resuming his southern tour and continuing on to Cork. He has meetings scheduled with the key players causing havoc in the region. He says he’s going to end the bloody conflict once and for all. “For Arthur and Annie and every feckin’ lad that’s hung on the end of a rope or faced a firing squad trying to do my bidding.” But Cork has become a hotbed for the republican resistance. Railroads have been destroyed, trees are downed all over the roads to prevent safe passage, and mines have been set throughout the countryside.
I begged him not to go.
“These are my people, Tommy,” he snarled at me. “I’ve been all over Ireland, and no one’s tried to stop me. I want to go home, for God’s sake. I want to go to Clonakilty and sit on a stool at the Four Alls and have a drink with my friends.”
I’ve told him if he goes, I’m going with him.
For a moment the library rang with those words, and Kevin and I were silent, wrapped in the memory of men who were larger than life until life rose up and snuffed them out.
“These are incredible,” Kevin marveled. “I know a little about Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. But not as much as I should. Do ya want me to read more, Anne?”
“No,” I whispered, heartsick. “I know what happens next.”
He handed the book down, and I set it aside.
“This journal is a lot older. It’s in bad shape,” Kevin mused over another volume. “No . . . it’s the next one,” he reported, turning the pages. “It starts in 1916, May, and ends—” He flipped the page. “It ends with a poem, it looks like. But the last entry is 16 April 1922.”
“Read the poem,” I demanded, breathless.
“Um. All right.” He cleared his throat awkwardly.
I pulled you from the water, and kept you in my bed, a lost, forsaken daughter of a past that isn’t dead.
When I stared at him in stunned silence, he continued, his face as red as Eoin’s hair. With each word, I felt the wind roaring in my head and the lough gathering beneath my skin.
Don’t go near the water, love. Stay away from strand or sea. You cannot walk on water, love; the lough will take you far from me.
There was no ledge beneath my feet, and I sat down on Thomas’s desk, dizzy with disbelief.
“Anne?” Kevin asked. “Do you want this one too?”
I nodded woodenly, and he climbed down, the book still clutched in his right hand.
“Can I see it, please?” I whispered.
Kevin placed it in my hands, hovering and clearly rattled by my shock.
“I thought this journal was lost . . . in the lough,” I breathed, running my hands over it. “I . . . I don’t understand.”
“Maybe it’s a different one,” Kevin supplied hopefully.
“It’s not. I know this book . . . the dates . . . I know that poem.” I gave it back to him. “I can’t look at it. I know you don’t understand, but can you read the first entry to me, please?”
He took it back, and as he thumbed through the pages, several pictures fluttered to the ground. He stooped, scooping them up and glancing at them curiously.
“That’s Garvagh Glebe,” he said. “This picture looks like it’s a hundred years old, but she hasn’t changed much.” He handed the picture to me. It was the picture I’d shown Deirdre that day in the library. The picture I’d tucked into the pages of the journal before rowing out into the middle of the lake to say goodbye to Eoin. It was the same picture, but it had aged another eighty years.
“This one is something else,” Kevin breathed, his gaze captured by the next picture in his hand. His eyes widened and narrowed before lifting to meet mine. “That woman looks just like you, Anne.”
It was the picture of Thomas and me at the Gresham, not touching but so aware of each other. His face was turned toward me—the line of his jaw, the slice of his cheekbone, the softness of his lips beneath the blade of his nose.
My pictures had survived the lough. The journal too. But I had not. We had not.
28 August 1922
We left for Cork early on the twenty-first. Mick tripped going down the stairs and dropped his gun. It went off, waking the entire house and increasing my sense of foreboding. I saw Joe O’Reilly framed by the window, watching us depart. He, like all the rest of us, had begged Mick to stay out of Cork. I know he felt better because I was with Mick, though my value in a fight has always been when it’s over. My war stories are all the surgical kind.
It started well enough. We stopped at Curragh barracks, and Mick carried out an inspection. We stopped in Limerick and in Mallow, and Mick wanted to swing by an army dance, where a priest called him a traitor to his face, and I had a pint poured down my back. Mick didn’t even flinch at the insult, and I finished my whiskey with a wet arse. Mick showed a little more outrage when the lookouts at the hotel in Cork were fast asleep in the lobby when we arrived. He grabbed each boy by his hair and knocked their heads together. If it had been Vaughan’s Hotel in Dublin a year ago, he would have left immediately, certain that his safety had been compromised. He didn’t seem especially concerned and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. I dozed sitting in a chair in front of the door, Mick’s revolver in my lap.
Maybe it was my weariness, or the fog of grief I’ve been walking in since Anne disappeared, but the next day unfolded like a motion picture, jerky and dreamlike, with no colour or context to my own life. Mick had meetings with family and friends in the early part of the day, and it wasn’t until late afternoon that we left for Macroom Castle. I didn’t accompany him inside but waited in the courtyard with the small convoy—Sean O’Connell and Joe Dolan from Mick’s squad and a dozen soldiers and extra hands to clear any barricades—assigned to escort Mick safely through Cork.
We ran into problems near Bandon when the touring car overheated twice and the armoured car stalled on a hill. One debacle fed into another. Trees were cleared, only to discover trenches had been dug behind them. We took a detour, got lost, got separated from the rest of the convoy, asked for directions, and eventually reunited for the last appointment of the day, heading towards Crookstown through a little valley called Béal na mBláth. The mouth of flowers.
The road, narrow and rutted, was more suited to a horse and a buggy than a convoy. There was a hilly rise on one side and an overgrown hedge on the other. Daylight was slinking away, and a brewery cart missing a wheel lay tipped on its side in the middle of the road. Beyond that, a donkey, freed from the cart, grazed benignly. The convoy slowed, and the touring car veered into the ditch to avoid the obstacles blocking the road.
A shot rang out, and Sean O’Connell yelled, “Drive like hell! We’re in trouble.”
But Mick told the driver to stop.
He picked up his rifle and tumbled out the door, eager for the fight. I followed him. Someone followed me. Shots rained in from the left, high above us, and Mick whooped, ducking behind the armoured car where we crouched for several minutes, punctuating the steady stream from the Vickers machine gun with shots of our own.