Danny Boy

‘I don’t know,’ Danny said, running his hands through his hair. ‘She’s different somehow, though.’

Connie knew she was but she’d not been able to get to the bottom of it either. ‘Could be just the weather, son. Dear God it could put years on you, the constant rain and the leaden skies. I know it’s stopped for now, but not for long by the look of it. Those clothes Rosie is putting out will gain nothing, for the very air is damp and she’ll be fetching them in again shortly.’

Danny grimaced and shook his head. He knew it was more than that. Rosie never laughed any more, and the rare smiles she gave never touched her eyes. Then there was the way she behaved with Phelan. She never seemed to have anything to say to him now, yet once the pair of them had been as thick as thieves. It bothered him that she’d tell him nothing and claim everything was fine, when it so obviously wasn’t. He was her friend, surely, as well as her husband? There shouldn’t be secrets between them.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it is a fortnight since my last confession,’ Rosie mumbled in the small box in the dimly lit, cold church. It was the evening of Good Friday and all the family, indeed most of the church, would, after attending the ‘Stations of the Cross’, make a good confession that day.

And Rosie had more to confess than most, for she’d decided to unburden herself to the priest about the weapons, safe in the knowledge he could repeat none of it.

So, after the litany of usual sins, Father McNally enquired, ‘Is there anything else, my child?’

He knew there was. Years of hearing confessions had sharpened his awareness in listening to people and he knew there was more Rosie Walsh, whose voice he so clearly recognised, wanted to tell him. Rosie, although aware of the rows of people waiting outside the confessional box, knew that if she didn’t tell another person about this whole business she’d burst, and so she replied, ‘Yes, Father. It’s not something I’ve done wrong, you understand.’

‘Go on.’

‘I found something, Father. In fact it was my young brother who found it and brought me to see it. It was a cottage, an old disused place. Only it had been done up, made watertight. I wondered at that, for no-one owns it. It’s been derelict for years.’ Rosie stopped and the priest urged her on.

Rosie swallowed. ‘The floor is covered with a rush mat. There is a hidey-hole under it, cut into the floor and covered with a sod of turf that can be lifted out.’

The priest’s blood ran suddenly as cold as ice. He knew what kind of thing might be hidden in such a way in an empty, disused house. Hadn’t he had mothers weeping in the confessional before today about the menfolk in their lives, who they feared had got mixed up in subversive activities? Indeed, he’d had young men too, who asked for his blessing in their quest to free Ireland from British tyranny. He’d not been able to do that, of course, but he wasn’t surprised when Rosie went on in a whisper to tell him what she had found that day and Phelan’s reaction to it.

‘I think my brother-in-law is mixed up in this Irish Republican Brotherhood, Father,’ Rosie told the priest, ‘and he said these are desperate times and the organization is run by desperate men and I wasn’t to tell a soul what I’d seen.’

Father McNally didn’t know how to advise the girl. ‘Are you worried about your brother-in-law? What he might do?’

‘Aye, Father.’

‘Can you not discuss it with your husband?’

‘God, no, Father,’ Rosie cried. ‘The minute I mention a word of this to him, we’d all be in danger.’

‘What would you have me do, child?’

‘There’s nothing you can do, I don’t think,’ Rosie said. ‘I just had to tell someone.’

‘All I can do then is pray for you all.’

‘Aye, Father,’ Rosie said. ‘That never comes amiss, at any rate.’

The priest sighed. Ireland seemed poised on the brink of something and in Europe soldiers were being massacred in their thousands, and all the prayers in the world seemed unable to stop any of it. But this was no way for a priest to think, he chided himself. Didn’t he preach that prayers could move mountains?

‘Try not to worry too much,’ the priest told Rosie. ‘I know you might think that’s easy for me to say but really there is nothing you can do, unless you can talk to your brother-in-law and make him see sense.’

Rosie knew that wasn’t an option. Phelan now avoided speaking to her so obviously that even Danny had noticed and had asked if they’d had a fall-out. God, if only it had been just that. She doubted that even if she did manage to talk to him she could make him change course.

‘Say a decade of the rosary for your penance,’ the priest said, jerking Rosie back to the present. ‘And now make a good act of contrition.’

Rosie said the familiar prayer and then, leaving the confessional box, she headed for the side altar where she prayed earnestly for Phelan. She said not one decade of the rosary but three, playing the beads through her fingers. She lit a candle for good measure and left the church feeling she’d done all she could, yet somehow knowing it wasn’t going to be enough.

Much later that same night, Dermot heard footsteps outside his bedroom window. Since his talk with Phelan he’d slept lighter than usual and now the sound of boots on the cobbles woke him with a jolt and he was out of bed and across the room in a flash.

Phelan was outside the window, which had been left slightly open just as Dermot had promised it would be. Dermot pushed it wide and Phelan put a warning finger to his lips. He had the letter ready. ‘The Brotherhood are off tomorrow evening,’ he said.

‘Ooh, Phelan,’ Dermot said in an awed whisper. ‘Where are you making for?’

‘Dublin,’ Phelan said and bit his lip in annoyance. He hadn’t intended to tell anyone. ‘I can’t tell you any more and it’s really best that you don’t know, then you can’t tell, whatever pressure is applied.’

‘I wouldn’t tell,’ Dermot said, indignation causing his voice to rise.

‘Ssh,’ Phelan hissed fiercely. ‘All we want now is your sisters and parents in here demanding an explanation about who you’re talking to through your bedroom window in the dead of night. I thought you had more sense. Are you sure you’re up for this?’

‘Aye, aye,’ the boy assured him, but in a whisper. ‘Please? You can trust me.’

‘Right then,’ Phelan said. ‘Now listen. I won’t be missed until the milking on Sunday morning and by then, if all goes to plan, I will be installed in Dublin. You take this letter to my family, no earlier than Sunday afternoon. Can you do that?’

‘Course I can.’

‘You must hide it till then.’

‘Aye,’ Dermot said. ‘I’ll make sure no-one sees it. And may good luck go with you, Phelan. I wish I was old enough to join.’

‘I should think there will still be work for you when you’re my age,’ Phelan told Dermot reassuringly. ‘By then, though, the Irish tri-coloured flag will be fluttering over the capital and the English driven from our land.’

It sounded stirring stuff and Dermot was captivated. It seemed such a tiny thing to deliver a letter, but then, if that’s what Phelan wanted, he would do it and be proud of the part he’d played in the fight for Ireland.

He didn’t know yet how he’d get to leave the house by himself on a Sunday afternoon. His mother had not let him go anywhere since that day in the Easter holidays when he’d found the cottage and the guns. But allowed or not, he’d go out to the Walshes’ farm that Sunday afternoon, even if he had to sneak away to do so.

‘Give Phelan a knock, will you, Rosie,’ Connie asked as Rosie came into the room early on Easter Sunday.

‘Isn’t he up?’ Rosie asked, for at this hour he was usually out in the milking sheds with his father and Danny.

‘No, he is not,’ Connie said. ‘He must have been in powerfully late last night. I never heard him and his father will go mad altogether if he isn’t in the milking sheds and quickly.’

Connie thought it strange that she hadn’t heard Phelan come in. Although she often dozed through sheer weariness, she always heard him. Maybe, though, he’d come in later than usual to avoid his father, for when he’d nearly jumped up from the tea table the previous evening, scraping his chair across the stone flags, Matt had said, ‘Where are you off to in such a tear?’

‘Out,’ Phelan replied tersely.

Matt, usually such a quiet man, slammed his hand onto the table. ‘Don’t talk to me like that! Out where, boy?’

Phelan looked straight at his father and the look and words were both insolent. ‘Let’s say I’m going there and back to see how far it is,’ he said.

‘You cheeky young bugger, you,’ Matt cried, leaping to his feet and catching hold of Phelan by the arm. ‘You’re not too big yet for a good hiding, let me tell you.’

Rosie held Bernadette, who had started to wail, on her knee, and at Matt’s outburst her alarmed eyes met those of Danny’s. He seemed unconcerned, though, as if he thought Phelan had asked for anything he got. It was Sarah and Elizabeth and especially Connie who were looking upset.

Phelan tugged his arm from his father’s grasp and his words had a jeering note to them. ‘Like to see you try,’ he said and he strode across the room, snatched his jacket and cap from the hook behind the door and was away.

Matt would have followed him, but Connie stopped him. He sat back at the table, shaking his head. It wouldn’t be the end of it, no by Christ it wouldn’t. Jeered and cheeked by a mere boy and in front of them all. It was not to be borne. He’d have something to say to that young bugger in the morning.