The Dead Republic

Rare Book

1
 
It looked the same. There was a break in the clouds, and the sea was gone. There was green land down there. A solid-looking cloud got in the way – the plane went right in. It was suddenly colder. I stopped looking for a while and when I looked again it was back down there. The green thing. Ireland.
 
I’d left in 1922. I was flying back in, in 1951. It was twenty-nine years since I’d left, and five since I’d made up my mind to come back.
 
The plane dropped a bit more. It shook and rattled. The ground was getting nearer; there were no more clouds. I looked down at my country and felt nothing.
 
It landed – there were the jumps on the tarmac, and the burst of clapping from passengers in front and behind me, cast at the front, crew at the back. Me, in the middle. I didn’t clap. The engine died. The propellers became visible, and stopped. I watched two big-faced lads push the steps towards the plane. I heard the door open, and the rush of real air, and gasps of excitement. There was sea in the air.
 
My face hit the wind. I went down the steps. Ford was surrounded by the Company and the hangers-on.
 
—Welcome home, Mister Ford.
 
—A hundred thousand welcomes.
 
—You brought the weather with you, Mister Ford.
 
The red faces on them, wet grins for the Yanks with the heavy pockets. They had him standing on the Pan American steps, with John Wayne on one side, a few steps down, and Barry Fitzgerald above, the three of them waving and smiling. Wayne’s wife and brats were beside me, cold and waiting.
 
I walked.
 
I heard the voice.
 
—Where’s Henry?
 
I kept walking. I didn’t wait for my bag.
 
—Where’s Henry?
 
He wanted me standing beside him, with his hand on my shoulder. He was the man who’d brought me home. The man who’d pulled me out of the desert. The last of the rebels, with the last of the rebels.
 
—Where’s Henry?
 
He’d paid for my suit and for one of my legs. I was his I.R.A. consultant, my wages paid into my hand by Republic Pictures.
 
I got into the back of a taxi.
 
—Welcome to Ireland, sir.
 
—Don’t fuckin’ talk, I said.—Just drive.
 
To the nearest bed for rent in Limerick, and I fell face down on top of it. I lay there and felt the country crawl into my lungs. I felt it bubble and turn. I’d been living too long in dry air and deserts. I coughed.
 
—For fuck sake.
 
It was an Irish cough – I’d forgotten – the big hack, the rattle. The sheets, the mattress, the wall to my left – they were fat with old breath, and soaking. I coughed again, and heard a voice through several walls.
 
—Ah, God love you.
 
I lay on the bed. I felt the rejection and let it slide over me. I felt it rub and pull at my skin.
 
I slept.
 
 
The wooden leg creaked and whispered. I pulled up my trouser leg and looked. It was fatter, expanding – I could see the wood grow as I watched. The wet air was seeping into it. The varnish was already giving up. It was peeling away, and the shin was getting pale and blotched.
 
I stepped out into rain. It was already adding weight to my suit. It all came back, the slant of its fall, the touch of each drop on my skin, its dance on the black stone around my feet. I fuckin’ hated it.
 
I held up the sagging brim of my fedora and saw the black car crawl out of the lightless rain. I couldn’t hear the engine but it was getting slowly nearer. The approaching car and its low hiss over the water brought back pictures that had never gone away. Model Ts prowling the country, men in trenchcoats moving in to kill me. But the Civil War was three decades gone, and it was just a Limerick taxi. I stayed still and waited for it.
 
—Good morning, sir.
 
—I’m not American.
 
—Where d’you want me to take you?
 
—Roscommon, I said.
 
—You’re joking.
 
—No.
 
—Is it not wet enough for you here?
 
I looked at him.
 
—Will you take me or won’t you?
 
—We’ll need a map.
 
—We won’t, I said.—I know the way.
 
He still hadn’t moved.
 
—The old homestead, is it?
 
—No, I told him.—Someone else’s. Will you take me?
 
—Right, he said.—I will. I’m curious.
 
He was young, half my age.
 
—But you’re the navigator, he said.
 
—Fair enough, I said.—Let’s go.
 
—Will I be bringing you back?
 
—No.
 
—You’ve no bag or nothing.
 
—No.
 
—And you’ve got the money?
 
—Yeah.
 
—Right.
 
He leaned forward, like he was giving the car the first push. We began to crawl into the rain.
 
I should have been going to Cong, in County Mayo. I should have been there already. That was why I was in Ireland. I was the I.R.A. consultant, come home to watch the filming of my life. But first I was going to Roscommon, to the house my wife had come from. I had to see the house.
 
 
It wasn’t there. The house was gone. It had been burnt out when I’d seen it last, just before I’d left Ireland for good. My wife’s mother, Old Missis O’Shea, had moved into the long barn, and I’d slept in the kitchen, under a tarpaulin roof. But the wall that had held up the tarpaulin, and the other walls – all the walls – were gone. And the barn – it was gone too. I was standing in the right place, but there was nothing. I wasn’t there to find anyone; I wasn’t that thick. But it felt like another death.
 
My bearings were exact. The few bits of trees, the yellow furze, even the cows had stayed more or less put, where I’d left them in 1922. But it was as if the house and the outhouses had never been there, or the well, or the low stone walls that had kept the cows out of the bog.
 
I walked to where the door had been. I knew exactly where I was going, where there’d once been a stone step. I could feel it in my muscles; I could feel the knowledge sing through me.
 
I stopped. There was no hint that there’d once been a door there, not a thing. I stamped my foot. I felt nothing under the grass. I walked around, to the wall we’d been put against, myself and my new wife, Miss O’Shea, with her cousin Ivan and the other cousin, as we were photographed on our wedding day, in September 1919. I could feel that day’s heat and shine as I turned the corner. I knew exactly where Ivan had placed his lads, to guard our normality for that one afternoon in the middle of the war. But there was no wall, no hint of dry clay where the wall had fallen, or hardness in the ground where it had stood. My trousers were wringing. It wasn’t raining but it must have been just before I’d paid the taxi driver and got out. I was in the middle of a field, in good wet grass. Not the edge of the field, where there’d once been a wall surrounding the kitchen garden. I could have coped with that, the walls knocked and covered, topsoil thrown over the map of the house. That would have made sense; it had been a long time. But this was just weird. My angles were perfect. I’d walked exactly here, trying to feel running water, with my father’s wooden leg held in front of me, and I’d heard her voice – Two and two? – and I’d seen her boots and the laces made fat by the muck. But there wasn’t even muck here.
 
I walked back now through the field. My own wooden leg was groaning, protesting, biting into the folded flesh. I could feel no water under me, and the well I’d found that day was gone. But I grabbed the gate and the top rung was there, exactly as cold as it should have been. I’d held that gate before, even if the path from the gate to the house was gone. The gate was real; it felt like sanity.
 
I walked out onto the road. I left the gate open. They weren’t my cows. They were Ivan’s cows, probably. If Ivan Reynolds was still around and living. On the drive from Limerick I’d passed dozens of abandoned farmhouses, falling in on themselves, left standing beside the newer, brighter houses. But this was different. There was no new house, and no ruin. Ivan had razed the house, then he’d buried it too deep to be remembered.
 
I’d paid the taxi driver and sent him back to Limerick. I was alone on the road. The heat was picking up the morning’s rainfall. The rest of the day was going to be hot.
 
They were all dead – my wife, Miss O’Shea, and my children, Saoirse and Rifle. All three were dead. I’d never thought that they were going to come running to find out who the man was, getting out the taxi. I never thought I’d see my wife or daughter looking out the window, over the window box, as I marched up to the door. My son wasn’t going to be mending an outhouse roof or gelding a fuckin’ greyhound in the yard. They were dead, somewhere. They’d been dead for years.
 
I’d come to see the wall, maybe put my hand against it, break off a piece of whitewash, put it in my mouth and taste it. But just to see it – that would have been enough. To find its foundation in the grass, to feel it in the sole of my good foot.
 
Proof.
 
I had sat in front of the wall. I had held my new wife’s hand. I could h...