up. For a moment there was a lull, filled only with the ringing in our ears and the echo in our heads, and I dared hope.
“There they are! They’re running up the road,” Mick yelled, standing to get a better shot at the party of ambushers scurrying up the hill. He ran out from behind the car, and I immediately followed, shouting his name. A single shot rang out, clean and sharp, and Mick fell.
He lay crumpled, facedown in the middle of the road, a yawning hole at the base of his skull. I ran to him, Sean O’Connell at my heels, and we dragged him by his ankles back behind the car. I fell to my knees and began tearing at the buttons of my shirt, needing something to make a compress. Someone said an Act of Contrition, someone else began to rage, and others ran down the road, firing at the fleeing shooters. I pressed my shirt to the back of his head and rolled Mick towards me. His eyes were closed, his face young and loose in repose. Night had fallen, and the Big Fella was gone.
I cradled him in my arms, his head against my chest, his body across the seat as we headed back to Cork. I was not the only one weeping. We stopped for water to wash the blood from his face, and shell-shocked and unaccustomed to our surroundings, we got lost again. We were caught in a hellish maze of felled trees, blown up bridges, and railroad crossings, and we drove aimlessly in the dark. At one point, we pulled over to ask for help and direction at a church. The priest came within several feet of the car, saw Mick propped against my blood-soaked chest, and turned and ran back inside. Someone screamed for him to come back and threatened to shoot. The weapon discharged, but thankfully the priest didn’t fall. Maybe we misjudged him, but we didn’t wait for him to return.
I don’t remember finally coming into Cork, only that we eventually did. Two members of the Cork Civic Patrol led us to Shanakiel Hospital, where Mick’s body was taken away, leaving us covered in his blood and stranded in the corner of the world that should have loved him most. He had been so sure they were his people.
A cable was sent, warning London, alerting Dublin, and informing the world that Michael Collins had been brought down just a week after Arthur Griffith was laid to rest. They sent his body by boat from Penrose Quay to Dún Laoghaire. They wouldn’t let me go with him. I took the train, crowded among people who talked of his loss, of Ireland’s loss, and then talked of hats and the weather and the neighbour’s bad habits. I became so angry, so irrationally livid, that I had to get off at the next stop. I am not fit to be around people, yet I don’t want to be alone. It took me two days to get back to Dublin.
They buried him today in Glasnevin, and I was there among the mourners, huddled with Gearóid O’Sullivan, Tom Cullen, and Joe O’Reilly. Their love for him is a balm to me; I won’t have to carry his memory by myself.
I am selling my house in Dublin. After today, I have no desire to return. I am going home to Eoin, to my little boy. Ireland has taken everyone else, and I have nothing left to give her.
T. S.
26
A MAN OLD AND YOUNG
She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.
—W. B. Yeats
The last day in August, I returned to Ballinagar and climbed the hill behind the church, my breath hard to catch, my lungs crowded by my ever-expanding abdomen. My doctor, an ancient ob-gyn practicing in Sligo, said I was due the first week in January. At my first appointment, the nurse had tried to calculate my pregnancy based on my last menstrual cycle. I couldn’t tell her it had been in mid-January of 1922. I’d had to plead ignorance, even though I suspected I was about twelve weeks along when I returned to the present. My first ultrasound confirmed my estimate, though the dates did not align. Time travel or not, I would still be carrying this child for nine months, and I had four months more to go.