At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [249]
And they too had seemed idlers who watched from the Surgeons roof. All week had grown a sense of disengagement. The occasional fire fight, bloody at times, but mostly the hours of waiting, of potshots and Rosaries. Typical to find oneself in the unfashionable end of a rising. For one by one the British had cut off the rebel outposts. Surrounded them, and more or less disregarded them; to concentrate their ire on the GPO, where the flag flew over Connolly and Pearse, the genius perhaps and certainly the heart of the fight.
The order to surrender came on the Sunday morning. There was some rankling among a part of the men who fabulously all week had sustained the persuasion that all was well. MacMurrough found Jim in the makeshift chapel in the college anatomy-room, where the rebel dead were laid out on slabs. He was staring with that unblinking gaze that newly had come upon his face. A dust of rubble powdered his cheeks, and he stony and still the way a tear would crack him. “Come, my dear,” MacMurrough said. “We must leave him now.”
“What will happen?”
“He’ll be treated with respect, I’m sure. They’re soldiers.”
“I mean with us.”
“Well, we’ll be prisoners.”
“I see.”
His rosary beads had dropped by his side and MacMurrough crouched to pick them up.
“You can keep them,” the boy said. “I won’t be needing beads no more.”
The British marched them through the streets. All hungry Dublin crowded the way. In all that taunting spitting mob one man gravely had lifted his hat. That little, lovely, silent act recalled MacMurrough to Wilde, when Wilde too had been paraded for the crowd. And MacMurrough had wondered could there truly be something to this business—that stooping so utterly low one should rise again to gain all.
Now the British held them prisoner, in their temporary jail, a barracks hall. MacMurrough lay against the wall and Jim lay sleeping on his chest. They stretched ahead, the years, of military confinement, convict labor. How many, he wondered, would the British shoot? If yet they lived, Connolly and Pearse, they were walking dead. They said his aunt was dead. Caught in a cross fire at the Castle, they said. MacMurrough reached his hand in his pocket where he kept Jim’s beads. There was a comfort in the childhood shapes, the aves and gauds that rolled in his fingers.
He remembered the moment in the street with a dream like vividity. He had grabbed Jim’s rifle and fumbled to fire it. The bullets everywhere zipped driftingly by. He had taken a breath, and in its inspiration he heard his aunt’s voice telling him again and again to be brave, to be proud. Then he had felt it, all about him, the wind of the beat of magnificent wings. Here was splendor at last, splendor indeed, splendor enough for a lifetime. In that confusion of senses, it was no wonder if the rifle sighted by ear. He picked up the boy’s body in his arms and the shreds of a heart walked beside him.
When later in the week they brought him news of his aunt, he had not needed to be told, for the scene had revealed itself while about him that wind had beat. She was slumped on a Castle balcony, her death-face grim and ghosted still with exhilaration. Shorty lay beside her, though whether he had given his pistol for her to fire, or she had seized it from him, he was now too mum to tell, indominatably . . .
MacMurrough brought his hand to his head where the ache all week had not ceased. He closed his eyes, and wove through the pain till he summoned the form of an island home. He would build that home for Jim. Brick by brick he would build it. He had never built before, but now he would begin.