At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [87]
Never to rest, by day or by night,
Deeming it the proudest of privileges
To fight for freedom,
To fight, not in despondency, but in great joy,
Never lowering our ideal,
Never bartering one jot or tittle of our birthright,
Holding faith to the memory and inspiration of Tone,
And accounting ourselves base
As long as we endure
The evil thing against which he testified
With His Blood?
What is that evil thing? That evil thing is the English in Ireland!
We will! they roared. The kilted boys, and youths and men in suits and soldier green, even the women under their umbrellas and the white-frocked black-stockinged girls. Round after round they cheered and Jim, too, roared with the full of his lungs. Save, looking round, he saw that few stirred, that few cheered. Were they deaf? Were they stunned? Like herded beasts they waited. Till he understood he too was stunned, and it was his blood pounding, not his throat roaring, that clamored his ears.
He turned to find Doyler. Doyler was behind, looking away. Following his gaze, Jim saw a straggle of men arrayed by a hedge. Their green was duller than the smart Volunteers, and their cloth had a cheapness about it. Working men that even in a uniform looked jumbled together. A Red Hand badge was pinned to their hats.
“Citizen Army,” said Doyler. He was whispering in Jim’s ear. “The Citizen Army is here.”
Jim’s father had not attended that day, and it was strange listening to his cheerful chatter at supper that evening. He had a vocabulary all his own. The insurgents of ’98 were not the Croppy Boys or the brave United Men, but he called them Babes in the Wood. And the cruel militia and crueler yeomanry were Blaney’s Bloodhounds. “The 89th Foot as became, Royal Irish Fusiliers, 2nd Battalion, as is. The Rollickers they calls themself. Fierce fellows altogether. Though not to be confused with the 1st Battalion, for them is the Faugh-a-Ballagh boys. The Old Fogs. Faugh a ballagh! Clear the way! There’s Erse for you. Bird-catchers, on account they took the French eagle down the Peninsular Wars.”
Jim couldn’t tell were his father’s loyalties shifting or if he saw at all the direction the band was heading. His sentiments, to all seeming, remained the same. His old regiment first and foremost, then any of the Irish regiments, then the generals who won the Boer War for the British—Roberts, French, Kitchener, Kelly-Kenny and Mahon—“not a one but he was an Irishman.”
Only Aunt Sawney was steadfast. Saturday afternoons when the Irish Volunteers marched by, she was quick sticks out the door, waving her ashplant and lashing her tongue, scourging them to hell and back for idle Fenians. And when Father O’Táighléir chanced by one time, collecting for the Chinese missions, he said, “A word missus,” and was off explaining how the Volunteers were decent honest Catholic sons of Ireland and of the Church, whose leaders in the tradition of this sainted isle were poets as much as gentlemen.
“No, Father,” Aunt Sawney corrected him. “Them is the Fenians. Idle blaspheming rebels is all. The canon was certain.”
But the canon was convalescing in Mayo. Jim’s father had to dash out with a half-crown donation to the cause of buying Chinese children to convert them to the Cross.
“And ye,” Aunt Sawney blasted him afterwards, “ye’d sell your soul for the twopenny-door.”
And maybe that was the truth of it. For his father had been given the tuppenny collections at chapel on Sunday. “A responsible position,” he maintained, “in charge of the parish comings-in.” He had been enrolled in a respectable sodality; was a member now of the Mary Immaculate Traders’ Guild of Glasthule. “Only last week Phillips ironmongers stopped me in the street, asked my opinion of the Corpus Christi. Sure the up isn’t up enough for us now. The Macks is on the ascent.”
The great event to which all energies were directed was the Glasthule Feis, due to be held the last Saturday in July at Ballygihen House. Tamasha, his father called it, rubbing his hands at the prospect. “You know what’s this we’ll do, Jim? We’ll fetch