Today began even warmer than yesterday. I ate a slice of toast and drank a pot of weak tea for breakfast and then set out for the Royal Irish Constabulary hut. Even in the center of the town we heard the keening.“Pagan savages,” Mr. Bolton murmured. “Like an African tribe.”
Superintendent Doyle did not reply.
“If you ask me, it’s too bad that all of them didn’t die in the famine or migrate to America.”
In my mind, I agreed that it was too bad that they all hadn’t migrated to America like my grandparents. Good journalist that I was—or hoped to be—I kept my mouth shut. I would, however, remember Mr. Bolton’s remark for possible later use.
A huge crowd of people waited patiently outside the hut, the women keening, the men drinking. The young woman who had captured my heart was still saying her rosary. She seemed so very sad. Did she know that her husband was a dead man? The constables carried out the five bodies, now in shrouds, on boards. Men emerged from
the crowd as if by prearrangement and shouldered the boards. Then they began to walk up the mountains slowly and solemnly.
There was no priest to bless the bodies or to pray at the graves. Yet, somehow there was a touch of Catholicism in the solemnity of the march.
I removed my rosary from my pocket and, despite Mr. Bolton, prayed.
The police lurked on the edges of the procession, watching carefully.
“What are they doing, Tommy?”
“They are getting ready if there’s a riot, which these poor folks are too hungry to do, and keeping an eye on the suspects.”
Finally, we came to a level place. The ruins of an old church loomed over a scattered collection of stones. There were five empty graves, four in one place and another at some distance. This was a cemetery for poor people! Carefully, the pallbearers, if one could call them that, lowered the corpses into the ground.
“’Tis called the Church on the Hill. They’ve been burying people up here for centuries. See that manor house at the edge of the cemetery? Lord Ballynahinch lived there for a while, till the local Ribbonmen and the Fenians made it too hot for him. He was before my time, but they all say he was a bit of a monster.”
“The house is empty?”
“Has been for twenty years. Occasionally someone comes over from England, looks at it, stays a couple of weeks in Letterfrack, and then decides to go home.”
“Why the separate grave?”
“It’s for Breige. They’re lying her next to her first husband, Tom O’Brien. Her marriage to John Joyce was a second for both of them. They both lost their spouses at about the same time. She was a fine looking woman.
Peggy and the two boys were John’s children by his first marriage.”
A big, handsome man with long black hair walked up to the first grave, picked up a shovel, and cast a first pile of dirt on the corpse. The pitch of the wail rose higher. He passed the shovel to another man, who did the same thing. One by one the men marched in procession from grave to grave until the last one had been covered. Some of the mourners placed rough stones at the head of each grave. There was a last prolonged wail of keening, and then the crowd dispersed, some down the mountain, some up the mountain.
“Do they keen because they’re sad?” I asked Tommy Finnucane.
“More like the opposite,” he said. “They keen, and that makes them sad. Most of the women will have recovered by teatime. Then they’ll take out their clay pipes and begin to smoke again.”
“Have you been to the crime site, Mr. Bolton?”
“I hardly think that is necessary, sir. We have our criminals. I believe one or two of your men are up there, however.”
“I want to see it myself.”
We walked up the mountain—Rod Doyle, Tom Finnucane, and myself. I felt miserable. Heavy heart and heavier stomach. Lonely, weary, sick. And very sorry for myself. I despised all of those emotions. I was in truth a coward, not an adventurer. I’d never be anything else.
Romantic indeed.
Clouds raced in rapidly from the Atlantic. Heat yielded to damp. Drizzle started when we reached the house of the murder. Gloom hovered over us like an impending plague.
“House” is too strong a word. The blood-splattered hovel was little more than a cave, with stone walls extending from the walls of the cave and wood beams supporting
a thatched roof. A few pathetic outhouses clustered around it.
“It wouldn’t seem that stealing sheep is a very profitable occupation in this part of Ireland,” I exclaimed.
Doyle glanced at me quickly and then looked away.
“Nothing is very profitable around here, Eddie. Nothing. They manage to stay alive and produce children. Only just barely … Yet why so much violence?”
I felt rebuked, a fool once again.
“The drink,” Tommy Finnucane muttered.
“Aye, the drink.”
“Hatred,” I plunged in again. “Hatred so great that it was necessary to kill John Joyce and his whole family with as much brutality as possible.”
“And themselves all relatives up here too, eh, Tommy?”
“Still, Chief, this one is unusual.”
The Superintendent sighed heavily.
“A lot more unusual than Mr. Bolton seems to think … Well, we’ve seen enough. Let’s go back to the police hut.”
I was soaking wet when we finally stumbled into the hut, buffeted by rain and fierce winds. I sat by a peat fire trying to dry out. I should go back to my room in the inn, I thought, write a dispatch, and sleep the rest of the day.
“Here’s the story, Eddie.” Tom Finnucane sat on the floor next to me with a diagram. “If the story the ‘independent’ witnesses tell is the truth, seven of the killers, who lived east of the John Joyce house, went out of the houses here, walked down to the other end of the valley to collect Myles Joyce and his cousins down there at the west end, and came back here to the John Joyce house in between to do the killing. They did this making enough noise on the road to wake Tony and his other witnesses, but not to disturb anyone else. Moreover, the witnesses claim to have followed them along that wandering path
for several hours, hiding behind bushes and outhouses and never once were spotted by the killers.”
“That seems impossible, Tom. Do you think the informers are lying?”
He hesitated.
“Not to say lying, lad, just adding to the truth a little more than is required. They probably heard the crowd carousing through the valley and made up the story. They don’t know who went into the house and did the killing. So they’re not really accusing anyone … . The lad that survived, Patsy Joyce, says that the three men who did the killing had dirt on their faces, so he can’t identify them. The informers figure they’ll earn a few English pounds and do no real harm to anyone. Moreover, they’ll even the score with Myles Joyce. They may even have had a pretty good idea who the real killers might be and put them on their list of ten. They don’t know how Mr. Bolton works.”
“Does anyone know who really killed John Joyce and his family?”
“Everyone in the valley knows except us.”
“What!”
“The women know which husbands were in their beds that night and which weren’t. They talk to one another. The men know what plans were whispered around the last two weeks. They talk. The valley has already solved the crime.”
“And they won’t come forward?”
“No one ever comes forward to English law.”
“Not even to save the lives of those they love?”
“They don’t believe that it would do any good. Most of the older ones speak only Irish. They’re afraid even to talk to English law. They’re in terror of the real killers, if any of them are not on the list the informers turned in. Moreover, they have to live with each other for the years ahead. They’ll tell themselves there is enough hatred already.
They really can’t believe that the English will hang men who are not really guilty. Like I say, they don’t know the way Mr. George Bolton works. By the time they find out it will be too late.”
“You mean that he really doesn’t care whether he arrests the innocent or the guilty?”
“He cares about making arrests and getting convictions.”
“Innocent men might hang for this crime?”
Tommy sighed.
“Probably not, lad. Probably not.”
“What happens next?”
“We arrest the suspects and transport them to the jail in Galway Town. I’m supposed to take four men and arrest Myles Joyce, the dead man’s cousin.”
“Four men?”
“Aye. He’s another big fella, not likely to come quietly.”
“Was he at odds with his cousin?”
“Myles Joyce is a fierce man, but peaceful enough until he is pushed too hard. He had no serious quarrel with John Joyce that we know of. Still, these people up here are quiet about their grudges. You discover their hatreds only after the explosion … . Do you want to come along?”
I didn’t. I was too much a coward, however, to refuse. Yet I told myself it was time to prove that I had still a remnant of manliness. So I told him that of course I did.
In the mists, the mountain we climbed and the little valley into which we descended were foreboding places, permeated, I thought, with hatred, revenge, and death. Myles Joyce’s house was as small as the others, but it had been whitewashed and flowers had been planted in front of it. A child of eleven or twelve, a girl to judge by her red petticoat, saw us coming. She stared at us and then darted into the house.
“That’s the wife’s niece. She doesn’t live here but
spends most of her time with the wife. Myles Joyce has no English, but Nora, his wife, can speak both languages well enough. This will be difficult. They say the woman is pregnant.”
An icy shaft stabbed at my soul.
A moment later Myles Joyce and his wife emerged from the hut. He was a short, burly man with iron gray hair and a dark, handsome face, probably in his middle forties. His eyes were deep black pools of hatred. She was wearing a thin red cloak, which set off her beauty, but no shoes.
“What do you want?” she demanded, glaring at us.
“Myles Joseph Joyce,” Tommy intoned solemnly, “it is my duty to arrest you on suspicion of the murder of John Patrick Joyce.”
Nora translated for her husband, though there was little doubt that he knew what had been said. He responded in a fierce flow of Irish.
“My husband says that he had nothing to do with the murder of his cousin and his family. He was here in our bed all that night. He will not come with you.”
“He must come with us, Nora,” Tommy insisted. “If he is innocent, he has nothing to fear.”
Nora translated again. She was, I thought, containing her fury by sheer willpower. I was ashamed of the attraction I felt for her, a pregnant, barefoot woman whose husband was about to be dragged off by the police of a foreign nation.
Myles Joyce’s dark and handsome face twisted in rage. He shouted his defiant reply in words that needed no translation.
Nora, her arm around her husband now, hesitated and then translated.
“My husband says that he has no faith in English justice and that he will not permit himself to be arrested.”
“Nora,” Tommy Finnucane pleaded, “he must come with us or we will have to take him by force.”
“You’ll have to take me too,” she raged.
“Take him and chain him,” the Sergeant ordered.
The four men approached Myles Joyce warily. Then they lunged at him. He threw two of them off his body with a shrug of his powerful shoulders. Nora and her niece beat at the constables’ backs with their fists. Myles gave a gruff command. Rebuked, Nora backed off.
“Josie,” she said to the girl, “go home now!”
He must have ordered his wife to think of their unborn child.
Josie hesitated, still eager for a fight.
“You heard me, Josie. Go home!”
The child turned and ran off sobbing.
After a long struggle, the constables finally subdued Myles Joyce. He was a gallant warrior, I thought, overcome by his enemies. They dragged him down the path into the valley. Nora ran screaming after them.
Again Myles Joyce gave a brief command. Nora, head bent, shoulders slumped, returned to the house, where Tommy and I were standing.
“You can visit him in the Galway prison in a couple of days, Nora,” Tommy said, trying to be kind.
“I’ve lost him forever,” she moaned. “He’ll never hold me in his arms again.”
It sounded almost like a death sentence. Was she one of these Irish women, one of the dark ones, who knew the future? I shuddered at the thought.
I strove desperately for something to say to this woman in her terrible grief. No words came to my mind, no thoughts to my lips. I was helpless.
Josie appeared again, hesitant and wary. Sobbing, Nora lurched back into the house. Josie followed her on the run, pausing only to spit on me.
“Josie! Shame on you!” Tom yelled after her.
“I feel like I deserved it,” I said.
“Aye, lad. I understand.”
“I believe her.”
“What woman, Eddie, would not lie for her husband?”
“She might well lie, Tom, but this time she’s telling the truth.”
“Mayhap she is. They all say she’s a fine young woman. She would not have had to marry Myles, and herself so young, if her parents had not died and her brother off in America, no one knows where.”
“She obviously loves him.”
“No doubt about that.”
“What happens to her if he does not come back?”
“The way times are now, she and her baby will be lucky if they don’t starve to death.”
Great sheets of rain beat against us as we returned to the police hut. Already six men in chains sat sullenly on the floor. Only Myles Joyce glowered defiantly at the constables.
Worn and dejected, I walked back to the inn here in Letterfrack and drafted a dispatch for the Daily News. I described the funeral service without a priest and the arrest of Myles Joyce with as much detachment as I could achieve. The passionate cry of Nora Joyce did not need any elaboration from me.
There was a wire from the paper congratulating me on my previous dispatches. I crumpled it up and threw it away.
I write this entry in my journal with the sense that I am a callow, worthless young man, caught up in tragedy beyond my experience or my comprehension. I stood by, silent and powerless, while a family’s future was destroyed and while perhaps a death sentence was passed on all its members. I am an interloper, a voyeur, a shameful
participant in what increasingly seemed to be a vicious game being played by the English authorities.
I am quite incapable of any more lustful thoughts about Nora Joyce, but the pain of loss in her wondrous blue eyes will haunt me for the rest of my life.