Fergal O’Hara and his widowed mother lived in a tiny cottage with a thatched roof upon which an anachronistic television antenna was perched. The main room of the cottage was crowded now with the eight “boys” and Ellen and David. Mrs. O’Hara, a thin little woman with snow-white hair and cool blue eyes, kept bringing food from the kitchen. Lamb chops, sausages, bacon, plates of fried potatoes. They ate ravenously; no food had ever tasted so good.
And there was plenty of drink. Some of the men uncapped bottles of stout and drank deeply in long swallows. Seamus Finn drained one bottle without taking it from his lips, then set it down empty with one hand and snatched up a full bottle with another. “Sure,” he said, “and I’m going to hell in me Guinness.” And he uncapped the second bottle and poured it down his throat.
Little Mick O’Sullivan, looking more like a leprechaun than ever, came over to them with a jug of colorless liquid. “Poteen,” he announced. “Made not three miles from this very house, and none the worse for not having the tax paid on it.”
David took a long drink, coughed, shivered, and passed her the jug. She tried a sip. It was very smooth but extremely strong, and it burned its way down her throat and into her stomach. She shook her head when O’Sullivan offered her another drink.
“It puts color in your cheeks, lass.”
“Maybe later.”
David took another drink, a longer one this time, and returned the jug to O’Sullivan without coughing. The little man beamed appreciatively. “It’s a good lad you are,” he said. “Ye’ll have to teach the lass to drink. Though it can be bad if a woman develops too much of a taste for the jar. She’ll turn her back on your housework and not be paying enough mind to the children.”
She looked at David. His eyes met hers and she felt herself blushing. There were no more tears now, she thought: Only the elation of having survived and the joy of good fellowship. Warmth permeated the cottage, and only a portion of it emanated from the turf fire on the hearth. The greater part came from the men themselves.
“Oh, I feel like singing,” she cried.
O’Sullivan had already told the others that Ellen was a singer. Now one of them came to her, a banjo in hand. She was not very good with the banjo, had only experimented with that instrument from time to time, but she sensed that the professionalism of her performance would not matter. She took the banjo, and they gathered around, jugs of poteen and bottles of stout in hand.
“What shall I sing?”
Suggestions came from every quarter, but Fergal O’Hara’s voice overrode the others. “Give us a song for today,” he said. “A song to commemorate the fighting by the caves.”
“You mean make one up?”
“I do.”
“I don’t know if I can…”
“Then can ye play for me? And do you know the tune to ‘The Men of the West’?”
She did; it was the same tune that was also used for “Acres of Clams” and “The Eighteenth Day of November” and several other ballads. She plucked tentatively at the banjo, letting her fingers accustom themselves to the unfamiliar tuning, then began to play the chords and, bit by bit, pick out the melody.
He let her go through two choruses to get used to the banjo. Then, in a sweet tenor voice as clear as a church-bell, he began to sing.
In the county of old Tipperary
One night in the fall of the year
The spawn of the devil came riding
To gun down a lad and his dear
But they never took into accounting
The boys of the West Tip Brigade
Who shot them with rifles and pistols
And blew them to hell with grenades
“Didn’t use a solitary grenade,” someone said. “Canister bombs and bottles of petrol, but not a grenade did we have.” Someone else told him to hold his hour and have another, and passed him a jar of poteen.
Oh, they lay in the darkness in waiting
Outside of the Mitchelstown Cave
To fight for their master, bold Satan
And murder our Ellen and Dave
But Jamie was there with his pistol
And Fergal, and Mick, and both Seans
And Seamus and Peader and Tommy
To shoot ’em all dead before dawn
“Shoot ’em all dead in ten minutes,” someone said.
So here’s to the West Tipperary boys
So valiant and bold and serene
And here’s to the Irish Republic—
Now pass me that jar of poteen!
They applauded wildly and made him sing it four more times, and each time he added another verse. And then they called for some of the other Republican songs—“Take It Down from the Mast” and “The Patriot Game” and “Barry’s Column” and more, and she played them all and they sang them all, and the room rocked with their singing.
Hardly anyone noticed when the friar came in. There was knocking at the door, and Mrs. O’Hara scurried off to answer it. A robed form passed through from the doorway to the kitchen, and moments later Mrs. O’Hara returned to the room.
But Fergal said, “Who was it, Mother?”
“Oh, and only a friar, a poor Dominican, and him so chilled and wet and saying he hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning. I’ve got him in the kitchen with a plate of food before him.”
“And him wandering the countryside at this hour?”
“He was lost, he’d lost his way and saw our light on. The poor man, how cold and wet he was.”
“Then he’ll need more than food in him, Mother. Bring him in and pass him a jar.”
“And if he doesn’t drink?”
“And Mother, when did you know a Dominican who didn’t?”
Mrs. O’Hara returned to the kitchen. She reappeared moments later with the friar at her side. He wore a great brown cloak with a hood covering his head, and he moved into the room smiling shyly, and Ellen glanced at him and looked at the banjo and then looked at him again, and her eyes rolled and she shrieked.
It was Farrell.
No one moved. Everyone stared at her, puzzled. She was the only one who recognized him, the only one who had ever seen him. And now, as her cry hung in the air, she watched as he reached into a fold in his cloak and drew out a small black automatic pistol—
Someone shouldered her aside, pushing through the crowd. David. The gun drew up and pointed at her, and David threw himself on Farrell. The gun went off. A bullet streaked upward and buried itself in the thatched roof. The two men thrashed on the floor, locked in furious combat. The gun discharged a second time, and a bullet flew across the crowded room, and a man cried out in sudden pain.
She watched, wide-eyed, breathless, her heart pounding furiously. Watched as David wrested the gun free and tossed it aside. Watched as his hands—his gentle hands, but gentle no longer—flailed at the false friar, beating him to the ground.
Watched as David got up, slowly, blood trickling from his nose, a bruise on one cheek. And watched as Farrell lay motionless upon the cottage floor.
There was a furious debate over what to do with Farrell. Peader Killeen suggested that they put a pistol bullet in his head and be done with it. Seamus Finn, who had taken one of Farrell’s bullets in his right thigh, argued persuasively for beating his brains out with a pike. Jimmy Davis thought they ought to hang him.
“He’s more use alive,” David insisted.
“He’s no use, alive or dead.”
“Some people will have a lot of questions to ask him,” David explained. “Questions he’ll have to answer. And when they’re done with him, he’ll get what’s coming to him. He killed a woman in Dingle and probably murdered a motorist on the road. And may have killed many more. What happens to murderers in Ireland?”
“They’re sentenced to life in prison. It used to be the gallows for them, but now it’s only prison.”
“Then that’s where he’s going.”
They felt cheated out of the chance for an execution but went along with it. They tied up the unconscious Farrell, lashed his wrists and ankles together, and locked him in a closet. Then they brought out more jars of poteen and more bottles of Guinness and another tray of food, and went on with the party.
Ellen picked her banjo and everyone sang. Twice more Fergal O’Hara had to go through “The Boys of the West Tip Brigade,” and on the second run-through he added a verse to include the night’s latest development.
But the worst of the villains deceived us
And lived to escape from the fray
And garbed in the robes of a friar
He came to O’Hara’s that day
But our own darling Ellen she spied him
And David he wrestled him clean
And the government’s going to jail him—
Now where in the hell’s the poteen?