Check out part one for the whole story from the beginning if you like. As always, comments and ratings are more than welcome!
Part Two: Great Love, Great Loss, and the Great War
Years wore on since that night on the eve of November, and my visits to the Connollys became less frequent. My bones couldn't take the mile walk over the rolling road more than once a week. Humphry, or Fry as we'd call him, came more frequently to help me round up my poor few cattle for count and care with my old friend Shep.
Fry was still a quiet boy, now of twenty, and very respectable. Still I sent my regards home with him to his family whenever I could and I still I walked down the road every so often to visit. But the best times were when Aideen came down the road to visit me on her way to the village. She was sixteen and had been out of school for years. Her unexpected visits were always my favorite part of the day. Sometimes she would make tea while Fry and I tended the farm, and sometimes she would stay long after Fry had left and we'd had our tea. The best of all was when she would come, have tea, and stop over to me again on her return from the village. She brought the bread and maybe some treat from a shop or a neighbor, and would stay until the small hours talking with me, eating stewed rhubarb and sugar. We traded stories-- I only had a few, but she had new ones all the time. Sometimes she would cut my grey hair by the light of the fire and the kerosene lamp and shave me. Sometimes we would play a game of hearts or thirty-one.
But the people were talking. I knew it to be true from the teasing I'd get when I saw her father, or when I talked to the people down the road. I never saw nor read a glimpse of shame on Aideen's face, but I knew. The hills of Bonnakeen were talking. They were talking over tea and whisky and beer about all the time that the Connolly girl, the child Aideen, was spending with the old bachelor Denny Doyle.
"Bless her heart, that Aideen Connolly, helping the poor old Doyle brother in his old age," says one.
"Aideen is the absolute life of Denny, without her he'd be gone yesterday," says another.
"Would you believe the sinful conduct between them? She, only sixteen, and he a man of eighty-two?" says a third.
But they were all wrong, for there was no sinful conduct at all between us, and neither was it charity that brought her to me during the night. It was a true and beautiful friendship that kept us together so much and so often. Later that year, the voices faded as the violence in the Irish countrymen's blood boiled up and over and became the War of Independence.
The Easter Rising swallowed all rumor. Hushed voices spoke of land and law and loss. The belief in omen and fate faded away. Violence accented the sudden, the unexpected, and the unforeseen possibilities in life. Catholicism became, more than ever, the national supernatural. The opportunity to shape the future was on the people's minds. There was a Great War happening in Europe, but the war that came home to Ireland was all ours.
Fry fought for the Republicans, Owen farmed like his father and stashed an arsenal, and Úna ran messages for the boys in green. I will always believe that Eoin and Cait must have had some kind of prescience to give Owen the English version of his father's name, because eventually everyone would have to take an anglicized name in the face of the half-crazed Black and Tan squadrons. Aideen never joined the cause.
For me, it was not an option. I lived through the famine, I've seen the destruction of lives, and I was too late in years to share in the victory of the young rebels. Aideen and I were so close that our company kept us safe, for the most part, from the tragedy. Her closeness to me tacitly pushed her away from her family and her country. We were only us on a farm, on a road in Bonnakeen.
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One December day in 1918, she came to me at an odd hour in the day.
"They captured young Owen," sobbed Aideen through the door, "they'll make him tell... or they'll kill him... and none of us Connollys is safe anymore. And you neither Denny, ye poor man." And she sobbed onto my shoulder.
"Well what do you mean Aideen? I never wanted to be involved in this war, and I have nothing here to hide, save for knowing you."
"Ye don't know me well enough Denny."
"What are you talking about?"
"I told Owen. I told him not to hide the arms on our farm anymore."
"So they'll find nothing then."
"No!" sobbed she. "We hid them in the gullets here, on your land. The word is out Denny. Don't think that people have forgotten about us. Worse that we are friends and nothing more. Yer to be the target from the first word out of Owen."
My sorry situation was clear. I had been dragged into this conflict, living in this republican stronghold of Bonnakeen in the south, but I could still get out of it. Aideen and I spent all day looking for the tarps full of arms in the countless gullets on my old farm. We checked thirty gullets on forty acres. We trudged through the bog, the rusted thorny wire, the Queen's woods, the frozen streams, the overgrown lane on this dilapidated land that would make 1,000 countrymen cringe. We found the three bags, containing six rifles and five revolvers all in all. As we returned to the house, Aideen reached into the window of my crumbling chicken coop across the road and took out two boxes of bullets.
"These I hid myself," Admitted Aideen, and well of her to remember.
We walked together one mile up the road, and left them square in the middle. If the Black and Tans came to shake my house down, they'd find nothing. Whoever found the arms first, British or the Irish, could keep them.
I was a reinvigorated man when Aideen and I walked my farm and dug out the awful guns, but when we got back to the house, we were both dirty and exhausted. We boiled some water that Fry had saved for me in the pantry and drew a small bath.
First Aideen bathed in the pantry alone and then she drew a new bath for me, bringing the tub into the warm kitchen and drawing the drapes. She undressed me and washed my body. She washed away the dirt of the day and a week. She looked on my body for the first time with kind eyes, and I know it was not just my imaginings that I saw want in her eyes too. She heated more water in the black kettle that hung on the crane by old sooty hooks. She lugged the heavy thing over to me, dirty rags insulating her soft white hands and poured it in the tub so I felt the warm current convect through the cool water and surround me. She dried and dressed me and then the knock came.
Three Black and Tan soldiers came through the door as soon as Aideen turned the knob.
