All Our Yesterdays by Robert B. Parker Read Free Book Online Page B

and then shook his head.
    “Fucking Irish,” he said as if to himself, and jerked his head at the guard. The big iron cell door groaned shut behind them and the bolt clanked home.
    Conn stayed where he was. His ribs hurt where the guard had kicked him, but he ignored it. He was fascinated instead with the flicker of feeling he’d experienced. It was as if the first hint of regeneration had stirred under the snow. What was it? The prospect of dying? Did he seek it so avidly that its promise brought him hope? He stood and walked to the doorand turned and walked back to the wall. It was only a few steps. He leaned on the wall with his palms flat against it and his cheek pressing the chill stone. He felt the roughness of the granite. No, it wasn’t death that thrilled him. It was that it didn’t matter. He didn’t care if he died or didn’t die. Nothing mattered and the thrill he felt was the thrill of freedom. No constraints. No restrictions.
If God is dead all things are possible
. He rolled along the wall until his back was against it and he said aloud.
    “Fuck it.”
    And his voice sounded so alien and odd in the cell that he said it again louder and laughed and the laugh echoed even more oddly under the oppression of stone and iron.
    “And fuck the English.”
    He drummed the flat of both hands in manic counterpoint against the wall.
    “And fuck the rebellion.”
    A guard appeared at the peephole for a moment.
    “And fuck you too, Hadley.”
    The guard’s eye disappeared from the peephole and Conn leaned against the wall and flexed his back and bounced against it. And laughed to himself.
    “Nuns fret not,” he said aloud. And laughed again, and rubbed his hands softly together. If you didn’t care, then it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. And fear and need mattered no more than comfort and love. They could kill him but they couldn’t scare him. They could keep him but they couldn’t crush him. It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. She couldn’t kill him. And perhaps, someday, he might kill her.
    “Fuck her,” he said aloud. And then smiled again, and said, “That too, maybe.”

1921
Conn
    S pring developed slowly outside Kilmainham jail. Inside, as if responding to it, prison discipline began to ease. The guards in Murderer’s Wing who had seen their prisoners filtered through the image of the skulking gunman, began to relax as they saw the men banter with each other, ragging and laughing. The prisoners laughed at the jail rules, much as their keepers did. And an enlisted man’s camaraderie began to develop, which realigned guards and prisoners against their mutual enemy, the officers. The guards left the cell doors unbolted when the officers weren’t around, and the prisoners moved freely about their cellblock.
    A short, thick soldier from a Welsh regiment leaned in Conn’s open doorway smoking.
    “So you plugged one of the bloody ferrets did you?” he said.
    Conn grinned at him.
    “Of course not.”
    “Did you shoot him outright or did you put a bomb through his window?”
    “You must be thinking of someone else,” Conn said. “But if I had done it, I’d have shot him, face to face.”
    “Face to face is the way,” the soldier said. “I don’t like the bloody bombing. Seems a coward’s way.”
    “You fight a war against a foreign invader,” Conn said. “You do what you have to do.”
    The soldier offered him a cigarette, Conn took it, and a light. They smoked in silence for a moment.
    “You think we’re invaders?”
    “Are you Irish?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Are you in Ireland?”
    The soldier nodded slowly.
    “In armed force?”
    The soldier grinned.
    “Foreign invaders,” he said.
    They smoked again in silence. A prisoner who called himself the Old Gunner went by on the way to the jacks.
    “Jail regulations do not permit fraternization with the prisoners,” the Old Gunner said in his best impression of an upper-class accent.
    “Bugger the jail regulations,” the