Ashes In the Wind by Christopher Bland Read Free Book Online Page A

Josephine.
    Below Staigue Fort on the road to Waterville an obelisk was later placed:
    IN LASTING MEMORY TO THE MEMBERS OF THE SECOND KERRY AND FIRST CORK BRIGADES KILLED OR CAPTURED AND SUBSEQUENTLY EXECUTED AFTER ENGAGING BRITISH FORCES AT STAIGUE FORT ON 14 APRIL 1920
    And below, in Ogham script, which Eileen Burke could have translated but not Frank O’Gowan:
    LAISAIR ROMHUIN A BUADH
    Eileen and William each have a simple gravestone in Drimnamore churchyard. There is no mention of how they died.

6
    A FTER THE SALE John goes to the graveyard by the church in Drimnamore, where the raw earth on Eileen’s and William’s graves has not yet settled. The brown curve above the grass presses heavily down on the bodies six feet below. There are no flowers. He stands there for a moment, then walks to the square to catch the horse-drawn outside car to Kenmare. He is given a heavy leather blanket to keep out the worst of the rain; although he is the only passenger, the elderly cob makes heavy weather of the long pull to the top of the pass at Moll’s Gap. There he asks the driver to stop for a moment, gets out and looks back across the bog down towards Drimnamore.
    A turf line has been cut in the bog to a depth of five feet and the black walls glisten with the rain, showing the neat cut-marks of the slane. The drain at the bottom of the wall is half full of water moving slowly down the hill. The dozen beehive mounds of cut turf are drenched. They’ll hardly save that, thinks John. Only the red berries of a small rowan break the grey landscape. The steady drizzle does not stop; a sea mist rolling up the Kenmare estuary blots out the country that John used to feel was his.
    From Kenmare John takes the train to Dublin and stays for the inside of a week with a friend in Trinity. It is less than a year since he left Dublin, which had then seemed alive, at the centre of a struggle just beginning, and Kerry a backwater. Staigue Fort, Eileen and William’s capture and murder, his days of fruitless searching, the fire and the sale had changed, changed utterly, his perception of the war. He had been transformed from a spectator into one of the walking wounded.
    Dublin is more sombre now. There is a nightly curfew from midnight to 5 a.m. Since the arrival of the Auxiliaries there are even more troops on the streets; in parts of the city groups of Volunteers openly carry weapons, no longer on the run. The balance of power is shifting. It is clear to John that the struggle will have only one ending, an ending that a year ago he would have welcomed, as would Eileen. Now he isn’t sure.
    He goes to see his solicitor in Leeson Street to sign some papers to complete the Derriquin sale. On the way, two troops of cavalry trot by, and he recognizes the saddlecloths of his father’s old regiment, the Royal Irish Dragoons. He had last seen them at a review on The Curragh just before they embarked for France in November 1914, his father at the head of his squadron, the regiment a heady mixture of green, red and gold, bright bits jingling, horses’ coats gleaming. The horses hadn’t lasted long, and Henry not much longer, thinks John. He wonders whether his father could have stopped the Staigue Fort battle, whether Henry could have found Eileen or persuaded General Strickland to reprieve the five Volunteers.
    These troopers are in khaki, their tin hats incongruous on horseback. The horses’ coats are dull and the line is ragged. John sees the last horse has cast a shoe. As they pass, a woman on the far side of the street yells abuse and spits. A trooper in the rear rank shouts back at her.
    ‘Don’t pay any attention to that fucking Fenian bitch,’ says the troop sergeant.
    The man next to him on the pavement says, ‘They’re on their way to Kilmainham where there’ll likely be a riot. They’re hanging a young Volunteer at three o’clock this afternoon. He’s a boy, a medical student, barely nineteen. No sense, no sense at all.’
    The