Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (7 page)

“Have you ever seen Michelangelo’s sketches?” she asked.

Pat shook his head.

“Well I have and these remind me of them, same raw, unleashed talent. Though,” her eyes had a wicked twinkle to them, “it seems you may have a greater love of the female form than did Michelangelo. Oh, by the way,” she leaned close enough that he could smell her scent, vanilla and strawberries, “I’ve got a birthmark on my left hip, I thought you might want to add it in for authenticity.” With that final thought, she left him standing openmouthed, books and drawing instruments puddling around his feet.

“Mr. Riordan you’ll be tardy for your next class,” said the professor in his best uptight teacher voice. “Thinking up more revolutionary rhetoric are you?” he asked as Pat still stood unmoving. Blinking like a stunned owl, Pat turned and said in a soft voice,

“No sir, I was just wondering if maybe the circles of Hell and Paradise don’t sometimes overlap.”

“Of course they do, Mr. Riordan,” the professor, laying out his books for the next class, looked over the top of his spectacles, “that’s what we call Earth.”

Perhaps, thought Pat, at last gathering up his papers, pens and charcoal, perhaps the man wasn’t totally hopeless after all.

Pat had meant it when he said the history of Ireland was the history of his family. He was not bragging, for the Lord above knew that in Ireland to have your past generations mirror the events of its nation was not a happy situation. His statement was simple and unexaggerated; the fortunes of the Riordans had paralleled those of Ireland. Which is to say, in no small manner, that neither had ever known peace, nor much prosperity or happiness. It was also to say that both had seen more than their share of bloodshed, sectarian violence and longing for an unattainable dream, something that over the years had taken on the ethereal form of normality, a life of simplicity and small happinesses. However, in all truth, neither the nation nor the family understood what dreams had to be discarded and sometimes crushed to attain these things. In either case, neither was willing to find out.

There had been a tradition of a rising in every generation since the days of Theobald Wolfe Tone and his tragically failed uprising of 1798. Irish history tended to remember the men who failed gloriously with greater fondness than the men who actually won some sort of advancement. The Riordans too had their tradition of a rising in each generation and as a result, not a man of them had seen his fiftieth birthday, some falling a few decades short even of that.

The story of Ireland was a tale as old as mankind itself. A story of resistance in the face of insurmountable odds, of a refusal to put one’s neck under the master’s boot willingly. The boot in this case being the stiff-legged and unwieldy one of British imperialism.

The trouble of Ireland fit quite nicely into an old Vietnamese proverb in that Ireland was
‘too close to England and too far from Heaven
.’ Some would say that the problems all started when King John thrust his tri-leopard banner into Irish shores, for after that the successive English monarchies, Tudors, Stuarts, Old King Billy et al, considered Ireland as an English island just off their west coast. It was in this frame of mind that James I of England ‘planted’ colonies of English and Presbyterian Scots in six of the northern counties, cutting a nation in two irrevocably. The blood from that cut would still be running freely some three hundred years later.

Catholic farmers were pushed off their land and the Protestant landlords with large holdings were forbidden by law to give them tenancy, the landlords with smaller holdings were permitted to grant them tenancy but were taxed at a higher rate for the sin of doing so.

The list of Thou-Shalt-Nots for the Catholics were formally disguised as penal laws.

Thou Shalt Not own land.

Thou Shalt Not Vote.

Thou Shalt Not be educated within Ireland nor without.

Thou Shalt Not hold public office, nor work in the civil service, nor own a weapon, nor earn more than one-third the value of your own crops. Nor be a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant nor a professional of any sort.

The Catholic religion was for the most part banned, illegal and the practice of it subject to severe punishment. Seminaries to train new priests were outlawed and foreign-trained priests forbidden entrance into Ireland.

There was one Thou Shalt and it managed to be the bitterest of the lot, a law that demanded Catholics pay tithe into Protestant coffers. The commandment that remained unwritten was no less forceful for its lack of ink and it was firmly etched within the Catholic consciousness, thou shalt not live as a human being nor aspire to the lofty notion of being one and this we will not let you forget. Ever.

The dour Lowlander Scots who settled in Northern Ireland were a God-fearing, hardworking, suspicious minded breed who saw the ‘Old Irish’ as a feckless, lazy, yet dangerous foe. Even the Pope, far away in Rome, was as suspect as if his middle name was Beelzebub and he sprouted horns under his hat.

Where the Riordans fit into this history was also, as anything inherently Irish must be, a point up for debate. However, the first one to breeze into history with any aplomb was the organizer of the Defenders, a rural underground group who would eventually forge strong links with a group of young Protestant idealists called the United Irishmen, led eventually by the unfortunate Wolfe Tone.

It was Wolfe Tone who led the Rebellion of 1798 that set into action events which were to forever alter the course of Irish history. The Rebellion failed miserably from the perspective of the peasants but for the British it was a bit of a triumph. It proved what they had believed all along—that the Irish were a feckless, upstart bunch of hooligans who were not to be trusted. It was this mentality that brought into being the Act of Union of 1800 which was passed by the use of force, threats and bribery, an Act that forced the Irish Parliament to amalgamate with the British one, rendering them voiceless in an assembly of some 650 strong. The Irish Parliament had consisted of the Protestant Ascendancy, leaving the three million Catholics of the time without representation.

One fallout of the Act of Union was that political power shifted from Dublin to London and so did many of the titled landholders. Irish landholdings were exploited in an effort to maintain lavish lifestyles, while in Ireland the people who tilled the land faced starvation, disease and death.

In an effort to maximize yields from small landholdings, potatoes as an easy and hardy crop became heavily relied upon, which led to the disastrous famine of the 1840’s. The famine would kill one million and send another million fleeing to America, though they would often die on the disease ridden ships and never see the shores where they’d sought sanctuary. Ireland would lose nearly half of her population and would forever change the face of America.

Cathal Riordan, father of Kieran, chose to stay. He watched his brothers leave and knew that he would never see them again. Then he set himself the task of surviving and keeping his family alive. It was, even for so strong and determined a man, a daunting task. It meant eating grass and stealing fish from the landlord’s pond. It meant hunting in the night and learning to ride the wind as if he’d been born to it. It meant watching your friends and neighbors die because you could not spare them a morsel. It meant holding the only baby girl ever known to have been born to the Riordan line and knowing that there was not enough food for her mother to nurse her, it meant building a wee coffin with your two hands and putting your own flesh and blood under the ground. It meant losing faith in God and church and man. It meant having your home seized by English troops, razed to the ground and burnt, just so you couldn’t drag through the ashes for your meager belongings.

It meant watching your oldest boy die in agony from the ‘bloody flux’, blood pouring from his body and being unable to help him. It meant not making love to your wife for fear of pregnancy and finally because you were too weak to even consider the idea. It meant selling every scrap of clothing, bedding, leaving only the cloth on your back, which was louse-ridden and filthy. It meant finally putting your only remaining boy on a famine ship and praying to a God you no longer believed in that he would make it to America alive. It meant watching your wife die from a combination of starvation and heartbreak and then stumbling drunk with grief and pain along roads where entire families lay in ditches, dying of the black fever, typhus. It meant walking for endless days and nights, never stopping, gone beyond the limits of degradation, humiliation, pain and affliction into the no man’s land of madness. Not knowing where you were, lost, alone and crazed, falling to your knees and then onto your face only to discover that you’d made your way to the ocean and would likely die because you were too weak to lift your face from a mere four inches of saltwater.

Cathal did survive, was pulled out of the water by a grizzled old fisherman and taken to Inisheer, the southernmost island of the Arans. Cathal came from a long line of men who preferred to keep their feet firmly planted on land but from necessity, he learned to navigate the frail wickerwork curragh, the traditional Irish boat, on the rough and unpredictable north Atlantic waters. Fish and seaweed became the staples of his diet and he would swear to his dying day that he could still taste the both of them.

Healing comes even to those who don’t want it and so it came to Cathal. In 1852 he remarried, a quiet dark island girl who gave him three sons within the space of five years.

From the seeds of famine sprung the sapling of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an oath-bound secret society whose object was revolution. Its tentacles reached across the ocean by the following year and Clann na Gael was established on American shores. Thus began the long relationship of support from the United States for Ireland’s fight for freedom.

In 1866, twenty years after his father put him on a famine ship, Kieran Riordan came home. He brought with him an American wife and a ten-year-old son, Daniel. A year later, he and his father would be hung for their part in an unsuccessful uprising. The British hung, flogged, jailed and transported the leaders thus adding more names to the very long roll of Irish martyrs.

Kieran’s wife decided to stay in Ireland and raise her son. Daniel would grow up in an Ireland that saw the likes of Charles Stuart Parnell, the Protestant lawyer who became the leader of the Irish Parliament and devoted much of his life to the issue of Home Rule, giving the Irish the right to rule their own destiny. It was as close as Ireland would ever come to complete independence. Parnell was ruined by a divorce scandal and died only a year later. His cause would be taken up by others but never with the same fervor or charisma. Home Rule would be tabled, put aside, shunted about and never seriously considered by the British Parliament. Its ghost would hang about firing more generations, leading them to insurrection and defeat.

The Unionists, descendants of the Lowlander Scots, had no interest in Home Rule, ‘Home Rule is Rome rule’ went a popular slogan of the day and the Unionists led by Edward Carson and Andrew Bonar Law wished to remain firmly wrapped in the Union Jack. They would play the ‘Orange Card’ and appealing to the most primitive fears and hatreds would stir the cauldron for another generation of sectarian strife and hatred.

Daniel Riordan became a leader of sorts, helping Parnell to tie the disparate limbs of politics and force, the marriage of these two bedfellows forged another link in the chain that would eventually lead to the formation of the Irish Republican Army.

Daniel, never comfortable in the city, settled in Connemara, home to an ancient and lonely landscape. It suited him well. He raised four sons, the youngest of whom was Pat and Casey’s grandfather, Brendan. The Riordan household became the hub of the surrounding countryside, a place where wisdom was dispensed in equal measure with food, drink and respite. If two men had a quarrel over a piece of land, a horse, a cow or even a woman they would take their dispute to Daniel who could be trusted to make a fair judgment. Strays of all sorts made their way to the Riordan door, dogs, cats, children, men on the run, women in despair, all certain to receive a welcome and a place to lay their head for as long as need be. Though a blacksmith by trade, Daniel ran a small but productive farm. He’d a way, people said, of coaxing the best from the soil, of making the cows produce more milk and the chickens more eggs. It was true that despite the raising of four big, hearty boys with appetites to match, there was never a better table than the Riordans for good, honest fare.

Daniel, despite a happy home and full belly, never forgot the past. He had, as a boy of eleven, watched his father and grandfather hang and vowed he would honor their memory. Kieran and Cathal had come late to Republicanism, but Daniel was born to it. It became in his time the religion of the Riordans. By no means an orator, still Daniel had a quiet strength that made him a natural leader, a magnet to which people were drawn and, once drawn, became disciples. Under his guidance, people banded together to push for reform, to defend their rights, to take back what had been stolen and nearly destroyed in the Irish soul. Though not a proponent of force as a means of change, Daniel nevertheless believed its use justified when necessary. Land reforms slow to come finally resulted in the buying out of landlords in the later years of the nineteenth century and a return to the Irish owning their own land.