“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.
“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.
“Shoot ’em all dead in ten minutes,” someone said.
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.
Twenty-one
Farrell cracked wide-open the moment the police began their interrogation. Defeat, his first defeat, had been too much for him. Mentally unstable from the beginning, he was completely unhinged by defeat; he raved like a lunatic. Along with the raving he came out with the facts.