It's dropped from 13 pages to 10, Courier 12pt, double-spaced. I include this when an agent's submission process asks for it.
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Any and all who knew Eamonn Kinsella, and were being honest with themselves, had to admit that were he born but ten miles to the west or north his murder would have been seen as the fitting end to a hard and brutal man. As his son, I do not make this claim lightly. Nor is it from spite. While it is true he near broke my arm when forcing me to turn over a five-pound note I’d received for my tenth birthday, all so he could drink himself into yet another stupor, that was nothing unusual for him to do.
No, in truth and honesty, my father was a very difficult man. With everyone. For him, it took little more than a wrong word, here; a wrong look, there; or even a wrong touch on his shoulder to call forth some beast within. Then suddenly you’d find yourself on the floor with a split lip or blackened eye, after which, it would be your fault for his reaction, no matter how improbable the cause. Combine that with his height of well above six feet, weight at more than 15 stone, and back still carrying the strength gained from a long-past position as a navvy, few were they who would take the dispute further. That was why, as word of his death spread, the first thought on many a mind was he had finally focused his anger on the one absolute truth of existence -- that there was always somebody bigger, stronger, meaner and better with his fists than yourself, and that one day you were sure to meet.
And so he had.
His body was found off the Limavady Road, down a farm trail that might have offered a pleasant view of the Foyle had it not decided to turn so sharply to the east. The morning air was cold and blustery, and the fields around him bleak and gray despite recent whispers of snow and the brightness of sky. He was dumped in a ditch, his coat pulled down his arms and his hands bound behind him. Rumors also flew that he had been emasculated, never to be confirmed one way or the other. It was verified that every bone in every finger was broken, several ribs were shattered, an elbow had been dislocated and his face pummeled into the mere hint of a human visage. Blood soaked his shirt to his trousers, the knees of which were torn and scraped as if he’d been forced to crawl on them. Or been dragged. And it was said not one tooth was left in his mouth.
As for the Coroner’s comment on his death? It was the purest embodiment of callous simplicity.
“Mr. Kinsella perished from the result of a bullet being fired into the crown of his head.”
Mr. Kinsella perished.
He was not killed.
Nor was he murdered.
Or even slaughtered like a cow in the abattoir. Good heavens, no.
He merely perished.
A charming word you’d hear more often on the lips of someone claiming, “I’m perished from the hunger.” Or thirst. Or cold. Or work. Or the mere seeking of a job. Not once until that Coroner’s comment had I ever connected the damned word with death. Which sent me to the library to dig into their dictionary and discover it actually was defined as such, with synonyms being expire, wither, shrivel, vanish, molder and rot, any of which might have been just as inappropriate.
He had lain on his back in a slight trail of dirty water until his clothing was soaked through and solid with ice. One unseeing eye open and tinted by blood; the other swollen shut. Well-preserved, he was. Refrigerated, even. I grant this made it difficult to set an exact time of death, but when the powers that be claimed it was somewhere between midnight and four of that morning, they were ridiculed in the extreme. For he was last seen being jostled out of McCleary’s in his far-too-usual condition just after last orders, two nights before. And he had not returned to his hovel, that much was certain. So this had not been some quick and easy death for him. In fact, it became a truth carved in stone, to one and all, that his torturers had enjoyed their game with him for near two days. Especially as some of his injuries had begun to heal, prior to death.
Adding to the certainty of his lengthy demise was how the somewhat reticent undertaker handling the funeral arrangements had gently but firmly insisted on a closed casket.
“Considering the overall devastation visited upon him,” he’d softly said to the new widow, “well...there’s only so much one can do, you know, and really, Mrs. Kinsella, it would be best to remember him as he was.”
To which she began to wail, “My poor Eamonn.”
Mrs. Haggerty, her immediate neighbor, was at her side. Which was how word of this travesty leap from house to home with the speed of telepathy; that woman never knew a secret she couldn’t spread faster than the BBC.
I also was in the room, as was my elder brother, Eamonn, the younger. I was standing beside him and told I was being quite stoic, as my elder sister, Mairead, sat on a stool and wept. Eamonn’s fists were clenched and his body tight, for he and Mai knew what the man meant. And while I did understand the concept of death, I could make no sense from why such careful words were being used to describe it.
Not then, anyway.
But oh, did this new information increase the dead man’s stature in the eyes of most. He quickly became the truest of true Irishmen, who did not release his hold on life as easily as others would have. Who fought to the end in order to return home to his kith and kin. Why, he even spat blood in the faces of his killers, that much was a certainty. Before the day was out, he’d been elevated to the likes of Cu Chulain and Michael Collins and every other hero of Ireland’s past.
So throughout the afternoon and evening, many a pub mate dropped by to offer kind remembrances of Da’s bleak eyes and long face, a visage that brought to mind tortured poets and sad balladeers. They wistfully spoke of how he could sing so well as to make the angels weep. Elegant tunes of Ireland’s ruined past and her dead future. Others provided gentle smiles as they told stories about the stories he could weave. Melodious tales of fairies living in Oak glens that once spread forever across the land. And of gods who roamed her once glorious green fields and forests. And exciting events wrapped around Grianán Aileach, the ancient ring fort but six miles and a hundred worlds away from town. Oh, he had a true Irish heart in his use of words, and in another time under much better circumstances, he could have given the likes of James Joyce and Sean O’Casey a challenge as the nation’s bard. For each tale was brought to life with such beauty and perfection you’d have thought he lived through each and every one.
Though none of them could recall one well enough to repeat, or so they swore.
Which put me off, for Da had never shared a one with me or the others in my family. But when I said as much, the usual response was, “Oh, you poor wee lad, you just don’t remember,” or, “Were you not paying attention, again?” or, “This is what happens when you’re simple, lad,” and the like. Usually followed by a wink and nod to whomever was seated next to them. And with neither Eamonn the younger nor Mairead saying a word to the contrary, my dismissal was complete.
I was smart enough to know now was not the time to remind the bloody hypocrites of the beatings and the bursts of howling fury and the theft of any money we managed to pull together. I had long ceased to wonder at how much viciousness and cruelty and beauty and grace could have been poured into one man in fewer than thirty-six years and had accepted it was a part of him. After all, he was hardly the only Irishman filled with it. Anger was the one honest emotion those like him were allowed to hold. And if my mother was seen at market with a few fresh bruises...or was out in the cold night air walking us around till our lord and master had sworn himself into weary, drunken sleep? Well, her nails had left scratches deep on more than just his back, and her quick hand with an iron skillet to the head had not gone unnoticed. Hypocrisy is just good manners when dealing with a death, and so the bad was made quiet and the best cried aloud.
His funeral was well-attended and partially paid for through the intersession of Father Demian, who’d so often visited the man’s home in times of distress. The rest was done by the widow’s one sister, Maria Nolan, who had rushed over from Houston. Texas. She had departed four years before I was born but maintained steady contact. It was she who’d sent me that five-pound note; I never told her what became of it. She saw that everything was arranged as well as possible in our sad little hovel, and kept my younger brother and sister at her hotel room to give them peace from the nonstop clamor of adults in the house.
She also spoke to the press, and emphasized that the widow had five children with another soon due yet was living in a structure that was close to collapse and had no prospects for better. She actually shamed the bastards who ran the town like their bloody fiefdom into promising new lodgings once the last of the Rossville Flats was completed.
If there were room still available on the queue, of course. Can’t make promises one might have to keep.
But as with most catastrophic events, soon all was over and done with, and life began its return to normal as the confusion surrounding us all drifted away...except for one small and final detail that proved more than important; Eamonn Kinsella lived and died in Derry, in the North of Ireland -- Londonderry for those who cannot be bothered to learn the city’s true name.
She was a Catholic city taken hold of by Protestants in the way an abusive man might take hold of his woman, refusing to let her go even if it meant her destruction. So when it was learned that my Da had been killed by two drunk Protestants, that well-mannered hypocrisy turned to fury.
It didn’t help the bastards swore to heaven and earth they’d only meant to have some fun with the Taig. Which was accepted as the most reasonable explanation by the powers that be, despite his vicious and extremely well-known injuries.
So thus was the martyrdom of Eamonn Kinsella to Mother Ireland made a part of historic value and his trek to sainthood begun as the truth of his former violent existence vanished like a ghost. This was added to when other Catholics were killed, that year, and several Catholic schools attacked, all because the move to civil rights for the Catholic minority in the state had begun to grew in force. As if hitting someone who’s asking you to stop hitting them means they will shut up and let you continue to hit them. Any fool could see the opposite is all that would occur.
But still, Protestant leaders declared it was the Catholic population responsible for the discrimination against it and no quarter would be given to make amends for past transgressions that they, themselves, had caused. It never ceases to amaze me how many stupid people refuse to see the reality of what is happening around them.
So there was my new beginning barely have passed my tenth birthday. Unaware of the quiet hatred that was slowly building to an explosion of death and cruelty made only the worse by it happening in a supposedly civilized part of the dwindling British Empire. But what child can see the growth of history around him when even few adults can? Things happen, and you either rejoice when all ends well or weep when it doesn’t. Thus, my father’s death held resonance for me in but the most selfish of ways -- that he was gone, and I could now live my life in the manner I chose, that of a lad filled with hopes and dreams and prayers and promises, thinking himself to be in a place of safety.
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