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In many ways and with everyone.
It would take 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. And it would be your fault for his reaction, no matter how improbable the cause, so expect no apology. With his height of well above six feet, weight at more than fifteen 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.
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 the sky. He had been dumped in a ditch, his coat pulled down his arms and his hands bound tight 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 merest 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 release on the manner of 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 murdered.
Nor was he killed.
Or even slaughtered, like a cow in the abattoir.
He merely perished.
A charming word you'd hear more often on the lips of someone claiming they're perished from the hunger. Or thirst. Or cold. 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. Time of death was somewhere between midnight and four of that morning, which brought forth a great deal of anger. Two nights before, he had been jostled out of McCleary’s in his far-too-usual condition, just after last orders. And he had not returned to his hovel, that much was certain. Nor had he been seen anywhere else, since. So to one and all it became a truth carved in stone that his torturers had enjoyed their game with him for near two days.
Adding to the horror of his lengthy demise was how the somewhat reticent undertaker handling the funeral arrangements had gently but firmly insistented on a closed casket.
"Considering the overall devastation visited upon him," he'd softly said to the 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." As was expected of her.
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 quietly, and told I was being quite stoic a lad, as my elder sister, Mairead, sat on a stool and wept. Eamonn's fists were clenched and his body tight, for he and Mairead knew what all of this meant. And while I did understand the concept of death, I could make no sense from the quiet reticence in the way it was being depicted by any and all concerned.
Not then, anyway.
But oh, did this news increase the dead man's stature in the eyes of any and all. 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 gone, he'd been elevated to the likes of Cu Chulain and Michael Collins and every other hero of Ireland's past, with all past grievances forgotten.
So throughout the afternoon and evening, many a pub mate dropped by to offer kind remembrances of my 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 word. In another time under much better circumstances, he'd 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.
Which put me off, for I'd heard Da's stories and singing voice, and not been much impressed. But when I said so, the usual response was, "Oh, you poor wee lad, how could you know?" Or, "What a thing to say about your poor dead da." Or, "This is what happens when you're simple." The last one usually followed by a wink and nod to whomever was seated next to them. And when neither Eamonn the younger nor Mairead said a single word to the contrary, the dismissal of my opinion was complete.
Simple! Once you have the reputation of that, you cannot seem to remove it. But I was smart enough to know now was not the time to remind the bloody hypocrites of the money borrowed but never to be repaid, or drunken rants along the road, or the beatings and the bursts of howling fury and the theft of any money we'd managed to pull together. I had long ceased to wonder at how much viciousness and cruelty could have been poured into one man in fewer than thirty-six years, and had just accepted it was a part of him. After all, he was hardly the only Irishman filled with anger. It was the one honest emotion those like him were allowed to hold. And if my mother was seen at market with 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 use of an iron skillet to the head had not gone unnoticed.
But it hit me wrong, then.
It wasn't till years later I understood that hypocrisy is just good manners, at a wake.
So the bad of my father 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 provided by the widow's one sister, Maria Nolan, who had rushed over from Houston. Texas. It was she who'd sent me that five-pound note. She saw that everything was arranged as well as possible in our sad little hovel. She also kept my younger brother and sister at her hotel room to give them peace from the nonstop clamor of adults in the house. And when she spoke to the press, she emphasized that the widow had five children with another soon due yet was living in a structure that was condemned and had no prospects for better. She actually shamed the bastards who ran the town like their bloody fiefdom into at least 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.
I think they expected that, as with most catastrophic events, soon all would be over and done with and life return to normal as the confusion surrounding us all drifted away, so they could return to ignoring us. And would have but 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.
A Catholic town taken hold of by Protestants in the way an abusive man might take hold of a woman he fancied, 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 history and his trek to sainthood begun as the truth of his former violent existence vanished like a ghost.
The year was 1966, when several other Catholics were killed for being Catholic and Catholic schools attacked by the Protestant fools, all because the move to civil rights for the Catholic minority in the state had begun to grow in force. It was as if they thought hitting someone who's asking you to stop hitting them means they will shut up and let you continue the beating. To add to the insult, Protestant leaders insisted the Catholic population was responsible for the discrimination against it so no quarter would be given to make amends for the 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. That we had decided not to let the past determine the course of the future. That trying to keep everything as it had been was no longer an option, and if they would only compromise a little, a lot could be achieved and both our world and theirs made better.
But to follow that course would have been intelligent, so arrogance and stupidity took sway...and what followed was all but pre-ordained.
Having barely passed my tenth birthday, I was not much aware of the quiet hatred that was building to an explosion of death and cruelty. An explosion 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 weep when it ends poorly or rejoice when it doesn’t. Thus, my father's death held resonance for me in but the most selfish, limited and childish 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.
