The Three Demands
By Donald Reilly
Even though the house is empty now, every morning Patrick breathes life into the coal embers that remain in the kitchen fireplace from the night before. As he blows orange into the ashy coals and the fire catches, he can’t stop the thought, the wish, that he could have breathed life into his son, Liam, all those years ago. Once, he shared this wish with a friend after too many whiskeys at Keogh’s, one of the pubs down the road that had escaped the destruction of the Troubles. His friend replied, “That’s a God role. Fan the flames so you don’t have to blow.”
This morning, after tea and a slice of brown bread, Patrick finishes yesterday’s paper and waits for the fire to warm the back boiler behind the fireplace. Once it’s hot, he turns on the pump that circulates water to the radiators in the empty bedrooms above. At nine o’clock, he washes the dishes. As he dries them, he can hear the house creaking alive from the growing warmth. Another thought intrudes. A memory really. It was the first October after Liam’s death. He lit a fire just as he did today. As the house warmed and the creaking started, it sounded as if Liam was tiptoeing down the rickety stairs so he wouldn’t wake his mother. Those sounds rocked Patrick to his knees.
At half-nine, he puts on his black anorak and his dark tweed beret and calls out “I’m away” to the empty house. He walks along the Falls Road, reciting a prayer for the dead from Thessalonians. He thinks he has it memorized. But just in case, in the pocket of his track pants, there’s a piece of air mail stationery, the one with the red and white borders, onto which he had copied the prayer. His daughter-in-law, Meaghan, sent him the stationery from America. He’s never used it to send a letter.
This morning, like every morning, people walking along the Falls Road give Patrick a wide berth on his pilgrimage to Milltown Cemetery. They call out to him, “How about you, Mr. Maguire?” but they know not to stop him because he must arrive at his son’s graveside before a quarter past ten, the time of Liam’s passing.
As he enters the cemetery, he walks to the cottage where the gravediggers store their picks and shovels, and around to the back where the men allow him to keep the rusty beach chair he uses every day. Patrick sees one of the gravediggers gathering his tools as he waits for the electric kettle to heat water for tea. The gravedigger asks, “Will you take some tea, Mr. Maguire?” In the year following Liam’s death, when Patrick wanted company, he had tried. But he found that he had lost his ability to make small talk. Especially in the cemetery. And who needs talk, really? The gravedigger smiles when Patrick declines his offer. “Maybe tomorrow,” he says and calls out, “God bless” as Patrick walks away.
When he arrives at the gravesite, he says, “Hello son” and pulls a rag from the pocket of his jacket, an old cotton shirt which belonged to Liam. He dusts the face of the stone so the enamel shines. Then he wipes off his chair and scolds himself for not replacing the frayed nylon ribbon that is near its breaking point. “Why can’t I remember?” he says aloud. “Aren’t I here every day?” He reaches into his pocket for a pen so he can write a reminder on the air mail stationery, but he has forgotten a pen, too.
He reads the inscription on the tombstone: “Liam Maguire, 1951-1981. Irish martyr. He died hungering for the freedom of Northern Ireland.” That was his wife’s idea, a compromise he had to make so she would meet his three demands. Originally, he had asked for four. But one of the things his wife, Geraldine, would never agree to was removing the Irish flag from Liam’s coffin. She put up less of a fight about his first two: no three-gun salute and no eulogies from IRA leaders. He told her that he wanted to prevent the procession of thousands through the streets from the funeral home to the cemetery. To this Geraldine responded, “What does that have to do with me? I can’t control what other people do.” And that was true enough. In the end, she was thrilled to immortalize Liam in stone as a martyred hero, and Patrick felt that he had reduced the chance that the IRA would use Liam’s funeral as propaganda for their revolution. There had been enough of this at the funerals of the four hunger strikers who had died before Liam.
Today, Patrick has good news to share with his son, a break from the usual stories of assassinations, revenge killings, and explosions that continue to mark the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Liam’s daughter, Alanna, will be graduating from Fordham University in May. Her mother is planning a party. Alanna wants him to go. “But that means I won’t see you for a week,” he says to the stone as if asking for permission. It also means that he’ll have to see Meaghan, Alanna’s mother. Something Patrick isn’t ready to do.
He sits silently and nods off until the song of a distant skylark snaps him awake. Remembering the pictures Alanna sent, he reaches into his pocket, kneels in front of the tombstone, and shows the photos to Liam. “How big they’ve gotten in the last ten years,” he says aloud, referring to Alanna and her brother, Connor. He promises to frame two of them so they can be here with Liam. Then he adds, “And you won’t believe what Alanna’s planning next.” Patrick waits as if Liam will respond. “She’s been accepted to the Irish Studies Program at Boston College.”
Patrick has a hard time imagining this. When Alanna told him, he asked, “Why would you want to immerse yourself in the nightmare of Irish history? Haven’t you’ve had enough of it?” But that’s as far as Patrick will go. There are things that he won’t discuss with her. He often wants to, but the monthly phone call goes by so fast and is full of mostly good news, that Patrick refuses to ruin it by forcing her to relive the past. There’s so much of it. There’s the violence she witnessed in the streets of Belfast as the IRA fought the British Army and Protestant paramilitary groups to end colonialism and the persecution of Catholics. There’s the trauma of Liam’s secret membership in the IRA and the shock of his arrest and imprisonment for attempted murder. That news left Alanna silent for months. And Connor wetting the bed. There’s the torment of the sixty-one days of Liam’s hunger strike in Long Kesh Prison to protest the criminalization of IRA political prisoners, freedom fighters they called themselves, in a British jail. And of course, there’s the affidavit that Liam’s wife, Meaghan, refused to sign, the one that would have given doctors the authority to try to save Liam when he lapsed into a coma on day sixty-one. But by that time, there was very little of Liam remaining.
Occasionally, during their monthly phone conversations, Alanna mentions that Connor is still clean after his second stint in rehab. This seems like an opportunity to talk about how their lives have been destroyed by those sixty-one days, but Patrick lets the moment pass. He knows how Alanna was traumatized by the arguments he had with his wife. Patrick yelling, “I’ll not let my son die,” and Geraldine insisting that they could not intervene. She had promised Liam, like the mothers of the previous four strikers had done. The ones who had let their sons die. “The only way a hunger strike can succeed,” she said, “is if no one falters until the British government meets the prisoner’s demands.” But her promises didn’t matter. Meaghan, Liam’s wife, had the legal right to intervene. In the end, she didn’t. This is what Geraldine had wanted all along. For her son’s intentions to be honored. All Patrick wants is to watch rugby with him.
He stares at the inscription on the tombstone. Irish martyr. Hungering for freedom. Had this compromise been worth it? When Geraldine first showed him these words, which were hastily written on a stained paper towel, Patrick said he couldn’t bear to see them every day. She shrugged like it didn’t matter, like she had every time he objected to paths that seemed to lead Liam to the IRA. His next words exploded out of his mouth like vomit: “I can’t bear to see you, either.” Sometimes, Patrick sees this conversation like the moment a driver takes his eyes off the road and has an accident that kills his family. Tomorrow will mark ten years since Geraldine moved out to live with her sister. Her departure was his third demand.
