He sat by the turf fire staring at the floor. When he sipped they sipped, when he cleared his throat they cleared their throats. Prophecy was a gift and couldn't be hurried. A man who was about to lose seventeen sons fighting in seventeen foreign armies had a right to weigh his thoughts. Still the question escaped once again from someone.
What's to be done, Joe?
A sip. Sips across the room. The king cleared his throat, they did the same. Now was the moment.
What's to be done? I'll tell you what's to be done. In two years time there'll be an Easter rebellion, a rising of the nation, and I'll have a son in that rebellion, one son fighting for Ireland, a mere lad it's true but he'll be there. So that's the full truth on this June 14th in 1914. I've had thirty-three sons in my time and I saved my name for the last of them, and what will happen will be and that lad will do as he has to and I know what it is, and after that he's going to go on and become the King of Jerusalem for some reason.
The last words startled everyone in the room. Even the king's head jerked back in surprise.
Don't blaspheme, cautioned a voice.
And none intended. I have no idea why I said that. And now what's your name? he shouted suddenly to hide his embarrassment, staring between the shoulders of his friends who crowded the room.
Everyone turned. They hadn't noticed the small dark boy huddled in a corner at the back, struck dumb as always by his father's oracular sessions. With all eyes upon him he was afraid to speak, but with his father's eyes upon him he was even more afraid not to speak.
Joseph, he whispered.
Joseph what?
Joseph Enda Columbkille Kieran Kevin Brendan O'Sullivan Beare.
Saints of this island, answered his father, and that's my name too, saved for you so you can fight for Ireland as I once did, two years hence in the rising. Now there's no need to swear by those saints, lad, but we're going to raise a mug to you for what's to come, that much we can do. And the evil eye be off you and the little people be with you, and as your mother has taught you to say, If you haven't a shilling a ha'penny will do, and if you haven't a ha'penny God bless you.
Solemnly the men in the room raised their mugs and emptied them. In the corner young Joe, fourteen years old, stood perfectly straight and terrified.
On Easter Monday in 1916 the rising came as predicted and the Irish revolutionaries managed to hold the Dublin post office for several days. One of the few to escape from the post office was young Joe, who then walked two hundred miles south to the mountains of County Cork, thereby reversing the route of his famous ancestor.
What's to be done? he wondered as he walked. A man fighting alone needed distance from the enemy, so he decided to teach himself to use his rifle at long range.
The rifle itself was a curious antique, a modified 1851 U.S. cavalry musketoon that had last seen service with czarist dragoons in the Crimean War. But Joe soon discovered that with its short thick barrel, its heavy stock and enormous bullets, the musketoon could be used with extraordinary accuracy when fired in the manner of a howitzer, aimed in the air rather than at the target so the bullets traversed a high arc and struck from above.
For the next three years Joe practiced with his musketoon in the mountains mastering the trajectories of a howitzer, careful to let himself be seen only from far away. He moved at night and never slept in the same place twice, a phantom figure in a bright green jacket and buckled shoes and a flat red hat whom the farmers of Cork, with their sure knowledge of pookas and banshees and trooping sly fairies, quite naturally came to refer to among themselves as the biggest of the little people.
Then too he had to scavenge for food at night and that added to the legend. In the morning a farmer would find a chair in an outbuilding out of place and four or five potatoes missing.
He was here last night, the farmer would whisper to his neighbors, and of course no one had to be reminded who he was. The neighbors would nod gravely, perhaps recalling a soft crack of thunder they had heard in the distance at dawn.
In 1919 guerrilla warfare broke out and the English later sent in the Black and Tans, who roamed the countryside looting and beating and spreading terror. Until he manifested himself and the terror in southern Ireland was suddenly on the other side.
The pattern was always the same. A band of Black and Tans galloping down a road, a lone farmer running across his fields trying to dodge their bullets. From far away a soft crack of thunder. Another and another. Two or three Black and Tans tumbling to the ground, each with a bullet wound in the top of his head.
One day in western Cork, the next in eastern Cork. The third day near a fishing village. The fourth day far inland.
And the bullets always striking from directly above as if fired from heaven. All at once the Black and Tans found themselves facing divine intervention or at least a division of elusive sharpshooters armed with some secret new weapon. They refused to leave their barracks and he seemed to have won.
But the private war waged by the biggest of the little people couldn't last forever. When ballistic tests proved the enemy was only one agile man armed with an old modified U.S. cavalry musketoon, the Black and Tans began ravaging the countryside with renewed vengeance. And the informers informed and young Joe's hiding places in the mountains disappeared.
Gone now were the bright green jacket and the flat red hat and the buckled shoes, gone the reassuring soft cracks of thunder in the distance, gone the mysterious presence in southern Ireland, gone even the old cavalry musketoon, buried now in the ruins of an abandoned churchyard along with the tiny hope that someday he might return to reclaim it.
It was Easter Monday again, four years to the day since the rising, and young Joe sat in a vacant lot in a slum of the city of Cork passing his last afternoon in Ireland. His trousers were worn with holes, his bare feet were blistered and what served as his shirt was a lacework of rags tied together with string. Sea gulls screeched overhead. He blinked at the sky and sadly gazed back at the turf fire on the little island in the Atlantic where his father sat surrounded by the crowd of poor fishermen.
Jaysus, he whispered, I just hate to disappoint but I have to give it up now. I can't run and I can't hide and people are clubbed because of me and I can't help them, I only make it worse. You know what they're saying now? They're saying he's gone and it's true, I'm lost to them.
The roomful of men solemnly raised their mugs to him.
I know, he whispered, Jaysus I do know and I'd do anything rather than disappoint, I'd stay and stay if it could do any good but it can't. I tried and it worked for a while but the while's up and what I told you just now, Jaysus it's the truth and I'm done, they've done me in, he's gone.
He raised his hand in farewell and limped away from the vacant lot across a bridge and crawled down a coalbin into a cellar. There an elderly carter told him the plan for his escape was ready, adding that the Black and Tans had tortured someone on the west coast and discovered their old enemy of the musketoon was in Cork. By noon the next day they would arrive in force, seal the city and begin the search.
The Black and Tans arrived well before noon but still too late. Early that morning a small freighter had sailed from the harbor with a cargo of whiskey and potatoes for the English garrison in Palestine. In addition the freighter carried a dozen nuns bound on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
The journey the nuns were about to make was exceptional, for they were Poor Clares who ordinarily would never have been allowed out of their convent, let alone out of the country. The cause of their going was a request for a pilgrimage made by a reverend mother from a less strict order who had been in charge of the convent at the end of the eighteenth century, before the Poor Clares had acquired it. But the Napoleonic wars had intervened and after that the convent changed hands.