Those words—threats against the girl, against his brothers, against the family of the eldest—made Cronin sick to his stomach. Alice had told him that he was no longer the man he had once been, and he wanted to believe her. But those words had leaped from his tongue. Words he swore he would never say again had come so easily. And what else would he do to carry out this errand Gavigan had given him? If Dempsey had run, would he have punished the girl? Little Michael, a mere wisp? The whole of Martin’s family? He believed he would. If Dempsey ran and by running placed Alice in jeopardy, he would burn the whole city to the ground just to find him.
But now he had Dempsey, and if he had to become this man—his true self, the self he hid from Alice—in order to keep his family safe, then he would do it. The farm was his heaven. He was willing to risk hell later for it. Hadn’t he always been a brute? Or was it Black Frank who had made him a brute, and set him on this path? It was under his tutelage, after all, that Cronin had learned the uses of violence. Back home, before he went to Cork city, his mother had called him the gentle giant. When the recruiters from the British army had come to town looking for men to send to the trenches in the Great War, they had picked him out of the crowd straightaway. But no, he said, he wasn’t the military type. He couldn’t point a gun, pull a trigger—anyone in town would tell you the same. Not Tom Cronin. Sure, there were boys in town who were messers and scrappers and they’d picked plenty of fights with Tom when he was a lad. But they learned quick that if you pushed Tom to his limits he would flatten you. He never started fights, but he sure knew how to finish them.
The recruiters had an easier time with his brother, Jack, who was older and more restless. Christ, he was hard bored living in Glengarriff. Jack took the king’s shilling and the promise of a new house on his return, but within a month he was dead. The recruiters came back to try again, to see if Tom didn’t want to get revenge on the Turks for what they’d done to his brother. Only it wasn’t the Turks whom Tom wanted his revenge on. He would have torn the recruiters to shreds if it weren’t for the cries of his mother, but still he roughed them up enough that he had to leave town or else see the inside of a jail for years to come. Suddenly his mam was transformed from a spitfire widow with two grown sons still under her roof to a shrunken old woman with one son buried under foreign soil and another disappeared into Cork, a city big enough for a man to get lost.
A friend of his uncle’s landed him a job as a groundskeeper at the university, and it was there that Frank Dempsey began to give a shape to the anger that Cronin carried for the loss of his brother. Cronin knew it wasn’t the Turks who were responsible for the dissolution of his family, and from Frank Dempsey, a kind of man whom Tom had never encountered in Glengarriff, he acquired a narrative for fitting it all together, a history that stretched back centuries. Hadn’t this sort of thing been done over and over again to men just like Tom’s brother? Weren’t they always the ones who paid the price? And now Tom had a chance to take part in a struggle against history, to put an end to the endless reaping of the Irish. Cronin’s mother might have seen her youngest as a gentle giant, but that’s not what Frank Dempsey saw. He looked into the eyes of Tom Cronin and knew he could unlock a terrible energy.
Frank spoke to him in low tones, invited him into his home, prepared him, pointed him in the direction he needed to go. And with each operation that Tom completed, it was Frank who was there to praise him or upbraid him—whatever was necessary to keep him resolute in the cause in which Frank said he was playing such a grand part. But Tom knew he was doing it at the expense of his own soul. Every man grabbed, every shot fired—it reduced him. Frank couldn’t see it or wouldn’t believe it. He was proud of what Tom had accomplished in the struggle against the old history, and in service to a new history.
Then, before the struggle was over, it was over. The war and Tom’s part in it was supposed to free everyone—all of Ireland—from the yoke that had led his brother to his death. But here was Frank telling him that they had done all they could for now. That Collins had signed the treaty, and they would deal with the north and the question of full independence later. That what they had won was enough, for now. Except that wasn’t what Cronin had given away his soul on behalf of. How do you trade your soul for a partial victory? He could not stomach it. And when the others who felt the same way got their hooks into Cronin, it was easy to turn him. He had already half turned himself.
Now, almost twenty years later, he had to admit that this was who he was. Black Frank hadn’t made him into a brute. It had always been inside him. Frank had just seen that and at least had directed Cronin’s grim energy toward something worthwhile. Wasn’t it good to fight for freedom? For the rights of a people denied their dignity for centuries? The fact that Cronin later put this same energy into the service of a man like Gavigan—that wasn’t Frank’s fault. This was entirely of Cronin’s own making. And now here he was, still in service to Gavigan, to his system of debts and punishments. Alice said he wasn’t this man anymore, but look how easily he had slipped into his old skin.
DEMPSEY DIDN’T SAY a word as they crossed the park, and that was a small blessing. There was nothing a man in his position could say: the wheedling, the false bravado, the efforts to build goodwill, were a waste of breath. Not that Cronin hadn’t heard it all. Whether men raged or keened prayers to the Blessed Virgin for her intercession, they all met the same fate.
The car emerged from the park and began working its way to the garage where Cronin would deposit Dempsey and be done. Cronin hadn’t even bothered with a blindfold—Dempsey wouldn’t be telling any stories, not once Gavigan was done with him. Cronin would have to pat him down when they arrived, just to be on the safe side, though something about Dempsey suggested he was not only unarmed, but completely unprepared for what was coming.