Ashes In the Wind by Christopher Bland

‘You know they executed five Volunteers in Kenmare. Patrick O’Mahony was twenty, taught by Josephine in Drimnamore, just like us. They had to tie him to a chair before they shot him.’
    ‘You were all soldiers – and you’d killed a few Englishmen first. My mother killed nobody. Were you there when she was shot?’
    Tomas stands up, clasps and unclasps his hands. ‘Three of us brought the warrant. I was in the firing squad.’
    There is a rattle on the door. ‘Five minutes almost up.’
    ‘She didn’t suffer. She wasn’t abused. She was a brave woman right enough. And I wish...’ His voice trails away, and for a moment he closes his eyes.
    ‘I wish,’ says John, ‘I wish I had died in her place. I wish you as quick a death as you say you gave my mother and William.’
    The door opens, he is ushered out, but not before he sees Tomas putting a sleeve to his eyes.

10
    T WO WEEKS AFTER he has been visited by John in Kilmainham, Tomas’s leg-irons are taken off, and Dick Teeling, another member of The Squad, is moved into his cell.
    ‘We’re the elite,’ Teeling says. ‘This is the Murder Row. There’s only one way out, and that’s over the wall.’
    ‘Or in a coffin.’
    ‘No coffin for the likes of us, only a pit out the back full of quicklime. We might as well try the wall. I’d as soon be shot trying to escape as die by the noose.’
    The cells in Kilmainham have wooden floors and stone walls covered in flaking whitewash. High and low peepholes are cut into the door, which is secured by a massive bolt and lock on the outside. Old graffiti, a calendar with 231 days crossed out, a crude drawing of the Republican flag, an illegible name, an inscription ‘A few men faithful and a deathless dream’, remind Tomas that Kilmainham has been a jail since 1796. The cells are damp, unlit, lice- and flea-ridden; Tomas itches all over, but his bruises have almost gone, and he can walk. They are exercised in small groups of twenty in an outside yard for half an hour each day. Kilmainham is guarded by soldiers and the RIC; discipline has broken down, and the regime is less strict than at Mountjoy. Although the block is sealed, the cell doors are often left open unless an inspection by an officer is due. There are visitors, food parcels are allowed, and notes are smuggled in and out. It is easy enough for the prisoners to talk in the exercise yard or at Mass on Sunday.
    Teeling tells him one of the soldiers is friendly.
    ‘He’s from Limerick, and I’ve said we’ll look after him when the Republic arrives. Most of the English soldiers can’t wait to get home. The Irish are scared. They know they’ll have nowhere to go when this is all over. Collins and his men will try to get us out, but we’d best make plans to save ourselves. There’s no knowing when the hangman will come for us.’
    Tomas, for whom everything that has happened at Staigue Fort and after has seemed to take place in a strange and different world, cannot stop thinking about the hanging.
    ‘Where do they do it? Does it take long? Do we get any warning?’
    ‘This’ll be my first time,’ says Teeling, laughing. ‘They’ve got a separate block, the hang-house. They take you there, blindfold you, put a big thick rope around your neck, open the trapdoor and that’s you gone with a broken neck. It’s quick enough provided they’ve got the drop right, otherwise you strangle. The offer of a priest an hour before is all the notice we’ll get. The hangman comes over from England to do the business. We’ve tried to get him several times, but he’s guarded more closely than the Viceroy. He’ll be brought here to take a look at us through the peep-window, judge our weight for the drop.’
    They make a careful note of the prison geography – there are two yards between their cell block and a gate through the wall to the outside world. The second yard is the place where the leaders of the Easter Rising had been shot, including, Tomas