The Written Words

I

The wall was colder than Joseph expected. He placed his palm against it and left it there. Stone did not argue. It did not ask whether a Republic could be proclaimed into existence, whether six days might alter six hundred years, whether men had been brave or foolish or both. It was simply cold.

He took his hand away. The movement pulled beneath the bandage at his neck. He waited. The pain came late now, a dull tightening under the cloth, followed by the familiar need to cough. He bent forward on the narrow bed and held the handkerchief to his mouth. When it passed, he looked at the cloth. Nothing. He folded it once and put it away.

Outside, boots crossed the corridor. One pair. Then another. A key touched metal somewhere beyond the door. Joseph listened until the sound disappeared. There had been so many sounds in the last weeks that silence itself seemed unnatural.

He sat at the small table. A sheet of paper had been left for him. Beside it, a pen. He picked it up, turned it between his fingers and put it down again. What was left to write? There were words for nations. For God. Love words. Words for death, certainly.

He touched the bandage. A line came back to him from years before.

I see his blood upon the rose.

His own words. They sounded as if another man had written them. Perhaps another man had. A younger Joseph, writing toward death as poets did because death was beautiful when it remained an idea. There had been roses then. Gardens. Sunlight. The luxury of metaphor.

He looked again at the blank paper. He could write to Grace. The thought made him reach for the pen. Then stop. There was too much to write to Grace. Or too little. A letter ought to carry something from one place to another. Thought. Request. Promise. What promise could he make now?

He might write that he loved her. She knew. That he was sorry. For what? That he was not sorry. That would be worse.

Another cough began, smaller than the first. He waited for it to finish. Boots again. The men outside had hours remaining in their duties. Somewhere a kettle might be boiling. Someone would finish a shift and go home. Someone would complain of being tired. A man might take off his boots beside a bed and wake his wife.

Ordinary things continued. That seemed to Joseph the strangest fact of all.

He stood and crossed to the wall. This time he touched it with two fingers. Cold. Solid. Still there. He wondered how long a prison remembered the people put inside it.

Then he went back to the table and looked at the paper. His name had been on another sheet not long ago.

That paper had not been blank.

II

Seven names. That was what Joseph remembered. Not the whole document. Not at first. Seven names beneath words large enough to demand a country.

Thomas J. Clarke. Seán Mac Diarmada. Thomas MacDonagh. P. H. Pearse. Eamonn Ceannt. James Connolly. Joseph Plunkett.

His own name looked peculiar there. He had seen it printed countless times before. Beneath poems. On letters. On the journal. A name was an ordinary possession until someone placed it beneath extraordinary words. Then it ceased to belong entirely to you.

He remembered the Proclamation laid out before them, the cramped type, the unevenness of the printing, the great title above everything else.

POBLACHT NA hÉIREANN.

Irish Republic. Two words could contain a future. That was the seduction of words. They made things appear complete. A republic on paper had borders. Citizens. Rights. A government. Dead generations standing behind it and generations unborn waiting somewhere ahead.

Nothing trembled on a page. Nothing coughed. Nobody failed to arrive. No ammunition ran low in a sentence. No messenger disappeared between one street and another. The words stood straight.

He remembered looking down toward the bottom. Seven names. Joseph Plunkett. Not Joe. Not the name Grace used when no one else was listening.

Joseph Plunkett belonged now to the proclamation. A printed thing. Something strangers might read. He had wondered, perhaps only for an instant, what happened to a man's name after it became history.

A key turned outside. Joseph looked toward the cell door. It did not open. The key moved on.

He returned to the paper before him. Blank. For the first time he envied it. Nothing had yet been asked of it. He ran one finger over its edge.

Paper was absurdly light for something people expected to carry so much. Declarations. Sentences. Poems. Orders. Marriage certificates. Death warrants.

A breeze could take the lot.

He smiled at that, though there was nobody to see it. Then the smile passed. He could see the pillars again. Grey beneath smoke. He could smell dust.

The clean certainty of the printed page broke apart.

Dublin returned.

III

At first there had been room inside the words. Men moved with purpose. Orders repeated. Messages carried. A post office became headquarters because they said it was headquarters. A rebellion became a Republic because they said it was a Republic.

Outside, the Proclamation went up. People stopped. Some read. Some laughed. Others did not know what they were looking at.

Joseph remembered the great stone columns. A building designed to look permanent. Behind them, nothing was permanent.

By the end there was dust everywhere. Paper underfoot. Glass. Smoke pressing into corridors. Reports contradicted reports. A street held. A street lost. Reinforcements expected. Reinforcements not coming.

The GPO shook. Dust loosened overhead. The certainty of the Proclamation remained outside somewhere, pasted against Dublin.

Inside, Connolly was wounded. The news moved through the building first as rumour, then fact. Later Joseph saw the injured ankle, the effort required simply to move him.

A commander reduced to flesh.

That was what artillery did to language. It returned everything to the bare bone.

Joseph could no longer recall the order of some things. History would arrange it. History liked order. It would decide which hour mattered, which doorway, which command. It would draw arrows on maps. Count rifles. Name positions.

People would later stand on clean streets and say: Here is where it happened. As though what happened had known where it was while happening.

Joseph remembered heat. Smoke. A man's face blackened with soot. Someone handing him water. A scrap of paper clinging to a boot.

Already the days interfered with one another.

He closed his eyes. The cell came back. No artillery. No smoke. Only stone.

Then boots approached. They stopped at his door. A metal panel opened. An eye appeared. Then vanished. The boots moved away.

He almost laughed. They were guarding him carefully now.

Too late.

The dangerous part of him was already printed. His name was loose in the world.

IV

He saw the ring first. Later, he would think that strange.

Grace stood in the prison chapel with her hands held together before her, and the small circle of gold caught the candlelight. For several seconds Joseph looked only at that.

She had found a ring.

Outside these walls, while men were being court-martialled and condemned, Grace had managed in a confused Dublin to find a ring. A simple wedding band. He wondered whether the jeweller had known. Whether Grace had pointed. That one.

Ordinary things. A purchase. A receipt perhaps. A door opening onto a street.

Then Kilmainham.

Grace lifted her eyes to him. Joseph forgot the ring. She did not smile. Neither did he.

There were soldiers in the chapel. Two of them would witness the marriage. Father McCarthy stood waiting. The prison candles gave little light. They produced small uncertain halos and left the corners of the chapel dim.

Joseph had imagined marrying Grace before. Not like this. There had been another day intended for it. Another church. Another future. The Rising had swallowed that day before it arrived.

Now the future had been reduced to candles. A priest. Two soldiers. A ring.

Joseph moved toward her. His body embarrassed him suddenly. The bandage. His thinness. The cough he was trying not to allow. He wanted, absurdly, to look well for her.

Grace's gaze rose briefly to the white cloth around his neck. Then returned to his eyes. That was all. No pity. He loved her for that.

The priest began. Words filled the little chapel. Not Joseph's words. Older words. Words used by people who expected years.

Joseph listened. He had spent much of his life believing language could reach beyond the visible world. Poetry depended upon it. Faith depended upon it. Revolution perhaps depended upon it most of all.

Say something correctly, and perhaps reality would follow. Declare a Republic. Name a freedom. Speak a vow.

Grace held out the ring. Her hand trembled. Barely. He might not have seen it if he had not been looking so closely. He wanted to cover her hand with his.

There were rules. There were always rules.

He took the ring. It weighed almost nothing.

For one dangerous moment he imagined its years. Grace wearing it the following summer. Her turning it absent-mindedly while reading. Grace setting a hand on a table at forty, fifty, sixty, the same band of gold moving with her through rooms he would never see.

He forced the thought away.

The priest prompted him. Joseph spoke. So did Grace. Their voices sounded very clear. That was the peculiar thing.

The words themselves were ordinary wedding words. No rebellion in them. No Ireland. No England. No martyrs. No history. Only two people making promises that everyone in the chapel knew time would not permit them to keep.

Perhaps that made them truer.

Joseph slid the ring onto Grace's finger. It stopped for a fraction of a second at the knuckle. He pressed gently.

Then it was there.

His wife.

The thought came with astonishing simplicity. Grace. His wife.

He looked at her hand. Nothing had changed except everything.

The ceremony continued. Joseph would later be unable to remember all of it. The priest's voice. A candle guttering. Leather shifting as one soldier changed his stance. Grace's face. The ring.

Those remained.

At some point it was finished.

There should have been congratulations. That was what weddings contained. Hands shaken. People kissed. Families stood badly arranged for photographs. A meal waited in another room.

Instead, a soldier opened a door.

Grace looked at Joseph. He understood that they were expected to separate.

Already.

He thought there must be some mistake. Not because he did not understand what was happening, but because the human mind sometimes rejected facts through sheer disproportion.

They had just been married. Therefore, they could not possibly be separated.

It was ridiculous.

For one moment Joseph almost said so.

Then Grace's fingers touched his. Quickly. The ring pressed against the side of his hand.

Metal. Warm already from her skin.

Then the guard stepped between what had been and what would be.

Joseph was taken back toward the cell. He carried no ring of his own. Only the sensation of hers against his hand.

V

She came again in the early hours.

Joseph had not slept. He had lain down once, then risen because lying down made the waiting worse.

When the door opened, and Grace appeared, officers entered with her. Too many men for the little cell. Their uniforms seemed to take up the air.

A sergeant held a watch.

“Ten minutes.”

That was all.

Grace entered. The door shut behind her. For several seconds neither of them spoke.

Joseph had imagined these minutes since the chapel. Still, he had thought words would come.

They did not.

Grace stood near the table. She looked at the blank sheet of paper. Then at him. Joseph almost apologised for it.

He could have written something. A poem. A farewell. Something she might keep.

Instead, he had left the page blank.

“I—”

The word stopped.

Grace shook her head. He did not know whether she meant don't or there is no need. Perhaps both.

She came closer. Joseph took her hands.

There was the ring.

He turned her left hand slightly and looked down at it. The gold appeared duller in the cell than in the candlelight. Realer.

“You found one,” he said.

A ridiculous thing to say.

Grace looked at him.

“Yes.”

He smiled. She did too, almost.

For one instant they were somewhere else. A shop window. A Dublin street. Any ordinary room.

Then the sergeant shifted his weight. The watch remained in his hand. Joseph could hear it. He thought he could hear it. Perhaps that was imagination.

There were so many things he wanted to ask Grace. Where would she go? Who would be with her? Had she eaten? Would she forgive him? Should she forgive him?

He could ask none of them without placing some part of his death into her hands and asking her to carry it.

So, he held them instead.

Grace looked at the bandage.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not much.”

A lie. A small one. He was grateful for the existence of small lies.

She nodded as though she believed him. Perhaps she was lying too.

Outside the cell someone walked past. Joseph heard the boots fade.

He looked at Grace's face and tried to perform an impossible task.

Remember this.

Not Grace as she had been years ago. Grace laughing and drawing.

This Grace.

He tried to fix the line of her cheek, the way the poor light rested against her hair, the tiredness around her eyes. But memory changed things even while they were happening.

Already he knew he would fail.

Perhaps memory was not keeping at all. Perhaps it was only losing slowly.

Grace tightened her fingers around his. He looked down.

The ring again.

That might remain.

Objects had advantages over people. They did not have to remember. They simply continued. A chair. A wall. A piece of paper. A ring.

He thought of the Proclamation. Seven printed names beneath all those confident sentences.

What would Grace remember when she saw his name in years to come?

Joseph Plunkett. Signatory. Rebel. Poet. Executed.

Words that could be arranged beneath a photograph. None of them contained this room. None contained her hand inside his.

He wanted suddenly to tell her that. Not eloquently. Just somehow.

That what mattered was not what would be written.

He was here.

She was here.

That for these few minutes they were husband and wife in a cell crowded with men waiting for their time to finish.

His throat tightened. He coughed instead.

Grace waited.

When he straightened, there were tears in her eyes. Joseph touched her cheek.

A guard looked away. Only for a moment.

Joseph noticed. It moved him more than kindness would have.

Grace placed her hand over his. The ring rested between their skin.

The sergeant looked at his watch.

Joseph hated the watch. Not the man. The watch.

Its little machinery continuing with perfect innocence.

Time was not cruel. That was the trouble. It did not know enough to be cruel.

He wanted one minute to become an hour.

It remained a minute.

He tried again to find words.

“Grace.”

“Yes.”

Nothing followed.

Her name was enough.

Perhaps all names were like that before history got hold of them.

Grace. Joseph.

Two people. Not symbols. Or causes. Or consequences.

She moved closer and rested her forehead against his. No one stopped her.

Joseph closed his eyes. The stone was behind him. Her hands were in his.

For an instant there was no prison because neither of them looked at it.

Then the sergeant spoke.

“Your ten minutes is now up.”

Grace did not release him immediately. Neither did Joseph.

The delay could not have been more than a second.

It felt enormous.

Then her fingers opened. Joseph's hand slipped from hers. The ring caught his fingertip as they separated.

A tiny touch of metal.

The last thing.

The guards moved. The door opened.

Joseph looked once at the table. At the blank paper. Then at the wall.

He put his palm against the stone as he passed.

Cold.

Still there.

Grace said his name.

Or he believed she did.

He turned.

Then the door came between them.

Joseph walked away with the priest.

VI

Seven years passed.

The prison remained.

Governments changed. Uniforms changed. Words changed.

Kilmainham kept its walls.

In 1923, Grace Plunkett came back through its doors. Not as a bride.

As a prisoner.

There were other women with her now, other voices, another quarrel over Ireland beyond the walls.

The ring remained.

One day, inside Kilmainham, she came to the place.

There was no revelation. No sudden presence. No voice. Only timber. Stone.

A prison had no obligation to return its dead.

Grace put her hand against the wall.

Cold.

She wondered whether this was where he had stood. Whether he had touched this timber. There was no way to know.

So much had been written since 1916. Accounts. Reports. Arguments. Lists of the executed.

Historians would decide what caused what. They would put dates beside his name.

Joseph Mary Plunkett. 1887–1916. Poet. Revolutionary. Signatory of the Proclamation. Executed at Kilmainham Gaol.

All true.

None of it enough.

Grace found a pencil. The first letters appeared faintly. She pressed harder.

This was not poetry. It was not a proclamation. There was no promise in it. No argument.

Only a fact someone might otherwise forget.

She wrote carefully:

This is Joseph Plunkett's Cell.

Grace looked at his name inside the sentence.

Joseph Plunkett.

Not one of seven now.

One.

She touched the pencilled letters with her finger.

The words would fade. Timber would split. Walls would fall eventually.

Still, for now, the words were there.

And so was his name.