Free Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) by Cindy Brandner Page B

chest and be laid to rest beside the three sons who were killed before him. Brian, his oldest, alive only by the fortune of not being home when masked armed strangers killed his brothers, was a quiet man, not given to fighting nor a great many words. Brendan, a family friend had once said, had been born with his hand fitted to the shape of a gun; he hadn’t liked violence but had understood it in the context of its Irish marriage with politics. Brian neither liked nor understood it. His republicanism tended to be of the mythical, rather than practical sort. Romanticism though fled in the face of imprisonment without trial or real accusation. Brian was jailed on trumped up charges, a privilege the government granted itself under the Emergency Powers Act of 1939, allowing it to intern Irish citizens it suspected of crime, real or imagined. Such an imprisonment could not be challenged in the courts as the Act was not subject to the court’s power.
    He was jailed, they told him, for crimes against the Republic and they produced signed statements saying he’d been seen in the area where a bomb had killed four people. Brian had not even heard of the incident much less been present at its execution. To secure his confession he was, over the course of two weeks, beaten, half-starved, denied access to a toilet, beaten some more, chained to his bed post, allowed to sleep only in twenty minute snatches then seized by the hair and awakened by his face slamming into the bedpost. He was certain after the first week that he’d sustained brain damage and would, indeed, walk with a limp for the rest of his life. Four weeks after his initial arrest he was released without reason or explanation. He went home to his mother who nursed him back to health and when he was well enough to get about on his own he went to Belfast. Within a week, he had joined the IRA. It had been easy for him; his father’s name still carried enough weight within the Army to ease his initiation.
    He never moved to the forefront of the army, he took his orders from other men and carried them out quietly and obediently. He was, as it turned out, rather expert at explosives, a job that required a still hand and a steel mind. He managed both. He was particularly effective during the Border campaigns of the fifties.
    The Fifties were a decade which saw a great reduction in the violence that had defined the Forties. Many within the Republican movement favored passive resistance as an alternative to armed struggle. Wearied and disillusioned by bloodshed and death, the generation that had seen the IRA through the forties began to fade into the background, the new generation stepping forward, many merely seeking excitement without being aware of the consequences of their actions. There was sporadic activity within the ranks of the movement, some of so little consequence that it seemed, even days later that the incidents were mere rumor and never really happened at all.
    Within this rather loose framework, Brian managed to find a niche for himself. He revived, on a smaller scale, the Republican newspaper his father had founded some thirty years earlier and poured what little time and money he could find into it. He’d been taught Gaelic as a child and now taught his own sons, born in 1944 and 1949, to speak it as well. His boys were the core of his life and when their mother left, shortly after Pat’s second birthday, none of them, it could be said, was sorry to see the back end of her. Brian raised them to be self-sufficient, to cook and clean and mend and should the occasion eventually arise to not be too big of burden for a woman. He told them stories, pretty silver spun fancies when they were small, grand tales of rebellion as they got older, always at a safe remove in the mists of ancient Ireland. He gave them the sky on long summer nights when they went to the west coast to fish. In another life he might have been an astronomer or a poet or