Jim Kelly is a retired travelling salesman whose fiction captures the grit, humour, and heartbreak of life on the road. His work has appeared in Harvard Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Coachella Review, The Galway Review, and many other journals. His debut collection, Pitchman’s Blues, won the George Garrett Fiction Prize and was published by Texas Review Press. Praised for its vivid characters and lyrical prose, the book showcases Kelly’s gift for revealing the hidden struggles and quiet triumphs of ordinary lives. Drawing on years of experience meeting people from all walks of life, his stories explore resilience, longing, and the restless search for meaning. Kelly continues to write fiction that illuminates the human spirit with honesty, empathy, and sharp storytelling.

Conversation Outside a Belfast Prison

By Jim Kelly

      Some memories won’t quit, just won’t let us be. This is one of mine. If I could mimic my Professor’s voice, I would. He was a wise and funny man, Thomas Flanagan, with a clipped manner when offering up a story. He used pauses like a scalpel. Events were never explained, summarized as if we needed help figuring them out, but allowed, always, to speak for themselves. An admirable practice too little followed these days.

     I wasn’t there at the events described, and my memory of their telling is, by now, well over fifty years old. Fifty and counting. So why, at this late date, conjure the anecdote? Piece it together and pass it along? The times. Ideologues abound. Truth suffers. Events, past and present, are bludgeoned to fit puny, nonsense narratives of what and how the world is.

     Summer 1970 and I’m in a classroom in a Georgian mansion in Dublin taking a class in Irish Literature. My Professor, Thomas Flanagan, is an expert on 19th century Irish novelists, has written a classic book about them. He will, in years to come, write three fine novels, each about  a period of rebellion, of the Irish fight for independence from English domination, from centuries and centuries of English imperial rule.

     Bernadette Devlin, he explained, was in a prison in Belfast. Held for her part in a protest. As the youngest member of Parliament, she took her views to the streets. An easy target, she was arrested for raising her voice. For saying, out loud, in public, that persecuted people needed to be heard, their grievances addressed.

     He drove north with friends from Dublin to attend a poetry reading in her honor to be held outside the Belfast prison where she was being kept. With one thing and another, they arrived too late. The poetry reading had come and gone. It was early evening, lightly raining, going dark fast. The ancient prison, stone walled, mammoth, was grim in the mostly empty street near the entrance.

     A lone man stood vigil. He was large, hatless, holding and beating, metronome regular, an enormous drum stuck out from his belly like a massive tumor. On it, symbol of the Protestant cause, a massive orange rose.

     Professor Flanagan tells how he and his friends approached the man. He was staring, unblinking, at the prison. Thump, pause, thump pause, as if programmed to whack the big drum forever and a day in this slow, dirge like rhythm.

    Asked what he was doing the man said nothing, simply continued to stare at the prison wall, beat his drum.

     Cigarettes, at the time, were a luxury. You could, on the streets of Dublin, go to a newsstand and buy only a few. One, two, three, whatever your budget allowed, and not have to pay for an entire pack. Times dictated commerce.

     Professor Flanagan tells how he lit a cigarette, then offered the pack, his matches, to the fierce drummer. The man stopped his drumming and took one, lit it, said nothing while he smoked. To the question, then, of what he was doing he said, “I’m going to drive Bernadette Devlin crazy.”

     “And what” he was asked, “about the Protestant prisoners inside? Wouldn’t he be driving them crazy as well?”

     “He looked at us” Professor Flanagan said, “like we were ignorant children, understood nothing.” Finishing his cigarette, the hard man resumed his drumming, saying, over his shoulder, staring again at the stone prison wall, “I told you, I’m going to drive BERNADETTE DEVLIN CRAZY.”