Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Heavy weights, like sacks or logs

  Or furniture from room to room,

  I combed the horses with the groom,

  And fed the cats, the birds, the dogs.

  The other matters that I tended,

  Sweeter things that women need,

  A lovely flower, a glass of mead,

  A smile to praise a garment mended.

  I ate her food with hearty joy,

  I chose for her the finest leather,

  For boots to brave inclement weather,

  Loved her hearty or when coy.

  If I came into the house,

  And she stood there, unawares,

  I chased her laughing up the stairs

  And kissed her neck, soft as a mouse.

  Every night I held her close,

  Stroked her softly, caresses deep,

  Smoothed her forehead, and in sleep,

  Held her safely till she rose.

  As I speak these words this morning,

  It must sound as though I brag,

  But my motive is to drag

  My hurt heart out of its mourning.”

  A shout stopped Leary. Jem had wined somewhat before the hearing, and even in the courtroom took a covert nip.

  “Make your point, man!” he yelled. “This is so dreary.”

  The judge looked down along his beak of a nose.

  “Silence there! If you’re unruly,

  I’ve the power to shut you up.

  Losing is a bitter cup,

  And I’d say you’ll taste it truly.”

  Well! The court nearly fell down in amazement. The people listening knew what had happened. Leary spoke so hypnotically that his rhythm had infected the judge. And the women there—and it was mostly women—concluded that it was now only a matter of time until Leary won back his wife.

  But Leary wasn’t finished. He had some more powerful things to say, and he meant to say them.

  “The truth is, judge, I lost my lady

  Not to any man who’s moral.

  Pretty soon he’ll pick a quarrel,

  And he’ll dump her somewhere shady.

  But if she’ll come and take my arm,

  I’ll so love her, so regard her,

  Do my best to work much harder,

  Even try and learn some charm.

  I may be dull and somewhat boring,

  But I love her perfect skin,

  And the way she tilts her chin,

  And her little whispered snoring.

  I love the way her tiny hand,

  Can crack a nut, or milk a cow,

  I love above all that she knows how

  To draw pictures in the sand

  Of faces, insects, beasts, and birds,

  And writes rhymes that never scan.

  She whistles better than a man;

  I love her sense of the absurd.

  We dwelt quietly on a hill…

  I’m an ordinary man…

  Her body’s soft, much softer than

  A fledgling’s—God, I love her still.”

  Leary ran out of steam. His speech halted, and he sat down with a jolt, a man from whom all the energy had suddenly drained out. He had tears in his eyes. The judge sat back, closed his eyes, and breathed very deeply. He kept sending his hand across his smooth, seagull’s head.

  Before he could sit up again, a tiny noise could be heard down in front of him. Gloria had turned away from Jem; she faced Leary, and as sincerely as a woman in love—which is the truest sight on earth—she held out her tiny hands and began to applaud him.

  Behind her, another woman began to clap her hands, and then another, and then another. Soon the whole courtroom was clapping and cheering, making the place as merry as a carnival. The judge did nothing to quell this noise—most unusual, because judges are known to love banging their gavels and shouting, “Silence in court!”

  Leary sat there, a little dazed. After a moment he looked up and saw the lovely face of Gloria a few feet away from him, clapping her hands toward him with all her might and crying like the rain. Handsome Jem stood there too, but his face was as black as a cloud over a hill. After a few seconds, he darted away from Gloria and slipped out through a side door. People said he was never seen in the area again.

  Gloria came over to Leary and laid her palm on his cheek. He caught the hand and kissed it.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry I was a dull husband,” he said.

  “You’re not dull. How could a dull man make words dance in the air above our heads?”

  “No, that’s where the words came from,” said Leary.

  Gloria looked puzzled.

  “I’ll explain it you,” said Leary. “But it’ll take me the rest of my life.”

  “I’m listening already,” she said.

  They were carried shoulder-high from the courtroom. The judge fell asleep on the bench, as judges famously do.

  Leary and his Gloria went back to the farm, and the old servant woman who never answered back, and never was there such jam made or such chickens stuffed.

  Barry Hanafin’s little audience grunted. Two or three drinkers drifted over and nodded.

  “Good stuff.”

  “Powerful, Barry.”

  The poet raised his eyebrows and half-closed his sleepy eyes in embarrassment; it made him look like a tortoise. He said, “More power, says old Power, when young Power was born.”

  “Always an old proverb to hand, I see,” said Andy Hogan.

  “I learned that saying from my grandfather,” said Hanafin. “Too rural for you, I suppose.” He turned to Ronan. “Well, young shaver, how did that go down with you?”

  Ronan nodded. “Very well, thank you.”

  “I hope you’re teaching him right, Andy?” said the poet.

  “Ask him,” said Mr. Hogan. “Come on, young O’Mara. You know what to say.”

  Kate smiled encouragement, and Ronan began to recite a poem to its poet: “For the lands of romance are the fields of gold/Where the earth we have is the wealth we hold/Greened and watered by each little eddy/Fruitful each year with the seasons steady.”

  Andy Hogan joined in. “And home to the coots and the pairs of swans/Who nest in the reeds or glide along/Searching for trout or gleaming salmon/Those citizens…”

  Hanafin, embarrassed, cut in; “You fellas must have little to do with your time.”

  When the good-natured laughter died away, Ronan said, “When is the Storyteller coming back?”

  “Apropos that,” said the poet, “and by the way, did you ever notice how people always say ‘apropos of that,’ which is all wrong, that’s like saying, ‘arising from from that,’ the second ‘from’ is totally and completely unnecessary, utterly unnecessary—”

  “Barry, you never repeat yourself,” said Mr. Hogan, now feeling the length of the liquor inside him. “Look at me, too. I never, never repeat myself. No, I never, ever, ever repeat myself.”

  Ronan wished they would both be quiet. He shuffled his shoes.

  “What I’m really asking, Mr. Hanafin, is—if you know when he’s coming back here, I’d like to come and meet him.”

  Barry Hanafin walked away. “I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t steal anything.”

  One of the younger men in the bar, with ragged yellow-blond hair, edged up to Kate.

  “How well do you know him, the story man?”

  Kate said, “He came to our house five years ago.”

  “I got talking to him a few times,” said the young man. “I’m Kieran the tractor mechanic,” and he pushed for a space beside Kate on the bench. Ronan had to move along.

  “Hallo, Kieran the tractor mechanic,” said Kate.

  “He’s most interesting,” he said, pronounced it “interesting.” “He walks twenty-five thousand miles a year.”

  “Does he?” said Kate, smiling.

  Hanafin came back. “Ah, Jayzez’ sake, how could he walk that much? What about bunions?”
/>   Ronan said, “What’s his name?”

  Kieran looked surprised. “Barry, what’s the story man’s name?”

  Hanafin looked morose. “He has no name. I asked him once and he told me to call him ‘Mr. Everyman.’ I said to him, What kind of a name is that, sure that’s no kind of a name to have.”

  “Was that all he said?”

  “Kieran, if he said any more than that, I’d tell you, wouldn’t I?”

  “But what kind of a name is that? Everyman? Every what man? Everyman who?”

  “Jayzez, Kieran, I told you. Why don’t you listen? I said—no kind of a name.”

  Kate tried to cool the heating air. “It’s medieval. The figure of Everyman is a medieval figure. Everyman is a no-name person who makes a great journey.”

  “Aah!” said Kieran, not totally familiar with morality literature and eyeing Kate ever more keenly.

  “The Man with No Name,” said Hanafin. “Like a gunslinger. The Wild and Wooly West.”

  “Did you know,” said Kieran, “that Barry’s a direct descendant of Brian Boru? His mother is one of the O’Briens of Thomond.”

  Kieran placed his thigh alongside Kate’s, who moved to get away. Ronan asked another question.

  “Is there any way of knowing where he comes from?”

  “Brian Boru?” said Hanafin. “He’s from here. Everyone knows that.”

  “No, Barry,” said Kieran. “He’s talking about the story man. The wind, that’s what he told a girl here in the bar one night. The Man Who Comes from the Wind.”

  Kieran the tractor mechanic nuzzled closer still to Kate, who laughed and slid away from him. With jerky movements, Barry Hanafin poured two more drinks for himself and said, “There’s people here who believe he’s a ghost.”

  “A ghost?” said Andrew Hogan.

  “These your own legs?” said Kieran, patting Kate’s thigh.

  “No, I bought them in Cork.”

  John laughed at Kate’s riposte and moved toward her; she rose from the bench. Hanafin’s face had gone slack as a hammock.

  “There’sn’t a thing wrong with ghosts. They can—you know—Jayzez, a ghost can do you a favor now and again. If you grease his palm. Or his wing, I suppose it’d be.”

  He leaned back, closed his eyes, and fell asleep standing up. Nobody disturbed him.

  On the journey home, Mr. Hogan now sat in the back seat beside Ronan.

  “Of course,” said the teacher, his voice bleary with drink and bad sandwiches, “that was all a myth. I wonder, you know, if it isn’t a bit dangerous putting out a story like that about poetry. We’ll have people trudging the country, their heads cocked, listening for words to come down to them out of the sky.”

  John O’Mara winked at Kate.

  “But, Andrew, how d’you know he’s wrong? We weren’t there to witness the moment poetry first happened.”

  “There to witness the moment? Is that a lawyer’s approach?” asked Mr. Hogan.

  “What do you think, Ronan?” said John.

  “We should be allowed to believe anything,” said Ronan, awkward in the presence of his teacher.

  “The key word, ‘believe,’” said Mr. Hogan. “‘Believe.’ What makes us ‘believe’ something must be the truth? We can ‘believe’ events that actually happened. We can ‘believe’ things that eyewitnesses reported. The truth’ll be in there, at the heart of those occurrences, that’s why we ‘believe.’”

  “Not if you practice law in a country town,” said John. “I’ve seen people believe what they’ve been telling me even though a dozen others contradicted it. But Andy, tell me; the way he said poetry was invented—did you ever think of teaching something like that?”

  “That poetry happened like that? Heresy,” said Mr. Hogan. “Utter heresy. You can’t teach as fact something that is a man-made myth.”

  “Don’t tell my wife that,” said John. “And you’d better not tell the archbishop either.”

  “Did you know,” said Andrew Hogan, “that if a penguin falls backward on its back, it can’t get up again?”

  Next moment, they heard him snore, which saved them asking him what he was talking about.

  Ronan rose at six next morning to begin writing down the poetry tale. The verses tantalized him; he could remember many but forgot crucial rhymes. Should he write to Barry Hanafin? What if he took the day off and tried to recall? He decided not—and decided well; school that day brought a new dimension to his life.

  The history teacher, David Cronin, called Ronan to the front of the room. He turned him around to face the class and said, “Now, Mr. O’Mara, I hear you’ve been to county Clare. And we’ve been studying King Brian Boru. So, I want you, in a tale of your own words, to tell us his story.”

  Ronan’s mouth went dry. Andrew Hogan had evidently talked. But the challenge roused him; he had so much inside him that he could bring to this. He licked his lips and reached for general facts.

  “As we’ve learned, Brian Boru was a great Irish king, and we’ve learned too that he was the first king in Ireland to repel a foreign invader.”

  He surveyed his classmates. Would they smirk—or worse? To his surprise their faces encouraged—as though they genuinely expected a good story well told. Ronan hesitated, then leapt to the task.

  AS YOU WELL KNOW, THE ANCIENT PROVINCE of Munster, in which we live, consists of the six southernmost counties on the island of Ireland. Waterford, Cork, Kerry, and Clare are all maritime; Limerick has its big estuary of the river Shannon flowing to the sea, and Tipperary is the only county entirely inland.

  In the first thousand years of this calendar, that is to say, the ten centuries since the year one Anno Domini, Ireland, and especially our southern province, prospered. It was our country’s best era, and some say it was the most important time the Irish ever had. The good land made the farmers rich, and Ireland was a peaceful place most of the time, except for those local kings and chieftains who made war in order to take land from their neighbors. We weren’t invaded in any dangerous way until the eighth century, and this gave the country time to grow rich.

  Part of this wealth included big monasteries, and because they were supported by their neighborhoods, the monks had enough time and skill to make beautiful and valuable books. As well as books, they made objects of gold and silver, with jewels inserted as ornaments.

  Our first invaders came here in longboats, and they wore metal helmets with horns that made them look very fierce. These were the Danes, part of the Viking people who lived in Scandinavia, and they were the best sailors in the world. They were also very savage, and they wrecked many of the places they invaded. Mostly they attacked the monasteries and abbeys because these buildings usually stood on the banks of rivers, so that the monks would always have enough water for their cattle.

  Monks, however, hadn’t much of a fighting tradition. Therefore, when the men from the north came in with their longboats, the monks greeted them as guests. The abbot of a monastery would stand out on the riverbank, his monks assembled behind him, and watch these open boats with high, curved prows come up the river. As the boat docked, the abbot probably raised his hand in greeting. The Norsemen poured ashore with their horned helmets and their wild blond hair. Often their first sword cut off the upraised hand of the abbot, and the blood spurted up like a fountain from the stump of his forearm.

  Then the raiders ransacked that abbey and took every valuable thing they could find. First of all, they grabbed all the food and loaded it into the boats; they came back for the chalices and the other sacred vessels. Then they tore the jeweled covers off the Bibles and threw what was left of the great illuminated books into the rivers. We don’t know how many of these beautiful volumes were simply thrown away.

  After the pillage the Norsemen went off, leaving everybody behind them dead. When the first of these catastrophes was discovered, the word spread, and abbots everywhere were advised to welcome nobody unless they knew them.

  The monasteries began to buil
d a safeguard—what we now know as the famous Round Towers of Ireland, several of which are intact. These tall, narrow buildings reached seventy feet off the ground, and they had their entrance doors thirty feet up. The towers had two functions; they served as watchtower belfries and as refuges. When the monk on watch duty rang the bell to say he had seen the Viking boats approaching, the brothers raced to gather up every valuable they hoped to preserve. Then they climbed to the high door and pulled up the ladder.

  Sometimes, because they were fearless warriors, the Vikings tried to scale the walls. But the monks prepared vats of boiling oil that they poured down on any Danes climbing up. When the boiling oil hit them, it roasted their heads and their necks. It slid down the metal helmets and blistered their eyes and burned their faces. The Danes couldn’t fight the oil; they usually went away again, and the monks thanked God for their safe release from danger.

  Many of the coastal places in Ireland were overrun by the Danes, mostly on the south and east coasts. They took control of Waterford, Wexford, and Dublin and settled down there, marrying into local families. In most other places they raided and ran, but enough of them stayed to mix and marry with the Irish, so that they became a noticeable part of the people. And those that stayed and married and had families eventually contributed in large ways to the life of Ireland.

  But others still raided our shores, and finally it became too much for the Irish kings, who were supposed to rule their people and therefore protect them. They banded together and tried to merge their armies and defeat these terrible people. But they couldn’t agree among themselves very often, and when they were supposed to be fighting the Danes, they wound up fighting each other instead.

  All through the ninth and tenth centuries, one wave of Norsemen after another raided and settled down. Finally, around the year nine-ninety, one king got tired of all this, and he decided he’d bring an end to the Norse raids. His name was Brian Boru, and he held court in county Clare, in a place called Kincora. His name, “Boru,” came from the Irish word for a tax on cattle, which was one of the ways Brian made money for his kingship. In the year nine-seventy-six, when his older brother was killed, he had become king of the Dalcassians, a tribe from county Clare.