by Leon Uris
"What's it about?"
"I'm sorry, I had the idea you knew all about Ireland. This is about the Irish court poets during the Middle Ages. I think that before one, gets his teeth into the real red-blooded revolutionaries a foundation should be built on earlier Irish history. It is quite a history, you know. Do you think you'd like to take a try at it . . . it's not too difficult."
"It might be all right," Conor said as he accepted the book suspiciously. "I'll be sure to bring it back."
"No hurry. The door is always open. When you do return it, help yourself to another one. Just leave a note on my desk."
The door was open indeed! Conor walked down the rows of volumes feasting his eyes on the wonderland of it although he couldn't make out half the titles. He kept looking like he was in a dream, his hand irresistibly drawn to touching the books' spines.
"If you can spare the time," Mr. Ingram said, "oh, say an hour a week, you could stop by after school hours and the two of us can chat about what you're reading. Sometimes, when you're doing it by yourself, it can become complex and confusing and could stand a bit of explaining."
"I might."
"In that way I can also tell if Seamus is keeping your lessons up and maybe I can work out a few assignments for you."
Conor walked to the door but could not quite leave. He came back to Mr. Ingram and tried very hard to speak but he was too filled with the gift that had been bestowed. "I want to thank you very much," he said finally, then turned and ran out
*
Conor Larkin always had magic in his hands. Since I could remember he was making toys of straw for the village children and straw costumes for weddings and celebrations and fine wood carvings and St. Brigid's crosses to ward off evil spirits and other omens to keep the home and byre safe from fire, fairies and ravagement. He made fishing lines and nets of horsehair tail and butterfly cages and was near as good as Tomas at repairing furniture and mending farm tools.
All of this talent leaped to life at Mr. Lambe's forge. Not only was he forging plowshares, spades, hinges and doing farrier work with horses, he was soon on advanced wheelwrighting and tinkering with fancy decorations that had Mr. Lambe, scratching his head. Handles for hearth tools and hearth cranes took on beautiful scroll patterns and his trivets couldn't be matched, even in Derry. Everything that Conor made had his special touch on it and lucky the person who received a gift of utensils or candlesticks for his birthday.
Conor did not stand at the anvil and bang away like Mr. Lambe. He moved about it in the graceful manner of the master dancers of Inishowen in flight and he drew the metal out and twisted it like an artist at a canvas or a poet talking to the bluebird. It was to the everlasting glory of Josiah Lambe to encourage Conor even though the apprentice was catching up to the master.
As I watched him blossom in the blacksmith shop, I began to realize he didn't really want to come into the Larkin farm. Conor would never come right out and say it in so many words for that would hurt his daddy. Instead, he edged away from the family as he gained skill at the forge and every spare minute was spent in study.
On the other hand, Liam was ever at Tomas' side in the fields, slaning turf at the bog, plowing, digging the lazy beds for the potatoes. Liam Larkin had the land in his soul but Tomas was unable to see it for his love of Conor.
What seemed so sad was that Conor and Tomas loved each other as dearly as they ever had but they barely spoke to one another. Here were two strong people almost deliberately hurting one another through silence and moving toward that point where there could be no turning back.
CHAPTER SIX
Mr. Ingram asked everyone who had a relative who had emigrated from Ireland to raise his hand. Everyone in the class did. Mainly, the relatives were in America. Us six Catholic kids had kin living in large cities like Boston and Baltimore. The Protestants mostly emigrated years before and had spread all over America and many into Canada. For our most important term assignment, Mr. Ingram had us write a long and detailed letter or story to a relative and tell them about ourselves.
I can't recall my brother Eamon, who had left before I was old enough to get to know him. The one photograph we had was of him together with a bunch of firemen on a picnic in the park and we could hardly make, him out. We didn't hear from him often, maybe once a year. I especially remember the one letter we got telling of him changing his name from Eamon to the American version of Ed. Of course there was always a big package at Christmas and, when my grandfar died, Ed sent money for a fine tombstone as was the custom. You could tell from the graveyard at St. Columba's who had relatives in America.
I remember sitting near the fire trying to think of how to start my letter and looking at my ma. I realized for the first time how old she was getting. I watched her working kind of bent over a little, for she didn't walk real straight any longer. She smoored the fire, constantly to keep it alive and appease the fairies, for it is said that when the fire dies the house will soon be falling down. During the famine, neighbors would smoor the fires in the homes of those who had emigrated so it would be warm when they ended their exile and returned to Ireland. Of course they never did come back and the fires died out and the cottages came tumbling down. That is how I started my letter.
All of the women of Ballyutogue aged before their time. Endless chores in the house and out in the fields and byre, kept them laboring like slaves from morning till night. They were the keepers of the customs, bringing their own new lives into the world and, in the case of my ma, hundreds of other wanes. When I asked her how many babies she had midwifed, she gave me her half toothless smile and said, "Sure I can't count that high. I should have had a son in school like yourself when I started and then I'd know."
There were four-legged babies, too, the new animals in the byre and the driving of the cows past the fire for luck and the hanging of St. Brigid's crosses and rowan sprigs to ward off evil spirits and making certain a cricket was put in the handle of a scythe and mixing ashes with the new seed for luck. Maybe they couldn't read and write and count so high but they surety had to know a lot, women like my ma, just to keep up with all the old beliefs and make new lives and keep the old ones going.
When evening came and the men would be having at their jug at the shebeen or playing glink, the women would gather in a cottage and sit around the fire with a single candle or lantern and do the fancy lacework on the linen for his lordship's factory. Their eyes were always red rimmed from the strain but the few pence they earned were sorely needed.
With the hours they worked and having the yearly baby, it was small wonder the grayness came and the teeth were lost and the stoop of weariness invaded long before its rightful time. There was little joy for these women. Even the joy that on felt as a haughty young girl being courted, and the joy of the moment of marriage, fled too soon.
The only path open was to plunge deeper into the fairy tales of their faith to keep them going, for it held out a promise of the hereafter and the long rest and the end of suffering. So many of those who could not submerge themselves into the fantasy of Jesus and Mary often went the way of madness.
When the last crop was in and the rents paid, there was an idle time, for our land was far too poor to work in the winter months. It was needed to grass over to feed the cattle and sheep. Winters were the time when the babies were made and the wee wanes were harvested the next year with the potatoes.
There were small respites during those long stormy winter days and nights, the revelry of a new marriage that matched the revelry of the wake. The bride went through a mock kidnap by her husband, who rode in gallantly on horseback and swept her off, and the invasion of straw boys who broke into the merrymaking disguised as washed-up seamen from a shipwreck. But the marriage song soon dimmed with the coming of the first baby and faded to nothingness and everlasting monotony with the second and the third and the fourth. But on they came, for to stop giving birth meant ostracism from the dream of life hereafter with Jesus and Mary.
Us y
ounger ones had a fortnightly ceilidhe of village dancing and singing at the Norman keep. Half the lads of our village could sing in any angel's choir and the other half was just as talented at the pipes. Father Lynch laid down stringent restrictions on all gatherings where both sexes would be present and hovered about to make certain that God's will was imposed. But try as he might, he couldn't entirely, one hundred per cent keep the Devil away.
Other gatherings of a more vigorous nature took place at the shebeen and public house where the songs and stories reeked of insurrection and poets went into gentle combat
The Inishowen weather of storms within storms, and storms in between storms, made it more difficult on the men, who were idler than the women. Tomas Larkin had his hands full to keep family feuds from flaring as tempers grew short.
Conor and I alone seemed to fare well. I was as happy in Mr. Ingram's class as Conor was at Mr. Lambe's forge. For him it was a busy time repairing old tools and making new ones, as well as filling the order for the stone quarry.
Spring always seemed to rescue Ballyutogue just in time. By the first of March the men were eager and tramping about the infields and outfields of the run dale poking around to see if the ground was firm enough and always casting a weather eye, toward the lough and praying it would be kindly. It indicated good luck if we turned the earth on St. Patrick's Day with the first ridge of potatoes planted by Good Friday. Tomas Larkin pretty much made the decisions in organizing communal work and marrowing together the labor pools. On his word, the year's labor began. "In the name of God," he'd say, spitting into the wind and throwing up some hay to ward off the storms, then turn the horses to the lucky side and plow the first row.
Tomas, my daddy and my brother, Colm, and later Liam, would take up their slanes, long thin spades, and make the lazy beds for the potatoes. I'd run water up to them. The lazy beds were dug by hand, a series of trenches and ridges designed to get full use, of the slope of the hill but caring for the drainage to prevent rotting while at the same time making certain the rains carried down dead grass and humus as fertilizer. No plow could match a man's work and every lazy bed showed a slightly different individuality and technique.
With the lazy bed in, I'd gugger with my ma as Finola guggered with Brigid. It was women's and kids' work. I was too young for the slane and getting just old enough to be embarrassed working with the women. The gugger itself was an archaic sod-busting wooden tool that allowed seeds to be dropped into the holes. The women would gugger and the kids come up behind them, covering the holes with small forks.
Four seeds in the hole,
One for the rook,
One for the crow,
One for to rot,
And one for to grow.
The crops followed in, one behind the other, in the ensuing weeks, and when summer was on us the youngest boys of the family went up to the mountains to shepherd.
Mairead and Finola kept close watch on that mystical animal, the pig, who alone in all the world was gifted by the fairies with an ability to see the wind. The pig was the gentleman who paid the rent, and his weight, welfare and size, of litter were of utmost concern.
With the early crops in, the men would then move up to the bogs to clamp turf during the dry months starting in May, cutting and drying it and sharecropping enough for our own use. This time of year brought an annual tension. The next month was June and the beginning of the blue, months, where all our superstitions and prayers were put into play. Food and fodder this time of year would be getting low. As July turned, a communal breath was held. On the Twelfth of July, the Orange celebration, there would be the first cutting of the hay and that was followed by the harvest--wheat, barley and oats in that order.
In blessed October the potatoes were lifted and, although the famine was thirty-five years behind us, no one ever forgot. If they were healthy after a week, we allowed ourselves an outbreak of relief.
Shortly thereafter, many of the men would be droving sheep and cattle to Derry, then crossing the water to find dock jobs in Liverpool or other menial labor in England. If all had gone well, if natural disaster had not struck, if surplus members of the family married or emigrated or moved to the city, if food and fodder held during the blue months and terrible loans didn't have to be made, the farmer would be able to make it for another year. The thin line of survival was so delicate it didn't really require a major disaster to wipe us out but the series of minor ones that never failed to come: loss of a few head, sickness, partial crop damage or some other unexpected assault on our meager resources which always put us in a position of trying to catch up. The only time any of us really got caught up was on that final visit to St. Columba's graveyard.
When the Rankins left the estate and it went under direct control of Viscount Coleraine, there was a feeling that a great burden had been lifted. We were dead wrong, of course.
Flax had been a good crop for us, grown communally in several of the larger outfields. Then the word was given by Luke Hanna that the Hubbles would no longer buy because they were putting in their own vast acreage, and the Protestants would supply the balance. He wanted us to grass over our flax land and increase our herds, but in the transition the loss of revenue would be catastrophic. Moreover, cattle was a lot riskier than flax.
Viscount Coleraine hadn't been in the business long enough to see the effects of a boycott As the old rumbles of discontent and anger spread around the earldom, Kevin O'Garvey, speaking for the Land League, was able to impress on his lordship that other means had to be found to make up for our loss. To his lordship's credit, he smelled trouble and immediately got government funds for road projects and doubled the jobs at the stone quarry, then finally gave the Upper Village a contract to harvest and prepare his flax fields.
Jaysus b'Jaysus, it was filthy, loathsome, disgusting work. The stalks had to be pulled from the ground by hand with us kids acting as gleaners to gather up what the main body of men passed over. At the end of a day you'd be so stooped it would take an hour to be able to stand straight.
After tying the stalks into bundles, we set it in artificial pools or dams to decay the cores. It remained in the water for a fortnight and, as the cores rotted, it set up a stink that would chase a banshee across the Irish Sea. Then came the very job for the kids that convinced me that I'd never make a farmer. We had to get into that putrid, rancid, stinking pool which had turned slimy as well, take, out the sheaves, shake them and spread them by hand to dry. It was worse than saying the rosary.
The men bundled it into stocks for further drying and built up two-story huts awaiting Luke Hanna's carts from the mill to collect it for spinning, weaving and bleaching into linen.
I merely mentioned the flax harvest because, of the smell which I recall so vividly.
*
There were holy gatherings and traditional holidays during which we'd have a chance to travel away from the gimlet eyes of Father Lynch and dance complete with touching your partner closely and game and bet and drink and court and brawl. There were pilgrimages to holy wells and holy beds but I didn't fancy that too much, although our mothers took them seriously and forced us to go along sometimes. St. Brigid and St. Columba were very dominant in Donegal but, as in the rest of Ireland, St. Patrick was by far the most important. Daddo Friel said that some of the rituals we practiced as Catholics were so old they were really begun by the Druid priests of the Celts, such as the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick Mountain where the worshipers climbed one of the highest peaks in Ireland barefooted. Only three people in Ballyutogue had ever made that great journey to County Mayo, Finola Larkin being one of them and, as everyone) knew, was rewarded by the birth of Conor because of it.
Conor and I would be walking on air the morning of the monthly trading fair which was usually held on a saint's day. At gathering day at Muff or Moville or Buncrana or Culdaff we'd enter the grounds as cocky as big swells from Derry.
There would be stalls of used clothing from Scotland and kitchen and farm tools and boys looki
ng for fights and girls, and sometimes horse racing and illegal cock fights and wandering troupes of bards and actors and ballad singers and storytellers and piles of cloth and creels and toys and straw men plying their gambling games.
Conor and I always had one important transaction at the fair like buying a pair of secondhand shoes. We'd fill our pockets with omens on gathering day in order to have the luck of the fair and find a tinker and cross his palm with copper and have our fortune told complete with dire prophecies. They told us what to look for and what to stay away from. Tinkers who weren't soothsaying were plying their art as horse traders while their wives and kids swarmed the grounds begging.
Daddo Friel told Conor and me that the tinkers were not real genuine gypsies but our own Irish folk who had taken to the road generations ago after their houses were tumbled or after the defeats of the risings or from the famine. Once each year they'd camp their wagons at the crossroad near the hanging tree. We gave them safe lodging and in turn they'd hardly steal a thing. In Ballyutogue we felt it was good luck to be kind to them. They did the year's white-smithing of tin and sheet metal arts, repaired the poteen stills and moved along. It was a dirty life they lived. Dr. lan Cruikshank had an annual Tinker Day in which he'd examine the lot of them at no cost whatsoever and supply them with medicine.
The second day was known as fair day. All the family and clan feuds which had built up on gathering day were apt to explode. As the crowds thickened, so did the Constabulary. Peacemakers like Tomas Larkin were on constant call. Sometimes it did no good at all and the better brawls supplied fodder for next winter's conversation at the shebeen.
Trading on fair day would be fierce. In the spring we were looking for a good horse and the women were after cloth from the earnings of their egg money. In late spring cattle was sold along with the first wool shearings in order to make the first of two rent payments. The, autumn fairs were even more crucial. To have a prize cow or sheep could mean the difference between a marginal year or a highly successful one. There was the final auction of beef that wasn't under contract to his lordship and hiring ourselves out as drovers to move the animals to port in order to meet the year's second rent payments in late October.