Only with Blood

by Therese Down

  Jack looked at the accordion – at his hand and the ferocity of the grip upon the leather strap – and lowered it. Caitlin greedily gathered her instrument to herself, pressing the bellows together and cradling it as though it were a child.

  “Never,” he shouted, but less wrathfully, “touch my horse again or spend my stinking money without my permission! Is that clear?” But Caitlin was kneeling on the floor sobbing, bent over the accordion and rocking with it gently. Jack strode across the kitchen and flung open the door. Just before he went through it, he turned back to her. “And from now on, you will go to mass on a Sunday.”

  Forlorn beyond his ability to process, Flynn walked up the road to his cow field. Another man might have sought solace in the bar. Leaning on the gate, Jack watched his cows moving about their new field, cropping the sparse January grass, unconcerned by his presence. It seemed to Jack that life had played upon him a cruel trick and that he would leave it as he had started, abandoned and alone. He knew enough to know there was no cure for TB and no respite he could take to prolong his life, for who would run the farm? Jack leaned on his gate, bowed his head, and contemplated the shivering grass, felt the small shifts of his boots on loose stones.

  He tried to break through the barrier grown thick over the merciless wring of years, between sensibility and the instinct to survive. Somewhere, always, he had the impression of a small boy behind a door, who could not reach the handle but who lived in hope that one day he would be strong enough to let himself out to a world of light and freedom. Or else, someone would come and push the door wide open as if it were weightless and light would come flooding in, the way it did when his mother parted the curtains in the mornings. But no one had come.

  Jack reflected now that he had known the key to his freedom was deep in his father’s pocket, and no amount of book learning or fine language would ever have induced Sean Flynn to relinquish his hold on his son. It was hard now to think of words with which to name the things he understood. The ancient Irish Celts, he had learned once in classics, had introduced soap to the Greeks. Someone had sniggered and asked why they didn’t make more use of it. And it was true enough; as far back as Jack could remember, life had been filthy. There was little reason to wash your clothes or yourself when all you did was trudge through mud and manure. Even in the summer, the work was sweaty and there was endless digging: digging for turf or to make ditches so the fields weren’t sodden in the frequent rain and the crops didn’t rot in the ground; digging to put in fence posts; digging to plant things, and when you had planted them, there was digging to get them up out of the ground. It seemed to Jack that all his years had been a bending to the earth, and soon she would fold him into herself entirely.

  The only clear memories he had from learning were anchored like buoys in the swift, dark current of his life. Wolfe Tone’s French galleys with their bloated sails, spilling ink blue uniforms and light snaring bayonets onto the sandy shores and grey marram grass of Buncrana; Brian Boru in warrior dress at the battle of Clontarf, fighting against Mael Morda mac Murchada, King of Leinster, and the army of Vikings Mael Morda had enlisted to challenge Boru for monarchy of All Ireland.

  History was Jack’s favourite lesson. He learned that Brian Boru had died saying his prayers in a tent. A cowardly Viking mercenary called Brodir had slain the almighty king when he had no chance of defending himself. It had made Jack so angry! That was no way for a warrior to die, on his knees with his eyes closed.

  “The good news, boys and girls,” professed his teacher, Mr Carolan, “was that the great King Brian Boruma mac Cennetig would have gone straight to our Lord and the Blessed Virgin in heaven, for he was ‘taken at his prayers’.” Jack was not consoled by the image of Brian, his spear in hand and mane of flying red hair, floating around with angels and a lady in blue clothes. Remembering it now, though, he tried to imagine the light which everyone said you saw as you approached heaven. But his hands were freezing and his heart, receiving again its reservoir of sadness, sank heavily in his chest as the colourless day sighed into darkness. He opened the gate. He may as well milk the cows now. No point going down the road to come back up again.

  That evening, as Caitlin cried herself to sleep in the pitch darkness of a moonless room and Jack sat guilt-ridden and ruminative by the range, Donal Kelly caused a stir by walking into the bar in Dunane. Mick Spillane was particularly intrigued to know who this young man was, for he recognized him straight away as the same who had wordlessly confronted Jack Flynn after mass a couple of Sundays before. Approaching Donal, Spillane extended his hand. Knowing who he was, the younger man hesitated half a second then returned the gesture. They shook hands.

  “Well?” said Mick. “We’ve seen you hereabouts a few times now. Where are you from?”

  “Golden,” replied Donal, turning as he did so to pay Jim Fogarty for his pint.

  “Golden?” Mick waited for Donal to turn back to him. “That’s a fair few miles up the road, now,” said Spillane. Donal looked down and smiled to himself. “Ah, hah!” exclaimed Spillane triumphantly. “It’s a young one you be after, am I right, eh?”

  Donal nodded again and allowed himself to laugh at the irony. “Indeed,” he admitted.

  “Well, now, and who is she?” Mick sipped his pint, smiling at Donal in what he assumed was a fatherly fashion.

  “Ah, now, I’d rather not say.” Donal affected coyness and Mick winked conspiratorially at him. What a pity, he thought in that moment, that Maureen was so bloodless. Sure this was a fine young man by any standard and he had a good strong back on him – would be helpful around the farm.

  “Come and have a drink with us,” urged Spillane. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t.” There was a pause and Mick stopped again to look at Donal with amused confusion. “Kelly – Donal Kelly.”

  “Kelly up at Golden? Sure I know your father well,” said Mick. “Have seen him plenty of times at the markets above in Tipp and Cashmel. Is he well? Sure didn’t we hear he was after having a heart attack?”

  Donal became very serious. “That’s right. He’s not too bad now.”

  Mick squinted and bit his lower lip as if trying to recall something else to impress Donal.

  “And weren’t you above in Blackwell – a teacher, was it?”

  “I was,” confirmed Donal, “but the old man needs me at home now.”

  Mick nodded and his eyes became serious. “Aren’t you the grand son, now?” Then, turning to the men who had all ceased to talk and were watching Mick and Donal, he said, “This is Dan Kelly’s boy. Make room there, lads, for he’s planning to make himself at home in Dunane by the sounds of things.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “The horse is lame,” announced Jack when he came in from milking the following Monday morning. “His leg is worse. You will have to walk to school.” He could not look at her, such was his shame. But at the same time, his irritation was growing with what he regarded as Caitlin’s slovenliness around the place. He understood that she was feeling sorry for herself and that life was a disappointment for her, but what about him? She had said she would look after him. Most of the time, she stayed in her room and it was all she could do it seemed to put a meal on the table or clear up after it.

  Caitlin looked at Jack with an expression of sneering disbelief, though she was careful to ensure he did not see it. She walked quickly across the kitchen and out of the door. It was raining and cold. The thought of walking the two miles to school filled her with despondency. It would take her at least forty minutes in her rubber boots and the rain and the mud. She would be soaked. But her suspicion that Flynn had exaggerated the horse’s lameness out of spite following their row was soon allayed. She was shocked at how swollen the horse’s fetlock was. He stood with his weight on three legs, his painful foot dangling from the fetlock joint, the tip of its hoof just touching the ground. At her arrival, the horse turned and whinnied softly. Well, there was nothing for it – she would have to walk.


  Within a few minutes, Caitlin had changed her shoes for boots and wrapped a shawl around her chest and head. She put on woollen gloves and picked up her bag, then left the house without a word to Flynn. When she arrived at school, Caitlin was cold and bedraggled, like most of the children who daily walked to school. At the back of the classrooms, throughout the winter, were placed large paraffin heaters; the children hung their coats on pegs behind them. They arranged their soaked gloves along a bench which ran under the pegs and lingered as long as they could near the source of warmth before the handheld bell signalled the start of class.

  Since her marriage, the five other pupils in Caitlin’s class, four of them boys, had become awkward around her. She had always been renowned for her intelligence, and as the girls with whom Caitlin had started infant class dropped out of school to help at home on farms or seek paid employment in dairies, shops, or as maids, she had become increasingly aloof and isolated. There was only one other girl still at school at seventeen, Nuala Kenny. Nuala was exceptionally intelligent with a wiry mane of flaming hair which resisted all attempts to restrain it. She had bushy blonde eyebrows and freckles which seemed to halt like full tide at the boundaries of her spectacles. When Nuala removed her glasses to clean them, the paleness around her eyes was astonishing, and her blue eyes seemed small and vulnerable. Hardly friends – more comrades in adversity – Nuala and Caitlin sat together in class but competed fiercely with the boys and each other.

  On this morning, as Caitlin unwrapped her shawl and removed her wet gloves, laying them out on the bench in the hope they would be dry by three o’clock, Nuala approached her in a state of rare excitement.

  “Have you seen the dreamboat they’ve brought in to teach maths?”

  Caitlin was not interested, too preoccupied with her sorrows and freezing fingers to care for gossip. She shook her head distractedly, did not turn to face Nuala. “Caitlin, he’s an out and out doll! Apparently, his father has a farm in Golden but he’s sick so Mr Kelly came home to help him out but it turns out he’s brilliant at maths – went to Blackwell and taught maths there – and he’ll be teaching the young ones here part time, so he can still help his father.” Smoothing her hair, Caitlin turned to regard her classmate’s bright eyes and ruddy cheeks. The rims of Nuala’s glasses were pink and she had a habit of pushing the frames up her nose with her right third finger.

  “Well,” said Caitlin, and could think of nothing to add. At the sight of Caitlin’s pale face and lacklustre eyes, Nuala remembered, to her embarrassment, that she was a married woman now.

  “Ah, sorry, there,” she muttered, her excited flush deepening to red. “I didn’t think, sorry.” Sister Mary Francis rang the hand bell and the children in the playground ran into the school. Within minutes, all was silence and Caitlin took her place behind her desk, lifted its lid, and removed a geography textbook. She turned to page seventy-three and a chapter entitled “The Ruhr Valley” in perfect synch with Nuala and the four boys in Leaving Cert class.

  “Begin reading please, Conor Fahey.” Sister Mary de Ricci’s crisp imperative began the lesson.

  “I don’t like the look of that pastern, Mr Flynn.” Jack had walked into Dunane and asked Mary in the post office to put a call through to the vet in Tipperary. Without his horse, he was stranded. This was not such a problem when he had his health, but now that walking anywhere was an effort, Jack needed to know if his horse would get better and when. Though it pained him to spend money on a vet, he had no choice. The fetlock swelling was not responding to the poultice or hosing down treatment he had been applying to the leg. Caitlin’s decision to use the horse without his permission had not helped. The animal needed complete rest. “He’s getting on a bit now,” said the vet, still palpating the fetlock joint, feeling for the tell-tale bony growth around the lower pastern joint and finding it. The horse flinched, stamped his foot. “OK, old boy, OK,” soothed the vet, straightening up. “This horse has a nasty case of osteoarthritis,” he pronounced, “and unless he gets several weeks of rest – maybe months – so the swelling can subside and he can avoid stressing the joint, I’m afraid the outlook is not good.”

  Jack cursed, passed a hand over his face in consternation. How the hell was he supposed to get by without a horse? Walking into Dunane and back in the cold rain had been a terrible strain on his chest. How would he make it to mass on a Sunday or get shopping? And how would Caitlin like it, walking to and from school every day? He particularly had not wanted her to do that. It was only two miles but it was hard enough in the wet and cold and the dark. He had been pleased to be able to offer her the lift. And how would he get feed up the road to his cows, or pigs to market, without a horse and cart? How would he dig turf in the spring and bring it home? How would he get hay from the fields to the barn? Even as he stood beside the vet and contemplated his animal, more and more ways in which his mobility and commercial survival were compromised occurred to Jack. A badly lame horse was no good to him.

  “I can inject him now, for the pain,” said the vet, “and to reduce the swelling a little. But if you want this animal to pull a cart again, you will have to rest him – totally – for a long time. We’ve caught the condition at an early stage, but this sort of thing doesn’t go away. There’s no guarantee he won’t go lame again within days of use. You have a hard decision to make, now, Mr Flynn. How old is he?”

  Flynn had to think hard. He bought the horse as a youngster and trained him to pull a cart. He had always been a good-natured and willing beast. Flynn could remember being fit and strong and in his prime, trotting fast through summer lanes to mass, proud of the way the light shifted on the horse’s black, glossy coat. He recalled working as one with his animal as they turned furrows of earth, Jack guiding the bulk and will of the animal as it pulled the ploughshare up and down the sugar beet and potato fields all day. He had never given it a name.

  “He’s fourteen or thereabouts,” answered Flynn solemnly. As if the horse sensed the seriousness of the trouble he was in, he turned to look at Jack, snorted, and bobbed his head. Jack stepped forward and rested a hand on the animal’s broad, strong back, then slipped his hand beneath his mane and followed the warm line of his neck from shoulder to poll. The vet saw the affection in the gesture and sighed. This was never easy, the weighing of sentiment against economy. Everyone had a living to earn. Farm animals were beasts of burden or production. He awaited the verdict, prepared for what he might have to do.

  “I will need a new horse.” Jack’s words were barely audible. “That will be expensive.” The vet nodded. “Is there any sort of a chance he might be good for riding?” asked Jack suddenly. “Nothing too strenuous, like. Maybe for a woman?” The vet raised his eyebrows and considered the request.

  “If you can afford to keep this horse and look after him, then I don’t see why he couldn’t recover enough for light work of that sort – with a woman on his back.”

  Jack smiled, patting the horse’s neck. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “That’s what we’ll do.”

  “And you’ll buy another horse?”

  Jack nodded. “Aye. Nothing fancy.” The vet smiled and shook Jack’s hand.

  Caitlin sighed as she emerged from school and Flynn was not there with the cart. Much as she loathed her husband, she remembered how grateful she had been when he said she could continue at school and it was a luxury indeed to be delivered and picked up each day. School finished at three o’clock in the winter, but the sky was dark grey and the few houses visible from the road outside the school house were already blacking out their windows. The nuns who ran the school pulled out of the gates in their shiny car and away to their convent in Tipperary nine or so miles away. This had become a National school in the last five years. The Christian brothers in Dunane had aged and declined in numbers till it was no longer economical to maintain a seminary there. The Presentation convent in Tipperary was secure enough and there were several nuns young enough to take over the job. The state
paid them and the lay teachers they employed, and subsidised the purchase of a car.

  This afternoon, close behind the nuns’ car came another – that of the science master, Jim Fennessey. What remained of Mr Fennessey’s once curly black hair was a ring around his pate. He had bulbous features and a fleshy lower lip which hung open most of the time as if too heavy to lift. He had lived in England for years before the war broke out, coming home to his widowed mother in Cappagreen when it did so. He intended to sit out the war, teaching science and keeping his mother company in the little shop she kept on Cappagreen Main Street, eight miles from Dunane. Mr Fennessey was not married but rumour had it that he was courting, for some had seen him cruising about the country lanes in his little Austin car, a lady in the passenger seat. In the passenger seat now was Donal Kelly. As Jim drove past Caitlin, he raised his hand in a salute of acknowledgment.

  “Who’s that?” asked Donal, turning his head to watch the girl until the car left her well behind.

  “That’s Caitlin Spillane – no,” Jim corrected himself, “Caitlin Flynn. Her father recently married her off to an old fella – got a tidy sum for her by all accounts. At least he lets her continue at school, which is most unusual. The girl is fiercely intelligent. Much good will it do her now. Primitive as hell but sure, what can you do? We’re called to enlighten the natives not change the world, my friend. One step at a time.” Donal said nothing but changing the world was exactly what he had in mind.