Theresa’s love for her home was equaled only by Patrick Halloran’s love for his farm. His forty-seven acres “had the grass” of eighteen cows, and also supported half a dozen pigs, two plow horses, and a pony for the cart. On the blue-black marshlands of the Fergus he grew corn for the market, while a large kitchen garden kept his family supplied with potatoes, cabbages, carrots, and turnips. Hens and geese in the yard furnished eggs for the table and stuffing for pillows and featherbeds. The orchard hummed with bees, and in a good summer the high meadow was golden with hay.
Below the meadow was a half acre and a limewashed cabin that Patrick rented to Thomas Devlin of Clonroad. Devlin was a brawny, taciturn man who paid the rent with farm labor while his unmarried sister, Janey, served in the Halloran house as maid-of-all-work. The tidiness and prosperity of the holding was due in no small measure to their devotion over the years.
Seeing his mother’s house, his father’s fields, hit Ned like a blow to the heart.
But his brother’s face shocked him. Although he was only three years older than Ned, Francis Patrick Halloran seemed to have turned into a middle-aged man in two short months. Deep pouches had formed beneath his blue eyes. His brown hair lay lank across his forehead, his shoulders drooped beneath the weight of burdens they were unprepared to bear. Once he had made the countryside ring with his whistled rendition of the new Percy French tune, “The Darlin’ Girl from Clare.” But the music was dead in him now.
Norah Daly was doing her best to maintain a home for her sister’s orphaned children, but the strain was evident on her as well. A plump, soft woman, with thick brown hair—graying now—scraped back into a knot, in her youth she had been the beauty of the Daly clan. The family home on Abbey Street in Ennis had seen its share of young men trying to court Norah, and not just for her dowry. But she had refused them all, becoming instead the devoted spinster aunt to a horde of nieces and nephews.
When the locals wondered among themselves at her failure to marry, only Patrick Halloran had never joined in the speculation.
Now Norah Daly stood in the Halloran doorway to welcome Ned home, as the two little girls, Lucy and Eileen, peeped shyly around her skirts. “Wisha, Ned, you’re wearing your father’s face!” was Norah’s greeting to him. Then she burst into tears.
NED’S mother had been so proud of her parlor. The walls were decorated with holy pictures and the windows were hung with lace curtains that Janey Devlin starched four times a year with potato water, but Norah and Frank bypassed the parlor and went straight to the kitchen. Ned followed. In rural Ireland people invariably gathered in the kitchen.
A massive stone hearth dominated one end of the room. The chimney breast was coated with a tarry residue from countless fires. Within the mouth of the fireplace was a spit for roasting meat, and an iron crane with a projecting arm braced to hold pots and kettles. Sides of bacon hung from hooks above, curing in the smoke. Similar fireplaces had been the hearts of Irish homes for hundreds of years.
Beside the hearth stood a creel: a large, square basket made of hazel rods and piled high with blocks of turf. Since the island had been denuded of its timber in the sixteenth century, turf cut from peat bogs had become the ubiquitous fuel. The achingly sweet smell of Ireland’s burning earth was as much a part of Ned as the color of his eyes.
A note of modernity was provided by an iron cooking range. Here food could be prepared by a woman standing upright, and smoothing irons could be heated without being coated in ash. So this new household god, lovingly blacked and polished, was much venerated by the womenfolk. It, too, depended on turf, however.
In the center of the flagstone floor was a large deal table surrounded by sugán chairs with straw-rope seats. Other furnishings included a tall flour bin with a sloping lid, a wooden kneading trough, and a pine dresser displaying the “delph”—glazed pottery in blue and white and speckled brown. A half door opened onto the yard; strings of onions hung drying beside a curtainless window. The kitchen smelled of fresh-baked bread and muddy boots.
On the mantelpiece next to the clock was a dog-eared book of poems in a faded leather binding, the sort of slim volume Patrick Halloran had always carried in his pocket, even when working in the fields.
At first no one knew what to say. Norah blew her nose on a handkerchief; Frank rummaged in his pockets. The ticking of the clock was the only sound in the room as the surviving members of the Halloran family looked at one another.
Ned wished his mother were there. She always had something to say.
“I’ll poke up the fire and put fresh water in the kettle,” Norah said abruptly. “Lucy, Eileen—you had your tea already. Be off and play now, let your brother catch his breath. He’ll have time for you after.”
Two sets of small arms wrapped themselves around Ned’s neck, hugged hard, then reluctantly loosened. The bottom of the half door slammed.
“I’m sorry my sewing things are all over the table, I was cutting patterns,” Norah went on, speaking too fast. “But here, we’ll put the tea on this.” She unfastened a hinged tabletop that was held to the wall by a wooden turn-buckle. When it was let down and its two folding legs were lowered into place, the “falling table” provided additional eating space for the extra laborers hired at the hiring fair to help with the harvest. It served other functions as well; the surface was deeply grooved as a result of being used for cutting up pig carcasses after slaughtering.
Ned felt as if he were visiting the house for the first time. He had grown up in this place and never before questioned either its style or its substance. He was astonished at how primitive it seemed to him now.
“Would you like bread and jam?” Norah asked as she spread an oilcloth over the table. “There is black currant or gooseberry.”
In his mind’s eye Ned could see his mother and the servant girl as clearly as if they were in front of him, ladling the hot, jewel-toned jam from the kettle into the jars. The smell had filled the kitchen, so thick and sweet it coated his throat and flooded his mouth with saliva. And Mama looked up, flush-faced from the heat, and smiled….
“I’m not hungry,” he managed to whisper.
“You’re as thin as a lath; there’s not a pick o’meat on you. You will eat, I’ll see to it.” Suiting deed to word, Norah began placing food in front of him. A Blue Willow platter was piled high with “boxty,” cakes made of raw grated potato mixed with flour, then flavored with sugar, caraway, and cinnamon and cooked on a greased griddle. A second platter was heaped with thick slices of bacon, pork steak, and black pudding. A bowl held boiled eggs; another contained creamy pot cheese. Wedges of soda bread still warm from the oven were slathered with sweet butter, and scalding hot tea—“strong enough for a mouse to trot across,” just the way Patrick Halloran had liked it—was poured into Ned’s cup.
“Eat,” his aunt commanded. “You too, Frank.”
They obeyed. As was the custom with country women, their aunt would wait until the menfolk were finished before taking anything for herself.
“White Star’s disclaiming further financial responsibility,” Frank told Ned while they ate. “They seem to think they’ve done enough just sending you home. So with Papa gone, it’s up to me to support us until the girls are old enough to marry.”
Ned glanced out the window toward his two sisters, playing in the yard. Lucy, at age nine, was already a sober little girl, with heavy eyebrows and a sallow complexion. She had none of her older sister Kathleen’s beauty. Five-year-old Eileen was fair and chubby, with dimpled hands and a gurgling laugh that caused Lucy to scowl and shake her head.
Ned could not make out what the older girl was saying, but it was surely some admonition to remember their parents were newly dead.
“I’ll help,” Ned said, turning back to his brother. “You won’t have to do it all yourself.”
“Work on the farm, you mean?”
“I do of course. I’ve been working on this farm since I was five years old, same as yourself.”
&nbs
p; Frank said, “Lord Inchiquin wants to do something for you to make up for what you’ve been through. He suggests sending you away to school.”
“I’m after having my schooling, I don’t need any more. I went to National School until I was twelve.”
“Your father always said you had a great turn for the books, Ned,” interjected Norah. “So His Lordship would like you to have a proper education. To equip you for the larger world, as he says.”
“I won’t go, so I won’t! I’ll stay here and do my share of the work.”
His aunt was watching him with an intent gaze, struck anew by his resemblance to Patrick Halloran. “Would you not do something other than farming, if you could?”
“Farming was good enough for my father.”
An expression Ned could not interpret flickered in Norah’s eyes. “Your father did what he had to. That was his way. But it is possible he wanted something else, might have yearned all his life for…” She bit her lip.
“How would you know what my father wanted?”
Her face closed, hiding secrets behind locked doors. “Just tell us, Ned. You love books like your father before you, and you always say you never get enough of them to read. Would you take more schooling if it was on offer?”
Before the Titanic he would have answered no with a shrug and a laugh. What need had a County Clare farm boy for a “proper” education?
Now the Titanic was gone, but the horizons she had opened in his mind had not shrunk. Yet too much had happened in too short a time; he was mentally and emotionally exhausted.
Later Frank and Norah discussed the matter out of Ned’s hearing. “We have to stay here, Frank, though everything we see reminds us of our loss. But the boy is different. Like his father, he…Oh, let us give him this chance! Down deep he wants it, I know he does. He’s trying to do his duty. Can we not be generous and let him follow his heart instead?”
In an Irish household the senior male’s word was law—but the women knew how to legislate. Frank made only a token objection before giving in to his aunt. Ned was duly sent up to Dromoland for an interview with Lord Inchiquin.
Chapter Six
AFTERWARD he wrote Kathleen:
I had never been inside Dromoland Castle before and it is very grand. The air inside is so still, you would never know there are lots of servants about. There is a library with hundreds of books. Lord Inchiquin said he had not read them all. I would read them if they were mine. He has a kind face with a nose on him as long as a wet winter. I could tell he felt sorry for me. I do not like it when people feel sorry for me. He talked about my father and said what a hard worker he was, and Her Ladyship gave me some sweet biscuits with pink icing on them. I just et one and brought the rest home to Lucy and Eileen. Lord Inchiquin has promised to send me up to Dublin to school. We are going to ask Father Hagerty to recommend a Catholic one. When I next write I hope to have good news.
Your loving brother, Ned.
There was one duty he felt honor bound to perform. On a cold gray day when the wind blew in off the Atlantic like death’s own voice, Ned took the pony and rode to Ruan to pay a call on Dan Duffy’s family. He hardly knew what to say to them, but he had to go.
As the pony trotted along the winding roads he saluted with a country-man’s nod the other travelers he met, and called out to laborers in the fields, “God bless the work!” They grinned and waved back; none were strangers in Clare.
When Ned reached the village of Ruan a white-haired, weather-beaten post “boy” on a bicycle directed him to the Duffy holding, which proved to be a dilapidated bothán scóir at the end of a rutted lane. Tiny, stony fields growing a meager crop of potatoes and turnips surrounded a rectangular cabin built of rocks and mud and roofed with reeds. The hovel was like a pustule erupting from a sea of mud.
Ned noticed that someone had made an effort to bring a touch of beauty to this particular hovel. There were wildflowers in a jug on the sill of the only window.
Liam Duffy met Ned at the door. His resemblance to his dead son gave Ned a physical jolt. Ned stammered, “I was…I was on the Titanic.”
A moment later he was inside and the hospitality of the house was being pressed upon him. It was only cold potatoes and buttermilk, but the best they had. He could not offend them by refusing. While he forced down a few bites the senior Duffys watched him avidly, hungry for any comfort to which they could cling. Their remaining children gathered around them, staring at the stranger. The noses of the younger ones were running. They wiped them on their sleeves, if at all.
Ned glanced around the cabin. As was common when one structure must serve as both house and barn, a drain running across the hard-packed earthen floor marked the division between human habitation and animal byre. Sleeping accommodations consisted of one small recess containing a rickety bedstead with a mattress of woven straw, a sleeping loft above reached by a ladder, and a lean-to accessed through a hole knocked in the wall. There was no real fireplace, merely a few turves smoldering on a slab.
“And was he brave at the end?” Liam Duffy kept asking. “Was me lad brave at the end?”
“As brave as Brian Bóru,” Ned assured him.
Mrs. Duffy said, “Is there no chance he could have survived? He would not have been easy to kill, our Dan.” She thrust her face into Ned’s, every line and seam and broken vein telling a tale of struggle.
Ned longed to hold out hope, however slim. But the heartbreak of future disappointment would be more cruel than telling the truth now. “Dan went down with the Titanic,” he said.
Though his voice was pitched low, the words cut the smoky air like a butcher’s knife.
Mrs. Duffy threw her apron over her face and turned away. Her husband stood solidly, feet planted wide apart, and absorbed the blow without flinching. “So,” he said. “Sure, don’t we all have one foot in the grave and the other on its edge anyway.”
Ned stayed only as long as good manners dictated. Conversation was limited: Ned spoke of going away to school; Mr. Duffy complained of his “rheumatics.” The older children watched silently; the younger ones sniffled and fidgeted.
When Ned rose from his broken stool and said his good-byes, one of Dan’s sisters came forward and pressed his hand. “ ’Twas good of you to come, so.”
She was a year or two older than he and almost as tall, with creamy, freckled skin. Eyebrows and eyelashes were purest copper; her rust-colored hair was like raveled rope. Her eyes were slanted like a cat’s. She was not beautiful, her features were too strongly modeled. But her bosom was magnificent.
Ned’s hand felt burned by the touch of hers.
“Síle!” her father said, “be letting go of the lad’s hand now, he’ll be wanting to be on his way before dark.”
The girl released him, but held his gaze. “Someday,” she said softly, “I’m going to leave, too. There’s nothing for me here, no dowry to get me a husband.” Her mouth twisted. “Perhaps I’ll go to Dublin like you. Watch for me there, you never know.”
Then she threw back her head and laughed.
On the way home Ned kept thinking about her. He was surprised she had such an old-fashioned name. People of his class christened their children with English names, or at least anglicized the Irish. Síle—Sheila—would have been changed to Cecilia.
And none of the Irish girls he knew would have taken his hand the way she did, or met his eyes so boldly.
June 19, 1912
IRISH HOME RULE BILL ONCE MORE
BEFORE PARLIAMENT
September 30, 1912
RUSSIA MOBILIZES 245,000 TROOPS AS
TENSION MOUNTS IN BALKANS
Chapter Seven
THE parish priest, Father Hagerty, was an energetic little man with the veinous nose of an alcoholic and a tendency to slur his speech on occasion, though his parishioners swore he rarely touched “a drop o’ the crayture.” His political views were in no doubt, however. Home Rule and the Gaelic League commanded his passionate loyalty, to the distres
s of his bishop. Pat Hagerty wanted Ireland to be ruled by its own parliament in Dublin and speak its own language everywhere. He was an Irishman to his toes.
“There’s a school in Dublin that would be the very place for yon lad,” Father Hagerty told Frank Halloran. “Mind you, he might be a bit old, but I could have a word with a cousin of mine who’s married to one of the Bradys. The headmaster’s mother was a Brady.”
Frank Halloran nodded. He understood the complex network of familial relationships by which most arrangements in Ireland were made.
“This school, Saint Enda’s,” the priest went on, warming to his subject, “was established in 1908 to acquaint Irish boys with their native language as well as give them a thorough education. They don’t teach our own Irish history in the National Schools, but Saint Enda’s does—and the Irish language, too. If the lad has a good mind he’ll do well there.”
“Is it very expensive?” worried Frank. “And do you think His Lordship would object to paying the tuition for a school that teaches…Irish?”
“The Lords Inchiquin may be anglicized, but in the heel of the hunt they’re still O’Briens underneath,” Father Hagerty replied stoutly.
True to his word, Father Hagerty made the arrangements. On a warm autumn day Frank prepared to drive Ned to the train station. Ned insisted on harnessing the pony to the trap himself, giving the animal a fond rub between the eyes as he adjusted the bridle.
Norah and the girls stood at the door to bid him good-bye. Norah gave him a smothering hug, then turned away. Lucy also hugged him, the embrace hard and abrupt, swiftly broken off.
But little Eileen followed him to the road and stood beside the wheel of the trap. She held up her dimpled arms. “Please, Neddy. Please!”
He leaped out and squeezed her to him until she gasped for breath. This time it was Ned who wept.
1916 Page 5