by Kalyan Ray
It was near Christmas, almost a full year before Padraig got his sudden idea to go off to the great meeting at Clontarf so far away. The festival at Sligo Town had been big and raucous with ceilidh bands and drinking and dancing and stirring about. The harvest had been good earlier and so had the ocean’s catch. Many strangers had come to town, some fisherfolk from as far away as Donegal, some had brought horses for sale from the South—some even from the Isles of Aran—and there were tramps and tinkers and poteen makers from around Roscommon inland. We had no school those days.
The morning after the festival was over, and dogs wandering all over licking the paved stones where people had spilled food or offal, and all the strangers left, and the townspeople were slowly putting themselves back into their ordinary lives, someone discovered Poor Madgy Finn lying behind a paved by-lane like a broken toy, hair matted and reeking from the poteen some jokesters had poured on it, her face torn as if she had been fighting dogs. She had cuts on her hands where some nails had broken off, and she was whimpering.
In ones and twos the townspeople gathered about her in a growing circle. Padraig’s ma too had gone into town that day. She went to see what people were gawking at, and found Odd Madgy Finn moaning on the ground, a drying splotch of blood on the thin dress she had twisted over her crotch.
This put Padraig’s ma in a tearing rage. What she said I did not hear, but the townspeople slunk off and Mrs. Aherne lifted Poor Madgy Finn and cradled her home. She was strong. I followed her at a distance, all the way to her home, not daring to get close. She gave a piece of bread to Madgy, who curled up in a corner, chewing between groans.
A few days later Odd Madgy Finn was back in front of Mr. O’Flaherty’s school. She got no more food than she always did—fruits she got off the trees in season—the wedges of bread from Mr. O’Flaherty, or the praties that Padraig’s ma would give her if she showed up at her shop, sometimes a heel of cheese, and perhaps a bit of coloured paper which Poor Madgy Finn would treasure until it got sodden and sere. But one thing was changed in Madgy. Her stomach bloated and grew as the weeks passed into warming months and late summer, until time came when she could barely stir.
She disappeared for a few days as September ended. No one knew where she was. There was even some relief, I sensed, among the townspeople. But, as unexpectedly as ever, she limped her way back, her dress now filthy with mud and a rusty stain, and one breast lay open to plain sight. On her teat suckled a naked infant, large, like a diminutive man, with a smudge of pasty hair on his blue skull. Padraig’s ma coaxed her to come home with her, though Odd Madgy Finn bridled if anyone, even Mrs. Aherne, came too close to the bairn, let alone tried to dress it. I once saw her trying to feed her newborn some bread. The baby began to choke. Madgy threw the lump down, thrust her teat back in his mouth, and strolled away to the woody copse of elms and rhododendron, where a thin spring burbled from the rocky ground and black-back gulls roosted under Ben Bulben.
When she sensed no one was around she would leave the baby in a small nest-like mess made of moss and furze. I saw it there a few times, returning from school, and heard it gurgling and gooing and a-staring at the branches overhead. Madgy would run off and bathe in the stream, squawking and guffawing in the chilly water, and sometimes took to the habit of hunkering down to defecate on the road itself. And once, stingy Willy McDougall was driving his flock of mangy sheep down when he saw her, crossed himself, and doubled back, and came another day because he thought it bad luck itself to see anyone parting with anything at all on his way to market day.
In a couple of weeks Odd Madgy Finn began to leave it for longer and longer. The dress about her breasts was always wet and glotty with milky ooze, her hair coming off in patches, and she spat about a lot. Some days, she took to walking down to Sligo Town in the afternoon, begging and badgering people for food or a dram, but always returned to wherever she had left her bairn, by the time the light grew westerly and long on Sligo Bay.
And then it happened. Just a month or so after her birthing, she returned one noon and found that the birds had been at it when she was gone. They had pecked and ravaged her boy eyeless and scratch-headed, cheeks torn and flesh-pecked. Madgy had put the bairn to breast, but the creature was past suckling. She set up a mighty howl, and when she stumbled into the open door of our schoolroom with a great cry, we were all that shivered and goose-bumped with horror as she held out the baby to Mr. O’Flaherty, herself smelling of blood and stale milk. The youngest of us, Charley Keelan and Malachi O’Toole, set up wails of fright. Mr. O’Flaherty rushed out, and Odd Madgy followed him—still holding out the mottled bundle. Mr. O’Flaherty, whom we had never seen flustered, made a retching sound and led her out, slamming the door behind himself, leaving us inside in the gasping dark.
There we sat, still as death itself, in the closed schoolroom. Malachi was sniffling and hugging his older brother Joe, and rusty-haired Charley Keelan bent over the dirt floor, his hands over his ears. When Mr. O’Flaherty returned, his face looked old and lined, and he went out again with a piece of black bread in his hand, the door swinging open and shut in the dizzy sea-wind. Madgy put her baby down on the rough dirt of the threshold in front of his laced old shoes, took two lurchy steps back into the yard, bit on the bread, and was gone.
Mr. O’Flaherty picked up the bundle and spoke loudly from the threshold itself, without turning to look at us, as if he were speaking to the far wrinkled sea out there, “Go home, go away today,” was all he muttered.
From the next day Poor Madgy Finn did not show up at school, rocking in time with the multiplication numbers, did not lie in the dirt under that tree, waiting for her morsel at Mr. O’Flaherty’s door.
• • •
THINGS LULLED BACK in a few days, as they always did in our corner of Ireland, beneath the prow of Bulben, which faces the Atlantic. To the east, a sandy pebbled arc with a stone breakwater holds the harbour where fishing boats bob beside Mullaghmore village, between the open sea and the high Ben.
From Cairns Hill you can see Lough Gill, which holds within itself isles—one named Innisfree, a calm eye in the lake. Hazel woods east of the lough whisper from early spring into the grey slant of autumn. In the twilight, you can see the twinkle of the village of Dromahair, under a purple vein still bleeding in the sky.
There was water all around us, starting with the Garavogue, right by the harbour. On the slope to Ben Bulben, a stone hut usurped the small storm-bitten green on which it stood. Out on a jaunt, Padraig and I sheltered there once, from a sudden rain. Snug, under the muttering rain on the slate and sod roof, we watched through its door how a tunnel of radiance bore its way from the Atlantic waters, through wreathed mist, until it was all clear. Far out west the Atlantic glittered under a full and falling sun, turning its waves beyond Ben Bulben into layers upon layers of gleaming fish-scales.
During that last spring of 1843, when he was still with us, Padraig used to take me and go, sometimes with Brigid tagging along, toward Rosses’ Point, where there is a small church. Turn left and it took us to seven miniature lakes. Farther along this road we could see Dead Man’s Point and the broad chest of the Atlantic gleaming, the wide rocks like armour. Underfoot, the crawling tides tug to and fro, depending upon the time of day. All we could hear—above the stir of pebbly water and the sudden squawk of a seagull—was the gong of an iron bell swung whimsically when it pleased the Atlantic gust. To the right, Ben Bulben sets the scene, like the master in his house.
During our jaunts, Padraig seemed so much less taken with Brigid than usual. I had him more to myself. Brigid tried to match his carefree mood, but I could feel my sliver of jealousy, how she was waiting to be wooed, and I feeling that small pleasure of his neglect of her. He was my brother in spirit, but it troubled me how much or what I sought of Padraig. I was content with my unwillingness to delve more. I found Brigid looking at me, in unguarded moments, in an appraising manner. We both looked away if our eyes met, but I could tell I was being measured
on some inexplicable scale through her woman’s eye, probing to learn the weight on my heart.
• • •
PADRAIG AND I had always known Brigid; we had known her as baby and child and girl. ’Tis a mystery how Padraig, who teased little Brigid, almost a year younger, pulled her hair and made her cry, now turned and began to go silent and watchful as she grew tall.
Padraig was the one to go nest-egg hunting, the first to bring in a frog to put in someone’s school satchel. He was also the first to share his praties or give away his slice of bread to a girl or boy without lunch. His flung stone was death itself to the squirrels until one day when Brigid cried, staring at the limp bodies hanging from his bloodied fist. That’s when he pulled her hair, and made a face, to be friends again. But the lass shook her mane of black and looked away. Padraig, who could bear everything but to be ignored, grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth. I saw he was breathless, while she walked off as if indifferent.
The host of children with whom we had first flocked to Mr. O’Flaherty’s school had begun to drift off. Many took to the fields beside their fathers, carrying their hoes and spades at dawn. Some left for Sligo or Boyle, others farther afield, leaving their carved names on tables. Declan Clooney had run away to become a sailorman. One or two would drop by after some years, blinking at our threshold, as if expecting to find their own wee selves writing on the slate, their eyes clutching at the childhood they had left behind, crestfallen that others now occupied their seats. Charley Keelan had been the first to leave when he turned eleven. Then by ones and twos they left until in the next four years none of our vintage was left, but the three of us.
Brigid mustered the wee ones scrawling the alphabet on their slate tablets which she would wipe clean with a wet rag when they were done, Mr. O’Flaherty glad of her help. They clustered around her, and she was content, away from her mean cottage, especially when her da was home, blustering in his poteen fug. Padraig stayed on, discussing Ireland and newspapers with Mr. O’Flaherty, and willingly mend the sod roof of the schoolhouse and the doors, replacing corbel stones on the mossy sides of the lane. With his sharp knife, he would carve wooden ships for the little ones, calling these Grania’s Fleet, ignoring Peter O’Connor’s real one, which sailed from his Garavogue shipyard office, where Padraig said he might one day go to work. He had an inexplicable ability of calculating numbers from large columns of figures, swiftly in his head, instant additions, divisions, and multiplications and such. Mr. O’Flaherty said that Padraig was a rare one, born with that ability: He saw numbers and the answers flocked to him as if at his bidding, like a line of sandpipers flying in to settle on the beach.
“An asset he would be in my business,” Mr. O’Connor had declared, but Padraig kept putting off that plodding employ. Besides, his mother with her tidy shop was glad to have him get more book learning and was in no hurry to bid her boy goodbye. My mate too was reluctant to depart his carefree days. Oh, I was glad he had not left.
By the time Padraig approached seventeen, I knew he was over his head. I understood it bitterly, and ignored Brigid. I watched him stare at the frail neck and the curve of her cheek, and all the letters on his page might as well have been motes of dust swirling meaninglessly, while the sunbeam lit up Brigid Shaughnessy alone.
I began to stay back and talk to Mr. O’Flaherty, so I would not walk with Padraig trailing Brigid, him answering me in distracted monosyllables. Padraig thought me considerate. Nay, angry and bruised, I was—and proud—in my fashion, noticing more than I let on.
The winter had raged into February, and tapered off in rains and mists in March, and the faint, then glorious, sunshine began to speckle and deck our early April Sligo with scatters of bluebells, rhododendron, and forsythia all the way up the Ben.
Sharp and clear as a break in a perfect crystal, I chanced to see Padraig kissing Brigid one day under a crab apple that was at the point of budding. A week later one April afternoon, unexpectedly warm, I spied them entering a shepherd’s broken hut, one of those that lie about the county, abandoned and empty. Padraig took a hurried look around before Brigid’s palm closed over his, drawing him in.
Even from the far edge of the meadow above them, I could see how gentle the clasp of his fingers was—and yet how helpless—as he held Brigid’s palm. My heart and all its veins were twisted within me and hurt, for I knew that Brigid was at that moment closer in his arms than any of our heedless and raucous wrestling contests which Padraig always won, pinning me to the dirt.
Yet it was not I alone who had seen this. Father Conlon had seen it too. How is it that two persons can see the same thing, from great far distances, and react so differently? I resolved to keep the sight as between the pages of my heart’s book, secreted forever. But the priest, in great snorting dudgeon, hobbled fast, even with his weak knees and wheezing breath, and arrived by the longer path—not the steep shortcut we take, half-sliding down the hill—at that same broken shepherd’s hut. He found them entwined, a trace of dirt on her knee and Padraig’s surprised face, sweats mingled, their little dim world redolent with caresses and kisses, fondled half-words and moans—and broke that moment apart.
He dragged them out, naked and seemingly newborn, into the April glare. He was going to tell their mothers, he was going to tell the world, he was going to bellow it to the whole congregation, he would point God’s finger at them. He stood there shouting on the glorious hillside, brandishing his staff, and justifying the ways of God.
Padraig and Brigid, hastily covering their nakedness, did walk hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, and through that valley took their solitary way.
• • •
I SAT FOR a long time on a rock and looked out at the ocean. After what I had seen, I felt a tiredness of spirit. I wanted to sit on the rock and not have to go back, to my sick mother, to my shabby sod-roofed home, to the daily wants, to the smell of sputtery tallow candles under the blackened ceiling, to the barefoot dirt beneath, to whatever sanctimonious mischief Father Conlon had been able to brew.
I saw folks gathered outside their cottages, seeming to mind their own business, but I knew the ways of our villagers. Everyone was straining their ears to every bit of scandal thrown into the air, for Father Conlon certainly prated about Brigid’s shameful deflowering and how he knew about Padraig Aherne’s mischief. Ah yes, his red face and pimpled neck aglow, the priest was surely having his loud say. Padraig’s ma was among a number of people in front of her shop. She was with Brigid’s mother. I wondered where Brigid might be. Padraig was surely inside, miserable that his day in paradise had rotted so. He would be in a rage, for I knew his temper.
It was then my heart sank. There stood Mr. Shaughnessy, Brigid’s father, unsteady on his feet as a heavy hamstrung bull. He came to the village on his erratic trips home from Connemara, where he worked in the boatyard of an Englishman. He drank most of his money, and people—if you heeded them—would tell you worse. Every few months he would show up on our lane and settle some of the accounts at Mrs. Aherne’s shop, and then go for a drunken binge. He would wobble down to Mullaghmore or Sligo harbour making a nuisance of himself, then weave back to his cottage, spitting and retching on the way. He had been warned in Mullaghmore for public pissing. He would stay holed in his cottage for several days, making a terror of himself at home. Brigid could not go to school those days. Then he would get up, put on his shoes without even washing off the flakes of retch, and head back to Connemara, to the relief of all, but especially to his family.
Ay, but now he was back, in the worst of times.
Mrs. Shaughnessy was weeping, her head bowed. Padraig’s ma had her arm around her. Father Conlon stood a little farther away from them and kept looking at the jumble of eager neighbours who had gathered as if by chance.
“ ’Tis your proud way, Maire Aherne, that’s the cause of all this,” said Father Conlon unexpectedly. Mrs. Aherne, who had been speaking quietly to Brigid’s ma, bridled at the priest’s hectoring,
and walked right up to the priest and stood before him. “Is that what it is, Father?” she retorted. “And when widowed I returned here, heavy with child, my young husband late gone, what help were you?”
Desperately Father Conlon looked about him. Brigid’s da had reached the crowd—for ’twas a crowd now.
“Come here, Shaughnessy!” Father Conlon called out and grasped the man’s shoulder. “Look at this wronged man, Maire. Can ye look him in the face?”
Mr. Shaughnessy tried to rearrange his stubbly face into the semblance of the righteous. He sighed deeply. The poteen breath made Father Conlon blanch, in spite of himself. He took his fat hand off Mr. Shaughnessy’s shoulder as that man stood swaying, his eyes goggled on one face, then another.
“ ’Tis that odd, Maire, ’tis mighty odd that the English agent Arkwright comes by, wringing every sorry coin from our fists, ranting and threatening to tumble our cottages—but when he comes to ye, Maire, why then does he smile and scrape, and nary a broken farthing does he walk away with? ’Tis always Mrs. Aherne this and Mrs. Aherne that, and old Mrs. Hetty Bunthorne in London did say thus and such,” said Father Conlon, mimicking the English accent. “I wonder what that lordling Palmerston has to say of all this,” the priest tittered. “Your son’s pride is a putrid thing in the eyes of our Lord. Ye don’t see it, Maire. That riddles me.”
“Let your daft head be riddled by other matters then. Is not our Brigid as much a child of mine? Will I see her wronged? You hush, and let us—just we two mothers—deal with this. You prattle of taxes and gibbering nonsense.”
“Gibbering?” sputtered the priest.
But Brigid’s da had had enough of this. He felt cheated of all the attention he felt he deserved. He shouldered his burly way before Padraig’s ma, who refused to yield an inch, never mind the poteen breath.
“Ye say, Mrs. Maire Aherne, your son is all free and clear, having made a darned fool of me?”