The Paradise Tree
A Novel
by Elena Maria Vidal
Mayapple Books
St. Michaels, Maryland
Copyright © 2014 M.E. Russell
All rights reserved worldwide
This book is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real locales is used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition: October 2014 by Mayapple Books
Visit www.mayapplebooks.net.
ISBN-13: 978-1502448132
ISBN-10: 1502448130
Cover design and illustrations by Dominic Heisdorf
Visit www.emvidal.com and the Tea at Trianon blog, http://teaattrianon.blogspot.com.
For my daughter, Eleanor
And in memory of my cousin, Mary O’Connor Kaiser
“And the Lord said to Abram: Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father's house, and come into the land which I shall show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation...." Genesis 12:1-2
“To him that overcometh I will give to eat of the tree of life which is in the paradise of my God." Apocalypse 2:7
This book is especially dedicated to Saint Joseph, in thanksgiving for favors received.
Also by Elena Maria Vidal
Trianon: A Novel of Royal France
Madame Royale: A Novel
The Night’s Dark Shade: A Novel of the Cathars
Table of Contents
Preface…………………………………………………………..7
FamilyTree…………………………………………………...…10
Map of Long Point Farm……………………………………….11
Prologue: The Chain of Life…………………………………….…12
Part I The Book of Daniel……………………………………21
1 Man of Desires………………………………………………………22
2 Cry of the Banshee………………………………………………….39
3 The Wooing………………………………………………………….50
4 The Winter Bridal………………………………………………..…65
5 Child of Grace………………………………………………………76
Part II: Brigit’s Lorica……………………………………….86
6 The Lake……………………………………………………...87
7 Moy Mell…………………………………………………….104
8 Of Blue Willow and the Reverend Mr. Smith…………….……115
9 The Light of a Winter Day……………………………….….127
10 Wedding at Long Point…………………………………….136
Part III: Bridget of the Woods and Waters…………….….147
11 On the Gananoque River………………………………….148
12 Babe in the Meadow……………………………………....161
13 The Scrutiny…………………………………………….…173
14 The Wages of Sin……………………………………….…179
Part IV: Charlie’s Windmills………………………….....…188
15 A House for Emily………………………………………....189
16 Farewell…………………………………………………...197
17 A Winter Sunset……………………………………………202
Part V: Fergie’s Choice……………………………………..206
18 The Wake………………………...………....………….......207
19 The Procession………………………………………….....214
20 The Quick and the Dead………………………………......224
21 The Resting Place……………………………………….......229
22 A New Heaven and a New Earth……………………………232
Afterword: The Tree of Life………………………………….235
Author’s Note on Songs, Fairy Tales and Biblical Quotations...238
Author’s Note on the Importance of Catholic Tradition in the Lives of Irish Immigrants……………………………………………..239
Index of Characters……………………………………………..241
Index of Irish Words and Expression………………………...…244
Bibliography………………………………………………….…246
Acknowledgments........………………………….....……….......249
PREFACE
The Paradise Tree is a work of historical fiction inspired by the life of my great-great-great-grandfather, Daniel O’Connor. Over the course of many vacations, when going to the lake in Ontario, Canada, where my grandmother’s brother had his summer cottage, we would watch for Long Point Farm where Daniel had settled and where his immediate descendants had lived. Across the meadow could be seen Daniel’s daughter Ellen’s house and the Saddle Rock, a huge boulder on which rested a stone saddle, carved by nature. While perusing my Uncle Ferg’s memoirs, I read how Ferg, my grandmother and their siblings also watched for Aunt Ellen's house as children. As he wrote many years later: “Aunt Ellen's house was seen, across the field as we drove down Ellisville Road, before we saw the farm house and Dad was always informed by the chorus when the house was seen.” (O'Connor, Fergus James,107) For my extended family, Long Point has had an aura of mystery for generations, due to the stories passed down from the old folks of odd and unexplained occurrences, as well as of happy ordinary times. I hope through this novel to create a living portrait of the old homestead and of those who dwelt there.
Daniel was born in 1796 at Togher parish in Dunmanway, County Cork, Ireland, the son of Michael and Joanna Ronan O'Connor, one of nine children. Descended from the High Kings of Ireland and the Lords of Connaught, they were from a branch of the O’Connor clan known as the “Kerry-O’Connors.” Cork was known as the “rebel county” and, at the time Daniel was born, was the site of many insurrections against the tyranny of English rule, which forbade the Irish Catholics the open practice of their religion. Due to the harsh penal laws imposed in 1695, Catholics could not own land, hold public office, or receive an education. The O’Connor clan defied the laws to the best of their ability and, according to Aunt Ellen, Daniel and all of his siblings received “a liberal education” in spite of the difficulties.
There were a series of potato crop failings and famines throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Great Famine of the 1840s. Many Irish Catholics found it impossible to ever get ahead. Daniel immigrated to Canada in the spring of 1821. He worked and saved his money until he was able to purchase land in Leeds County, Ontario, which he called Long Point Farm. He had moved away only to find that things were not so very different in the new world than they had been in Ireland. In fact, Daniel “found that local settlers were very prejudiced against anyone professing the Catholic religion, and more especially if that person happened to be an Irishman.” (Lockwood, 148-149) Daniel’s youngest daughter, Charlotte O’Connor Palmer, wrote to her niece, Madeline O’Connor, that “When father came to Delta one of the first salutes he got was ‘for the love of God do not tell that you are a Catholic or you will not succeed.’ He said, ‘Never will I deny my faith,’ and he fought valiantly for it.” (Letter from Charlotte O’Connor Palmer to Madeline O’Connor,
undated)
There were few priests. Daniel often had to walk fifty miles or more, fending off wolves, in order to go to confession and make his Easter duty. As each of the eleven children were born, he and his wife Brigit, who arrived in Canada from Ireland with her family the Trainors in the late 1820’s, sought to raise them in the Catholic Faith. In her letter to Madeline, Charlotte O’Connor Palmer wrote:
Mother and he used to take a child a piece on horseback…when a priest had a station in Kitley which was very seldom, they rode on horseback to have their children christened….By good examples, good books, and constant admonishing to their family they kept the light of faith burning in their children. How often Protestant ministers were invited to come partake of father and mother’s hospitality in order to discuss religious questions to point out to his family the truths of our holy religion. No church, no school to send us for instruction; that, my dear, is the faith of our dear old Irish parents. (Ibid.)
The Paradise Tree is a novel in which the characters are constantly faced with the mysteries of life, death, love, redemption and eternity. Eternity was something that Daniel O'Connor kept ever before him, as was typical of the old Irish, and can be seen in the following excerpt of a letter to his grandchildren: “Farewell, my grandchildren, God bless you all, and keep you in his love and fear of offending Him, as my prayer for you all big and little, young and old.” (Letter from Daniel O’Connor to Lena and Etta Flood, November 8, 1884) Daniel died on December 8, 1886, two years after his beloved wife Brigit, of whom it was said in her obituary “her death was calm as her life had been.” Daniel’s obituary in the Brockville Reporter, March 1887, illustrates that the calm faith possessed by his wife was something Daniel possessed as well:
Of the deceased it may be truly said that his faults were few and his virtues many….Upright and honest, a true-hearted Irishman, he leaves behind him memories which link his name to the true and trusted who have gone before. His death was more the result of the natural decay of old age more than actual sickness. And he died fortified by the sacraments of the church, in peace with himself, in peace with his fellowmen and in peace with his God.
May this story honor Daniel, and all those whom he loved.
PROLOGUE
The Chain of Life
December 9, 1886
“Let us now praise the men of renown and our fathers in their generation.”
─Ecclus. 44:1
“Nothing will ever be the same again,” Fergie said to George when Grandpa O’Connor died. “He's gone, and everything is different now.”
It was as if the world had ended, or at least had been altered in its very essence, although the surface of things appeared to be unchanged. The December snow continued to fall, blowing into heavy drifts along the roads and byways of Leeds County, Ontario; the cows still needed milking, the horses required their oats in the wintry twilights and dawns, the frosts made faery patterns on the window panes. School days plodded along, followed by evenings of study. Mother sewed near the stove and Father read the newspaper aloud, or carved sumac spiles in preparation for sugar-making season.
The passing of Grandpa O’Connor, of Squire Daniel O’Connor, however, seemed to herald in Fergie’s seven-year-old mind the unfolding of the Apocalypse. His mother had only just taught him the doctrine of the Four Last Things, of death, judgment, heaven and hell, as well as of the Second Coming of Christ. Grandpa would surely be enthroned with the patriarchs of Israel at the Last Judgment. He had looked as if he could be as old as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but Aunt Ellen had said that Grandpa was only ninety. But he had always been there, it seemed, living on and on at Long Point Farm on Singleton Lake. The idea of not seeing Grandpa ever again would be like not seeing the sunrise. The universe had indeed been transformed.
Grandpa’s dying had been a two-year process for Fergie, beginning with Grandma's death on a bright day in late July of 1884. Fergie had been only five then, but he vividly remembered standing on the porch watching Father MacDonald arrive in his buggy to give Grandma O'Connor the Last Rites. He stood transfixed by the dread and gravity of the moment. Never in Fergus Joseph O’Connor's short life had the priest come to the white frame house; never had his father been summoned from the fields in mid-morning, especially while cutting hay. Fergie was not permitted to follow Father MacDonald into Grandma's sick room, so he had wandered into the kitchen, half expecting to see Grandma there, peeling potatoes or kneading bread. The walls of the house still echoed with her gentle, lilting voice, as when she quietly told her beads in her rocking chair or in bed during her last illness. Stooped with age, she was a small woman even to a five-year-old, like one of the sidhe or faeries of whom she sometimes spoke, with her blue-green piercing eyes highlighting her worn face, framed in the white-linen house-cap. She was said to be not nearly as ancient as Grandpa O’Connor, which Fergie could hardly believe, especially when the two of them sat side by side near the stove, canopied by ropes of drying apples, like Abraham and Sarah enthroned in eternity, talking quietly. Their Irish brogue, so thick when they conversed with each other, might as well have been a foreign language, which they otherwise modified for the sake of their Canadian-born progeny.
When Grandma O’Connor died, Fergie and his best friend, George, had run across the field and scrambled upon the Saddle Rock. It was a large, white, domed rock with the shape of a saddle formed on the top by the elements, as if it had been carved by a human hand. Fergie liked to play upon the rock, and pretend he was riding a horse. He could watch the swirling of the various greens of the pasture, of emerald, apple and bottle-green, dotted with Queen Anne's lace, buttercups and chicory, rippling into patterns of endless complexity. He cried for his Grandma, for her sweet and calm ways, and George wept, too.
After Grandma died, Grandpa would sit alone, occasionally turning towards her empty chair, having forgotten for a moment that she had gone. Then he would gaze ahead of him, as if he were seeing beyond time.
“Go sit with Grandpa,” Mother would whisper to Fergie, who then hastened to sit near Grandpa’s feet on one of the rag carpets Grandma had woven on her loom.
“Tell me, Grandpa, of the O’Connors,” asked Fergie, eager as ever for the oft-recited litany. George appeared from somewhere upstairs, as he was wont to do; he liked to hear the stories, too.
“I will tell you, Grandson," the patriarch replied. "Although you have surely heard me tell of it many times before.” Grandpa’s half-chanted words made the past and present mingle and become one. “The O’Connors are descended from Milesius, King of Spain.” His grayish-blue eyes flickered, as if observing the past unfold. “The Milesians invaded Ireland in the ancient days before the Coming of Christ, and took the island from the Tuatha de Dannan and the Firbolgs. The O’Connors derived their name from Conchobar, King of Connaught in the 1st century. Of his kindred was Conn of the Hundred Battles, one of the most celebrated of the monarchs of all Ireland.”
Grandpa’s familiar voice was like the flint that lit the spark of Fergie’s imagination. As the boy listened to the oft-told tale of his ancestors, he could see the warrior kings marched through the kitchen, tramping upon the scrubbed wooden floor, amid the fragrance of pumpkin pie. The rattle of dishes and utensils became the clang of swords.
“When did the O’Connors become kings, Grandpa?” asked Fergie as Grandpa paused to puff on his pipe. Fergie knew that Grandpa wanted him to ask.
“I was just getting to that, lad. Excepting for two O’Rourkes, the O’Connors held sovereignty of Connaught from the fifth to the fifteenth century. Of this family, Roderick O’Connor was last High King of Ireland. Roderick, after abdicating in 1184 at the time of the Norman invasion, passed eighteen years in religious meditation at the monastery of Cong. Upon his death in his 82nd year, he was interred in the same sepulcher with his father, King Turlough. I myself journeyed there on pilgrimage one Lent.
“Cathal succeeded his brother Roderick as head of the Clan O'Connor. Though brave and energetic, he was unab
le to withstand, in the absence of national unity, the encroachment of the steel-clad Anglo-Normans. The royal seat of the O'Connors became the chief fortress of the Knights of Connaught. They held it until the reign of Elizabeth I, when most of the estates were confiscated.”
“What did we do then?” Fergie pictured his ancestors running with bundles through the woods and snow away from soldiers and burnings.
“Ah, Fergie, you come from folk who have survived many troubles. We, the O’Connors of Kerry, are descended from Fergus, the great grandson of Roderick the Great, 86th monarch of Ireland. We are not afraid to fight, but we have the prudence to know what fights to choose. We went to Cork in the thirteenth century to aid the royal MacCarthys in their fight against the Normans. We were driven back into Kerry, but after several years the MacCarthys triumphed over the Normans. They reconquered all of Cork and shared their glory with the O’Connor clan by granting us some lands near the present Dunmanway, and the use of Togher castle. The castle and lands were taken from us by Cromwell in the 1600's. We stayed on, greatly reduced in circumstance, having to pay rent to the English for living on our own land. There were many uprisings, but none gained us our freedom. It is there near Dunmanway in County Cork, in Togher parish, that I was born in 1796, amid more uprising and rebellion that came to nought.”
“Why did you come to Canada, Grandpa?” Fergie had often asked the question, and knew what the answer would be. The aged man paused for a moment of reflection. The comforting warmth of the stove made the wild old Irish days seem far, far away.
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