Dark Rosaleen

by Michael Nicholson, OBE

  The village was famous for a well that had been visited by St Patrick when he had stopped and refreshed himself, one of the many wells he made holy on his long walk through Ireland. The young priest led the villagers in a wide circle around it, stopping every few yards or so to recant each of the Stations of the Cross. They bowed their heads and bent their knees and walked on, reciting out loud the ten decades of their rosary, along with the five sorrows of Christ’s death.

  The cold numbed their fingers so that they barely felt the beads and the wind chilled their lips so the sacred words tumbled incoherently from their mouths. Their feet bled. They were barefoot and the stones cut, them but the more it hurt, the more their blood mixed with the rain, the more certain they were that God was witness to their penance and would hear their pleas and cover their fields in some holy cloak.

  Then the priest stopped and they followed him into the church to receive the holy Host. Cold and desolate, they watched as he put on the robes of Benediction and lit a single candle. Then, kneeling before the bare wooden table of an altar, he prayed for them and for himself, for he too had potatoes. None could see his anxious face and the rain drummed so loudly on the roof that few could hear his words. The icons of painted wood and plaster, the pious celebrities of prayer, heard nothing. Even Christ, limp in the lap of Mary, now seemed truly dead and she uncaring.

  The priest ended his pleading, quickly de-robed and walked back down the aisle past his flock, careful not to look at any one of them. They followed, hurriedly pushing their way out, afraid to be there without him. As they crossed the churchyard, lightning lit up the gravestones and in one bright, single flash, the Celtic crosses and the names of the dead were suddenly magnified and leapt out at them. The women screamed and pulled their aprons over their heads. The men walked on, knowing it was just another of the Devil’s tricks.

  Tom Keegan had almost reached the bottom of the mountain slope when his son and Kate saw him. His clothes were sodden and heavy with mud, his face white with cold and splattered with dirt. The rain lashed unseeing, unblinking eyes, for he was now completely blind. Keegan ran to him, lifted him over his shoulders and carried him to the cottage, shouting.

  ‘Father, you fool. You stupid old fool. You will die. What are you doing on the mountain on a night like this? For God’s sake, get inside and stay inside and get warm. Kate is with me to get your praties out.’

  But the old man seemed not to hear and when he spoke he was talking only to himself. ‘I can hear water,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you can, father, we all can and a lot of it is inside you, I shouldn’t reckon. Great God! I’ve never seen a storm like this in all my life.’

  But the old man could now see things that men with eyes could not.

  ‘There’s water coming,’ he whispered. ‘The river’s rising, it’s coming and flooding and it’ll drown my praties. I have to get down to them.’

  He struggled to free himself from his son’s grip but Keegan held him tight and, once inside, they undressed and dried him, wrapped him in a blanket and sat him as close to the fire as they dared. Then he was silent.

  The garden was now under water so that only the heaped potato mounds showed where they should dig.

  ‘Throw them up to the ledge, Kate!’ Keegan shouted to her. ‘There on the rock. They’ll be safe until morning.’

  The water was like ice and Kate’s hands and feet throbbed with the pain. The spade slipped from her fingers and she splashed around, searching for it beneath the muddied water. Soon she was crying with the cold.

  They moved to the second row, Kate at one end, Keegan the other, where water was now gushing in like a frantic stream that had lost its course. Kate dug deeper but her spade felt nothing. She dug again but pulled up only mud.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ she shouted, but already Keegan was on his knees, pushing his hands deep into the mire, his powerful arms breaking the mounds apart, as frenzied as the storm around him. Then he stopped and straightened his back and held out his cupped hands to her. She waded towards him but she knew even before she saw it. She knew the smell. A mass of pulp, brown and glue-like, oozed from between his fingers. They had come too late. The potatoes were lost.

  Kate fell on her knees beside him, exhausted, and rested her head on his shoulders. There was no pain now. No throbbing. She was sitting in mud and water but she could not feel them. It was as if her body had been pulled apart and the stinking, corrupting, fetid odour belonged elsewhere. Then, as the sky was bright with lightning, she saw the old man.

  He was behind them, white and naked in the rain, standing as straight as a ramrod in the wretched swamp that had been his life’s garden. The smell had brought him out, the stench of miserable defeat. He was looking at the sky and talking, asking questions she could not hear above the storm, talking to the sky or something above it. He held up his arms, beckoning as if he was calling someone to him, the way a gentle shepherd does to a lamb. Then he dropped his arms to his side and walked slowly back to the open door. As his son ran after him, Kate sank back into the mud and was sick.

  The old man lay on his mattress of straw, dirtying the sheets he had always been so careful to keep white and pressed. He held his ankles tightly together and his arms were crossed over his chest. His son pulled the blanket over him and knelt by him, knowing what he was about to do and knowing he could do nothing to stop him. He sat that way, watching his father’s face for nearly an hour, not moving his gaze even when Kate came and sat behind him.

  The old man stirred, opened his eyes to the son he could not see and whispered for him to come closer.

  ‘I cannot do more, my boy. All these long years I have fought and fought and finally I have lost. I think I’ve known that for a long time, but no matter now. We might have had better days together, you and me, a better life, but it was not to be. I had always believed that when things come to their worst they must mend but now I know that to be false. I will not struggle more. I cannot. It is time to leave.’

  ‘Yes, father, I understand. May God bless you.’

  ‘And you too, son of mine. And speed you to a better fortune, for it must be out here somewhere for someone. I’m away at last to meet my Mary. She has waited so long. Bless you, son, and bless you again and remember only what was good in me.’

  He closed his eyes and lay still. Keegan whispered his prayers and crossed the old man’s forehead.

  Then he bent over and kissed his dead father’s lips.

  Keegan wanted his father put into the ground without fuss but the women would not let him. For more than half a century he had taught two generations of their children and there were grandmothers who still remembered the quiet young man with a stammer who had risked going to an English prison ship so that their sons and daughters might count to a hundred and recite the alphabet. Merchants and farmers in Cork and Kerry, and even as far away as Clare, owed much of their good fortune to the schoolmaster who had taught them the mysteries of division and multiplication, which had propelled them on the road to profit.

  So Keegan could do nothing. The women did it all with rites that had prospered long before the first monk had ever stamped the first holy cross on Ireland’s shores.

  The old man was laid out on his table, washed from head to toe, his hair neatly brushed and a white and newly pressed sheet was tucked around him, tight and decent. The little mirror over the hearth was covered with a cloth and the clock was stopped, its hands turned back to the hour and the minute he had taken his last breath. Copper pennies were laid on each closed eyelid and his Bible was placed under his chin.

  Then the keeners began their wailing and crooning, hands on hips, rocking back and forth, their aprons over their heads as cold ashes from the fire were sprinkled over them and scattered around the front door to frighten away the evil spirits that might bar the old man’s journey to heaven.

  All that day of the wake, people filed past to look at his face for the last time and say their goodbyes. In better ti
mes, Tom Keegan might have expected a little jollity around him, some whiskey, some poteen and perhaps a fiddler too. But only talk was free now and there was little enthusiasm for that.

  They carried him to the graveyard at St Nicholas. The grave was already open and the diggers had placed their spades across it in the shape of the cross so the evil spirits could not hide there. They sprinkled the coffin with water and as it was lowered the crooners began shouting, ‘God is glory … Open your gates.’

  When they were gone at last, Keegan sat alone by the mound and pushed a lighted candle into the soft earth of his father’s grave. Then he bent down and touched the earth with his lips.

  ‘Goodbye, Father,’ he whispered. ‘You were a good man, noble and kind. I know how you grieved for your woman and I love and honour you for that. We shall meet no more on earth but whatever your doubts at the end, you are with God now. May he fit us both for a better world.’

  He spoke no more and sat there weeping.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kate had never thought of death as violent or bloody. She had imagined it to be peaceful, wreathed in its own private dignity. Now she was no longer a stranger to the faces of the dead and the agonies of their dying.

  The Fitzgerald family had taken her as their own and seldom had a day passed when she was not in the company of one or other of the twins. But Una had begun to visit Keegan on her own and those journeys were becoming more and more frequent. The bond was forming just as Kate and Tom Keegan knew it would.

  Robin was working all the hours that daylight gave him, tending the sick and the dying in the makeshift hospitals and the overcrowded workhouses. Kate offered to help. He did not hesitate and promptly recruited her as his own nursing orderly. It was then that she began her descent into the suffocating mire of death and despair. Every day she suffered the sight of bodies twisted in pain, mouths open in silent screams. Women were giving birth to babies so deformed from malnutrition that Robin needed the help of another man to pull them out of the wombs. It was the silence of the children that shocked her most. In the moment of their dying there was not a movement, not a cry, not a tear, just their unblinking eyes, condemning. They could not speak because starvation had weakened their bones and the slightest pressure on the jaw forced their tongue to the roof of their mouth. Hunger had silenced them.

  Many did not look like children at all, bent and wrinkled, their skin taut and thin, like grey muslin. They had lost the hair on their heads and it grew instead on their foreheads and cheeks and even their chins. It was written that they resembled monkeys, which was how the cartoonists in the British newspapers depicted them. The ape-like Irish.

  That morning, Kate saw a donkey carrying two dead children. They were stuffed into wicker baskets hanging either side of it, like a harvested crop off to market. A man, a walking skeleton, their father perhaps, led the donkey by its mane but there were no other mourners. No mother, no sisters, no brothers, no black cloth, no wailing keeners. Death was anonymous.

  She watched until they reached the church. The man sat down. The donkey ate grass, and the two wicker coffins swung with the rhythm as it moved.

  ‘He will bury them where he can,’ Robin said. ‘If he has the strength. If he does not, he will do what so many do now and leave them by the church gate and hope someone stronger will do it for him. Did you ever think, Kate, even in your worst nightmares, that it would come to this?’

  ‘A year ago, I was hardly aware these people even existed,’ she said, ‘let alone have any sympathy for them.’

  ‘You can’t have sympathy for suffering you haven’t seen.’

  ‘You can be blamed for not knowing it exists.’

  ‘Why are the righteous so severe with themselves?’

  ‘Is that what I am, Robin? Righteous?’

  ‘No, Kate, you are not. Not righteous, but you must forgive yourself the past. You have left it behind.’

  ‘Have I?’ she asked. ‘Is it possible to become another person?’

  ‘Is that what you are?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have recognised me when I first arrived in Ireland. You wouldn’t have wanted to. I loathe what I was. I want to disown my past’.

  ‘The calamity has changed us all, Kate.’

  She paused. ‘Do you suppose that underneath, deep down, I haven’t changed at all? That I’m still a spoilt little English lady simply infatuated by it all?’

  He leant forward and held her arm. ‘That’s a silly word, Kate, and a silly thing to say. Nobody could drain an ulcer or dress a septic wound as you have done and call it infatuation. You are real, Kate. Why do you doubt it?’

  ‘It’s what I want to believe,’ she said.

  ‘You must believe it. You have changed, you know you have.’

  ‘But Robin, I don’t feel I have, at least not yet. I don’t feel I’ve crossed a boundary, like changing my religion or my country.’

  ‘You have changed, Kate. I’ve seen it myself and it has nothing to do with being English or Irish, papist or Prod. It’s about what’s decent and whether you care. And you do. You’ve declared yourself and everything you are doing proves it. You’ll not turn back now.’

  Robin knew it to be true. For a month now she had been at his side, helping him, travelling with him, nursing his patients as best she could. Not once had she distanced herself from the suffering. Not once had she allowed herself to be overwhelmed by it. She could have retreated and he would have thought no less of her. But she had not. She had become more resolute every day, even as their work became more grotesque and unrelenting. How could she call it infatuation?

  A man can be as brave as a legend but the day will come when the snap of a twig will alarm him. A woman can endure a lifetime of abuse and then, in the space of a moment, turn on the torturer and end it. So it was that day with Kate.

  She and Robin had ridden south to Skibbereen. He had received reports that the suffering there was worse than ever. They rode for three days. Five miles from the town they came to a derelict tumbled village. It looked deserted but the sound of their horses’ hooves had woken someone. They heard a moan, like the lowing of a cow. They dismounted and Robin gave his reins to Kate.

  ‘Stay here. I’ll call out if I need help. Promise me you’ll not move unless I call.’

  Kate nodded. He had been gone some minutes when she heard a cry behind her. She tied the horses to the stump of a tree and went to the nearest cottage. There was no roof, no door. It was an igloo of mud. She saw bundles wrapped in sacking on the floor. They were the small bodies of children. In the corner a woman lay half naked. Rats scampered at her feet. She looked at Kate, her lips moved but there was no sound. A bloated rat ran across her stomach.

  Kate ran to her horse and was sick down its flanks. She called out to Robin but her voice was barely a whisper. As she held on to the saddle to steady herself, arms suddenly clutched her scarf, twisting it, choking her. She turned. A young woman was screaming at her, pushing a baby against her lips. The child’s body was suffocating her. She could taste its filth. She struggled but the woman’s arms were tight around her like a clamp. She could not turn one way or the other. Then her horse reared as Robin wrenched the woman and her baby away and they fell to the ground.

  ‘Help her, Robin,’ Kate pleaded. ‘For God’s sake, help her.’

  He shook his head. ‘There is nothing I can do for her. I cannot save her. Nothing can save her now.’

  The young woman pulled herself to her knees, picked up her baby and wandered away from them, her strength exhausted. They watched as she sat by the edge of a ditch, the child in her lap, talking to it, caressing it. She cupped its tiny face in the crook of her elbow and tried to feed it with a weed she had squeezed and rolled into a soft ball. She put it into its mouth and turned its chin with her fingers, trying to make it chew. The baby stared back, puzzled. Then it swallowed the ball, convulsed and was still. For a moment she held it tight to her. Then she dropped it between her knees and with her feet buried him in
the mud.

  They rode south towards Baltimore. The Quakers had established a depot there to distribute food and clothing sent from America. Within weeks a thousand hungry people had besieged the port. They brought their diseases with them. There were no doctors, the small hospital had closed its doors and the workhouse was full.

  Robin halted their horses to rest at the cliff top. To the south he pointed to Sherkin Island and beyond that the outline of Oileán Chléire.

  ‘A simple bit of Irish for you, Kate. It means “Clear Island”, which is a bit of a misnomer because there are very few days in the year when it shows itself quite as well as this.’

  The wind was high and the spray from the waves carried forty feet up. They sat behind the natural shelter of rock and ate their oatcakes. Kate took Robin’s hand and pointed.

  ‘Robin. Over there by the gorse. Do you see? It’s moving. What is it?’

  He paused. ‘It looks like …’ He stood and went slowly towards the shrubs.

  ‘What is it, Robin?’

  ‘Don’t come, Kate. Stay where you are.’

  She would not. She came close. She saw a mound covering the body of a girl that had not been buried deep enough. The soil around her head had been swept away and the wind had picked up her long black hair so it flowed like silken strands above the grass of her shallow grave. Dr Robin took Kate in his arms and guided her away.

  He looked to the sky. ‘Dear God, hear me and do not blame us for what is happening here.’

  Mary McMahon sat in the gloom at the bottom of Patch’s pit. Her baby suckled at her hanging breast but drew no milk from the bruised and sore nipple. Her three other children clung to her thighs under the filthy blanket on the bed of straw that smelled of urine and human waste. The baby boy, born only five months before, was no bigger than the day Robin Fitzgerald drew it from her womb.