“ ’Tis a modest boast,” MacCarthy said, and sat down with them. O’Carroll the widower, with a strong farm held from the Big Lord himself; he worked it with his nephew, a harmless half-cracked creature, and a half-dozen labourers. The fourth man was Donal Hennessey; he held less land, but he had two growing sons, and a strapping handsome wife, with long legs and smooth lovely haunches. She had been shaped expressly for the purpose, but Hennessey would have little knowledge of such matters. She gave him children and that was the bargain.
Hennessey did not matter, nor O’Carroll, nor Quigley. Duggan mattered. He sat facing MacCarthy, hands on heavy knees. The eyes were pale blue, watchful; round as moons.
“We have been waiting for an hour,” he said. “An hour spitting into a dead fireplace while we waited for a schoolmaster.”
“Sure it couldn’t have been too hard for Donal and Phelim here, with Matthew Quigley’s good whiskey to keep them company. It was hard for a man like yourself who never has a thirst.” MacCarthy raised his glass to Quigley.
“It is not for a joke that we asked you here,” Duggan said.
“It is your help we want,” Hennessey said, placating. “You can help us.”
Whiskey, raw, burned MacCarthy’s throat, and then spread its warmth through him. Light from the unglazed window fell upon the glass: imprisoned fire.
“Only a letter,” Duggan said. “There is a letter that we want you to write for us in English. A letter to a landlord. You know the kind of letter we need, and there is none of us can write it.”
“You cannot be serious,” MacCarthy said. “ ‘Remoreseless Tyrant beware. Long has your heel been ground into our neck.’ ”
“We are serious, right enough,” Hennessey said.
MacCarthy spoke in English. “‘A terrible vengeance will fall upon you. Tyrant beware.’ ”
“By God, that must be beautiful English. You rattle that out like an agent. What did that mean, Owen?”
MacCarthy did not answer him. He spoke to the watchful bull, Duggan, heavy dark head balanced easily on thick-muscled neck.
“What is it to be, a warning to the agent of the Big Lord?” He shook his head. “He would use it as a wad to start his fire.”
Matthew Quigley, greasy-apronned, leaned forward to refill their glasses, Hennessey’s, O’Carroll’s, MacCarthy’s, his own. Duggan had no glass.
“It is no warning this time,” Hennessey said. “And it will not go to the Big Lord’s agent. It will go to Captain Cooper here in Kilcummin, to tell him what we have done after we have done it. We are going to hough the cattle that he has turned into the new pasture.”
Slashed tendons and bloody bellowing in the night.
“Write your own letter,” MacCarthy said.
“An easy thing for you to say, Owen,” O’Carroll said. “You have no land to worry about. A schoolmaster has only his books, and who would take those from him?”
“You would,” MacCarthy said. “You would take the fine words that are in them. Do you not think the magistrates would wonder who sent Cooper a letter in handcrafted English?” He saw himself standing before the magistrates, and his letter being passed from hand to hand. “Much better you scratched out the letter yourselves, ignorant men confessing an ignorant crime. Draw a coffin on it, is what the Whiteboys used do in the old days. Cooper has enough Irish in him to understand a coffin.”
“It is no crime,” Quigley said, “when slaves ask for simple decency.”
“Is it not? The magistrates would quarrel with you there, and so would Hussey in the Killala chapel.” Whiskey lapped at the edges of his spirit. He drank again.
“A priest has no understanding of these matters,” O’Carroll said.
“I know,” MacCarthy said. “He has no land. If you mean to protest slavery, you might put in a word for your own. There are no worse slaves in this barony than those poor lads you bring in from the hiring fair and keep half starved on potatoes an honest man would not throw to sows.”
“Now that is a hard saying, Owen,” Hennessey said. “Poor Phelim does the best he can for those lads. He has the life squeezed out of him by the Big Lord’s agent, and so do I. And well you know it.”
MacCarthy drained the whiskey. “But you have no need to look abroad for slaves, have you, Donal? They are bred for you at home.”
Puzzled. “My sons, do you mean?”
“Do you call them so? There is no great resemblance.” In a corner of his imagination, the mother of Hennessey’s young sons stood wide-legged by cabin door.
“This is a letter that you will write,” Duggan said. The others looked towards him. MacCarthy watched their eyes. They followed where he led, hard farmer, bully, faction fighter. Three years ago, on a fairday, he led the men of Tyrawley against those of Erris, stout stick in hand, neither pleasure nor anger shaping the creased, stolid face. Leaning against the gable end of the Belmullet tavern, MacCarthy had watched, disdainful and awed. “You will use your fine English for this letter, and it will be a long one. You will say that this will happen whenever a farm is taken for pasture by any landlord or any middleman. And there will be no other warnings. We want that known.”
“You want that known,” MacCarthy said. He held out his glass and Quigley refilled it. A poet’s privilege. “Four men in a tavern want that known.”
“There are more than four, Owen,” Hennessey said. “You may be certain of that.” He was a marvel. Insults dripped from him like rain from a cow’s flank.
“The Whiteboys of Killala,” Duggan said. “You will sign it that way. The Whiteboys of Killala.”
“The Whiteboys of Claremorris were on public view two years ago,” MacCarthy said. “Two of them, in Castlebar, outside the courthouse. Gibbeted and soaked in tar.” Beyond the window, a corner of the moon. Elegant, aloof.
“Out of how many?” Hennessey asked. “The people will be with us in this.”
“By God they will,” Duggan said. For the first time he smiled.
“Not my people,” MacCarthy said. “I am from Kerry.” Clear water and bright cliffs; bird song.
“You are here now,” Duggan said. “In the barony of Tyrawley. You would do well to remember that. It is not four men in a tavern. It is a matter for the men in all the townlands.”
“I do not think so,” MacCarthy said. “You have a grievance to pay Cooper for, because he turfed out the O’Malleys to make pastureland, and you have given yourselves a grand name, the Whiteboys of Killala.”
“ ’Tis a good enough name,” O’Carroll said.
What did it matter? The Whiteboys of Macroom, the True Men of Bruff, the Honest Men of Tralee. For thirty years now they had been starting up in one place or another, and the end was always the same, bodies on a gibbet. But this was a strange year for Whiteboys, with every pedlar and travelling man bringing stories into Mayo of the great fighting in Ulster to the north and Wexford far off to the south. They had not been Whiteboys, those United Irishmen. Now they were nothing at all. Two months ago, the armies of England had smashed them.
“It is a very good name,” Duggan said. “Every landlord in Ireland knows it, and he knows what it means. There will be cattle killed and fields burned, and there is worse that could follow after. This is nothing new in Mayo. There are bodies of agents and bodies of bailiffs sunk in the bogs of Belmullet, with their eyes squeezed out of their heads and their backs cut to ribbons by thornbushes.”
His voice was flat, but his lips glistened with spittle. He wants this. The thick, square fingers could fasten on bailiff’s throat, tear punishing thornbush from the earth.
“Ach, there is no choice, Owen,” O’Carroll said. “If the landlords turn to grazing we are done for. It is happening in other places. There is no argument we have but the Whiteboys’ letter.”
MacCarthy turned towards Quigley. “A tavernkeeper has no land. What is all this to you?”
“Well now, Owen. I have no land it is true, no more than a schoolmaster has. That is true for you.” He took
MacCarthy’s glass and filled it again with the calm, colourless whiskey. “But a man should stand in well with his neighbours. That never hurts him, whatever his trade.”
MacCarthy turned the glass around in his hand. The room was darkening. Beyond the window, the evening light had turned to the linnet-wing softness which stands at the edge of night.
“This is a foolish business you have in mind,” he said to Duggan. “Great risings have now been stamped out in Ulster and in Wexford. There was a travelling man last week in Killala who said that gallows stretch from one end of the County Wexford to the other, and burned cabins. And no count will ever be made of all who were killed with musket and sword. He said that there are more English soldiers in the country now than have been here since the Boyne. They are in Tuam in their thousands, and they are in their thousands in the city of Galway.”
“I heard that travelling man,” O’Carroll said. “He had more to say than that. He said that for a month the army of the Gael was victorious in the County Wexford.”
“Great comfort that was to them when they stood on the gallows,” MacCarthy said.
“There are not thousands of British soldiers in Tyrawley,” Duggan said. “There is only Captain Cooper and his tinpot yeomen. Protestant shopkeepers and tithe proctors. What was happening away off in Wexford or in Ulster is no matter here.”
“There were thousands of them risen up in rebellion,” said MacCarthy. “All of the County Wexford, and all of Carlow and all of Wicklow and parts of Kilkenny. They tried to fight their way out of Wexford. They were going to bring their rebellion to all of Ireland. They went this way and that way, but there were English soldiers on all the roads. And when they could think of nowhere else to go, they climbed a hill and waited for the English cannon to blow them to pieces.”
Beyond the power of his imagination. The roads of Wexford clotted with people, their pikes a winter forest against the horizon. Priests rode in their van. Faction fighters drove them against yeomen and militia. They prodded cattle before them into battle. He heard again the words of the travelling man: “There were great encampments of the people on the plains and along the rivers. They captured town after town, Camolin and Wexford and Enniscorthy. They burned Enniscorthy.” Only two months ago. All over now.
“The people of Wexford were fools,” Duggan said. “Captain Cooper will satisfy me. And after him, Gibson.”
“Gibson is your own landlord, is he not?” MacCarthy said. “I thought that you would find time for Gibson.”
“Then Gibson,” Hennessey agreed. “But after him the agent for the Big Lord. By God, I hate that Creighton. He is the worst tyrant in Tyrawley.”
“He does as he is bid,” MacCarthy said. “The Big Lord off in London sends him a letter of instructions. That is how it is done.”
“I will send him a letter, by God,” Duggan said. “The Whiteboys of Killala will send him a letter.”
“So that is to be the way of it,” MacCarthy said, “and then a fourth and then a fifth. You have a great budget of work for me there.”
“You will be safe enough, Owen,” Hennessey said. “We will all be safe enough. There will be five hundred Whiteboys in Tyrawley.”
“It will not stop at the bounds of this barony,” Duggan said. “There are men I know in Erris, and across the Moy in Sligo.”
“We are not fools,” Quigley said. “We have met with this fellow and that fellow. And we have made out an oath.”
“To be sure you have,” MacCarthy said. “An oath is a Whiteboy’s first order of business. The more mouth-filling the better.” Seventeen seventy-nine, a barn close to Tralee in Kerry, and MacCarthy just turned eighteen. Frightened, boastful faces gathered around a candle. He would burn away parts of his past if he could, all the nights of the Whiteboys’ moon. Fellows with blackened faces, white smocks pulled over their coarse frieze, baggy stockings peeping underneath, creeping across wet fields towards cattle. The night air a sudden jangle of bellows and shouts.
“We are not fools,” Duggan said. “We know how to do this.”
“You do, to be sure,” MacCarthy said, draining his glass again. “You are grand fellows. It was well worth my long ramble northwards from Kerry to meet such grand fellows.”
“Corn and oats will bring good money to the landlords,” Hennessey said, “but cattle will bring better. The landlords will give farm after farm to the cattle, as Cooper gave them the farm of the O’Malleys.”
The landlords had no choice and the people had no choice and the magistrates would have no choice but to hunt them down and hang them. It was like a proposition in Euclid, straight lines driving towards a point. That is what happened twenty years before, in Kerry and in West Cork. He had seen Whiteboys drink their victories in chapel yards, and he had seen them swing at the rope’s end. What of me, he thought; have I a choice?
“We did not bring you here so that you could argue with us, MacCarthy,” Duggan said. A question answered.
“No more do I want arguments,” MacCarthy said. He took Quigley’s jug of ill-tasting whiskey, and filled his glass to the brim. The parting glass.
“That is not true,” Duggan said. “You would be happy to sit arguing here while there was any of that stuff left in the jug. You are a slave to it, and every man here knows it.”
“We are all slaves,” MacCarthy said. It tasted better now, soft and cool. “Slaves to this or slaves to that. I will write your letter for you, and I will write it with my left hand. But I will take no other action with you or for you, and I will take no oath. You will bring blood into the streets of Killala and Kilcummin, and it will not be the blood of landlords.”
“Some of it will, by God,” Quigley said. “If our blood is spilled, so will theirs be. We will bring the bright edge of the knife to them.”
MacCarthy looked at him, despising the round, complacent face. The room was dark now. The face floated in dying afterglow, a fatuous moon. MacCarthy suddenly hurled his glass into a corner of the room; whiskey splashed across his hand.
“Listen to him,” he said to Duggan. “Listen to that man. That is the kind of man you will have with you, who has never seen blood save for the blood of cows and pigs. He will be drinking his own bad whiskey and making his boasts and he will drink and boast you up the steps of the gallows.”
“But you have seen blood,” Duggan said, with his humourless irony.
“I was schoolmaster in Macroom when Paddy Lynch was hanged with five of his followers. I saw his feet reaching for the air and I saw his face. That brought me close enough to blood.”
“By God that would take away a man’s appetite,” O’Carroll said to Duggan, but he smiled nervously to take the edge off his words.
Duggan shifted to face him. “If we are careful and quiet there will be no hangings in Tyrawley.”
“In Castlebar,” MacCarthy said. “They will load you in carts with your wrists tied behind you and take you down to Castlebar and try you there and hang you there. If you have a hundred men, you will have ten informers and if you have five hundred men, you will have fifty.”
“Will you listen to this man?” Duggan said to O’Carroll, his voice rough with contempt. “A man who owns nothing in this world but a sack of books and half of Judy Conlon’s bed. Let you listen to him, and in two years’ time there will be nothing left in Tyrawley but graziers and cowherds. And Judy Conlon.”
“Be careful how you talk, Duggan,” MacCarthy said, standing up. What use would I be against him, with his hands like great hams, smoked and seasoned by the blackthorn and holly of the faction fights. “By God,” he said to the others, “it is once in a while a great comfort not to have land.”
“It is,” Matthew Quigley said. “A great comfort. If we do not forget loyalty to our neighbours.”
“Owen is not the man to forget that,” Hennessey said. “Sure, what life would a schoolmaster have if he did not stand in well with his neighbours?”
“None at all,” Duggan said. “No life at all.”
/>
MacCarthy remained standing. “My thanks to you for the whiskey, Matthew. To which of you am I to give the letter when I have it written?”
“As well to me as to another,” Quigley said. “I will walk down to the Acres for it tomorrow evening.”
“Not the Acres,” MacCarthy said. “Nor my schoolhouse either. I will meet you at Tobin’s tavern.”
“Sure don’t be in such a hurry, Owen,” Hennessey said. “Have you no song for us?”
“A song, is it? A pity I haven’t Paddy Lynch here to teach you to dance upon air. Poor Paddy, he was a true artist. He learned the mystery of that craft, but he told it to no one.”
Only Quigley laughed. “You are a witty man, Owen. A witty man when you have drink taken.”
“That is often enough,” MacCarthy said.
“Safe home, Owen,” Hennessey said.
He took a last look at them, indistinct now in the dark room. What harm will they do, four men in a tavern by Kilcummin strand? No, three men and a bullock with brains. A bullock with eyes as round as moons.
Outside the tavern, the moon mocked him. Full, perfect. It fell upon rock and strand and black bay. The night air was chill. Far to the west, Downpatrick Head, fierce-snouted peninsula, and the lonely, savage barony of Erris. To the south, the Nephin Mountains, stretching towards Achill Island. To the east, the Ox Mountains, in the softer county of Sligo. A hard land indeed, after the sweet kingdom of Kerry, and the cheerful bustle of Cork. The wildest and poorest county in Ireland, the people of Galway said of Mayo. Well were they qualified to judge such matters, poor creatures.
His path followed the line of the bay, narrow, uneven. Ahead of him, Killala, cupped by low hills. At their centre, on Steeple Hill, the ancient, upthrust arm of a round tower, black against the darkened sky. What man could know the age of such towers? Far older than the Dane, some said; older than the Sons of Milesius and the coming of the Gaels. Perhaps so. It was a land where history was measured by ruins, Gaelic fort and Norman keep. Not even the round towers marked the farthest line of wrack, for were there not the dolmens, and the queer underground burial chambers, immense, as though for giants?
The Year of the French Page 2