Together they all knelt down and, for the second time that day, Ellen crossed herself. Then she led them in the first of the morning prayers while the children joined in sleepily behind her. Katie, as always, elbowed Mary at every mention of the name of the Mother of God. This drew a similar elbowed response from Mary, coupled with, ‘Sure, you’re only jealous ’cos there’s no prayers for Katies.’ Ellen, fixing them with her most baleful glare, ordered Katie to lead the Hail Mary. This Katie did reluctantly, annoyed at having to give praise to her twin sister’s name. ‘Now, Mary,’ Ellen said when Katie had finished, ‘you will say the Act of Contrition.’ Mary considered that the Act of Contrition applied more to Katie than to her, and in consequence gave it plenty of emphasis for her sister’s benefit.
Some semblance of prayerfulness was restored when it came to Patrick’s turn. He was getting to the age where ‘O Angel of God, my guardian dear …’ seemed childish. Katie and Mary might still need guardian angels, but he was big enough to go to the top of the mountain by himself. Nevertheless for a quiet life he fell in with the part required of him.
Finally Michael concluded the morning prayers with the petition: ‘Keep us from all sickness and harm this day for ever, and ever, Amen.’ Then, having started the day off properly, he went outside – ‘To see what class of a day is in it.’
The others, meanwhile, had their own rituals to attend to.
Patrick cleared the night ashes from over the glowing turf and fetched fresh sods for Ellen to show him how to build up a new fire. Now he watched as she took the longer, narrower pieces of turf and stood them on end, balancing the top edges against each other for support, so that they encircled the smouldering embers of yesterday’s fire.
‘Always leave plenty of space between them for the breeze to get in and fan the flame,’ she advised. ‘Fire means life – never let the fire go out. When the fire is gone, so too are those who tended it.’
Patrick was too young to fully understand, but he knew from the way she held her face close to his and fixed him with those eyes that these were the Máistir’s teachings and therefore to be respected.
Mary and Katie, meanwhile, were up at the spring. For protection of both spring and playful water-carriers, Michael had laid two flat slabs of stone over the rock where the spring emerged. Forgetting the task at hand, Mary and Katie now lay on those slabs studying their reflections, fascinated by their sameness, and trying to find some feature in one that was not replicated in the other. Eventually a shout from the cabin below reminded them what they were there for: to bring back a pot of water. So they scampered back down – the lift in the land now being in their favour – pulling the pot this way and that between them, and spilling half the water in the process.
Thus began their day, like most every other day in the valley.
Then it was time for ‘the Lessons’.
Ellen’s love of learning came from her father. Forced to leave the priesthood when he fell in love with her mother, Cáit – a great scandal, and still whispered about in the valley – he had become a hedge-school teacher or ‘Máistir’. At his knee Ellen had learned to read not only in Gaelic but also in English. She had picked up a smattering of Latin, too. And he had taught her the history of Ireland, and England, and told her of the far-off places in the world where the people spoke strange languages and followed strange customs.
In the evenings they would sit across the hearth from each other and he would pass down to her the old sean-nós songs, stories and poems from Bardic times.
‘Come what may,’ he would tell her, ‘tradition and education will always stand to a person. It’s tradition that keeps the people strong and true to themselves, and it’s the education that will free them in the end. Never forget that, Ellen, a stór.’
But her father’s greatest gift to her was love. She remembered how he would reach out his hand to her across the hearth’s space between them. How he would softly murmur into her hair, ‘Ellen, mo stóirín, mo stóirín rua, mo Ellen rua.’
Now it was time for the education of her own children.
‘Tell us again about Cromwell and the Roundheads,’ said Patrick, showing signs of following his father’s nationalistic tendencies.
‘No! Do the lesson about our cousin “Granuaile”,’ Katie piped up. Her choice – Grace O’Malley, the chieftain’s daughter who, three hundred years earlier, had ruled the Connacht coastline from Clew Bay, dispensing with her enemies as quickly as her husbands – suggested a liking for the idea of independent womanhood. Katie particularly enjoyed hearing how, when summoned to meet with Queen Elizabeth I of England, Granuaile had considered it to be a meeting of equals.
‘And what about you, Mary – what would you like?’ prompted Ellen, knowing that the quieter twin would never put forward what she wanted, being content to let Katie make the running.
‘I like the story of the children who were turned into swans,’ Mary said.
How like Mary it was to pick ‘The Children of Lir’, the most childlike and the saddest of all the great legends of Ireland.
‘All right, then. Patrick, fetch me the traithneens,’ Ellen instructed.
Patrick darted outside and was back almost immediately with the three blades of grass he had plucked. He handed these to his mother, who put them behind her back, rearranging the stalks in her hand as she did so.
‘Patrick, you first – draw a traithneen,’ she said, presenting the three blades of grass to him.
Patrick made his choice. Next it was Mary’s turn, and then all eyes were on Katie as she whisked the remaining blade of grass from Ellen’s hand.
‘Who has it? Who has the shortest traithneen?’ cried Katie, wanting to know immediately if it was she who would get to choose the subject for this morning’s lesson.
‘I have it!’ Patrick shouted excitedly.
Cromwell had drawn the shortest straw.
Ellen waited for the children to settle, then began her story: ‘Before Cromwell’s time, two hundred years ago, the Catholics who lived in Ireland owned three-quarters of the land. But the King of England, who was a Protestant, wanted to take all the good land away and give it to the landed gentry. They were the descendants of people who had invaded Ireland and settled here, and they were Protestants too. When they were good and did what the King asked, he gave them big castles and lands in Ireland’ – Ellen could see Patrick bristling with questions, but she continued – ‘and took it away from the Catholics who didn’t want to obey him.’
‘But why didn’t they fight him?’ Patrick couldn’t hold back any more.
‘Well, they did. And there were a lot of Catholics – more than there were Protestants. Then, over from England came a big army …’ She paused before posing the question: ‘Led by whom?’
‘Cromwell!’ shouted Katie.
‘Yes, that’s right, Katie. Now, Oliver Cromwell was a bad and wicked man and he hated the Catholics. He beheaded King Charles first, and then came to Ireland to kill the King’s supporters here, the Royalists. They were mostly Catholics. But Protestants, too.’ Ellen interrupted herself for another question: ‘What were Cromwell’s soldiers called?’
‘Roundheads.’ This time Patrick asserted his pre-eminence in matters military.
‘Yes, Patrick, good. They were called Roundheads because of the big round helmets they wore on their heads to protect them from the swords of the Irish. So, Cromwell and his army of Roundheads marched through Ireland, and they went into the villages and murdered all the men and the women, and even little boys and girls. Everyone was killed.’
Ellen could hear the intake of breath, as three sets of eyes widened at this terrible telling.
‘That was a very bad thing to do to all the little children,’ Mary ventured, horrified at the thought. ‘And them not doing any harm at all – being only small like me and Katie.’
‘Yes it was, a stóirín,’’ Ellen said gently, ‘and the reason Cromwell did that was because he was afraid that if he killed just the
big people, then the children, when they grew up, would remember this and make a big army to kill him back. Also Cromwell wanted to get the land, so he had to clear out all the people who held the land. That’s why the Roundheads knocked down the poor people’s houses and burnt their crops – so that nothing was left, no trace of them at all. It was as if they had never been there. Then Cromwell sent word that this would be the fate of any Catholics who stayed on their lands. He wanted to drive them over here to the mountains and the sea, over to the poor lands of the West. “To hell or to Connacht” he said he’d send the people – and he did just that, the devil.’
‘That’s why we’re here on this mountain, with only a little bitteen of land and bog to keep us,’ said Patrick, repeating a favourite phrase of his father’s.
‘That’s right, Patrick,’ Ellen replied. ‘That’s quite right. The old people – seanathair mo sheanathair, “my grandfather’s grandfather” – were driven back to this valley, to the rocks and the stones, by Cromwell. So always remember this …’
Three heads craned forward.
‘It’s all to do with the land – everything goes back to the land.’
‘And he hung all the priests too!’ Patrick was warming to the subject now.
‘He did,’ said Ellen. ‘He put a price on their heads and the “Shawn a Saggarts” would hunt them down for money. Then Cromwell would hang them in front of their own people. One of his generals once said of a place that there was “neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him from, nor soil enough to bury him in.” Now, wasn’t that an awful thing to be thinking? They say Cromwell was the most hated man ever to set foot in Ireland, and the people haven’t forgotten – he still is.’
While Patrick would have listened for hours to stories of hangings and the like, Katie and Mary were beginning to tire of the foul deeds of Oliver Cromwell. Their tiredness coincided with the sound of Michael returning, so Ellen cut short the lesson with a promise that tomorrow they would draw the traithneen for Granuaile or the Children of Lir.
As she ushered the children outside, she wondered to herself whether she and Michael might now have been ‘strong farmers’ on the fine rolling plains of County Meath, had Oliver Cromwell not driven their forefathers to plough the rocks and bogland of Connacht.
She wondered how their lives might have been if the Roundhead leader had never installed Pakenham’s forefathers at Tourmakeady Lodge.
When the children were out of earshot she muttered to herself, ‘Cromwell – a curse on his name.’
Ellen had decided that she would tell Michael she was carrying his child on the homeward journey from the Sunday Mass. She always felt uplifted after partaking of the Eucharist, but this Sunday would be extra special because the God of all creation would be within her, side by side with her unborn child.
A month had gone by since that morning at the edge of the Mask when she had discovered she was pregnant. Everything had gone well with her since then, and more and more she felt the surge of new life strong in her. For some reason she had fallen into the habit of thinking about the new baby as ‘she’. It wasn’t that she particularly wanted a girl; another pair of labourer’s hands to look after them in later years would be equally welcome. Only God could decide, she told herself – but still, she just knew the baby was a girl.
There was no breakfast to be prepared – they would not break the fast before receiving Holy Communion – so Ellen was able to spend longer than usual getting the girls ready. She started with Katie and Mary, giving their hair one hundred strokes each with the silver and bone brush that the Máistir had given Cáit as a wedding gift. After her mother’s death, the brush had passed to Ellen. She never used it without recalling her father, reminiscing with that faraway look in his eyes:
‘I would sit there of an evening while the shadows moved across the lake and the meannán aerach would swoop down through the sky, his wings making the noise of a young goat, and I would watch your mother as she stroked her hair one hundred times with that brush, drawing it through the strands till they were like gold-red silk of the finest ever seen. And she all the while a-crooning in the old style, a soft suantraí. She never counted the strokes at all, but she was never one more nor less, because many’s the time I counted them myself,’ he would recall, longing for those days to be back.
Now, as she stroked Katie’s hair with her mother’s brush, Ellen was conscious of her role in carrying on and affirming the simple beauty of the lives of those who had gone before.
Patrick had dressed himself, and was now lacing up a pair of old boots which Michael had worn as a boy. Ellen smiled at this handing down between father and son. Yet another connection between then and now; crossings and linkings, always there, always reminding.
When she had finished with the children, Ellen took down her good red petticoat and dusted it off. Not a bright red – more the colour of autumn leaves. Surprisingly, it did not clash with her hair but merely added to the radiation of colour which seemed to encircle her. She had already brushed her wild dos of hair into some semblance of order and it now cascaded, loosely bound, at the back of her neck. Finally she draped her shawl – dark green, as her eyes – over her shoulders. This would cover her head on the journey to Finny and for the duration of Mass.
Michael, his Sunday cap perched jauntily over his black curls, watched approvingly as his family emerged from the cabin. Some of their older neighbours had already begun the trek, and they could see them in twos and threes negotiating the steep path that ran alongside Crucán na bPáiste – the burial place of the children.
To their right lay the dark beauty of Lough Nafooey, and above it the mountains, like steps in the September sky running all the way back to Connemara. Ahead of them, Bóithrín a tSléibhe wound its way over the crest of the mountain to Finny – the village on the banks of the river which connected the Mask and Lough Nafooey. Everything bound together, thought Ellen, fitting so well. Just like a family.
‘Katie, come back here!’
Ellen’s reverie was broken by Michael’s warning shout as the child careered dangerously close to the side of the mountain. For a moment, Katie looked hurt. Then, breaking into a big smile, she raced back to her mother.
‘I just wanted to get these for you,’ she said, gifting to Ellen some purple and yellow wildflowers she had snatched from the edge of the mountain.
‘Thank you, a stóirín!’ Ellen smiled at Katie’s burst of generosity. ‘Now, take my hand. You, too, Mary. Hurry up now, we mustn’t be late for Mass.’
* * *
As they made their descent, Father O’Brien emerged from the church. He looked up at the mountain track, seeing his people gathering in to hear the Word of God.
Among the black-clad figures of the old men and women, the sun seemed to pick out the tall figure of Ellen Rua O’Malley as, hand in hand with her twin daughters, she hastened down towards the church. Father O’Brien wondered what fate awaited them, given the news he must shortly break.
Deep in thought, the priest went back inside to make his final preparations for the Mass. Since Archbishop MacHale had stationed him at Clonbur, he had come to look forward to the one Sunday in a month when he said Mass here at the little church-of-ease in Finny. He loved this place and its people. Here in the midst of the mountains and the lakes, he heard the voice of God much more clearly than in the suffocating cloisters of Maynooth. And the French professors of theology there had taught him little compared to the peasants hereabouts with their humility, their gratitude for the precious few gifts bestowed on them, and their forbearance and dignity in the face of an unrelenting struggle for survival. On the Mass Sunday they flocked to the little Finny church. Some walked the near distance from Kilbride, but others faced more difficult journeys: skirting the edge of Lough Mask round from Glentrague, or climbing Bóithrín a tSléibhe up and over the mountain from Maamtrasna.
This would be his biggest test so far, and he did not want to fail them. But how was he to t
ell the peasants and mountainside cottiers who made up his flock of the news he had learned on his recent visit to the Archbishop in Tuam? What hope had he to offer them, what alternatives? None, he thought, except faith in the goodness of an all-providing God. Or, failing that, hope in ‘thy kingdom come’.
At least he could advise them to dig early rather than waiting until October to lift the potatoes.
Even so, maybe he was already too late.
When they reached the church there was still fifteen minutes to go till Mass. As was customary, Ellen, the two girls and Patrick – the latter with some resistance – went and knelt on the right-hand side of the aisle, while Michael, having doffed his cap, joined the men on the left-hand side.
Ellen thought that Father O’Brien looked a bit on edge as he took his place in the pulpit. He was nice, this new young priest. He had time for everyone, and he wasn’t all fire and brimstone as some of the clergy were. He had a holy face which shone with an inner light throughout the Mass and particularly at the Consecration. His hair was dark brown and neatly kept, in the way of clerics, but his eyebrows were the darkest she ever saw, darker even than Michael’s. She was tempted to look across the church to where Michael was, but knew she mustn’t – the old ones would be watching her, and she mustn’t give scandal by looking across the aisle.
‘Gloria in excelsis Deo,’ Father O’Brien intoned. Ellen liked the way he said the Latin. It was as if his Western brogue left him when he spoke the chosen language of the Church.
The Máistir had studied Latin in the seminary at Maynooth and had taught her enough that she could follow most of the Mass. But she thought it a cold language. Latin didn’t have the life, the earthiness of the Gaelic tongue and was only slightly ahead of ‘the narrow language of the Sasanach’ – as the valley people referred to spoken English – which had neither poetry nor music to it.
The sermon had started. She had better listen instead of wandering in her mind. Father O’Brien had a habit of picking out a member of his congregation and fixing his eye on them when he spoke.
The Whitest Flower Page 3