The Whitest Flower

by Brendan Graham

  A cheer went up from the crowd, but Ellen was concentrating on the drama unfolding on the road below them. A movement caught her eye and for a moment she had a clear view of Pakenham’s assailant. There, in the murky shadow of the mountain, was a figure clambering up where no horse could go. The figure stopped and turned to look once, not at its pursuers, but back towards the villagers. Back towards her.

  Ellen saw a young face exhilarated by the chase, and by the revenge exacted for the insult to the red-haired woman. Then the face was gone, and Ellen knew that the fair-haired boy would escape his pursuers.

  The following day Michael came running to her, down from Bóithrín a tSléibhe. ‘Ellen, the Church – Lord Leitrim has torched the thatch of it again! A curse on him, I’ll wager Pakenham put him up to it this time!’ he cried out.

  ‘You’d think he’d leave the House of God alone,’ Ellen replied. ‘That’s a few times he’s tried to burn it since Father O’Brien refused the keys to him.’

  ‘Well, the priest is right,’ Michael said. ‘Even if Leitrim owns the church, no man is God’s landlord. He can torch it now, but one day himself will feel the torch of hell for it. We’ll see how he’ll landlord it below there!’ And he laughed.

  It was true, Ellen thought, the landlords owned everything, even your religion. And they tried to own the people, not only their little bit of land and the botháns and whatever they produced, but their bodies and minds, too.

  4

  Ellen was in the middle of the morning lesson with the children when first they heard it. The shout seemed to come from faraway, and Ellen, thinking it was the men in the fields calling to one another, paid no heed but carried on with her story. She was busy explaining to a very attentive trio of pupils how the potato first came to Ireland, why it seemed to have overrun the whole land, and as a result why this blight was so serious. It had been Mary who had raised the question. Indeed, the topic for today’s lesson was hardly surprising, given that so much talk recently, from church to crossroads, was about the blight.

  The children listened enthralled as Ellen told them about the jungles of South America and the great river ‘longer than all of Ireland’. She told them of the Indian tribes who first grew the potato in the mountains, ‘long before the time of the infant Jesus’. Then she told them of the men who sailed across the world in great ships from Spain – sailed for a whole year to reach the lands of the Indian tribes, and how those men took the mountains and the great river from the Indians, and put their own names on them.

  ‘But it was not the Spaniards who first brought the potato to Ireland,’ she told them. ‘It was an Englishman called Sir Walter Raleigh. He would sail to all the far-off countries and bring back gifts for the Queen of England, and it was he who brought the potato to County Cork almost two hundred years ago.

  ‘At first there were many different kinds of potato grown in Ireland, not just the “lumper”. But you remember I told you about Cromwell driving the people to the poor land out here in the West?’ They nodded.

  ‘Well, when the people had only a little land on which to live, and the land was poor, they had to find a potato which would grow where other types of potato wouldn’t. That was where the lumper came in. Even up in the boggy lands on the top of the mountain, where nothing much but turf and heather grows, your father has the lumpers growing.’

  ‘Why didn’t we pick those ones?’ piped up Katie.

  ‘Because they’re our little secret, and we want to leave them another few weeks. Anyway, we haven’t room to turn in here, with potatoes on every side of us.’

  The shouting outside had grown nearer, and now there seemed to be more voices added to the clamour.

  ‘Sit still here for a few minutes until I see what all this rí-rá is about,’ Ellen told them. Then she ran outside.

  What she saw sent a chill through her. Coming up the bóithrín from the direction of Glenbeg was a group of men and women, all of them clearly distraught.

  ‘Tis here, ’tis here!’ they shouted. ‘Tis back behind in the Glen. The blight, God’s curse on it, has come down on us at last.’

  As they drew nearer, Ellen recognized Johnny Jack Johnny to their fore. She ran down the bóithrín towards him. All around her the cabins of Maamtrasna emptied of people as the villagers rushed to hear the news they had dreaded.

  ‘Johnny, what is it?’ she demanded.

  ‘Oh, woman,’ he answered, his voice broken with the news he bore, ‘’tis a terrible sight indeed. Last night the fields were green with fine healthy stalks. This morning they’re as black as the pit of hell.’

  ‘Overnight?’ she said, reaching out for his arm in disbelief.

  ‘Yes, Ellen Rua, one night and every last one of them was gone – black and sticky with the smell of death on them.’

  Johnny Jack Johnny held up his hands: they were coated with a stinking black substance – the likes of which Ellen had never seen.

  ‘But didn’t you lift them like the priest told you?’ she asked.

  ‘Some did, but most didn’t. Sure, we kept watchin’ them day and night, and there wasn’t a sign on them. They were the best crop ever – ’til now,’ the man said, shaking his head.

  ‘And are they all gone?’ Ellen wasn’t going to let up. There must be some hope – there had to be.

  ‘Every last one of them that was left in the ground is gone – like we never put them down at all,’ Johnny Jack Johnny said disconsolately, the murmurs of despair from those around him rising in a chorus of lament for their lost crops, and for themselves.

  ‘God’s pity on us all. What are we to do with the long winter bearing down on us?’ Johnny Jack Johnny asked of no one in particular, knowing no one could answer him.

  By now the villagers had heard the worst. Those who had not lifted all their potatoes rushed to the fields. Without waiting for loy or slane, they tore into the lazy beds with their bare hands, hoping against forlorn hope that this blight hadn’t reached here, hadn’t come the extra five or six miles up the valley to Maamtrasna.

  Ellen watched as one by one the frenzied diggers recoiled from the lazy beds, nothing in their hands save a mass of putrid black matter. The people remained where they were, immobilized by despair – fields of dead men, kneeling.

  Like the contagion itself, grief spread among the stricken people. Some threw themselves upon the source of their grief, the diseased lazy beds, in desperate supplication, digging their fingers deep into the cruel, unresponsive earth.

  Ellen, too, was seized by panic. She couldn’t think straight. Her first instinct, as always, was for the children. Somehow she got her unwilling legs to move, slowly at first, then running to the cabin, taking what seemed an eternity. She drew them to her. All three were sobbing, terrified of what was outside their cabin door without being fully sure why, but caught in the hysteria that swept on every side of them.

  ‘Shssh now. Where’s your father?’ she asked.

  ‘There he is!’ Patrick punched his finger urgently towards the mountain, glad to speak, glad to break through the tears.

  Ellen followed the line of Patrick’s finger. A number of shapes were hurtling down the mountain at a dangerous rate of descent. Ellen could just about distinguish Michael, Roberteen and Martin Tom Bawn, half running, half sliding, knocking stones and shale before them, as they careered down to the village and the awaiting calamity. By now the cries of despair had dissolved into sobbing and the keening normally reserved for the wakes of the dead.

  Michael ran straight to the cabin. Through the dust and sweat, Ellen could see the fear on his face. Neither of them spoke, only bundled their small family closer in to them.

  In the fields, husbands, wives and children did the same, until everywhere were hapless little bundles of people cut loose from life. Hopelessly hanging together. Each thinking the same thought. Wondering when death would claim them.

  Fear driving his body onwards, Michael O’Malley for the second time that morning climbed the mountain. Th
is time the ascent which normally took him a leisurely forty-five minutes was completed in twenty-five. He was the first to reach the ridge. Behind him was young Roberteen and, a ways further back, Roberteen’s father.

  Michael ran across the soft peaty ground, avoiding the swallow holes. His eyes were fixed on a small dip to the far side of the marshy area, where a few years ago it had occurred to him to try out some seedlings from the lazy beds below. The hardy lumper had grown well here and he had gradually extended the area of this mountain crop of potatoes. The natural fall of the land conspired with the planters to keep what was planted hidden from view, safe from the landlord’s prying eyes. Only his next-door neighbours, with their own crop growing alongside Michael’s, knew of this place. Each harvest-time the three of them would spirit away their secret crop, under cover of dusk, to their cabins below.

  Michael found it hard to understand why more villagers hadn’t followed their example in reclaiming some of the wasteland to provide a little extra food for themselves and their families. Perhaps they had been deterred by what had happened over in Partry. There Pakenham had discovered his tenants’ secret potato patches, and had rewarded their enterprise by levying extra rent. ‘This extra ground which I have allowed you to cultivate in justice demands extra rent,’ he had told them. ‘How could I be seen to act even-handedly towards all of my tenants, as any good landlord should, if I were to grant additional acreage to some, and not to others, and all paying the same rent?’ So those who had worked harder, and made good land out of bad, were even worse off than before.

  Here, on the far side of the lake from Tourmakeady, they were well away from Pakenham and the prying eyes of his toady, Beecham. The crop should be safe from the landlord, at least.

  Michael slowed down just before he reached the dip where the potato patch was. Roberteen, still running, came up behind him. Together they stood on a lip of ground overhanging the dozen or so lazy beds, waiting for the older man to catch up with them. When he did, the three of them continued to gaze down on the stalks blowing hither and thither, gusted this way and that by the mountain breeze. Each was reluctant to make the first move, holding back the moment when they must discover that which they most feared.

  Roberteen was the first to say it. ‘Look, Michael – look there, on the leaves.’

  But the keen eyes of Michael and the older, silent watcher had already taken in the white substance which lay fleecelike on the green leaves. It was almost beautiful, glistening in the half-light of the October sun. Like mountain fog – a will-o’-the-wisp that hadn’t lifted.

  Michael had never seen its like before. He looked first at the others, then slowly stepped down on to the patch. He went to his knees beside the nearest lazy bed and gingerly reached over to touch the mysterious mist. It felt as it looked – soft and dewy, yet sticky too. He tried to brush it from the leaf, but unlike the dew it did not melt with the heat of his hand. He took a closer look. This furry down was growing out of the green veins of the leaf. As he made to examine it, the smell that accompanied the rot assailed his nostrils. Panic setting in, he plunged both hands into the mound of earth, frantically searching for the hard uneven roundness that would tell him the lumpers were safe.

  But there were no lumpers, just a stinking mass of putrefaction. He withdrew his hands in disgust, staring in dismay at the foulness dripping from his fingers.

  ‘They’re lost!’ he shouted.

  The watchers, still and silent until now, jumped down beside him.

  ‘God save us, Michael – what is it?’ Martin Tom Bawn asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen the likes of it before today … It looks and smells like the very melt of hell,’ Michael whispered.

  ‘’Tis an evil thing, surely,’ young Roberteen added. ‘A fearful evil thing,’ the boy repeated in hushed tones.

  ‘And is there nothing at all down there, Michael?’ the older man asked.

  Michael did not answer. Instead he said, ‘We have to be quick. What we’ll do is this: Martin, you start on the beds at the far side, and turn every bit of them – maybe there’s some can be saved. Roberteen, you start there in the middle and work towards your father, and I’ll start here and work in towards you.’

  The three men set to their task without any great heart, but knowing that they must do it. If a few potatoes could be saved, it might carry their families just that bit further through the winter.

  What was most frightening, thought Michael, was the speed with which the blight had struck, and then spread, destroying all before it. He noticed, as he worked along the lazy beds on his hands and knees, that the white fleece on the leaves was already rotting, turning each leaf into sodden decay before his eyes. He worked more furiously, trying to outpace the run of the rot. But the result was the same. No matter where he dug, the blight had been there before him, waiting for him, waiting to cover his hands with its black clinging cloyingness.

  The more diseased potatoes he uncovered, the more the stench of them filled the air about him, until his body recoiled from carrying on. But carry on he did, as did the others, desperation driving them to turn every last handful of earth, to uproot every last stalk.

  Time after time they were defeated, but still they persisted in the heartbreaking task. It was as if even one good potato would be a sign of hope. A sign that all was not irretrievably lost.

  Fate, however, did not afford the three diggers even that slender thread of comfort. When they finally finished, they remained on their knees, aching and blackened, united in despair.

  ‘It can only be the work of the devil himself,’ Michael finally said.

  The others nodded. Then all three silently raised their heads in grim prayer to the glowering heavens.

  It did not seem to them that the heavens listened.

  Ellen and the children waited for Michael at the foot of the mountain. The wait seemed to go on forever. Black rain clouds gathered over the top of the mountain, throwing dark shadows down its side. Feeling Katie and Mary shivering against her, Ellen had just decided it was time to bring the children inside when Patrick shouted, ‘No, wait – there they are!’

  She strained her eyes to the place where the three men should have been, but whether they had stepped into shadow or one of the many little crevices, she could not make them out until minutes later they breasted a rocky ridge.

  They were making slow progress. At first Ellen thought that they must be dead weary, the way they weren’t looking up at all, trudging head-down, keeping close together.

  When he caught sight of her, Roberteen ran on ahead, anxious to be first with the important news. ‘It’s the same above as below,’ he said.

  Then she saw the look on the faces of the other two men.

  ‘Every last one of them is gone … gone into a stinking mess of pulp. Not even a beast could eat them,’ Martin Tom Bawn said to her as he approached.

  She looked at Michael.

  ‘It’s not good, Ellen – not good at all,’ was all he could say.

  5

  ‘Damn his impudence!’ Sir Richard Pakenham slapped the letter he had been holding. ‘It is impossible to get an honest answer out of this new breed of scientists without also getting a lecture.’

  The master of Tourmakeady Lodge threw the letter from Dublin’s Botanic Gardens on to the walnut-topped writing desk at which he was sitting. That dashed Scotsman, Moore, should never have been made curator. What were the Royal Dublin Society thinking of – appointing someone who took two months to reply to a simple question about roses? And when he did deign to reply, it was to pronounce the soil at Tourmakeady possibly ‘unfit for roses in any event’.

  And Tourmakeady Lodge with a garden full of roses, the finest this side of Victoria’s palace.

  He tugged at the bell-rope. Where was that serving girl? It was long past tea-time. Didn’t anything work in this accursed country?

  While he waited, the landlord picked up the Mayo Telegraph.

  ‘More tirades against landlords
, I expect,’ he mumbled to himself, knowing by now the editorial stance of that newspaper on such matters. Wearily he put it down again without reading a word, and picked up the Mayo Constitution instead. At least the Constitution would give him a non-papist view of local events. An account of Daniel O’Connell’s recent visit to Castlebar caught his eye. ‘The Liberator, indeed! The last thing we need here is him and his damned Repeal movement exciting the populace.’

  He was pleased, however, to read that Lord Lucan and some of the other magistrates of Castlebar had succeeded in having the Liberator’s public platform removed on the grounds that it would ‘obstruct the public passage’. ‘Good for Lucan!’ he laughed, ‘and too good for O’Connell – “obstruct the public passage” – there’s a rub!’

  In much better fettle, he returned to the Mayo Telegraph. The spirit which a few moments prior had buoyed him up soon evaporated as he read the front page.

  The disease which now so formally threatens our own country last year destroyed three-fourths of the potato crop of the United States of America, as well as a large proportion of those of France, Germany, Belgium and Holland; and whatever be the mysterious origin of the disease, whether it is to be found in fly or fungus, it is but too plain that no effectual remedy against it has thus far been devised in any of the countries which it has afflicted.

  ‘There it is!’ he said aloud, in such a manner as to cause an already nervous Bridget Lynch, arriving with His Lordship’s tea, to jump back in alarm.

  Bridget waited, silver salver at the ready.

  ‘That’s what that scoundrel in the Botanic Gardens should be about. Instead of writing impudent letters, he should set to finding a remedy for this blight.’

  ‘Sir, your tea …’

  ‘Get out, get out – I don’t want tea now!’ Pakenham bellowed, waving the girl away.