The Whitest Flower

by Brendan Graham

  Michael got a job on the Relief Works out Maam way. Ten miles a day he walked to break stones for a ‘famine road’ that led nowhere. Then he walked the ten miles back. For this he was paid six pence a day. Meanwhile the merchants of the West held fast their stores of potatoes, waiting till they made ‘a penny a piece’. Thus Michael, with his labour of six pence a day, could buy only six potatoes – one for each of them. The work and the walking were killing him, but he insisted on going. ‘It’s one potato or none,’ he told Ellen.

  From their scailpeen high above the valley, Ellen could see down over her own place and Glenbeg and across the Mask towards Derrypark, and back along the Tourmakeady road.

  At night while the others slept she would count all the little cabins, identifying them by the dim glow of their fires or the wisp of white smoke, like an untied ribbon above them.

  ‘Where there’s fire there’s life,’ she would say to herself, echoing the Máistir’s words.

  Then one night, she noticed that where the previous night there had been the glow of a fire, now there was none. The next night another fire had gone out. The following night two more cabins were dark – no white ribbon of smoke above them. All along the far shore of the Mask, where once there had been a chain of glowing fires, was now only a long dark line.

  ‘Michael!’ she called, shaking him awake, panicking at what she was witnessing. ‘Look – the fires are gone! Every night there’s more going. Pakenham is tumbling them – he’s tumbling the cabins one by one along the road! That’s why there’s no fires – because there’s no people! Where there’s fire there’s life; where there’s no fire there’s no life …’ her voice trailed off.

  The people were systematically being driven out, their lives extinguished. It was too terrible to contemplate.

  Roberteen came to visit them the next night, whether by design or accident, and she overheard Michael ask: ‘Is there any word of the Shanafaraghaun man?’

  In the mornings she kept the children asleep later and later to conserve their energy. She let them up for a while, then made them lie down again in the afternoon. At night they went earlier to bed than ever before. There was nothing else to do.

  She watched them fade before her very eyes, bit by bit, day by day. They were dying around her in stages, sleeping more and more. More sleeping than living. Soon she thought they would not wake up at all – sleep would become death. Still she did not give up hope.

  Somehow she managed to have milk for Annie, though her breasts had lost their roundness, the skin more loose on them, the ripe colour of her nipples faded.

  But Michael had work, though he was foundered by it and the twenty-mile walk every day. He had become more like a walking skeleton than the fine body of a man she married.

  They never made love any more. Their bodies were not able. Survival now was their greatest need. Their only need. At night he would hold on to her, but not like before; it was as if she were the reed of life and he must cling to her or drown. In the hollow of his eyes the light of passion, once always there for her, no longer burned. Only the dull glint of desperation.

  ‘I’ll have to do something, Ellen, when the Shanafaraghaun man comes,’ he would tell her, and she would nod and put her hand to his forehead and say, ‘You are, Michael, a stór-you’re keeping us alive,’ and she would sing him the old love songs, and hold him until he slept.

  She was losing him, she knew, losing all of them. Losing them by inches and minutes, almost beneath her notice.

  If they could only hold out until the finer weather came it would give them some respite. She could take Annie with her – take them all – comb the hedges for berries. There wouldn’t be much, she knew, but she knew what was safe to eat, and which roots to dig. And she could glean here in the Hare’s Garden, or in their old field below, for any odd potato that might still be there, missed by the other women. Get Biddy to boil up some of the nettles, if they weren’t all taken. Whatever.

  She did not think beyond the spring. She could not.

  One night Michael did not come back.

  She knew he had finally broken.

  The cracks had started to show a fortnight ago. Two days running he had walked the ten miles to break the rocks for the ‘Famine road’. Two days running he had come back again. The Relief Works had stopped – waiting on some letter from Trevelyan, ‘the Government man in charge of the Famine’, before any more work could be done. Eventually the letter came and work resumed, but the following week the Clerk of Works had no money to pay them. They would have to wait for payment until Trevelyan himself gave Treasury approval for the funds to be released.

  The past week, waiting on the Treasury, had been the hardest yet. Ellen wondered whether they would survive to see the money. If it did not come soon, death would bring an end to their suffering.

  Roberteen, hearing of their plight, had climbed the mountain to bring them one potato – all the Tom Bawns could spare. She mashed it with water – skin and all – into a kind of thin, gruelly paste so as to spread it out.

  Then Roberteen came a second day. This time he brought a small tin. When he offered it to her, she saw it had blood in it. She pushed it back at him.

  ‘It’s all right, Ellen – it’s fresh from last night,’ he told her, and he put the container to his lips and sipped from it, then he handed it back to her, a red smear staining his mouth. ‘We go over the next valley at night, and puncture a hole in the neck of a cow and suck out a dropeen of the blood.’ He didn’t tell her it was the landlord’s cow, for fear she wouldn’t drink it. ‘Go on, take it! It’ll stand to you!’

  She closed her eyes and raised the container to her lips tasting the cold mucous of the thickened blood, no longer warm and fresh from the beast’s neck. Quickly, she gulped it down before she could think any more about it, tilting the tin so her tongue could find every last salty clot of blood.

  She held it down as Roberteen carried on with his explanations. ‘It don’t kill the cow,’ he said, wanting her to know that they had done no grievous harm to the animal, ‘and we patch up the wound again so no one can tell.’

  Later, as she sat waiting for Michael, with Annie at her breast and the other children, ragged and listless, lying against her, Ellen felt stronger in herself. The blood must have worked, she thought.

  She looked down at her little ones, distraught with helplessness. They’d never get out now. Never see Boston, or anywhere. Her great plans for teaching them English, saving some money, getting them to America had been shattered. Tumbled in a heap like the cabins below her. They were going to die here on the top of the mountain. Die like wild things – their flesh to wither away, their bones to be cleaned by the birds of the air. The thought terrified her: the children coffinless, picked and clawed at, their flesh being fought for. She shuddered and tried to get the children closer to her.

  It had all started with Sheela-na-Sheeoga and her riddles. It was a bad day she had ever gone over the mountain to the old woman. The prophecy had been fulfilled: the whitest flower had become the blackest flower. But how was she to crush its petals, as the riddle said, lying up here on the side of a mountain with four starving children? How was she to overcome the suffering that had been visited on them? It tormented her that the thing she was meant to do, the thing that would save them, was not being revealed to her.

  She saw now that it wasn’t just Michael’s death the Banshee had foretold. It was all of their deaths. She looked at them all half in death already. She looked down at the valley. The death messenger could have stood on top of this mountain and keened for all the people in the valley below, and beyond that into the next valley, and the next, so many would be taken by this Famine.

  What lay in store for them if Michael again returned empty-handed? It didn’t bear thinking about, she knew. They could go to the workhouse … All of them would have to go in, including Michael. At least they’d get shelter and some food for as long as they were in there. Michael would be put to work breaking s
tones for more ‘famine roads’, but this time with no pay. Maybe Patrick too. And they’d be separated – Michael and Patrick in the men’s quarters, herself and the three girls in the female side. And then there were the diseases … She remembered Biddy telling her: ‘When you go in the door at Castlebar or Westport, you only come out again by the window’ – meaning the gable-end windows from which the bodies of those who died were slid on a board into the lime-pit beneath. But at least they’d be buried, not left exposed on a mountaintop for their bones to be picked clean. And they might even survive it – if they could survive till they got in.

  To do that, they had to survive today.

  She had to look at it like that, not too far ahead, or she’d give up. Just today.

  She put Annie, partly fed, down at her side, and pulled Katie to her. Katie was so light, like a bony feather. The child was half-asleep, her once beautiful red hair now unkempt, falling about a face devoid of all devilment and mischief.

  She cupped Katie’s chin in her hand and drew the child’s face to her still-exposed breast. Gently she placed the nipple between Katie’s lips, and held the child’s head to her.

  ‘Now, Katie, a stóirín,’ she whispered, looking out over the valley. ‘Don’t think of anything – anything at all.’

  She caressed the back of the child’s neck, cronauning softly into her hair. She felt Katie waken and stiffen, trying to draw back. But the child was weak and Ellen was able to force the little head to stay against her, until she felt the first involuntary tug. Then, she relaxed her hold on Katie, as some long-forgotten instinct within the child took over. After a while, she laid Katie down, closing the child’s eyes as they separated so that they wouldn’t have to look at each other.

  Then she fed Mary.

  When she had finished with Mary and was laying her down, the child momentarily opened her eyes and looked questioningly at Ellen. Then smiled before going back to sleep again.

  Now it was Patrick’s turn. Nervously Ellen drew the boy to her. Patrick was two years older than the twins, quite a bit taller, and more difficult for her to manoeuvre. She felt awkward, embarrassed. The girls had been one thing, difficult enough, but they had always been physically close to her. Patrick, in the last year or so, had not been close to her in that way, had begun to shy away from physical intimacy. She had understood his reluctance to be hugged or kissed, had put aside the little hurts it brought. Now, she was about to suckle him at her breast. Her eldest child. Her son. Tampering with old taboos, that – even in the primitive, confined conditions in which they lived – had always been observed. She had no choice. She had to keep him alive, whatever the cost to them both.

  But what if she woke him and he resisted her? His emerging manhood would be unable to bear the shame. He would never forgive her.

  It was a struggle for her to pull him towards her. She prepared her breast for him, and, when finally she felt his face against her flesh, she closed her eyes, saying to herself: ‘Jesus, have mercy on me. Mary, Mother of all mothers, help me.’

  And then he awoke.

  At first she felt him tense, uncertain what it was she was doing. Then he jerked his head back against her arm, almost forcing her to let go of him. But she didn’t.

  ‘Patrick, Patrick, don’t fight me – it’s all I can do for you, a stóirín!’ she whispered to him, trying to keep her voice down.

  Still he pulled against her.

  ‘No! No, I don’t want to!’ he said, twisting his head away from her breast.

  ‘Patrick, you’ll die if you don’t!’ she said, forcing him back in against her.

  He shook his head violently from side to side, keeping his mouth closed, refusing to engage with her.

  ‘Patrick, don’t make me force you,’ she said, praying that the others wouldn’t wake up. ‘Don’t fight me – I don’t want to lose you.’

  Still, his dark head resisted her. Still, she held him.

  Somehow, with her other hand, she clamped her thumb and forefinger over his nose, cutting off his breath, forcing his mouth to open, to gasp for air. He tried to get free of her, sensing what she was at. But she was determined not to let go of him. She thrust her breast forward into his open mouth, felt him try to close his teeth against her, and then the sharp stab of pain as they caught the side of her nipple, drawing blood. She fought back the urge to withdraw from his mouth, to see to the cut, and continued to talk to him, to try and soothe his anguish: ‘Patrick, shssh now, a stóirín … shssh … I only want to save you – you’re my child and I love you. I don’t want you to die … shssh now!’

  Slowly, she felt him respond to her, and this time, when he unclenched his mouth for air, he resisted her no more. Still, she spoke softly to him and stroked the back of his head, dark and curly like Michael’s, in the place she had so often stroked his father.

  A shudder went through Patrick’s body as the life-fluid passed between them.

  She spoke to him again, soft and loving as before, feeling for him, for what she had forced him to endure. ‘It’s all right, Patrick … it’s all right. It’s not a wrong thing when there’s nothing else. It’s all right, a stóirín.’

  And she felt the hot tears run down over his lips and on to her breast.

  And fall.

  22

  They brought Michael up the mountain to her on a makeshift stretcher, Martin Tom Bawn and Roberteen.

  The previous evening Michael, with Roberteen, had waited in the woods below Tourmakeady.

  ‘Will the Shanafaraghaun man himself come?’ Roberteen asked him, nervous with excitement at what they were about to do.

  ‘Éist do bhéal, Roberteen, and listen.’

  Michael could make out the sound of someone approaching. He recognized the tall figure of the Shanafaraghaun man and the equally tall but much gaunter figure of Johnny Jack Johnny’s son. But he did not know the other two men with them.

  ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá!’ the Shanafaraghaun man greeted them.

  ‘Saoirse,’ Roberteen said back. ‘Did ye bring the musket – “the landlord doctor” –?’

  The Shanafaraghaun man brushed aside the question and spoke instead to Michael: ‘Dublin knows – the leadership supports the plan.’

  Whereas Johnny Jack Johnny’s son and the other two men looked nervous, the Shanafaraghaun man did not. It seemed to Michael that he had done this kind of thing before. For his own part, Michael just wanted to get on with it.

  ‘The only good landlord is a dead landlord – isn’t that right, Michael?’ Roberteen contributed, eager to prove himself.

  The Shanafaraghaun man glared him into silence. ‘The time for revolution is upon us. Violence is justified if it is defensive, and it is justified here, where the people are ground down. O’Connell has at his disposal a force larger than the three armies at Waterloo, but use it he will not. So it is left to us, the Young Irelanders, to strike the first blows.’

  Then, imbued with the spirit of revolution, they had worked themselves up into a near-frenzy, chanting the slogans of rebellion: ‘Saoirse!’ Freedom! and ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá!’ Our day will come!

  Brandishing some makeshift weapons, and with only one musket between them, Michael and the Young Irelanders had then mounted a raid on Pakenham’s house.

  The plan was that Michael would pin a ‘notice to quit’ on the landlord’s door while the others hid. When Pakenham appeared, the Shanafaraghaun man would shoot him. But the alarm was raised too early, and – the element of surprise having deserted them – they had no choice but to flee. Michael, however, could not bear to see the landlord go unpunished. In a last-ditch attempt to inflict some damage, he tried to knock down one of the rose garden walls with a slane. The others shouted at him to come on, but he had promised Ellen he would do something and he could not let her down. He attacked the wall with the slane, striking it again and again, at last damaging it. Intent on its destruction, he no longer heard the warning cries of his comrades, or the noise of Pakenham’s musket before the b
all pierced his side.

  They waited till morning to bring him to her. Thankfully he was not dead.

  ‘We would have kept him longer below in the cabin with us, Ellen, only …’ Martin Tom Bawn said apologetically.

  ‘I know, Martin. I know,’ she said.

  Soon the constabulary summoned from Westport by Pakenham would be in the villages, searching out those who had committed the outrage against the landlord. To harbour a rebel who had committed such an outrage would invite terrible retribution from the authorities.

  ‘Michael, Michael, can you hear me?’ she called anxiously.

  He opened his eyes. He was weak and, though they had patched him up as best they could, he had lost a lot of blood.

  The children gathered round, frightened, crying. His eyes took them in – feebly he reached a hand towards them.

  ‘Ellen … I did it … I did something about it all. The roses!’ he said, scarce able to get the words out.

  ‘You did, Michael, a stór, of course you did!’ She knelt down beside him, her hand on his forehead, eyes brimming with love and pride. Inside she was deeply worried.

  ‘Roberteen, you’d better go for the priest,’ Martin Tom Bawn said to his son. The frightened young rebel scampered away over the mountain, glad this time to be gone from her, for fear she might think he had let her husband be shot.

  She and Martin brought Michael in under the shelter of the Hare’s Garden, and she lit a small fire with the few pieces of turf they had brought to her, to keep him warm.

  Martin Tom Bawn also produced some boiled potatoes in a cloth. ‘The pay came from London. Michael bought these and left them below with us, before they left for Tourmakeady. Biddy boiled them up. I’ll bring the rest tomorrow – here’s the few pence left over,’ he said, handing her the money.