The Whitest Flower

by Brendan Graham

  It was morning when Father O’Brien came with Roberteen. Michael had rested well, and the food and her care had given him some courage. He seemed a bit stronger. She was pleased with this, but still anxious about him.

  Father O’Brien gave him Extreme Unction, anointing him with oils. Then the priest helped Ellen to bandage Michael using a length of white gauze cloth which he had brought for the purpose.

  ‘He needs care, Ellen – medical care, or he’ll die up here,’ the priest said. ‘Even if the constabulary don’t find him.’

  ‘What can we do?’ she pleaded.

  Father O’Brien thought for a moment. ‘I could probably get him into Westport, into the workhouse hospital, without too many questions. The parish priest there is known to me and sits on the Board of Guardians. Michael would get the medical care he needs, and chances are the constabulary will be too busy looking for him back here to think to look in there for him.’

  He saw the look cross Ellen’s face. The workhouse was anathema to these people, a place of shame, a last resort.

  ‘I know. I understand your reluctance … and there are risks. But it’s his best chance, Ellen.’

  She watched from above as Roberteen and his father lifted Michael off the stretcher they had used to carry him back down the mountain, and set him up on the big grey horse behind the priest.

  Michael turned his head and looked up to the place where she might be. She raised her hand to wish him God’s speed, though she didn’t know if he could see her – half-conscious as he was.

  It was the last time she ever saw him alive.

  23

  That same evening Ellen had a visitor: Sheela-na-Sheeoga.

  ‘I heard you was back on the mountain, Ellen Rua,’ said the old woman. ‘I heard of your misfortunes, too. And about himself.’

  ‘Here,’ she said, holding out a tooreen filled with a mix of herbs and water. ‘It’ll do them a power of good,’ Sheela-na-Sheeoga added, indicating the children.

  Whatever the soup-like mixture was, Ellen knew they would have no choice but to eat it. It would give them another day. It was generous of Sheela, who couldn’t have had much herself. Ellen thanked her.

  ‘For nothing – an old woman doesn’t need much to keep body and soul together! What little I take wouldn’t feed a sparrow,’ the old woman replied, as if knowing her thoughts.

  As always, Ellen had the feeling that Sheela had sought her out, had come to her with something on her mind. She wasn’t wrong.

  ‘Where is himself gone with the priest?’ Sheela ventured.

  ‘To Westport,’ Ellen told her.

  ‘The workhouse, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mmmh …’ The older woman pondered this for a moment. ‘’Tis not a good place to be in, Ellen Rua,’ she said. ‘Not a good place at all.’

  ‘I know,’ Ellen replied, her voice filled with worry.

  ‘Walk to the edge of the garden with me, Ellen.’

  Ellen went with her, telling the children to wait behind in the shelter.

  The old woman took her arm, and they both stood looking down over the valley and the lake.

  After a while the old woman spoke. ‘He can be saved …’ She had turned her face towards the valley, not looking at Ellen at all.

  Ellen said nothing, waited. That was the way with the old woman – you waited.

  ‘The Slám,’ Sheela-na-Sheeoga let the words out softly, so none but Ellen would hear her secret. ‘Some have the gift you know.’

  Now it was the old woman’s turn to wait, letting the words seep into Ellen’s mind.

  The Slám. Ellen had heard her mother mention it once or twice – not to herself but to the Máistir, in a whisper. When she had asked about it, she was told, ‘Some things are best left alone.’

  Years later, Biddy had used the expression, walking home after a wake. It had to do with passing death from one person to another, she said. Some special mixture of herbs and water was made, and thrown in the face of whoever it was first entered the room of the dying person. The one recovered, the other died. The conduit was a woman. It was said only the women of the far valley had ‘the gift’, or curse, of the Slám.

  Could it be that this was what Sheela was putting to her: another’s life instead of Michael’s? The horror of the thought seized her mind. The old woman had said it out as easily as you might talk about replacing a diseased potato with a good one. At the same time she had managed to allow much to remain unsaid, leaving it to Ellen to work out. To decide.

  She turned her head to look at Sheela-na-Sheeoga, who stood impassive beside her, looking far out over the Partrys to where the Reek was. The old woman’s lips moved.

  ‘Westport’s a long way off, craythur. A long way.’

  The grief that Ellen had been struggling to hold at bay overwhelmed her now. Michael was dying – the old woman had just confirmed it. She knew he would never come out of the workhouse alive. Ellen knew it too. Deep down she’d known even as she agreed to let Father O’Brien take him to Westport.

  She should have kept Michael here, with her and the children, for his last days; nursed him, comforted him, prayed with him. Given him that, even if he wouldn’t know them half the time. She had been wrong to let him go. Then, when the end came, she could have used the stones that he and Martin had cleared to make the lazy beds for a tomb for them all, here in the Hare’s Garden. The Máilleachs would have been together in the end.

  If only she’d thought it out – she would never have agreed with the priest. If only she had another chance …

  Now the old woman was offering her another chance. Michael could live, be restored to health. He could work again. Then, they all would live: Patrick, Katie, Mary, Annie … even herself. All she had to do was go the road to Westport with the old woman. Agree to the Slám.

  Ellen had no doubt that the old woman was serious. No doubt at all that she had ‘the gift’.

  And the other person? He’d be some stranger in the workhouse. Maybe already dying with the famine fever? Maybe glad to be taken out of his misery … And she’d have Michael back.

  She stared at the side of the old woman’s face – grey, wrinkled, pinched in silence. Ellen wanted her to say something. The woman must know the turmoil she was going through. Why didn’t she speak?

  Ellen looked back at the scailpeen where her children lay.

  Patrick was stirring. The boy sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then looked out and saw her there with Sheela. He waited a moment, thinking of something. Then he stood up and came towards her. He was so like Michael, the way he walked. Deep like him, too, she thought. He stood near her, saying nothing, looking from her to the other woman, then back at her again. Then he took another step closer to her and slowly slid his arm round the small of her back, his head against her shoulder.

  Together they stood, mother and son, silent, looking out over the valley to where the mountains hid the seaport town where her husband, his father, was.

  When finally the boy’s mother spoke, it wasn’t much.

  ‘It’s alone I’ll go to Westport, Sheela,’ she said softly, as if breathing out a prayer.

  The old woman said nothing. Only nodded down into the valley below them, before disappearing across the mountain.

  24

  Ellen left at daybreak. She took the children to Biddy’s cabin, then set off on the long walk to Westport. Every mile along the road there were people. Standing, sitting, sleeping, wandering. Trying to get to somewhere where there might be food. Many were in a worse state than she was: nearer death than life.

  Westport itself was teeming with the destitute, scattered like leaves about the place, wherever they might fall. The scale of the desolation frightened her, robbed her of hope that they themselves could survive it. But she pressed on. She had to find Michael. Get him out of this place. Back to the mountains. If she was with him, he’d be all right. Hadn’t she watched over him up to now?

  She had to push her way
through the crowd milling around the workhouse, and brazen her way in past the guard.

  ‘It’s not signing myself in I am, it’s to take someone out of here – give you one less mouth to feed,’ she said, an air of conviction about her. She mentioned the name of the priest Father O’Brien had said was one of the workhouse Board of Guardians. It worked; she was allowed inside.

  If the state of affairs outside the workhouse had been grim, inside was a thousand times worse, heightening Ellen’s fears for Michael. Those who were immured there were the most wretched creatures she had ever seen. The clothes fell from them through raggedness and the inability of their shrunken and deformed bodies to fill garments made in better times. Skin hung paper-thin from bones. All eyes – some unable to see, caked with cataracts as they were, or gangrenous – followed her. Mouths gaped, no sound escaping them. Some dragged themselves, one-armed, along the ground towards her, their flesh showing signs of mange, their heads infested with lice.

  And the children … Everywhere on the filthy ground, their heads too large, grotesque atop their skeletal frames, their little bodies translucent, skin so stretched that the daylight shone through it. Children whose only instinct now was to stay close to those who had brought them into this famished world – if they could find them. She saw one poor mother, with barely the energy to do so, take the skin of her child and wrap it round the girl’s arm, so loose it was.

  Few spoke or made any sound. As though the grief of the people here was so great as to be beyond the power of words. One woman, her own age, exemplified this hopelessness by stretching out a hand to her, then withdrawing it, recognizing the uselessness of her gesture. The woman then pressed the back of her hand against her forehead in abject despair. Ellen, anguished beyond anything she had yet experienced, ran to the fever wards. Here the stricken people lay on single beds, two and three diseased bodies on top of each other, the pus from their sores, the droolings from their mouths, the excrement from their bodies, coagulating in one putrid mess.

  Desperate now, she ran between the rows of beds, trying to find him amid the mass of bodies. Ran until she reached the open window at the end of the ward. There was no sign of him.

  She looked out of the window. She saw the wooden chute, polished to a shine by the passage of diseased bodies, sliding down in endless procession to be burned in the lime-pit below.

  The smell came up to her. It burned her nostrils, burned her eyes, stopped her from seeing the faces and hands half-eaten by the quick-lime. Stopped her from noticing the large blackened section against the gable wall, rising like a giant black sun. Here the lime had done its macabre work, imprinting forever on the bricks the shape of the great mound of corpses it had disposed of. She thought she would faint with the stench, with the horror of the place.

  This was no refuge for the poor and the hungry. This was a graveyard with walls. All inside it were already entombed, ultimately doomed.

  Frantically she ran back along the ward to search the workhouse yards. Perhaps Michael wasn’t here at all, perhaps Father O’Brien had taken him somewhere else … Castlebar, Ballinrobe. Anywhere, she prayed, except here.

  Then, in the yard, she saw him.

  Slung on the back of a cart, his black head rolling from side to side, as the cart was pulled along by a bent old man.

  She tore across the yard, knowing she was too late yet hoping she wasn’t. Through the crowds of the near-dead, impervious to one more death among them, she jostled her way to him.

  ‘Michael! Michael, a stór,’ she cried, throwing herself on him, forcing the bent old man to stop the cart.

  ‘He’s gone, woman,’ the man said, showing no interest, not even pausing to set down the cart handles.

  ‘No – he’s not!’ she cried. ‘No, he’s not gone – he can’t be!’ She cradled Michael’s head against her, the tears streaming down her face when she felt no beat of life in him.

  ‘Oh, Michael, Michael, what have I done?’ she sobbed into his dark head, kissing his cold white forehead. ‘I should never have let you go … Tá d’éadan ciúin, mo bhuachaill bán, mo ghrása!’ Broken-hearted, she whispered her love to her ‘fair-haired boy’. ‘I should have known! Oh God, I should have known!’

  ‘Woman, I can’t stand here all day while you ullagone. I’ve work to do and there’s more after this one,’ said the old man, no hint of callousness in his voice.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ she demanded, without raising her head from Michael.

  ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be buried proper … without the walls, not in the pit. He had no fever, he died natural – from the wound.’ The old man, deformed from pulling the carts of the dead, nodded towards the workhouse gate. ‘Out there – without the walls.’

  She went with him, walking alongside the cart, her hand on Michael’s chest, the heart torn inside her.

  At the cemetery there was a queue of handcarts with bodies ahead of them. And ahead of that were rows of bodies stacked at the sides of big open graves.

  What Ellen saw then horrified her more than anything she had witnessed so far in that day of horrors.

  ‘Buried proper’, the old man had called it. First the clothes were removed from the dead and laid to one side for re-use. Then, each naked corpse was placed in a coffin, which was then borne to the graveside. The pall-bearers positioned the coffin over the open grave and held it poised there for a moment while one of them pulled a lever; suddenly, the floor of the coffin fell away, and the corpse tumbled out through the bottom, down into the waiting grave. The men then snapped the hinged base of the coffin back into the closed position and returned to collect the next corpse.

  Ellen was aghast, but this procedure did not seem to bother anyone else present. Not the priest who chanted prayers for the repose of the departed soul, not the pallbearers, not the men with the corpse-laden carts who waited in line to deposit their load.

  Crushed with sorrow and guilt at Michael’s death, Ellen was panic-stricken at the thought of what lay ahead as the queue inched forward. This was not a right thing. She didn’t want this for Michael. But what was she to do? Soon it would be Michael’s turn, and they would strip the clothes from him, and go through this mockery of giving him a decent burial by putting him in the one side of a coffin and out the other.

  She saw her chance when the priest and the gravedigger stopped. The old man at last dropped the handles of the cart and gruffly ordered her: ‘Wait there, woman. I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t lose place!’

  She watched his bent back, his broad shoulders, shamble away from her, back towards the workhouse. Then she quickly stepped into his place between the arms of the cart, lifted it, taking the weight first. Somehow she found the strength to tug the cart out of the queue and turn it round. She was gone with Michael before the old man returned.

  The gap they left in the burial line closed behind them as if they had never been there.

  Once she had broken its initial inertia, the cart with her dead husband was not too difficult for her to manage. The biggest problem was avoiding the bodies of the poor strewn at every side, and the stopping and starting that this entailed.

  She was nervous until she reached the outskirts of Westport lest the constabulary or militia should stop her, but her spirit was buoyed up by the knowledge that she had reclaimed her Michael. Now she’d bring him home to their own place, bury him properly, with her and the children gathered round to pray over him. Up there on the Crucán, in the midst of their mountains and the Mask and Lough Nafooey.

  ‘God give me the strength for the journey!’ she asked, looking up at the Reek, knowing that what she was about to undergo would demand infinitely more of her than the barefooted climb to the summit of the holy mountain.

  So she started – not too fast, somewhere between a walk and a gait – for the long road ahead of her. She carried on going until her arms ached and she could hold up the cart no longer. Then she rested, and talked to him, settling his hair back from where it had fallen over h
is eyes; whispering a prayer or two in his ear. And then she set off again, the next rest needing to be sooner – the aches now pains, her arms almost out of their sockets, her back breaking under the strain of the death-cart.

  The rivers without bridges were the worst. The stones on the river bed would block the wheels from turning and she would have to reach down into the water and loose them one by one.

  Now and again some of the helpless wretches she passed would try to lend a hand, but their weak attempts would only hinder her the more.

  At one place, a woman, hardly a stitch to her back, offered her some milk, and a meagre-looking boy gave her half a crust of hard bread. Like her, they had nothing. But, deeming her to be worse off than they were, they wanted to share their nothing with her. It was the way of the poor, Ellen thought.

  She would rest again before she reached Tourmakeady. There was something to do there for Michael, and she wanted to make sure she still had the strength.

  She pulled the cart in off the road and concealed it as best she could amongst the trees at the start of the long driveway. Michael would be all right there, and she wouldn’t be too long.

  What she was about to do would be a sign between them that she understood his need ‘to do something’; that she honoured and respected the sacrifice he had made. It would be a sign, too, to a trodden-down people. A symbol of her defiance of Pakenham and Beecham and their crowbar brigade – a rallying call.

  Pakenham would understand it too when he heard about it. And he would, soon enough.

  No one was about.

  She stooped, selecting the reddest rose on the solitary bush of the Rosa chinensis that remained in flower within Pakenham’s walled gardens.

  She cut the stem, puncturing it with her fingernail, careful not to damage the bloom.

  Then she left, as quickly and as quietly as she had come, pausing just a moment at the wall where the fresh damage was.

  The damage that had cost Michael his life.

  The sight of the Mask – and beyond it the valley where her children waited with Biddy – gave her fresh courage. Though great water-blisters rose on her hands adding to the pain she already endured, she did not stop again until she reached the foot of the Crucán.