Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

  What did happen was stranger still.

  “By the Devil’s pulleys, I’m sorry!” exclaimed Mochta, slapping his forehead as he rolled the empty wheelbarrow down the plank into the ditch. And he now made an apology to us in English so simple that Mr. Krumpacker could not misunderstand its meaning. And though we had been ready to collapse with laughter only a few moments before, and even if we couldn’t possibly have divined his scheme, we understood well enough what we had to do. With our blackened faces, holding our tools still for just a moment, we bestowed on Mochta looks as grave as the judge in Dingle would use to sentence a prisoner in the dock.

  Mr. Krumpacker clapped his hands and told us to get back to work. But you could see he was intrigued. And we were greatly cheered. We had never known such entertainment in the ditch.

  For the next few days, Mochta pretended to be in disgrace with the rest of us. There were no songs, no Irish chatter, only lowered eyes and hard work. I knew he must be up to something, but he refused to say what. And when I said I could see no possible good in this doffing-the-cap to Mr. Krumpacker and speaking of clochans, he clapped me on the shoulder and—by the Cross—he quoted Old Conn at me! “Neither luck nor good fortune,” he said, “ever came to anything that runs in people’s talk.” And then he added, “We’ll pay that doctor’s bill before Christmas, Dubhaltach.”

  “And how shall we do that?” I said. “Raid a bank?”

  Oh, that was cruel, I know. But I’d heard these kinds of big words from him so often before, that I knew exactly how much weight to give them.

  Let me put what happened next in a nutshell, so that you can glimpse the mad trajectory on which my brother had determined. Back in the summer, after we’d had that talk about the poor turf in America, Mochta—without telling me—asked a friend who knew his ABC to send a message to the Blaskets, requesting that they send him a box of Blasket sod. Only after that box arrived, did Mochta begin to spin his tale. He told Mr. Krumpacker that a friend of his had built a clochan on the other side of Chicago. Would he like him (Mochta) to test some prairie turf in that clochan? Yerra, said Mr. Krumpacker, why not? And that, my friend, was all it needed. Once he had seen that Blasket sod burn in the hearth, Mr. Krumpacker was on the hook.

  Each turf block, Mochta explained, was made by pressing the right mix of clochan-fired soil and shredded prairie grass into a wooden mold. Once you had the right blend, it was as easy as making bricks. You put them in the clochan, fired it up, let the turf bake overnight, and by morning you were ready to make your fortune. Mochta could begin at once, he said. All he needed was permission to use some of those rocks he’d been blasting from the Canal—and $4,500. Yerra, $4,500 was a grand sum, wasn’t it? A fortune, no less. The spezialist who built that clochan on the other side of Chicago would then build one for Mr. Krumpacker too. Only a spezialist could build a clochan because it was like a factory, Mochta explained, with spezial holes at spezial points at spezial angles for a very spezial ventilation.

  * * *

  In the beginning, I refused to help Mochta with his clochan. Each Sunday he would go to work on it. He told me he had chosen a site hidden in a dip between two ridges, an empty place, about a mile from where the first canal lock would be positioned. I’ve never built a clochan, nor seen anyone else build one either. They were done before our time. But I knew it wouldn’t be easy to do. He would need persistence, patience and hundreds of flat stones. It begins with a layer laid in a circle on the ground. On top of this layer goes another, but this one must be set a little more inward than the one below, so the overhang is pointing always toward the center of the circle. Layer is placed on layer. In this slow way a thick round wall is built, and the circles grow ever smaller until the central and the highest point of the dome is reached, which stands at more than the height of a man. From a distance, it looks like a beehive, though that might give the wrong idea. A clochan is one of the most solid buildings on earth.

  Each week Mr. Krumpacker would hand over bills to Mochta, hidden in a roll of newspaper. Presumably, he went to check on progress before he did so. I often wondered how a ganger could find so much money, however much he’d stolen from us. Probably from investors. At least, I think that’s what they called them. If that was true, I hoped they were as crooked as Mr. Krumpacker so there was no sin in taking it away from them. In any case, Mochta would bring every single dollar straight to me. I was to handle all the money, he said, because I was good with it. As soon as we had $200, Mochta went to pay the doctor.

  There was one major problem with Mochta’s madcap plan and it bewildered me that he would not see it. “What do we do,” I asked him, “when Mr. Krumpacker discovers he’s been taken for a fool? He’ll send his thugs for us, and we’ll be lucky to escape with our lives. Then we’ll have to hand back the money, including the $200 we don’t have because you’ve paid your good friend the doctor. We’ll be out of work, and likely as not in jail, with half our limbs broken into pieces. What would our parents say, Mochta, if they could see us, gone to jail in America? Is that what we came here for? And tell me this, what happens then to Oscar?”

  Mochta always answered, when I look back at it, too calmly. “This agreement is between me and Mr. Krumpacker, Dubhaltach, not you as well. Remember this. He doesn’t know we are brothers.” That, at least, was true. Mr. Krumpacker knew nothing about anyone. “He doesn’t know you have the money for the clochan. You and Oscar don’t have to worry about a thing.” And then he’d add: “Trust me. I have a plan.”

  “And what’s your plan?” I’d say in exasperation. “Have you found the seven seers inside your head? Is that why you’re suddenly so clever?”

  Not another word could I get out of him. I had to trust him when he said he had a plan, and that was that. I feared he had no plan at all, that this was simply Mochta taking one more foolish risk that would bring danger to all three of us.

  And then, one day, I realized what the plan must be, and I was furious. We were simply going to take the money and run. “You great bosthoon!” I raged. “You think America is so big we can hide in it? We’re not thieves. And I’m not going to spend the rest of my life running from the law.”

  I had got it all wrong, he said. Nobody would be running anywhere. “Trust me, Dubhaltach. Just this once, trust your own brother.”

  One Sunday, when he told me the clochan was nearing completion, I offered to help him and what a surprise I got. It was the most beautiful clochan I had ever seen. He’d built it with such perfection, such a grand choice of stones, that all the admiration I used to feel for him as a boy came rushing back. Only Mochta could have done this.

  It was a glorious day, that last day we would spend together. It felt as though we were back in our own small world on the Blaskets, without anyone to tell us what to do or how to do it. We were two brothers, alone in the world, who loved each other. The clochan seemed to emit a spiritual interferingness into the air, like a veil of Blasket mist. We competed to find and lay the best stones we could. And although we did not talk much, there was an ease come between us that had been lacking these last few months. I felt ashamed of how I had blamed him for everything that had gone wrong, and I vowed I would find a way to make amends. All day long, the only noise in that little valley was the clinkity of stones and the occasional cries of wild geese that passed across the slit of prairie sky.

  I reminded Mochta of how Old Conn would chant: “The Fenians of old sang hymns of praise when monks sat in their clochans.” Probably, I should have told you this earlier. All the clochans on the Island are ancient. That’s why none of us had ever built one before. Although we’ve turned them into sheep shelters and storehouses, they used to have a higher purpose as temples where monks would fast and pray on their way to the Blessed Isles.

  “Old Conn said something else about them too,” said Mochta, to my surprise. “‘He who lays the crow stone shall be blessed in ways miraculous, and his fortune assured forever.’”

  Indeed he did, I said, w
ith a smile. Ah, if only I had known what he meant.

  * * *

  The next Sunday, the clochan would be fired. Again, I asked Mochta about his plan, and again he would say only that he had one and I should not worry. And so did I let that jester pull the wool over my eyes one last time. It has always been my failing, to be too “easy come, easy go.” When Oscar grew up he said he’d take a very different path to mine and by God’s bright sake he did, though he never visits his father anymore to tell him of the life he leads. How I wonder if he thinks of me sometimes, and of his poor lost mother, and of his Uncle Mochta too, for haven’t we all had a hand in giving him his start in America?

  That final Saturday night, there was a mood in the camp like on St. Patrick’s Day. When Mr. Krumpacker rode off to his family in Chicago, the same as every Saturday night, Mochta announced that on the morrow he would fire a clochan to make sod for burning in the hearth for Mr. Krumpacker and everyone was invited. The whiskey, as you can imagine, began to flow.

  Begorra, you know how it is with the Irish at times like this. We’ll drink and dance until the knees collapse, and when the dapple of the next day’s dawn peeks into the sky we’ll be found horizontal somewhere or other on God’s earth, crooning about the Old Country, weeping like babes. Mochta, for the first time since that day he stopped, was drinking with the rest of us and I couldn’t blame him. I even began to believe, the more I drank, that the clochan might work. That’s what a lush I’d become.

  It was an early fall day with only about an hour or so of daylight remaining as we gathered at the site. Oscar was whining. All day, without a break, he’d been pestering me about when we’d see his Uncle Mochta. It was beginning to get cool and a wind was pushing off the prairies, but I didn’t notice these things because my throat was still well wrapped in whiskey.

  When Mr. Krumpacker arrived on horseback, his buck goat bush trimmed neat and wearing his best duds, we were already collected on the overlooking ridges. He was not pleased when he saw the crowd that had come to welcome him. And no wonder, from the way we clapped our hands and cheered. One other point he probably grasped was that although nobody was fighting, none of us could stand too prettily on our legs. And our singing was not in any tune a sober man would recognize.

  What a mistake it had been to bring his wife and youngsters, even if his daughter didn’t understand the shame of it. He seemed to have given her permission to crawl inside the entrance of the clochan to look at the spezial mix of soil and prairie grass piled up inside that would soon be turned into magic turf. And what a mistake to invite some friends, or maybe those were his investors? He looked around anxiously. Where on earth was Mucker?

  Mr. Krumpacker wasn’t the only person worried about Mochta’s whereabouts. When I had seen him in the morning, he was a shipwreck. But he promised me on the Virgin he wouldn’t touch another drop till sunset. Then he disappeared again. Don’t worry, Dubhaltach, the others told me when we set off from the camp. Mochta’s gone ahead. But I had still not seen him.

  When the little girl emerged from the clochan, she ran back toward Mr. Krumpacker, wrinkling her nose and shouting. She didn’t tell him it was very dark inside, or that it stank, as she might have done. She was screaming so loud we could all hear what was on her mind: “A ghost, dada. There’s a ghost in there.”

  I should have thought about what she said and kept a close eye on Oscar, but I wasn’t in my ordinary mind and was no more steady on my feet than anyone else.

  Mr. Krumpacker began to shout. “Mucker?” he cried out. “Mucker?”

  That was a signal for all of us to join in, and we were soon making a great hurly-burly. “Mucker!” we yelled, laughing ourselves to tears, as if it was the best joke we’d heard for years. Yerra, for my sins, I was a part of it. “Mucker! Mucker! Mucker!”

  I don’t know when I first realized Oscar had disappeared. Did I turn to the side and see him gone? Or did I spot him only when he was already scrambling into the clochan? At any rate, I flung myself downhill as soon as I understood he wasn’t there. I slipped and tumbled and went head over heels. When I righted myself, I saw him tugging at a massive pair of gray pantaloons I knew only too well. He was helping Mochta squeeze out of that little entrance to the clochan, backside first. As soon as I saw them I set off again, hurtling their way fast as I could. Once upright, my brother swayed and hoisted Oscar high onto his shoulders. The boy was gazing around with pride and happiness while Mochta waved. I was frantic, shouting at the top of my voice for the boy to be put down at once. But my words were drowned out by another round of cheering and applause. Next, Mochta was greeting Mr. Krumpacker, and the daughter too, with a low bow that almost toppled the two of them, both him and my son.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he cried out in words that slurred. “I shall now…” He made five or six attempts to find the word he wanted, which was a complicated and slippery creature. I think it was “inaugurate,” or something of the kind. “I shall now inaugurate the clochan.”

  Somebody produced a burning torch and a cheer went up. He turned to wink at us, to make sure we were all watching, before plunging the fire into the hole out of which he had recently emerged. There was no turf in there, of course, for it wouldn’t have caught and there’d have been no spectaculation. There was only some timber we had loaded inside the day before. The cheering grew louder. They were waiting for the flames to take hold.

  And Mr. Krumpacker? I have a picture of him in my mind, standing at a distance, trying to smile as though he hoped this was normal. But I don’t know whether this was real, or whether it’s only in my imagination. If it was real, I do know it was the last time I ever saw him.

  Oscar—thank God—was standing back, no longer on his uncle’s shoulders. I pulled him away to safety. And because I was so concerned for Oscar, I did not look to see where Mochta was. He had already clambered halfway up the outside wall of the clochan before I realized. That great oaf was using for steps the corbel stones that jutted out at spezial intervals. And what reason could there be, you’ll ask, for him to climb up there?

  He had not yet laid the crow stone.

  The crow stone is the last piece to be set on top of a clochan. It is laid across the central hole above the highest circle and is no ordinary stone. It is the flattest, largest piece in a clochan, and the nearest to God. We believe it to be sacred. Mochta must have spent days searching for it, because I never saw one more perfectly round and smooth.

  You might have expected to hear the crow stone had to be hauled to the top by two men and a donkey, using ropes and pulleys. But if that was in your imagination, I am a poor teller of tales because you still haven’t understood the gigantic strength of my brother, even when he was awash with drink. That noble brute held the crow stone under one arm, easily as the likes of you probably carries a pile of books. All he had to do was drop it in place on the top and come back down the same way he’d gone up. In theory, God willing, it was still possible that nothing would go wrong. But he would have to be quick about it.

  Perhaps if I had gone to reason with him, there would still have been enough time for him to jump away before it was too late. It’s easy to know afterward what you should have done at the time. Well, I didn’t reason with him, did I?

  There came a moment when even Oscar went quiet. Indeed, a stillness fell over the scene. The cheering and singing stopped. Everyone was staring at Mochta in amazement when they saw what he was doing. People were either rooted on top of the ridge, or staggering down to get a better look. My heart was gripped by a horrifying fear that we had already passed the tipping point and there was nothing to be done. For isn’t this always the case, that when the celebrations have peaked we have to go down the other side and slide toward the wake, which is the final truth for all of us?

  The timber inside the clochan had caught. Smoke was beginning to filter out of the ventilation holes. And at the very moment when he laid that crow stone on top of the clochan to cheers from every one of us … yer
ra, at the very moment when the clochan reached completion … at that same moment I realized what his plan had always been. He must have squirreled away some of Mr. Krumpacker’s bad gunpowder. That’s what he must have done.

  Because the clochan exploded.

  Black smoke smethered out of the ventilation holes and flames leaped through the hole where the crow stone should have been.

  Mochta was changed out of recognition. Begorra, he was! And the reason he didn’t look like you and me anymore was because he was being swept up in the Great Master’s final mystery. I’m certain of what I’m saying. I know I’d been too friendly with the bottle, but a shock like this quickly sets you straight. Mochta glowed and shimmered. I could no longer see any brother of mine on top of the exploding clochan. What I saw was the flying eagle with six wings about him rising to the jasper stone of Heaven in the Book of Revelation, the same as the priest would read aloud to us in Lent in a voice of thunder, the words watering his eyes.

  I gazed up at the bright, swirling colors of holy fire and vapor that were consuming him. In his new robes of sacred flames, Mochta stood astride the raging furnace and a rainbow of violet and indigo, of emerald and jacinth, formed about his head and his face shone as it were the sun, a thousand times more brilliant than the lonely rock of Teeraught, and his feet were pillars of fire, and he opened his mouth and roared like a lion and seven more explosions there came in answer, and when in time they passed, we heard another voice that came from Heaven itself with orders that everything uttered should be sealed up for eternity and never written down.