by Colin Murphy
After a tortuous ascent up the slope, he paused and looked around at the foliage. Grass and heather, heather and grass. Up higher where the incline grew into another precipitous cliff he could see the brightly blooming furze bushes clinging to the rocks, their gay, yellow colours at odds with the mood of the land. Flowers all around him but not a bite to eat. Dismayed, he cast himself to the ground to rest and as he sat there gazing wearily across the depleted landscape, he spotted what looked like a gargantuan worm moving along the road that skirted the southern side of the valley. It snaked along the road that followed the base of Maumtrasna Mountain’s vast bulk, seeming like some vile creature that had crawled from the earth to add to Ireland’s woes. Suddenly the sound of a gunshot echoed with great clarity across the valley, over and over, bouncing from Maumtrasna across to Tawnyromhar and Tawnyard Hill and then fading to a whisper. He strained his eyes at the sight and realised he was looking at an immense caravan of men and carts. It had stopped moving, and he could identify tiny figures bustling about it, hear the whinny of horses and the barely audible sound of many voices shouting and laughing. Soldiers. Most likely assigned to guard the carts, probably filled with Irish grain and animals bound for ships in Westport. He’d witnessed these caravans before, although never on such a scale. When he realised what he was looking at, his bile rose once more. To consider the hunger pangs in his belly, Owen lying near death for want of a morsel of food, his family, his countrymen one by one starved into an early grave, to consider all that, and to watch as the English conveyed from Ireland enough food to feed thousands; he dearly hated that race and swore that if fate decreed that he should somehow survive he would pay them back in kind for all the misery and blood that dripped from their hands.
He began to walk again, his eyes drawn repeatedly to the caravan, fires now springing up along its length as they made camp for the night. He briefly entertained thoughts of attempting to steal food from one of the carts, but so well guarded were they, he would surely end up with a bullet in his head. They’d already let half the country perish, what was one more worthless Irishman?
Thomas followed the curve of the mountain until it arced around into the smaller Cregganmore Vale, an offshoot of the main valley. To his left, despite the fading light, he could see all the way along the vale, the waters of the meandering Owenmore River white in places where it bounced over rocks and boulders, the fields newly harvested of wheat, their riches probably long gone on a ship to a foreign shore. A few cottages nestled in boggy hillside, high above the fertile soils.
Exhaustion forced him to slump to the ground again, his bony rump sending a ferocious ache through his body. He could just close his eyes, he thought, and let the fading light take him, drifting off to death in harmony with the setting sun.
But he wasn’t prepared to surrender yet. The sight of the English fires across the Erriff Valley was the impetus for renewed rage, as was the sight of Harris’s double-storied, semi-palatial dwelling directly north across the vale, which was named Oughty House after the hill in whose shadow it rested. Oil lamps burned brightly in its windows, mocking his desperation. On the road below he could make out the school that had once held a dread for him as each day dawned. Yet if time’s door opened that moment, he would gladly step back and embrace those days of thrashings and incoherent lecturing and hour-long treks in the foulest of weathers. Because those days offered one other inducement. Food.
His recollection of schooldays set him thinking of his brother and how he had thrived at learning, among a select few in school chosen for special attention. Thomas, on the other hand, despite possessing a reasonable intelligence, had struggled. His defiance of their teachers and their cruelties seemed the more important battle to wage than that against ignorance.
Owen had a way of looking at the world, Thomas could acknowledge, that he’d never consider himself. Almost everything Thomas knew had been drilled into him, but Owen knew things he’d never been taught. He reasoned and pondered until the answers presented themselves. That was all Owen ever seemed to do – spend his days staring into empty space, thinking, dreaming, dithering. His brother was smarter than him; this was indisputable. But Thomas believed there were all sorts of intelligence. There was the book-reading kind, the seven-times-eight-equals-fifty-six kind, the Latin and ancient Gaelic scripts and Brian Boru defeating the Vikings, and all of that useless horseshit that was battered into them in school. And then there was the intelligence of survival; the intelligence of the fox to outsmart the hound; the intelligence of understanding the nature of man himself, instinctively to sense friend or foe and to know when to deceive, to feint, and when to strike. Whether his father’s seed had carried in it Thomas’s looks or hair colour he knew not, but he believed it had carried his father’s guile. The world may need its thinkers and dreamers but they owe their very existence to the doers, the workers and the fighters, all the people who clear the paths on which the dreamers tread in quiet reflection, considering the whys and wherefores of some old bollocks. The doers were people like his father, Michael Joyce. The man who would traverse the earth for his family, who would work all of God’s hours to feed them, who would die for them, or kill for them. As he had.
Geraghty. The land agent’s gamekeeper. It was as vivid in Thomas’s memory as if it had happened an hour ago. He’d just snared a small deer, a rare sight, when he’d felt the cold muzzle of a musket on his neck. Geraghty had outsmarted him, his foul breath sniggering with glee at the back of Thomas’s head, promising prison, transportation, flogging. The sadistic gloating had been interrupted by a loud crack and Thomas had turned, trembling, to see his father standing there with a heavy, bloodied branch. They would flee, he’d said, leave the area, run, get a ship. This was his father’s startled thinking. Scurry away like rats, was Thomas’s interpretation as he stood there, the Glenlaur River’s babble a backdrop to the deepening coldness of his thoughts.
‘We can’t,’ Thomas had cried. ‘We’ve no money, nothing, nowhere to hide. They’ll catch us and hang you!’
Michael Joyce had listened in silence then turned away and with his father’s gaze momentarily averted, Thomas had lifted Geraghty’s musket and swung it over his head, about to strike at the prone gamekeeper. His father had grappled with him then and forced him to the ground, pinning him, kneeling above him.
He’d raged and ranted at Thomas. No Joyce would ever commit that terrible sin and be damned to eternal hell.
It was the only way, Thomas had countered, over and over.
At which point Geraghty had stirred in near consciousness. Tears had spilled from Michael Joyce’s eyes, falling on to his eldest son’s face. He had shaken his head violently as if doing so would keep at bay the terrible conclusion that was rushing upon him. That his son was right. Should Geraghty live, they might well hang Michael Joyce anyway, or at the very least lock him up for the rest of his days, a living death, alive but tortured daily by the thought of his family abandoned in the world. He had exchanged a look of terrible conspiracy with his son, seized the musket, and with an agonised yell had beaten the final, clinging nuances of life from Geraghty’s skull. Thomas remembered thinking, as he watched his father kneeling and sobbing beside the lifeless body, that now, finally, he and his father truly shared the same blood.
Darkness was near upon him. He turned his head and looked towards the cottages further along the mountainside, his last, desperate hope. The sun was gone but its afterglow still cast a faint light across the heather. But he had barely shifted his wearied legs when voices gave him pause. Fearful they might be Harris’s men, he threw himself flat on his belly and crept behind a small boulder. Just down the slope, three figures stood with their backs to him, looking away towards the lamp-lit windows of Oughty House. One of the men turned and spoke, leaving Thomas in no doubt as to their designs.
‘Harris may have an armed guard outside. The bastard might even shoot on sight. So we have to approach carefully. It’ll be completely dark in twenty minutes so w
e should be able to get close without anyone seeing us.’
‘What about Uncle Éamon?’
That voice, a boy’s, rang familiar with Thomas. The man spoke again.
‘You hurry to Éamon’s and tell him to meet us at the schoolhouse at Drummin in two hours. We’ll all make our way up the track to Oughty House together. The more of us there are the better.’
‘What about me? I can come along and–’
‘It’s no place for a lad.’ The other man’s voice.
‘Jimmy’s right, son. Harris could start shooting before we get near his door. But that’s a chance we have to take. It’s this or we all starve.’
‘But I–’
‘Don’t argue with me!’
Thomas’s mind raced. They were planning to attack Harris in Oughty House. Maybe kill him. Jesus Christ! They hadn’t a hope of getting away with it. Half the fucking English army was camped across the valley. Were they insane?
‘Go now. Quick as you can. Remember, two hours, the schoolhouse.’
The young lad, a broad bulky youth, turned and walked away with a disgruntled mutter, affording Thomas sight of his face. Tim Walsh. He lived on the other side of Tawnyard Hill, in the Glenlaur Valley. His father was Pádraig Walsh, once suspected in the murder of Geraghty, a real rebel by all accounts. Éamon Walsh was his brother and Jimmy was probably Jimmy Burke, a neighbour of theirs. The bunch had hatched a plan to do away with Harris, probably with Burrell too. They’d leave no witnesses. Bloody murder would be visited upon their land again tonight. No, not murder; bloody justice.
Walsh and Burke set off down the hill, fading into the swelling mist. Thomas lay in semi-shock for some minutes before resuming his trek, his mind a confused miasma of fear, excitement and hopelessness. He staggered on until he stood in the focal point of a semi-circle of cottages, most black and dead to the world, their thatch hacked out or burned. Yet one cottage remained intact. A low glimmer of flickering gold danced on the floor beneath the wooden door. A shadow interrupted the fire’s capering light. Thomas looked up and saw a whirl of smoke drift up through a hole cut in the thatch, enlivened by an occasional spark. And escaping on those rivulets of turf smoke was that other smell, aromatic in the dampening Mayo air, exotic, rare and priceless: the smell of roasting animal flesh.
He strode towards the cottage door, the other dead houses seeming to watch him, to bear witness to whatever act he might perpetrate, because some part of him had resolved not to leave this house without a fill of meat and he would do anything he had to to fulfil that resolution.
He pushed at the door and found it barred or bolted. The inhabitants had something to protect and he knew full well what it was. Thomas gritted his teeth and hurled his bony shoulder against the door, which shifted inwards a few inches and allowed a wider wedge of light to escape into the night air. The smell of cooking meat rushed at him like a surging wave, swelling his nostrils and lungs, startling his flimsy muscles into renewed life. He heaved again and the door swung inwards, the bench that had been pressed against it toppling sideways with a thud. He stepped into the room and stared to his left at the sight of a man of maybe thirty, maybe sixty, his age lost in the ravages of starvation. He stood with his back to a crackling fire. His left hand clutched a bone chewed almost to whiteness but for a few bits of ragged, burnt flesh that clung to its balled end. In the other hand he held a poker, still faintly glowing, its tip pointed at Thomas, though it wavered in his tremulous grip. The man’s lips shivered too, despite the overpowering heat of the room.
Thomas took a step forward and the cottier gasped, his breath heaving as though in mortal fear that hell was about to claim him. Or already had.
‘You’ve got food.’
The man didn’t respond.
‘You’ve meat. If you share it, I’ll be on my way. I need food for my broth–’
‘I had no choice. Jesus!’ The man started to weep bitterly.
Thomas thought the man looked mad, driven to insanity through hunger. He glanced around for a weapon should he need it.
‘Just give me some meat and I’ll leave.’
The man raised the bone in his left hand and stared at it and Thomas saw his opportunity to strike. A small three-legged stool rested nearby – he could grasp it and brain the mad old bastard before he knew what was happening. But before he could lurch at the stool the man spoke again through a babble of sobs.
‘May God forgive me…oh Jesus…but she was dead already…I swear before the Almighty…’ With that he threw the bone into the flames, sending a shower of sparks skywards. He then raised his eyes and allowed them to flicker over Thomas’s shoulder to the other end of the room.
Some awful truth began to seep into Thomas’s consciousness, a terrible, sickening reality he desperately wished to deny. He looked behind the door where a mouldy, ragged curtain divided the room in two. A clattering startled him and he looked and saw that the man had dropped the poker. His entire body seemed to sag, shoulders slumping, chin almost to his chest. Thomas turned his back on the cottier and walked to the curtain. As he reached out he was conscious now of his own quickening breaths. He grasped it, stepped forward, pulled it to one side.
He didn’t know how long he stood there. His mind was having difficulty processing what he was looking at; his heart was pounding. Shame, revulsion, terror, rage and a thousand other feelings swelled until it seemed his very brain might explode. On the floor lay a ragged, bloody mess. He could barely discern the remains of a human body entangled in a filthy, dark green dress, some parts of limbs still attached to the torso within the garment, other parts cleaved and hacked free. On the floor beside the body lay a bloodstained knife.
A mass of tangled black hair drew his eye and commanded him forward. He released the curtain, which fell back into place behind him, isolating him with the ghastly tableau. He reached down and pulled at the hair, turning the head to one side. It was a girl of perhaps fifteen or sixteen, wasted as were they all, but familiar nonetheless. Her eyes stared blankly out at nothing, her lips were slightly parted, as though in surprise. Her name: it was Etain O’Casey. She’d been one of the ‘bright’ ones in school that had been selected for special attention along with Owen. He released her hair and her head fell back against the ground with a faint slap. He picked up the knife, he knew not why, perhaps somewhere in his mind intent on imposing justice on the cottier for this abomination.
Then came a sob, imploring some release. ‘I had no choice. May God forgive me.’
There was a shuffle and the clatter of something falling. Thomas flung the curtain aside to witness the cottier’s final death agonies as he desperately scratched at the loop of rope around his neck, his feet kicking wildly as they tried to locate the ground. Thomas stood riveted, his shock too intense to motivate any attempt to rescue the man. He stood there, mouth agape, staring at the pleading face, now turning purple. The clawing at his neck, the kicking, the spreading stain on his crotch, the creaking of the rope against the timber, endured for what seemed an age until finally Thomas’s mind snapped and he ran from the cottage out into the blessed relief of the black night air.
Three or four steps were as far as he’d progressed when his feet entangled in each other and he went sprawling onto his outstretched hands and knees. He remained thus for five full minutes, sobbing and gagging, atavistic moans escaping his throat as his mind struggled desperately with the scene to which he’d just borne witness.
Finally he calmed somewhat and sat up on his haunches, staring out over the pitch-dark vale, his breaths easing, dots of colour still dancing before his eyes. He ran his jacket sleeve across his face and erased some of the snot and spittle and wetness.
They had come to this, he thought, his race reduced to the wanton savagery of a wild animal, starved not only of food but now also wrung dry of all humanity. Robbed of their very dignity as men. Ireland had been thrust back into a primeval age where the only rule was survival and morality was revealed to be nothing more than
a mask of convenience. The cottier had no choice, so he’d said. And after a while Thomas began to accept it as truth.
And he himself was no different. The hunger still remained in his belly, the weakness in his every muscle. Were his brother not dependent upon him, he too might consider the option of exiting this world to sweet oblivion. But he truly did have no choice. Whether madness was taking him, or his actions were those of the perfectly rational, he couldn’t have said.
He rose to his feet and turned to face the cottage. Through the open door the dead man’s shadow moved back and forth, ever so gently accompanied by the slow creaking of the rope on the beam, like the sound of a boat on a lough surface straining on its line.
He glanced down at the bloodstained knife he still clutched, walked back into the cottage and looked up at the dead man.
He had no choice.
CHAPTER 4
Since the days of O’Connell a larger public demonstration has not been witnessed than that of Sunday last. About 1 o’clock the monster procession started from Claremorris, headed by several thousand men on foot. At 11 o’clock a monster contingent of tenant farmers on horseback drew up in front of Hughes’s Hotel, showing discipline and order that a cavalry regiment might feel proud of. They were led on in sections, each having a marshal and occupying over an Irish mile of the road. Next followed at least 500 vehicles from the neighbouring towns. On passing through Ballindine the sight was truly imposing, the endless train directing its course to Irishtown.
–The Connaught Telegraph, 26 April 1879
20 APRIL 1879
He’d been little more than a pimpled youth when he’d first heard the term ‘The Three Fs’. What had they been called, the crowd who’d first penned that snappy slogan? Tenants’ Rights Brotherhood? Tenants’ League of Something? He couldn’t remember.