Boycott

by Colin Murphy

  It crossed Becker’s mind, as his car reached the main road north to Ballinrobe, to take a detour to visit the tiny hamlet of Neale, home to the priest whose name had been spat from Boycott’s lips. But the excitement of recounting the scenes he had witnessed was too great, so he quickly flicked the reins and pulled to his left, steering the horse towards Ballinrobe. Bernard H Becker’s subsequent report would include no mention of any viewpoint on the situation at Lough Mask House other than that of Charles Boycott.

  CHAPTER 24

  Sedition, conspiracy and murder are abroad, life and property are in peril; the era of government in Ireland has passed away. The Government must put an end to the existing terrors coute que coute [at all costs]. Propose Coercion Acts; proclaim martial law! Ireland needs to be ruled with an iron fist.

  –The Daily Express, 1 October 1880

  MISS FANNY PARNELL, sister of Charles Stewart, to her countrywomen:

  Our nation stands on the brink of a tremendous conflict between English colonist and Irish serf. Which is to win? The struggle will be a life and death one. Let Irish women put their shoulders to the wheel, for the war that must be waged will be for the cause of women and children. There is but one body in Ireland endeavouring to help you in your hour of agony – The Irish Land League. Extremists find fault with the League because it does not use physical force. I believe that the League is right to confine itself to moral force alone. Someone has said that suffering belongs especially to women. I entreat my countrywomen here not to belie the reputation of their sex. Have you heard what happened at Carraroe, when the women – as nobly as the old heroines of Rome and Sparta – threw themselves in front of the bayonets of the soldiery and saved their husbands and children? I fear that this winter heroic women as well as heroic men will be wanted in Ireland.

  –The Nation and The New York Irish World, 12 August 1880

  24 OCTOBER 1880

  Síomha stood looking at the ivy-covered sweathouse on Inismaine Island, the structure appearing little different to her now, some twenty-four years after she’d first made love to Owen within its ancient walls.

  It was Sunday afternoon and like the day before, it had become pleasantly warm. Owen had lingered after mass to meet with Fr O’Malley, Thomas had disappeared to Ballinrobe without explanation, Tadhg had gone to play hurling and Niamh was at a friend’s cottage. Finding herself alone, she’d decided to take a reflective stroll across the shallow waters out to Inishmaine Island and the precise spot where their life together, to all intents and purposes, had been conceived.

  Monks from nearby Inismaine Abbey, now but a tumble of stones, had constructed the so-called sweathouse. They used to light fires inside and lie within, the swirls of heat and smoke allowing them to commune more closely with God, or so some said. It had certainly brought her closer to Owen, and the memories of those days had come crowding back like a flock of sheep channelled through a narrow gate by a sheepdog, clambering over each other to get through. And she’d let them come, allowing the indulgence of immersing herself in their sweet nostalgia. Just as she had immersed herself that day, long ago, naked, in the waters of the lough.

  She quailed at some of her recollections as she began to stroll back towards the mainland – stripping naked in the open air, pretending to bathe at his favoured fishing spot, knowing he would soon be along to cast his line out among the silvery flashes of fish. She’d sinfully used her body to tempt him, coax him to make the leap she knew he couldn’t make alone, to cast aside his indecision and fear and to give his heart to her without condition. As he had emerged through the bushes, she had allowed him the indulgence of caressing her with his startled, aroused gaze, before feigning affronted modesty, rushing from the water and clasping her dress. He’d sputtered profuse apologies and turned away as she dressed. She had grinned to herself like a mischievous sprite behind his back, then touched his shoulder and told him not to be sorry. She wasn’t.

  Yet she had known, even after they had kissed by the lakeshore, that Owen was still capable of changing his mind, of spending days mulling over their relationship and possibly backing away from commitment. She’d often overheard the farmers say on market day during the barter of an animal that a drink afterwards would ‘seal the deal’. That line had played in her mind as she’d led him to the sweathouse and crawled on hands and knees ahead of him into its dark and cool interior. Not a drink, but the conception of a child, would seal the deal on their relationship.

  The risk, the rashness, the brazenness! What a little minx she’d been! But despite her self-reproach, she couldn’t help but smile. Perhaps if she hadn’t done what she’d done her life might have taken a wholly different path, one not so blessed, she thought; for, despite their poverty, she did feel blessed.

  But to this day she bore a scar of guilt. She told him of her pregnancy a month later and they married hastily, raising the eyebrows of more than a few. But she need not have feared the whispers that would have accompanied a baby arriving just seven months after wedlock, for the child was stillborn, its life ending before it saw the light of day. Perhaps it had been God’s punishment for her selfish ploy.

  Síomha lifted her skirts to her knees and waded the short distance back to the shore. Feet on dry land, she replaced her shoes and turned to see one of the tenant farmers, Francis O’Monaghan, some distance away. She returned his wave.

  She recalled that she had once regarded men like Francis as ‘turnip pickers’ – their days were spent discussing the trivia of village life while hers were spent in the endless limits of an imagination fuelled by books and learning. She was a publican’s daughter in Clonbur, better off than most, and she’d been the brightest of her class at school, though none of the male teachers or her classmates would admit as much. It was their shared passion for books that had first brought her and Owen together. But what an intellectual snob she’d been, keeping the locals at arm’s length for fear their company might taint her. After her marriage and the beginning of their life as farmers, she had quickly come to have a deep respect for the ordinary folk who surrounded them. They were tough, honest to a fault and dedicated to their families. And they would come to a neighbour’s help without prompting.

  And Owen had grown to be the man she knew he would be. He had never escaped the bonds of the land, but in many ways, although he often dreamed aloud of unfulfilled hopes and wishes as they lay in their bed, she believed in her heart that he hadn’t really wanted to be anything other than a farmer. Perhaps it connected him to his own upbringing or to his family’s memory, or perhaps it attached him in a real, tangible way to Ireland. She frequently ribbed him that he dithered over everything. He had dithered especially over her and only asked for her hand when he had no choice. The one time he had been decisive, she had told him with a smile, was when he’d leapt from that ship at Westport and swum back to shore. Ireland was his true mistress, she’d said, the one lady he could never be parted from and that could bring him to take action. He had rebelled at her suggestion, but ‘he doth protest too much’, she’d thought.

  She had lost another baby in their second year and had begun to despair. A year later and she was pregnant again, her days filled with dread that another horrible loss would afflict them. But Lorcan had come alive into the world after a terrible battle that had raged an entire night. When Lorcan had, as a young man, taken a wife and departed Ireland forever, she’d been given to weeks of deep melancholy, haunted by the same awful sense of loss that had accompanied the stillbirths. And although Owen had been sorrowful, she could never convey to him the emotional depth of her privation as a mother robbed of the fruits of her womb.

  When Tadhg’s time to enter the world had come, she had undergone even greater agonies, and but for Owen, the child would surely have perished. He came four weeks early and day turned to night as the midwife’s hands probed and prodded, the walls echoing back Síomha’s screams. Owen, pacing frantically beyond the door, had finally burst in, earning a torrent of abuse, the midw
ife ranting about the indecency and outrage of his daring to intrude on a ritual ordained by nature for the eyes of women only. But he pushed the old crone aside roughly, calmed Síomha with tender words, knelt between her legs and reached inside her. He had delivered a hundred lambs and foals in his time and after a minute or so he turned to the midwife and yelled that she had the child ‘arseways’. The woman insisted his interference would only do harm and that everything was in God’s hands now. Owen muttered some profanity and began to press gently into his wife’s swollen abdomen, probing and manipulating the unborn child inside her, trying to manoeuvre the child’s head towards the opening.

  He’d reached inside her then and begun to move the child with his hand, and what an eternity that seemed to take. But finally she felt something shift, a release, as though she had been probing about in a darkened room and finally her hand had fallen upon the door, and she pushed and pushed, and within minutes Tadhg’s head had appeared and then the body, and then he had cried at the flick of Owen’s finger. Owen took the infant and pushed it on to her breast, and as the rankled midwife muttered her disgust and left, they clutched each other in a tight embrace and cried.

  She had lost one more child early in pregnancy and then, when she was aged thirty-six, Niamh had arrived. This time no call had gone out for the midwife. Thanks be to the heavens that, for once, all had gone well and they had been gifted their only girl, Owen having played no small part in not only the conception of two of their children, but also their birth.

  But Owen wasn’t perfect; she wasn’t foolish enough to believe that. Like everyone else in the world, he was afflicted with flaws. He still ruminated on everything, even after all these years, and she often found she had to give him a kick in the backside, metaphorical or otherwise, to force a decision out of him. He’d sometimes allow a blackness into his soul, particularly when it came to landlords and the English presence in their country, and he had in the past, in anger, expressed a view that they would only ever be rid of the foreigners through war. And while he would give his life for his country or his family, she knew he’d never truly believed in bloodshed as an ultimate means to an end.

  Over the years he had also been given to bouts of melancholy, when his mood would darken and he would snap for no reason at her or the children. He would often wander about the farm or sit staring across the lough bearing a sombre face, shoulders slumped. In the early years the bouts might last for days, but he had largely outgrown them, time closing the darkest pits of memory. Much of his sadness emanated from his experiences in the famine; she herself had lost two of her five brothers to fever. Everyone had lost someone. But he had been cursed to lose everyone either to death or to a foreign land. He had cause enough to feel mournful.

  But her husband loved her and their children as much as it was within the ability of a man to love. And that, she considered, was her greatest blessing, and she prayed daily that God would not see fit to take him or any more of those she loved from her bosom for a great many years to come.

  When Síomha arrived back home it was still early in the afternoon. There would be neither sight nor sound of any of them for some time yet, she imagined, and the preparation of their meal could be put on hold for a while. She picked up a week-old copy of The Ballinrobe Chronicle, which she set on the table, but her mind was distracted before she read the first line and she sat, chin on hand, staring out the window for a time.

  She rose presently and went to the bedroom, her thoughts intent on drifting back to times past and that outrageous day on the shore of Lough Mask. She permitted the immodest thought that she had indeed been beautiful then, but life, babies and time had taken their toll. She stood before their old second-hand mirror and looked down at the dress that Thomas had given her and that had earned so many compliments after mass. She ran her hands along the curve of her hips, measuring them against memory, and frowning a little. Then she opened the buttons and allowed it to fall. She undid the lacing on her pantalettes and pushed them down, stepping lightly from them and standing there naked. She cupped her breasts, lifting them to ease the annoying sag that child nurturing had brought, and turned from side to side to determine if even a little of her beauty remained. She tilted the mirror forward for a better view of her lower body then turned to peer at her backside over her shoulder. It had lost the tightness and gentle curve of youth, but her skin was still smooth to touch, her flesh soft to press. Lost in her thoughts, it was in this pose she stood, when, too late, she heard the voice beyond the door.

  ‘Síomha, they’re saying Boycott’s got the police posting his mail and–’

  As he pushed the door open he froze at the sight of her, the words severed from his lips, his mouth dropping open, hand still gripping the door latch. So startled was she that she made no effort to cover herself and, for a moment, as his eyes wandered over her body and then rose again to her eyes, they were both transported to an earlier time, a youthful day that lived only in the privacy of their souls.

  ‘What are you…?’

  ‘Owen, I’m…’

  He pushed the door closed behind him, took her in his arms and kissed her, all thoughts of Boycott and Parnell and landlords banished from his mind.

  Owen lifted her from her feet and carried her to the bed, lay her down and almost fell on top of her. Síomha laughed aloud and pretended to push him away.

  ‘Owen, it’s Sunday, we’ve just been to mass. We can’t…’

  He was awkwardly, desperately pulling off his jacket.

  ‘I’m sure God will give us his blessing,’ he said.

  And they made love as they had almost a quarter of a century before, their passion and their unqualified love undimmed by the passing of the years.

  Their mood was upraised for the remainder of the day and their son and daughter were bemused at the air of gaiety that pervaded the cottage. Thomas returned late from Ballinrobe after they had retired keenly to bed and they listened as he mooched about, assuming he’d had too much drink taken, whispering their worries about his increasingly furtive behaviour.

  The next morning, with Niamh at school and the men engaged about the farm, she began an overdue sprucing of the cottage. She carried their thin mattresses outside and beat them thoroughly with Tadhg’s hurley, washed down the smoke-blackened windows and swept the floor of every room. As she was poking the broom under their bed, a mouse skittered across her bare foot and she yelped aloud. She made a lunge with the broom after the scampering rodent but it fled towards the living area. She quickly set off in chase, making several unsuccessful strikes as it fled past the hearth.

  ‘Come here, you dirty little beast!’ she yelled and swung the broom in an arc that sent a tureen clanging to the floor. In its terror the creature turned and ran directly across the room towards the corner where Thomas had folded his blankets and piled his possessions. The mouse now sought refuge behind these and she hurried across before it might escape into some hollow within the walls. She pulled Thomas’s blankets and clothes away and saw the creature dart beneath his knapsack. Broom at the ready, she grasped the knapsack and threw it aside and was immediately conscious of its weight. It landed on the floor with a loud thud and her pursuit of the rodent stopped suddenly. The creature vanished as Síomha, the hunt forgotten, turned her attention to the knapsack.

  She hesitated a long time, staring down at the crumpled bag. It wasn’t in her nature to pry into people’s personal possessions, but something disturbed her about that bag. He’d said he only carried a few clothes and mementos from America, but the weight of whatever lay inside was not that of pants or shirts – and his recent behaviour, disappearing suddenly into Ballinrobe, implying the boycott was all but useless, all conspired to set her mind ill at ease, and she soon found her hand reaching for the bag.

  It landed with a thud on the table. She cast a quick glance through the window to check that no one was nearby, then began to undo the straps, fear rising in her breast. She folded back the flap and peered inside, the
n removed some shirts, pants and a small, flat metal can. There was a book by Marx, another by someone called Malthus and a bundle of pamphlets on Irish nationalism and anarchism. Troubled somewhat by the sight of these, she rummaged further but could find nothing to explain the bag’s weight, and began to think she was imagining things. She lifted the knapsack again and allowed it to fall. Again it thumped down hard, yet she had removed everything. She glanced over her shoulder, her pulse racing and droplets of perspiration popping out on her forehead.

  Síomha pressed her hand flat at the base of the bag and allowed her fingers to explore the edges, finally locating a cleverly concealed flap held in place by straps. She undid these blindly, fumbling with the tiny buckles. She lifted the flap to reveal a compartment holding a rectangular box of dark stained wood, its surface scuffed and worn, which she removed and set on the table. She lifted the small latch. There was a tiny metallic click and she trembled as the hinged lid rose in her hands, confirming what she had feared in her heart all along.

  On the inside of the lid was a label, yellow with age, with the legend ‘E. Remington & Sons Manufacturers of Arms and Ammunition, Armory, Ilion, N.Y.’ The box was divided neatly into sections, lined with a soft, deep-red material, and within it sat a revolver with a barrel perhaps eight inches in length. The metal was black and it had a dark wooden handle grip. The other sections contained pliers, a small circular can labelled ‘caps’ and about twenty bullets. A shock of cold passed through her as she lifted the weapon, as though she’d stepped from a warm room directly into a frosty morning. The tremble in her hands was visible to her own eyes as she examined the gun, its cold metal surface giving her the same grim sensation she’d experienced when touching a corpse lying in wake.