It was as though they had been touched by the hand of the Almighty, as though something of God’s own power to conjure perfection out of nothingness had been breathed into their mortal mouths. Merely to be in their presence was regarded all over Connemara as an honour. A new song was greeted like the flowering of a crop; if it was unusually good, like the birth of a child. Often enough they derided each other’s abilities, but nobody else dared to blackguard them. To insult a songmaker was considered evil luck. There was fear in the way these magicians were regarded; if you crossed one you might end up in a song yourself and be left there for ever to have your folly mocked, long after it had ceased to matter.
In his frayed, spineless dictionary Mulvey looked up the English verb ‘to compose’ – to calm, to produce, to set up printer’s type, to decide what is printed, to write or create, to adjust or settle, to put together. The man who put together could also take apart. There was nothing such a wizard could not do.
He began to wonder in a quietly excited way if somehow he might include himself in this venerated priesthood, if one day he might fashion a song of his own. Always he had felt that he must have some purpose, that his life must mean something other than vassalage and frostbite. Soon he felt the need start to fume in him like a fever. Rhymes occurred to him often, and always had; he could fit words to melodies as well as the next man. His problem was the great limitation of his experience. He had never been in love or fallen out of it, never fought in a battle, never met a heavenly woman. Nor had he married or courted or killed or spent all his money on whiskey and beer or had any of the adventures which people worked into songs. Pius Mulvey had never made anything happen. Knowing what to write about was the hardest thing about writing.
At night while his brother was praying in the back room Mulvey would squat by the meagre fireside and try to compose. But to break open that part of him proved harder than breaking the land. He hungered to do it but it was so hard to do. Nothing came. For months nothing came.
He felt like a fisherman on a lake of shadows; just about able to glimpse the flit in the depths but able to net nothing no matter how he tried. Ideas darted past him, pictures and similes; he could almost feel them slither through his desperate fingers. In his mind he reached out to the spirit of his mother, the woman who had bequeathed him his love of singing. ‘Help me’, he prayed. ‘If you can hear me, help me.’ Never since her death had he felt so painfully close to her as on the long, taunting nights when he tried to compose. But nothing came. Nothing ever came. Only the skittering of the rats in the thatch and the low fretted whisperings of his brother at prayer.
And then, one morning, everything changed. He awoke from a dream of leaves in a breeze with a couplet forming in his fuddled mind. It had happened just as strangely and as simply as that; like being roused to find a gift on your pillow. As though the leaves of the dream had suddenly fallen away to reveal it sitting there like a drowsy moth.
Myself and my brother were tilling the land,
When up came a sergeant with coins in his hand.
That he had heard the lyric before was his first conscious thought about it. It was good. He must have heard it before. Quickly he rose from the bed and crossed the cold earth floor to the table. A butterfly of words that might escape. He scribbled them down on the back of an old sugar bag, as though they would fly out the window if he didn’t. He looked at the lines. Really they were very good. They obeyed the first principle of the architecture of balladry: each line moved the story forward.
Myself and my brother were tilling the land,
When up came a sergeant with coins in his hand.
A loin of steak with not an ounce of fat. Nothing at all about the lines was a waste. All the characters were introduced, their professions noted, their relationship to each other defined. Even the fact that the sergeant was said to have coinage implied that the narrator and his hard-working brother must not. Suddenly he saw that if you changed ‘tilling’ to ‘scratching’, and the dull noun ‘coins’ to the more sparkling ‘gold’, the fact of their relative poverty might be apprehended more clearly. And if you promoted the lowly sergeant to ‘Corporal’ or ‘Captain’ you would have a pleasing piece of alliteration with the flat verb ‘came’. Hastily he made the alterations and read the result. The lines seemed to burst into life like a fruit.
Myself and my brother were scratching the land,
When up came a captain with gold in his hand.
Mulvey’s elation felt almost indecent, like the giddiness of a child for remembered joys during a solemn benediction. Already you had an idea of how the song might turn out, but there was drama there too, for you couldn’t be certain. Like all good stories it had choice at its heart. Would they go with the captain or stay where they were? What would you do yourself if you were in their position? Who would be the hero and who the villain? Now it occurred to him that ‘my brother’ might be a little too vague. But ‘Nicholas’ was too long to be made to fit. As though riffling the pages of a brick-thick book, he allowed himself to scan the names of all the men he knew. Who had a name that would fit the same space as ‘my brother’? What about John Furey, the farmer from Rosaveel? Mulvey had only met him twice, and had certainly never scratched or scraped alongside him, but his name had the requisite trio of syllables. He scribbled it down and diedled the new line to himself.
Myself and John Furey were scratching the land.
No. It wasn’t as good as ‘my brother’. He crossed out the name and returned the line to its original form; and the fleeting candidature for immortality of John Furey from Rosaveel was thereby cancelled for ever.
He walked out to work on the bog that morning as though carrying the light of the world in his head; a flame that might go out if left untended. Mother, I beg you: don’t take it away. Silently he prayed the Rosary for the first time in years. He would never sin again; would never steal, would commit no impurity in private or with another. The Stations would be done every day of his life if only his flame did not flutter out. And later that day while digging with his brother, two more lines had loomed up at him out of nowhere.
And stories of soldiers all fearless and grand;
Oh, the day being cheerful and charming.
Again he was terrified he might forget them. He scratched them into the blade of his loy in case they slipped back into the nothingness later. He knelt by the roots of a fallen bog oak and wept for his mother and the kindness of God. He wept as he had never wept in his life, not at her deathbed, nor even at her graveside. For her loss; for his own; for all the things he had never told her. When his brother approached to see what was the matter, Mulvey took him in his embrace and cried like a child and told him no man ever had a better brother, and he was sorry for the distance which had come to separate them. His brother stared back at him as though he was mad. Mulvey laughed. He roared with laughter. Danced across the bogland like a mountain goat.
That night Pius Mulvey did not go roving. He hunkered on the floor of his parents’ cabin with a pen in his hand and a wildness in his heart. The facts of what had happened on that wintry day were hard to meld into the lines of the ballad; if you could even say clearly what the facts actually were. So he changed them a little to fit the rhyme scheme. It didn’t really matter. Nobody would ever know the facts anyway; if they somehow found them out, they wouldn’t find them worth singing. The main thing in balladry was to make a singable song. The facts did not matter: that was the secret. He wrote and scratched out; rewrote, refined. The effect you wanted was a kind of easiness. Strong forward motion and easily remembered words. People needed to feel that the words had written themselves, that the balladeer now possessing them was only their medium. He wasn’t singing the song. He was being sung.
And says he, my fine farmers, if you will sign up,
It’s a handful of sovereigns I’ll give you to sup.
Away with you, Captain, you redbacked auld pup.
For your words are most deeply alarming.
Your bloody auld coat is a fright to behold;
We’d rather go naked and shiver with cold
Than to put on slave’s rags in the morning.
The last verse took the most time to compose. In a song like this it was a matter of custom to put something about Ireland into the climax. Mulvey didn’t give a sparrow’s fart for Ireland and he suspected many of his audience would give even less, but people liked a bit of a shout at a hooley. To leave it out would be not to finish the job; like building a cabin with no roof.
And if ever we take up the musket or sword,
It won’t be for England, we swear to the Lord.
For the freedom of Erin, we’ll rise up our blade,
And cut off your head in the morning!
The first time he sang it, at Claddaghduff Horse Fair on Hallowe’en night, there was a roar of applause afterwards that almost frightened him. And as the shower of pennies fell at his feet, Pius Mulvey’s body began to fill up with light. He had discovered the alchemy that turns fact into fiction, poverty into plenty, history into art. Bread was flesh and wine was blood. He had found his true vocation.
Late in the night he met a girl with pitch-dark eyes and when they lay down together in a ditch by the roadside he felt something of what his brother talked about when he talked of the mysteries of God. A passion that would make you want to bleed out your life, then the peace which passeth all understanding. He was nineteen years old, a man, and a prince. The girl told him she loved him and Mulvey believed her. He knew he was worthy of love at last.
When he came home at dawn his brother was walking the field, his bare feet bleeding as they trampled the stones. He was gaily singing a hymn which wasn’t meant to be sung gaily and at first Mulvey wondered if it was some kind of game. Though the morning was cold his brother was shirtless, his pallid chest speckled with goosepimples and dew. He was scourging himself, he quietly explained. Punishing his body for the good of his soul. He deserved punishment; he was sickeningly evil. If people only knew the lusts that festered in his heart they would burn him or drown him, he said and he grinned. When he turned away to resume his penance Mulvey saw something that stuck him to the soil. The stripes of a horse-flail across his brother’s bloodied back.
He went into the cabin and found the still encrimsoned flail lying like a question mark on the packed earth floor. Tendrils of his brother’s flesh were attached to its thongs, and he shakingly threw it into the fire. The smell of it burning was like cooking meat, and shamefully, as though finding himself aroused by a sister, Mulvey realised the aroma was moistening his starved palate. As he watched the whip shrivel away to a twist of molten blackness, it occurred to him that he had indeed exchanged places with his brother now; had won the unspoken contest for seniority. And he cursed himself for having ever wanted it at all, for it carried accountabilities of which he was afraid.
He brought his gulping brother into the house and settled him as best he could by the fire. Where were you, Pius? I looked and you were gone. Nicholas Mulvey was quietly ranting still, like a man who was dreaming with his eyes wide open, and shaking in his limbs like a calf with the staggers. For you, Pius. I did it for you. After a time he began to calm and he fell into a restless and muttering sleep. Mulvey went out and stood on the boreen. All sorts of thoughts were going through his mind. Where could he go? What kind of help? A priest? A doctor? A neighbourman? Who?
It was then that he saw the paper left to rest beneath the stone. He picked it up. Opened its folds. ‘Final Warning of Eviction’ was the opening line, but it was no brave ballad or song of resistance. The Mulvey brothers had been given four months’ notice. If the back rent remained unpaid, they would have to go.
A fearful moan came from the cabin behind him, the anguished bellow of a beast in a snare. His brother was stumbling over the mossed, black rocks with his left hand outstretched and pumping with blood, and his right hand clenching a blacksmith’s hammer. By the time Mulvey got to him Nicholas had collapsed into the ash-pit, a beatific smile on his hollowed face: through the grizzled wrist of his emaciated left hand protruded the stub of a six-inch nail.
Nicholas Mulvey was taken away to the asylum in Galway but returned after two months, claiming to be cured. He did not want to speak about what had happened that morning; it was a matter of hunger and exhaustion, nothing more. But Pius Mulvey was not convinced. A new lustre now shone from his brother’s eyes; a light that seemed somehow the opposite of light, though you couldn’t have called it darkness either. It was as if someone else had slipped into his skin. A man more rational and evidently at ease; but not the brother whose irrationality and unease Mulvey knew as intimately as he knew his own, and which, in his own way, he had come to love.
A sparse, cold Christmas was had at Ardnagreevagh. The day itself was spent in bed with nothing to eat but a couple of withered apples. Mulvey said nothing about the Warning of Eviction, fearing to madden his brother again. Time enough to share such terrors when Nicholas was fit to hear them shared. Mulvey did not know that such a conversation would never happen. It was already too late for the apportionment of dread.
Nicholas had made a decision. He was joining the priesthood. For a time he had considered an enclosed order of monks but had opted instead to go into the seminary. There was a shortage of priests in Connaught now. It was causing terrible suffering among the poor. All the signs were of famine the following year. An army of priests would be needed then. If it didn’t come next year, famine would come soon. But it would come; Nicholas had been assured. A dreadful punishment would be visited on Ireland. Thousands would starve. Millions, maybe. The people would be scourged until they could bear no more and only when they repented would the harrowing cease. He had thought about it carefully and made up his mind. At times he had considered priesthood a waste of a life but now he could see – since his illness he could see – that the real waste would be for him to do anything else. No other calling could bring him relief. His madness had been sent as a kind of revelation.
‘Stay for a while. Please, Nicholas.’
‘I’ve been studying the scriptures this many a year now. Father Fagan up above says they’ll take me in early. I’m to be ordained as soon as possible.’
‘Is it that drunken craw-thumper Micky Fagan of Derryclare who wouldn’t know his arse from a hole in the bog?’
‘He’s one of God’s anointed, Pius.’
‘Who says it’s a sin to think of a woman? And the Jews must be damned for killing Christ?’
‘He says hard things sometimes. He’s an old man now.’
‘What about the land? Your father’s land.’
‘It’s my father’s land I’m going off to till.’
‘I’m speaking literally,’ Mulvey said.
‘So am I,’ his brother replied.
‘Don’t leave me here, Nicholas. I can’t stick it here alone. At least wait till the spring comes, for Jesus’s sake.’
‘Why?’
‘We’re in a hames of shite. They’re going to put us out.’
‘Trust in God, Pius. You’ll not be alone.’
‘Will you listen to me, man? I’m not talking about God!’
‘Neither am I, Pius. Though maybe we should.’ His brother smiled his shy and beautiful smile. ‘There’s a girl, isn’t there? I can tell by the go of you. You’re like a lamb in April lately.’
‘A lamb in April is mutton by Easter.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘There’s someone, right enough. I don’t know if it’s anything.’
‘Well if this one isn’t right, another’ll happen along soon enough. That’s only nature. Your own vocation. Saint Paul says: “it is better to marry than to burn”.’
‘You’d not want to be married yourself one day? There’s land enough here if we divided it up.’
‘Half a rood? For two families?’
‘There’s many in Galway living o
n worse. We could manage it, Nicholas. Please don’t go.’
Nicholas Mulvey laughed quietly as though what had been said was absurd. ‘That life isn’t given to everyone, Pius. I wouldn’t have the courage for it.’
‘Do you not see girls around that you like?’
His brother sighed strangely and gazed into his eyes. ‘There’s nights I’ve wanted someone so bad I’d weep with the lust. The devil is clever. But that isn’t love; it’s only the body. I couldn’t love a woman in the way you could yourself. You’re the better man of the two of us; you always have been. No man ever had a truer friend.’
A black weed of hatred seemed to sprout in Mulvey’s heart. Even the claim of inferiority was somehow to lord it over him.
It was the fifth of January, 1832, the eve of the feast of the holy Epiphany when the lords of the East came following the star. The last night the Mulvey brothers sat down and ate together, the last time they slept in the same broken bed. Nicholas left at dawn for the seminary in Galway with his mother’s prayer book under his arm and a handful of earth in his pocket for luck; his parting gift the breakfast he refused to eat before leaving and the pair of rotting workboots he said he wouldn’t need any more.
That was the day Pius Mulvey’s dark-eyed girl, Mary Duane from Carna village, a small place on the estate of Lord Merridith of Kingscourt, told him she was expecting his child in the summer. She was crying with what he thought must be happiness. They would have to be married now, she said. And that was a good thing because she loved him after all, and he had often told her that he loved her too. They would live here, of course: on his people’s land. They wouldn’t have much but they would always be here. No matter what was coming, they would face it together. They would live here and die here, like his people before him.
The Star of the Sea Page 13