by Eamon Kelly
Is gael mise agus mise im Ghael,
Ni thuigim gur náir dom é
Ni chasfainn mo chúl le fearaibh an tsaoil;
Is ní fearr d’fhear cach ná mé.
(I am Irish and Irish I am,
Of that I am not ashamed.
I would not turn my back
To the men of the world,
And there is no man
Better than I am!)
Walking back to my place I thought to myself not alone was I as good as the next but after confirmation I was a strong and perfect Christian, provided of course that God accepted the act of contrition in place of my bad confession. God is good, I always heard, and he has a good mother. I prayed to her now as my own mother had told me do and asked her to intercede for me with her divine son, and for all the family.
Now that I was confirmed I knew that my days at school were numbered. I’d leave when I was fourteen and follow the trade of my father and grandfather. Already during the school holidays I was helping my father in the workshop, keeping a car shaft steady while he was mortising it for the cross laths or turning the handle of the grindstone. I tried my hand at planing and sawing or drilling deep holes in wood with the auger or bit and brace. At night on the kitchen table I’d rewrite, so that we’d have a copy, the long list of materials down to the last nail, when my father was engaged to do the carpentry work of a new house. Masons built the house in stonework and my father made the doors and windows, staircase and partitions. He put on the roof and slated it and put down the timber floors. Away from school in the summertime I loved getting on the roof and helping to nail the slate laths to the rafters. Nothing gave me more pleasure than clouting two-inch wire nails into timber. When the last lath was on, I’d walk on the inch-and-a-quarter ridge board, with my hands out like an acrobat on a tightrope from chimney stack to chimney stack. My father would nearly have a heart attack watching me but he wouldn’t shout in case I’d fall.
In a short time my father was allowing me to cut the ‘bird’s mouth’ on the heel of a rafter where it fits over the wall plate, or letting me chisel out the chase in the string boards of the staircase to receive the step and the riser. The rough preliminary work I would do like Michelangelo’s apprentice and my father would finish it himself. He had the name of being a great man at his trade and it was a joy to watch him working and a pleasure to see him when a job was finished, the staircase for instance, complete with balusters, handrail, newel post and bull-nosed step, and the way he would stand back from it, his head a little to one side, admiring his handiwork. I looked forward to the time when school would be over and I could be with him every day.
The master’s father, a stately old man with a King Edward beard, lived in the school residence. Now and again he came to the school and looked us over with a practised eye, picking out the boys with the brains. He had a tub trap highly polished, and with yellow stripes on the shafts and on the spokes of the wheels. This classy contraption was drawn not by a high stepping horse or pony but by a jennet, a stubborn and cantankerous animal who’d kick the stars and often left the marks of his hind hooves on the under carriage of the trap. One morning on our way to school we met the master’s father in the trap. As he passed us he lifted the whip crop and said, ‘Good morning, boys!’ To which we all answered, ‘Good morning, Master!’ The jennet must have taken exception to this greeting and as the gate of Mick Horgan’s field was open the jennet suddenly wheeled across the road, almost knocking us down and dashed into the field. The old man stood up in the trap and, tugging at the reins, tried to bring him to a halt but it was no good. The jennet galloped three rounds of the field, making a strange neighing sound, with his tail stuck above the front board of the trap. Then he ran out the gate again and continued on his journey. We would have cheered that morning at what looked like a one-jennet chariot race but we knew the story would go back to our own master and we’d never hear the end of it.
Sometimes when the master’s father came to the school he would say to his son. ‘I want two boys to come to the house and clean out the jennet’s droppings.’ We were afraid of the jennet but still if picked out we would go gladly because it could kill maybe an hour away from lessons. One day I was selected with a boy from Ballaugh. We plodded after the old man over to the house. He showed us the shed where the jennet was stabled and gave us a fork and coarse brush to clean out from him. We thought it strange that he didn’t take the jennet out of the shed while we were cleaning it. Maybe he forgot. We opened the door of the shed and went in. The jennet was tied with a rope running from a halter to a ring in the wall beside his manger. When he saw us he bared his teeth and put both his ears lying along his neck, a sure sign that he had evil on his mind. He threw a few kicks in our direction and collected himself up near the manger. We availed of this opportunity to clean and brush the droppings on to the dunghill outside. We put in fresh straw, going as close to him as we dared. As we made for the door he let fly with the hind hooves. Mercy of God that he didn’t brain us. We told the old man that the job was done. He came and looked and was satisfied and gave us sixpence each. When we came back to class the master asked us how we had got on and the boy from Ballaugh, hoping that the master might be talkative, as he sometimes was, asked him why jennets were so cross. The master thought it had to do with their not being a definite species. He took off his glasses and began to polish the lens with his handkerchief, a sure sign that he might spend some time on the subject.
The jennet was a crossbreed, he said, and so was the mule. In the case of the jennet the mother was a horse and the father was a donkey, and it was the other way around for the mule. He paused for a moment as if he wasn’t too sure of that statement. These hybrids, he explained, did not breed again, which was just as well as there were enough strange looking animals in the world. They were very rough, stubborn, bad tempered creatures, but were great workers and lived longer than either of their parents. The jennet and mule were in great demand during the Boer War for pulling small cannons over rough ground and when they became scarce large donkeys were used for the same purpose. Then with a half-smile as he warmed to his subject he told us that it was announced in the British House of Commons that an army representative was coming to Ireland to buy as many large donkeys as he could find. Our local MP, seeing an opportunity for farmers to make money, asked that the representative come to Kerry. Spanish donkeys were rounded up in readiness for the sale but the army man never turned up. Very disappointed, the MP asked in the Commons why he hadn’t come, to be told that he got his full needs of large donkeys in the midlands and Connemara. ‘He made a mistake,’ the MP said, ‘he should have come south for the biggest asses in Ireland are in Kerry!’ We all laughed, ending in a hee-haw. The master looked at us for a while and then, getting serious, said, ‘Maybe that MP was right!’
THE REAPER COMES
‘Go for the priest!’ was the shout we heard from Daniel’s high field, the same field where we were saving hay when the British soldiers drove up and down Bohar Vass singing and cheering on the day of the Truce in 1921. Daniel had been working at the hay when he had a seizure. Immediately his son was on his bicycle to the presbytery and someone else went to town for Dr O’Donoghue. Neighbours arrived quickly and one man recited an act of contrition into Daniel’s ear as he lay on his back on the ground. His family, the blood drained from their cheeks, were a pitiful sight to see. His wife, her arms around him, cried, ‘Don’t go! Don’t go from us!’ As we waited for the priest – and it seemed ages before he came – everything was done to make the sick man comfortable. The neckband of his shirt was loosened and someone brought a bolster from the house to put it under his head. The priest came in long strides across the field. We all moved back as he knelt beside Daniel, feeling for the pulse in his left wrist. With a grim face he took the penitential stole from his pocket, put it about his neck and pronounced the words of absolution. Then he anointed his eyes, lips, ears and we had to take off Daniel’s boots and socks so that t
he last oil could be put on his feet. The young doctor came in over the fence, running from his car. He knew immediately what everyone suspected: that Daniel was dead. The family wept bitterly. His wife, cradling his head on her lap, raised her eyes to heaven and asked God why he had done this to them.
The kitchen door was taken off the hinges and the body placed on it and taken by able-bodied men and placed on his bed. Older women who had done this job before came and washed the corpse. With his own razor he was shaved and, dressed only in his long shirt, he was put lying on the white sheet of the bed. White sheets were draped over the head and foot of the bed. Two blessed candles were lit, one at each side of a crucifix. The clock was stopped and a cloth hung over the only mirror in the room. Later, when supplies for catering at the wake were brought from town, there was a brown friar-like habit which was put on the corpse. Two pennies were put on his eyelids and a prayerbook under his chin. These would be taken away when rigor mortis had set in and the face with the eyes and the mouth shut would look serene. The hands were joined and a rosary beads entwined around the fingers. The white cord was tied around his waist and his grey socks that his wife had knitted for him were put on his feet.
The wake was about to begin. People were already coming in. Women of settled years, near neighbours and relatives of the family by blood or marriage, sat in the wake room with the widow. Men took off their caps coming into the room, knelt by the bedside and said a prayer. Then they sympathised with the widow or any of the family in the room and spoke a few words in praise of the man who was gone. The wife was dry-eyed and composed after hours of weeping, but when a near relative of her own or her husband’s came into the room she took them by the hand and cried openly.
Her husband was a great loss, his family not yet reared. The older members had emigrated and were now in America. They wouldn’t hear about their father’s death until a letter came and then news would spread to his nephews, nieces, cousins and one-time neighbours. They would all come together and there would be another wake three thousand miles away in New York. With the candlelight flickering on the pallid face of the corpse and paler on the faces of the women there was an eerie atmosphere in the wake room. Voices were subdued except when a near relative arrived and cried out on seeing the corpse on the bed. It was heart-warming to see the feeling of love, sympathy and the sense of loss displayed by all who came and the deep respect they showed for the dead.
The kitchen was brighter. There were two oil lamps lighting. Preparations were going ahead for catering for the crowds who would come to the wake, not only tonight but tomorrow night. Neighbouring wives and daughters would see that tea, white shop bread and red jam were provided for all those who came. The provisions brought in the horse cart from town were still being taken into the house. Some families beggared themselves with the amount of money spent on food and drink. Men were tapping a half-tierce of porter and setting it up on a small table in the bottom of the kitchen with a white enamel bucket under the tap. When the last sympathiser had come and everyone was seated, snuff went around in a saucer as the people settled down to wake the corpse. Each person took a pinch of snuff, praying for the soul of the departed. There was much sneezing, which brought choruses of ‘God bless us!’ or ‘God bless you!’ In a while’s time a man went around with the white enamel bucket full of porter and each man of the older generation got a bowl of the liquid. When they raised the bowl it was not to say, ‘Good health!’ but ‘The light of heaven to his soul!’ The women, girls and younger men sat into the table and drank tea and ate bread and jam.
In a corner of the kitchen there were men cutting and crushing tobacco and putting it in clay pipes. Men, again of the older generation and close friends of the man who was gone, were given a pipe, and as they lit the pipes and the smoke curled up, prayers ascended to heaven for their dear friend. The talk among the men and women was about the late owner of this fine house. They spoke about the age he had reached, about his farm and the great warrant he was to work. The men talked about the times they met him at fairs and markets, at wakes and weddings and in the work they did when neighbours came together for threshing oats or cutting turf. They remembered him as a young man at house dances before he married and how when the music struck up he knocked sparks out of the flagged floor. Those feet were now stilled. They looked at the concertina on top of the dresser which his wife played for set dances in this kitchen. That would now be silent. For twelve months his wife and daughters would go to town or church in black mourning, and his sons would wear a black diamond on the left sleeve.
By degrees the talk took on a general tone and as the white bucket went around again the volume of the conversation increased but never so loud that people forgot the sadness which death had brought to their midst that day. In groups men put their heads together the better to hear old men tell stories until before midnight, when it was time to say the rosary. This was started in the wake room and the person who called the mysteries stood in the short passage between the room and the kitchen. After five decades were recited, the Hail, Holy Queen was said and then the litany for the dead began. When God’s name was mentioned the response was, ‘Have mercy on us!’ and when the name of the Virgin or the saints was called the people responded with ‘Pray for us!’ After the rosary many people went home, but near neighbours and relatives sat and watched and talked and prayed until the grey light came in the window. The next day, relatives who lived far away would come, and that night Daniel would be waked again. On the third morning the funeral would set out for Muckross Abbey.
As the mourners were assembling for the funeral, a tall, stately woman arrived. She was a distant cousin and the first and last person I heard to cry the lament for the dead. At the wicket gate leading to the house she dipped the corner of her apron in her mouth and wet under her eyes to give the appearance of tearstained cheeks. She threw her shawl back on her shoulders and gave a loud cry which sounded like, ‘Oh, oh, oh, ochone, oh.’ She brought her voice up to a fierce wail, which subsided into a singsong as she walked in the pathway. When she saw the family coming to the door her grief knew no bounds and they all added their voices to hers. Other women joined in as they went through the kitchen to the wake room where the family cried their hearts out. Just as suddenly as it began, there was silence and, as if having shaken off a weight of sorrow, those nearest to the dead man smiled and were contented. I had seen for the last time what had once been the dirge for a dead chieftain, when his genealogy was recited in the old days. It was now only a pale imitation of the ritual it had been then.
The coffin came through the door and was borne on the shoulders of four men of the same surname. Each man wore, as did every male relation, a black crêpe piece on his left coat sleeve. The older men put the length of crêpe around their hats. The crêpe was tied with a black ribbon. A white ribbon was used if the deceased was a young person. The coffin was placed in the horsedrawn hearse. There was a pause then while people got into their transport, and when everyone was ready the hearse moved off, followed by sidecars, then traps and common cars and last in the procession were men on horseback. As we were going through the town, shop doors were shut and in some cases a single shutter put up as a mark of respect. The grave was open when we arrived at Muckross Abbey. Neighbours’ sons did the work. Every act connected with the wake and funeral, the catering for the numbers who came to the house, the washing and laying out of the corpse, its placing in the coffin and now the burial, was performed by relatives and friends. All these services were given as a mark of respect for an esteemed neighbour. Death the reaper brought the people together.
The priest read the prayers and sprinkled holy water on the coffin. In the sunlight, drops fell on the breastplate which read, ‘Daniel Moynihan, 49 years.’ When the coffin was lowered into the grave two men went down and, unscrewing the wing nuts on the lid, placed them in the sign of the cross by the breastplate. This meant something, a nod maybe in the direction of rising on the last day. During the prayer
s the relatives remained calm. The great cry at the lament that morning seemed to have drained them of their sorrow, but now as the first shovelful of clay fell with a loud noise on the coffin lid they cried out again. Red-eyed and pale-faced, the wife and daughters wept in their black mourning clothes. The lid covered with earth, the noise was reduced to a dull thud and then no noise as the grave was filled and the green sods beaten down with the backs of shovels on the new mound.
The priest led a decade of the rosary and that over, people waited for a while and then drifted away to pray at a family grave before making their way in twos and threes to the graveyard gate. The men and women would go for a drink when they reached the town. Many of the women who didn’t like sitting in a pub would crowd into the snug. The man who was gone was the talk of the last three days, and he was talked of again when the men came that night to my father’s rambling house, a place where he himself had sat three nights before. They mentioned all the people who came to the dead man’s wake and funeral and they all agreed a king couldn’t have got a better send-off.
THE STATIONS
My mother always wanted to have the stations in our house but it was not to be. The station Mass was said in the farmers’ houses. The powers-that-be decided that the occupant of an artisan’s dwelling would be unable to meet the expense of catering for a big crowd the morning of the stations. The men around my father’s fire did not know the origin of the stations unless they were necessary in the penal times when there were no churches in which to say Mass. They did say that the priests in those days travelled long distances and were put up in the station house the night before. There were at least seven obligations the owner had to meet in connection with the priest’s stay: a room, a bed and a fire, food, polish for the priest’s boots, oats for his horse and an offering. The men heard tell of the days when the priest was hunted and of the time when there was no presbytery in our parish and only a shack for a church. The parish priest and his curate lived in a one-roomed hovel. The curate was an exceedingly holy man. He’d give the shirt off his back to the poor. One day a beggar asked him for help. The curate told him he had no money, that he had given his last ha’penny to a poor man the evening before. The beggar persisted in his plea for help and asked the curate in the name of the Virgin to give him something. ‘Look!’ says the curate, turning out his trouser pockets. Half a crown fell on to the road. He gave the money to the beggar and nothing would convince the holy man but that the Blessed Virgin had put the money in his pocket.