In the Time of Famine

by Michael Grant

  Michael wanted to tell his father that there was no sense in making things worse by blaming himself for this disaster. Michael doubted there was a God, but if there was, why, he reasoned, would he waste his efforts on this forlorn country? That’s what he wanted to say, instead, he said, “We’ve done nothin’ to displease God, Da.” Then he remembered the words of a Father Rafferty sermon, words that meant nothing to him, but might be a comfort to his Da. “It’s as Father Rafferty says, the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  As they approached the cottage, Michael knew immediately something was amiss. The front door was shut, which it never was during the day, and there was no usual wisp of smoke rising from the chimney. Fearing the worse, he handed his shovel to his father. “Would you put this in the shed for me?”

  Da gave Michael a curious look, but he was so unaccustomed to Michael asking him to do anything, that he took the shovel without protest and went on to the shed.

  Michael pushed the cottage door open and stepped inside. With the turf fire out, the interior of the cottage was even darker than usual. It took a moment for Michael’s eyes to adjust to the dim light and it was then that he saw his Mam.

  She was lying on her pallet, as though she had decided to lie down for a bit of a sleep. But her eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling. He knelt down beside her and touched her cold cheek, and wondered how he was going tell his Da.

  “Oh, Jasus, Michael… What is it?” Da was standing in the doorway, grasping the doorframe to steady himself. “Why is your Mam lying there like that? Is it the fever, Michael? Does she have the fever?” He shuffled forward. “Sure she’ll be all right. We’ll take care of her. She’ll be right as rain in no time, won’t she, Michael?” Da stared down at his wife and tears streamed down his face. “She’ll be all right, won’t she, Michael?”

  Michael stood up. He wanted to put his arms around the frightened old man, but his father had never been one for displays of affection. It suddenly occurred to Michael that he had never hugged his father. Not once.

  “She’s gone, Da. Gone to a better place.” Michael fervently hoped that was true.

  Da dropped to his knees and threw himself across her body. “No, Mary… You can’t leave me… You mustn’t leave me… For the love of God, please don’t leave me….”

  It was the first time Michael had ever seen his father cry.

  Mam’s burial was a simple affair. Earlier that morning, Michael had gone to the cemetery to dig the grave himself because there were no gravediggers left. They’d all died or fled the countryside.

  While a gentle rain fell, Father Rafferty recited the prayers for the dead while Da, Michael, Emily, and Goodbody looked on. When he was done, Michael lowered his Mam, wrapped in a threadbare sheet, into the ground. He waited for everyone to leave before he filled in the hole.

  Emily insisted they all go back to the church where she made sure Da ate something. When she was satisfied that he’d eaten, she went outside and found Michael sitting on a stone wall. She sat down next to him.

  “Your father isn’t taking it well.”

  “All he ever wanted was to keep the family together. And now, there’s just the two of us.”

  “What will you do?” she asked, almost afraid of the answer.

  “I asked him if he wanted to go to Cork or maybe Dublin. Perhaps there I might be able to earn enough for passage for the two us to go out to America.”

  At the mention of him going to America, Emily felt a sinking feeling in her heart. “What did he say?” she asked bleakly.

  “He’s a stubborn old man. He said he’ll never leave his land.” Michael chuckled mirthlessly. “His land. He still thinks he owns that miserable bit of dirt.”

  Emily bit her lip in relief, eternally grateful for the stubbornness of an old man.

  November 1849

  Ballyross, Ireland

  It was midmorning and Da should have been at the worksite, but he sat by the fire, all alone in the cottage. It was a bitter, cold day and Michael, concerned for his father’s health, had insisted that the old man stay home. Uncharacteristically, he had given Michael no argument.

  He was still sitting by the hearth, staring into the glowing turf fire, when there was a knock at the door. It was a small boy. “I’m to tell you Squire Kincaid wants you up at the big house straightaway,” he announced before running away.

  Da was shown into the great room and memories came flooding back. He remembered how joyful he’d been when Lord Somerville had agreed to sell him the acres that would support his two sons. That seemed ages ago. And then, when that dream was lost and gone in the shambles of the famine, his overwhelming gratitude when Somerville offered him and his sons the opportunity to work with Mr. Goodbody in the soup kitchen, knowing that no matter what, the family would always have a bite to eat.

  The great room looked very much the same as the last time Da saw it, only it was more cluttered than it used to be. There seemed to be more furniture and bric-a-brac about, more things to break, but, now, Da didn’t care if he broke anything or not.

  It saddened him to see the gombeen man, all puffed up and trying to look important, sitting behind Lord Somerville’s big desk. Across the room, a clerk, a little wisp of a man with sneaky black eyes, sat at a small writing table.

  “You wanted to see me, Mr. Kincaid?”

  Kincaid, looking outlandish in a cream-colored long coat, straightened his cravat. “That’s Squire Kincaid to you, Ranahan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How much, Stanley?”

  The obsequious clerk leafed through a thick ledger on his desk and squinted at the tiny, neat rows of numbers. “That’d be forty pounds, Squire.”

  “There it is,” Kincaid said. “You’re forty pounds in arrears. When can I expect full payment?”

  “Mr. Kin—I mean, Squire Kincaid. For the love of God, I don’t have that kind of money.”

  “But you do have a son who likes to meddle in other people’s affairs, do you not? Perhaps he can advance you the sum.”

  “Sure he doesn’t have—”

  “Then I’ll say good day to you, Ranahan. You have till Saturday next to pay or suffer the consequences.”

  Every chance he got, Michael continued to go to the soup kitchen just so he could be near Emily. By the end of the day, he was tired to the point of exhaustion, but he went to the church just the same. He blamed his constant fatigue on his bout with the fever, but he was only partly right. The chronic lethargy, which Michael shared with all the other men on the work gang, was also due to a combination of a diet bordering on starvation and the impossibly hard work on the road gangs. Indeed, as the famine worsened, more and more men were dying on the roads just from the effort to get to the worksite.

  The day before, an official inspector from England had come to the worksite to inspect it. Michael overheard him say to Tarpy, “As a Royal engineer, I’m ashamed to be paying these men for so little work. As a man, I’m ashamed of requiring so much from them.”

  Michael was drying a pile of soup bowls when Mr. Goodbody came in. The Quaker’s usually ruddy face was pale. And his blue eyes reflected a level of distress Michael had never seen before.

  “What is it?” Michael asked.

  He offered the paper to Emily. “It’s the London Times. I pray thee, read the editorial.”

  Emily turned to the editorial page and read. “‘They are going. They are going with a vengeance. Soon a Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the streets of Manhattan...’” Emily paled, cleared her throat, and continued to read. “‘Law has ridden through. It has been taught with bayonets and interpreted with ruin. Townships leveled to the ground, straggling columns of exiles, workhouses multiplied and still crowded express the determination of the Legislature to rescue Ireland from its slovenly old barbarism and to plant there the institutions of this more civilized land...’”

  Goodbody shook his head in dismay. “Does thee believe, as I do, that they are speaking of g
enocide?”

  Tears welled up in Emily’s eyes. There was a lump in her throat and she couldn’t speak. All she could do was nod in agreement.

  When Michael arrived at the worksite the next morning the men were abuzz with the news. The night before, Major Wicker had blown his head off with a shotgun. Earlier that day, Fergus Kincaid and his bailiff had served notice on Major Wicker that his estates, including all chattels and goods, were now in the hands of the gombeen man.

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  December 1849

  Ballyross, Ireland

  Michael watched his father listlessly pick at his bowl of cornmeal gruel. With Mam gone, the cottage seemed oppressively quiet and sad. He knew his father had taken her death harder than the others of his family who had died. Practical, stoic men like Da knew that old grandparents would die someday, and they knew that their children would one day move out of the home to lead their own lives. But they always expected that they would live out the remainder of their lives with their wives.

  Michael pushed his bowl away. He wasn’t hungry either. “It’s time we were on our way to the worksite, Da.”

  Before his father could answer, there was a thumping at the door. Michael opened it and there in the front yard stood Kincaid surrounded by a bailiff and a half-dozen constables.

  “You’re evicted, Ranahan,” a smirking Kincaid said, making sure that the constables were between him and Michael. “You’ve got three minutes to clear out before I tumble the cottage.”

  Michael ducked through the door and stepped outside and Kincaid darted further behind the constables. “What are you babblin’ about, Kincaid?”

  “That’s Squire Kincaid to you. Ask him,” Kincaid jabbed a finger at Da. “He’ll tell you.”

  Michael turned and saw his Da, leaning against the door, trembling with fear.

  “What’s he talkin’ about?”

  “Sure I didn’t want to trouble you, Michael. Last week Kin—I mean, Squire Kincaid here told me we were in arrears with the rent, but I told him I didn’t have money to pay and that I would—”

  “And I said you would suffer the consequences, didn’t I?” He waved a piece of paper in the air. It’s all legal and proper. I have the decree from the courts right here in me hands.” He glanced at the constables, expecting them to acknowledge how reasonable he was under the circumstances.

  But the constables, fed up with being the agent of so much misery, regarded him with stony glares. If the gombeen man was looking for sympathy, he would not find it in this group. These men had become constables to uphold the law. Most of them had no liking for the peasant Irish, whom they saw as undisciplined, uneducated, and shiftless. But there was not a man in their ranks who had ever dreamed that upholding the law would include taking part in the destruction of a man’s home.

  Kincaid, irked that he had no support from the constabulary, turned to the bailiff. “You there, I want you to put the torch to the roof.”

  The bailiff, looking down his nose at Kincaid, said, “I don’t burn people’s homes.” His response was not prompted by some heartfelt sympathy for a tenant farmer about to lose his home; it was because he was angry at Kincaid for reneging on several promised kickbacks.

  Kincaid kept a wary eye on Michael, terrified that the young hothead would attack him again. Desperate to get the tumbling over with, he leaned close to the sergeant constable and whispered, “I’ll give you half a crown to do it.”

  The constable studied the gombeen man with narrowed, cold eyes. “Are you offering a bribe to a constable in her Majesty’s service?”

  Kincaid jumped back as though he’d been slapped in the face. “No, no. Good God, man, no.” He cursed himself. He knew the constables despised him. He’d been using them more and more to keep the peace while he tumbled cottages. And he knew they hated the duty. He’d always been careful not to give them an excuse to take action against him and here he’d just tried to bribe one of them. You fool.

  “You misunderstood, sir,” Kincaid said, scrambling to redeem himself. “I merely meant I would like to make a contribution to the widows and orphans fund.”

  “There is no widows and orphans fund,” the constable said, grinding his truncheon in his big, beefy hands.

  “Oh. Then I stand corrected.”

  While Kincaid had been trying to convince the constable to tumble the Ranahan cottage, the news had spread and everyone had come to see. Kincaid, desperate to get the tumbling over with, turned to the assembled farmers. “I’ll offer a half a crown—no, wait…” he fumbled with his purse and held a shinny coin aloft. “A guinea. A guinea to any man who’ll torch the cottage.” A guinea? he said to himself. Am I mad? A guinea will buy the services of a whole damn village of these bog trotters.

  There was no response from the sullen tenant farmers. Michael, still stunned by the realization that his cottage was about to be tumbled, was grateful that at least none of his neighbors had stepped forward to collect the blood money. If Kincaid wanted to tumble the cottage, he’d have to get a crowbar brigade from somewhere else. Then Michael’s heart sank when he saw big Pat Doyle step out of the crowd.

  On the verge of hyperventilating, Kincaid clapped his hands together. “Good man,” he said. “Get on with it. Get on with it. The quicker you do it, the sooner you’ll be a guinea richer.”

  Even thought Pat Doyle was as emaciated as the rest of them, he still looked formidable. He crossed his arms and faced the crowd with a scowl on his face.

  “I made the mistake of tumblin’ John Scanlon’s cottage for a handful of coins and I’ve not had a minute’s peace since. I’d sooner watch my children starve than put a torch to John Ranahan’s home and I’ll destroy any man who tries.”

  Kincaid groaned. For Jasus’ sake. Am I goin’ to have to do it meself?

  Then, to Kincaid’s astonishment—and everyone else assembled there—John Ranahan stepped in front of the gombeen man and held out his hand. “I’ll do it. But I’ll take the money first.”

  Kincaid hesitated. What if he changes his mind? How will I get my money back? He stole a glance at the stony-faced constables. They’ll be no help. But what choice did he have? Reluctantly, he handed the guinea to the old man.

  “Very well, but get on with it, man.”

  Michael stood in front of the door with outstretched arms. “No, Da…”

  With a look of steely determination that Michael had never seen in his father before, Da pushed him aside. He grabbed a handful of thatch from the roof and ducked through the door.

  Michael went in after him. “Da, this is your home and your Da’s home before you and—”

  “You were right all along, Michael.” Da glanced around the room with tears in his eyes. “Sure it’s not our land. It never was. It never will be.” Da looked at the coin in his calloused palm. “One guinea. It’s all five generations of Ranahans have to show for workin’ the land all those years.”

  Da glanced around the little cottage that had been his home for as long as he could remember and voices from the past echoed in his mind.

  “Mary, will ya be happy here?”

  “Aye, John, I will…”

  “It’s a fine young son you have…”

  “Da, can I go out into the fields with you? Can I, Da?”

  “Michael, Dermot, when the time comes to get married you’ll have a bit of land to build a cottage…”

  “A bit of land…”

  “A bit of land…”

  Da thrust the straw into the smoldering turf fire and it exploded into flame. He took one last look around and, pushing Michael ahead of him, went back outside.

  His neighbors stood in stunned silence. Most stared at the ground, unable to look him in the eye. The constables stood with their hands clasped behind their backs, slowly rising and falling on the toes, determined not to get caught up in the emotion of the moment.

  Kincaid, scarcely breathing, watched the older Ranahan intently. Do it, man. Do it.

  As if heari
ng Kincaid’s silent, desperate command, Da turned to the cottage and without hesitation thrust the burning straw under an eave. The dried thatch immediately burst into flame.

  Michael came up behind his father. “Da, let me do that...”

  The old man, determined to do it himself, roughly pushed his son aside. Stumbling the length of the cottage, he thrust the straw under the eaves again and again, shielding his eyes as flames shot up. Soon, the entire roof was engulfed in flame.

  Michael watched his Da step back from the scorching intensity of the heat and wondered what would become of him now. Michael knew he could sleep in a ditch if he had to, but his father would never survive a harsh winter outdoors in a scalp. He’d just lost his home, and he was in danger of losing his work as well. The old man, physically weakened by hunger and the backbreaking work, and emotionally drained by the death of his wife and youngest son, was incapable of doing the hard work of the road gang. Only last week, Tarpy had pulled Michael aside and warned him that if his Da didn’t do his share he would be sacked.

  Michael went to stand beside his father. For the first time in his life, he put his arm around him, and was stunned to feel bones through the threadbare coat.

  “It’ll be all right, Da,” he shouted above the crackling of the fire. “We’ve still got the work.”

  December 1849

  Ministry of the Treasury

  London, England

  Mr. Kane and Dr. Lindley made an appointment to see Trevelyan. Based on past experience, they had no expectation of changing Trevelyan’s mind, but now that Playfair, the commission’s spokesman had gone, it fell to them to make one last entreaty to save the destitute people of Ireland.