Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  ‘Oh, God, I love it,’ says D’Arcy, and for a moment the grey fades from his face. For he’s had two or three little turns - griping pains in the chest and jaw, enough to remind him that he must go more slowly. He enjoyed the joyful turmoil of London, meeting all those stunning people, though he didn’t know the names of half of them. One day, I recall, he came back to the hotel full of the great conversation he’d had with a little pink bloke called Dickie, who later turned out to be Richard Attenborough.

  ‘Oh, God, I love it,’ he says, looking out the window at a baker’s boy on a bike. There’s a shabby little shrine to Our Lady stuck in a corner of the wall, and the boy is having a feast of trouble balancing his tray of cakes in one hand and snatching off his white cap with the other. But he even manages to make the sign of the Cross as well.

  While Anne and I explore, D’Arcy rests. When we return we find him sitting up like Jacky in an armchair in the parlour, every sign of loving attention about him, a cup of tea at his elbow, an old lady’s shawl over his knees, and every religious paper in the business laid ready to his hand.

  ‘I’m the king of the castle,’ he says complacently. ‘All I had to do was to tell the mistress we’d seen His Holiness so close I could have cracked him one with a stick. They come in every three minutes and ask me to tell them all over again.’

  A married couple named Dulihanty were the master and mistress of the little hotel. They had an ongoing legpull that Mrs Dulihanty had gone after the master like a ferret after a rabbit. Mr Dulihanty expressed it this way: ‘She was following me everywhere and tormenting the soul from me, so I married her just to get rid of her.’

  They were assisted by innumerable aunts and nephews whose yells of hilarity could be heard from the service areas any hour of the day or night. But most of the work seemed to be done by a thickheaded useful called Michael, incessantly called for by both guests and staff.

  ‘Mee-hawl! Mee-hawl!’ wailed the voices, in the bar, out of the bar, in the cobbled courtyard where we kept our hired car, on the steps where he sat to rub up the brass or set the mousetraps, for which there was plenty of use.

  ‘Mee-hawl, my treasure, you’ve brought me good news,’ said D’Arcy one day, as the lumbering young man delivered a cable. ‘And so I have a little something for yourself.’

  Michael had eyes with a light in the iris, like blue glass in the sun. They almost fell out of his head.

  ‘Oh, holy Jesus, me pocket won’t know itself!’ and he rushed off down the passage shouting, ‘Uncle, Uncle, the Yank give me a punt!’

  The sight of the cable had put me into a sweat for fear it was from Australia with bad news, but it was the best of news. Months earlier we had airmailed an entry in a television-play competition run by the powerful Lew Grade Organisation, and forgotten all about it, as usual. We had won first prize, a handsome prize, and in pounds sterling, too.

  ‘Do you realise what this means to us?’ I asked.

  ‘Could we really?’ he asked, reading my mind.

  ‘Yes, and we shall. We’ll go to Memphis, and do that research on Les Darcy you’ve always wanted to do.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Where’s a church? I have to give thanks.’

  For him it was not a happy coincidence; one of his friends in heaven had pulled the strings.

  Leaving Anne at the hotel, we flew across to London and were presented with the cheque. Second and third prizes were won by another Australian and a New Zealander respectively, which pleased us greatly, for the competition had been open to the entire Commonwealth.

  We flew back to Dublin, rented a more comfortable car, and drove off through the gauzy rain into an antique landscape. The hills wore swansdown caps of cloud; a wasp nest of a ruined castle was stuck on the side of a steep; larks tossed around in a gentle sad sky.

  That is a bewitching land; you can fall into it and be lost willingly, with nothing to mark your vanishing, not even one of those strange Irish tombstones, inscribed with mystic circles, cups and mazes, or the lichened images of thoughtful crowned saints.

  Like so many pilgrims to Ireland we looked for ancestors, mine from Derry and Clare, D’Arcy’s from Kilkenny and Offaly, once called King’s County. We travelled almost five thousand kilometres on that first exploration of Ireland. (Twice we returned, and once in later years I went back by myself.) And five thousand kilometres, in a country the size of Tasmania, or the State of Maine in the United States, is detailed travelling.

  If ever there was a leaky land, it’s that one, oozing water in every direction – puddles, lakes, bogs and countless streams two metres wide that spout down mountains and try to hurdle the road in one jump.

  Our hire car stuck in one of these once, and was pulled out by a tinker’s thin horse, its white hocks painted red.

  Meantime the car was swarmed over by children, fat as butter and thick with dirt, who moaned for alms while their mother aimed swipes at them with a coal-black petticoat and screeched, ‘Get out of there, ye ginger rateens! Ah, mister, if you could give them just the smell of a penny, they’d fall off like fleas!’

  We escaped at the price of all our loose change, a packet of mints and two Qantas kangaroo pins, which went off to awed cries of ‘Gould! Pure gould!’

  The tinkers were on their way to Puck Fair at Killorglin, a Kerry market town which since the thirteenth century has annually been the scene for a ceremony of the frankest paganism.

  The casual onlooker marvels that the Church has not come down upon this three-day hullabaloo like a ton of bricks, but no.

  ‘It takes the sting out of them,’ a parish priest cosily says of the revellers. ‘And it’s not-considered a success until there is a knock down and drag out fight or two.’

  The Puck is a splendid mountainy billy goat, swathed in a magenta cloak, brought into the town on the back of a red truck. He hates everyone, scorching the crowd with his split-yellow eyes, trying to butt the silver-garlanded girl who attempts to crown him with gold. But this is all to the good. A docile Puck is thought little of. He’s hoisted with block and tackle to the top of a sixteen-metre-high pedestal, and left there for three days and three nights (though not without food and water.) Forecasts for the ensuing year based on his demeanour during the ‘honouring’ are freely made and bet on.

  People come from as far away as Glasgow and other parts of the Irish diaspora for The Gathering, as the fair is also known. The pubs remain open all night; the travellin’ people get married, drink, fight and play the pipes; news is exchanged and fought over; cattle and pigs are sold.

  ‘The ceremonial came to Ireland with the Normans,’ says the priest. ‘I daresay the Puck represents the devil. But the Ould Boy isn’t such a bad fella in Ireland, thanks be to God.’

  Our hunt for my ancestors had gone very well, as I have described elsewhere. My grandmother had left Ballindrum much later in the nineteenth century than D’Arcy’s forbears had left Galway and Dublin.

  He was fortunate however, in that he had a surname unusual even for Ireland, and so whenever we found a Niland in the telephone book he rang it up. Without fail he found that the person at the other hand was confident he was a third cousin or some such, greeting him with hospitable yelps of ‘Come on over and have a jar.’

  One set of namesakes lived many kilometres out of Galway city, and so were not on the phone. As it was Easter Sunday, I felt sheepish about calling on them unannounced.

  ‘They’re all so devout, they’ll probably be saying the family Rosary.’

  ‘We’ll be sweet, then. They’ll be filled with the holy spirit and fall on our necks.’

  I persuaded him to put off the venture until the afternoon, when we wouldn’t clash with the ceremonial midday dinner. Thus, by the time we’d been misdirected down many green velvet lanes and passed through many villages bent like wishbones, it was four o’clock and I felt reassuringly late.

  The namesakes lived in a flatfaced eighteenth-century farmhouse, set amongst stone walls topped by shaggy golde
n grass upon which two goats were grazing.

  A flock of lilywhite geese preceded us slowly up a drive lined with holly bushes; at the end stood a drenched madonna with a broken nose and rain running like blessings off her outstretched hands. There were also several cars. A tremendous smell of roast pork, and a fearful row, emanated from the house. It obviously wasn’t Rosary time, and I took instant fright.

  Too late. D’Arcy gave the door one clout with the door knocker, it whisked open and a woman seized him by the scarf and jerked him inside.

  ‘God be praised that you’re here, Doctor,’ she yelled, ‘and poor Uncle Martin gasping for the priest this half hour back.’

  ‘What’s the matter with the poor man?’

  ‘And didn’t Dan say when he brought you the message? It’s a pig’s toe caught in his throttle and him half strangulated with the coughing and barking, poor Martin.’

  At this point she drew back, crying aghast, ‘Holy mother, it’s not you after all, Doctor!’

  There was no hope of explanation; the hall seethed with people. Over-excited children jumped up and down shouting; someone was waving around a carving knife and fork. In the midst of this hubbub we were borne towards a handsome dining room, where a mild, neolithic-looking old man wearing a large bib lolled in an armchair making genteel hooting sounds. An immensely old lady with a green marble cross weighing down her neck tossed a drop of Lourdes water on the sufferer from time to time.

  As far as I could see the old man looked quite bright, not in the slightest purple, in fact, rather fancying being the centre of such uproar. The family party had arranged itself in two divisions. There were the practical, who wanted to stand Uncle Martin on his head, and the resigned, who had already given him up to the mercy of God. The noise was terrific.

  Will someone take off the man’s bib? Declan, will you take off Uncle Martin’s bib? If the man’s going to snuff it, there’s no reverence in a bib.

  Put away the holy water, Granny, there’s a girl. Say a decade for him, that’ll keep you busy.

  Ah, poor Martin, and him making such headway with that pig’s foot. He always did love a pig’s trotter, God bless him. Who’d have guessed it’d come against him like this?

  It’s the toes that did it, Declan, the toes.

  ‘Let’s have a go,’ said D’Arcy with great briskness, and he gave Uncle Martin a shake as if he were a half-filled bag of chaff. ‘Come on, spit it out!’

  Uncle Martin shut his lips tightly and glared up at him defensively.

  ‘Open your gob and let me get my fist in!’

  Uncle Martin coughed like a seal. The moment his mouth opened he was a gone man. After some frenzied gluggings and struggles out popped the small white bone.

  Ah, you have a way with you, whoever you are!

  Blessed be God, when the family fails, He sends the stranger!

  Just then in bustled the doctor with his black bag. Uncle Martin subsided dramatically and began to snore like a steam engine on a grade, but the doctor took in the situation at a glance.

  ‘Sorry I wasn’t here earlier, Norah. Doesn’t look much wrong with the old devil. What a day I’ve had, seventeen cases of the blind staggers. I’ll be thankful when the holy season is over. Now, that’s enough of that, Martin. Sit up like the grand man and Norah will pour you a short one. And I’ll have a sip with you. Now, then who are you? Ah, I’ve got it, you’re the Yanks who’ve been eating at the Green Flag Tearooms. I’ve heard about you.’

  ‘Saved my life,’ began Uncle Martin, determined to get back into the limelight. From the corner of the room Granny’s voice rose as she huffily began the second decade. Someone brought me a cup of Irish coffee that tore off something at the back of my nose. I settled back to listen.

  ‘My name’s Niland and my grandfather came from around here …’

  Niland! Wouldn’t it be the glory of the world if we were all third cousins! Aren’t I always saying that Easter is the best time of the year, Declan? Be quiet, Uncle Martin. Aren’t I now, Declan?

  We had no luck in Offaly, whence D’Arcy’s maternal grandfather, the brutal farrier William Egan, had emigrated long before.

  ‘Not worth tuppence he was,’ says his grandson, ‘and hard as nails with my mother and her sisters, but it’s a sad thing that a man should vanish into the ground like a raindrop the way he has.’

  Nothing remains of William Egan but a story that he was a victim of the great evictions, when the landlords changed over from agriculture to cattle-raising. His entire family starved in a ditch, it is said. Otherwise nothing is known except that he ‘had hair like a young bull’, presumably thick and tightly curled.

  ‘God rest the old rip, nevertheless,’ says D’Arcy, whose son Rory has the same hair.

  We came to Offaly from Athlone, through hesitant rain, pink blackberry bloom, peat cuttings the deep colour of cooking chocolate, shattered stone walls growing topknots of thick and livid grass.

  ‘The flowers here don’t close when it’s raining,’ observed Anne. ‘In Australia they wrap up tight.’

  ‘Not worth their while in Ireland,’ agreed her father, driving through sudden sunlight.

  Offaly’s bogs grew flowers like a garden, as far as the eye could see – daisies, red poppies, meadowsweet like rags of cream lace stretched out on bushes to dry. On a thatched roof bloomed ragwort, and to my dismay, gorse being such an invincible noxious weed in New Zealand, a gorse bush in a cottage garden, trimmed and pampered.

  We are on our way to Clonmacnois. In my young days, when I had no books, and if I wanted to ‘own’ a poem or piece of text I had to learn it by heart, I had committed the T.W. Rolleston poem to memory, and often spoke it or parts of it to D’Arcy when he became ill and couldn’t sleep - ‘In a quiet watered land, a land of roses’ and ‘many a blue eye of Clan Colman the earth covers, many a swan-white breast.’

  Thus we come through the mist to a land we know well, St Kieran’s city fair, not a soul to be seen, the ruins sketched in grey against the steely Shannon, a young shallow river lipping the slopes like nothing more than a big puddle of rainwater. The bulrushes shuffle and sigh; there is no other movement or sound.

  This is a long-gone city. Only two topless towers; crumbled pyramided walls; tombstones standing or tilting in the grass, or lying like stepping stones amongst the daisies speak of centuries past. Tall Celtic crosses, incised with mysterious dumpy figures still in high relief, state that here was Faith, and here it is still.

  Clonmacnois is only one of such sites, but there is something here so tender, so patinated by the long reverence of pilgrims that more than any other place it speaks of the five ‘extraordinary and radiant centuries’ when Ireland’s scholastic fame influenced the known world. For here was a university, a collegiate town of churches and schools, which could handle six or seven thousand students at a time.

  ‘Here is heard only the cry of an otter, or the sharp creak of turning vellum page,’ wrote a physician from Crete who had already studied at the University of Alexandria. Indeed, many of his tutors at Clonmacnois had their education at Alexandria. In those days there was great come and go between Ireland and Egypt.

  In 548 A.D., not so long after St Patrick’s death, this site was deeded to St Kieran by the High King of Ireland. Like most monastic seats of learning, Clonmacnois was placed near a stream, up which foreign students could conveniently travel. This tradition was to lead to the downfall of such universities all over western Europe. The Vikings brought their longships up the rivers, and the Dark Ages fell like a wintry night.

  The ancient Irish schools were free to scholars. They were supported by endowments from rich, pious or princely people, and had their own fishery, quarry and farming privileges.

  ‘I wonder did they have a library,’ says Anne, the dedicated apprentice librarian. Yes, a celebrated one, and a school devoted to copying, the finest scriptorium in Ireland.

  Time has taken away the fame, the ornaments of the world, from Clonmacnois but left
undisturbed its grace.

  ‘I’m going to come and blow about here when I’m dead,’ says my husband, and I wonder whether this is what he meant, consciously or unconsciously, when the Customs man at the airport asked him if he had come home at last, and he answered, ‘God willing.’

  So we went to the United States, and in California, New York and Memphis followed the near fifty-year-old trail of Les Darcy, finding him in yellowed newspaper files, old men’s stories and official records of all kinds. Mostly D’Arcy did the interviews, and Anne and I did library research, peering through viewers in libraries and repositories until our sight fogged.

  ‘Ah, man, he was a lovely fella,’ said one old man, who’d been at Les Darcy’s bedside when he died. ‘I think of him still; he had such a smile even when he could no longer utter a word.’

  For months, years after we returned to Sydney, parcels of old letters, notes, photographs and scrapbooks came to us, legacies from the old men of Memphis who had known Les Darcy, wanted D’Arcy Niland to write that book.

  But he never did. Perhaps the magnitude of the task daunted him especially when he knew his life might end any tick of the clock.

  ‘Come on,’ I would say. ‘I’ll catalogue all this material for you. Act as your researcher, get things in order.’

  ‘That’d be great, Tiger. But first I’ll write this story, this article, clear my desk. You know how it is.’

  Yes, I knew how it was, except that I still wrote on the kitchen table between household tasks. Work kept me from worrying. And there was a practical reason, too; I had to keep busy, hang on to my regular assignments, grab all the new ones, just in case anything happened, an anything undefined even to myself. I broke into a sweat of terror at the thought I might become ill. What would happen to the children then? At this time Anne was working and as nearly independent as anyone could be on a young girl’s wage, Rory was at Sydney University, and the three younger ones still in secondary school. They all needed support of every kind.