He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  This weather controls the Irish brain; the fact that from youth to graveyard a person does not have the freedom to step out from under his own roof without drowning so restricts the people that madness sprouts like mushrooms. As the reason for madness is so obvious — look up at the clouds — it is deliberately omitted from most of the academic and medical research on Irish genius and instability. Mix weather with the still-lingering effects of Jansenism and sometimes there can be trouble of great magnitude.

  Jansenism is a religious teaching that says love is really felonious assault on God. When the British outlawed religious training in the seventeenth century, young men were smuggled to Louvain University in France, where Cornelis Otto Jansen, a religious fanatic, taught his theories and sent priests sneaking back to Ireland, where they dressed like civilians and told the Irish that even holding hands was sinful. Jansen was condemned by the church as a heretic, but his doctrine lasted in Ireland and then was transported to America, particularly to all the eastern states where, hundreds of years later, a state the size of New York, with a population of fourteen million, could not get full sex education into all of its public grammar schools because of the grip held on the government by Catholics.

  Any religious mania is assisted by the rain that has doused the race for so long that finally in a lifetime a person shakes a wet head to throw off the excess water and finds that this time the inside of his head does not stop swiveling. Frequently, religion and weather combine to destroy people before they can reason.

  D’Arcy Cosgrove was eleven years old when he first thought of becoming a priest. One day a recruiter for the Redemptorist order came in and made such a stirring presentation about the glories of serving God and self-denial that when D’Arcy went home for lunch, he was utterly convinced. His mother was at the stove with steam rising all around her. “Mum, I’m going to be a priest,” D’Arcy said.

  “No you’re not,” his mother said, stirring pots in the steam.

  Then one day, when D’Arcy Cosgrove was twelve, his mother suddenly began to weep during a rainstorm on a February afternoon, and when the tears did not stop for several days, his father took her on the five-hour bus ride to Cork City, where in the long red-brick mental hospital on the Lee Road the female attendants interested her in making moccasins.

  At first it was difficult for her to move her hands. After several weeks, however, she stitched with a country girl’s deftness while women attendants reveled in her progress and lectured to her that upon her return to the hut on the cliff, she must continue making moccasins, selling them anywhere, just keep working, and then one day male attendants came in while she made her moccasins and said this was her scheduled day for shock treatment. The female attendants tried to protest, but a male attendant leafed through his documents and said no, this was the day on which she must have her treatment.

  As the Irish are a third-paragraph race — the first two devoted to the weather and then in the third the news that your mother has just died and you had best hurry home for the funeral — the idea of talking out a mental illness with a psychiatrist was completely alien at that time. For any disorder of the head stronger than a common headache, the subject was strapped to a pallet, as D’Arcy Cosgrove’s mother was, and hit with enough electricity to light a street. The insides of her head were shaken like dice in a box, with the predictable result that the same dice came out, but with different numbers on the top. She returned from shock treatment unable to make moccasins but now quite adept at shrieking in the night.

  “To make a long story short, the Devil sits on her mind,” a male attendant told the husband. They sent the mother home with him.

  In July the sun broke through the clouds and remained for several days of a fantastic heat wave, climbing to 74°. D’Arcy Cosgrove found his mother on the floor with blood running out of her ear. She was taken to Dunboy Hospital, where she died of her hemorrhage. The local newspaper, the West County Telegraph, ran a headline saying, WOMAN IS VICTIM OF MASSIVE HEAT WAVE.

  Rain returned for the funeral, streaming off the casket as it was carried down the church steps. Helping carry the casket, D’Arcy Cosgrove resembled the land on which he was raised. His flesh barely made it across his rib cage, just as the earth at Dunboy was spread so thinly over hills that when rain lifted and light fell on the hills, the sheer rock glinted through the thin covering of soil.

  Later, D’Arcy’s father, left with four children, sat with Bill O’Connell, proprietor, the Landmark Inn, and had a gloomy drink. “The boy mentioned to me that he wants to be a priest,” D’Arcy’s father said.

  “To tell you the truth, I’d sooner be cut in pieces,” Bill O’Connell said.

  “What am I going to do with him home?” D’Arcy’s father said. “He’s best taken care of in a seminary.” And so D’Arcy Cosgrove went off to become a priest.

  The priest in Ireland, as he stood at the altar with Christ, God the Father, and the Holy Ghost inches away in the tabernacle, was considered by all as superior in station, knowledge, and celibacy. He was a great soldier who made a chapel of his body, which he mortified by forfeiting the pleasurable side of his organs as the first offering each morning.

  When he left Dunboy for a religious boarding school in Toome, in the center of nowhere, D’Arcy wanted to be a missionary priest — not uncommon, for travel is exciting, and the Irish love to save distant blacks. Blacks in person are something else.

  This does not diminish the national desire to save blacks who are far away; in the West country, in towns such as Dunboy, there were signs for the “Black Babies Fund.” Meanwhile, in the fields outside the same towns, the Irish homeless, the tinkers, sit on the ground with children coughing and mothers ancient and dying at forty and fretfully watching the road where, so often, townspeople who have donated to the Black Babies Fund come rushing angrily with torches to set the tinkers’ wagons afire.

  D’Arcy had seen only one black in his life, at a circus that came to Limerick. The circus black was a man whose ebony skin fascinated D’Arcy as much as what he did, which was to eat fire. The man came out in tights, bare from the waist up, and held a flaming torch to his lips. D’Arcy watched to see if the flames reflected on the man’s skin, which they did not. The black man eased the torch into his mouth and snapped his mouth shut. The crowd wailed and screamed, the noises turning into delighted laughter as the man opened his mouth and brought out a dead torch. “Your man here just ate your fire!” the barker screamed. D’Arcy ran forward and reached out and placed his hand on the ribs of the black man. He then retreated to the edge of the crowd and examined the hand carefully, to see if there was any evidence of contact with the black.

  At the school in Toome, boys were housed and taught in one building and girls in another, and as both supposedly were on their way to religious orders, both sexes were required to walk with eyes downcast so as to prevent accidents and then late one afternoon, for no reason at all, a whim in the rain, D’Arcy, walking alone, heard footsteps and he found himself facing a girl with a full mouth that spread even fuller into a smile that caused him to move toward her. Such a step spread a deliciousness through his body and he intended to experience it fully, and obviously so did the girl, for they met mouth-first and a nun came out the door to grab the girl and a priest yelled out the window.

  D’Arcy never saw the girl again. That night all the school priests sat in a large room by candlelight and considered whether D’Arcy should be banished or beaten. When it was over, the prefect of discipline took D’Arcy to a room in the basement, a cold room with a puddle on the floor, and beat him with a hazel rod.

  Even when he went on to a seminary in Tipperary, he still was required to ask each day for a special penance for his sex-crime sin.

  In the seminary, he also found that the students had to address one another as “Mister” in order to keep cold formality in daily relations and diminish the Devil’s ultimate threat, homosexuality. Whenever any student placed a foot in another’s room at nig
ht, particularly in February, the most dangerous month for sin, Monsignor Fagan, pacing the hall, would roar, “Sodomites!”

  Time and time again the seminarians were forced to read Rodriguez’s description of punishment for sexual transgression by a priest: suffering that would be magnified a thousand times because the priest had betrayed the personal trust of God. Along with this suffering would come an added torture, a sexual desire that would never be satiated through all the millions of years and the millions of years that followed them.

  This terrified him forever. Home for a month, he picked up a copy of the American National Geographic magazine in order to read about his future parish, Africa. The magazine’s covers were usually ripped off by the town librarian. On this hot day, Cosgrove found a copy that the librarian had neglected to rip off, a cover of a proud African woman, her bare breasts beckoning to all to buy the magazine in the name of natural history. Cosgrove ran out of the library with the magazine and on the way home, looking at it intently, he found himself hard between the thighs and he swerved off the road at the secret house that he and the other kids had played in, a crumbling stone building that sits in tangled brush. He sat on the dirt floor and he knew he was supposed to be reading about lions or pottery in the Congo, but instead he was fixated by the two roaring big brown tits on the cover of the National Geographic.

  He had been in such a hurry to get off by himself that he neglected the significance of where he was. It had been a British granary in the 1840s, when the wheat crop owned by the British was excellent, although the potato crop used to feed the Irish was blighted. The potato had been brought to Ireland by the British from Peru in the sixteenth century. There were many varieties of potato in Peru, but the British brought only one, known as the clone, which was susceptible to fungus. When the fungus struck the clone, the Irish, with no second variety of potato, merely planted any potato eyes that seemed to be uninfected and prayed that the next crop would be clean, which it wasn’t and over a million died in the West of Ireland and two million others fled, most to New York and Boston.

  And in the West of Ireland, through the many years, the tale of the famine was passed along by a town storyteller, but always a renegade storyteller, not one welcomed by the general populace, for the stories he told on this one particular subject, handed down through all the years, were invariably horrifying. The renegade storyteller would stand in an alley or at the edge of a field, away from the decent people, and tell of cannibalism on the west coast, around the very town itself, yes, perhaps in the very town itself, the storyteller intimated. People dying of starvation, their mouths stained green from eating grass, became crazed and took man’s unthinkable step and ate a friend. Each time a storyteller whispered the word cannibalism, somebody would flee from the audience in horror and report the storyteller to police and church. Over the decades, many of the town’s storytellers were either chased out of town or thrown into jail.

  Of course the official records of the famine, as opposed to oral storytelling, showed that at the very height of the famine, the British continued to fill sacks with grain and ship them to Southampton. Soon there weren’t enough Irish in the town with the strength to work the wheat fields. So, with ceremony, the British donated the granary to the Irish people for use as a Children’s Home. This was in the British tradition of covering horror with reasonable language; it had a proper name, Children’s Home, but its function was to serve the entire area as a morgue for children who died of starvation.

  The official records for the entire famine in town were kept in one of the damp stone buildings used by British government workers during the years the Irish lived in subjugation and starvation. The British stored the records in the cold wet attic of the three-story government building in the town square, only feet from the waterfront. When the British left the town in 1916, the garrison commander sneered at the people and said they were rabble and that the only history of the town’s ever having been on the face of the earth would come from the civilized manner in which the British kept records. “We put the history of these years on proper paper, thickest parchment, and it will outlast every one of you buggers and the bloody children you produce.”

  With that the British departed, and their records sat in a building which went unused for over a quarter century. During winter months, the stone walls of the attic where the records were kept became so damp that the stones turned green with mold and water streamed down the walls. Whenever anybody talked about the building, the subject was demolition, not rehabilitation.

  The records were forgotten, and so was the ruin of the old Children’s Home, where at this very moment, D’Arcy Cosgrove was flat on his stomach and somewhere in the earth under him were the bones of hundreds of children who had starved to death, and as he looked at the National Geographic cover, he wiggled around, face down, and unbearable tension filled him and then he was relieved and he had no idea of what had happened except that his underwear was stuck wet to him. He felt great depression. He ran from the building, for one of the truly greatest of sins, masturbation, had been committed in it. He rode his bike to the Well, which consisted of a circle of mean rocks at the foot of a section of cliff that was only ten feet above the water.

  At low tide the rocks were high out of the water. On a flood tide the water covered the rocks and the water inside the rocks was five feet deep. An incoming wave caused the water in the Well to rise to nine feet. A leap from the cliff, timed with the incoming wave, but still made with the marvelous fear that the wave would recede and leave the rocks high, ended with a plunge into nine feet of freezing water. But it took a leap of perfect aim, and great timing, and therefore it was not a suicide, punishable by interment forever in Hell, but a sporting chance at life or death and some tried and lived and now, staring at the water, Cosgrove remembered a day in the heart of a fall rainstorm when Paul Daley, forty-seven, who lived with his mother, was found draped on the rocks.

  Cosgrove knew that never could he confess to this monstrous sin, and under the rules of the seminary, he could confess only to one of the priests in charge, thus eliminating the hope of finding some ancient country priest in a haze. Cosgrove thought of his sin and stared at the water, assured himself that it wasn’t suicide, and jumped. Immediately he screamed Christ’s name, for he knew that he indeed had meant it as suicide, but he did not want to die and he hit water and went into such dark sea green that when his eyes were open nothing could be seen, not even the rocks that brushed his shoulders as he rose. After this, confession at the seminary was painful but bearable. And always he carried in his mind the vision of the granary as the center of sin.

  The next morning a young boy banged hard on Cosgrove’s door and told him that the pastor needed him immediately. When Cosgrove got to town, he found the pastor and the mayor and an old man, the owner of the town’s one great estate, which ran for a quarter mile along the waterfront. They wore concerned looks and talked quickly.

  “How is it that I didn’t know?” the mayor asked the old man.

  “Because I was told nothing. The woman’s barrister got on to me over the phone and told me how they had arrived at my name, through my own barrister in London, of course, and I became properly concerned when I was told that she was just around the bend out there, spending the night with Lady Glassniven.”

  “And good Lord, here she is,” the pastor said.

  All looked at the old government building, where at the open green wood front doors stood an old woman, a wisp of a woman, obviously a regal woman, in a tweed suit and with chin properly raised, but also a woman of great industry, for while she had on a tweed suit, she also was wearing dirty work gloves. She walked with a high ladder against her shoulder and it was a struggle for her, but she refused to allow any signs of effort to cross her face. She carried the ladder through the two large green wood doors and into the old empty building.

  “She must be stopped,” the pastor said.

  “If she isn’t, we’ll all die in shame as we s
tand here in this very spot.”

  The pastor spoke to Cosgrove. “Here, lad, you’re young and vigorous and able to know what you read. Come off with me and we’ll talk.”

  He took Cosgrove for a walk and instructed him carefully, after which Cosgrove went into the old building, climbed the stone staircase, and found the old woman on the ladder, her gloved hands testing the old wood trapdoor in the ceiling that opened to the attic.

  “Here, let me,” Cosgrove said.

  Nimbly, he went up the ladder and when he could not budge the old trapdoor with his hands, he gathered himself and used his head as a hammer and the door burst open. He crawled in and assisted the old woman. They stood in the dampness and pale light and looked at rows of wood filing cabinets lining the walls. The woman walked over to a cabinet and pulled it open. She took off her work gloves and put on glasses and her long fingers went into the file and brought out a packet of papers bound with white cord. On the cover sheet, printed in large letters, were the words POTATO FAMINE, JAN., FEB., 1847. The woman went into her purse and brought out a small pair of scissors and snipped the cord. Then she sat on the cement floor with the papers in her lap.

  “You’re sitting on a wet spot,” Cosgrove said to her.

  “I shall gladly hazard pneumonia for just a glimpse of this,” she said.

  She began to leaf through the pages. Suddenly she jumped up and went to another file cabinet. She pulled out packets, inspected them and gasped, and went almost frantically to the next cabinet, after which she slumped to the wet floor, closed her eyes, and sat motionless. Many moments of silence later, she said, “My God!” Then she said to Cosgrove, “Do you have any realization of what we have just found? I suppose you don’t. Do you know my name or what I am doing? I guess you don’t know that, either. Don’t know why you should. Fine young man sent to help me and help you did. If you only knew how much. What is your name?”