The Grey Horse

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  Tadhg Ó Murchú was a good speaker but not a loud one, and it was all he could do to drag the heads of the assembly back to face him as he finished his sermon. But he worked at it powerfully, for he wanted them to remember.

  He stepped down from the lectern, and a few of the soldiers, perhaps Nonconformists, took a step through the doorway, only to be restrained by Major Hous, who was raised Church of England and knew what a mass was. For the long offertory they stood there, almost at attention, blocking the increasing daylight out of the doorway.

  Hous wondered, as he listened to the stream of Latin, whether perhaps the priest was giving the congregation instructions for a concerted attack upon the soldiery. Though their own language seemed to Hous made up only of sounds of complaint and throat clearings, still he knew many of them spoke Latin. Or worse, French. There were over a hundred people here, and the women as rough as the men, he had no doubt. But two dozen regulars were a match for any hundred peasants.

  The communion was very slow, as it seemed that every pew would empty out its contents to the altar rail; and to slow things down even further, the two altar boys who aided the priest had been frightened into clumsiness.

  There was noise in the street; his men had evidently found something to laugh about. He spared a moment to look, though the service was almost done.

  The girl they had encountered on the street had now led her horse by the forelock to the foot of the church steps, where it was clowning for the men. It was a silly-looking beast, lop eared and with a hanging head, and at her command it put the most unlikely expressions on its face. It could cross its ears.

  The girl herself was heavy eyed and with lips that promised something. Hous wondered if she was looking for trade and would carry her advances even into the church. He decided to put a stop to that, but as he opened his mouth the girl lost her hold on the horse’s forelock.

  “Oh, dear!” she said, in English, and the horse stepped up to the door.

  First it pushed one trooper aside and tried to stick its head between the man’s coat and his shirt. “Hand-raised and spoiled,” said the major. He pushed at the animal’s hip and received a stinging tail across the face.

  “Prick it with a knife!” The major was spitting horse hairs as three right hands reached to do his bidding. In another moment the horse had exploded, shrieking, toward the nave of the church.

  “Now you’ve done it,” said the girl very flatly.

  “Ite, missa est,” Ó Murchú had said. “Go, the mass is over.” The congregation was in its mumbled reply when the horse screamed. Every one of them turned and every mouth was open as they watched the race winner of two days before charge down the central aisle snapping its teeth. The stallion looked neither right nor left, but came at the priest like a devil unleashed, took him by the throat, shook him, hauled him over the altar rail, and dragged him toward the small, side door.

  At first it was thought the man was dead, for the assault was horrible and straight for the throat, but then Ó Murchú, too, was screaming, though his words were lost to most amid the horse’s violence.

  There were soldiers at that door, of course, but very few of them had ever in their careers gone to battle against a raging stallion, and had very little idea how to go about it. Nor were they sure whether they were now to take the Popish priest, rescue him, or merely watch him torn asunder.

  Out in the yard the beast shook poor Ó Murchú again, so that the priest’s head and arms were entangled in the long chasuble he wore, and then with a gesture more like a fox’s than a horse’s, it flung the man over its back and went galloping down the road, with its burden flopping and bellowing on top.

  The major’s own horse had been left with his batman, but when he ran to it, it was dragging the soldier by the length of its rein and could not be mounted. He commandeered the Hackney horse out of the shafts of Ó Cadhain’s wagon and slashed the lines to riding length with his saber. “Keep them in the church!” he shouted behind him.

  Riding that high-stepping horse in its blindered bridle, bareback, he came out of the town of Carraroe to find an empty road and no sight or sound of a horse over all the treeless landscape. Since he could not convince the beast to leap the embankment, he kicked it north along the road until he had disappeared as completely as the stallion and the priest.

  The parishioners were still in the church, every man jack of them, held at prayer by riflepoint. Neither did they look eager to leave, for in that one space Major Hous witnessed more upturned eyes and crossings of self than he had encountered in all his previous career in Ireland. He noted the faces, from the ancient with the stick by the doorway to the bereaved widow in her black lace.

  “Where’s the girl? The girl that started all this.”

  His lieutenant dipped his eyebrows in thought.

  “I told you to keep them in the church!” said Hous.

  “She … she wasn’t ever in the church, sir. After the horse went mad, I don’t think any of us saw her again.”

  Hous strode down the aisle, his boots making a racket, and stopped at the widow. “Who was the girl at the church, door?”

  Áine stood in her dignity. “I didn’t see anyone in the door but soldiers.”

  For a moment Hous was angry, but he glanced behind him and saw that she was speaking the truth; no one in the church could have seen down the steps and past his men.

  “Who owns that horse?”

  Áine smiled, as she had for Seosamh. “Many would have liked to. My old man, for one of them. But no one owns him. Though sometimes he is friendly, he is not tame.”

  Major Hous smiled along with her, grimly. “I agree with you there.”

  No one had an explanation to offer better than that simple one offered by the major’s eyes. Knife pricks had set off the spoiled, untrained beast, and it had gone for the man in its path as a fox goes for a goose. Old Colm Ó Baoill, who rarely strayed from the stoop of his cottage for anything less important than a funeral, had a variant upon this: that it had been a fairy horse and had stolen the priest away. This was offered in Irish and translated, with much reddening and apology, by a shamefaced grandson.

  Major Hous thanked the old man but preferred his own explanation. He sent his men out to comb the stone hills and the boulders of the peninsula, to find the remains of the brutalized Ó Murchú.

  It was a fool’s errand; it took all the day, and half of the men ruined their trousers in the bogs.

  It was not too far from Casla, that poultry house where Toby Blondell had not been desperate enough to linger on the day when he ran away. The desperation of a man may exceed that of a boy, or perhaps Tadhg Ó Murchú had grown up with chickens. He made no complaint about his lodging.

  That is not to say he made no complaint. For thirty minutes Ruairí MacEibhir had squatted in the other open corner of the hovel and listened to his faults itemized. The fairy was a swaggering, intrusive, and unintelligent lout. His life was utter selfishness and his soul as dumb as that of a beast. He had thrust his way into the Catholic Church with no more sense of his own actions than a cow lapping the holy water font. And he had now capped his life of thoughtlessness with the mortal sin of sacrilege against the sacrament of the mass, which was all Ó Murchú’s fault, he had to admit, for allowing this camel his head in the church door to begin with.

  Ruairí listened without much attempt to interrupt, for his few minutes, of roaring rage, though purely theatrical, had taken all fight out of him, and his flight up from Carraroe to the crossroad had been at full speed. Besides, he had his ear pressed against the woven screen of the window, listening.

  Through the half light he noticed something, and he put up a finger. “You have blood on your neck,” he said to Ó Murchú.

  The priest slapped his hand to the spot. “If I do, who’s to blame for that, you renegade?”

  And Ruairí grinned toothily. “Better a little pinch now than the rope’s pinch down the road.”

  On Ó Murchú’s lap was the seam
-ripped and tooth-torn funeral chasuble. His head drooped over it, and he sighed. “I was prepared for that. To run is to bring shame both to my vocation and my convictions.”

  “Hear me, Tadhg Ó Murchú. You didn’t run; you were dragged out by the throat by a murdering mad beast. Your bishop will be very pleased to have a dead priest instead of a priest in the dock. Your friends in France and in America, from all I hear, will be glad enough for your living presence among them.”

  Ó Murchú said nothing.

  “And Máire Standún, I think, will be glad for you to get safe away.”

  The priest’s eyes flickered left and right in the light of the willow screen. “I imagine she will; why not? Is she a part of your bloody scheme, Ruairí?” He did not seem pleased with the idea.

  “It is the work of her hand only,” answered Ruairí. He also did not seem pleased. “And she is climbing the hill to us this moment.”

  Máire came up with a bale of fleeces on her back. Hers was not a fast progress, and because the weight was on her shoulders, she tended to wobble. In the shadow of the poultry house she put down her burden and then disappeared into the hole in the roof, amid a protest of hens.

  “So you’re the author of this comedy, I hear.”

  She peered around her. “In some ways I am. Don’t be sullen, a Thadhg. What was done fulfills all your stipulations …”

  “I know. It’ll make the pope and the queen very happy.”

  “And you too, I hope,” said Máire.

  The dark man and the dark woman confronted each other, hardly able to see. Ó Murchú didn’t answer, and the air began to crackle with their suppressed feeling.

  Ruairí shoved past her and worked his head and shoulders through the hole. It was a difficult job.

  Máire found him by feel. “Where are you going, Ruairí? I brought your supper in with me. It’s in my lap.”

  “I’m not … I have somewhere to be,” he called down through the slats.

  She took the canvas of his trousers in her two hands and pulled. She was a strong woman. “What do you mean, you have somewhere to be? What sort of appointment would take you away in the middle of all this?”

  “Don’t go yet,” said Ó Murchú, and in his voice was authority.

  Ruairí MacEibhir hovered over them, half crouching, his hair in the slats where the chickens had messed. “I will go, though. There is no reason I should be here with the two of you.” He glanced over at Ó Murchú, grimacing for the dirt in his face. “I will return for you tonight, and we’ll have you in Clare by tomorrow at the same time.”

  Máire was not oblivious. “What does the man mean: he won’t be here with the two of us? Does he think we’re sweethearts?”

  “I do think that, and it is true.” He pulled upward, and she pulled down with doubled strength. Ruairí came down heavily half on her lap and half on the cake, ham, and potatoes. He rose again and hit his head against the roof.

  “Well, can you deny it, woman? It seemed to me that if the soldiers took him, you’d die on the spot. And you, Priest of the Parish no longer, what is there to keep you away now, from this woman who is worth so much more than it?”

  Máire gave an astounded snort. And Ó Murchú, speaking calmly with his face as closed and secret as ever, said, “I told you once, Fairy Man, that if I broke my vows, it would not be for Máire Standún.”

  “Of course not!” added Máire, explaining the obvious. “There has been nothing like that at all. You, Ruairí MacEibhir, are as bad as any of the nasty-minded old women in the parish.”

  He heard her, but didn’t take his eyes off Ó Murchú. “Well, then. If you want nothing of this woman, and I am too dangerous a swain, is this treasure to be left gathering dust?”

  “What do you mean, you are too dangerous a swain? Did … did he”—and she pointed at the priest through the darkness—“did he tell you to stop courting me, Ruairí?”

  “He did, and wisely. I killed a man, a Mháire. I killed the man Grover.”

  “Good for you!”

  “A Mháire NíStandún!” shouted Ó Murchú. “You are a bloodier heathen than he is!”

  Ruairí tried to explain. “I shouldn’t have done it; for I had taken a vow against that. I broke his back as I would kill a rabbit, and it is probably for that reason the soldiers marched into the church this morning.”

  “Don’t take away all my credit,” murmured Ó Murchú. “They knew what they were about, if they went for Morrie, too.”

  Máire settled against the filthy wall. “I’m learning a lot today,” she said. “And you’re more of a fool than I took you to be. But what other husband is there for a nationalist wife than a dangerous one, even if he is a fool?”

  “But it could be that you would be left …” Ruairí stopped in the middle of his phrase. “A Mháirín, I’m not one for cutting my own throat. If you are saying you’ll have me …”

  “I’m not saying all that,” she answered. “I have questions in my mind, but neither my father nor this priest here nor even you, laddie, is the one to decide whether I’ll marry and who I’ll marry.”

  Ruairí sat up and struck his head on a perch, which broke. But Máire glanced uncertainly from him to the priest. “I’d like you to close your ears, Tadhg.”

  “I’m not likely to repeat what I hear,” he said, laughing. “I’ve had practice in that before now.” But he lowered his head and put his index fingers in his ears.

  This method was not proof against hearing, he found, even when he ground his teeth to help. He heard the word “mare,” and then Ruairí answered very clearly, “Well, I do have a great respect for them, darling, but …” And then the fairy was laughing very coarsely, and Máire said nothing at all.

  The voices went on for a long time, and when they lost their urgent up-and-down-ness, Ó Murchú got tired of having his fingers in his ears. Unobtrusively he lay his hands over the mangled chasuble on his lap.

  It was Ruairí, speaking: “… and the mare is out of Tim Ó Cadhain’s best blood mare and by Anraí’s black. But her baby is by my own black king, and it will be a filly. She’s the very horse for you: Anraí paid Diarmuid for her already, though she’s not even a swelling in her mother’s belly.”

  He sounded very confident, as though the matter was decided between them.

  “Hers is the blood of all the good horses in Connemara—those that are really horses, my love, not púca fairies—and she will be the foundation of our stable.”

  “You’re going too fast,” answered Máire. “I haven’t said I will. This is not the time to be discussing affairs of the heart, with the soldiers getting lost in every combe and Tadhg, here …”

  Shifting uneasily, Ó Murchú put his second fingers into his ears. They worked better.

  He almost fell asleep from the weariness of being bruised, bloodied, and hauled over the hills, but a sound roused him. Ó Murchú raised his eyes in time to see Máire’s full petticoat disappearing through the roof. She put her face in again and winked and whispered, “Tonight.”

  He was left alone with the hens all afternoon, and they shared the very nice funeral supper that Áine had ordered, Maurice prepared, Máire carried, and Ruairí sat upon.

  Two days went by Ruairí MacEibhir came back from Clare very tired, only to find Donncha in worse condition than Ruairí. The horsemen worked together for a week of long hours, repairing the neglect caused by three days of upset.

  The soldiers were gone, and Major Hous had become reduced to one of Maurice’s stories: a small part of the large story that was the great race and its tragedy, and the other tragedy or miracle that had happened at the funeral. The major’s name was remembered, however, for he had had the boldness to ride off on Ó Cadhain’s bone-jarring Hackney, though he hadn’t gained anything by it but barstool fame.

  Ruairí was in Carraroe often, and each time he looked happier, sleepier, and broader about the shoulders. He called upon Máire at the back door of her house, according to approved custom. />
  On a day of clouds a week after the funeral of Anraí, it was Seán Standún who opened the door and who closed it after Ruairí.

  The fair man stood like a razor, “My daughter,” he said, “tells me that she is with child by you.”

  Ruairí’s eyes opened wider. “She does? Then she must know very little about the act of engendering. I had thought Máire raised chickens, at least.”

  Standún didn’t move. In his hand he held his polished walking stick, which he no longer needed. He held it very tightly. “It is not Máire we’re talking about.”

  Now there was a ring of white around each of Ruairí’s eyes. “Eibhlín? She is very ignorant, then. Or does me more honor than I deserve, in that case. Bring her here to me.”

  Seán Standún hesitated, fingering the stick, but at last he called her name. He had to call twice.

  Eibhlín slid into the room, looking pale, pretty, and very frightened. She stood behind her father.

  “Now why would you tell your father I have trifled with you, woman? You know very well I have courted your sister to distraction since I came here.”

  Standún moved, so that he himself could look at the girl’s face. She backed against the wall. “You told me you were just sporting with her”—her voice was high and small—“that it was me you loved. You told me …”

  “I told you to behave yourself, and I told you nothing else!” He did not move toward her or threaten her. In fact, Ruairí seemed to take the accusation as a backhanded compliment, ineptly conferred. “And I notice it’s only since I came into half of Anraí Ó Reachtaire’s property that you see fit to throw this at me, girl, yet by looking at you I guess you have been carrying for two months or more. Wasn’t I the father till now?”