“Oh yes … and wasn’t there something about gold … something about a hand?”
“Black Dan O’Reilly’s quest for the golden hand. He was the one that began by stealing chickens … but he wanted more. So he moved on to piglets, but he still wanted more. He stole cattle, and wanted more, so then he stole fine silver from the gentry … but he wanted more. In the meantime he fell in love with a virtuous girl who wanted him to be virtuous too. But she knew him well – that he always wanted more – so she told him of a golden hand that she’d heard of that was buried in a bog and that it was the most of everything and that he should try to find it. Encrusted with jewels and all that.”
“Did he find it?”
“No, but he was kept honest trying.”
“Was it there?”
“Osbert, this is folklore.”
“Yes, but a golden hand is undoubtedly a Celtic artifact. Probably the story contains some historical accuracy. They often do, you know. Did Flanaghan happen to mention which bog the girl was referring to?”
“He did … but I’ve forgotten.”
“I’ll ask him then.”
“Yes … I’ve it written down somewhere but rather than have me hunt it up it would be faster if you ask Flanaghan. He and Boyle think it will happen here as well.”
“What … golden hands in the ground … robbers?”
“No, this potato disease.”
There was shouting out in the garden where some of the men were working, followed by a chorus of laughter.
“O’Donovan must have arrived … the young one …” said Granville after a pause. “The men are teasing him. He’s to be married.”
“Ah,” said Osbert, squinting at his watercolour of the shell, “and a good thing, too. He’s a wild one.”
“They’re all wild at that age, and the girls, too.”
“But charming.”
“Yes … quite. What about O’Malley’s wife who was away. Have you seen her about? Will she ever speak about it, do you think?”
“They say never … and she won’t do cures.”
“It’s a shame, I mean that we can’t record her experiences. As for this disease, it won’t come here.”
“No … why not?”
The shouts in the garden had stopped and the surroundings were quiet except for the sound of a rake, quite close, near the window.
“Because this is Antrim. Our peasantry are fine. Look at the cabins Father provided. Listen to them sing. And we’re here. The landlords in the West are all absentees. We look after our people and they have the ‘Tenant Right.’ “
“A good thing, too,” said Osbert, watching as his brother dipped his pen into thick blue ink. “A good thing since they eat nothing but potatoes, as well.”
“And some oatmeal, and milk. Did I tell you, by the way, that at last we’re to get a National School.” Granville would talk all morning rather than revert to the listing of Latin terms. “And about time, too. They’re everywhere else, all over the country.”
“A National School? Then what’s to become of O’Malley’s establishment en plein air?”
“Perhaps he could teach in the National. Better than worrying all the time that the inspector would come and shut him down. And a reliable salary. He’s a good man. Perhaps they’ll hire him to teach there.”
“Unlikely … he’s Catholic … and a great companion to the island priest.”
“Oh yes … Catholic … I’d forgotten. It’ll be the farm for him then, all the time. And his father the hedge schoolmaster before him. What a shame … still, I suppose it’s all for the best. Except we’ll probably get someone from God knows where with small Latin and less Greek.”
“No doubt.”
WHEN pressing the few linen napkins that had been owned by Brian’s mother, Mary always watched the patterns and pictures emerge from the wrinkles as the fabric smoothed and stiffened under the iron. Three connected castles, a shamrock, a Celtic cross, a hand.
She loved doing this. Brian had said that he had no real knowledge of how his mother had acquired these objects, which suggested privilege, table manners, and banquets, but that they were used only on special days – those few occasions when there was red meat to be had, or whenever there was a wake.
Mary had only fragments of the legends attached to the pictures, her own associations being stronger than the fragile narratives she had heard as a child.
“Look,” she said to her own child, who crawled on the flags near where she worked. “Look, Liam,” she crooned, holding a bright white square like a holy cloth in front of her torso, “there are the three castles: Dunluce, Dunseverick, and Kinbane. And there,” she nodded with her chin towards a spiral in the corner of the napkin, “there is Slough-na-More, the swallow of the sea near the island where I was born, and it’s your grandmother who lives there still.”
The child regarded the cloth with large, clear eyes then turned to reach for a wooden spool with which he had been playing.
The hand meant something else, Mary knew, a robber or a king. In her own mind was a hand that wavered under water but she pushed her inner pictures of this aside. The linen itself came from the factories in Belfast. Brian had described factories to her; huge rooms full of people making the same things at the same time, machines the size of cabins and with more noise than the sea. She would like some day to look at these factories, though Brian said it would be death itself to work in them even for a day.
It’s much better, he had told her, to work at planting things in the earth and in the mind, and then there’s the quiet and the patience to wait for them to bloom.
In the geography book she read aloud to Brian in the evenings there were lists of crops from lands she’d never seen; long columns of national products which her husband said were loaded onto boats and transported from country to country. There were engravings of exotic fruits – coconuts, pineapples, bananas, oranges – and certain plants that changed the taste of soup boiling in the pot. Cinnamon, Brian said, once tasted was never forgotten, was longed for ever after. He showed her the tear-shaped island where it grew and she thought about longing for something so far away.
Brian came in now, earlier than usual because of the wetness of the summer day. He sat on the rush chair which creaked under his weight and he picked up his son, running his large right hand through the child’s red curls. He looked tired.
“Were there many today?” she asked him.
“No,” he answered, “no. The same, only five.”
Three eggs rested on the table where Mary had placed them earlier in the day, and one potato, old and crumpled, from last year’s harvest. “Will they not come back?” she walked towards him. “For your teaching. There’s all the girls who were so fond of you.”
“I was too easy with them. They were fond of me for that … not for the Latin.”
Mary helped the child down from his father’s lap where he was beginning to squirm. “Well, whoever he is at the National School, he’ll not be like you. He won’t have the gift of it, the teaching.”
Brian reached across the table and picked up one egg. It fit perfectly in the palm of his hand. “Next year at this time there will be no more hedge schools anywhere,” he said. “Their days are gone. There will be no one left willing to listen to me or any of the other schoolmasters talking about the Greeks. The people are poor enough and the children will be educated by the government.”
Mary was silent. She looked at the eggs she had pulled that morning from their own roof. It would need to be fixed soon. “They’re nesting in the thatch again,” she said to her husband.
He walked across the width of the cottage and peered through the glass panes of the window. Mary knew there was nothing to be seen out there in the rain. Returning to the chair, he sat down with a sigh and folded his thick arms across his chest. The child began to cry for his feeding. As she unbuttoned her blouse for the baby to nurse, Mary turned to her husband again. “What are you going to do, then, if the sc
hool is finished?”
Brian sighed and leaned back in the chair. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not much of a labourer. Perhaps if I improved the farm –”
“I could spin,” Mary interjected, “there’s something to be had from that. There’s your own mother’s wheel sitting untouched in the corner. And then there’s the seaweed. I know how to gather it like the women on Rathlin.”
“Yes,” he said quietly, “there’s that.”
The child’s hand reached towards Mary’s face. “Brian,” she said softly, “will you regret the school so thoroughly?”
“Yes … I will regret it. A child learning to read …” he began, but left the statement unfinished. “And it’s the end of us,” he said, “with them teaching our children. There will be none of us left, you understand, in the way that we know ourselves now.”
Mary looked down at her child. “You’ll teach Liam,” she said, “and myself?”
“Yes.”
“And the farm will prosper and the children will be taught. They will have learning.”
“The poetry will be gone from our people,” he said bitterly. “There will be none of it left at all. And no more scholars on the road. The way we know it … it will all be finished.”
“You’ll continue with your own poems, Brian. You don’t need to gather the children to continue with your own poems.”
“Ah Mary,” he said sadly, “what I write is hardly poetry. It was the one scholar with the gift that I was waiting for, who never came, to my very great sorrow. My father taught his whole life and only had two with the gift, and they scattered off then to the roads with the correct amount of passion in their hearts and the old language and the weather on their tongues … that and all the old tales. One came by here once. He came by here after my father was dead and he himself was old, and he sat where you are sitting now. He was a man who could twist a sentence into a song. His whole life on the roads doing that. He remembered my father, so he came by here to see the spot again where my father had given him learning. His kind will not be seen again. There’s not one that I gave the learning to who could twist a sentence into a song, and, now, with the school declining, I’ll never have the opportunity.”
He rose and flung another lump of turf onto the fire. “And my own son,” he said angrily, “my own son will be taught at this National School.”
“No,” said Mary, “no. We won’t allow it.”
“We won’t be able to stop it.” He crouched over the fire, attacked it with the bellows until it shone, angry and hot. “The old language will disappear forever, and all the magic and the legends. It’s what they want, what they’ve always wanted, to be rid of us one way or another. I’d thought the old beliefs were bad for the people. I’d thought that when they were in no danger of disappearing. Now that I know they’ll be gone it saddens me deeply, Mary.” He turned his back towards her. “That and the language,” he said. “To think I had the mule stupidity to be teaching the children English and Latin and Greek when it was their own language I should have insisted upon.” He leaned the bellows against a stool that stood near the fire. “It’s enough to break a man’s heart at his own stupidity,” he said.
“Don’t take on so, Brian.” Mary reached across the nursing child towards him. “The children still have the language, and beliefs are what they are. There are great truths in the old beliefs … they’ll not disappear as fast as all that.”
Brian slammed his fist into the open palm of his other hand. “They can be beaten and starved out, and they can be silenced, Mary. They can be educated out. And don’t I know the truth of this. I have none of them myself, though my own father, an educated man, and Quinn over on the island were always talking about things inexplicable.”
The couple were silent. Mary placed the baby, who had fallen asleep in her arms, into his cradle and crossed over to the hearth to prepare the evening meal. Brian moved towards the door. “I’ll be outside for a bit,” he said, “to look at the field.”
“It’s raining, Brian.”
“There’s a bit of a break, now, and I won’t go far.”
Alone, Mary knew there was something hidden inside her, a lost thing she could find again when she had need of it, for she had fragments of the old beliefs. They were gone from her husband but they had not been completely stolen from her … had become dormant, instead, in a kind of winter sleep. Any kind of return would be accepted by her, unquestioningly. A stone, a song, a green eye, the interrupted gesture. Something in her wanted finishing.
There was a story about a woman who had danced across a moor and over the cliffs at Rathlin to her death, and a belief that when her body washed up at Fair Head this was how the place received its name; from the look of her beautiful blonde hair moving in the water near the rocks where her skull had broken. Mary couldn’t recall who had been the girl’s partner in the dance but she could imagine the paleness of him, his torn shirt and liquid eye. She could imagine the blood of the young woman aflame in his embrace, every colour of rock, turf, and sea swirling, and the belief in him strong in the bones of her slender ankles – one wrist clasped by his beckoning hand. It was in herself, in her own beliefs, to dance like that, though she kept the idea hidden. And it was in her also to twist a sentence into a song if she chose to sing at all.
Brian ate his supper in silence, dipping the potato in the milk and looking past his wife to the fire. He peeled away the shells and pushed the eggs whole into his mouth savagely. When he spoke, at last, it was to no one but himself, as if he wanted to deliver his thoughts out into the room in order to rid his mind of them.
“To think that the little schools were started in the time of the Penal Laws, in response to oppression, when they wanted none of us educated. It’s as if our people have always been hungry,” he said, “for knowledge. And when they had nothing at all they still produced the few miserable pennies it cost to keep a schoolmaster alive. They’ve always had this hunger, you see, for the day that words can be spun into meaning. Nothing could keep them from it. Two hundred years of hiding the hunger, and then hiding the nourishment of the learning in the small makeshift schools.” He placed his hands flat on the table in front of him. Their largeness was manifested in their length rather than in their width. They were the hands of neither labourer nor farmer. “There’s a rare beauty,” he said, looking at his hands, “in something hidden and secret, and it’s a rare kind of education to be got in hidden places.”
He was not speaking to her but Mary answered him anyway. “Yes,” she said, “there’s a rare beauty in something that is hidden.”
As they ate their supper of bacon, eggs, potatoes, and milk, the clouds parted and the low sun broke through, sending a beam in the window and lighting the tops of the folds on Brian’s sleeve, enriching the various soft browns of the scattered eggshells. It came to rest on a pile of books that occupied a three-legged table in the corner. Moving through this harsh light to the child or to the fire, Mary seemed to appear and reappear to her husband, who remained with all but his sleeve in shadow.
Outside, the moist earth steamed in the sudden blaze and, in a valley two miles from the uplands on which O’Malley’s cottage stood, a mild breeze awakened, stirring marsh grasses and making thorn bushes lurch in odd ways. One by one the leaves of the planted fields there turned over. Had anyone been watching they would have seen the beginnings of a black stain speckling otherwise healthy foliage. As it was, one small boy, playing with stones and sticks and a puddle of rainwater, lifted his head and sniffed the air, unable to identify the new perfume, a portent carried on the wind.
These are the beginnings of despair. The clouds part and the last rays of sun blanket a landscape of unspeakable beauty. The blue sea is covered with a carpet of stars, cormorants sail near cliffs where their young flourish, and smoke drifts from cottages where meals have been taken in peace. The sweet, dark smell of the change is confused with that of hidden roses. Not one bird pauses in song, anticipates the hunger.
The breeze crept under the cottage door. Brian, reading Latin near the window, lit his pipe at the exact moment that he might have inhaled the terrible sweetness. Mary, however, recognized something in the air that made her think, for a moment, of cool white skin stretched over the muscle on an arm. The air smelled of loss – of a beautiful absence. It caught in her throat and she brought her hand briefly to her lips as if to silence herself.
Then the wind changed direction, the sun set. Soon it was time for sleep.
THAT winter Osbert and Granville tramped around the countryside with campstools as usual – weather permitting. At Murlough Bay, Osbert sketched the view of Rathlin Island and Granville composed a lament for the hundreds of women and children who had been slaughtered there in 1576 by the Earl of Essex in his attempt to tame “Wild Ulster.” Although he could not, from this distance, see Crooknascreidhlin (the hill of the screaming) or Langraviste (the hollow of the great defeat), where he assumed the massacre had taken place, just looking at the cliffs of the unfortunate island moved Granville to poetry. In fact, he had confused his disasters: both locations were the sites of equally brutal attacks on the part of Scottish soldiers a hundred years later.
The brothers also visited the now-abandoned hedge school. Osbert made several drawings, inside and out, so that it would be recorded for posterity, and Granville wrote two long narrative poems, one entitled “A Lament for an Abandoned Hedge School” and the other, a dramatic monologue, called “The Hedge Schoolmaster’s Lament.” They had seen this gentleman once or twice during excursions to the cliffs at Fair Head. As was the case with all the tenant farmers and cottiers in Antrim, the schoolmaster’s potato crop had failed. But he was managing the winter well, he said, had eggs from the chickens and milk from the cow and a bit of money set aside so that he could last until next year’s harvest.
“And your wife, sir?” they asked, anxious for a glimpse.
“Quite well,” he had replied. “Thinking of spinning now that the child is weaned.”
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