The Big Wind
Page 5
‘God save you. Sir Roderick,’ greeted Black Pat. ‘’Tis an ill wind blows no one good. I could be almost thankful to last night’s big wind for blowing you my way.’
Black Pat wanted to know if there was any truth in the story about the flying field. There was an element of fear in his amazement when Roderick assured him that there was nearly five acres of truth in the story. ‘They say you cut down the ring of hawthorn trees beside the Hungry Grass.’
Roderick smiled amusedly. ‘So you still give in to pishoguerie?’
‘Not a whole lot, but,’ Black Pat shook his head slowly, ‘I’d cut down a forest of oaks before I’d cut a hawthorn tree.’
Roderick returned to his mission. Mrs. Stacey had told him that Black Pat’s wife had a young baby. She might make a suitable foster-mother. ‘She will need to come at once,’ he said. ‘The child is very tiny. She has come six weeks ahead of schedule. It was the storm.’
Black Pat’s face closed. For a fleeting moment it showed something that eluded Roderick. His wife, he said promptly, had weaned their baby. The impression persisted with Roderick that there was an element of—reluctance? An independent devil. Black Pat! But this was no time for independence. Had he some kind of idea that his wife was above being wet nurse to his landlord’s child? Black Pat was speaking quickly. His neighbour’s wife—widowed in the storm—was nursing an infant. She would be an admirable wet nurse. All at once Black Pat could not do enough for his foster-brother. He would tend to the woman’s livestock while she would be at the castle; would repair her roof; tend her farm. This was the Black Pat who had risked his life for Roderick. There seemed to be but one point where his loyalty halted. As Roderick turned out on to the carriage road he realised that he had not met his foster-brother’s wife.
Roderick could scarcely get passage through his own land. There were crowds milling about. News of the uprooted field seemed to have gone far and wide. They gazed with awe at the pit-like wilderness strewn with rubble and boulders and trees and lifeless carcasses. O’Driscoll, the groom, came to him with the information that the field itself had fallen unbroken on a small farm at Poolgower, four miles off. O’Driscoll had waggons yoked in readiness for the Sir’s instructions to recover his soil.
At Poolgower the crowds were greater. The receiving end of the marvel held more spectacle. A field of grassland fallen from the clouds of heaven!
‘My men will remove it now,’ Sir Roderick said to James Keating, the owner of the farm. The man eyed him levelly for a moment. ‘By whose authority?’ he demanded.
Roderick gave an impatient frown. ‘By mine, of course,’ he gestured O’Driscoll towards the field. He had expected to find it lying loose and broken upon the surface, but the might of the blast had impacted it into the earth as though it had been there always. O’Driscoll looked at it in bewilderment. ‘It is not goin’ to be so easy as we thought, your Honour’s Sir,’ he said.
Keating barred his way. ‘I’m glad that you realise it is not going to be so easy,’ he said grimly. ‘I dare any man of you to put a foot into that field.’ Behind him a tall, lantern-jawed young man, obviously a son, sauntered forward. He held a fowling piece nonchalantly through the crook of his arm as though he were off for a bang at a rabbit. By a strange coincidence a few more young men happened along with casually-cocked fowling pieces as though they also were off for a few pot shots. Roderick sized up the situation. The possibility of anyone dreaming of trying to retain the field had never occurred to him. He curbed his fury and spoke coldly. ‘Do you not realise that this is my property blown here by a freak of nature?’
‘I realise,’ Keating replied, ‘that this is my property.’ He indicated a few poor fields bordering the bog. ‘And that,’ he said, pointing to the greenest one, ‘is something that fell from the heavens; an act of God. It is best not to dispute the actions of God.’
Rage swept through Roderick. A short while back he had mused on how his ancestors had clung to their land through the centuries in the face of every menace. Not a foot had they yielded! Did this hind presume to hold a parcel of its acreage that had strayed by freakish chance? ‘By God,’ he cried. ‘I’ll dispute your action.’ He signalled his men to return home. There was no hope of achieving anything at this moment. ‘I shall return,’ he said to Keating, ‘when the crowd has dispersed.’
On his return he encountered Black Pat again. He had brought the foster-mother to the castle. ‘Are you off to see the peep show?’ he asked him.
Black Pat turned blacker still. ‘You have no call to say such a thing to me, Rody O’Carroll.’ In the quick hurt of his sensitivity he addressed his landlord as he had done in those young days of fosterage. ‘I wouldn’t be wanting to see or hear that a dog belonging to you was sick.’
He had lingered in the park to enquire from Sir Roderick if it would be necessary to include the name of the woman’s husband in a list of storm casualties that a neighbour was bringing to the police.
Roderick bethought himself of Mrs. Mansfield. Of course! There would have to be an inquest. Before he could reply the Bard came picking his slow way towards them. He was full of reproaches that no formal announcement had been made to him of the birth of the child. ‘I who recorded the genealogy of your father, aye. and your grandfather, for my own father had gone blind at the time.’ There was no harp in his apartment fit to play a note in honour of the great event. The small harps were flung trinacaila, their frames battered, their strings awry. The great family harp stood in two feet of water. The Bard held the piano in scorn and of course the bagpipes were only for lesser folk. ‘And I assume,’ said the old gentleman slyly, ‘that the wine cellar has fared as badly. We may not even drink to the great occasion.’
Roderick took the hint. He led them inward and rang for the butler. Black Pat hung back, but the Bard harangued him upon the ties of fosterage. ‘The little cailín uasail above is your foster second cousin. The link,’ he said, ‘extended in fosterage to one hundred degrees whereas in blood it stopped short at twenty degrees.’ They drank the health of the infant girl and it looked as though the old man would drink the health of all her preceding generations. He was aghast to hear about the field. Not at the manner of its going, but that Sir Roderick should be so puerile as to consider falling back upon the quill of any attorney for its recovery. ‘Has the Wild Huntsman dismantled your gun room?’ he asked. ‘The O’Carroll Ribeach went out and bade the English quit his land when Queen Elizabeth divided Tipperary among four men of Cheshire. And they quit!’
Roderick rose to end the genealogical survey. ‘Unfortunately, Bard,’ he smiled, ‘it is not Queen Elizabeth this time. It is the Wild Hunstman who has chosen to divide my land. And this Keating man of Poolgower is proving more formidable than the four men of Cheshire.’
Sir Roderick, gazing bleakly through the window at his wastelands, watched scores of men cutting up the great trunks that lay across the carriageway and piling them along the sides. Away to the left beyond the park, groups of people were standing round talking and pointing, and behaving rather like spectators at a hurling match. Two horsemen rode past the massive iron gates that lay on the ground. Roderick saw that one was a policeman. The other he recognised as Mr. O’Neill-Balfe the Coroner. Someone must have told him about Mrs. Mansfield. But it was to hold an inquest on Lady O’Carroll that the Coroner was travelling to Kilsheelin. Rumour had it that she was a victim of the night, that the coachman had been seeking frantically for a doctor—who had arrived too late. The Bard, swaying out from the library against the folds of his picturesque saffron cloak was still proclaiming about the birth of the child. Mr. O’Neill-Balfe, weary from coping with the night’s toll was glad to toast the birth in a welcome glass of claret. Any gleam of lightness was a relief in the prevailing horror. Weariness returned when Sir Roderick told him about the housekeeper’s death. ‘I’ll see her,’ he said. ‘And after that I have just one more storm inquest in this district. A man called Lucas has reported that his wife and newly-born inf
ant were washed from their bed and drowned. Meantime,’ he raised his glass, ‘I drink to the birth that defied the storm.’ Then he remembered the field. ‘I take it that it is some exaggeration of superstitious peasants?’
Sir Roderick shrugged. ‘I wish it were an exaggeration. Before my very eyes I saw a section of my land—about five acres scooped out of the ground and carried through the air. It travelled across the park and over the western turret out of sight.’
‘Astounding!’
‘What is more astounding still is that it travelled four miles before it alighted on the farm of James Keating of Poolgower. I rode over there yesterday and saw it; a field of green, fattening grass amongst a few little fields no better than bog. I see little hope of retrieving it. It has been planted there with the same force that lifted it from my territory; and the sightseers are aiding and abetting him; tramping it deeper into his possession.’
The Coroner had the impression that his host was speaking to himself. Aiding and abetting? What strange language! But then the poor young gentleman had been through a dreadful ordeal; he must have incurred immense financial loss. Roderick suddenly recollected himself. ‘You see the people are going there in their hundreds. I don’t suppose anything like it has ever happened before.’
When the Coroner had departed, Roderick seated himself at his desk and made an entry in a big black book.
‘On the night of 6th January in the Year of Our Lord, 1939, a great wind blew across Ireland. It has caused havoc and disaster and the loss of many lives; how many it is not yet known. In the course of this storm five acres of the land that my forefathers have held through the centuries against all unwarranted approach, were raised skywards in my presence and borne out of my sight. On the Seventh of January, this same year, I rode forth to the farm of James Keating of Poolgower and there did see my own land lying unbroken as it had left me. I pray that this act of nature will not affect the lives of those whose heritage has been so strangely visited.’
He closed the book and then almost as an afterthought, reopened it and wrote, ‘The stress of the storm brought my wife to labour before her time. Our housekeeper, Julia Mansfield, was killed in my wife’s presence while tending her. Towards morning my wife gave birth to a daughter.’
As he re-read what he had just written its significance smote him. He was the youngest and only survivor of his parents’ five children. The doctor doubted the likelihood of Margaret’s bearing another child and so the record of the birth of his daughter read like another incident of the storm. The record of the birth of a son and heir would have been a different matter. No storm would have taken precedence over that event.
5
The Dublin Mail Coach came clattering down the Market Square, scattering mud from wheels and hooves in all directions. A bigger cheer than usual went up from the crowd of ostlers and hangers-on outside Mullaly’s Coaching Inn. The coach was three days late and the whole town was out to greet its arrival.
The most imposing of all the waiting vehicles was that driven by Big John Dermody, of Kilsheelin Castle. Not indeed that it was the grandest, because he merely drove a one horse back-to-back. But he sat so regally, holding the long whip upright like a spear, that he gave prestige to any equipage.
The ‘Scout’, otherwise John Doyle, the shoemaker from Love Lane, a temperamental shoemaker and a master pedant, never missed the arrival or departure of a mail coach. He checked the identity of each passenger who descended from the coach, his occupation and mission, as though it were his paid calling. The various drivers, guards and ostlers passed on to him all the recent news from Dublin, and all possible information about the passengers. The drivers of waiting vehicles yielded, often unwittingly, all available information about those for whom they waited. But never would Big John divulge an iota of gossip.
It was obvious to the Scout that it was no member of the family, nor of the Quality, that Big John awaited, because he was only driving a back-to-back. Although, argued the Scout, the Sir was not above using the back-to-back; but in that event Big John would be wearing his tall hat, not the Hardy Bastard, which was the colloquial description of the pot-shaped half Caroline the coachman was wearing.
However, news of the storm in Dublin and en route was of primary importance just now. The identity of passengers must wait. The last blast of the bugle had scarcely died away when the Scout had his foot on the step sacred to the driver.
‘God save ye! We thought you must have blown away altogether, or did ye get e’er a blast of the wind there at all?’
‘Don’t be talkin’,’ said the driver; ‘’tis a sight for sore eyes to see you. It does me heart good to see the faces of friends when there’s so many on my route that I’ll never see again after that same wind.’ He threw the reins to an ostler and stood up stiffly. ‘Mr. Doyle, you have often heard me spake of Murty Kavanagh?’
‘Of Naas?’
‘The same. He’s gone.’
‘Is it kilt you mean?’
‘That’s what I do mean, and so is his wife kilt, and his two children, and the house they lived in is gone and the town it stood in is gone.’
‘The town of Naas is it you mean?’
‘There is no town of Naas in it now. Every house in it is levelled to the ground.’
‘Praises be to the Hand of God...’
Before he could pass comment there was a cheer from the crowd bustling about the coach. He stepped back and looked towards the alighting passengers. A tall man towering above the rest was being received with homage by the owner of the inn. In the brief exchange of news the crowd had swelled and the Scout had found himself pushed to the outside. A rich stentorian voice rolled over the craning heads. The Scout, flailing right and left with his elbows, cried out: ‘There is only one voice like that in all Ireland.’
Behind him the driver, his prestige disregarded, and fighting his own passage through the crowd, gasped into the Scout’s brim; ‘There is only one Liberator in Ireland.’ The Scout tried to answer, but his mouth was full of the elbow of a buxom lady in a bright red cloak who requested him not to eat the elbow off her.
‘Madam,’ said he, ‘you have, no doubt, a tasty elbow, but Saint Thomas says that a thing which is not in its own place is an abomination. I’d be thankful if you’d keep your elbow to yourself.’
The lady’s face went redder than her cloak. ‘How dare you call me an abomination!’
The Scout made a breast stroke away from her. His feet were off the ground and he was literally swimming forward in the throng. ‘That,’ he answered, ‘was merely a Thomasian figure of speech.’ He grabbed at the cape of the driver’s coat as he jostled past him. ‘You are the cause of all this. Why didn’t you inform me that the great Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator of Ireland, was on your mail coach instead of talking of trivialities like the big wind?’
‘Faith, ’twas the same “triviality” brought him here in my mail coach. The wheel of his own coach went over a hole in the road. The linch-pin came out of the wheel, and the whole side of the carriage went over into the ditch.’
They reached the forefront of the crowd and stood looking up in awe of the world’s greatest personality, the uncrowned King of Ireland, Daniel O’Connell. There he stood in their own home town, unheralded except by the trumpeting blasts of the wind that had brought him to their midst.
As he spoke the aristocrats paused with feet on their carriage steps in the act of departure. The voice that no orator ever equalled rolled across the square and every voice and sound was hushed. To most of them he was but a legend: the man who had liberated them from the savagery of the Penal Code.
He grieved with them over the anguish that had come to them in the wake of the storm. A voice in the crowd yelled, ‘Sure you would have prevented it yourself if you could, Dan.’
‘I would, God knows.’
His tones fell softer but still all-pervading. ‘There is nothing I would not do to prevent further suffering to my sorely tried countrymen.’
The Scout could contain himself no longer. He ran forward and grasped the Liberator’s flowing cloak. ‘You’ve done that, sir,’ he panted. ‘No man ever did more for his fellow men.’
The pat that the great orator gave to the Scout’s shoulder ‘went,’ as he said to the mail coach driver, ‘to me very soul, and it will vibrate down through the generations that, plaze God, will follow me.’
The Liberator resumed. ‘When the Hand of God is raised above us we can but bow our heads and say. Thy will be done. In Dublin alone I have addressed six hundred people made homeless by the storm. Not a stone left of the habitations in which they were born and reared. I have seen the drowned bodies of men and women washed forth from the homes along the Liffey quays. Some of my fellow members coming from their constituencies in the West and South have told, in Dublin, tales that are too harrowing for your ears. In some towns the fires blazed unremittingly from eleven o’clock at night until six o’clock next morning. In Loughrea the fire burned all night, and the aid of every possible member of the male population was of no avail. When one half of the town was destroyed and the fire had been almost extinguished, the wind changed and fanned the flames in the opposite direction until the other half of the town was consumed.’