The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  The rush light had been lighting in every window on the mountain, Rosheen said, so that the Blessed Virgin and Iosagain† and Saint Joseph would be able to find their way if they were looking for shelter. Mameen had watched every light go out one by one as the houses fell beneath the crowbar. Then when the last twinkle vanished into darkness she lay back in Daddy’s arms and died.

  But it was only when they reached the workhouse thirty-eight miles further, that they knew the real anguish of parting. The girls must go with the hard-faced woman and live separately from Daddy and the boys. Pakie had set up a wailing cry for Attracta who had mothered him when he fretted for mameen. The gates had started to shut out the wild mountains that dared not give them shelter. The hard-faced woman was drawing away the girls. They were to wear the pauper jerkin. They were to give up mameen’s shawl.

  The shawl decided all of them; with one swift thought as uniting as its own warm folds Attracta drew it tight around the three pairs of shoulders and Daddy put a hand on the nearest one and said, ‘We’ll not be stoppin’.’

  ‘And that is all very sad,’ said Sir Roderick when Sterrin had poured out the whole story verbatim. She was helping him to tie flies in the gun room. ‘But my own tenants have the first claim on my charity.’

  ‘But Papa—’

  ‘Sweetheart, the roads of Connaught are thronged with starving people making for the districts where the potatoes have not failed and where bread and meal have not reached famine prices. We must christen our own children first. We cannot afford to adopt a family of bacachs.’

  ‘Oh, Papa, the Scallys are not beggars. No beggar would breed such ponies and—their mother’s shawl is not a beggarwoman’s. It is wundruss.’

  But her papa was adamant. They would have to go out of that fever hut. What would happen if any of the servants were to contract fever, now that the fever hospital was full and all these sick and semi-starving people moving along the road to the workhouse?

  She went and perched on the arm of his chair. ‘Don’t dare to wheedle me,’ he said, drawing her into his arm. Margaret came in and demanded her embroidery scissors.

  ‘I would ask the blacksmith to make scissors for your flies but I am too superstitious. A sharp instrument might cut our love.’

  He reached up and touched the brown coils under the prim babet. ‘Vulcan himself could not contrive an instrument sharp enough to cut our love.’

  ‘Good!’ cried Sterrin clambering down, ‘then the Scallys may stay.’

  ‘Come back, you baggage!’ he called. ‘I tell you I cannot pay my way. I shall soon be touching my hat to the bank manager.’

  Sterrin sighed gustily. ‘What a pity the bank manager is not a lady! You might try paying your way the way you paid your footing to Mrs. Black Pat.’

  ‘Footing?’ Margaret was mystified. Sterrin explained. Vividly. Roderick put up his hand again. This time to ease out the ominous crease forming between the brown eyes.

  ‘It is just an old Irish custom,’ he expostulated. ‘Like you kissing Mr. De Lacey under the mistletoe.’

  ‘I did not kees!’ Margaret always went very foreign when she was angry. ‘I was keesed—and Mr. De Lacey is fat, and he is bald where his wig slips!’

  Sterrin sought to reassure her mamma. ‘But Mrs. Black Pat is not fat, nor bald. She has golden hair, and it curls without rags or paper, her daughter says.’ Her mamma didn’t seem to find the information helpful, so Sterrin pressed on. ‘She dresses very nicely, and speaks nicely too. She is much highclasser than Black Pat.’

  Margaret walked slowly to the table and dropped the scissors with a little clank in front of Roderick. ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘I give it to you.’

  He quirked his eyebrows. ‘And what about cutting our love?’

  ‘It ees cut! In hafs! By you! Foo-ting, Hein!’ The little bugle and bells in her key belt jingled angrily as the door closed.

  Roderick looked back to his amazed daughter. ‘My dear,’ he said untenderly, ‘will you never learn that little girls should be seen and not heard.’ Particularly, he added to himself when they have seen!

  * A Connemara belief that the wailing of the wind is the souls in Purgatory pleading for prayers.

  † Iosagain—Eesagain means Little Jesus.

  22

  The ‘footing’ incident caused the first discord in the lilt of their marriage. Margaret got so bogged down in her resentment that she couldn’t extricate herself. She devoted herself to little Dominic, so much so that Sterrin felt jealous and out of sorts watching her mother wheel him about in a bassinet and sing him to sleep every night. Roderick was desperately busy trying to cope with the prevailing distress; organising relief schemes, attending to the purchase and sowing of tested seeds, supervising the cleansing of the soil after its terrible disease.

  He took the time off to greet the Liberator along with Phineas De Lacey and other landlords at the Thurles railway terminus where O’Connell would entrain on his journey to Westminster to plead for help for Ireland. Roderick held that a government’s first duty was to save life. A national disaster like this, he urged, ought not to be left to the efforts of private individuals.

  Roderick felt sad as he gripped O’Connell’s hand. The Liberator was showing the effects of his imprisonment. The winter that ought to have been spent in convalescing from its effects had been spent in relieving the distress of his own people. His blue eyes looked unlikely to cause him further criticism on the score of roving over the curves of a pretty woman. He possessed as many faults as the soil from which he sprang, but lack of charity or generosity could not be listed against him. He had brought a doctor at his own expense to cope with an outbreak of fever in his district. He had ordered wholesale slaughtering of beeves and mutton; dispatched blankets to the remotest parts of his wild mountain territory. Out of the purblind depths of his own charity, he held that all charity should be voluntary and private. Organised charity, he insisted, offended human dignity.

  He listened wearily to the difficulties and suggestions pressed by Roderick’s deputation. At stages all the way from County Kerry he had met similar deputations.

  But once in England, O’Connell threw off his weariness. At Westminster, he was once more the incarnation of Ireland; seeing with its eyes, enduring its sufferings. He reminded the House that the potato had failed in Europe. The countries afflicted had closed their ports to the export of grain until their populations were fed; had ceased distilling; had lowered the price of bread. Why could not this be done for Ireland?

  He raised again the wondrous and witching voice of a mighty orator, riveting the attention of the world, drawing all eyes towards Ireland. But Parliament averted its gaze, and told O’Connell and the world that the possibility of a famine in Ireland was a ‘baseless vision’!

  Roderick watched with panic in his heart as the stock in his granary dwindled. He would have to buy grain; And with what? Only a third of his tenants had paid rent! He was feeding most of them. A line of tenants moved up for the meal that Lady O’Carroll doled out. She glanced up and caught his cold expression and her face hardened. But he saw only their substance that was draining away through her hands. A baseless vision indeed! God knows he didn’t begrudge the poor devils their bit! But he had a wife and two children and a heritage to guard. A man should christen his own child first. He became aware of his wife’s angry scrutiny and turned away.

  She watched him ride across the fields and jump the ditch into an old road. Somewhere in that direction lived that Ryan woman! Margaret had pieced her story together; a product of a boarding school for Young Ladies! Hein! Nothing very ladylike about flaunting herself on the roadway to be kissed by passing strangers. His foster-brother’s wife! Perhaps his footing was not just an annual affair! Had Roderick gone footing now? Immediately she was ashamed of the thought, but it rankled.

  Roderick rode to the townland called the Cobs where he was experimenting with potatoes in lea soil that had not been ploughed in twenty-five years. The Cobs lay
behind Black Pat’s farm. He could see the horse he had sold them. But no sign of the mare. It ought to have foaled before now. He thought for a moment to call and have a look at the foal but he spied O’Driscoll waiting for him. As he skirted the Ryan haggard he heard the tinkle of the music box.

  Margaret heard it too as she came along the little road in the brougham. A cluster of ‘half-acre’ holdings lay beyond Ryan’s house. Their occupants were depending entirely upon the food she dispensed at the castle every day. There were some who were unfit to come for it. Margaret, straining after the distant speck that she could still see bobbing up and down inside the hedge, experienced an urge of charity that was strangely sudden. She ordered the brougham and packed a basket with food.

  The Ryan children, peeping through the hedge, saw the fine brougham lurching along their rutted boreen. They raced in the back way to tell their mother. ‘And she has a big basket of goodies! She must have heard that we are in hardship,’ said the eldest girl, Norisheen. Her mother rounded on her. Had she breathed it to a soul that things were not well with them? Had any of them? But they assured her that they had let no one know that food was short. ‘We tell them, coming from school, that we have fresh meat every day and soda currant cake and roast chicken—’ Nonie hushed them. The phantom menu was torturing. ‘And,’ she chided them, ‘it is dreadfully bad manners to speak outside of what you eat.’ She strained on tiptoe in the shadow of the window hangings. She had never seen his wife. Perhaps she might be bringing the children some dainties? It would be terrible to accept anyone’s charity. Still, Pat was his foster-brother. Sir Roderick would be bound to feel concern if he had heard that the foal had been stillborn and the mare had died, and that they had lost a cow; that pigs had rooted amongst the rotten slime in the potato drills and had died; that catastrophes had rained upon them!

  She smoothed her hair. But I won’t go out to my lady’s carriage to receive her charity with a curtsey. I’ll stay here and accept it graciously; a gift for the children from their father’s foster-brother! She ordered the younger children down to the kitchen, ‘And, turn off that music box! No, leave it on.’ It lent an air of unconcern; a background for conversation. You like music I see? Oh yes, I adore Mozart; especially his Fantasia in C Minor.

  Lady O’Carroll looked straight ahead. The corner of her right eye had glimpsed the toparied hedge, the patches of grass cut in the semblance of a lawn; the window boxes; and even a Chinese rose blooming away regardless of season. Out of place, like its owner! All of a sudden Margaret would have given her back teeth to glimpse this little person whom Roderick had lifted in his arms from the road. She turned full face and looked at the house as the brougham passed it. Margaret felt a surge of rage. It gave her gentle face the look that the peeping Nonie took to be its habitual arrogance.

  Fantasia! It played past Nonie’s door in an orchestration of creaks and jingles and wheels and hoof beats. She had known many a secret moment of homesickness and heartsickness, but never anything like the desolation she felt as she stood now in the shadow of the curtains; steeled to accept the charity that—that had no intention of coming her way!

  She, too, was angry. Hell roast you for a Belgian barbarian! But, she strained after the carriage, its outline was blurred with her own tears, she is lovely! Those eyes and hair against the skin! Chocolates and cream!

  The metaphor recalled her to her constant niggling for something dainty to eat. She looked up at the beam from where, last year, a row of bacon flitches had hung. Would she dare to cut a piece from the solitary diminishing flitch? And with Pat away, too! But then, he was probably guzzling delicious food at her Auntie’s in County Cork. He was staying there on his way to purchase seed potatoes from the Maharees in Kerry; the one place where the potatoes had not failed. Her idea, that! Another of her extravagances, like the horse. No, the horse had been Pat’s extravagance. She whirled from the thought of the horse and their pipe dream of wealth from its stock. ‘Stop that crying, Norisheen!’ she said in a quaky voice. ‘Did you actually think that I would accept food from anyone? Come on and help me beat eggs. I’ll make pancakes for supper.’

  Children are so pathetically easy to please, she thought, as she sloshed off a layer of bacon to fry the pancakes. They were prancing with joy. Pancakes—and with rashers! They hadn’t tasted the like since the pigs had died after eating the black potatoes.

  A thought strove treacherously to rise and remind her that she herself had been easy to please a while back. What more than a child had she been when she let herself in for this—squalor!

  The savoury smell from the pan restored her good humour. As she beat the eggs she carolled the song her mother’s mother once sang long ago while her servants spun—

  Now hasten ye women

  Ye want not for bread

  The good wheels are steady

  Go spin the fine thread.

  Margaret, driving back, heard the blithe words. So did Roderick on his way to speak to Pat unaware of his absence. The lively clatter of eggs beating and laughter and the savoury smell came to him as he rode into Ryan’s backyard from the fields. His father used to hum a song like that. He had told Roderick that his own mother used to sing it to her spinning women. It was heartening in this semi-starvation to hear that gay voice that dared sing. ‘Ye want not for bread.’ He started to dismount, then he saw the brougham.

  He jumped on to the boreen and reined in beside the brougham. ‘What on earth brings you down this way?’ he demanded.

  Margaret was deep in reverie. There was pitiful poverty in the cabins she had just visited. And then to hear that song ‘Ye want not for bread’. Such bad form! Whatever her upbringing, the huzzee was déclassée. A wayside Lorelei trying to lure passing gentlemen—Margaret looked up startled. ‘I don’t have to ask what brings you this way.’ She glanced back significantly towards the Ryan house.

  He looked at her silently. ‘No,’ he said, at last. ‘You don’t have to ask. You prefer to find out for yourself.’ She flinched at the hurtful suggestion—spying! It was incredible; also it was true. But Roderick was not troubling to make suggestions. ‘If you must come spying this way,’ he stated positively, ‘don’t take the brougham. This road will break the springs.’ He spurred his mount and shot out in front.

  Big John thought it was very unlike the Sir to shoot up a spray of puddle with his horse’s hind feet. Her Ladyship was forced to dab her face with her handkerchief. She was still dabbing when he reined to at the hall door, and her eyes were red.

  Life could not wait for moods and misunderstandings. As days passed, more and more people made claims on Roderick’s time and stocks. Margaret’s food distribution dragged on later each morning. The backache acquired at Dominic’s birth grew chronic from the prolonged standing. And Dominic, too, felt the strain. His chubby face lengthened and he missed his mother.

  Nurse Hogan came one day to tell Margaret that the celery was finished. Last week it had been the cauliflower. There was nothing now but the more drab vegetables—cabbage, turnips and onions. Bacon was scarce because the pigs that had been fattened for killing before Christmas, had got hold of those dreadful black potatoes and died. Margaret thought wistfully of the prodigal slaughtering of pigs during the prayers for the Liberator’s release. Who would ever dream that feasting could turn so quickly to fasting? But who would ever dream that potatoes could make such a difference? To everyone, to an entire way of life! It had something to do with national economy, Roderick said. Meantime, Margaret hated cabbage; silently.

  Sterrin, too, hated cabbage. But not silently. She expressed her aversion so volubly that both parents levelled their jagged tempers at her. Roderick was missing the potatoes. He frequently ate them three times a day, and always twice.

  ‘You should be thankful,’ he told her, ‘that you have so much other food. There are millions who have nothing whatever to replace their potatoes.’

  Her mamma told her sternly that she should be prepared to make sacrifices. Sterrin prom
ptly sacrificed a heap of cabbage over the side of her plate. She tried to make Dominic eat it and offered him a little when he cried. She was tempted to warn her parents and governess that it contained a segment of caterpillar. There was bound to be some more in the dish. But it was bad manners to allude to the presence of such unscheduled species of cooked life in the vegetables until after people had eaten them. Anyway it would do Miss Ferguson-Coyne no harm to eat some of the nature stuff she was always preaching about.

  She shoved a few spoonfuls of rice into her pocket. It wouldn’t proclaim its presence so messily since it had no cream. There was so much milk being doled out that cream was reserved for butter-making only. For the past fortnight, Sterrin had been hoarding bread and butter and cheese and odd bits of meat to deposit in the hollow of a tree for the Ryan children. It was a deadly secret. The Ryans were awfully jolly. They said the quaintest things. The big girl could sketch and play the violin. In a couple of years when her parents made lots of money from selling blood stock horses, she would go to a boarding school. Meantime, her mother would skin them all alive if she knew that they were accepting food from anyone.

  But Nonie knew all about the secret feasts. The younger ones had let it slip. She pretended not to hear and turned a blind eye. Let them have whatever they could. As long as she wasn’t supposed to know and as long as that philandering father of Miss Sterrin O’Carroll and her stuck-up mother knew nothing.

  Sterrin placed a layer of crocuses inside the lid of her basket of food. By right, she thought, they should be roses. The saintly Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, it seems, used to bring a basket of food to some poor people. One day, her cruel, wicked husband intercepted her and demanded to see what was in the basket. And, Lo, when she raised the lid there was nothing there but roses.

  It was Young Thomas who intercepted Sterrin. He whisked her cloak from the suspicious looking hummock in front of her saddle. ‘Crocuses my eye! Who do you think you are? Queen Elizabeth of Hungary?’