The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  Thomas looked back and sketched a restricted wave. He didn’t call ‘Sursum corda’ this time. Lift up your hearts, inagh.

  He vaulted a fence. From the sheaves of corn a company of black-headed gulls rose silently to the night sky. Thomas suddenly stopped dead, his scalp prickling. A white wraith had appeared before him. Up and down it moved, wafting, swaying but never budging from the space before him; almost eye level.

  He forced himself to move forward, his heart racing with dread. He that had no fears of the night! And then he realised what it was. How often had he stopped to watch that marvel of nature, the dance of the ghost moths. He forged ahead. He mustn’t let the evening’s disaster unman him. But the dread was on him. From the foetid fields the smell rose up to waft through the night mist like a ghostly haunting of the landscape.

  *

  Sir Roderick was out at dawn. He checked on every drill. He had planted twice last year’s potato crop. Not a drill had escaped! It was the same with the tenants. They wandered dispiritedly through their drills, stopping here and there to pick up a blackened stalk. He looked across to Golden Meadows. Mr. Lonergan was walking slowly across a field, his head down. Roderick rode up the short avenue to Ulick Prendergast’s farmhouse. The old man was sitting bolt upright on his horse, tightlipped and grim. He uncovered silently and Roderick waited for him to speak. Ulick spoke only when he had something to say.

  ‘It is like the Wrath to come,’ he said, ‘no one round here has escaped.’

  A stream of callers surged up the avenue all day; landlords doing the rounds; ascertaining how other estates had fared; what measures to take.

  ‘I’ll evict,’ cried Major Darby. There was panic in the threat. ‘I couldn’t carry through another season without rents.’

  Roderick wasn’t certain himself how far he could carry mercy. But he remembered Darby’s tenant, Dominic Landy. ‘Our first concern,’ he said coldly, ‘is to save human life.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Darby thrust. ‘But carrying uneconomic tenants on our backs is weakness. A weak landlord is a bad landlord.’

  ‘Property,’ Lord Templetown reminded him, ‘imposes responsibilities. We can make no plans until we know the extent of the Blight. If it is nation-wide, then the government will take over.’

  ‘The government,’ said Phineas De Lacey dully, ‘will tell us again that the Blight is “a baseless vision”.’ There was a white despair on the cheerful ruddy countenance.

  The Scout was not the only one who awaited the mail coach in the evening. A crowd of respectable townspeople waited anxiously for its news. The Scout almost scaled the sacred heights of the driver’s seat. But ritual was upheld. The reins were handed to the ostler. The white gloves that remained immaculate no matter how black the potato, were slowly removed. Then the driver informed the Scout that the nine mail coaches that had checked in at the Dublin Depot this morning had all carried the same tale of disaster. The Blight had struck all over Ireland.

  24

  ‘She gave them some broth without any bread. And she whipped them all soundly. And put them to bed.’ Roderick couldn’t believe his eyes. And yet it was true. He was standing at Arbour Hill in Dublin watching her Excellency the Vicereine dip the ladle into the first Government Soup for the famine victims. The ceremony was being held on the eve of Roderick’s return to Kilsheelin after the Landlords’ Protest meeting. His neighbours, the de Guiders, had come with him. The Government had not acceded to their petitions for help to combat the famine. But it had made the gesture of sending Monsieur Soyer, the chef of the Reform Club, to show the starving Irish how to live on a soup containing one ounce of solid food to three ounces of water! ‘A French chef, my dear!’ murmured Miss Hester.

  There he stood on a platform above the pit at Arbour Hill barracks where the bodies of the insurgents of ’98 had been buried by their executioners. It seemed like a symbol of forgiveness that the spot should have been chosen by the Government for this act of benevolence. Palms and flowers adorned the sides. In the centre stood the Lord Lieutenant and his Lady, flanked by the ladies-in-waiting and by aides-de-camp in the glory of full-dress uniform. Her Excellency, the Vicereine, was dressed for the occasion in a high-necked robe with but one velvet-edged flounce. It conveyed a dignified impression of subdued restraint. It reproached the fashionably dressed ladies present in their many-flounced silken gowns. A military band brought from England for the event, played a selection of operatic and patriotic airs. The Union Jack blew in the wind over the bubbling cauldron. The great French chef came before the footlights and stirred the life-giving brew.

  He flavoured and sipped; it was good! With a gesture of satisfaction he turned and bowed low to her Excellency. The band muted its airs. The bandmaster raised his baton. There was a rumbling and a crashing. All the gentlemen withdrew their supporting arms from their ladies and went rigid at the opening bars of ‘God Save The Queen’.

  The semi-starving withdrew their support from the starving. The cripples straightened over their crutches. Hungry old veterans decorated by Wellington drew in their empty stomachs and stood erect to the anthem that had marched them to many a victory.

  As the First Lady moved forward inside her swaying skirt, Sarah whispered, ‘Hester, observe how the skirt swings. Her Excellency must be wearing one of those new “watch-spring” petticoats.’

  The chef drew the ladle that was chained to the cauldron. Like a knight surrendering his sword he proffered it to the Vicereine. Slowly she dipped it into the Elixir of Irish life. Roderick turned to watch the first of the multitude led forward. It had woman’s clothes and the face of a skeleton. Miss Sarah fumbled for her smelling salts.

  As the gracious figure in the austere robe of blue barège dipped the ladle and slowly brought it towards those pallid lips, a young beau in front of Roderick murmured, ‘Angel of mercy.’ The charming girl on his arm gave an audible sob. The ladies were not the only ones moved to tears by the beautiful charity of this noble lady. Roderick noticed one young aide-de-camp furtively wiping a tear.

  Whether it was that she was overcome with compassion; whether it was revulsion at the contortions of the terrible face as the mouth opened to receive the soup; or whether it was simply that she had filled the ladle too generously—the Vicereine’s hand trembled and a few drops of soup fell on that exquisite gown!

  The lady showed the iron training of vice-royalty. She went on holding the ladle while the creature took an unappreciatively long time about consuming the nourishment that she should have been gulping frantically.

  ‘That lovely gown!’ exclaimed Miss Hester. ‘The dreadful soup is still dripping on it.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Cousin Hester,’ soothed Roderick. ‘It is not strong enough to stain.’ And grimly he added. ‘They ought to have strengthened it with bones from the pit.’ Amongst the bones of ’98 rebels executed where the Vicereine stood were those of his uncle, the red-haired Calvagh O’Carroll, who had blandly helped the hangman to tie the knot.

  The young English gentleman in front glared challengingly back at Roderick. He was a recruit of the twelve-thousand-strong army of highly-paid officials who had crossed over to cope with the famine crisis.

  ‘Shall we move, Sir Roderick?’ Stephen de Guider was nervous lest the young blade call out Sir Roderick. People were edging away.

  Roderick drew Miss Sarah forward. His face had the look that always told Mike O’Driscoll that the Sir was ready to ‘shoot a flea off the tail of a snipe’. ‘Stand aside, sir,’ he said to the young gentleman.

  On the homeward journey Roderick and James de Guider passed crowds of starving men moving wearily along the roads to the Relief Works Schemes. Sleek and well-dressed officials put them through a catechism of insolent questions that began with the inevitable, ‘Why should a big able-bodied man like you seek Relief Work?’ And always it was answered with the patient statement that echoed through the millions. ‘Tá ocras orm! The hunger is on me!’

  *

  At
Kilsheelin, Margaret sat at the window for a sight of Roderick’s returning carriage. She was physically exhausted. The gloom of those daily scenes in the yard had darkened her spirits. She longed for Roderick.

  Suddenly she saw a figure creep through the grey light of the fields. The silence was pierced by the agonising scream of an animal in torture. Dear God, it was starting again! The White-boys! The terrible mutilations! She pressed her hands over her ears so that they heard only her own screams.

  When Roderick entered his wife’s lovely white room with its gilded harp and its spinet and its glow of fire and candlelight, she was swaying in Nurse Hogan’s arms. Horror was in Margaret’s great soft eyes, in her voice whose screams had been muffled from him against Nurse Hogan’s shoulder. ‘Maman!’ she screamed. Always before it had been ‘Roder-eeck!’ But now she cried out for Maman whom she would have been with, but for this terrible famine.

  She quietened in his arms. The tenseness went from her body. He could feel its own warm seductiveness flow back. Too late. She had merely unburdened her strain on to his overburdened shoulders. There was no escape for him, anywhere, from this seeping, all-pervading horror.

  Roderick knew the sickening truth about the cry that Margaret had heard. It was not the Whiteboys this time, but desperate women who stole through the fields by night to draw blood from cattle to mix with meal for their hungry children!

  Big John was first on the spot from which the cries had sounded. He found an emaciated old woman lying near the wounded animal. ‘It wasn’t for myself I did it,’ she whispered. He recognised Mrs. Downey, the mother of Felix and Jim. ‘The gossoons were fading before my eyes. I couldn’t stand the look on their faces,’ she whispered. He carried her to the cabin that had replaced the house blown down the night of the Big Wind. He had not been able to stop that night and help her because of his hurry to get help for her Ladyship. The next day she was dead.

  Hers was the first famine death in Kilsheelin. The frenzied animal had lashed out and caught her temple. Though she died from her own criminal act, Mr. O’Neill-Balfe brought in a verdict of Death From Famine.

  *

  ‘The hunger is on me,’ was the cry of the famine. Repeal was forgotten as men and women scrounged and battled to survive.

  Nonie Ryan was desperate. There was nothing left to sell. She had written home at last for help, but there was no word back. ‘We can wait no longer then,’ she told Pat, ‘He is giving employment, draining that snipe bog of his.’

  Pat looked at her squatting on the straw palliasse, her feet tucked under her like a little fairy woman. He reached and plucked the feather that clung to a tear at the end of her dainty nose. Feathers; they were every place since she sold the fine down stuffing of their marriage bed. ‘Love!’ he muttered aloud. ‘Bad ’cess to it for the love that made me take you away from full and plenty. All right. I’ll get work.’

  Outside he gripped the gatepost to cough, and where he spat there was blood. Her head came through the window. ‘Pat! I’d do it again—priest’s horse and all—if—if I had the energy.’

  His smile flashed back and his shoulders straightened.

  But he went in the opposite direction from Kilsheelin; on to Major Darby’s and his ‘famine folly’. For sixpence a day—and a halfpenny docked by the pay clerk—men were building a thing called an obelisk. He cast a longing upward glance at the bog that Sir Rody O’Carroll was paying sevenpence a day for draining, no pay clerk to pocket his cut, and only a few fields away instead of this two-mile trudge! He halted, uncertain, and then it came back to him, as vivid as hunger; the scene on that Saint Patrick’s Eve. Footing kiss how-are-you! Hadn’t he seen their two faces? Like of people’s that had found each other after being lost; the slow way their mouths had come towards each other and clung; and the eyes of her, longing after the fine horseman of her own kind till he was out of sight. Black Pat turned away. ‘“Dear to a man’s heart”,’ he quoted, ‘“is his brother; but his foster-brother is the marrow of his heart”. And you were the marrow of my heart, Rody O’Carroll. I little thought you’d ever play me false.’

  *

  For Margaret, her turn of duty at the soup cauldron at Templetown served as some relief from the horror around her. Despite misery and sorrow and often repulsive spectacles, when Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin was ladling there was bound to be diversion. Nothing seemed to depress the little lady. She took her place behind the cauldron in the most startling confections as though she were presiding behind the silver tea urn in her own drawing-room. The Misses Cherry and Berry Comerford and Mrs. Enright in their big callimanco aprons had given up trying to impress her with their disapproving sniffs. She just didn’t care. And there was never a shortage of gentlemen. When passing officers saw the vivacious chatterbox at the ladle they dismounted and leaned nonchalantly against their mounts, roaring with laughter at her sallies. Even the scarecrows laughed gaily when it was she who filled their soup cans. All the world loves laughter.

  The scarecrows laughed now as Mrs. Enright pinned up for all the world to see the announcement that a sum of money had come unsought from a strange body of people in faraway New York. They called themselves the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

  What kind of fellows could they be at all, marvelled the hungry ones! The Scout enlightened them. They were a benevolent body of gentlemen who were handicapped by certain mental disability. ‘...what you ignoramuses might describe as being a—a bit touched here.’ He tapped his chimney pot and the crowd roared. ‘But,’ he went on sternly, ‘the great free land of America permits all men to go free and therefore these—these kindly gentlemen though they are—intellectually—like—like Billy Din there—’ Billy smiled his silly smile and said that they were good gentlemen and ‘...they wouldn’t hurt me foot,’ the Scout continued, ‘are allowed freedom to indulge the Christian impulses of their generous hearts.’

  After his oration, the Scout would have liked a drop of the soup that smelled so temptingly. But it was the brew of charity; and the Scout styled himself a landlord. Didn’t he own his own tiny house in Love Lane? And the lean-to-shanty beside it that was let at two shillings a month!

  Young Thomas moved in a rasping trance—only one thing was clear. He was grateful for the memory of the leisurely—the cultured—life he had known before the famine. Now he milked cows in the sheds of his master’s friends. He felt humble as he dispensed charity to industrious farmers. Those outstretched hands had cultivated their owners’ soil whilst he had eaten the soft bread of servitude. Ah well! He didn’t eat much soft bread now! No lazy reading; no pleasant chats with Miss Sterrin. No existence of his own. He saw few of his friends. As for Kitty and Mark, he put the thought of them from him with panic. God alone knew how things fared with them.

  *

  Kitty watched a shadow fall across her doorway. Her heart lifted. A coordheecer? Young Thomas maybe! She hadn’t seen him for months.

  ‘God save you,’ said the man at the door. ‘I’m looking for a colleen named Molly Slattery.’ The implements of his trade protruded from the satchel on his shoulder. ‘Has Molly the fever?’ she asked. At least this was ‘newses’ of some kind. All ‘newses’ were bad these times! ‘They don’t wait for fever now to get their hair cut. There is a length of food value in hers. I’m told.’ He watched the nervous play of Kitty’s fingers through the black ringlets.

  ‘How—how much will you give me for it?’

  ‘Two shillings.’

  She dropped her hand. Woman’s vanity shot the listlessness from her voice. ‘What do you think you are buying? A boneen?’

  ‘By the frost, ma’am! ’Twould take a better head of hair than yours to buy a little pig these days.’ He turned to the door. ‘I must be on my way. Mrs. Campion has five daughters down bad. She wants the hair off them before night. Not lookin’ for money she is. Only waitin’ for the relief I’ll give.’ He watched her features straining out at him through the thin skin of her face.

  ‘The Campions!’ she scof
fed. ‘Who would want to buy yellow hair?’

  ‘Two and six, then,’ he called. From the cradle the hungry wailing started again. The travelling barber gave a sympathetic, ‘Tek, tek, I won’t be keepin’ you ma’am. You’ll be wantin’ to get the child’s supper.’ His eyes slewed deliberately round a circuit that embraced the empty hearth, the door that swung from an empty cupboard. ‘The mothers of hungry children haven’t time to be bargaining about their hair.’

  She turned frantically from the cradle and pulled the pins from her hair. ‘How many mothers of hungry children have hair like that to bargain for? Four shillings,’ she challenged.

  He stepped back into the room and took out his purse. ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  She kept her eyes squeezed tight until she heard the closing of the door. When she opened them the room was empty, but four silver shillings brightened the table.

  The door opened again. ‘Where did you say the Slattery girl lived?’

  ‘I didn’t say.’ She wasn’t going to have the plunder of Molly Slattery’s cloak of hair on her conscience. What will Mark say, she thought, as she trekked home with her purchases? He was proud of her beautiful hair. But Mark merely asked her in amazement where had she got the beautiful food.

  ‘I bought it.’

  He looked round the bare room. ‘With what, in the name of God?’

  ‘With a bit of myself.’

  People spoke strangely these times. He hoped there was nothing queer going on in Kitty’s head. He peered out at her over the wooden porringer. There was something queer about her. ‘Kitty!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Kitty, cailín duv machree!’ Dark girl of my heart! ‘Your beautiful hair!’

  By Christmas night when Young Thomas saw the Hennesseys, the cut ends of Kitty’s hair had curled around her ears. The graceful line of her neck and shoulder stood out uncluttered.