My Father's Footprints

by Colin McEnroe

  “That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about,” Frank agrees.

  I’m ordinarily horrible at small talk, but for a moment I feel supremely Irish to be sitting in the driveway of a parish priest talking to him about something completely pointless when at least one of us has somewhere pressing to go.

  “Well, anyway,” I say finally, and then, because I am so involved in thinking about why he hates the expression, say, again, without meaning to, “take care.”

  “Aaugh!” cries Father Frank, and I throw the car in reverse and speed away before he can kill me.

  Boom boom boom boom boom.

  I’m up in the tower writing, plickety plick plick, but Sam Walker is worried.

  I can hear his broad farmer’s feet tromping up the roughly 2,339 stairs to where I am. Boom boom boom boom, here he comes. Sam’s wife manages the castle, and from what I can tell, Sam runs a rather large farm nearby. But, a june bug to a Coleman lamp, he is drawn to the guests, and he has gotten wind of my project and appointed himself my Mountnugent Literary Manager.

  Today he has decided it is imperative—imperative!—that I go and see Joe Moynagh. He has phoned over to Joe Moynagh and learned that if I leave with alacrity—with alacrity!—I can have an audience with him. Boom boom boom. But if I stay up in the tower plickety plicking on my laptop, this moment will pass, so boom boom boom, he is coming to force me to stop writing and get over to Joe’s.

  “Okay!” I tell him. Plickety plickety.

  It’s just that it’s so nice to write up here, high up, encased in stone, mournful ghosts swishing and gliding unobtrusively in the background.

  Back in the boxy Nissan and down the lane to the main road, past the graves and the quarry and the fairy throughway. And who is Joe Moynagh?

  Merely the undisputed expert on the Tonagh evictions, that’s all.

  This is, I remind you, Ireland in the time of foot-and-mouth disease. I am one of about six American travelers in the country, from what I can tell. There are signs all over the countryside imploring people to dip their feet. Country houses have little basins of water by the doorstep, and the driveways often begin with a spongy mat soaked in some kind of disinfectant. Even Newgrange, a megalithic mound of mysterious purpose in County Meath, with inner chambers older than the Great Pyramids, has been shut down so that we don’t spread foot-and-mouth to 5,000-year-old dead kings.

  No one has ever seen Ireland act quite this way. Ruthless efficiency! In England, the cows are heaped up in burning piles, and the gods wrinkle their noses at the stench. Ireland has been… well, goddamn it, proactive! As a result, foot-and-mouth never really gets going in Ireland.

  Information-Technology Ireland has canceled its Saint Patrick’s Day parades, closed down the countryside, and got everybody dipping and wiping like a bunch of Norwegians with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The days of good-natured ineptitude are, it would seem, over. Remember the famine? Well, this time, let someone else have the famine. “We do ones and zeros now,” says Ireland.

  All of which is why I am standing at the foot of Joe Moynagh’s long drive in a bit of a quandary. There are several “No Entry” signs. There’s a squishy thing for the car tires to drive across. There’s a dipping basin for the feet. There’s a sign urging me to join the fight against foot-and-mouth. Am I supposed to (a) go away, (b) drive across the squishy thing, or (c) park by the road, dip my feet, and walk up?

  For no reason at all, I pick (c), and when I get up to the house, I say, “I wasn’t, um, sure so I, uh, left the car down, um…”

  Yes, yes, come in, come in. That’s fine. Nobody seems to care what I’ve done. The disease scare is 90 percent over, and people have almost forgotten that there are still ominous signs and contrivances scattered around their properties.

  Moynagh has the gentle face of a boy and the saddened look of a very old man. He’s middle-aged, with pale blue eyes and a not unhandsome, slightly equine face.

  “Going back over history is very dodgy,” he tells me. It sounds like a warning. I can leave now and skip the whole thing, if I’ve no stomach for dodginess.

  Not leaving? Well here it is, then.

  Joe tilts back in his chair, and the story streams out of him like blood. In 1847, the Irish landlord at Tonagh wanted the land clear to grow grain, wanted to consolidate small holdings into large holdings, wanted to start fresh with a new set of tenants.

  So he threw seven hundred people off their land, all in one day.

  “It was snowing and sleeting that day,” says Joe.

  Actually, contemporary accounts report a cold and copious rain, following the autumnal equinox, but the ballad does upgrade it to snow and sleet.

  Joe sings a bit of the ballad for me:

  All our joys were too good to last,

  The landlord came our homes to blast.

  In vain we pleaded but mercy no,

  He drove us out in the blinding snow.

  No one opened for us their door,

  For each one vengeance would reach for sure.

  My Eileen fainted in my arms and died,

  On that snowy night by Lough Sheelin side.

  Farewell my country, a long farewell,

  My tale of anguish no tongue can tell.

  For I’m forced to fly over ocean wide,

  From the home I love by Lough Sheelin side.

  Every house was “knocked” (dismantled by a bunch of goons wielding crowbars) says Joe, except for one, whose occupants included a man with cholera. The roof of that house was removed, he said, but the walls were left up. Joe believes the house was not razed because the occupants included an agent of the landlord.

  “My people were the Briodys,” says Joe. “There was an old man in the house who was an invalid. They carried him out and laid him on the ground and knocked the house.”

  For the record, the contemporary account, by a new priest named Nulty who later became a bishop, is a little different.

  I reproduce a chunk of it here, mainly because Bishop Nulty’s tone—one of near-hysteria—captures the moment more piquantly than anything I might write.

  Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day and set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, notably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them. And we remember well that there was not a single shilling of rent due on the estate at the time, except by one man; and the character and acts of that man made it perfectly clear that the agent and himself quite understood each other.

  The Crowbar Brigade, employed on the occasion to extinguish the hearths and demolish the homes of honest, industrious men, worked away with a will at their awful calling until evening. At length an incident occurred that varied the monotony of the grim, ghastly ruin which they were spreading all around. They stopped suddenly, and recoiled panic-stricken with terror from two dwellings which they were directed to destroy with the rest. They had just learned that a frightful typhus fever held those houses in its grasp… They therefore supplicated the agent to spare these houses a little longer; but the agent was inexorable and insisted that the houses should come down.

  …He ordered a large winnowing-sheet to be secured over the beds in which the fever victims lay—fortunately they happened to be perfectly delirious at the time—and then directed the houses to be unroofed cautiously and slowly, because, he said, “he very much disliked the bother and discomfort of a coroner’s inquest.”

  I administered the last Sacrament of the Church to four of these fever victims next day; and save the abovementioned winnowing-sheet, there was not then a roof nearer to me than the canopy of heaven. The horrid scenes I then witnessed I must remember all my lifelong. The wailing of women—the screams, the terror, the consternation of children—the speechless agony of honest, industrious men—wrung tears of grief from all who saw them.

  We’re right smack in one of those dodgy areas. Joe Moynagh thinks there was one house that was spared, and in that house was a collu
der with the landlord and also a case of typhus. The Nulty account gives us two houses with typhus, each unroofed, and a separate house where there lived a man whose “character and acts” were so despicable that Nulty couldn’t keep himself from mentioning them, although he was not comfortable going into any more detail or even naming a name. (That, by the way, strikes me as a supremely Irish trope. Because I am an idiot, because I didn’t see this project coming, I brought up the subject of lineage with my father exactly once in our lives, in 1996, almost two years to the day before he died. It prompted a letter from him, not to me but to his cousin Peggy. It had almost a “someone’s been around here asking a lot of questions” tone. Going through his papers, I found a draft he didn’t send. He writes of their fathers’ generation: “All of Pat’s boys—except one—were exemplary. Your father had two candy stores and had the gumption to start them.” Who was not exemplary? He doesn’t say. Does he mean his own father? You see what I mean. Like Bishop Nulty before him, he lifts the pot cover just long enough to let a whiff of perfidy escape and hang in the air. I figured out much later that the exception was Henry, the fifth child of Patrick and Elizabeth. Known as Harry, he ran off to join the circus. He returned to New Britain later in his adult life and was, I gather, a charming man, if not terribly strong in the visible-means-of-support area.)

  Why should I care who was the rotten apple of Tonagh?

  “It was the Coyle cottage that was spared,” says Joe.

  Now he looks like a horse who has said something awkward.

  You could say I’m as much a Coyle as I am a McEnroe. In fact, that’s one of the great jokes of lineage. Let’s imagine (falsely) that, when Thomas McEnroe marries in 1834, he is 100 percent McEnroe. His children are only 50 percent McEnroe (and 50 percent Coyle). When his son Patrick marries a Healey, the offspring will be only 25 percent McEnroe and 25 percent Coyle. You could argue that the Healeys, whoever and whatever they are at that genealogical moment, have a bigger claim. They’re 50 percent of the identity. And in the next generation, the old Thomas McEnroe stake drops to 12.5 percent and a new family (named O’Connell) buys in, again at 50 percent. You can go back to the old country and find traces of the great-great-grandfather who shares your last name, but he’ll have a lot less in common with you, genetically, than your maternal grandmother’s sister, whose name you probably don’t even know.

  Anyway, the Coyle house was never knocked, Joe says. Unroofed but left standing. There was even some talk, he says, that the house was cursed. The local story was that the front door would never shut. There would be plenty of vengeful ghosts, happy to rattle its handle and swing its hinges. The Tonagh evictions were a death sentence for roughly a quarter of the people thrown out.

  The reason for this was an unusual instruction from the landlord.

  “Everyone for miles around was told not to take them in,” Joe says.

  There were reprisals threatened against anyone who did.

  That left two options. Emigration to America or the workhouse, where families were broken apart and quartered separately, men, women, and children. Diseases raced through the workhouses; floggings were common; you were lucky to survive even a year there.

  So by putting out the word that no one was to give shelter to the evictees, the landlord had effectively killed a great number of them. Why do it?

  “Nobody knows,” says Joe. “There was no rent owed. It was very strange.”

  Well, there is one explanation. It is possible—although it seems counterintuitive—that owing to complexities in the law of the time, a landlord might have thought he could escape responsibility for his tenants under the “poor law tax” that helped fund famine relief if he not only evicted them, but drove them out of the area.

  “Who would have done such a thing?” I ask Joe. “What kind of heartless British bastard would turn seven hundred helpless people out of their homes, knock down the houses, and go out of his way to ensure they had no place else to go?”

  “Wasn’t the British,” he says.

  Oh. It was an Irish bastard.

  “The landlord Malone and his partners,” says Joe. “Their agent was Guinness.”

  “God bless you for the beer,” says Snowbird Toomey, one of my father’s characters. “Snowbird Toomey will always be at your service. I am dependably evil. I come from a long line of evil bastards—generation after generation. Breeding counts.”

  Bob McEnroe, like any good Irishman, could get himself pretty riled up about the British. He once refused to walk into a New York restaurant called The Oliver Cromwell. A couple of Jewish producers were trying to take him there, and my father offered the charming observation that this would be like someone trying to take them to a place called The Adolf Hitler. But I don’t think the Tonagh story would have surprised him.

  “The landlord was Irish. His agent was Irish. The Irish landlords were no better than the British, and often they were a good deal worse,” says Joe, his face contorting with sorrow, with woundedness, and with something unmistakably resembling satisfaction. “In 1854, the land was put up for sale and it was bought by two Irish priests. And they were no better either. This is why goin’ back over history can be so hortful.”

  What is even more hortful is the idea that the Coyles, my kin, may not have behaved honorably.

  We took soup, you might say.

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t talk to Kitty McEnroe,” says Joe, intruding on my reverie. “She was the last of her generation around here, and she knew some of the old stories.”

  “Where is she?” I ask.

  “She was buried last week. She was eighty-five,” he says, adding in a chipper tone, “You just missed her.”

  A day or two later, my toaster-sized Nissan rumbles down a country lane to the home of Noeleen McEnroe Plunkett, who is probably my closest relation in Ireland even though—after she gets out her papers and I get out my papers and her husband, what the hell, gets out his papers—we can’t really figure out how we’re related. Further confusing us is the fact that on two occasions, roughly fifty years apart, someone named Thomas McEnroe has married someone named Mary Coyle.

  “When you called, I was sure there was no connection, but now I think there is,” says Noeleen. She has lived in Mountnugent every day of her life, and her speech is unusually thick with the local accent, which is vaguely Klingon, lots of noises from the back of the throat.

  She is certain that no McEnroes were evicted at Tonagh. It would have been passed along orally, as it has in her husband Oliver’s family. He’s a Plunkett, one of the other local clans living for almost two centuries alongside the McEnroes, intermarrying liberally. The Plunketts were indeed turned out at Tonagh. They also boast an actual saint, the also-named-Oliver Plunkett who was hanged, drawn, and quartered by the British on trumped up charges involving a completely chimerical Popeish plot to invade Ireland.

  Noeleen knows the McEnroes were not turned out of Tonagh because she knows where they were.

  “Right there,” she says. She points out her window at a crumbly nineteenth-century farm cottage, long abandoned.

  “That might be your ancestral home,” says Oliver, grinning just a little.

  I resist the temptation to dash outside and run my hands melodramatically down its cool stone walls. Instead I look longer and harder at Noeleen. She doesn’t look much like me, but she strongly resembles my father and the rest of his family. She has what is unfondly called “the McEnroe nose,” although it might be fairer to say that they have hers. Probably nobody is going to fight very hard for ownership, because it is at once slightly bulbous and hawkish.

  I don’t know what I expected to find in Ireland.

  Well, that’s not quite true. I had a vague mental picture of myself on a hill, under a swirling gray sky, falling to my knees and digging my fingers into the earth and announcing myself as “a son of Ballyjamesdough” (or Knockgrafton or some other cool-sounding place). And meaning it. Having some kind of Moment. In this mental picture
I seemed to have darker, more tousled hair and stormy, flashing eyes—the guy on the cover of the novels called Savage Wicked Ravaging Fire of Love, with elements of Windy from the Association song of the same name.

  Instead I found a nose. The McEnroe nose, attached to this nice, somewhat reticent woman.

  “Have you noticed in the McEnroes any particular… consistent personality trait… or any kind of theme running through their lives or…” I falter. She is looking at me with incomprehension, and I realize that this is kind of a dopey question—something you might find on your English 223 final exam. What themes unite the protagonists in Arbuthnot’s McEnroe novels? How do they compare with those suggested by the House of Atreus in Greek tragedy? Give examples that support your points.

  On the other hand, I’m flying out of Dublin tomorrow. If there’s something here for me to learn, there probably isn’t time for me to soak it up in some nuanced way.

  “It’s just that my father and grandfather had this doomed, anguished quality, and I wondered if…”

  Noeleen looks out at the cottage for a moment, then looks back at me and says, “No.”

  And my Irish quest is over. Just like that.

  Somewhere in the world maybe there’s a packet of letters that tell the story of the passage, how Thomas and Mary find the money to get themselves and five children onto a boat and across the Atlantic in 1855.

  I can’t even picture the trip, but I can at least imagine their new lives in one of the crowded, unsteady-looking houses strewn around what came to be called Dublin Hill in New Britain, Connecticut.

  Thomas takes a job in one of the factories. New Britain is already a center for toolmaking. Ten cents an hour, and days that stretch on for ten hours. The children are Margaret, Mary, Thomas, Henry, Patrick. Thomas is born the year before their passage. He doesn’t make it to the age of five. The others, including my great-grandfather Patrick, settle in New Britain and live long lives. Patrick takes a job in a mill, marries Elizabeth Healey, another immigrant.