Irish Cream

by Andrew M. Greeley

  The cottage smelled like a public house, tobacco and drink. I may have been the only sober person inside.

  “Granny survived the Famine as a little girl because she was young and strong. She served her family through her life with all the strength she had. Now her strength has finally failed her and she has left us behind, all of us the poorer for her absence. Those who knew her long ago must remember her as a strong, brave young woman. Those of you who are young must realize that she was like you are now. We all die, most of us grow old and die. We find courage from our faith that Granny is young again as so we too will be as God has promised us. Let us now pray for her and pray for ourselves.”

  At first their responses to the prayers were weak. They wanted to get back to their drink, their tobacco, their keening, and their party. But as I progressed through the mysteries their voices picked up. Perhaps their dogged Irish faith had reasserted itself. I don’t know. The final decade was a shout that filled the countryside.

  Kate sobbed through the Rosary. It was not artificial keening. When I left, she kissed my hand and thanked me for coming—the smell of whiskey strong on her breath. The crowd of mourners was decently quiet as I rode away. Doubtless they were happy to see me go.

  The wake I conclude is a pagan custom to which some Christianity is attached. I could stop it as easily as I could scream down the ocean or move Colm’s great ugly, evil rock.

  They do not have requiem Masses in this part of Ireland, perhaps because the custom did not survive the penal times, perhaps because the people felt they did not have the money to pay for it. Yet the custom that the body was carried directly from the wake to the cemetery is strong. They do not want to give it up.

  So I waited for them at the entrance to my leaky old church as the rain beat down. The burial was to be “in the morning,” with no precise time given. “They won’t come before noon,” Mrs. O’Flynn predicted quite accurately.

  They finally straggled up the road to the cemetery next to the church. My tiny acolyte and I braved the rain to walk to the graveside. The unctuous Branigan raised a leaky umbrella over my head. I realized that the whole funeral party—several score of people—were both soaked to the bone and drunk. I was shivering uncontrollably and my teeth were chattering. Nonetheless, I was determined that Granny Murtaugh would receive the full Latin ceremony for commending a Christian soul to her maker.

  “Your Reverence needs a small drop against the cold,” Branigan said.

  I ignored him.

  I would not desert Granny Murtaugh until the last shovel of earth was piled on her grave.

  Eternal rest grant unto her O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon her.

  Back at the parish house, Mrs. O’Flynn had a warm pot of tea and a small sip of poteen for me.

  “Your Reverence needs a bit of warmth.”

  “What will they do now?”

  “Won’t they go to the public house and keep on drinking?”

  “They’re all drunk now.”

  “Doesn’t a burial require a lot of drinking?”

  I would like to have asked whether her husband’s funeral was similar. At least I had the sense for once to keep my mouth closed.

  I sipped the whiskey, drank the tea, and ate the warm meal that Mrs. O’Flynn had prepared for me. Then I left the house to walk into town to the pub. I wanted to witness the entire burial ritual. The rain had stopped and in the distance over the roaring ocean a bit of blue sky was beginning to appear. I will not try to describe the degradation of the scene. Half the mourners were unconscious, the rest were quarrelling with one another. Kate was in the corner, still sobbing, with a whiskey bottle in her hand.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Your Reverence,” Branigan told me.

  “Yes, I should have come. There will be no more of these binges after burials. Do you understand? I will condemn them from the altar and condemn you if there is another one.”

  “I need the money,” he pleaded.

  “You will not earn it off the grief of these poor people,” I told him, turned on my heel, and walked back to the parish house, feeling that once more I had made a fool of myself.

  St. Colm’s massive rock seemed to stare at me with implacable scorn.

  As I played late this afternoon Eileen O’Flynn brought some of her young friends along to stand outside and listen silently.

  Not much good as a priest, but a great entertainer of children. A man could have a worse epitaph.

  We have a new doctor, younger than his predecessor and, I think, more intelligent. And, thanks be to God, Catholic! However, he drinks too much, as did his predecessor. I wonder whether he can do much more than bind up a few wounds and perhaps repair the occasional broken limb.

  Lord Skeffington has appointed young Liam Conroy as schoolmaster for three years. Liam arrived three days ago. He is an innocent, a true Israelite in whom there is no guile. A tall handsome Viking, with long blond hair and a gentle smile, he is young in a place where everyone is old, even those who are not yet twelve. Will his hope survive in a school where the children of the old are already old themselves?

  How many years will it take to turn Eileen O’Flynn into Granny Murtaugh?

  August 22, Octave of the Assumption, Feast of St. Andrew of Fiesoli, brother of St. Donatus, first bishop of Fiesoli.

  Two more wandering Irish missionaries. Fiesoli, I thought, high above the Duomo of Florence, would have been a great improvement over anything they left behind, to say nothing of my own exile here.

  I preached today against superstitions and paganism. The Irish people would never amount to anything until they left behind the paganism that they had permitted to slip back into their religion despite all the fine work that Patrick and Brigid and Colm had done in spreading the pure Christian faith. The English were right in their judgment that the Irish were poor, ignorant, superstitious savages. They were poor and ignorant because they believe in such things as holy wells and sacred mountains, which were a survival of pagan times. Good St. Colm is ashamed in heaven to know that his name was associated with superstitious practices and with the abuses of the patterns and the wakes, which were also survivals of paganism.

  I would preach on these abuses until they stopped. Moreover I would absolutely forbid visits to the public houses after a burial. Unless the relatives of the deceased promised on their solemn honor that they would not permit such drunken orgies, I would refuse to bury the deceased in consecrated ground.

  That created a stir in the congregation. Refusal of a Christian burial was a great punishment, not to the deceased, who would probably be on his way to God (whose love I had assumed would forgive the Irish many things because of the acute pain of their lives, one of my opinions that greatly upset the Cardinal), but to the family. It would be a disgrace that would linger for centuries and cause bad luck.

  I was using one superstition to rout another, which was also a sacrilege.

  They were sullen after Mass, the men touching their forelocks but with little sign of real respect, the women looking down, more humiliated, I thought, by their own degeneracy than the men were. Branigan simply shook his head in despair. A handful commended me, some of the women who would have approved of what the parish priest said, even if he had preached in Russian, and others like the new schoolteacher, the new doctor and his wife, and, of course, Mrs. O’Flynn.

  The last said with her usual firmness, “It’s time those things be said, Your Reverence.”

  September 15, Feast of St. Ciaran of Clonmacnoise, one of the greats in Irish history.

  His monastery survived the Vikings, Irish kings, and the Normans, only to be destroyed in the sixteenth century by the Protestants under Cromwell.

  Lady Skeffington bathed in the Holy Well today, two weeks before the feast.

  Bob, part of Cromwell’s inheritance here, did not warn me, which is just as well. I could hardly have ridden over to the well to warn her off. She was, after all, a Protestant and I had no jurisdiction over her soul,
even if she and her husband were friends.

  Nor had I any right to judge what was superstitious for an Englishwoman. Fortunately she came early in the morning. Mrs. O’Flynn reported to me that several of the women of the parish were there to protect her modesty. She didn’t say whether she was among them. I didn’t ask. I presumed that she was.

  What would happen if she conceived after her visit to Colm’s well? I would have to rejoice and also perhaps conclude that God has a sense of humor and is not subject to the jeremiads of a parish priest.

  September 16, Feast of St. Nimian, an Irish convert who antedated St. Patrick and brought religion to the Scots, a poor venture at best.

  A troop of redcoats rode through the parish yesterday. The rumor spread that they had come to help the customs men search for stills. Panic spread as many of my parishioners moved their stills by the dark of night, fearing that there might be an informer in our midst who would report to the redcoats the location of every still in the townland.

  The people of the parish turned out to watch them, silent, sullen, threatening. The troopers looked neither to the right nor the left, but some of the younger ones seemed intimidated.

  I was invited to dine with Lord and Lady Skeffington to meet the two callow subalterns who commanded the troop. They were barely twenty years old, fresh out of Sandhurst and sent not to the extremes of the British Empire but to a place which might be more dangerous than India. The Fenians were still around, if silent and brooding, as they awaited the time for another rising, one doubtless more ill planned and ill led than that bloody disaster. Nor did the local Ribbonmen like the idea of redcoats in our townland. They wouldn’t risk doing battle with the whole troop of twenty lance-carrying men. But they might pick off an occasional straggler or two. The men would simply disappear. There would be a frantic search for their bodies, which would lie at the bottom of the ocean. The constables would hunt for the killers. Everyone in the townland would know who was responsible, but no one would say a word, for fear the Ribbonmen would take vengeance on themselves and their families.

  They were pleasant enough lads, though arrogant as young men wearing red coats and carrying lances and carbines would be. At first they thought I was the local Church of Ireland parson. Who else would be on a firstname basis with the lord of the Big House?

  Mary Margaret Skeffington, who at first would not look at me, gently corrected them. “I say, sir,” the more callow of the two, a young man with unruly blond hair said to me, “can’t you do anything about these ‘patterns’? Isn’t it rather a disgrace that a troop of the Queen’s cavalry has to be called in to help the local authorities maintain order? And what exactly is a ‘pattern’?”

  “You might think of it as a kind of village fair,” I said pleasantly enough (I was after all, Bob’s guest), “combined with ancient pagan practices on a festival day, which here at any rate honors one of Ireland’s great saints, Colm. Horses and sheep and cattle are bought and sold, races are run, both human and equine, people bathe in a pool of springwater, which the locals claim was caused by the saint striking it with his crosier. It is icy-cold water which does more harm to the health than benefit. Poteen is bought and sold, though with utmost discretion—His Lordship may explain that to you. Then at the end of the day, someone whispers an unguarded word to someone else and a duel ensues between two factions which both the initial combatants represent. The tension has been growing all day long as everyone awaits the spark, some fearfully, others eagerly.”

  “I say!” exclaimed the other one, a tiny fellow whose cockneylike accent said that he had to be a promising soldier for Sandhurst to make him an officer and a gentleman. “Do they fight with swords and pistols?”

  Milord Skeffington laughed, bitterly I thought.

  “Ensign Cadbury, few men here on the outer edges of Europe possess such weapons, for which Her Majesty’s government should be grateful. When they engage in revolution which they will every twenty years more or less until Westminster permits them to govern themselves, they use pikes. In these fights they use good stout clubs, shillelaghs they call them, since the intent is not to kill, which pikes tend to do.”

  “No one dies, then?”

  “The odd person does occasionally, but through mischance and drunkenness. They intend only to wound and maim.”

  “How barbaric!”

  Neither Milord nor I disputed the point.

  “What will happen if a score or so of British lancers should line up?”

  “They’ll run as fast as they can,” I answered. “It’s not Balaklava, you know.” I had failed again in the custody of my tongue. The reference to the ill-fated light brigade at the siege of Sevastopol was uncalled for.

  “Nor are they a warrior people like the Zulus,” Milord added, commemorating another glorious British defeat, one more recent.

  It occurred to me that for a veteran who had been a regimental commander at a very young age, His Lordship was more than a little cynical about Her Majesty’s Army.

  “Your men,” I told them, “will be in more danger from knives in the dark. You’ll be perfectly safe during the daylight hours, which are very long this time of the year, but once darkness sets in, you might as well be in Zululand.”

  “Which reminds me, Bobby,” Mary Skeffington interrupted our conversation, “you must insist that your guests spend the night here.”

  “No, ma’am!” they insisted bravely. “We couldn’t possibly do that!”

  “You can and you will, gentlemen. If I have to make that an order, I will. You will learn in time that bravery is only taking necessary chances. There is no moon tonight. Father Lonigan is correct. For British officers after dark, this is enemy country.”

  “For you too, sir?” the short man asked in horror.

  “That could happen, though I think it won’t. I’m held in sufficient regard here that if such a plot were afoot, I would hear about it beforehand.”

  A lord had been killed down in Mayo in recent memory. But he had been a cruel tyrant. Most of the local people respected Robert Skeffington, some loved him. Yet it could happen, especially if the Fenians decided to stage another rising.

  Lady Mary Margaret rose from the table.

  “I’ll leave you gentlemen to your cigars and brandy.”

  I had noticed that the two young officers had devoured her with their eyes all evening. She was only a couple of years older than they were.

  “I think we can do better than brandy, can we not Mary?”

  “I’ll send the butler in with it,” she said primly.

  It was the bottle of clear liquid. “Gentlemen, this is the drink that the men in the faction fight on the festival day will have consumed for most of the day. It’s amazing how much courage it bestows on a man with a club in his hand … No, Father? I gather you don’t need the creature to be courageous.”

  I rode home in the dark of the moon. It was not raining but there was a chill in the wind and a mist in the air. The ocean was growling sullenly, and the stench of salt was thick in the mist. I will never get used to that stench. I was aware that there were men lurking in the mists as I turned away from the sea. I paused and waited for them to come closer.

  “Go home, you fools!” I shouted. “’Tis only the parish priest. You might want to kill him, but you’d be afraid to. You’ll not catch the soldiers tonight. Do you want to bring all the might of the British Empire down on this poor townland? You will surely die if you do. So will many others. So will many innocent women and children. Go home now and be content with maiming one another in honor of good St. Colm.”

  I nudged my mare and galloped off.

  I have already sent my groom with a note to Bob warning him that there were Ribbonmen about and that there was no telling what they would do.

  Would they use the violence of the pattern to attack the constables and the redcoats? The Ribbonmen had done more foolish things. The fact that this looked like a good year for the crops, a chance for the tenant farmers to catch
up on their debts, would not deter them.

  I doubt it.

  This afternoon I played Irish reels for Eileen O’Flynn and her friends. Very hesitantly at first, then with cautious enthusiasm they danced to my music. I had learned in Spain that God made us dancing creatures and approves of dances if they are proper. What proper is, like so many other things, depends on time and place. I felt also that good Colm might not mind either. The Cardinal would, but he’s a long way away.

  I also noticed that Eileen O’Flynn was a little older than I had originally thought. The decent food of the parish house had come at the right time in her life. I prayed to God that she would find a man who was not a brute like some of them or an insensitive lout like many of them, but rather a decent, upright, gentle man who would love her and treasure her.

  I warned myself that I was thinking like a father and then dismissed that foolish fear.

  September 18, Feast of St. Keemgel, one of the early Irish women saints. She probably thinks I’m a fool too.

  I have a pretty clear memory of the patronal feast. There are some blanks, but the main events are etched in my memory. The church was filled for Mass. The people were dressed in their finest clothes. We sang some old Irish-language hymns and I surprised the congregation by my knowledge of their language. I preached on Colm and his generosity and dedication, especially when he had to go into exile on Iona, the most barren and desolate place in all the world and how his goodness turned it into a holy place, which it still is.

  I wondered to myself if Iona was any more desolate than my own parish. That was self-pity, however, which I despise.

  The fair was just outside the town, between the town and the Holy Well. I resolved that I would stay away from the well, at least for this year. It was the faction fight I intended to stop.

  By the standards of England or Spain or even the Pale, our town fair, as I liked to think about it, was not very impressive. Yet for the edge of Europe it was a pleasant and lively day. Shy young couples watched anxiously as their parents negotiated the terms of their marriages. Shrewd horse breeders argued and insulted one another in high good humor. Women sold lace shawls and wool sweaters on which they had worked all winter and prayed for sales that might give them a few extra coins with which to manage their families’ lives. Happy crowds surrounded storytellers from other places. Musicians with fiddles and drums and pipes and tin whistles entertained for a few pence and led the songs and the dances.