by Seamus Deane
That was long before the feud, as my mother called it. The feud. The word had a grandeur about it that I savoured, although it occurred to me that maybe there was more to be told. But it was only a half-sense that warned me what I had already been told was not all there was to tell. When I lay on my bed and looked at the picture of the Sacred Heart on the bedroom wall, I thought of Ena’s sad eyes as she fell back dying on the bed; its eyes watched me, whether I moved or lay still. Its mournfulness always gave me the same sensation that there was a deeper sorrow in the family than I could yet know, that the eyes were asking me to acknowledge the sharpness of a grief that could so pierce the heart.
FIELD OF THE DISAPPEARED
August 1950
In the summer of 1950 we had more money because my father was working overtime in the dockyards. We could, therefore, afford a holiday – two weeks in a boarding-house in Buncrana. My father came down on the bus at the weekends, for he could not get the time off during the week. The weather was hot, unbroken, bright as metal. When we wearied of the lough shore, we walked in the hills beyond the town, escorting ourselves carefully away from ceiling and the feud-farm, as we called it, where my father’s people seemed to us to hide, recessed into the hills. But on the first Sunday he came down, my father took Liam and me for a walk out the road that climbed steadily, curve by curve, towards the very place, nearer and nearer to where we believed the farm was. We glanced at one another, but said nothing. Instead, we looked blindly at the shivery furrows the wind opened in the hissing corn, at the potato drills stretching across the gently steepening slopes, and at the gulls drifting lazily inland before they banked towards the cliffs on the coast. He wanted to show us something, he said. His forehead glistened; his reddish hair was receding, making his craggy face more exposed, kinder, sweeter. He was walking heavily, not with his usual jaunt. Liam looked so like him that day: the same colouring, the same sharpness in his blue eyes. I was dark, like my mother, and felt almost like a member of another family beside them.
We came round a bend in the road that swept us out towards the ocean and then began to wrinkle inland again in a series of shallow loops. We stopped on the outer rim of the road. He pointed towards the sea.
‘Can you see anything peculiar?’ he asked.
We looked. Fields ran down to the cliff edge, lifting in a wave before they reached it. We saw nothing odd. We climbed a gate and went downfield into a shallow dell, thick with clover, buttercups, dandelions, daisies; it curved up and yielded to the final fold of ground that jutted into air as a lip of the cliff. From there, when we looked up, the grass seemed to stretch out into mid-air, yards beyond the rockier ground on either side. That stretch of green, he told us, was what we were to watch. We should be patient; look at the birds. They would fly towards it but were never really above it. We watched. Gulls, starlings, a swallow, all hung or soared in the air. They were so high it was hard to tell if they were above the patch or not; but certainly none landed on it, although some came near. Why? What was it? Tell us, we asked. That, he said, is the Field of the Disappeared. The birds that came toward it would pass from view and then come back on either side; but if they flew across it, they disappeared. We watched. My heart was thudding, even though I thought he was joking at first. The sea heaved in my ears and boomed far below, over and over. No, it was the truth, he said. That was its name. The local farmers avoided it. There was a belief that it was here that the souls of all those from the area who had disappeared, or had never had a Christian burial, like fishermen who had drowned and whose bodies had never been recovered, collected three or four times a year – on St Brigid’s Day, on the festival of Samhain, on Christmas Day – to cry like birds and look down on the fields where they had been born. Any human who entered the field would suffer the same fate; and any who heard their cries on those days should cross themselves and pray out loud to drown out the sound. You weren’t supposed to hear pain like that; just pray you would never suffer it. Or if you were in a house when the cries came, you were meant to close the doors and windows to shut them out, in case that pain entered your house and destroyed all in it. Christmas was a silent day in that valley, he said, especially when the evening came. I looked up at him and into his eyes. He smiled a little at me, but his face was troubled. Again, I felt there was something more to be told, but his eyes were saying he had changed his mind, he was not going to say any more.
We stared for a while longer at the grass on that patch wavering in a mirage of wind, although the day was still. I wondered what it was like in those days of February, November and December when the cries came. I went a little further up the slope to get closer to the magic field.
‘Don’t,’ said my father, ‘that’s far enough.’
I stopped. I wanted to go on. I looked back at him, standing there, waiting, his eyes squeezed against the sunlight. Liam stood between us. A gull landed on a nearby rock. I wanted to go on towards the cliff edge. I took another couple of steps upward. The slope was steeper than it looked. My father said nothing. Liam went back towards him and sat down among the buttercups. Is this, I wondered, where Eddie’s soul comes to cry for his lost fields? Dare I ask? I didn’t. Nor did I want to go closer to the edge. So I came downhill again to ask him if he had ever heard the cries. No. Had he ever wanted to hear them? No. If you could recognise the cry of someone lost to you amid the others? He didn’t know, didn’t think so. By this time he was walking back towards the gate. When did he first hear about this field? He couldn’t remember. I felt angry. He was blocking me, he had brought us here and then he walked away, with no explanation.
‘I don’t believe all that,’ I told him, ‘I think it’s all made up.
‘No doubt,’ he answered drily.
‘I mean, who’d believe that? Birds disappearing. Look, there’s one, that gull, right above it.’
I pointed but the gull was wheeling away, its cry scrawling the path of its flight.
Back on the road, we looked towards the field again. Now it looked quite ordinary. We could see the cliff edge where it ended. Then, as the sunlight flashed off the sea, for a moment, I could have sworn I saw someone standing there, right at the edge, a man peering down at the waters folding softly below But when I looked again, there was no one. I came off the high camber and half-ran to the other side of the road, where Liam was cutting a switch from a bush with his penknife, hacking it angrily. My father was ahead of us, walking quite fast. I reached to help hold the switch stick straight while Liam sliced off the side twigs. He looked at me furiously.
‘Get lost, you. Go up there and walk with him.’
And I ran to catch up with him but, as in a dream, he seemed never to get nearer and I gave up, stranded between them, Liam at the hedge paring his switch and looking at me, my father’s back receding as he came to a turn in the road, the gulls’ cries ringing piteously, angrily, in my ears.
GRIANAN
September 1950
Grianan was a great stone ring with flights of worn steps on the inside leading to a parapet that overlooked the countryside in one direction and the coastal sands of the lough in the other. At the base of one inside wall, there was a secret passage, tight and black as you crawled in and then briefly higher at the end where there was a wishing-chair of slabbed stone. You sat there and closed your eyes and wished for what you wanted most, while you listened for the breathing of the sleeping warriors of the legendary Fianna who lay below. They were waiting there for the person who would make that one wish that would rouse them from their thousand-year sleep to make final war on the English and drive them from our shores forever. That would be a special person, maybe with fairy eyes, a green one and a brown one, I thought, or maybe a person with an intent in him, hard and secret as a gun in his pocket, moving only when he could make everything else move with him. I was terrified that I might, by accident, make that special wish and feel the ground buckle under me and see the dead faces rise, indistinct behind their definite axes and spears.
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bsp; Liam and I spent a large part of our school holidays there in the summer. When there were others with us, we would break into groups and have races to the fort at the top. The winners then defended the fort against the rest, struggling wildly on the parapet, scaling the walls, our cries lost in the wild heather and rocks of the reserved landscape.
Once, my friends – Moran, Harkin, Toland – locked me in the secret passage. At first, I hardly reacted at all – just sat there in the stone wishing-chair. Gradually, the dark passageway up which I had just crawled lost its vague roundness and simply became blackness. I sat there, cold, even though it was hot outside and there were larks lost in song on high warm thermals above the old fort. I touched the wet walls and felt the skin of slime sliding in slow motion over their hardness. Even there, it stirred something in me to move my hand up against the wrinkling moss and water. If I were out and on the circular parapet again, I would see Inch Island and the wide flat estuaries of the dark-soiled coast and hear the distant war noise of the sea grumbling beyond. But here, inside the thick-walled secret passage which ended in this chair-shaped niche, there was nothing but the groan of the light breeze in that bronchial space, and the sound of water slitting into rivulets on the sharp rock face. I imagined I could hear the breathing of the sleeping Fianna waiting for the trumpet call that would bring them to life again to fight the last battle which, as the prophecies of St Columcille told us, would take place somewhere between Derry and Strabane, after which the one remaining English ship would sail out of Lough Foyle and away from Ireland forever. If you concentrated even further, you would scent the herbal perfumes of the Druid spells and you would hear the women sighing in sexual pleasure – yes-esss-yes-esss. If you then made a wish, especially a love-wish, you would always be attractive to women.
My friends had done this. I had been sitting there, in the wishing-chair, wondering how I could concentrate more on the emaciated ghost sounds within the passage, when the little light there was disappeared. I heard the grunt of the stone that covered the entrance being rolled back into place to shut me in. I yelled, but they laughed and ran up the parapet steps above me. The stone could not be moved from inside the passageway; it was too narrow to allow for leverage. So I sat and waited. When I shouted, my voice ricocheted all around me and then vanished. I had never known such blackness. I could hear the wind, or maybe it was the far-off sea. That was the breathing Fianna. I could smell the heather and the gorse tinting the air; that was the Druid spells. I could hear the underground waters whispering; that was the women sighing. The cold was marrow-deep; the chair seemed to shine with it. A scuttling, as of field mice, would come and go; perhaps it was mortar trickling away from the stones. I crawled down to the entrance and shouted again. Eventually, someone came and rolled the stone back and I scrambled out into the sunshine, dazed by the light, unsteady when I walked, as though all my blood had collected around my ankles. Later, when we climbed to the parapet again and scrambled down the wall to the road that took us home, the sky and the hills around seemed so wide and high that the dark passageway felt even worse in retrospect, more chilling and enclosed.
We had crossed the border by more than a field’s width and were approaching the road when a car came round a bend and almost caught us in its lights. We ducked into the darkness of the hedgerow. ‘Water rats,’ said Brendan Moran, peering up after them. It was the nickname given to customs officers. ‘Looking for smugglers. My father told me the smugglers caught one of them one night near Grianan and they took his customs jacket off, tied him up and closed him inside the passage. It was nearly two days before they found him, and he was stark, staring mad when they got him out. He’s still in the asylum at Gransha and they say he’s always cold; never warmed up since. Never will.’
As we came over the last rise in the road, the city lay braided in lights below us. We seemed to fall towards it, too tired to talk, into the network of narrow streets on that still Indian summer’s night.
KATIE’S STORY
October 1950
So there it was, our territory, with the old fort of Grianan on one hill overlooking Lough Foyle, the feud farmhouse on another hill, gazing on Lough Swilly, the thick neck of the Inishowen peninsula between, Derry gauzed in smoke at the end of Lough Foyle, the border writhing behind it. We would walk out there into Donegal in the late morning and be back in the city by six o’clock, in time to see the women and girls streaming home from the shirt factories, arms linked, so much more brightly dressed, so much more talkative than the men, most of whom stood at the street corners. We would call to them, but they would dismiss us as youngsters.
‘Wheel that fella home in his pram. His mother’ll be lookin’ for him.’
‘You and your wee red cheeks. Teethin’ again!’
We’d retreat in disarray. Sometimes, the older boys would jump on to the back of a lorry or hang on to the luggage ladder on a bus and fly past them, whistling, shouting the names of girls and the boys who fancied them. When the women disappeared into the houses there was always a blank space, a stillness of air disrobed, gaiety lost. Smoke from the chimneys stood up in the sky, even in summer, and when one went on fire, the sheaf of flame was a delight to see.
Katie, my mother’s sister, had been working in Tilly and Henderson’s factory as a stitcher. She had married young, way before my mother. Her one child, a daughter, Maeve, was already in her twenties and worked in a newsagent’s. Her husband, Maeve’s father, had disappeared even before Maeve was born, when Katie was only a couple of months pregnant. It wasn’t much talked about. His name was Tony McIlhenny. He had gone out to America in 1926, it seemed, looking for work, wrote once or twice, then nothing. He had left very suddenly; rumour had it that he had gone to Chicago, that he was married there and had children and was a respected member of his community. But he had never seen his child, never contacted her. It was strange. Katie never spoke of him. Once, when Liam asked my mother about him, she shook him by the shoulder and told him never to mention that man’s name in the house again. ‘Jesus,’ said Liam, ‘ask and ye shall receive. Jesus.’
In a way, Katie adopted us and became a second mother. I used to wish she would stay in with us more and that my parents would go out to the movies together. But they never did. They went nowhere together – not that there were many places to go, except to other people’s houses for a chat and a ceilidh, as they called it. Had they ever gone out together? I asked Eilis and Liam because they were older, but they didn’t remember them ever going out. Anyway, what was strange about it? They lived in one another’s pocket. That’s what married people do, Eilis said. Yes. But still, I wished they would go out together. ‘Costs money,’ said Liam. ‘And there isn’t any. Simple.’
Because Katie had no children to look after, now that Maeve was grown up, she was freer to go out than anyone else; besides, she was out of work. The shirt factory at the end of Craigavon Bridge had laid off scores of women when work got scarce. She didn’t think she would work again. So she came up to our house more often now and sometimes let my mother go upstairs for a nap while she looked after things in the kitchen. I watched the different ways she did things. She used more coal and kept the fire brighter; she put the saucepans on the range with their handles turned to the left rather than to the right. She sat with her back to the window My mother always sat facing it. ‘There,’ now she would say, when she finished doing something. ‘There now.’ She could never get the amounts straight when she was giving me the order for the grocer’s.
‘God bless us, you don’t need four loaves. One will do.’
‘You’re used to buying for just two people, Katie. There’s eight in this house.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘never more than two. You’re right.’
She had always told us bedtime stories when we were younger, with good and bad fairies; or mothers whose children had been taken by the fairies but were always restored; haunted houses; men who escaped from danger and got back to their families; stolen gold; unhappy
rich people and their lonely children; houses becoming safe and secure after overcoming threats from evicting landlords and police; saints burned alive who felt no pain; devils smooth and sophisticated who always wore fine clothes and talked in la-de-dah ways. She had so many accents and so many voices that it hardly mattered to us if we got mixed up in the always labyrinthine plot. Now that we were growing up, all that had stopped. But she would still tell stories of a different kind, downstairs in the kitchen, if we got her in the mood and if my parents were not there. I always felt their presence as a kind of censorship on what Katie would say.
‘There was this young woman called Brigid McLaughlin,’ she told Eilis and me one afternoon, after we had helped her with a big laundering of clothes and were all sitting about the kitchen, Katie in the armchair with her back to the window and her feet up on a pile of cushions. My mother was asleep upstairs. ‘Mind you, this was long before my time. I heard it from your Great-uncle Constantine’s mother, God be good to them both.’ She fell to brooding for a while. We didn’t stir. This was her way of telling a story. If you hurried her up, she cut it short and it lost all its wonder.
Brigid had been hired – no, not at one of the hiring fairs in the city centre, where young men and women gathered to be hired out for the winter to work in the hinterland farms – hired by a private arrangement to look after two children, two orphans, a boy and a girl, who lived away down in the southern part of Donegal where they still spoke Irish, but an Irish that was so old that many other Irish speakers couldn’t follow it. Brigid had been brought up there before coming up here to Derry, so the language was no problem to her. Anyway, these children’s uncle was going away to foreign parts and he wanted someone to look after them and educate them a bit. Now one of the odd things about these children was their names. The boy was called Francis, and the girl was called Frances. Even in Irish you couldn’t tell the names apart, except in writing. No one knows why their parents christened them so. The parents themselves, they had been carried off by the cholera during the Great Famine, though they were well enough off themselves and had never starved. Anyway, however it was, this young woman – Brigid – was sent down there to look after them. She had a year’s contract, signed in her father’s house. But she was not, for all of that year, to leave the children out of her charge and was never to take them away from the house itself. Everything she needed would be supplied, on the uncle’s arrangement, by the shopkeepers in the village a couple of miles away. So off she went to this big farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to look after Frances, the girl, who was nine, and Francis, the boy, who was seven.