Dark Rosaleen (10 page)

Eugene's wounds had healed but the scars rose from his skin in hard white ridges and so they would always remain. He was small, clean and neat in his ways and Keegan had taught him simple words in English. After many days of gentle coaxing and with Keegan's help translating, Kate persuaded him to talk to her.

He said he did not know how old he was; he thought perhaps eleven. He had thirteen brothers and sisters and he was somewhere in the middle. His mother had died that January. The cottage had been tumbled and with his father away on the road, there was no one strong enough to build a shelter. A stranger had taken the two older girls away and had given him sixpence for each of them. His brothers had gone to an uncle in Galway and he did not expect to ever see them again.

‘Why didn't you go with them?' Kate asked.

‘I sat with mother.'

‘But you said she was dead.'

‘No one to bury her.'

‘You stayed with her? By her body?'

‘Yes.' He began to speak in Irish and looked to Keegan to translate. ‘I sat four days with my mother to keep the dogs and rats away. I went back and gathered as much straw from the thatch as I could carry and covered her. I set it on fire and when it was cool I collected her bones from the ash, put them in a sack and buried them in a hole in the churchyard under the roots of the big tree. There is no cross but I know the place. I go to speak to her every Sunday. She knows I am there.'

Kate listened and wept. But it was all past for him. There was no longer any sorrow in remembering. He put his arm around her. She was no longer a stranger.

On every journey to the school she brought something from Cork. Fruit, pies, slates and crayons, picture books and always the Bible. She brought a Hessian rug to give warmth to the schoolroom floor, pinned cloth to the single window to counter the draught and set a brass oil lamp on the floor, taken from her own bedroom. It was now so welcoming and cosy that Keegan protested that his problem was not persuading the children to come to class but getting them to leave.

Except for Eugene, none of the children spoke English and it was Keegan's suggestion that Kate should teach them. He said it would not be a problem and it was not. She had seldom to repeat a lesson or speak an English word more than twice for them to repeat it correctly. They, in turn, would stand at Keegan's beckoning and recite in Irish, telling stories of the great feats of courage and sacrifice in Ireland's history. Kate did not understand a word but she clapped her applause and kissed their cheeks.

Whenever she spoke to them individually, the girls bent their knees in a curtsy and the boys stared resolutely at the floor. Keegan lifted the head of one.

‘This is Declan. He walks three miles here every morning and three miles back every night. And you see that he is barefoot. That's how keen he is. He never misses a day, whatever the weather.'

He touched the head of the next in line, taller and older than the rest.

‘Young Kevin here has a limp. He wasn't born with it. Show Miss Kate your legs, Kevin. Don't be shy now.'

The boy slowly and neatly rolled up his tattered trousers. The calf of his left leg was badly scarred. The right leg had been broken and had not set properly. It was twisted and a knot of bone pushed out the skin just below the knee.

‘The tumbling gangs came into his village a year ago. It's a ruin now. The agent must have been expecting trouble because he rode in with armed men. So there were no protests, not even when they began taking away the few cows and pigs. The villagers went down on their knees imploring the agent to leave them their animals. But they went, the women weeping and the men mute. What could they do? How could they fight men with guns at their shoulders? So they watched as everything they owned was taken from them. But Kevin here followed the gang and ran among the cows and pigs, shouting and screaming and waving his arms, like an army of banshees. With all the blather the animals turned and ran back the way they came, straight into the village, straight back into their pens. The agent, in his rage, rode his horse at Kevin, trampled him twice over. They thought he was dead. But he is a fighter and here he is and a good fellow too.'

‘Did the villagers keep their stock?' Kate asked.

‘No! The landlord himself came back a fortnight later with thirty soldiers and there wasn't a Kevin to oppose them. They took the lot and set fire to whatever was left.'

‘So he was almost killed for nothing.'

‘No, Kate. Not for nothing. He did what no man twice his age and size dared to do. He'll not be forgotten for that.'

Kate brought Eugene a present. She had searched for it in Cork and had found a handsome edition, bound in brown Morocco leather with its title,
The Children's Encyclopaedia
, embossed in gold leaf. It was three inches thick and one thousand eight hundred pages long, beginning with ‘Abu Simbel' and ending with ‘Zulu'. There were entries about strange happenings in Tibet, the life of a crab and many beautifully coloured lithographs, including Queen Victoria's coronation, each picture protected within a thin sheaf of tissue paper. Inside the cover Kate had written: ‘
From Kate. To my good and learned friend Eugene
.'

It was heavy and he took it carefully as if it was made of the most delicate porcelain. He sat down by the corner of the hearth stroking it gently, hesitantly, as if he expected it to disintegrate on touch, caressing it in his lap, the guardian of a precious jewel. Now he would know the source of knowledge, the beginning of all learning. Inside its cover was everything that made a boy a man and that man full of the world of wisdom. It was all his for the taking. He had only to open it.

‘Eugene has a surprise for you, Kate.'

A fortnight had passed since the boy's surprise present and Keegan had asked her to come early to the school.

‘He's been working at it every hour God's given him. He even persuaded the priest to give him an altar candle so that he could read by it at night. He's been a pest and I've lost sleep myself but by heaven, he's done it.'

‘Done what?' she asked.

‘I should tell you but I cannot. Or do I mean I can tell you but I shouldn't? Anyway, you will know soon enough. It's his surprise for you, to thank you for his book. From the moment you gave it to him it hasn't left his hands. I'll wager that if you asked him what was on page one thousand and one, he'd reel it off word-perfect. He's told me more about Tibetan monks than I've room for!'

The big black kettle over the peat fire began to boil. Kate pulled the rug closer to the hearth and waited. Every day here now was happier than the last and for the first time in her life she thanked God for it.

Keegan handed her a mug. ‘I will call him. He's waiting not far off and nervous too. But for such a little lad I think he's brave with it.'

Kate held Keegan's hand. ‘Tell me what to expect?'

‘It's a poem, yet another Irish poem. But this one is special and a dangerous one too, although you'll find that hard to believe. It's been banned by the English, forbidden because they think its rebellious. You might think it is but it's really more a lament about Ireland's anguish and yearning and we're famous enough for that, are we not? But the English think it's a call to arms and if you're caught with a copy of it or even reciting it, you can reckon the worst will happen.'

‘For reading a poem?'

‘Yes! For a poem. Such are the times, Kate. Such is the canker of fear.'

‘Then he mustn't do it, not for me. I won't have him do it … I won't listen. You mustn't let him.'

‘It's not my choice, Kate. Nor is it in me to stop him. He's doing it for you and for all of us. It's just because it is forbidden that makes it so valuable and his little contribution so precious. Do you not understand?'

She nodded and said nothing. Keegan went to the door and called out his name.

He came in slowly, clasping the encyclopaedia to his chest. How thin he was, how pale. Again she wondered, as she had so often recently, whether he was the boy of her dreams, the boy in the fire. But it was not his face. They were not his eyes.

‘A poem for you, Miss Kate.' He said it in a whisper, looking at his feet. ‘It is Irish but Mr Keegan helped me put it in English. Not all of it because it is very long. It is called “My Dark Rosaleen”.'

‘Go on, Eugene,' she said. ‘I'm proud that you have done this for me. It is a wonderful gift.'

He looked up, his face flushed with colour. Then he closed his eyes tight and began:

‘I could scale the blue air

I could plough the high hills

I could kneel all night in prayer

To heal your many ills

And one beamy smile from you

Would float like light between

My toils and me, my own, my true,

My Dark Rosaleen

The Erne shall run with blood,

The earth will rock beneath our tread

And flames wrap hill and wood

And gun-peal and slogan-cry wake many a glen serene

Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,

My Dark Rosaleen.'

Old Tom Keegan was long and thin, much taller than his son. When he was not crouched with the rheumatism that had tormented him all his life, he would, in the presence of strangers, and despite the pain, make the effort to square his shoulders and stand straight. He had a full head of white hair and a lovely dignity. He was self-taught, a teacher since he was sixteen, and almost blind now from a lifetime of reading forbidden tracts in the half light.

On bright days he could see clearly enough to tend his few roods of potatoes and the small patch of flowering herbs that sat prettily either side of the front door of his cottage. All his life he had worked longer hours than the sun itself, never allowing it to rise before him and waiting for it sink out of sight before he considered his day to be over.

He had built his cottage on land he rented at thirty-five shillings a quarter. He was known as a lifer and as long as he paid his rent, his landlord could not remove him. The cottage was low and squat with thick walls and a thatched roof and, unlike any other nearby, it had a small window with a single pane of glass, a prized possession given to him by his father on his wedding day.

On the day Tom Keegan married his Mary, they vowed that they would build their house of stone. They were strong and young with no fear of the future and wanted their first home to be their last, sturdy like them and destined to live a long life like them. For a full year, they gathered stones from the mountain and when they began building it, they dug two feet deep to give it a firm foundation.

For all that year they lived in a hole in the ground, roofed with turf, washing in the stream, and making love hidden in the heather. When they were not building, they were breaking the ground around them until they had a plot soft and tame enough to plant their first potatoes.

But young Mary Keegan died three months after she had moved into her new home, the morning her only son was born. Thereafter Tom lived a lonely, loveless life, unable to watch his infant son grow without the agony of knowing the sacrifice that had given him life. At first he wanted to move from the valley, away from the house whose every stone, so carefully laid, was a reminder of a day with her. Yet to leave would be to abandon her in her shallow grave beyond the potato patch. The cottage was her shrine and as long as he remained, so then would she. And the son she died for would be raised in her image, kind and good and gentle.

It was the first day of June and old Keegan's eightieth birthday. His son had asked Kate to join them to celebrate the day and she had been overjoyed at the invitation. He closed the school and together they rode the ten miles cross-country to surprise him, carrying a cake and a jar of honey Kate had taken from the cook's pantry.