No Country: A Novel (2 page)

Mr. Arkwright took his hat off to Mr. O’Flaherty. Our Mr. O’Flaherty simply was one of those men you took your hat off to, and felt better for having done so. Nay, he’d never rant like Father Conlon, for he was always a mild one in conversation. And wherever he stood, with his quiet smile and grey unruly hair and sparse white beard, that space was his, even our poor starving Irish soil.

From many villages around, unlettered folks would walk up to our school and wait for our day to be over. Then, hat in hand, or shyly smoothing aprons, they would ask Mr. O’Flaherty to write their letters, petitions, and such. Mr. O’Flaherty never sent anyone away. His pen gave their humble hopes and woes voice to address the usually stone-deaf ears of bailiffs, the absent landowners in
London and the English shires. He wrote the letters—to relatives in distant America and even, I heard tell, to kin who had crossed many oceans to India in red coats to serve the East India Company. If letters came back, Mr. O’Flaherty would read them out privately, and nary a soul complained that her news was bandied about. The old schoolmaster was a deep stone basin, and nothing spilt from it. Rain or shine he wore his thick black coat, the collar turned up almost to his nose, just below his thick glasses. Not much escaped those eyes either.

From our school, a single room of stone-built walls, we could see the edge of one breakwater when the door was left open in fine weather. There we sat: Padraig right next to me from the first day, Charley Keelan, Mikey Williams with his tiny nose and big ears, the O’Toole brothers—Joe, Sam, Brian, Malachi—the other Brendan, Brendan McMahon, Sorcha and Saoirse Colum, laughing Molly Purdy, Brigid from down our lane, and all the other children. Mr. O’Flaherty would stroll in for our morning class from his tiny cottage next door, still holding his chipped enamel mug of tea in one hand and his pipe in the other.

•  •  •

T
HERE WAS SOMEONE
else who would not be absent for a day: Madgy Finn. Mr. O’Flaherty called her by that name. Most in our village called her Odd Madgy Finn—for she used to wander about gabbling words no one comprehended—and was known to all from Dromahair and Collooney to Mullaghmore and Sligo, and all around the harbour and the banks of our Garavogue River. She was Wally Finn’s daughter, the same Wally Finn who would ask to go with the fisherfolk off Sligo Bay when he could
stand on his own two feet, and not hanging about in front of the pubs, begging for drinks until the publican shooed him off. With a three-tooth yellow grin on his unshaved face, long dirty eyebrows hedging his rheumy eyes, he would also hang about the poteen brewers back in the glen, hawking and spitting, begging for a swig or two. His wife had died when Madgy was a child. Padraig’s ma said that she was a good seven years older, was Madgy, though shorter than us by far.

We were still small children when her father died after the ceilidh festival down in Sligo Town. He had the poteen and tumbled on the side of the Garavogue River, where his dirty head struck a stone, and he lay facedown, a few feet off the paved path, drowned in six inches of water.

The townspeople gave him a hasty burial, and the only one who attended, apart from the gravediggers, Father Conlon, and Madgy, was Mr. O’Flaherty, who stood hat in hand beside me. I wondered what Madgy understood, but she stood quietly enough until the priest finished the prayers. But when they put Poor Wally Finn in the ground and began to pour the dug dirt on him, she gave a cry and leaped on the diggers and kicked the dirt about to stop them from putting it on her dead da. She fought tooth and nail, until they frog-marched her off the graveyard, but not before Mr. O’Flaherty gave her a piece of bread which she ate with appetite, diverted momentarily from her da and her bitter fight.

Every day after that, Madgy came to sit under the tree across from Mr. O’Flaherty’s door, rocking back and forth when we recited our multiplication tables, clapping with delight, as if we had sung to her. And when Mr. O’Flaherty would teach us, she would fall asleep, stretch and yawn, or wander off. But by the time the lessons ended for the day and Mr. O’Flaherty dismissed us, Poor
Madgy would sit until Mr. O’Flaherty would emerge shortly with a couple of praties, or a wedge of bread and a rind of cheese. She would smile up at him, her mouth twisted with glee. Biting into the victuals, she would amble off unevenly, though surefooted she was, in spite of one leg shorter than the other.

As a child, I remember being afraid of Madgy because of her puppet’s staring head, large teeth, and splayed feet that seemed too large for the rest of her. My eyes averted in finicky disgust as I saw her phlegm depending from a nostril. It was only of late I learned to see her through Mr. O’Flaherty’s even gaze.

During the ceilidh festival time in Sligo Town, she would go and dance at the fringe when the bands played. Aye, but her dance was that odd and beautiful, whirling on the balls of her feet, round and round, tottery with the poteen she would beg off people, but never falling, a gyrating mouth-open puppet, squeaking with pleasure and dizziness until she lay spent and panting in a part of the town square, on the stone itself, and sleep till the morning sun and early flies prised her eyes open, runny as they were with something like amber gum. Up she would stand and off she would go, up the slope towards Mr. O’Flaherty’s school, as if she could not bear to be late, and take her place under the tree, rocking with the multiplication tables, thumb wedged in her smiling mouth, a bairn.

It was near Christmas, almost a full year before Padraig got his sudden idea to go off to the great meeting at Clontarf so far away. The festival at Sligo Town had been big and raucous with ceilidh bands and drinking and dancing and stirring about. The harvest had been good earlier and so had the ocean’s catch. Many strangers had come to town, some fisherfolk from as far away as Donegal, some had brought horses for sale from the South—some even from the Isles of Aran—and there were tramps and tinkers
and poteen makers from around Roscommon inland. We had no school those days.

The morning after the festival was over, and dogs wandering all over licking the paved stones where people had spilled food or offal, and all the strangers left, and the townspeople were slowly putting themselves back into their ordinary lives, someone discovered Poor Madgy Finn lying behind a paved by-lane like a broken toy, hair matted and reeking from the poteen some jokesters had poured on it, her face torn as if she had been fighting dogs. She had cuts on her hands where some nails had broken off, and she was whimpering.

In ones and twos the townspeople gathered about her in a growing circle. Padraig’s ma too had gone into town that day. She went to see what people were gawking at, and found Odd Madgy Finn moaning on the ground, a drying splotch of blood on the thin dress she had twisted over her crotch.

This put Padraig’s ma in a tearing rage. What she said I did not hear, but the townspeople slunk off and Mrs. Aherne lifted Poor Madgy Finn and cradled her home. She was strong. I followed her at a distance, all the way to her home, not daring to get close. She gave a piece of bread to Madgy, who curled up in a corner, chewing between groans.

A few days later Odd Madgy Finn was back in front of Mr. O’Flaherty’s school. She got no more food than she always did—fruits she got off the trees in season—the wedges of bread from Mr. O’Flaherty, or the praties that Padraig’s ma would give her if she showed up at her shop, sometimes a heel of cheese, and perhaps a bit of coloured paper which Poor Madgy Finn would treasure until it got sodden and sere. But one thing was changed in Madgy. Her stomach bloated and grew as the weeks passed
into warming months and late summer, until time came when she could barely stir.

She disappeared for a few days as September ended. No one knew where she was. There was even some relief, I sensed, among the townspeople. But, as unexpectedly as ever, she limped her way back, her dress now filthy with mud and a rusty stain, and one breast lay open to plain sight. On her teat suckled a naked infant, large, like a diminutive man, with a smudge of pasty hair on his blue skull. Padraig’s ma coaxed her to come home with her, though Odd Madgy Finn bridled if anyone, even Mrs. Aherne, came too close to the bairn, let alone tried to dress it. I once saw her trying to feed her newborn some bread. The baby began to choke. Madgy threw the lump down, thrust her teat back in his mouth, and strolled away to the woody copse of elms and rhododendron, where a thin spring burbled from the rocky ground and black-back gulls roosted under Ben Bulben.

When she sensed no one was around she would leave the baby in a small nest-like mess made of moss and furze. I saw it there a few times, returning from school, and heard it gurgling and gooing and a-staring at the branches overhead. Madgy would run off and bathe in the stream, squawking and guffawing in the chilly water, and sometimes took to the habit of hunkering down to defecate on the road itself. And once, stingy Willy McDougall was driving his flock of mangy sheep down when he saw her, crossed himself, and doubled back, and came another day because he thought it bad luck itself to see anyone parting with anything at all on his way to market day.

In a couple of weeks Odd Madgy Finn began to leave it for longer and longer. The dress about her breasts was always wet and glotty with milky ooze, her hair coming off in patches, and
she spat about a lot. Some days, she took to walking down to Sligo Town in the afternoon, begging and badgering people for food or a dram, but always returned to wherever she had left her bairn, by the time the light grew westerly and long on Sligo Bay.

And then it happened. Just a month or so after her birthing, she returned one noon and found that the birds had been at it when she was gone. They had pecked and ravaged her boy eyeless and scratch-headed, cheeks torn and flesh-pecked. Madgy had put the bairn to breast, but the creature was past suckling. She set up a mighty howl, and when she stumbled into the open door of our schoolroom with a great cry, we were all that shivered and goose-bumped with horror as she held out the baby to Mr. O’Flaherty, herself smelling of blood and stale milk. The youngest of us, Charley Keelan and Malachi O’Toole, set up wails of fright. Mr. O’Flaherty rushed out, and Odd Madgy followed him—still holding out the mottled bundle. Mr. O’Flaherty, whom we had never seen flustered, made a retching sound and led her out, slamming the door behind himself, leaving us inside in the gasping dark.

There we sat, still as death itself, in the closed schoolroom. Malachi was sniffling and hugging his older brother Joe, and rusty-haired Charley Keelan bent over the dirt floor, his hands over his ears. When Mr. O’Flaherty returned, his face looked old and lined, and he went out again with a piece of black bread in his hand, the door swinging open and shut in the dizzy sea-wind. Madgy put her baby down on the rough dirt of the threshold in front of his laced old shoes, took two lurchy steps back into the yard, bit on the bread, and was gone.

Mr. O’Flaherty picked up the bundle and spoke loudly from the threshold itself, without turning to look at us, as if he were
speaking to the far wrinkled sea out there, “Go home, go away today,” was all he muttered.

From the next day Poor Madgy Finn did not show up at school, rocking in time with the multiplication numbers, did not lie in the dirt under that tree, waiting for her morsel at Mr. O’Flaherty’s door.

•  •  •

T
HINGS LULLED BACK
in a few days, as they always did in our corner of Ireland, beneath the prow of Bulben, which faces the Atlantic. To the east, a sandy pebbled arc with a stone breakwater holds the harbour where fishing boats bob beside Mullaghmore village, between the open sea and the high Ben.

From Cairns Hill you can see Lough Gill, which holds within itself isles—one named Innisfree, a calm eye in the lake. Hazel woods east of the lough whisper from early spring into the grey slant of autumn. In the twilight, you can see the twinkle of the village of Dromahair, under a purple vein still bleeding in the sky.

There was water all around us, starting with the Garavogue, right by the harbour. On the slope to Ben Bulben, a stone hut usurped the small storm-bitten green on which it stood. Out on a jaunt, Padraig and I sheltered there once, from a sudden rain. Snug, under the muttering rain on the slate and sod roof, we watched through its door how a tunnel of radiance bore its way from the Atlantic waters, through wreathed mist, until it was all clear. Far out west the Atlantic glittered under a full and falling sun, turning its waves beyond Ben Bulben into layers upon layers of gleaming fish-scales.

During that last spring of 1843, when he was still with us,
Padraig used to take me and go, sometimes with Brigid tagging along, toward Rosses’ Point, where there is a small church. Turn left and it took us to seven miniature lakes. Farther along this road we could see Dead Man’s Point and the broad chest of the Atlantic gleaming, the wide rocks like armour. Underfoot, the crawling tides tug to and fro, depending upon the time of day. All we could hear—above the stir of pebbly water and the sudden squawk of a seagull—was the gong of an iron bell swung whimsically when it pleased the Atlantic gust. To the right, Ben Bulben sets the scene, like the master in his house.

During our jaunts, Padraig seemed so much less taken with Brigid than usual. I had him more to myself. Brigid tried to match his carefree mood, but I could feel my sliver of jealousy, how she was waiting to be wooed, and I feeling that small pleasure of his neglect of her. He was my brother in spirit, but it troubled me how much or what I sought of Padraig. I was content with my unwillingness to delve more. I found Brigid looking at me, in unguarded moments, in an appraising manner. We both looked away if our eyes met, but I could tell I was being measured on some inexplicable scale through her woman’s eye, probing to learn the weight on my heart.

•  •  •

P
ADRAIG AND
I had always known Brigid; we had known her as baby and child and girl. ’Tis a mystery how Padraig, who teased little Brigid, almost a year younger, pulled her hair and made her cry, now turned and began to go silent and watchful as she grew tall.