Song of the Silent Harp (9 page)

If the cow had been stolen, a few hours wouldn't matter, Nora realized with dismay. Still, she knew he was right; they had to try.

“If she's only wandered off, I won't be long. Sadie will come to the sound of my voice,” he said uncertainly.

A nagging whisper somewhere deep inside Nora told her the cow had not wandered off. The theft of livestock, even in broad daylight, had been on the increase for weeks now, not only in Killala, but throughout all Ireland. People were doing whatever they must to survive. They had taken to eating horses, even dogs. A cow would seem a treasure.

She could see in Daniel John's eyes that he, too, held little hope of finding Sadie. But neither of them dared to give voice to their thoughts.

“Go, then,” she said, averting her eyes. “But not too far. It will do us no good to find the cow if you catch your death in the searching.”

He put a hand to her arm. “I'll find her, Mother. You go back inside now.”

She nodded, still unable to meet his eyes.

Hugging her arms to her body against the cold, Nora stood, watching him start for the road. She turned once to look at the empty barn, then glanced around the yard.

She was suddenly struck by the memory of Morgan's words when he had named off the requirements for relief distributions. No animals, he had said; no animals, no potatoes, and less than a quarter acre of land.

Well, then, it would seem we are now eligible for relief,
she thought, nearly choking on her own bitterness.

The question was, would they live long enough to apply for it?

7

When tyranny's pampered and purple-clad minions
Drive forth the lone widow and orphan to die,
Shall no angel of vengeance unfurl his red pinions,
And grasping sharp thunderbolts, rush from on high?

R
ICHARD
D
ALTON
W
ILLIAMS
(1822-1862)

M
organ spent the weekend at Frank Grehan's place near Ballina, working on a piece they were writing for
The Nation,
the journal of the Young Ireland movement. He had hoped a day or two away from the village might be just the tonic for his troubled thoughts about Nora and his own family. Instead, he spent an altogether dismal two days, wishing he had never come at all.

Why had he ever agreed to collaborate with the blustering, irascible Grehan
anyhow? The man was more trying than ever, to the point that Morgan could scarcely wait to get away from him.

Grehan was an embittered man in his forties who lived alone in a gloomy, drafty old farmhouse. A loyal Young Irelander who fancied himself a radical and a revolutionary, he unfailingly turned a visit from an acquaintance into a political forum. Unfortunately, his acquaintance with the bottle went deeper than his knowledge of politics.

He had spent most of the weekend attempting to badger Morgan into assuming a more active leadership role in the movement, accompanying each argument with the statement that Morgan could “make a real difference.”

Even as he ushered Morgan out the heavy front door, instead of sending him off with a friendly farewell, Grehan blasted him with still more rhetoric. “You think on it, Fitzgerald; you're ripe to lead. The movement is made up of mostly Protestants as yet, but your golden tongue and gift of reason can make the Catholic voice heard within the ranks at last.”

Morgan ground his teeth as he reminded Frank that he was merely an out-of-work schoolmaster and a dilettante writer, not a politician. “And I have no ‘Catholic voice,' as I have pointed out to you before. Why, neither Catholic nor Protestant would want to claim the likes of me, man. I'm a heathen in the eyes of both.”

His attempt at levity went unnoticed. Grehan accompanied him out the door and into the yard, waist high with weeds. “The people are going to rise, Fitzgerald. It's in the wind, even now. Aye, there will be a rising, that's sure, and you should be one of its leaders.”

With a great deal of firmness mixed with laughter, Morgan finally managed to free himself from his host's cloying grasp and take his leave. Hoisting his harp a bit higher, he whipped his cloak around his shoulders and started down the road.

The weather seemed grimly appropriate to his mood. Within moments he found himself in the midst of a savage storm of wind-driven, freezing rain and snow. Drawing his cloak a bit tighter around his throat, he ducked his head and turned his face toward Killala.

Despite the weather, he was glad to have escaped when he did. Had Grehan continued to press him, he might have lost his temper and revealed more of his personal displeasure with the “movement” than Firebrand Frank would
care to hear.

An entire host of objections to the antics of Grehan and his bunch swarmed in his head like angry bees. He was particularly disgruntled about the new militant organization being formed out of the Young Ireland movement—the “Irish Confederation,” they were calling themselves. He knew the plan. They intended to spread their influence by forming clubs in every city and town, whereby more and more pressure might be brought to bear on the British government. Repeal of the union between England and Ireland was one of their primary objectives, arguing as always that only absolute freedom could save their country from total destruction.

It sounded fine in theory, but in reality it had as many holes as a sieve. Oh, he knew well enough who Frank and his wild-eyed rebels had been listening to, all right: Fintan Lalor, a dark-natured, brooding recluse who had isolated himself on a farm in Queens County to agonize over Ireland's tragedy.

Lalor argued for a “moral insurrection,” his premise being that only the rising up of tenants against their landlords would eventually free the Irish from England's chains. He used his considerable facility with words to incite farmers to withhold their rent payments until they were granted coequal ownership of the land.

But Lalor's ideals would never be realized except by revolution: armed insurrection, not moral. And while he shared, with reservations, Lalor's contention that Ireland's only future lay in reclaiming her own lands from the British, Morgan knew beyond a doubt that these angry, “courageous” peasants were more figments of Lalor's imagination than fact. In reality, Ireland's farmers were dying in the ditches—frozen, starved, and decimated by disease. He found it incomprehensible that these raving visionaries could entertain the notion of an armed uprising by a starving, defeated people. Even a fool could see that the Irish peasantry were too enfeebled, too demoralized, and too broken to think of anything at all beyond survival. Moreover, it was commonly agreed that the famine had not yet reached its full horror. Morgan knew in his soul that a cataclysm of unimaginable proportions was yet to come.

With a failed potato crop for the second year in a row, the half-naked, poverty-stricken men and women who had managed to survive on the outdoor public works now had no employment at all. The public works were at an end; the workhouses were full and running over; thousands upon thousands of peasants were severely in arrears on their rents. To fall behind meant certain eviction, and to be homeless during this, the most severe winter in Ireland's memory, meant certain death.

Revolution, indeed! When a man had no food and no work, no health and no strength, no home and no hope—was such a man equipped for rebellion?

Morgan was convinced that before insurrection could even be considered, the people must be fed—fed and healed. Education, too, was vital. The Lord knew the Irish loved all manner of learning, but with years of their own Gaelic language forbidden and their schoolmasters and clergy in hiding, any traditional form of real education had gone by the wayside. In addition, there was the desperate need to end the hatred between Protestant and Catholic, which played a very real part in dividing the country.

We are forever fighting one another,
Morgan mused bitterly,
the Irish against the Irish.
He could not help but wonder who, themselves or the British, had harmed the island most.

It was midafternoon before Morgan reached the edge of Killala. In spite of his heavy cloak, he was drenched and thoroughly chilled. So absorbed had he been in some lines for a new poem that he was jolted harshly back to reality by a sound like approaching thunder.

He whirled around. Cotter, the land agent, came bearing down on him from the west fork in the road, astride a foaming, wild-eyed stallion. Throwing a wall of mud and ice in Morgan's path, the agent wielded his riding crop like a lunatic. His heavy-jowled, bloated face was raw and wind-whipped. Below his hat, sparse, wet strands of red hair capped his ears.

The agent's small round eyes betrayed a meanness, an expression of bestial excitement that chilled Fitzgerald's blood. The man looked for all the world like a demon turned loose from hell's pit. Following him, also mounted, were the bailiff and two ruffians known to be Cotter's personal bodyguards. Running behind and struggling to keep up came a raggedy bunch of housewreckers, all brandishing crowbars.

Morgan leaped out of the way, twisting his ankle as he hurled himself into the slush-filled ditch to avoid being run down. Watching them charge by, fury slammed at his ribcage, and he raised a fist to their backs, wanting nothing so much as to hurl the lot of them into the bay. Instead, he could only stand unmoving in the ditch, stunned and impotent in his rage, watching as the mob came to a halt in front of Aine Quigley's cottage.

Anger gave way to sick horror as Morgan realized what was happening. Mass eviction. He had seen it before in Galway and Sligo, still carried the nightmare scenes in his mind. His stomach knotted and his breathing grew labored as he stood watching.

The Quigley place, sorely rundown and neglected, had not always been in such a sad state. Once the dwelling of Michael Burke's family, the large two-story house with its slate roof and tall, narrow windows had been one of the finest homes in the village. But according to Thomas, poor Aine had been at her wits' end for months now, trying to keep food in the bellies of her three small children after her husband died of pneumonia. The house had steadily gone to ruin.

There were three homes there at the turn in the road: Aine Quigley's, Sean O'Malley's, and, directly across from these two, the Gaffneys', all looking forlorn and uncared-for in the icy winter rain hammering down on them. Within the hour, Morgan knew with a terrible certainty, three families—two of them with children—would face death in a ditch.

For a long time he stood watching the scene unfold in front of the Quigley's, anger and outrage hitting him like waves. Finally he stirred. His feet were half frozen in his boots, his hands stiff from cold in spite of wool gloves. He lurched out of the ditch, starting in the direction of the wrecking crew.

With every step, the fire of his rage increased. A moan of physical pain escaped his lips as he stumbled, then lunged ahead. Nearly mindless now with fury, he charged through the icy slush on the road, as intent on his prey as a mad bull.

Nora stood in the middle of the road outside her cottage, tented beneath Old Dan's
bawneen
and wearing his boots as she searched the surroundings for a glimpse of Daniel. This was the third day straight the boy had gone looking for the missing Sadie. In spite of Nora's insistence that the cow was surely lost to them, he simply refused to give up; he had been out almost all morning in this terrible, freezing rain.

A noise made her turn back to look toward the opposite end of town. The sound came rolling up the road, an advancing roar of angry voices.

With the gloom of the day and the pouring rain, it was difficult to see much of anything, but she could look down the road and make out the Quigley house and one side of the O'Malley place. A crowd seemed to be gathered in front of Aine Quigley's—some on horseback, but most on foot. Nora stared for another moment. Then, dropping the old man's work coat down to her shoulders, she quickly slipped it on and began walking.

She was over halfway down the road when Cotter, the land agent, came into view. He was sitting astride his big, dirty gray stallion, shouting orders to a group of men nearby. A sickening wave of foreboding engulfed her as she recalled a conversation she'd had with Aine Quigley only days before.
Apparently Cotter had been threatening them with eviction for weeks. They had fallen behind with the rent some months before, and, according to Aine, only the fact that the agent had his unholy eye on Padraic's younger brother had kept him from turning them out before now.

The sick-minded land agent's attraction to young boys had been rumored in the village for years. Speculation had turned to outrage just last summer, however, when Dr. Browne's son let it slip to some of the lads that his father had treated young Fursey Lynch for “wounds” inflicted by Cotter.

An orphan boy from Kilcummin, Fursey Lynch had been given a place in the agent's barn, as well as his meals, in exchange for doing odd jobs around the property. Although the doctor's son had been vague about Fursey's “wounds,” he let it be known that the lad's injuries were severe enough to keep him at Browne's house for nearly two weeks before his return to Kilcummin.

Aine Quigley, convinced that Cotter's leniency with their back rent hinged on his fascination for Padraic's brother, told Nora in hushed tones it was “the end for them,” since the lad had left the village to live with an aunt in Ballina. “Cotter will turn us out without mercy now,” she whispered to Nora, her eyes wide with fear. “And what will become of my babes, then? They won't last a day on the road!” Nora had done her best to reassure the distraught widow, but at the same time she feared that Aine was justified in expecting the worst.