The Year of the French (22 page)

“Gerry will not,” O’Donnell said. “He is a hot-headed young fellow and he blurts out how he feels. He will come to harm without myself to keep an eye on him.”

“Education is a great advantage,” MacCarthy said.

“Ach, it does us no good whatever,” O’Donnell said, in a loud, strained voice. He made a violent move for the book, but MacCarthy shoved it quickly beyond his reach.

“Will you have a care, man? Grief is grief, but that book cost me three and sixpence.”

O’Donnell glared at him briefly, but then smiled.

“It is time to open the jug I brought,” MacCarthy said. “We will leave poor Perseus up in the sky.”

O’Donnell shook his head. “Have a drink yourself, Owen, but I will not join you. Maire and I knelt down last night and I took a vow to Our Lady that I would not wet my lips with spirits until Gerry could have a drink himself in this house.”

Our lives are spent upon our knees, on mud floors, the cool flags of chapels. They have courts, yeomen, gallows. They own the earth, and guard it well from us. Prayer our only recourse, soft words upon the air. It was almost ten, but the evening beyond the open door was warm and light. Too light yet for the moon. He did not want to drink in front of O’Donnell, lest it tempt him from his vow.

“Go on, man,” O’Donnell said impatiently. “I have no thirst on me at all.”

MacCarthy picked up the jug from the floor, uncorked it, and resting it on his crooked elbow, held the mouth to his lips.

“There now,” he said, dragging the back of his hand across his lips. “That is better.”

“You are right to move out of this, Owen. I cannot. I have roots growing down out of the soles of my boots. All that I know is this mountain and Kilcummin and Killala.”

Roots running out from his boots into thin mountain soil. A poet’s image. From Ovid perhaps, with all his people turning into plants, and flowers into people. Needing to define himself, he mints an image: his first. Without poetry, we are senseless and blind. Three languages crowded MacCarthy’s skull. Irish, a nobleman in furs, trudging behind a plough. English, sober squire in broadcloth and flat, wide-brimmed hat. Latin, the queen of tongues, by which heroes were turned to stars and cast up to the heavens. He drank again.

“You are too fond of that, Owen,” O’Donnell said, nodding towards the jug.

“And it of me,” MacCarthy said. “We suit each other well. Like yourself and Maire. ’Tis fortunate you are to have that woman.”

“She goes early to bed these nights.” O’Donnell said. “ ’Tis a cheerless house now and I am poor company.”

“Ach, Ferdy. You never can tell. The assizes are a long way off.” He had said that before. He had no other comfort.

He stood up without grace, scraping his stool across the hard-packed earth, and walked to the door. The bay was a dull, metallic grey in the soft air. A fishing smack moved towards Kilcummin strand.

“There is a man I know,” he said, “who had a drink yesterday with Randall MacDonnell. There are more people than Whiteboys who are ready for trouble. By the time this summer has ended, there may not be a county in Ireland where a man can keep himself free from trouble.”

O’Donnell, still seated, looked up at him. “There is another man who has spoken to me of Randall MacDonnell. Randall is a far different man from Malachi Duggan. He is a decent, pleasant fellow.”

“He is that,” MacCarthy said. “But he chases foxes on horseback. A comical sort of sport.” He slipped his book into the tail pocket of his coat and straightened his neckcloth. “It was kind of the great warring winds that they did not drive poor Perseus to this miserable corner of the world.” He smiled at O’Donnell. “Didn’t your great Prince O’Donnell come raging through here with all his kernes and gallowglasses at the time of the great rebellion, driving all before him and scattering the soldiers of the English Queen?”

O’Donnell stood up, and joined him at the door. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I have heard it was farther to the east. But he claimed all this part of Connaught, and set up his chieftains here. It was the O’Dowds who held Tyrawley for him, Corny O’Dowd’s people. My father’s grandmother used say that an O’Donnell would rule Tyrawley again, when the army of the Gael rose up.”

“A wise tribe of people, grandmothers are,” MacCarthy said.

“ ’Tis all tinker talk,” O’Donnell said. “The army of the Gael.”

“Who knows that better than myself?” MacCarthy said. “Where would the poets be for their themes without the army of the Gael? We are terrible liars, the pack of us.”

“Poets and grandmothers,” O’Donnell agreed. “The world is spoiled between the two of you.”

MacCarthy, laughing, made his way down the boreen, and then turned to wave good-bye, but O’Donnell had gone back into the cabin.

Hugh O’Donnell, greatest of all the heroes sung by the poets. Ireland a mist-choked bog to the captains of Henry and Elizabeth, treacherous chieftains and shaggy, half-naked kernes, petty princelings ready to sell cousin or brother, their armies howling mobs with matted beards, eyes like wild animals peering through thickets. To be rooted out as animals are, hunted down in their lairs, their heads lopped off. All Munster turned into a desert by Lord Grey de Wilton after the Desmond rebellion. The poet Spenser had seen it and exulted. “Out of every corner of the woodes and glennes they came crepinge forth upon their handes, for theire legs could not bear them; they looked like Anatomies of Death, they spake like ghosts crying out of theire graves.” An old volume, dust-streaked, in the corner of a gentleman’s library near Corofin, the type black as a death notice:
A View of the Present State of Ireland
.

MacCarthy had read his poetry, half comprehending, a young omadhaun sprawled out on the Kerry sands. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. Bower of Bliss, like a phrase in the litany to Our Lady. Flowers and flowering branches, flowers like stars. Legends and enchantments, fair women and wonder-working enchanters. Meanings, gigantic shadows, moved behind them. Later, in Cork, MacCarthy learned that the great English poem of enchantment had been written in Ireland, in Cork itself. Not strange. Soft Munster was at work within it. Near Doneraile, on the gentle Awbeg, stood the ruins of Kilcolman, his castle. Yet this same man, this Edmund Spenser, this soft and seductive enchanter, had helped butcher the Irish, turned Desmond into a wasteland, watched the starving crawl towards him, their mouths stained with nettles and shamrock. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

O’Donnell had done for him. Puissant Gaelic prince, his lime white mansion sung by poets. From county to county his rebellion had spread, southwards from Ulster. His rebels burned Kilcolman. The poet fled, his poem unfinished, back to London and his glorious Queen. A little boy, his son, perished in the flames. Rebels, rough-clad, watched the flames leaking from the thatched roof, their faces ruddy. When O’Donnell was defeated on the southern coast, at Kinsale, a world shattered. Ruin. Now we move among ruins, peasants gawking at the broken, roofless keeps of Munster and Connaught. O’Donnell, MacCarthy: names now for the tenant of a mountain acre, a wandering schoolmaster. The brittle pages of our parchment history turn to powder beneath the weight of our fingers. Ferdy O’Donnell moves in the dark of his cabin, distraught, blundering against table, bed upon which his wife lies sleeping. His history a father’s word of mouth, a grandmother’s prophecy. I walk towards a village of hovels.

Ballycastle, August 10/Ballintubber, August 14

My dearest John:

Be assured that when George approaches my father he will find him well disposed to your suit. Your family he holds in great respect, and he has a great fondness for you, cherishing your virtues and welcoming your company. He knows that you will bring me to a home comfortable and secure, well ordered and decent in every way. Indeed, a home far finer and grander than that which I will leave. (Although I am told by my father and myself know also upon instinct that our gentility stands beyond challenge.) And yet he is most concerned and worried for you at this time, as I am, and as George must surely be.

It is not alone that he opposes most severely your politics, which concern me not at all, for such is no part of a woman’s proper sphere, as I am certain you will agree. Rather it is that these politics may have placed your feet upon a dangerous road. And here, dearest John, I tremble, lest his suspicions are well founded. It is being said everywhere in the barony that the disaffected poor together with reckless and misguided men who may have pretensions to family and breeding have welcomed the seductive approaches of the United Irishmen, and in the event of a French invasion will reveal their base intentions. And in such talk—most recently last evening, by Mr. Hussey and Mr. Falkiner, and at our own fireside—your name has been mentioned. All this my father stoutly denies, although in his heart he shares their misgivings.

Not only does he reprehend the seditious plans of the United Irishmen, he foresees for them nothing but bleak doom, disgrace, and death. And in this he displays to us his wisdom. Elsewhere in the kingdom, the men who involved themselves in this matter have suffered a shameful fate. Why should it be different here? And what if they were to succeed? They have stirred up the passions of ignorant men, men who are capable of the most dreadful brutalities. Surely it is no part of wisdom to administer to the patient a medicine more deadly than the disease? Thus reasons my father, and he is said by all to be a man of rare judgement and learning.

You may therefore depend upon it that he will press George upon this point, and perhaps even seek to extract from him an assurance that you have broken off your associations with men who have not at heart either your good or the good of this kingdom. No, nor the good of our Holy Church, and upon this point you may well consult Mr. Hussey, who is a saintly man and comes of a most respectable family, the Husseys being closely related to the Roches of Fermoy in Cork.

P.S. My dearest John. The lines above I have written to you after discussion with my father, and I have submitted them to his inspection. These few lines which follow are for your eyes alone. While my father may not be the wisest of men, he is far indeed from being a fool. Why in God’s name do you associate yourself with such rattlebrains as Corny O’Dowd and Randall MacDonnell who less than a year ago made to me a suggestion which was as improper as it was unflattering. He may account himself a gentleman but I do assure you that he is not. He is but a faction fighter who rides well and can boast of clean linen. Malcolm Elliott is indeed a gentleman, I admit, but a more long-faced lugubrious Protestant I have never met and his wife is a perfect ninny and is English. Do you not see from my questions that the very names of your associates are known, and their intentions guessed at? It will not be long before the magistrates turn their attention beyond those barbarous Whiteboys. O the folly and wickedness of turning for help to Frenchmen who are stained with the blood of their radiant and blameless Queen. Not to mention their King, and countless others, including several Irish officers in the Royal service. My love for you is too great for us ever to part, whatever the wishes of my father. O the unspeakable stubbornness of men, and the crazed notions which tempt them away from a reasoned and sober felicity.

My dearest Ellen:

I cannot deny that there is reason for your father’s concern and your own distress. What shall I say? I can at least assure you that I would not have enlisted in this cause had I judged it hopeless. On that score at least, if not on others, I am not inclined towards the romantic. I believe that an uprising of the people, if properly armed and led, and if supported by an adequate force from our French allies, stands a fair chance of success. And I am prepared to gamble on that chance, because I am entirely settled in my mind that there is no other help or remedy for this wretched island.

Yet I believe that the chance is no better than middling, and have indeed asked myself, and often, why I am prepared to put my life at risk. I believe, with both judgement and passion, that all men yearn for their own freedom. But no man can be free if his country is enslaved. Bid your father cast his eyes towards America, which fought for and won its freedom, and yet the chains that galled them were far lighter than ours. Ireland, your country and mine, is the mere creature of England, which abuses and mistreats us casually, as it serves her interests. She justly cherishes her own Parliament, and yet she has deliberately and by system corrupted ours until today it stands shamed before the world. Odious as are the religious animosities among our people, yet she has fostered and increased them, the better to keep us divided and thus weak. And our people bear, all of them, rich and servile, Protestant and Papist, some mark of this bondage.

I write this without rant, as a statement of fact which few would dare to refute. Certainly George would not, for no man has so clear or so sardonic a view of our affairs. Yet George, for all his estimable qualities of mind and sensibility, holds a dark and pessimistic view of human nature. For my part, I believe that every man is a locked casket of virtue, of which freedom is the key. That the great mass of our peasantry is brutish and ignorant, I shall not deny, yet what has made them so, for are they not shaped of meaner stuff than the yeomanry of England? The awful poverty of their lives has worked thus upon them, and the great cause of our national poverty is our subservience to England. It is of course dangerous to place a musket or a pike in the hands of a man inflamed with angry passion, yet with that weapon he may exchange despair for hope.

If indeed there are causes for which it is proper to risk life, is not liberty the noblest and the most necessary? Your father would not think ill of me if I took pistol in hand upon the field of honour, and wagered my life to avenge some trifling slight to my personal honour. Such is the practice of our bucks and self-proclaimed gentlemen, and I hold it in disdain.

Dearest Ellen, I pledge to you that I am seldom so solemn, and would far rather write to you of other matters, the nature of which you may judge. You speak to me of my “politics,” but I am not certain that I have any. My actions are guided by an instinct which I know to be virtuous. Even as I am drawn to you by an instinct which is the most powerful and virtuous of all.