The Year of the French (94 page)

When a man is to be hanged, his name is written out on a sheet of foolscap, together with the name of his crime and the nature of the sentence, and then are set forth the names of the civil and military authorities, Dennis Browne and General Trench. The paper is then nailed up outside the courthouse, with later ones nailed beside it or overlapping it. The rain pelts down upon the papers and smears the ink. In that way, names are proclaimed and then washed away—Donnellan, Nealon, Duggan, Mulkern, Dunne, Clancy, Burke. But the bodies are not washed away, and neither are they buried, but they are coated in tar and hung up again as a show.

“Owen McCarty,” they spelled his name, which is close enough, and he was given his proper calling as schoolmaster. It went on to say that he had accepted arms from the French and had fought against the Crown at various times and places, and had held authority among the rebels, this being the crime of treason and punishable by death. This is true enough, surely, although Owen has told me little of what he did in that month, and I have little desire to know. It is a wonder to me that a man and his death can be thus shrivelled to a few words on paper.

This evening, as I walked down High Street to the gaol, was clear, with ribs of red cloud stretched low across the horizon and the windless air was warm for the month it is. High Street and Castle Street were crowded with soldiers and militia and yeomen off duty, swaggering about or lounging against the walls of shops, and the taverns are filled with them. It has been this way ever since General Trench entered Mayo and set up his headquarters in Castlebar. There are militiamen from Munster who can speak only Irish, and men from across the sea who speak a kind of English that is beyond my understanding, as though their mouths have been stuffed with hot potatoes. A great folly it was that has brought down upon us in retribution these swarms of scarlet wasps.

I brought Owen a new linen shirt from the shop, that he might make a good appearance upon the morrow. And I brought him also a jug of whiskey and a loaf of bread that Brid had baked for him from the best white flour and the beads which had been my father’s, carved from bog oak in the penal days and worn smooth from my father’s sweat and mine.

He thanked me for these, and put them beside him on the mattress. The only light in the cell came weakly from a lamp in the corridor outside, and I saw him in shadows. He had a mat of beard, but behind it, his face seemed hollowed out, the cheeks sunken in. Some of his teeth had been knocked out and others were loose, so that he spoke with a lisp. My heart broke within my chest.

“A poor enough kind of death it is,” he said. “The kind of death you would give a puppy.”

“Ach, Owen,” I said. “It is quick enough over. It is of other things you should be thinking now. Has there been a priest to you?”

“There has. This afternoon. I sent that poor fellow out of here with his ears burning.”

“He gave you your absolution, though?”

“He did. But I don’t think his heart was in it. He would have had to work on me for days to make a decent job of it.”

I knew that he spoke lightly in order to build a wall around himself. He was sitting within a cell of is own making, smaller and darker than the squares of damp stones.

“It was kindness itself for you to come here, Sean,” he said at last.

“There are many others who would have come gladly,” I said. “Poets of Kerry and West Cork.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

“Perhaps is not in it,” I said, “and well you know it. Wherever you have lived you have been highly esteemed.”

He laughed. “Have I? By God, some of them had strange ways of showing it.”

I could see him more clearly now. “They will be saying your poems for many long years,” I said.

“Ach, they will indeed. The poems have nothing to do with me anymore. They will find their own way in the world. It was not the poems which led me to this terrible place, but my own life of folly and wildness.”

“Who knows what folly is,” I said.

“The priest does,” he said. “He would give no absolution to me unless I repented that I went off with the French. I do indeed, I said to him, isn’t it getting me hanged? But that wasn’t good enough for him, and he had me swear that it was all sinful from beginning to end and a crime against God and man. A boy in his twenties he was, with a high, unpleasant voice. Ach, sure an absolution from him is as good as one from the Pope. After a time I gave over all thoughts of a full confession. I just touched on the high points, else he would still be here. My God, what a terrible life I have led, Sean. It wasn’t until after he was gone that I remembered Mary Lavelle, the Ballycastle girl who married Ferdy O’Donnell’s hired boy. I had forgotten her entirely. A wild little thing she was, with haunches that a man’s two spread hands could just fit around.”

“Dear God, Owen. It is not of such things you should be thinking now.”

“Ach, sure, what did it all matter? There was a great passion on me for her, when I saw her there that night, in Ferdy’s kitchen. But later, in the darkness beyond the gable end, it was the same as making love to Judy, who was home in Killala waiting for me, and I was left wondering why I had gone to all the trouble. When a man is in passion, he takes leave of all common sense. Sure we all know that. The priesteen was shocked by what I could remember. Lust is a wild, raging beast, he said to me, some formula they gave him in the seminary. It is, I said, and most of those times I was blind drunk as well. That is a separate sin, he said. That fellow is going to be a holy terror that you would walk five parishes to avoid. Murphy of Killala was a madman, but he had judgement in some matters.”

“They are sins right enough, Owen. Perhaps God makes special allowances for poets, but He hasn’t told the Church about it.”

“He seems to have made a special point of telling the Church about the wickedness of rebellion against the King. The priesteen was eloquent on the subject. That was the blackest of my sins, to have gone off with the French. Are you truly repentant, he says, that you took arms against your sovereign? Oh, I am, Father, I say, most heartily sorrowful. You are paying a heavy penalty for it, he says. Oh, I am, Father, I say, I would be hard put to think of a worse one. An innocent young fellow, Sean. It isn’t many years that that fellow has had to scrape a razor along his jaw.”

For that moment, we might have been back in my room above the shop, with a jug between us, and his wild humour dancing on the edge of irreverence. But then he said, “It was a mad folly. There were men dead and dying all around us at Ballinamuck, with their arms torn off and their bellies ripped open. And in the midst of all my fear I could think only of the folly that had led us there, wandering after that banner onto the red bog of death. The bogside hedges were thick with blackberries, and I knew that I would never again walk down a lane with my hand filled with blackberries and my lips stained with them.”

There is in Owen a great love of our earthly existence and it is perhaps because of it that he is so fine a poet. What are the worst of his sins, the wild ways and even the girl at the gable end, if not that love speaking out? I truly believe that this love is so strong that he cannot understand his sinfulness. God help him and make allowances for him.

“I went off with them,” he said, “and then I ran away from them and then I drifted back to them. If I had stayed clear of them, I would be safe in Munster now, tucked away in a valley, and boasting and lying about what I had done. Oh, Christ, that is another sin.”

When I thought that on the next day there would be no life in him, my heart was wrenched in me. Clearly could I see him in a Munster tavern, leaning against the white wall, with a mug of porter in his hand. Now there was but the shadowy bearded face, and tomorrow there will be far less. It is terrible to know what will be the day and hour of a man’s death.

I said, “Often and often I think of it as a wave that swept over us from the great sea. Some of them were carried off for this reason and some for that. And some there were that went off for no reasons that I can think of, the poor landless men and the spalpeens. God alone knows why the gentry went off—John Moore and Malcolm Elliott and Randall MacDonnell and their like.”

“Commend me to the gentry,” he said with harsh contempt. “When have they needed a reason for what they do?”

“It had been building for a century,” I said, “and it broke upon us like a wave.”

We were silent for long periods, looking towards each other, or at nothing, or at the wan light in the small barred window of the door. I did not know whether he would have me with him or would prefer the silence of his own company. But I believe that he was glad to have me with him. We have been great friends from the first, since first he drifted northwards into Mayo.

Once, of a sudden, he asked me, “Did you ever see a man hanged?”

“I did not,” I said, “and I will not. It is a terrible thing that people would want to watch.”

“I did,” he said. “In Macroom. I watched them hang Paddy Lynch.”

“He was the Whiteboy Captain,” I said.

“He was. He was hanged for that and for two killings, but he had done worse. The Macroom Captain, he was called. Sure, he was raiding and killing up and down West Cork in his last year, but he began in Macroom, a man with a few acres of mountainy land and he was called the Macroom Captain. The Macroom gentry had a special hatred for him. They hunted him with packs of hounds as you would hunt a fox. But in the latter end of things, it took the militia. They found him with four of his men in a cave in the Boggeraghs, and they were all brought back to Macroom and hanged in the square.”

“I remember that. It was not until the year after that I left Cork City. That week they talked of little else.”

“Cork City is not Macroom. There is a great castle from the old days, and the entrance gate of it sticks out into the town. The shadow of it falls across the town, a great ugly castle. It is a market town, and there is a great wide square, as they have them in Munster. And that morning it was filled with people, more people than you would find people and cattle there on a market day. And all of them had come to see Paddy Lynch hanged. I was there myself. It was morning, but I had half a jug in me. People drunk and singing. A fine day we had for ourselves in Macroom, the day we hanged Paddy Lynch.”

“He was a hard man to have tears for, that Paddy Lynch.”

“He was that, by God. Rampaging up and down Ballyvourney and lighting into small farms. He was no better than a rapparee in that latter year, and what else would he be? Hadn’t they made him into an animal with their packs of hounds?”

In those hours, we each had three drinks or four from the jug I had brought, but no more than that. Perhaps he wished to go forward sober in the morning, or perhaps he was saving the jug for the long hours of the night when he would be alone. And either way, small blame to him.

“Sure my father was poorer than any Whiteboy,” he said, “a spalpeen carrying his spade to the hiring fairs. Did I ever tell you how he died? In a roadside ditch with no food in his belly. When I heard of his death in that manner I ran wild with grief.”

“It was a fine poem that you gave him,” I said. “There is no stone of black or white marble that is so fine as that poem.”

“It was not for lack of a poem that he died, but for lack of bread. And myself far off, roistering at my ease, and drinking in taverns, and shoving useless knowledge into the heads of farmers’ sons. It was by my father’s sweat that I had gone to school myself, with shillings that glistened with his sweat. And I left him behind, a hired boy grown old. What sort of father had you yourself, Sean?”

“A most excellent man,” I said, remembering. “He had a small shop in Blarney Street, and my mother was a maidservant in one of the houses there. That is how they met. He was a great man for the reading. The money went for books, and he gave me a taste for them.”

Owen reached out suddenly, and took my hand in the two of his and rubbed the palm. “There,” he said. “That hand is like mine. Soft as a gentleman’s. My father’s hand was like cracked leather, like old leather, with great knobby fingers. And it was never clean, he could never get it clean. The dirt was stained into it, and black beneath the nails. I remember the first time he took me to the school, he tried to hide his hands behind his back. Schooling for a spalpeen’s son. I remember his hands as clearly as I do his face.”

“It is certain that you loved him,” I said. “It is in the poem.”

“He was a terrible man for the drink,” Owen said, “but it was not often that he could afford it. He would drink himself stupid, God help him.”

“God grant him rest,” I said, but it was for the son that I prayed.

Later, after another long silence and a pull upon the jug, he said, “Do you remember that poem that kept worrying me? The moon and the bright curve of metal. For a time, when the madness came on me in Killala, I thought I had the answer to it, when I saw the curve of some fellow’s pike. But that was a part of the madness itself, like the drums and the muskets and the banner of green silk. The image lay there upon the dirt floor of my mind, and nothing would give life to it.”

“It will come to you if you give it time,” I said without thinking, and then, appalled, I heard my foolish words echo in the small, silent room.

But Owen laughed and said nothing.

Then, a bit later, he said, “I remember when I was small, and my father and some of them were at the ploughing on Hassett’s land, God torment his soul. At noontime, I brought a bucket of water to them, to wash down the cakes. The father and I sat down together, at the ditch, and shared out our cakes between us, and then he stretched out and lay looking up at the sky. But I sat looking at the turned furrows and the horses and the plough. One of the wooden ploughs it was, you don’t often see them these days, fitted out with an iron sole-shoe. The whole of the March morning was gathered up into that bit of iron.”

“Well,” I said, “and why not?,” thinking that I had read his meaning. “Didn’t O’Sullivan write a poem about a spade? Why not a plough?”