Tipperary (33 page)

For seven years they hunted, seven years, seven days, seven hours, and seven minutes. They never found his deer-bride and they never found the evil Druid; and they returned home, heavy-hearted, and never were so many deer spared by huntsmen in Ireland. And they never found out what had happened—nobody did, because Finn's wife, in her deer form, had managed to stay ahead of her pursuers. Then, when her time came, she lay in a cleft deep in a wood on a mountain in Donegal and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.

But no animal is made for producing a human child, just as no human woman may give birth to an animal, and the wife-deer died in childbirth. The birds in the trees were watching this event, and they sent out their signal songs, and the animals of the forest came to the bed of ferns where the expired deer lay and they saw this dear little baby boy, lying there on the ferns, kicking and smiling.

A male fox and a female badger agreed to adopt the baby, and they carried the infant to the badger's sett, a safe, large, warm nest deep under the ground. And as the baby grew and grew, they made wider and wider the badger's burrow, so that one day the boy would be able to look out, and then climb out, into the wide world outside. And he did—and he learned to speak to all the animals, and they taught him how to find berries and nuts and other foods, and he never, ever killed for food an animal or any living creature with a face.

For a further seven years and seven days Finn MacCool sequestered himself in his castle, mourning the loss of his wife and—because he had already known she was expecting a baby—his child. Nothing captured his attention—no dice game, no hunting, no story, no song. He moped and he wept, and he wept and he moped. Finally it all became too much for his companions, and one day they came into the castle and con-fronted him where he sat gazing into the fire that was blazing on the great stone hearth.

They said to him, “Finn, you've been mourning now for fourteen years and that is longer than a deer's life span. You cannot become an old man through grief.”

Finn, a noble spirit, heard and heeded, and soon he began to hunt again. He went back to all his old haunts and found that time is the great healer, and he became the best huntsman of old, always leading the chase, with his two hounds no more than a few paces ahead of him.

One day, they were hunting on his favorite mountain, the magic mountain of Ben Bulben in Sligo, and as usual Finn was hundreds of yards ahead of his companions. The dogs suddenly stopped, puzzled, and Finn wondered what had arrested them. Up from the long grass a few yards ahead rose this tall, majestic boy. He was about fourteen years old, with long hair of a deep auburn color; he wore a tunic made of leaves.

Finn's companions had by now caught up, and they stood and they gazed at this apparition. And everybody there on that hillside that day knew what they were seeing; they were looking upon the son of Finn MacCool and his magical deer-bride, the lovely fawn who'd been briefly changed back into a woman and who had married Finn MacCool.

Finn laid down his spear, held out his arms, and walked forward. The boy walked to meet Finn and they embraced, and that is how Finn MacCool met his famous son and gave him the name we pronounce “Osheen”—which, as every man, woman, and child in Ireland knows, means “little deer.”

Almost never did I find a Protestant Anglo-Irishman telling such a tale. To be sure, one or two, such as Mr. Yeats and Lord Dunsany, have explored the hinterland of Irish lore—but in most Anglo-Irish houses the books (if any) consisted of farming manuals and almanacs, and very few of those. However, where a Great House had turned bookish, splendid collections could be found, and some of the libraries of my parents' friends and acquaintances have been inspiring to my own family. Otherwise, I fear that the literary Anglo-Irish represented a minority—even though they have been educated in the British Empire's best schools.

With music, the divide plunged even more deeply. From time to time, during family events or at Christmas or to observe the Monarch's birthday, the great stuccoed drawing-rooms of the Anglo-Irish echoed to the stately notes of formal dances. The lords and ladies and their friends danced the Lancers or an occasional gavotte or a prim quadrille; the Irish countryside was many years behind London (some say many centuries). Musicians played violins and a piano, and maybe even the viola, and the event was ordered and stately. The arrival of the waltz removed some of the formality; and the works of Gilbert and Sullivan grew popular quickly.

“Down among the Catholics” (as the landlord's phrase often goes), nothing so regular ever took place. Night after night, some house or other glistened with music, and through the candle-lit open door the music carried across the fields. Fiddlers played faster than fury, pipers kept up; and the skin drum, the “bowrawn” (from an Irish word meaning “deaf”) kept time, amid cheers and unbridled energy. All ages took part, and I have seen a man heavy as a horse dance a light-footed jig on a dinner plate without cracking it.

Irish traditional music throve on spontaneity and improvisation. A tune would begin with the squeezed notes from, say, a concertina, held small as a handkerchief in a farmer's huge hands. As the musician felt surer of himself, and his music quickened, someone else sat down near him with a fiddle. Then came a banjo man or a girl with a whistle, and soon another fiddler, and in due time each one of these slid into the main tune and decorated it.

Some would depart from the theme entirely and then return to it by paths of genius. By that time they had invented and played another melody, yet stayed within recognizing distance of the beginning air—and all done spontaneously, often improvising to a tune they had never heard until that night. This is why, “down among the Catholics,” in culture and imaginativeness, they claimed superiority to the people in the “Big House,” as they called it contemptuously, to the “gentry”—a word they contemn deeper than any other.

I have a stone-breaker friend in County Roscommon. He sits all day by the roadside with his hammer, breaking large rocks into smaller stones. His is an epic task, and he wears eyeglasses of close wire mesh, through which he views the world from a refreshing vantage point. By chance, a great Anglo-Irish residence near where he was working one particular day had lain vacant for more than a decade, as the family struggled through intestacy's furor. He could see the Great House distant across the fields; he sat on his pile of stones near the disused gates.

One day, a strange and pompous gentleman, obviously long separated from a hunt he had been following, trotted his horse down the roadway where my friend labored.

“Stone breaker,” he called imperiously, “have you seen the gentry ride this way?”

“Sir,” answered my friend with his hammer and his wire spectacles and his dust-covered face, “ten years ago they came out that gate over there, they went down this road—and they never came back.”

Charles O’Brien reported fairly—even though his descriptions read oddly like those of a visitor. His impressions have the same kind of objective ring that was sounded by many who visited Ireland when the century's unrest caught the world's attention. Often the travelers who visited went home and wrote in simplified terms.

Many addressed the weather first and foremost. William Makepeace Thackeray, in his
Irish Sketch-Book
of 1843, found more rain than he had ever seen. He was generally sour about everything, including modes of transport: “The traveling conveyances are arranged so that you may get as much practice in being wet as possible,” he reported.

A French visitor, anonymous in the Paris newspapers, summarized the land difficulty thus: “No tenant farmer struggling to keep his lone donkey in rented grass could feel easy at the sight of his Lordship's stable of twenty horses galloping across thousands of acres. Magnify that divide all across society—in food, in clothing, in medicine, in every other aspect of life—and it becomes plain how a seedbed of rebellion got planted and cultivated. Revolutions are born when the drudgery of life aches from serving the grandeur on the hill.”

Other writers—many from abroad—made the same societal observations as Charles O’Brien, though not perhaps as intimately. They confirm his version of the divisions. And they also underscore his sensitivity to the most crucial ingredient in Irish history: the sense of passionate social and political feeling.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, this was a volatile place. Savage upheaval lurked just below the surface. The island seethed like a swamp of crocodiles. All Irish people, no matter what their stripe, knew that there was a violent balancing going on. One day, the bailiff of history must surely come to collect.

Thomas Carlyle, who had a massive literary output, often brought his summaries to a sharp point. “The whole country,” he wrote, “figures in my mind like a ragged coat; one huge beggar's gabardine, not patched or patchable any longer.” And when Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the cliffs ahead of him in the Atlantic, he observed, “There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the course of eight hundred years [of occupation] we could not discern.”

So far, I have written little of the country I travel, my native land of Ireland. It behoves me to include some brief description of its geographical beauty, lest for some unknown reason in the centuries ahead, Man becomes so profligate or uncaring or so needy as to destroy famous aspects. It is, I believe, also the function of the historian to generate an awareness of the terrain in which the events of his narrative have taken place.

In a previous description of my young life, I recounted my father's recitation of the Seven Wonders of Tipperary. For the purposes of this little digressive essay, I pluck at random the Weir at Golden. In truth, it does not exist at Golden, but a mile and more down the river, at a place they call Athassel. And in greater truth, I do not pluck it at random—I choose it deliberately because of its founder's name. He was William de Burgo, and the ancient Norman family became, in settled Irish time, Burke.

As you may imagine, having known the place since my childhood travels alongside Father, I returned to Athassel more than once, in order to contemplate whether April had originated here; and I fondly imagined taking her and her dear father on a tour of the beautiful place.

The limestone ruins of this great monastery glow white in the summer sun; and I have seen kingfishers flash their lightning blue in the willows across the river.

Who sleeps in these ancient tombs? It is known that more than one de Burgo lies here, deep within the priory walls. The outline of the cloister still stands, and the marks of the great altar. I have walked in the original channel, from which the monks (it is said) diverted the river to make themselves a little island; I have stumbled upon the rough earth that sets out the foundations of the town that once protected the abbey.

The best view may be had from across the river, from Mr. Dalton's land. Also, I much enjoy riding along the riverbank from the south, anticipating the moment when I see the broken arches of the dignified, empty windows. When I have ridden through, I then receive the extra pleasure of proceeding by the river until I reach the weir.