Lark's Eggs (4 page)

She lay in the hospital which she hated with nuns running about and nurses slipping with trays of soup.

The soup was awful, simply awful. ‘Package soup,' she
complained
to Mary. Not the strong emerald and potato soup of the bog-roads. ‘I'll die if I stay here much longer.' Mary looked at her. Her mother was ninety-one and the doctors had stated there was little hope for her. The tribe of the Wards was expecting death as their children would watch for the awakening of stars at night on beaches in Connemara.

Two Madges came and two more Marys came to see her later that night. They stood like bereaved angels gazing at the old woman who had mothered fifteen children, ten living, one a doctor in London, one a building contractor in California. The one who was a doctor had been taken by English tourists before the Civil War. He'd been a blond two-year-old, her youngest at the time. They'd driven up in a Ford coupé to the camp, admired the child, asked if he could spend the summer with them. They never gave him back. Jimmy Joe was a building contractor in California. He'd gone to the golden state in 1925, seeking gold. He now owned a big house in San Francisco and Tim, her great-grandson, had only that summer gone to him and installed himself in the house, ‘jumping into a swimming pool' it was whispered.

Eileen lay dying. As the news spread Wards and even
McDonaghs
came to see her. They came with cloaks and blankets and
children
. They came with caps and with fine hats from London. They smoked pipes. They looked on with glazed eyes telling themselves about history of which she had seen so much.

Mary recalled the wake for her husband twenty years before in the fair green in Ballinasloe, loud mourning and the smell of
extinguished
fires. In the fair green of Ballinasloe now bumpers bashed and lights flashed to the sound of music and the rising whine of voices and machines.

Tinkers from all over Ireland had come to Ballinasloe fair green as they had for hundreds of years, bringing horses, donkeys, mules. Romanies even came from England and Gypsies from the South of France.

Eileen in her hospital bed often thought she heard the voice of the carnival. She'd first gone to the fair at the age of ten in 1895 when Parnell was still being mourned as this area was the place of his
infamous
adultery, adultery among the wet roses and the big houses of Loughrea. You could smell his sin then and the wetness of his sex. Her parents made love in their small caravan. In Ballinasloe there'd been the smell of horse manure rising balefully and the rough scent of limestone. A young man had asked her age and said she'd make a fine widow some day.

She'd married at fifteen and her husband went to sea. He sailed to South America and to South Africa and the last that was heard of him was that he'd married a black woman on an island.

Eileen had had one child by him. The child died in the winter of 1902 on a bog-road outside Ballinasloe. It had been buried in a field under the mocking voices of jackdaws and she swore she'd become a nun like the Sisters of Mercy in their shaded gardens in Ballinasloe.

But Joe Ward took her fancy—he'd become a Tinker king in a fight in Aughrim—beating the previous king of the Tinkers, who was twenty-five years older than him, in a fist-fight. He'd been
handsome
and swarthy and had a moustache like British Army officers, well designed and falling like a fountain.

They'd wedded in St Michael's Church on St Stephen's Day, 1906. Her father had told the bishop in Loughrea her previous
husband
had been eaten by sharks and the marriage had taken place without bother. She'd worn a Victorian dress, long and white, which the lady of the local manor had given her, a woman who'd
performed
on the London stage once with bouquets of paper roses about her breasts.

The priest had proclaimed them man and wife as celebrations followed on the Aughrim road, whiskey and poteen downed where a month before two children had died from the winter chill.

There had been dancing through the night and more than one young girl lay down with an older heftier man, and Eileen slept with a warm-legged man, forgetting about the odd clinging piece of snow and the geese fretting in the fields.

She became pregnant that cold, cold winter, holding her tummy as March winds howled and their caravans went west, trundling along Connemara roads to the gaps where the sea waited like a table. They camped near Leenane Head. Fires blazed on June nights as wails rose, dancing ensuing and wood blazing and crackling with a fury of bacon. They were good days. They'd sold a troop of white horses to the Gypsies of France and many men went to bed with their women, stout in their mouths and on their whiskers.

They saw ships sail up the fjord at dawn and they bought crabs and lobster from local fishing men. When her belly had pushed out like a pram she found Joe on the lithe body of a young cousin.

Her child perished at birth. She had thirteen children by Joe. They grew up as guns sounded and Tinker caravans were caught in ambushes in East Galway. Joe was in Dublin for 1916. He saw the city blaze and he was bitterly disappointed as he'd come to Dublin to sell a mare and eat a peach melba in an illustrious ice-cream house in Sackville Street. He returned to Galway without having eaten his ice cream.

Michael Pat, her oldest, found a dead parish priest lying in the bushes like a crow in 1921; the Tans had smitten him on the head. The Tinkers had covered his body and fallen on their knees in prayer. The police came and a long stalwart ambulance.

The body was borne away and Eileen and her children attended his funeral, bringing bouquets of daffodils stolen from the garden of a solicitor and banners of furze which were breaking to gold.

 He was the last victim Eileen knew of, for Britain gave the men with their long moustaches and grey lichen-like hair their demands and as they arrived in Ballinasloe for the fair there was more anger, more shots, and buildings in flame in Dublin.

Irishmen were fighting Irishmen. A young man was led
blindfolded
to a hill above the Suck and shot at dawn and the fair ceased for a day because of him and then went on with a girl who had a fruity Cork accent bellowing ‘I'm forever blowing bubbles' across the fair green where lank and dark-haired Gypsies from France smoked long pipes like Indians.

Eileen opened her eyes.

Her daughter Mary, sixty-two, looked like Our Lady of the Sorrows.

‘O Mother dear you're leaving me alone with a pack of
ungrateful
children and their unfortunate and ill-behaved children.'

Mary was referring to her drunken sons and daughters who hugged large bottles of Jameson in Dublin with money supplied by social security or American tourists.

‘Sure they have picnics of whiskey outside the Shelbourne,' Mary had once told her mother.

As for their children they were Teddyboys and thieves and drunkards and swindlers or successful merchants of material stolen from bomb sites in Belfast. There was a group who went North in vans and waited like Apaches swooping upon bomb-sites after the
IRA
had blown a store or a factory.

It was whispered that the
IRA
and the Irish Tinkers were in league, blowing the Unionist kingdom to pieces for the betterment of the Travelling people and for the ultimate ruinous joy of a dishevelled and broken province. Middle-aged men sat in parlours in Belfast thanking God for each exquisite joy of destruction, a bomb, a bullet, while they drank to the day there'd be a picture of Patrick Pearse in Stormont and a shoal of shamrocks on the head of Queen Victoria's statue. ‘It's a bad picture of the Travelling people folk have,' Mary had told her. And yet more and more were becoming peaceable and settling in council houses in Swinford or Castlerea. These were the ones you didn't hear of. These children who attended school and were educated and those parents who worked and who
tidied a new house of slate grey. ‘They say Tommy Joe is in the
IRA
,' Mary had said. Tommy Joe was Eileen's fifth great-grandson.
Apparently
he wore roses in his lapel and turned up in distant places, meeting agents or big-breasted young women, negotiating deals of arms. He ran off to Libya at the age of seventeen with an Irish melodion player who was a secret agent for a Belfast regiment.

That started him. ‘It's been gin and tonic and
sub-machine-guns
since,' Mary had complained to Eileen before illness had
confined
her to Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe.

As Eileen lay in bed surrounded by bustling seagull-like sisters from South America news filtered through of violence in the fair green.

It was the first year there'd been trouble at the fair other than brawls and fights and lusts. Men had been beaten with bottles. A caravan had been set alight and an old man in the country had been tied in his bed and robbed by two seventeen-year-old Tinkers.

Eileen grabbed her beads.

It was the North, the North of Ireland was finally sending its seeds of ill-content among the Travelling people. Young men who'd been to Belfast had caught a disease. This disease had shaped greed, had shaped violence like a way of grabbing, a way of distrusting, a way of relinquishing all Eileen had borne with her through her life.

Talking to Mary now, she said, ‘England brought me great luck.'

She and Joe had travelled the length and breadth of Ireland as mares grew thin and men looked like mummers. They'd settled
outside
Belfast, dwelling on a site beside a graveyard while Joe, being a man of intelligence and strength, found work in the shipping yard. She'd had eleven grandchildren then and they hung their clothes like decorations on the bushes as her sons sauntered about Antrim on white horses repairing tin objects. One of her granddaughters fell in love with a minister's son. Eileen like her grandmother. She followed him about and when he ignored her she tore off her blouse, laying her breasts naked and her nipples like wounds, and threatened to throw herself into the Lagan.

Peader her grandson led her away. The girl cracked up, became babbling and mad and ever after that went off with an old Tinker called Finnerty, telling fortunes from palms, staring into people's
eyes in Ballinasloe or Loughrea, foretelling people of death or
scaldings
or bankruptcy.

In the winter of 1935 Joe was beaten up and a young child seized by an Antrim lady who wouldn't let him go for two days, saying he was a heathen.

The sky dropped snow like penance and the Wards moved off, wandering through Donegal, past the mass rocks and the hungry bays and the small cottages closed to them and the hills teeming with the shadow of snow. There was no work for them and Brigid her youngest died of tuberculosis and four grandchildren died and Peader and Liam took boats to America and were not heard of till they got to Boston and were not heard of again until 1955 when both were dead.

‘It's like the Famine again,' said Eileen, recalling days close to her birth when the banshee howled and young men and old men crawled to the poorhouse in Ballinasloe like cripples, seeking goat's milk.

Wirelesses blared jazz music as doors closed on them and Eileen cursed the living and the dead as she passed bishops'
residences
and crucified Christs hanging like bunting outside towns.

Her mother and father had survived the Famine but they lived to report the dead bodies lying over the length and breadth of
Ireland
like rotten turnips. They'd reported how men had hanged their children in order to save them and how at the Giant's Causeway Furies had eaten a McDonagh as though he was a chicken. ‘We'll leave this land,' she said to Joe. They tried to sell their mangy mares, succeeded in Athenry in selling them to an Englishman as thin as the mares and they took off.

‘Our people have been Travelling people since the time of St Patrick,' said Joe. ‘We should have been treated better than this.'

Sister woke her.

‘Wake up, Mrs McDonagh. It's time for breakfast.' She was not Mrs McDonagh but the nun presumed all Tinkers were McDonaghs.

Breakfast was porridge thin and chill as the statue of Mary standing somewhere near.

Eileen ate as a young nurse came and assisted her as though shovelling earth into a grave.

‘The tea is putrid,' complained Eileen.

 ‘Whist,' said the nurse. ‘You're only imagining it.'

Outside mists clung like a momentary hush. Winter was
stealing
in but first there was this October imminence, standing above sweetshops and council houses.

She took one more sup of the tea.

‘This is not good enough.' She called the nurse. A country girl made off to get her stronger tea as Eileen bemoaned the passing of tea thick and black as bog-water.

They'd set up camp in Croydon in 1937, and from that spot moved across England, repairing tin, selling horses, rambling north along ill-chosen seaside paths, paths too narrow for jaunty caravans. They surmounted this island, rearing right to its northmost edge, the Kyle of Lochalsh, John o' Groat's.

They camped in winter in mild spots where men shook herring from their nets as Eileen's daughters shook daughters and sons from their bodies, as the Wards germinated and begot and filled England with Tinkers.

During the War they craved their little spot in Croydon,
venturing
north but once, shoeing horses in Northumberland, taking coast roads, watched by ancient island monasteries. They settled in Edinburgh winter of'42 but Eileen got lonesome for talk of Hitler and the air-raid shelters squeezing with people and she left a city of black fronts and blue doors and went south with Joe and her daughter Mary, widowed by a man who jumped into the sea to save a bullock from drowning.

They camped in Croydon. Mary married a cockney tramp and they broke Guinness into an old bath and feasted on it. Mary had three children and more people of their clan joined them.