It was Mr. O’Flaherty who finally sat Padraig down and talked him to a measure of calm. Shaughnessy had no fixity of purpose and would never be able to stay away completely, reasoned our schoolmaster, and Brigid had the good sense to return as soon as she could get away, for Mullaghmore was the only home she had known, the place in this big world where she knew she was cherished.
In September, five months after Brigid left, Mrs. Shaughnessy stood silently inside Padraig’s ma’s shop, fingering the yarn, touching the wool. Mrs. Aherne took care of her customers and came and stood beside her and let her take her time. Brigid’s ma found a friendly shoulder to weep on for she had need of that surely. She had got news that her only brother, Liam, was sinking, so she was going to Antrim to live at his cottage and take care of him in his last days. Mrs. Aherne knew that she had not really come for advice; ’twas only that she needed to hear, if Brigid came back, Padraig’s ma would send her on to Antrim. It was in Maire Aherne’s nature to offer this simple trust and support. Brigid would be safe.
But Mr. Shaughnessy stayed away, month after month.
While Padraig waited impatiently, his raging mind began to be taken over by his other passion—the news of growing turbulence in our land. I think Mrs. Aherne was relieved, for she believed Brigid’s return was just a matter of time and Padraig’s increasing interest in the unfolding political news kept him away from a bloody encounter should he find the whereabouts of Mr. Shaughnessy.
As the news of Daniel O’Connell’s great meetings across the breadth of Ireland hit us, I could see the growling unrest in my mate. After the departures from our village—Brigid gone in April, then Mrs. Shaughnessy leaving her key with Padraig’s ma—I seldom saw Padraig as fretful as he grew by the third week of September. ’Twas then he conceived of his plan, confiding first to me and then to Mr. O’Flaherty.
We expected Padraig back in a month, maybe a little more, but by the end of October surely, even if he did stop and gawk, for his head was full of stories from our Mr. O’Flaherty and many of the places of those tales lay on his path. He was planning to walk and perhaps take the jaunting car to Drogheda and then to Clontarf, which was a stone’s throw from Dublin, in time for the monster meeting on October 8, maybe even meet the great Daniel O’Connell himself. I would not put that beyond our Padraig.
He did a great studying of maps, and consulted Mr. O’Flaherty, who had been to Kells, to Drogheda, to Birr Castle, and even to Dublin, where he, a young man then, had seen Swift’s house. Mr. O’Flaherty’s da, he told us, had seen the Dean himself, riding by on his carriage when
he
had gone once to Dublin.
I wanted to strike the blows, aye, bloody and felling, to bring back the old glory days. Brendan loved stories for their own sake, savouring the sweet and sad pith of our Irish tales—but I longed for the sweat and gore of the strife itself. All our Irish songs moved my blood about, and I was so stirred, that lads like Brenfi Clarke or Charley Keelan edged closer, ready to follow me to death. But I knew I would be the first one to charge ahead.
Even our childish games sprang from everything I had absorbed of our history: I would be Brian Boru in the rough-and-tumble games, mock battles among the trees and abandoned shepherd huts as we drove the Norsemen or the English to defeat. We brandished sticks for swords, used stones for missiles. By the time we returned home, we were hoarse and bruised, but victorious.
By sixteen, I went to every last meeting in Sligo, or wherever nearby they speeched about the wrongs done to us Irish, and our undeniable rights. It was always Brendan who would draw me back to earth when I raged against the slowness of time, in our
everyday Mullaghmore, and my mother wrapped me in her strong love. I was ready to take up arms in the great uprising everyone said was brewing, but seemed to me to be forever on the pot!
Just last year, I got into an argument with a sailor from Belfast who was jawing fun at our speeches, and though I was only fifteen then, I knocked him about, and he flailing away at me too. We ended in the seawater and kelp by the wharf, and I was for keeping his stupid head underwater until he had a good bellyful of our good Sligo sand, but the watchers all clamoured for me to let him go, for they feared for his lungs and life. So I did, but not before I gave him a black eye for good measure. Och, he scrambled off after his lesson, though he had been full of huff before.
Once the worthies from Dublin or Kerry or wherever the speakers came from were gone, our Sligo would slip right back to its sleepy ways, and us with our daily plod, while I chafed. Mr. O’Flaherty said that the great stir was in the offing.
“When!” I fumed.
“Very soon, Padraig,” said Mr. O’Flaherty, “I pin my hopes on Dan O’Connell.”
“All he has to do is to send out his call,” I grumbled.
• • •
A
H, BUT THERE
was one more tide that threw me about. I would amble over to Brigid’s, and whistle low so her ma did not hear, and Brigid would pretend some chore beyond the haycocks and trees, and I would catch up, and she, breathless and pink, would pretend I was not there. But I was there—and she in my strong surrounding arms.
One day she was near to fainting with pleasure, and after she
let me touch that sweet fern between her legs, I knew next time there would be no turning back, and for certain I would be entangled with her, forever and evermore. That time I came home, kissed and bitten, branded like a steer—for in her moments, Brigid was like one possessed, and her rosy lips gripped my soul in a sweet vise of torment.
• • •
I
WAS BORN
in April 1826, some months after my da was dead, but my ma kept our Aherne name bright and ran a good shop, selling dry goods and needles, yarns and pots, wool, seed potato and other sundry things, and hive honey besides. I never wanted for warm clothes, or potatoes and bread, and milk or cheese, which I always shared with Brendan.
My mother, Maire Aherne, stood tall, her flaming hair red-gold, a marvelous tangle to her waist. On those days she washed her hair, it would hang, straight and burnished; then as it dried—and it took time in our Ireland—the natural currents of her hair would begin to crisscross each other, as if in preordained order, becoming a mass of curls. A simple toss of the head, a shake with both her strong white hands, fingers run through the shiny mane, and it was done, as if all her hair had waited to fall into place.
Ma lived as if she were from another, more shining world. Few men had the presence of mind to try her with compliments, for in her manner there was something so direct and clear, so unexpecting of any such levity, that most men who came to the shop would shuffle their feet, and buy, and take their mumbling leave. The women would talk to her about their troubles but stop if any man came in—or any grown child too close.
Oh, she knew how to laugh—aye! —and she was greatly fond of shy Brendan with his head in a muddle of poetry. Our home was not unlike other cottages in Mullaghmore or Dromahair or Lissadel. It was small, but ours was neater, with redder flowers, it seems in my memory. She would make Brendan tell all the poetry. And she, her voice deep, told her favourite poems, which I remember in snatches.
On every pool there will rain
A starry frost . . .
The herons are calling
In cold Glen Eila
Swift flying flocks are flying
Coming and going . . .
Sweetest warble of the birds . . .
Each resting stag at rest
On the summit of the peaks.
That was her favourite. It was a list, a litany, and I do not truly know why it thrilled my heart so:
The stag of steep Slieve Eibhlinne
The stag of sharp Slieve Fuaid
The stag of Eala, the stag of Orrery
The mad stag of Loch Lein . . .
Brigid used to come in with her mother since her childhood. My ma would give her a kiss, and even as she spoke to Brigid’s mother, smoothed the child’s hair, handing her a bobbin or such to keep her little hands busy.
Since I had my first kiss, Brigid became shy of my mother—as if she thought my mother was all-knowing. In time I found her rose-petal nipples, which grew magically taut, and made me stand still and hard. But my ma said not a word, and watched my awkwardness with a smile out of the corner of her eyes, I knew I was growing up and that she knew it and was letting me grow without intruding herself in that strange and new place, and I was that grateful to her.
• • •
O
UR FIREPLACES KEPT
us warm, and in their embers we cooked our sod-grown potatoes, delicious as no other, cool and earthy to the touch, cooked to perfection in our very own sod-fed embers, and a lick of sea-salt dried off our Sligo Bay. That was how home tasted: The warm praties with but just a whiff of the peat and Irish mothersoil. I know it in my heart, my mouth and nostrils.
Yet it was far from tranquil in my heart. Between lessons, Mr. O’Flaherty had always told us something new about Ireland. I sat transfixed, listening to our sad and sorry history, brooding, nursed upon the history of all our wrongs.
When the Eighth Henry broke with the Holy Father in Rome, he began the burning down of all our sacred monasteries. In the past, the pious and outraged voices of our priests would be heeded—or at least heard. Our religion itself was now an anathema, another hard reason for the English Crown to send out its troops and its steel. Our very means of calling to our Heavenly Father was now a pretext to damn us as papists, our faith trodden upon.
People here still swear by the sword of our Irish Queen Grania.
She had triumphed on ship and land, around Corraun Peninsula and the slopes of Achill Island. When Elizabeth tried to buy her off with a promise of peace and a title, she was disdainfully told off. No English title could match the one our Grania had already. She died a ruler, and in her own bed, buried royal and peaceful, under the painted gaze of saints on the walls of Knockmoy Abbey. I longed for those lost days of the Irish swords. We heard the stories of later times, complete with songs, and curses: how Sir Frederick Hamilton led the British troops in the sack of Sligo Town. In his Protestant fury, with flaming brand, he tried again and again to burn down Sligo Abbey, once the abode of the peaceful singing Fathers. May his skin rot, mottled by pox, and his eye clutched with sore aches, squint, and motes.
The Abbey walls had figures carved upon them, saints holding tablets, some with gentle palms turned towards the looking folk beneath, benedictions in stone. Though the flames leapt all about, the wall would not crumble or humble, and the holy ones stood, lit by the flames as if shielded within God’s holy palm.
That fire finally burnt low, the sky full of stars until the embers blurred into dust beneath the stony stare of the saints. No one had been allowed to throw so much as a spoon of water. The hard and bitter English soldiery had stood by as the flames leapt. But our stone saints remained unharmed, Daniels in this later burning. Such were our few victories in those iron times.
In dark nights here, after the stories and songs, easy ’tis to imagine the sad-faced giant Finn McCoul a-looking seven long years for his bereft and naked son, or Oisin on his gigantic horse cantering a bronze beat in the gloaming. No such heroes rode into our town to save it on that day. But I longed to be with the warriors of the coming day, among my brother Irish.
• • •
T
O HEAR
M
R.
O’F
LAHERTY
tell it, our O’Connell was made of the same stuff as McCoul, the great Boru, Cuchulain, with the very mien of the heroes of old. Dan O’Connell spoke for us all, and his words were fiery. Ah, what dreams these words held for us! I had many by heart, and standing on the slope towards Mullaghmore on my way back from school, I would pretend to be the great O’Connell himself and yelled the words out—as if all the gorse-tangled valley, the rhododendron bushes, even high Ben Bulben were my audience.
“Here I am, calling for justice to Ireland. Will you, can you—refuse? You may raise the vulgar cry of ‘Irishman and Papist’ against me, you may send out ministers of God to slander and calumniate me. I demand equal justice for Ireland. I will not take less.
Refuse me if you can
.”
When I returned home some days, still high with the brave words, my mother would ask me with a chortle, “Will Mr. O’Connell be wanting his praties now?” But she would want to hear the words too, enthralled as I was, by the sheer rightness of them all.
I went wild with excitement the day I read the announcement of our Dan O’Connell’s plan, a vast “Monster” meeting on a Sunday, the eighth day of October in 1843. He had called upon all Ireland to come to the fields of Clontarf, next to Dublin, where exactly eight hundred years ago, our great Brian Boru had met the alien Norsemen in armed conflict and battered them, driving them brokenback and spentbreath into the sea. Dan O’Connell’s choice of place was masterly. Whoever thought that he was ever too much of a gentleman to roll his white sleeves and pick up the hoe or cudgel for a bleeding turn now
thought of the symbolism of the site, the time. My moment had come.
• • •
’T
WAS MORNING, AND
me fretful the whole night before, wondering how and what I’d say to my ma. Finally she brought me my glass of buttermilk and set it on the table by our window, the seaward door open, for it was balmy that September day.
“The whole folk of Sligo Bay think that you are off to Dublin to see O’Connell at his brave meeting. I was wondering if I was going to be the very last to be told.” Her eyes were twinkling as she bantered me about my secret discussions with Brendan, Mr. O’Flaherty, even Woolly Rafferty with his game leg and rusty cart, and I grinned back at her foolishly.
“Come here then, you big silly boy. Give your ma a hug and tell her when you leave. Go see a bit of the world. I went to work younger than you. I don’t worry about the travel. Be careful who ye travel with. And who you speak with, and what you say. The whole world is not Mullaghmore, or Sligo, or Dromahair. There are people of ill will.” Her eyes narrowed. Or did I imagine that? “God keep you safe then, Son, for I can’t surely keep you home forever, can I?”