The Hawthorns Bloom in May (11 page)

‘That reminds me,’ said Sarah, standing up and smiling at Sam, ‘Ma’s sent a wee dress for the new baby and a jersey for Sammy. They’re out in the motor.’

‘I’ll fetch them, Sarah,’ said Alex promptly, disappearing outside before she could object.

‘Take no notice of Joe,’ said Sam, turning towards her and putting his hand on her shoulder. ‘He an’ his brothers are all the same. Ye wou’dn’t get a civil word outa one o’ them. Don’t pay a bit of attention,’ he finished quickly, as Alex reappeared with two paper bags.

Sam opened the first bag and held up the tiny dress in his large square-fingered hands. ‘Ach that’s lovely,’ he said softly. ‘An so’s that,’ he added, as Sarah drew out a brightly-coloured Fairisle jersey. Wee Sammy’ll be a pleased as Punch,’ he continued, turning to Alex. ‘Ma has great hans. She takes it in turn up and down the family for sweaters and Sammy’s been askin’ every week since Charlie got his.’

‘Well, tell Emily it’s her turn next,’ said Sarah,
making an effort to show Sam she was herself again. ‘And then it’s Rose.’

She looked around her and out through the door, suddenly aware of the complete absence of children. ‘Where’s she got to? And where have the boys gone?’

‘Martha sent her down after Sammy and Emily to play at Loneys,’ he said, pulling a kettle back onto the hottest part of the stove. ‘Billy and Charley are up the road helping the Hutchinson’s lift their potatoes, and Bobbie and Johnny are asleep. An’ I hope they’ll sleep till I have their bottles made,’ he said, breaking into a broad grin.

‘Now I could give you a hand with a bit of welding, Sam, but I’d be no good at all on making bottles,’ said Alex lightly.

Sam laughed and looked pleased and Sarah decided it would be best to go before Martha reappeared again.

‘And we’d better be going, Sam,’ she said quickly. ‘I still don’t like driving in the dark even with the more powerful lamps.’

‘Aye, ye need to be doin’ it regular to get the hang of it,’ he said sympathetically. ‘The days is gettin’ very short already, but ye shou’d be home before dark.’

It was not until they’d passed through Richhill and turned south towards Banbridge that either Sarah
or Alex said anything. Finally, it was the young man who broke the silence.

‘I don’t think Uncle Joe would be quite my favourite relative,’ he said, with great deliberation.

Sarah looked at him, caught the sparkle in his eyes and burst out laughing.

‘Thank goodness for that,’ she replied, relaxing her fierce grip on the steering wheel. ‘It might have been the end of a beautiful friendship.’

They drove on, talking easily now, the afternoon sun declining into a glow of gold on the horizon, the sky paling above, the temperature dropping rapidly. By the time they reached Seapatrick, they could see their breath streaming on the crisp air as they glanced across at each other on the empty road.

‘Sarah, what’s a Shinner? I don’t think I’ve heard of them before?’

‘Sinn Fein. Political party. Very active in America in the last century. Not much talked off at the moment, but then, Joe has a long memory.’

‘Of course, I’ve heard of them,’ he said shaking his head, ‘But your Uncle Sam’s a socialist, isn’t he?’

‘All the same to Joe,’ she replied, now laughing easily. ‘If you don’t agree with Joe, it wouldn’t matter what you were, he’d find a way to disparage you. Uncle Sam worked for the Land League back in the 80s, but he was opposed to violence. He always has been. He did go to America to take letters and
raise funds for the League, but it was because of Eva he stayed,’ she explained. ‘He was probably on some of the police lists, but anyone who worked for the League was then. He’s told me often how any organisation can be infiltrated by people who want to use it for their own purposes. There were people in the Land League who moved to the I.R.B. when it was founded.’

‘Irish Republican Brotherhood?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about them. Hugh always tried to keep up with politics, but I’m afraid I feel defeated by great causes and marching men,’ she went on, as they drew to a halt and let a column of Ulster Volunteers cross the road in front of them.

Weighed down with heavy packs, some carrying rifles, they tramped solidly along behind their officer, scaling the wall alongside the road with practised ease.

‘All I can do is try to see that no one in the four mills goes hungry or dies for lack of care,’ she said sadly. ‘But even that seems a struggle at times,’ she added, as the last of the long column disappeared into the nearby fields.

‘Wouldn’t anything be a struggle when you lose the man you love?’

Tears sprang to Sarah’s eyes and she had to blink furiously as she revved up the engine and moved off again.

‘Maybe one of the lives you save will do more for mankind than all the political groups and volunteers put together,’ Alex went on, without looking at her.

‘I’d never thought of that,’ she replied honestly. ‘I’ll try and remember next time there’s a threatened strike or a punch up over a bit of coloured ribbon.’

‘Well then, Alex,’ said Rose laughing, ‘you’ve met Uncle Joe and lived to tell the tale. Are you sure you shouldn’t take his advice about the Hamiltons before it’s too late?’ she went on, as she and Sarah led the way into the new sitting room where a log fire blazed invitingly.

‘I think I’ll take a chance on my own judgement,’ Alex answered her with a broad smile.

The roast dinner Rose had ready for them had gone down well. In the warmth of the kitchen, the events of the afternoon were recalled, softened somewhat by distance and touched with humour by both Sarah and Alex in the telling.

‘I don’t know how our Sam puts up with it,’ said John slowly, as he straightening up from putting another log on the fire.

‘I forgot to tell you, Ma, Martha’s expecting again,’ said Sarah, as she looked across at her mother.

Rose sighed, took one look at John’s face and wished Sarah hadn’t mentioned it just then.

‘Well, she certainly keeps my hand in with babies’ dresses,’ she said as she bent down to leave the teapot on the hearth.

‘I think Sam is very fond of children,’ said Alex unexpectedly. ‘Maybe that makes up to him for something in Martha. He has only to say a word and they do what he tells them. Little Rose seems to adore him.’

‘Yes, Alex’s right,’ added Sarah. ‘He’s stronger in himself than ever I remember. I used to think Martha walked all over him, but it’s different now. I just wish he didn’t have to work so hard, evenings and weekends as well as a long day.’

‘Aye,’ said John, ‘I know what ye mean, but he once said to me that work keeps you from thinking long. When he’s working he has a whole world inside his head, figuring out things, planning things …’

‘Like you used to do yourself, John, on the fortieth horseshoe,’ said Rose, smiling at him across the fireplace. ‘Maybe we can only see one side of things. I must say Sam never seems unhappy when he comes here.’

‘Ach, how would he, love, an’ this his home an’ him so welcome?’ said John hastily.

‘Yes, but sadness hangs round a man like a cloak,’ said Alex promptly.

Rose and Sarah exchanged glances and they both smiled. They’d got used to it now, but to begin
with some of Alex’s sudden offerings had taken them by surprise. He had a way of summing up a situation or observing a characteristic in a person that was perceptive and shrewd.

‘Ye said, Sarah, that yer man mentioned Uncle Sam,’ began John, as he settled himself more comfortably in his high-backed armchair. ‘What was this about goin’ up and down to Dublin. Where did he get that?’ he asked, looking at Rose. ‘
Has
your Sam been to Dublin?’

‘Yes, he has,’ Rose said, ‘but I don’t know how Joe found out. Maybe I told our Sam that Uncle Sam had been down to see Lily.’

‘Lily?’ Sarah gasped. ‘Ma, you never told me he’d seen Lily.’

‘Did I not? I must have forgotten,’ she said laughing. ‘It seems to be a feature of getting older,’ she went on cheerfully.

‘Lily is the younger sister of my friend Lady Anne,’ Rose explained, turning to Alex. ‘When Sam was seventeen or thereabouts he thought he was going to die of love for the beautiful Lily,’ she went on, as both Sarah and John began to smile. ‘She was very pretty, I admit,’ added Rose, ‘but Sam might as well have been a sparrow in a tree for all Lily noticed him.

‘Lily took care of her father when he moved from Currane Lodge to their Dublin house. She still lives in Dublin but when he died she found a
smaller house in Dawson Street. We met her again at Hannah and Teddy’s wedding and she insisted John and I to go and visit her. Teddy is her nephew, of course. She was very welcoming, I must say. I think she’s rather lonely with all her sisters in England or America. She never married, herself,’ added Rose, with a sigh, ‘despite all the admirers she had. When I wrote and told her Sam was home on a visit, she wanted to see him too. I think he went out of curiosity, but they seem to have got on very well.’

‘But Joe said “up and down to Dublin”. Was he just exaggerating? He’d be capable of it,’ said Sarah sharply.

‘Well, I think Sam
has
been several times,’ she began thoughtfully. ‘Now that I think of it, he has mentioned in a couple of letters what an easy journey it is on the train from Creeslough and how much he always did love Dublin. Last time he was here he said Lily has no one to talk to about the old days in Kerry. The cook and butler from Currane Lodge are long gone. Her only friends seem to be in the artistic world, mostly young men trying to make a living. She’s a very good watercolourist, Alex,’ she added, nodding to a landscape of sky and water in the alcove by the fireplace. ‘She’s promised me a painting of Currane Lodge the next time we go down.’

‘It’s a pity she didn’t take your Sam when he
was so keen on her,’ said John thoughtfully. ‘But then I suppose he wouldn’t have met Eva and had a grand family and done so well for himself. It would always have been Lily’s house and Lily’s wee bit of money, once Currane Lodge went. And who knows how Sam would have made out.’

‘And I wouldn’t be sitting here,’ said Alex, looking him straight in the eye. ‘I must be very grateful to Lily Molyneux. If it weren’t for her I’d never have met Sam McGinley. And maybe I’d never have got back to where I belong.’

‘Ye have a point, Alex, indeed ye have,’ said John vigorously. ‘Sure if a groom at Castledillon hadn’t had his old mother ill, I’d never have laid eyes on Kerry m’self.’

‘And
I
wouldn’t be sitting here either,’ said Sarah, so promptly that they all laughed.

Sam McGinley smiled to himself as he took his sister’s letter out of its envelope once more. He had read it the previous day, but now he laid it on his breakfast table where he could see her generous signature and the scrawl of kisses with which they’d always decorated their letters. Whether Rose wrote about the ordinary every day things of her life, or asked for his opinion on matters political, literary, or personal, he always found her letters soothing. Not because they were pleasant or without distress or anxiety, but because he could always see her small figure sitting at the table, totally focused on what she wanted to share with him. It was an image that had comforted him for most of his life.

Sometimes it seemed her very existence helped him to keep at bay the sadness, the despair even, which came upon him as he considered the world around him, a world which he’d struggled to change
since his mid-teens. Now, at fifty-four, his sons and daughters married with growing families of their own, he wondered just what, if anything, had been achieved for Ireland, or for the millions of Irish who laboured on the other side of the Atlantic, in the three decades he himself had spent as an exile working for their betterment.

Long ago, in a cottage opposite the forge at Salter’s Grange, he’d broken it to Rose that he was going to America carrying letters for the Land League. A year later, after he and Eva had fallen in love, he had told Rose and John he was going back to America. He’d spoken with such sadness of the Ireland he was leaving that John, usually so silent on matters of feeling, encouraged him by suggesting he might achieve more for Ireland in America than he’d ever achieved in Ireland itself.

Sam poured himself more tea, smoothed out the letter, ready to read it again and then sat looking up at the sky. In the world’s terms, he
had
been successful. He’d worked hard and bought small pieces of land on the outskirts of New York with his savings. When he’d begun to sell them, to help his sons and daughters set up their own homes or businesses, twenty years later, he’d been truly amazed at the extraordinary sums of money he’d been offered.

But making money was not what he’d set out to do. Sometimes he wondered whether he would
have been able to achieve some satisfaction through philanthropy had he put his mind to making money, but the question was academic. He hadn’t made the huge sums that would have made a real difference, like Rockefeller or Carnegie, nor had his work for the labour movement produced the growth in numbers and activity needed to lift thousands of workers out of abject poverty in a flourishing land.

He pushed away his sad thoughts and took up the letter.

A shaft of sunlight struck the surface of the table. The clouds were now dispersing in all directions. It was going to be a good day after all. He cleared away his breakfast dishes, made neat piles of his papers, tidied his books, walked out the back door and climbed the dozen steep steps he and Brendan had cut and laid with stone one windy day the previous autumn.

From the top, he could look out over his own slate roof, but he strode on up the narrow path he had trodden day by day to the fence which bounded the mountain land where he kept the sheep in summer. He leant on a stout corner post and surveyed the whole of the countryside spread out before him. To his right, the great hump of Muckish Mountain was still wisped with cloud, but the valley below was bathed in sunlight, his own small fields and those of his neighbours green with new growth, dotted with sheep and the sturdy crop of lambs the mild winter had brought. To his left, the rough trackway that passed his own front door led down to the coast. He shaded his eyes from the dazzling light and saw the dark blue waters of Sheephaven still ribbed with white horses from the strong wind that had wakened him in the night, whistling and roaring round the eaves.

He climbed over the fence, scrambled up a slab of rock and found himself in the eye of the breeze. On this exposed point, it threw locks of red hair
across his forehead and made his eyes water but long ago, he’d accustomed himself to wind and cold. He looked around him once more and listened carefully.

From somewhere up near Muckish, he heard the harsh cry of ravens soaring in the uprush of air that rose all along the flanks of the great, bare mass of rock, its sides scarred and seamed like an ancient creature, the survivor of many battles. He smiled, satisfied.

The fuchsia bushes surrounding the house were recovering from the fierce pruning they’d needed when he first began work. Soft new growth concealed the saw cuts that had opened up the path and let the wind dry out the sodden earth. Soon there would be a mass of blood-red tassels swinging in the breeze. Already on the mountainside below him, orchids bloomed in the grassy spaces between the heather covered peat hags. Where the rock broke through the thin soil, milkwort, thyme and silverweed had found a place, plants he had never even heard of till he saw them at his feet and bent to look at their delicate colours and bright faces.

‘Uncle Sam Donegal,’ he said, smiling to himself, as he looked around him.

Whether it was the soughing of the breeze or his preoccupation with his own thoughts he wasn’t sure, for he had heard no sound, but suddenly, there at fence was Brendan, the youngest of his
sister’s children. Now in his mid-twenties, short and robust with a shock of straight, black hair, Mary always said Brendan was the image of their father. Sam took her word for it, for he had no memory at all of Patrick McGinley, only of Rose and Hannah, his mother.

‘Well, have ye still a mind to go?’ Brendan asked, as Sam climbed down from his perch, tramped through the rough grass and climbed back over the fence to greet him.

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding vigorously. ‘Isn’t it going to be a great day? Did your father lend you the trap all right?’

‘He did. He said if we went, it wou’d make him sit in the back room and do up his books. Shure he’d far rather be out.’

Sam laughed as they made their way down to the road where the tethered pony stood nuzzling the new grass by the gatepost.

‘Ma made us sandwiches and cold tea,’ Brendan announced, as Sam pulled shut the front door and pocketed the key.

‘That was good of her,’ Sam replied warmly. ‘Did you ask her to come herself?’

‘Oh I did, aye,’ he replied, nodding vigorously. ‘Sure ye told me to be sure an’ ask, but she said no, that maybe Aunt Rose wou’d come if she were here, but no, she diden want t’ go.’

The journey took much longer than Sam had expected. What the map he had studied could not tell him was how broken and potholed the tracks were after the frost and rain of winter. Where they served a scatter of farms, they’d been roughly mended, but where houses stood empty, the thatch grass-grown, the bushes run wild, then their progress was slow, the holes neglected for many a year, filled now with rainwater from the previous night’s storm.

It was a rough and bumpy ride, but the freshness of the day, the warmth of the sun and the brilliance of the morning sky made up for their discomforts.

‘Will we give her a bit of a rest?’ asked Brendan, as they crossed the Calaber Bridge and joined the road that turned east.

Above them the curved slopes of the Derryveagh Mountains were crossed with the straight lines of the deer fences which surrounded the Glenveagh estate. The road eastwards was well-mended for the benefit of the coaches and the motors of those who were invited to visit the Adair castle down by the lake.

They sat on the parapet of the bridge, the countryside brilliant in the morning light, silent, but for the noisy babble of the river below and the cheeping of finches flying from bush to bush in small oscillating flights. Even through his tweed jacket, Sam could feel the sun’s warmth on his shoulders.

He watched Brendan scanning the mountainsides, his eyes half closed against the light.

‘There was a golden eagle here last year,’ the young man said suddenly. ‘One of the gamekeepers told Da. But sure it stayed by the lake where the feedin’s good an’ the likes of us aren’t welcome,’ he added bitterly.

Sam smiled wryly as he got to his feet. For all the struggles of the Land League and the Land Acts that had given opportunities for tenant farmers to buy their land, there were still these vast estates, owned by people so rich they could afford to run a castle and dozens of square miles of mountain and lough simply for the hunting or the entertainment of guests in summer.

Adair himself was dead but it was said his wife loved the place. With her income from the Adair estates in Texas, she could afford to keep up a holiday castle.

‘She does provide some employment,’ Sam said steadily, ‘and I hear she’s not as indifferent to starvation as her husband was,’ he added wryly, as the two of them climbed back up into the trap.

‘I’ve been this far with m’ Da,’ said Brendan, some time later, as they rounded a corner and found themselves looking along the length of Lough Gartan, calm and shimmering in the noonday sun. ‘But I don’t know m’ way from here.’

‘We go right here towards Glaskeelan Bridge,’
said Sam, consulting a small notebook. ‘Provided we find the bridge we’re on our way. The track runs the whole length of the lough, but Ardtur is only just over halfway.’

They heard the river before they saw it. Swollen by heavy rain in the previous week, it poured down the hillside, collecting small streams from the sodden vegetation as it went. The brown, peat-stained waters had spread wide on each side of the single arched bridge, but the roadway itself was dry.

Apart from signs of repairs to the deer fence, there was no mark of human hand on the lower slopes of the mountains or on the damp margins of the lough. Everywhere, bushes and moisture-loving trees, newly-leafed, gleamed in the sunlight. On bare mossy banks, primroses bloomed prolifically, ivy and bramble scrambled over low stone walls and the golden flare of gorse blazed out against the dark residues of last autumn’s heather. Already tall, the vivid green branches of young bracken were beginning to unfurl.

‘Have ye any idea where yer goin?’ Brendan asked, as he slackened the reins and let the pony pick its own way on the grass-grown track.

‘Well, there
was
a school,’ said Sam doubtfully, as he ran his eye over the rush-filled land to their right where no trace of habitation could be seen. ‘It
would
have been on the left,’ he added, waving his arm towards a cluster of hawthorns whose creamy
blossom was just beginning to show white on the green branches.

The track steepened. They got down from the trap and Brendan led the mare, his eyes still seeking any sign of human life in the prolific but unpeopled landscape.

‘There it is,’ said Sam suddenly, his voice high with excitement.

‘Where?’ demanded Brendan, who could see no trace of a building of any kind.

Sam beamed at him as he strode ahead and hurried up the slope.

‘The apple tree,’ he said, waving his arm in triumph. ‘Rose told me a man who only spoke English came and planted it at the gable end. There it is. Would you look at the size of it!’