The Star of the Sea (20 page)

That night Pius Mulvey did not go roving. He hunkered on the floor of his parents’ cabin with a pen in his hand and a wildness in his heart. The facts of what had happened on that wintry day were hard to meld into the lines of the ballad; if you could even say clearly what the facts actually were. So he changed them a little to fit the rhyme scheme. It didn’t really matter. Nobody would ever know the facts anyway; if they somehow found them out, they wouldn’t find them worth singing. The main thing in balladry was to make a singable song. The facts did not matter:
that was the secret
. He wrote and scratched out; rewrote, refined. The effect you wanted was a kind of easiness. Strong forward motion and easily remembered words. People needed to feel that the words had written themselves, that the balladeer now possessing them was only their medium. He wasn’t singing the song. He was being sung.

And says he, my fine farmers, if you will sign up,
It’s a handful of sovereigns I’ll give you to sup
.

Away with you, Captain, you redbacked auld pup.
For your words are most deeply alarming
.

We have no desire for to take your fool’s gold;
Your bloody auld coat is a fright to behold;
We’d rather go naked and shiver with cold
Than to put on slave’s rags in the morning
.

The last verse took the most time to compose. In a song like this it was a matter of custom to put something about Ireland into the climax. Mulvey didn’t give a sparrow’s fart for Ireland and he suspected many of his audience would give even less, but people liked a bit of a shout at a hooley. To leave it out would be not to finish the job; like building a cabin with no roof.

And if ever we take up the musket or sword
,
It won’t be for England, we swear to the Lord
.
For the freedom of Erin, we’ll rise up our blade
,
And cut off your head in the morning!

The first time he sang it, at Claddaghduff Horse Fair on Hallowe’en night, there was a roar of applause afterwards that almost frightened him. And as the shower of pennies fell at his feet, Pius Mulvey’s body began to fill up with light. He had discovered the alchemy that turns fact into fiction, poverty into plenty, history into art. Bread was flesh and wine was blood. He had found his true vocation.

Late in the night he met a girl with pitch-dark eyes and when they lay down together in a ditch by the roadside he felt something of what his brother talked about when he talked of the mysteries of God. A passion that would make you want to bleed out your life, then the peace which passeth all understanding. He was nineteen years old, a man, and a prince. The girl told him she loved him and Mulvey believed her. He knew he was worthy of love at last.

When he came home at dawn his brother was walking the field, his bare feet bleeding as they trampled the stones. He was gaily singing a hymn which wasn’t meant to be sung gaily and at first Mulvey wondered if it was some kind of game. Though the
morning was cold his brother was shirtless, his pallid chest speckled with goosepimples and dew. He was scourging himself, he quietly explained. Punishing his body for the good of his soul. He deserved punishment; he was sickeningly evil. If people only knew the lusts that festered in his heart they would burn him or drown him, he said and he grinned. When he turned away to resume his penance Mulvey saw something that stuck him to the soil. The stripes of a horse-flail across his brother’s bloodied back.

He went into the cabin and found the still encrimsoned flail lying like a question mark on the packed earth floor. Tendrils of his brother’s flesh were attached to its thongs, and he shakingly threw it into the fire. The smell of it burning was like cooking meat, and shamefully, as though finding himself aroused by a sister, Mulvey realised the aroma was moistening his starved palate. As he watched the whip shrivel away to a twist of molten blackness, it occurred to him that he had indeed exchanged places with his brother now; had won the unspoken contest for seniority. And he cursed himself for having ever wanted it at all, for it carried accountabilities of which he was afraid.

He brought his gulping brother into the house and settled him as best he could by the fire.
Where were you, Pius? I looked and you were gone
. Nicholas Mulvey was quietly ranting still, like a man who was dreaming with his eyes wide open, and shaking in his limbs like a calf with the staggers.
For you, Pius. I did it for you
. After a time he began to calm and he fell into a restless and muttering sleep. Mulvey went out and stood on the boreen. All sorts of thoughts were going through his mind. Where could he go? What kind of help? A priest? A doctor? A neighbourman? Who?

It was then that he saw the paper left to rest beneath the stone. He picked it up. Opened its folds. ‘Final Warning of Eviction’ was the opening line, but it was no brave ballad or song of resistance. The Mulvey brothers had been given four months’ notice. If the back rent remained unpaid, they would have to go.

A fearful moan came from the cabin behind him, the anguished bellow of a beast in a snare. His brother was stumbling over the mossed, black rocks with his left hand outstretched and pumping with blood, and his right hand clenching a blacksmith’s hammer. By the time Mulvey got to him Nicholas had collapsed into the ash-pit,
a beatific smile on his hollowed face: through the grizzled wrist of his emaciated left hand protruded the stub of a six-inch nail.

Nicholas Mulvey was taken away to the asylum in Galway but returned after two months, claiming to be cured. He did not want to speak about what had happened that morning; it was a matter of hunger and exhaustion, nothing more. But Pius Mulvey was not convinced. A new lustre now shone from his brother’s eyes; a light that seemed somehow the opposite of light, though you couldn’t have called it darkness either. It was as if someone else had slipped into his skin. A man more rational and evidently at ease; but not the brother whose irrationality and unease Mulvey knew as intimately as he knew his own, and which, in his own way, he had come to love.

A sparse, cold Christmas was had at Ardnagreevagh. The day itself was spent in bed with nothing to eat but a couple of withered apples. Mulvey said nothing about the Warning of Eviction, fearing to madden his brother again. Time enough to share such terrors when Nicholas was fit to hear them shared. Mulvey did not know that such a conversation would never happen. It was already too late for the apportionment of dread.

Nicholas had made a decision. He was joining the priesthood. For a time he had considered an enclosed order of monks but had opted instead to go into the seminary. There was a shortage of priests in Connaught now. It was causing terrible suffering among the poor. All the signs were of famine the following year. An army of priests would be needed then. If it didn’t come next year, famine would come soon. But it
would
come; Nicholas had been assured. A dreadful punishment would be visited on Ireland. Thousands would starve. Millions, maybe. The people would be scourged until they could bear no more and only when they repented would the harrowing cease. He had thought about it carefully and made up his mind. At times he had considered priesthood a waste of a life but now he could see – since his illness he could see – that the real waste would be for him to do anything else. No other calling could bring him relief. His madness had been sent as a kind of revelation.

‘Stay for a while. Please, Nicholas.’

‘I’ve been studying the scriptures this many a year now. Father Fagan up above says they’ll take me in early. I’m to be ordained as soon as possible.’

‘Is it that drunken craw-thumper Micky Fagan of Derryclare who wouldn’t know his arse from a hole in the bog?’

‘He’s one of God’s anointed, Pius.’

‘Who says it’s a sin to think of a woman? And the Jews must be damned for killing Christ?’

‘He says hard things sometimes. He’s an old man now.’

‘What about the land? Your father’s land.’

‘It’s my father’s land I’m going off to till.’

‘I’m speaking literally,’ Mulvey said.

‘So am I,’ his brother replied.

‘Don’t leave me here, Nicholas. I can’t stick it here alone. At least wait till the spring comes, for Jesus’s sake.’

‘Why?’

‘We’re in a hames of shite. They’re going to put us out.’

‘Trust in God, Pius. You’ll not be alone.’

‘Will you listen to me, man? I’m not talking about God!’

‘Neither am I, Pius. Though maybe we should.’ His brother smiled his shy and beautiful smile. ‘There’s a girl, isn’t there? I can tell by the go of you. You’re like a lamb in April lately.’

‘A lamb in April is mutton by Easter.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘There’s someone, right enough. I don’t know if it’s anything.’

‘Well if this one isn’t right, another’ll happen along soon enough. That’s only nature. Your own vocation. Saint Paul says: “it is better to marry than to burn”.’

‘You’d not want to be married yourself one day? There’s land enough here if we divided it up.’

‘Half a rood? For two families?’

‘There’s many in Galway living on worse. We could manage it, Nicholas. Please don’t go.’

Nicholas Mulvey laughed quietly as though what had been said was absurd. ‘That life isn’t given to everyone, Pius. I wouldn’t have the courage for it.’

‘Do you not see girls around that you like?’

His brother sighed strangely and gazed into his eyes. ‘There’s nights I’ve wanted someone so bad I’d weep with the lust. The devil is clever. But that isn’t love; it’s only the body. I couldn’t love a woman in the way you could yourself. You’re the better man of the
two of us; you always have been. No man ever had a truer friend.’

A black weed of hatred seemed to sprout in Mulvey’s heart. Even the claim of inferiority was somehow to lord it over him.

It was the fifth of January, 1832, the eve of the feast of the holy Epiphany when the lords of the East came following the star. The last night the Mulvey brothers sat down and ate together, the last time they slept in the same broken bed. Nicholas left at dawn for the seminary in Galway with his mother’s prayer book under his arm and a handful of earth in his pocket for luck; his parting gift the breakfast he refused to eat before leaving and the pair of rotting workboots he said he wouldn’t need any more.

That was the day Pius Mulvey’s dark-eyed girl, Mary Duane from Carna village, a small place on the estate of Lord Merridith of Kingscourt, told him she was expecting his child in the summer. She was crying with what he thought must be happiness. They would have to be married now, she said. And that was a good thing because she loved him after all, and he had often told her that he loved her too. They would live here, of course: on his people’s land. They wouldn’t have much but they would always be here. No matter what was coming, they would face it together. They would live here and die here, like his people before him.

They went to his parents’ bed and undressed and lay down, and made love long into the afternoon. Wind screeched across the boglands. Sleet beat the windows like the clatter of drums. There was a wildness in the way they made love that day. It was as though they knew it would never happen again.

He waited until she had set off on the road back to Carna, then he made a small bundle of his few shabby clothes. And as night came down over the silent stony fields, Pius Mulvey walked off his father’s land, down the boreen and out of Connemara, resolved that never as long as he lived would he set eyes on any of it again.

I went up to [a prospective employer in New York] with my hat in my hand as humble as any Irishman, and asked him if he wanted a person of my description. ‘Put on yr hat,’ said he, ‘we are all a free people here, we all enjoy equal freedom and privilages.’

Letter from James Richey

W
E RETURN TO OUR
B
RAVE
V
ESSEL ON THE
TENTH
EVENING OF HER
V
OYAGE; ON WHICH
L
ORD
K
INGSCOURT WRITES A FOND
L
ETTER TO HIS BELOVED
S
ISTER AT
L
ONDON, THEREIN REFLECTING ON HIS PRESENT
P
REDICAMENT AND
I
NTENTIONS; NOT KNOWING HIMSELF TO BE UNDER
A MOST GRAVE SENTENCE.