The Year of the French (11 page)

“The Whiteboys of Killala,” Duggan said. The pompous title stuffed his mouth. “We will protect the people of this barony against Protestant landlords.”

“A religious war, is it? You have grown more ambitious.” Fine whiskey, the colour of a pearl, with fire buried within.

“Sure what else has it ever been?” one of the spalpeens asked. Eighteen or nineteen, and shaped like MacCarthy himself, long arms and heavy sloping shoulders. We are a tribe of our own, MacCarthy thought, bodies shaped for the spade. He began to speak, but changed his mind.

“Well can he tell us,” Duggan said, nodding to the spalpeen. “He is one of the poor people driven out of Ulster last year by the Orange Protestants. Himself and all his people, with their cabin burned behind them.”

“I am sorry,” MacCarthy said to the lad. “You have had a hard time of it.”

“It could happen here,” Duggan said. “We all know that.” He rolled his bullock’s eyes towards the others, and they nodded.

“Worse could happen,” MacCarthy said.

“Or better,” Hennessey said. “Drink up, lads.” He moved his jug towards them. “These lads are just after taking the oath, Owen. You would do well to take it yourself. The schoolmaster should be with the people.”

MacCarthy drained his tumbler, so that it would be empty and waiting when the jug came to him.

Quigley craned forwards his bald moon of a head. “The schoolmaster in Kilcummin has taken the oath.”

MacCarthy watched the whiskey fill his glass. “The Kilcummin schoolmaster is an ignorant dirty man who is a disgrace to learning. He was driven out of Ballintubber because of his ignorance, and every schoolmaster in Mayo knows that. They are not fools in Ballintubber. They are decent men with a respect for learning, but sure he is good enough for Kilcummin. They deserve no better.”

“He is a man with books in his house,” Quigley said hotly, “and a tremendous knowledge of the history of the Gaels from the time of Noah.”

“Noah my arse,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis a wonder you did not have this prodigy write your letter for you.”

“ ’Tis more than a schoolmaster you are, Owen. You are a poet and the writer of acclaimed verses.”

“And you would break my pen to your coarse plough,” MacCarthy said. He felt the whiskey; his head danced.

“It makes no sense,” Duggan said, “to have a fellow like this wander about without taking the oath, and him with our names in his head. He would shop us for the price of a jug.”

“I am no informer,” MacCarthy said. “I want no part of you.”

“It would be no harm done for you to take the oath, Owen,” Hennessey said. “There are good men in Kilcummin and in Killala who have taken the oath, and others will. These men here are as fine as you could wish, and they are men with friends.”

“What you did the other night,” MacCarthy said, “was to put the fear of God into a mean, shameless little bastard. Let it rest there.”

Duggan shook his head. “If you will not take the oath, we have no need for your advice. We have our plans made.”

“By God, we do,” one of the farmers said. “We will rule the barony.”

“You will not rule the gaolcart and the gallows,” MacCarthy said. “And that is how it will end, with your black tongues lolling out and your breeches soiled.”

The music began again, and the sound of feet on the floor of close-packed clay. I should be there, MacCarthy thought. Let my head be filled with music and whiskey, not argument. He drank again.

“By God, Owen MacCarthy,” one of the farmers said, “you should make us a poem about the raid upon Cooper by the Whiteboys of Killala.”

“I will not,” MacCarthy said, furious. “My poems are not about churls crawling across fields to cut the legs of cattle. My art is noble in subject and language.”

“You are too good for us, perhaps,” Duggan said. “You should be spending your days and nights with Treacy at Bridge-end House, with your poems about the glory of the Gael.”

The army of the Gael. In Wexford they confronted armies, seized towns, banners marched before them, and their beacon fires blazed upon the hills. In far-distant France, great ships were making ready. Not here, not in this wet, muddy land beneath sullen hills.

“There is always a welcome set before me at Bridge-end House,” he said, “and brandy at my hand and silver coins. Thomas Treacy knows the honour due to a poet who has mastered his craft.”

“ ’Tis no great honour to keep a school in Killala,” Duggan said contemptuously. “You live as we do. More meanly than some of us.”

“What can you know of such matters,” MacCarthy said, “huddled away in a corner of Mayo? I have seen the entire world, I am a travelled man, and I have been received with honour. I have seen the great waterwheel in Clonmel, and Dunboy Castle on the Cork coast where Murtough O’Sullivan held off the soldiers of the English King, and Dunluce Castle in Antrim amidst the black Presbyterians.” Hollow, the hollow words rattled like shells in his skull. I am drunk, he thought indifferently. Notes of music cut the shells.

“You may have seen these things,” Quigley said. “But you will not see them again. It is said that you would not be welcome in some of the places you have been.” Moon head nodded. “Mind you, I say no word against your poetry. But Malachi has the right of it. ’Tis a queer sort of place for a man with the airs you give yourself.”

“A poet always has his welcome,” MacCarthy said, “in the halls of the old gentry and in the beds of the young women. Without poets, we would be a people without a voice, and who would cut out his own tongue?”

“ ’Tis a wonder you waste your days teaching sums to children.”

“That is my trade,” MacCarthy said. “A poet has his trade and he has his craft.” And a moon which music itself could not reach. “I am a poet and a MacCarthy. Before we were driven into Kerry my people were lords of Clancarty.”

“And how were you driven there?” Quigley asked. “In a carriage of fine wood with the arms of the MacCarthys painted on its side in greens and gold, like the Protestant gentry?”

Duggan laughed. Rocks tumbling down a hillside. Two of the spalpeens looked at him and then at each other, then joined his laughter. Louts born of louts. MacCarthy turned upon them.

“Why should lads like you follow this man?” he asked them, pointing to Duggan. “If his land is made safe, will life be easier for you? At the hiring fair, who sets the low price upon you, the gentry or the farmers?” Lined up like cattle or niggers while the bucks of the county rode by, pointing with their whips.

“Perhaps we will not always be selling ourselves at the fair,” the lad from Ulster said.

“You will,” MacCarthy said. “You were slaves on this land before Christ was crucified.”

“A fine one you are to be talking about Christ,” Duggan said, “when the Christians of this barony are in need of help.”

MacCarthy finished off his glass. He detested the room and those in it. Music pulled at him, proclaimed his distant identity.

“Look at him,” Quigley said. “Much help that one could be to anyone. He cannot even help himself to stand upright.”

MacCarthy made a sudden lunge for him, missed his footing, and seized him by the jacket. The room danced.

“Pull them apart,” Duggan said scornfully.

When they were standing apart, Quigley was holding his hand to a scraped lip. MacCarthy stared at it stupidly.

“Go back to your woman,” Duggan said. “Much good you will be to her.”

“ ’Tis a disgrace to Killala,” O’Carroll said. “The schoolmaster living in open sin. Half of the women will not so much as talk to Judy Conlon, and she was a decent woman once. Before your time.”

“ ’Tis a happy man that you would be to take my place one night a year,” MacCarthy said. “No man is ever more virtuous than the envious man.”

“Now, now,” O’Carroll said, and took a step backward.

“Go back to your woman,” Duggan said again.

“I will,” MacCarthy said. “I will leave this mean, dispirited place.”

“You are welcome to this jug, Owen,” Hennessey said. “Go home now and sleep.”

“Well said. You are a better man than the company you are in, Donal Hennessey. That handsome, long-legged wife keeps you in good spirits.”

Hennessey put a hand on his shoulder. “It is an honour to have a man like yourself in the parish.”

“I will put into a satire the mean, ungrateful people of Killala. Excepting only yourself, Donal. Oh Christ, I am sorry for the people of Killala that they have earned Owen MacCarthy’s wrath.”

“Get him out of here,” Duggan said.

In the other, crowded room, MacCarthy held the jug aloft and shouted, “What woman goes home with Owen MacCarthy the poet?”

He heard their giggling, hands held decorously to mouths. One girl, more reckless than the others, called out, “That girl would have the trouble of a lifetime when she walked into Judy Conlon’s house.”

He felt a hand on his arm. Ferdy O’Donnell.

“Would you like me to walk a bit of the way with you, Owen?”

“And why should you wish to do that?” MacCarthy asked, drawing his arm free. “I know the way. We will construe Virgil these long summer evenings, Ferdy. I am a very fine scholar.”

“I know that, Owen.”

“You are not. You have that low, seminary Latin. You will never see how meaning curls and curves through a line. Still, we must do our best for you. Better than nothing, Ferdy. Better than nothing.”

“Much better,” O’Donnell said, standing with him at the open door. “You did not quarrel with those fellows, did you?”

“Which of them deserves to quarrel with me? They are a low lot, Ferdy, a low lot. You must hold yourself apart from that lot, now mind that. Remember Virgil. That lot in there, Virgil wouldn’t have given them the sweat off his balls.”

O’Donnell watched him walk up the road, unsteady on his feet, drunk, a clumsy ploughboy going home.

He sat on a small, grassy hill. The air was clear and cold, and the world no longer danced before him. He was disgusted with himself. He could not remember half of what he had said, and the other half he tried to forget but could not.

He was no MacCarthy of Clancarty, but a labourer’s son, as his father had been before him, as the spalpeens in the cabin were. As he would be himself if his father had not found the pennies to send him to the hedge school outside Tralee. There had been an enigmatic power to the words in the foxed and battered primer, a luminous presence somewhere behind the page. He would be a labourer now had it not been for the master, a poet himself, who carefully taught him the forms and conventions. When he was older, and had himself begun to set words together, the master took him to the taverns where the poets met. MacCarthy would sit well away from the winter fire, where the poets sat, his hands wrapped around a cup of ale, an overgrown boy with long arms and legs. First one and then another of the poets would rise, speaking from memory, the bells of sound ringing across the complex nets of metre, images grouping themselves together, ring beyond bright ring. Beyond the fastened tavern door, the cold West Munster winter, with Atlantic winds cutting past Brandon and across the two bays.

Home was a hovel on the Fenit road, as bad as any in Kilcummin, the dark, windowless room across which his heavy, exhausted father fell towards sleep. Against that darkness, the splendour of shaping a poem, the sounds and images entwining. It became your own, though linked with a hundred others by poets living and long dead. It was a world of air and sunlight. Everywhere else, cabins and the smell of dung, the pigs rooting by the bed, children fighting for the potatoes at the bottom of the pot. Clownish churl, you count your cows in children’s lives. But dawn would spring from blackness in a poem, a meadow in fair flower and a maiden moving across it, wondrous fair and bathed in light. The dark day of the Gael is ending, she would tell the poet, and her beauty would smite him like the power of truth. Ships are on the sea bringing the deliverer, an O’Neill or an O’Donnell, or the gallant young Scottish king, the royal blackbird. Darkness would shatter against the bright sword of that deliverer, and light would stream into windowless hovels.

In time, first as apprentice to a hedge teacher and then a master himself, MacCarthy scrambled out of the hovels, moving from village to village, posting his notices of instruction on chapel gates, meeting his winter classes in barns to which each child brought each day two sods of turf. Hens and pennies for instruction at first, then hens and shillings. It was his trade: a poet had his trade and he had his craft. His trade could be teaching, tavernkeeping, even, as with Owen Ruagh O’Sullivan, day labouring. His craft was the articulation of sound and passion. In time, still in his young twenties, MacCarthy’s verses became known to other poets, spoken in taverns he had never visited by men whose poems he himself knew, joined in the freemasonry of language. He was welcome in the houses of the old native gentry, where Irish was still spoken, and where beeswax candles lighted walls upon which hung swords which a hundred years before had gone into battle with Sarsfield. Harp and pipe would fall silent and MacCarthy would be summoned forward to recite his verses, and the gentry, O’Conors and Frenches and MacDermots who had somehow kept their land, would nod their approval. Coins of silver or of gold for a poet who flung backward a slender bridge of words to a world lost by Boyneside and Shannonside, buried beneath the bloody mud of Aughrim. He had his aislings and laments for the Catholic big houses, and songs for the taverns, courting songs and drinking songs, the loose copper change of his art. His frequent drunkenness, his loose and wanton ways with women, his bad temper, his sardonic manner, were accepted as somehow bound into his craft. He and his fellow poets were the survivors of an old order, like the impoverished Catholic gentry with their fading pedigrees and their useless, ornamental swords.

There were times, goose feather scratching beside tallow candle, when MacCarthy lived in a cold, perfect silence broken only by the ring of words upon his imagination. But there were other moments of chill doubt, striking at the hand which held the pen, freezing the fingers. His poems celebrated the old earls, the O’Neills and the O’Donnells, but what had these done in the heel of the hunt but take ship for Spain with their families, leaving their people stuck in the mud, as stuck they were to this day. They made fine poems about Ireland’s darling, Patrick Sarsfield, sailing off to France after Limerick with his Irish army, but few of these spoke of their wives who went screaming and wailing after the ships, their babies held high above their heads. Fine poems about King James, the Royal Stuart, but not one said what every poet knew, that the peasants who had been prodded and bayonet-pricked into battle called him “Seamus the Shit,” who fled so fast from the Boyne that he outdistanced the messenger bringing southwards the news of the great defeat. Rubies in the mud, those fabled names, O’Neill, Maguire, Sarsfield. The poets picked them up, polished them bright, set them in a filigree of words to comfort a people without hope.