The Year of the French (80 page)

“We brought this upon you,” he said to Cumiskey. “It was none of your making.”

“Indeed it was not. Nor of anyone I know.” He had been neat when he came to the warehouse; now grey stubble covered his cheeks, and his coat was streaked with dirt.

“This began at the edge of the world,” MacCarthy said, “with men wild from cruel treatment and tall-masted ships from France.”

He walked away, picking his path between men sitting with slack shoulders on the flagstone floor. Cumiskey followed him.

“The Catholic Committee were loyal subjects of the Crown. We were drawn from the most respectable classes, solicitors and doctors. Merchants with a stake in the community. We sought only a redress of our many grievances, in a peaceable and constitutional manner. Our address to the Crown spoke cheerfully of our loyalty to King George.”

“Excellent,” MacCarthy said. “The King will not forget you in your time of trouble.” He shrugged himself against the wall.

“You hedge schoolmasters will have much to answer for,” Cumiskey said. “Teaching bog-Latin and sedition. You call that education, do you not?”

“I don’t know what I call it. It is what I have.”

“Stuck in the past like a calf in a bog. Some of us were proving ourselves as civilised as any Protestant. And then you bring wild peasants down upon us from mountainy wastes.”

“Good God, man. There is no special virtue in living on flat land. It wasn’t these lads turned the militia on you, it was your civilised Protestant neighbours. ’Tis tired I am of your reproaches, and I begin to think that they are too high a price to pay for the setting of Michael Geraghty’s arm.” He drew up his own arm suddenly, and rubbed the back of his hand along his cheek.

Cumiskey leaped back a pace. “Go on so. Strike me. What other argument has a hedge master when his store of tags is empty.”

“I have no wish to strike you, Dr. Cumiskey, but I wish to Jesus you would get back where you belong, with Mr. Vesey and your friend the grazier. It is sick at heart I am, and I need no terrier to pull at my stockings.”

Suddenly Cumiskey’s anger collapsed. “I am sick at heart myself, Mr. MacCarthy, and frightened as well.”

“We are all frightened,” MacCarthy said. “The room stinks with our fear.”

“What was it for, Mr. MacCarthy? Can you tell me that, at least? Peasants and Frenchmen cutting Ireland open like a knife wound.”

MacCarthy shrugged. “It was all written out in a proclamation. The French brought it with them, together with a green flag.”

Last seen on the bog, a body half hiding it, the colour of hope.

After that Cumiskey and Vesey and the grazier, Hickey, made a place for MacCarthy in their conversations, but they were always aware of his guilt and of their own innocence. They would not be long imprisoned. Placed there by hate and hysteria, they would in time be released. “The King,” “Lord Cornwallis,” “Mr. Grattan,” “Counsellor Curran,” vague, beneficent deities filled their speech, guardians destined to discover the wrongs they had suffered. But at times, in bold whispers, they would praise the rebels.

“Jesus, boy,” Vesey said, “you gave it to them at Castlebar. I have no use for your cause, but you gave it to them at Castlebar.”

“I have no cause,” MacCarthy said.

Geraghty was interested in the life of the prison, learning the name of each arrival and the circumstances of his arrest.

“I declare to God, Owen, they will not rest until they have every man in Ireland inside a gaol.”

Edmund Spenser’s plan.

“This could be worse,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis a terrible gaol they have in Clonmel, and the gaoler is a brute. I spent a month there and I came out half dead.”

“What in God’s name ever landed you there?”

“Mischief. ’Twas years ago and I a young lad. There was a lad there not much older than myself that they took out and hanged. I made a song for him.”

“When we are back in Mayo they might let my wife come to the gaol.”

“Yes,” MacCarthy said.

“They might.”

“If she has let the harvest waste I will take a stick to her. I declare to God I will.”

Vesey the squireen was turned loose, upon the intercession of friends, and left the warehouse much subdued, not a swagger left in him. Prison had wrung out his quotations from
The Rights of Man
. His place was taken by a wild-eyed lad who had drifted south from Roscommon, a boaster in taverns that he had done wicked deeds with the rebels. Geraghty despised him.

“He chose a poor time for his boasts,” MacCarthy said. “Let you wait a few years. You won’t strike a road in Connaught without some rambler on it telling you he was with the Whiteboys or the United Irishmen.”

“Before this thing I was never ten miles beyond the baronies,” Geraghty said.

Nightfall, and the dip of the road into an unknown village, a tavern waiting with tumblers of whiskey and men to hear his songs. Unfamiliar hills dark against the sky.

“You had the best of it,” MacCarthy said. “Your own fields waiting for you in the morning.”

“I do,” Geraghty said. “I do have the best of it.”

The round window with its rusted bars drew MacCarthy to it for hours at a time. Down along the river road labourers would walk at evening, without haste, the evening air cooling sweat-soaked shirts. Or that gentleman whose hat was always cocked to one side, saying “Damn you” to the world, “I have a horse and a well-brushed hat and a gold watch.” The river which separated him from them flowed toward Munster. The spacious Shannon, spreading like a sea: Edmund Spenser, exterminator and poet.

Cumiskey joined him at the window, precise and fussy, no brushing could keep the prison grime from his trim brown coat. Local savant, organiser of petitions, civilised as any Protestant.

“You are not a Mayo man yourself, Mr. MacCarthy. Your accent speaks to that.”

“Kerry,” MacCarthy said. “I was born near Tralee.”

“The classical kingdom. A great nursery for schoolmasters.”

“And poets,” MacCarthy said.

“All of the island breeds poets,” Cumiskey said. “Oliver Goldsmith. ‘Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain.’
The Deserted Village
. You must know it.”

“Yes,” MacCarthy said. “I have a better knowledge of poetry in Irish.”

“You have the better of me there.” Had he snuff left, he would have taken a sniff of it, brown flecks resting on downturned wrist. “It is still being composed in the rural areas. Very beautiful, some of it.”

Beyond the river, a magpie rose, black and white, low-flying.

“Some of it,” MacCarthy said.

“Have you ever thought of producing English versions of the best of it? So that it might become better known to the educated public.”

Where was the second magpie? One for sorrow, two for joy. A small boy sat beside his father on a Kerry ditch and studied the flight of birds. I heard that said by my father, boy, your grandfather, and he was as full of wisdom as an egg is full of meat. Wonderful that wild creatures of the air should carry messages to men, warn them of changing fortune.

“My grandfather could rattle away in Irish whenever he chose,” Cumiskey said. “His English was perfect, of course. He needed Irish to deal with the labourers.”

“Of course,” MacCarthy said.

Words wedded to spade and furrow, intricacies of sound tethered to the dark soil.

Lying at night near the Killala men, he heard their voices speak in the cadences which had shaped his world. To speak in English was to wear another man’s coat, stiff against shoulders and back. Doctors spoke it, middlemen, shopkeepers, lawyers. Someday soon, in Castlebar, they would use it to sentence him. English did the world’s work, set broken bones, made laws and books. Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain. English shattered us. We live in a pool of darkness at the edge of the world. A poem by O’Rahilly leaped into his mind, austere, sardonic. A world flowered within its turnings. Labourers used it. Lying in darkness, he recited poetry in soft whispers, unheard, O’Brudair, O’Rahilly. Beyond them he saw taverns, valleys, massive keeps on Kerry headlands, the swift feet of dancers.

Martin Brady, the singer with the broken fiddle, was a poor misfortunate creature, not right in his head. The yeomen found him singing rebel songs in a crossroads tavern, but he might as easily have been singing “Bumpers, Squire Jones,” or “The Loyal Briton.” His luck had run out. Whatever the company desired, he had it for them, and a clear, light tenor voice to sing it with. He was a scrawny man, with a frame built for more flesh than he carried, long, gesticulating arms, and narrow feet that were never at rest. Lank black hair matted his face and fell beneath his collar. A musket butt had smashed in the fiddle, but he held on to it, swearing that he knew a man in Athlone who could repair it. At night or in the long afternoons, motes dancing in beams from the windows, he would sing quietly. Few heeded him.

“I have songs of yours,” he told MacCarthy. “ ’But when I’m drinking, I’m always thinking—’ ”

“I did it in Irish and then in English,” MacCarthy said, “to see could I catch how the sounds moved. A foolish notion it was.”

Brady’s songs were a patchwork of English and Irish, like an old coat. MacCarthy could see him by tavern hearth, black eyes darting beneath matted hair. “Come on now, boys, what will you have? ‘The Coolin,’ is it?” Or in the kitchen of big house or strong-farm. “Not a song you can name that I haven’t it locked in this fiddle. Name it and I’ll turn the key.” Had they escaped from the smashed fiddle, battalions and regiments of sound rushing out from the shattered wood? There was magic in a fiddle. It had a life of its own.

“Listen to this one,” he whispered to MacCarthy. “There has no one heard it yet. I have carried it all over this county.” He leaned back his head and closed his eyes. Adam’s apple bobbed to his prefatory swallow.

“Good man,” MacCarthy said. Running in blind terror across the treacherous bog. Everywhere the down-slashing blades of the cavalry. The screams of butchered pigs. Ballinamuck: the place of the pig.

“I can make a song the way another man would turn over turf with a loy. As easy as that.”

“ ’Tis a gift, surely,” MacCarthy said politely.

“ ’Tis my misfortune I was seized up when I was. There were half the men in Grogan’s spoke English. Bargemen on the big canal. I was singing ‘Monaseed.’ Do you know that song?”

“Yes,” MacCarthy said. He didn’t want to know it. Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain.

“There is the world of difference between yourself and me,” Brady told him. “They will call me a liar in Athlone when I tell them Owen Ruagh MacCarthy heard my songs. Isn’t that a good one, though? ‘Have you heard of the battle of Ballinamuck, Where the oppressed people they ventured their luck?’ ”

“ ’Tis a good rhyme,” MacCarthy said. “You could not best it for a rhyme.”

“I can go into a town where a word of English would be as rare as a golden guinea, and I will be as welcome as a bishop. Listen.”

Roisin Duhy
. Who wrote it? Older than O’Rahilly. Word and sound yoked together like man and wife. Behind it lay a world for which MacCarthy ached in the ugly, stinking room. Brady’s memory was a magpie’s nest, silver rings and tin thimbles buried in the twigs.

“They had no cause to seize me up and smash my fiddle. I know delightful songs of loyalty in English, that are much admired by the yeomen and the militia. I could have set their feet tapping.” His own feet twitched. Road-battered brogues, mud-caked.

MacCarthy took the fiddle from Brady’s lap and balanced it in his hand.

“That’s a yeoman’s song for you,” Brady said. “I sang it to the yeomen in Mullingar last month and they poured whiskey into me until it ran out my nose.”

A jagged splinter of dark, polished wood hung almost free. Carefully, MacCarthy removed it and dropped it into the gaping wound. No fiddle-maker in Athlone could repair it, however great his skill.

“Ye bright sons of Mars,” he said.

“Whoever he might be,” the singer said.

“A god of battles,” MacCarthy said. “In the Roman times. With a breastplate dazzling like the sun and a bolt of lightning in his naked hand.”

“There now,” Brady said. “There is the scholar for you. What am I beside you?”

“We are neither of us much,” MacCarthy said. “Sacks of old words.” He handed back the fiddle and stood up.

A slack smile from Brady. Gaps between his yellow teeth. “There is a song you have about a woman.”

“Oh, by Jesus there is. A dozen of them.” In meadows, strong legs spread wide, wild, shy bodies pressed beneath him. “Women, drinking, rambling. There is not a mischief in Ireland that I have not put a song to it.” The small change of my craft. The true poems were slow, mysterious, fresh light flashed from the smooth sides of their ritual.

Days passed. The warehouse was a backwater of war, its heavy door a weir. Odd fish flopped in. The men from Mayo, pilgrims to Ballinamuck, were quiet in their knowledge of an earned vengeance; men with pikes, all of them, and some had set fire to big houses. They remembered buildings red against an evening sky. The others were carried in by the tides, mouths slack with incredulity and fear. If they had read a pamphlet by the United Irishmen they were suspect, or if they had signed the wrong petition. There was a great scouring of the midlands, sedition was being scrubbed out as you would scrub burned porridge from a pot.

Cumiskey was released. Fair to him, he saw to the wounded one last time. He knelt beside O’Murtha, one of the men from Belmullet, and they seemed to MacCarthy creatures from two different planets, O’Murtha a heavy-boned spalpeen, his arms long and heavy-muscled.

Cumiskey pointed to the darkening wound which ran from knee to ankle, exposing tendon and bone. “Nothing to be done,” he said. “It has mortified. I am as useless to this fellow as an old woman with her sack of herbs.”

“It is a great comfort to him all the same,” MacCarthy said. “Yourself a doctor from the town of Carrick.”