Tipperary (11 page)

I now began to travel. My parents gave me letters of introduction and I rode here and there out across our lovely country, each journey a little longer than the one before, and I admired and relished what I saw, and I felt soothed every day by the trees and the rivers and the hills and the woods. And all the while I thought of the afflictions I had seen at that unforgettable shrine and wondered whether I might help to alleviate them.

Charles O'Brien was nineteen years old when he felt moved by what he saw at Knock. In a more traditional or conventional Irish household he might have been shaped at that moment for the Catholic priesthood. Yet his future had, it seemed, already been outlined. He, as elder son, would inherit and continue.

Surprisingly, this did not happen; Knock, apparently, handed him a spur that prodded him forward into a life very different from the one anticipated for him. To the natural forces that had already been shaping him, he now added a wish to help his fellow man.

To begin with, he had been born with the poetic advantage of living in a beautiful land. And he wished to remain permanently aware of it. The O'Briens lived in the South Riding of County Tipperary, “riding” being an old Norse term for a “thirding,” or a third of a land tract. It runs from Hollyford and Holycross down to the county's capital, Clonmel, birthplace of Laurence Sterne (and, therefore, Tristram Shandy), and home for a time of another English novelist, Anthony Trollope, whose sons were born there.

Beyond Clonmel, the South Riding reaches down to places with lovely names—Kilsheelan, Carrick-on-Suir, Ardfinnan, Knocklofty. The people who live in those lower reaches, flanked by the counties of Cork and Waterford, will tell you that Tipperary grows lovelier the farther south you go. Not much more than sixty miles stem to stern, this is inner space, luscious country, full of limestone beneath the soil, excellent for the bones of racehorses, with a rougher charm than the horse farms of New England and Kentucky or the stud farms of England. At least one racing stable ranks among the most successful in the world.

Although he doesn't mention it, Charles O'Brien must have been put on a horse in early childhood. In the days when all gentlemen saw riding as their primary mode of transport, his father would have taken particular care to introduce his son to it. In time, Charles refers to his mare, Della, as though to a family member, and she gave him a service that lasted for almost thirty years, a good span even by today's well-vetted standards.

On horseback, everything looks different. No truck, juggernaut, or car offers anything like the same vantage or intimacy. The countryside looks richer, sweeter, nearer—and the South Riding through which Charles O'Brien traveled has changed little. From his saddle today he would see the same freshness of green in the fields, the same mottled gray-white of limestone in the ruined abbeys and castles, the same enchanting dimness in the woodlands and copses, the same brown-and-silver sheen of a river glimpsed from the roadway.

Many of the horsemen of his time avoided the thoroughfares and rode their own routes. On the western journey to Tipperary, the shapes of old Norman castles, gaunt and alone against the sky, must have given him a sense of romance. As he rode east, the gentle sweep of the river and the stone arches of the river bridge in Golden brought him harmony, and an encouragement toward pleasant reflection. This was a universe in a small place.

Above all, if, during his first mile east or west of his home, he looked south, he saw through the trees the turrets and ramparts of the great mansion that would one day become one of his life's two great preoccupations.

Furthermore, he knew from his own locality that the Irish countryside abounds with history, a serious factor in his life. Barons and despots led armies across here. Wild men abducted beautiful women here. Poets wrote famous songs here. Conspirators plotted revolution here.

And in the ordinary commerce of the time, romantic yet practical figures crossed this stage—such as the wine salesman from Woodford Bourne, in Cork, who rode across this countryside to the well-to-do houses (such as the O'Briens'); or the undertaker's clerk, who rode down through the woods behind the house to measure old Mrs. O'Brien, Charles's grandmother, for her coffin. And the ghosts of two famous hunting hounds ran the crests of the hills in winter twilights.

Judging from his powers of observation, Charles O'Brien must have known all these haunting things, and his sense of story glowed brighter and brighter. Therefore, when the time came to choose a life for himself, he did not elect to stay in one place. He found a means of combining his three loves, of looking at the countryside, learning about his land and its people, and contributing to their lives—while observing them.

When I gained the age of twenty-one, Father deemed my four-handed education not merely complete but the equal of any university. Buckley, he knew, would have no ongoing part in my life; Mr. Halloran had shown, in his timid way, some impatience with my mathematical endeavors. Mrs. Curry's influence with Oxford, and Miss Taylor's with Trinity College, Dublin, took no root in my father, who said that too much further education might weaken me. He had expected that I must follow him into the management of the farm. If he felt disappointment that I did not do so, he concealed it from me; Father's good manners inspire all who know him.

At one time after this decision became plain, it had crossed the family table that I might try for being a doctor. Mother praised my humanity and Euclid thought that I should enjoy very much “meeting the people,” as he put it, “and cutting them open.” I believe that the idea of medicine had originated with my father—but then he changed his mind and said that being a doctor carried with it a difficult and, in his view, inessential burden of respectability, and a man should not think of such things until he had sown some wild oats.

“But if healing the sick seems like a necessary power to you,” he said, “you might think of belonging to an older tradition than doctoring. And it'll get you out and about.”

He sent me with a letter of introduction to a man some miles away, near Bansha, a man named Egan. I remembered this man well, and with good reason. At the age of six, I became covered in ringworm, an infection picked up from our cattle. Large circles of sore and itchy red scales covered my body from my ankles to my neck, and we saw doctors in Limerick, Cork, and Dublin, as well as our own beloved Dr. O'Malley. None of them, for all their goodwill and sympathy, could help me; their ointments and oils failed to make a cure.

Down in the kitchen, Cally, the housekeeper, and Mrs. Ryan's daughter, Biddy, who plucked our fowl for the table, directed us to Mr. Egan.

Biddy, from among the feathers: “He's a quack all right, ma'am, but he's kind of, like, a better class of a quack.”

Cally, hands a-floured with baking: “Isn't he back from Colorado, isn't he, working on the railways with them Red Indians and them sort of people?”

Biddy: “And he brought the snake-oil home with him, ma'am, and anybody'd tell you that snake-oil is the best thing of all. I heard the Pope uses it if he has anything at him, like, you know, boils and things.”

Oh, I wanted to see snake-oil. Did it have iridescent colors? Was it compounded from different venoms?

I remembered Mr. Egan as an exceptionally kind and warm-hearted little man, with a huge wife. (“He has a mountain to climb,” said my father on the way home. My mother laughed and laughed; I was only six.) My parents and I had been shown into a small bedroom at the rear of the cottage, where portraits of racing greyhounds had been pinned up around the walls. Mr. Egan looked at such ringworm on me as he could view without my undressing, and said to my parents, “We'll only try it out on what we can see.”

He produced the bottle, which, to my disappointment, contained a muddy green liquid streaked with yellow and orange until he shook it, when it became an opaque mud color; I had expected glittering scales and diamond patterns. When I took off my shoes and stockings and rolled up the legs of my knickerbockers, Mr. Egan, using a large goose feather, began to paint my sores. The liquid hurt like fury, stung me to tears.

My perturbed father asked, “What is that stuff? Is that—?”

“Snake-oil, sir.”

“And what kind of a snake?”

“They call it a king rattlesnake.”

“Ah, no wonder it stings,” said my father. To console me he said, “Now you'll never be killed by a king rattlesnake; you'll have the antidote already inside you.”

“That's so,” said Mr. Egan, and we all agreed afterward that he seemed an especially sound man. We agreed it doubly when, next morning, the ringworm began to disappear from my skin. The raw red badges seemed almost to fade even as we looked at them, and we were jubilant. Mother then painted the other affected parts of my body, and by the weekend each ringworm circle had receded to a mild glow; Father kept the rest of the bottle for the cattle.

“I'm going to put money on a horse for that man,” he said. He often did this—but he never told them beforehand; as he said, “I don't want them following the race and then being disappointed.”

Recently, I asked Mother, whose memory remains excellent, whether she had ever heard anyone thank Father for the winnings from such a gift. She looked at me, reflected for a moment, and then crumpled with laughter.

Given that little oasis of personal history with ringworm, I felt more than pleased when my father suggested that I learn healing from Mr. Egan—who, when I went to see him, remembered my parents and me, and therefore listened attentively to the notion of my becoming his apprentice. His wife, larger than ever, seemed especially interested in the venture. But it seemed to present a difficulty to them, and I understood the problem: the slow business of teaching someone else all that Mr. Egan knew; the presence of another person by his side all day, every day; the confidences that he must exercise, yet keep. And he put these points to me very clearly. However, I am pleased to say that my father had given me liberty to make an offer of payment for serving my time. I was proud to have overcome Mr. Egan's objections by increasing the amount a few times, whereupon the good healer caved in—and most graciously.

His first lesson drew on knowledge that I already possessed—recognition of wild plants. Mr. Egan sent me out to collect foxglove,
Digitalis purpurea.
I knew it well and I knew where to find it—in hedgerows facing southwest and sometimes a little overhung by the shrubs surrounding it. When I returned, Mr. Egan expressed his pleasure.

“And you didn't get it still green?” he said. “Well, very good.”

He then showed me his preparation, which he gave to people with weak hearts. I have undertaken to keep his secrets, and therefore I cannot pass on to the world his excellent remedy for all manner of heart ailment.

“When I started using this first,” he told me, “we had a little accident. Well, she was an old lady anyway, and there was a sense in which she had a blessed release. But it taught me never to mix too strong a mixture. And you know, don't you, that you should never eat the foxglove itself? Down you'll go like a stone if you do, straight down dead. Well, experience is the best teacher.”

Urtica
provided my next quest—the common nettle; I never learned the other half of its botanical name. But through Mr. Egan I did learn of its efficacy in bringing about sleep if mixed in a soup; and of rubbing it on the skin to cure wasp and bee stings. Mr. Egan asked if I knew where to find nettles, and I said that they grow in many places. However, he directed me to the most abundant source of all.

“Outside any house,” he said, “find the plot of ground where people empty theirselves and that's where the nettle grows.” And, as I told him, I already knew how to pluck a nettle—reach straight for it, grasp the leaf directly, and it will not sting.

One day, we sat outside Mr. Egan's door in the sunshine, mixing his powders and allocating them into his little boxes. (“My boxes,” he would exclaim when we traveled, “did I forget my boxes again?”—but he never did.) At noon, a most exotic gentleman arrived. Mr. Egan jumped up to meet him and they had a vigorous and delighted exchange. The man wore a wide scarlet cloth bound tightly about his head, and his mustaches looped like the horns of a foreign ram.