Tipperary (39 page)

(Incidentally, was Yeats, in some indirect way, also attempting to tell Charles that April had married? The poem that he mentioned, “The Host of the Air,” deals with a girl who is taken away by evil folk at the moment of her marriage to the man who loves her.)

Finally, Charles was shot the following day by the mysterious horseman who once semiassaulted him. Twenty-five days after the shooting, Amelia O'Brien made the entry in her journal—and now we meet a most significant figure in the story.

Joseph Patrick Harney, the young man who found Charles on the roadside, who came to the O'Briens' door that night, was born in 1888, the only son of the Crown Surveyor for County Kilkenny. His mother bore three other children, daughters; due to the family's salaried comfort, each of the four Harney children survived.

All received as good an education as could be had, meaning that they passed into schooling beyond the age of fourteen—which made them comparatively rare. Two sisters became nuns, one a government archivist in Dublin.

The Harney family seems always to have been well documented (as befits the children of a man who surveyed, and kept records). Their only son kept up the practice and left a personal archive, including an oral account that covered key phases of his life.

His earliest photographs show Joe Harney with a shock of black hair squinting into the sunlight. He wears a Sam Browne belt full of ammunition, and holds a rifle across his body like a soldier about to present arms. No uniform; this is a slim, tense man in a floppy tweed suit and boots; the photograph was taken in 1919, when Joe Harney was fighting in the War of Independence.

His role in Charles O'Brien's life became profound. Harney once said that because he had been raised in a household of women (his father traveled often), he grew up with “more than the usual quota of common sense.” He might have added affection, gifts of friendship, and loyalty. When he attached himself to Charles it grew almost immediately into a deep and involved commitment.

Their relationship began in the days after the shooting. Harney took it as his personal duty to become the communicator between the hospital and Ardobreen. He wrote daily notes to Amelia. He watched over the doctors. He became Mr. Egan's assistant in the healing of Charles.

Mr. Egan wrought miracles. Harney brought him in at the first opportunity, as a visitor late one night when Dr. Moran had finished his last round of the day. The “little quack,” as Amelia (kindly) called him, stood at the bedside and exchanged a touching greeting with Charles.

Harney charmed a nurse into undoing the dressings on Charles's neck and leg, and Egan looked grave at the sight of the wounds. The next night he came back, bringing with him some ancient soda bread on which mold had formed, like a green invader. Egan scraped off this unappetizing matter and applied it to Charles's wounds, while Harney stood guard over the door in case the nurse returned.

Within days, Dr. Moran began to profess himself pleased at the progress of the healing, but no sooner did one segment of one wound recover than another part became infected. This continued for eight or nine weeks—“two steps forward, one step back,” as Harney put it in a note to Amelia; and then a day came when Charles, much healed, went home to Ardobreen.

Harney went with him and began to stay with the family, on and off, for some time. He helped in the yard; he read to Euclid; he drove Amelia on visits to neighbors and friends. Most of all, he became a companion to Charles, and the two men, the thin, amusing twenty-year-old and the brawny, thoughtful, and often anguished forty-eight-year-old, talked for hours and hours, often until dawn.

To Harney, Charles confided every detail of his feelings for April Burke. For instance, he told Harney, but never recorded in his own writings, how he had been almost forcibly ejected from Oscar Wilde's presence when he began to sketch the man a few days before his death.

Wilde had begged him to stop, saying that the likeness could only prove dreadful. But Charles pressed on until Turner, Wilde's “English” friend (as Charles called him), took the pad from Charles's hand and asked him to leave the room.

And Harney was there too, in the warm days of early June, when Amelia O'Brien visited her son in Tipperary Hospital and told him that “Miss Burke has married.”

Amelia's journal for that night contained only this entry: “I told Charles today. It has been hanging over me. Until now I felt he was not well enough to know. He took it silently, said nothing. Not a word. Just gazed at me with those great big eyes. But he looked at me as though I were someone he had encountered at the end of the world.”

After she finished, Harney told Charles and Amelia that he knew Stephen Somerville. “Not as an intimate or a friend,” he said, and Somerville “never would be either of those.” Harney had met him because Somerville had a cousin living near Harney's aunt in Kilkenny city, and Harney's aunt was the biggest gossip in the county. “She had a mouth as wide,” he said, “as the mouth of the river Shannon.”

Harney also told Charles and Amelia that Stephen Somerville was what we today call an alcoholic, a dipsomaniac. “And a bad drunk, at that, a violent drunk.” (All this information comes from Harney's oral history.)

“I thought I'd buck Charles up with this information. His mother's eyes glinted for a moment—no love lost between Mrs. O'Brien and the new Mrs. Somerville, I thought, but Charles became distressed. He said, ‘That's dreadful news; I wanted her to be happy.’ Then he hesitated for a moment and said, ‘She'd have been happy with me.’ And he said little else.

“I walked to the hospital door with Mrs. O'Brien. My goodness, she was an attractive woman, with captivating eyes and the nicest, sweetest nature you'd ever find. She was in her sixties, yet I could so easily have fallen in love with her myself, and I only twenty. She put her hand on my forearm and stood to face me. ‘Harney,’ said she, ‘do you think this will grow Charles up?’

“And I said, and I meant it, ‘Mrs. O'Brien, do we want him to change from the kind of decent man he is now?’ And said she back to me, ‘I want him to be less hurt by life.’ And off she went.”

All in all, Joe Harney had strong values; they included a deep belief in his country's right to govern itself. And interestingly enough, even at that age, he had begun to understand the importance of recording his country and his own place in it.

With this in mind, and at his request, his sisters began to take down an informal record of his young life. Although there's no evidence as to whether Charles had confided in Harney about his own “History,” their record keeping did demonstrate a shared value in the necessary observation of their own times. (As a history teacher I find this irresistible.)

From Joe Harney, too, we get a new portrait of April. In July, when he came home from the hospital, Charles felt well enough to return to his caretaking duties at the castle, especially now that he had Harney to assist him. He didn't go there every day—just often enough to check that no doors had been breached. If a rainstorm or a high wind had caused damage, he wanted to be aware of it. And he had also been given instructions to check that the neighboring farmers had their animals under control.

In September, almost fully recovered, Charles slipped and fell in one of the upstairs corridors. He reopened the wound on his leg. Mr. Egan couldn't be found, Harney wouldn't let Charles attempt to heal himself, and Dr. Moran took him back into the hospital.

While he was there, April came to see him. Her new husband waited in their hackney car outside—Harney saw them from the hospital window. He also noticed that April never mentioned Stephen's name, even though the man had traveled with her and was sitting outside. This is how he described that afternoon to his sisters:

“I heard the commotion—the window was wide open. When I looked down, I guessed right away and I thought, Is this the woman everybody's talking about? There she was, being helped down from the car by her husband, and a hospital porter, and a passing gentleman, and some lady. She was one of those people who gets others to buzz about her. Is that a gift? I don't know. I said to Charles, ‘I think you have a visitor.’ He knew by my tone whom I meant, and the expression on his face went between thrill and fear.

“Moments later, she swept into the room. She had the same excitement about her that you'd get from seeing a tremendous bird. Of course I saw at once why he had fallen so hard for her. She looked like his mother, only lovelier, if that was possible. Oh, she had a swing to her, that competent briskness; she didn't walk, she strode, and she had the best eyes of any woman I have ever seen. Brown as the earth, with a fleck. And that rich hair that she had.

“I always notice what women wear—that's what you get for growing up among women. And she was wearing a gold jacket and green skirt. The jacket was cut like a man's coat, almost military shoulders. She had a very light, long green-and-gold-striped silk scarf flying from her neck.

“And she had a black handbag, a purse, of crocodile skin. She put it down on the end of the bed, ran both her hands through her hair, brought the scarf under control and, said she, brisk as a breeze, ‘Well, look at you, Charles O'Brien—you
have
been in the wars.’

“That was it. Very upper-class English accent. Not a ‘Hello’ or ‘How are you?’ or a thing. He said, ‘You look beautiful.’ Said she, this woman who, that afternoon, I can only describe as a running commotion, ‘Aren't you going to congratulate me?’ Charles said, ‘I hope you'll be very happy.’ Said she, ‘No, not that—congratulate me on finding you. I didn't even have to go to your home.’

“Charles asked her how she'd known he was in the hospital, and she said that she had been dining with Lady Mollie Carew, who had now come back to Limerick from her summer sojourn in Bantry. ‘I can't think why you and that woman are friends,’ said our visitor. ‘She's almost common.’ And she sat down, on the chair that I had automatically pulled out for her.

“The visit didn't last long. In fact, it was over within minutes. A brutal visit, too—she had scarcely settled on the chair when I heard her say, ‘Now. Business.’ Next thing I heard the words ‘I want you to testify on my behalf. Just tell the court that you always knew in your heart Tipperary Castle was meant to be mine. You'll do that, won't you?’ That was what she said.

“I knew full well that Tipperary Castle meant the world to Charles. We talked of it often. He felt he belonged there, that his soul was there. And, of course, we'd discussed the possibility that it might have been O'Brien ancestral land a thousand years ago. The ghosts of race memory and all to that. Now here was this English lady asking Charles to secure it for her and her new husband—who was not a native Irishman. Protestant name, Somerville.

“Charles, ever the gentleman, said, ‘Of course,’ and said, ‘I understand,’ and ‘Indeed—’ but she cut him off. ‘Good,’ said she. And that was that. Not a ‘please’ or a ‘thank you.’ He nodded, in that grave sort of way that he had—it reminded me of an elephant, a big nod of the head. And then she said, ‘By the way, I'm sending in a new caretaker. We need somebody there every day.’ Then she was gone. She grabbed the crocodile bag, upped, and went.

“At the door, though, she looked back, just for half a second, and if I hadn't known Charles's story, I'd have sworn it was the sort of look any man would want to get from a woman. Especially a woman as beautiful as that. What kind of a look was it? It was a look—a look . . . well, a look of longing. And, I'd say, admiration. Then she was gone.

“Charles—what a hammering that poor man had taken—he looked at me, crestfallen. ‘What did you think of her?’ said he.

“All the evidence I had seen and heard suggested that I shouldn't like this woman—not like her at all. But, to my surprise, that wasn't the case. I liked her a whole lot, and I immediately saw the tragedy of the business, because even on my short acquaintance I was able to confirm one thing to my good satisfaction: that she was the perfect woman for him. There was an air between them—even in that short and somewhat harsh meeting, there was a rightness to the two of them together. A kind of a spark.

“So I answered Charles's question something like this: ‘You'll probably be surprised to hear that I liked her very much.’ And I added, ‘Ask me again tomorrow and I'll see how she stays in my mind.’ Needless to say, he did ask again, and this time I said, ‘I like her even more today.’ And said he, ‘So I wasn't wrong to have fallen for her?’ Said I, ‘Not at all. Quite the opposite.’ I meant it; I mean it to this day. She was twenty-two years younger than he, and they were perfect for each other.

“But I was only twenty, and what did I know of love or anything at that age? Strange business.”

So passed the spring, summer, and autumn of 1908 for Charles O'Brien. In his lowest fantasies he couldn't have expected such turmoil, such roller-coaster fortune. First, he's installed, even if only caretaking, in the castle and estate to which he feels he belongs spiritually. The assignment makes him happier than he has ever been. Next he is suddenly wounded by persons unknown, and drifts toward death.