Tipperary (8 page)

Daily, and in intimate terms, my father taught me how Ireland is formed—how, for example, the people in the North save money more effectively than the people in the South, and are, in his opinion, more trustworthy. He told me my first tales, many of which came from the world around us, gathered from the many people to whom he spoke; and he liked to speak to everybody. And he had a great number of stories, some acquired down the years and some assumed by him to have been in his head since long before he was born. Many concerned land and the ownership of land, which was the question burning through the entire country all throughout his boyhood, too.

Thus, as other boys grew up with tales of pirates and trolls and ogres and wizards, I was raised on landlords and tenants and oppression and dispossession. Here is a story of a man who went to serve writs of eviction on some farmers over near Kilshane, about six miles from our home; I wrote it down from Father as he spoke it, several years ago.

“They call such men ‘process servers,’ and they make their money in a despicable way—they serve writs; other men make the bullets and they fire them. There was a man called Nolan—and, yes, indeed, some of them were natural Irishmen who chose to serve the landlord's writ on their fellow-countrymen. I wouldn't give a sour apple to a man like that and you wouldn't give a sour apple to anybody.

“This man, Nolan, left Limerick by the morning train and had someone meet him with a horse along the railway line somewhere near Bansha. He was carrying notices of eviction from two landlords, a man called Gibson, a bad pill that man, and a landlord called Birkin—two English-men, as you can tell from their names. All in all, the foolish Nolan was carrying in his leather bag nine white Court Orders.

“He rode his horse into Kilshane, up along the high road into the woods, and from what I heard of the story—a man living there told it to me—Nolan served the first writ and set out for the next house on his list.

“These small places—you'd think they had tom-toms or some kind of jungle communication, because as he rode on, he looked over his shoulder, and following behind him, on this narrow little road, came a bunch of about twenty men. And they looked grim. And then he looked ahead of him and saw twenty more, grimmer fellows.

“There was no escape. They caught Nolan's horse by the bridle, held the animal, and took down the rider. By the way, I heard that they took away the horse and painted it a different color until the search for it was over, and then they sold it for a good price at Mallow fair.

“These men began to kick the foolish Mr. Nolan, and hit him and punch him and pull his hair. He gave no fight back at them—too many against him, I suppose. They took his leather satchel, read out loud the writs and the civil bills. And then they tore them into flitters, and the scraps of paper, they blew away across the hedges like a little blizzard.

“Now the next thing was—several of the men in this affray began to blow hunting horns. Half a mile away, when this sound was heard, the chapel bell started to ring. These were signals, everybody knew them, and folk hurried from the north, the south, the east and west of Kilshane— which isn't a big place at all—to where the hunting horns were blaring.

“By now this bailiff was well beaten, but he still had his wits about him—which was what they wanted. There's a river flows down at the bottom of the hill, a little river, a tributary of the Suir, and they took Nolan down to this river. The men stripped his clothes off him and hauled him into the stream. Two of them went in with him and ducked him well and then took him out again and stood him on the bank.

“They pointed to him and they jeered him and they mocked him and then the men stood aside of him, and the women came through the crowd. One woman held up his right hand, one held up his left, and two more dragged his legs apart and he was held there, upright and naked, like a man being crucified without a cross. Then the prettiest few women in the crowd broke off branches of furze bushes—furze has more spikes than a rose, ask any man who has ever fallen off his horse into a furze bush. Prickly all over.

“These young women began to tease Nolan, naked and spread-eagled as he was, with the furze bushes. Up and down his body and in and out, anywhere they could get a few needles of furze to poke and sting—he must have gone mad.

“Then they brought forward a bucket of tar. It wasn't roasting hot, for that would have killed him. But it was warm enough to spread, and so they covered his body with this tar, and then they stuck white goose feathers all over him and they tied him to a tree. The constables from Limerick came out to rescue him, in response to a telegram they had received. They asked everybody, they quizzed all over the place, and of course nobody knew anything or had seen anything and there was nothing for it but to search the countryside.

“With no help and no direction, they found Nolan the bailiff as naked as the day he was born, feathers sticking everywhere out of him, tied to a tree out in the middle of the fields and shivering. It took two days of him being rubbed all over with butter to get all the tar off—a nurse in Limerick did the job. They say she did a great job too, every nook and cranny of the man. What a job to be given.”

And my father winced.

Such violence had long been taking place in Ireland, not only in our province of Munster but also in our county of Tipperary, where the land is so rich. The bailiff Nolan had been one of the fortunate ones. In my grandfather's time, the Whiteboys, a notoriously violent secret society, believed that the landlords should be driven out by much more savage force. They roamed the fields at night, wearing white smocks that made them sinister in the darkness—and to me therefore somewhat thrilling.

When I asked my father about them, to my surprise he spoke vehement condemnation. Yet I knew that he agreed with their aims; he too loathed the absentees—those owners who never appeared on their land but controlled the lives of all who lived as their tenants. It was the White-boys' methods that my father so gravely disliked, because they attacked the landlords' cattle and horses. They “hocked” them—they cut the tendons in the animals' legs, rendering them crippled and ready for death.

“How any Irishman can leave a field with a horse moaning in such awful pain,” my father said. “He's no kind of Irishman, he's a barbarian.”

I grew up, therefore, in territories of conflict—in a beautiful land of old castles, woods, and rivers, where sinister figures had but recently roamed the land at night, garbed in white, dealing out heinous violence, and where murder was often committed in the name of land. In childhood, my parents shielded us from reports of such occurrences, although we knew that at crossroads, in villages and in towns, people held turbulent gatherings to debate their rights to their own fields, and mainly to discuss the ousting of the landlords.

Once or twice, coming home at night from a neighborly visit, we encountered knots of such people holding such meetings. Much shouting seemed to be taking place, and the air felt disturbed. We ran into no immediate difficulties—when they saw my father, they waved us through with a laugh and a light cheer—but we knew that others had been turned back or not allowed to pass or, often, had been forced from their carriages and obliged to walk home. Next morning the carriage might be found in a disheveled state many miles away, and the horses nowhere to be seen.

Charles O'Brien knew that he came of a kindly and relaxed parenting. Those two people loved each other, loved their two children, and loved their existence in a simple and intelligent way. They gave their sons as good an education as their joint political agreement would permit.

Each tutor they hired opened a different window on the world. Nobody in that household feared eccentricity or shrank from individuality. A high sense of justice prevailed. And their patriotism seems to have stemmed from love of their land and their people, rather than from some acquired ideology or the pressures of history.

This is a man who should not have felt a need to “improve” himself. While under his father's roof, he had confidence and a happy inquiring sensibility, which he took with ease into his adult life. Did his uncertainty, his lack of faith in himself, simply arrive with one bound when he fell in love with the eighteen-year-old April Burke?

It can't have done. If the boy had grown unaltered into the man, he might have had something of the charm, the dignity and composure, that he saw at home in both his parents. Therefore, she might have been less brutal in the rejection that he mentions so early in his text.

Nor would he have issued such a self-negating warning about himself: “Be careful about me.” Admittedly, he includes it in the lee of the general, totally accurate, and justifiable warning about our emotional system of history. The Irish have always turned defeat into moral and emotional triumph. But his text begins to suggest that, somewhere along the line, after his loved and imaginative boyhood, and his lively and enjoyed adolescence, Charles O'Brien changed—into an anxious, self-doubting adult.

His journey from childhood is charted in glimpses. For instance, as the prelude to a major chapter, he tells—almost as an aside, and again out of chronological order—an illuminating story of an encounter with his father over a giant. After that, his tale spreads across Ireland as his life begins to find its first direction.

Father's discourses seemed unceasing but never intrusive; he knew how I loved to hear him talk, even when he was giving me difficult advice about my life and how to conduct matters. But is it not essential to trust a man who has encouraged one's every thrilling discovery? And who then has cushioned one's disappointment when, say, a hero turned out to be human, or a miracle's blinding light turned out to be the deft mirror of chicanery?

For example: When I was nine years old, I read in one of Father's many periodicals of America's great and amazing Cardiff Giant. In the state of New York, some laborers digging a well on a farm discovered the almost-preserved remains of a man ten feet tall. I ran, shouting, through the house on that rainy Sunday morning and found my father.

“You see! You see! The old stories are right—there were giants in days gone by, there were! And if there were ancient giants in America, then there could easily have been giants here, couldn't there?”

Father took the paper from my hands and read it gravely, muttering, “Boys-oh-dear, boys-oh-dear.” Then he and I shared some days of wonderful conversation about giants, and whether giants' graves lay beneath any curiously shaped hill that we knew, and might we even have had giants among our own ancestors? To which my father said, “Well, they told me my father had an uncle who was six feet six, and maybe he was a bit of a giant.”

However, sometime later, Father came to my room at bedtime and said, “I have grave news for you—but it doesn't have to change any of our beliefs.”

He read to me, from another newspaper, that the Giant of Cardiff was a hoax. Some gentleman had “created” the giant out of gypsum in order to fake support for an argument about whether giants had ever existed. My father sat down on the chair by my bed and said, “Well, I suppose you and I will just have to puzzle this out until we know what our hearts have to say about it.”

I now understand that, over the course of the next few days, he let me down lightly—but he also turned the Giant into a teaching. “A thing doesn't have to be true,” he said, “for a person to get joy out of it. What it has to be is not evil or malicious.”

Deriving from that exchange, it did not take me long to understand that Father and I shared a willingness to believe in the impossible, especially if it offered any assistance to someone's life. Ten years later, when I was nineteen years old, Father demonstrated this by going on—for him—an entirely improbable journey and one that altered my life and my soul.

He announced at breakfast one morning that he was “taking Charles and Euclid on a little holiday.” Mother scarcely raised an eyebrow. Cally, Mother said, would help us pack the bags, and we now had a girl to help in the kitchen, a thin girl who ran like the wind everywhere. Her name was Nora Buckley, and I soon asked whether Nora might be a relation to my beloved tutor. Mother shook her head and said, “You can't throw a stone in Cork or Kerry without hitting a Buckley.”