Tipperary (9 page)

When she first came to the house, Euclid whispered to me, “Easy to remember her name—look at her teeth.” Nora Buckley had prominent front teeth, a little splayed. She said, “Yes” (with a spray) to every word spoken to her, and she blinked a great deal, but she intended to please every person; we soon loved her fondly.

Mother asked, “Where will you stay?”

“We'll cross the Shannon at Killaloe. And then I suppose we'll try and get as far up as we can toward Gort. We could stay with the MacNamaras, and then the boys would like to see Galway city.”

“The City of the Tribes,” said Euclid, who knew all these names and nicknames. “Where Mayor Lynch hung his son.”

“Hanged,” said Mother, “is the correct word. And then?”

“Ah, maybe Connemara or so,” said my father, and I knew that he was being evasive.

Mother began to laugh; Father began to blush.

“That's why it's called ‘lynching,’ I think,” said Euclid. “Because of Mayor Lynch.”

“And I suppose,” said Mother, laughing harder, “there's every chance you'll go somewhat north after that.”

Father, now blushing heavily, laughed too. “A bit, maybe.”

Mother said, “I wasn't aware that we needed a miracle.”

Euclid fastened on this like a cat on a bird.

“Knock! Knock! Are we? Are we going to Knock, to the shrine?”

Father looked ever more sheepish.

“If you are,” said Mother, “and I've been wondering how long you'd hold out, take Nora with you. Her aunt lives there—she'll know everyone.”

As a simple preface, let me explain that Father—and all of us—had been pursuing in his newspapers the apparitional events in Knock, County Mayo, where the Blessed Virgin Mary and other divine figures had flared in bright white light on a church wall.

Traveling a long journey with my father had an epic and intrepid feel. No pony-trap this time—we took what he called “the long car,” a brougham with seats along each side. Our valises and our food sat in the well. An Indian summer had delayed the fall of the leaves, and we left the house in a blaze of gold; Mother waved smiling and laughing from the portico.

Even then, young as I was, I liked to stand back, as it were, and view every situation in which I found myself. That morning, this is what I saw; Polly, our great, gray mare, with her white plume of a tail waving as she lunged forward; and how the harness shone and rattled. My father, his muttonchop whiskers crisper than ever, and his large body teeming with life, called now and then to Polly, “Hup, there, hup, girl.”

Beside him on the brown leather bench, hoping to stay firm and well, sat Euclid, a plaid rug of red, brown, and green about his knees, even though that September sun would have ripened a green tomato in a day. He looked everywhere about him, taking in all the world with those great eyes and yet unable to ingest enough; he scarcely ceased jigging with excitement. Behind Euclid, on the side-seat, sat I, facing outward and pleased beyond measure to be traveling thus with two of the three people I loved most in the world. Across the car, at my back, sat the nervous and swift Nora Buckley; she was under strict directions from Cally and Mrs. Ryan never to take her eyes off Euclid except when he was “at the necessary”—and above all to make sure that he reached bed safely every night.

We had left in the early morning and made wonderful progress through the villages of Cappawhite and Cappamore, where, to judge from the sleepy windows, no person had yet arisen. Not far from Newport, Father halted at a quiet turn in the road and announced that he had drunk “too much tea.” He gave us what he called “voyagers' rules”: he, Euclid, and I would climb into one field to relieve ourselves, Nora to the field on the other side of the road. Afterward we all stood in the roadway and stretched, bending this way and that.

Euclid had declared that as the crow flies our house lay thirty-four miles from Killaloe, and my father said he would try his best to “do as the crow does.” In his younger days, he said, he had “hunted all over this barony” and soon, to the alarm of Nora Buckley but to the delight of Euclid and me, he decided, as he announced, to “go across country.” He steered Polly off the road and we swung down a cart track into someone's farm.

Thus began the first truly exhilarating journey of my life across the Irish countryside—and that is how I began to form my taste for such travels, sitting beside my father in the ponytrap or, as now, behind him on the long car, swaying and rocking to the clop of a horse. That day, we traveled down rutted tracks, splashed across streams bright as tin, up hills almost too steep, and over grassy headland plateaus. Here and there, as we drove past, a farmer or his wife waved from a doorway, or an inquisitive child came out to look, and a dog to bark. My father knew all the sweetest ways, and we never felt imperiled by the roughness of the ground over which he took us.

Birds flapped up from the long grass with a sudden clatter of wings. A deer, rare in those parts, cleared a low fence ahead of us and bounced away haughtily. We saw a fox, who walked astutely along a ridge and inspected us from a distance, its tail held out behind it like a bushy spar. Rabbits sat and twitched their noses, not at all bothered by this curious conveyance with the small, intensely frail, pale-faced boy wrapped in a rug in the front seat, who was counting the rabbits but looking for hares.

I heard him ask Father, “And shall we see eagles?” and Father replied, as I expected he might, “If you want to, Euclid. If you want to.”

One field remains in my mind like an encouraging dream. Father consulted his compass frequently and sometimes, directly after a reading, we found ourselves on or off a roadway. Now we trotted along a graveled avenue, at the end of which Father steered Polly into a wood with a broad pathway running through it. No branches overhung and we never slackened pace. We cleared the trees, climbed a hill, and ran along the top. Father drew Polly to a halt and said, “Now look back.”

Below us, a long slope stretched away down the fields; two ribbons of roads from different directions intersected the patchwork of green; and in the distance shone a third and brighter ribbon—the river Shannon.

“This is a good place to eat,” Father said, and we opened the boxes that Cally and Mrs. Ryan had supplied and packed under Mother's supervision. Eggs had been crushed and mixed with chopped ham and onion; we had chicken with onion; Father chose roast beef and some slices of onion. Nora Buckley, perilously with such teeth, elected to eat a soda-bread sandwich of onion and chopped egg; neither Euclid nor I dared look at each other as she ate. When she finished, she said to Euclid, “Somebody in your house must be famous for onions.”

We drank mugs of milk poured from a tall, shining dairy-can, and we looked at the countryside for a long time. I would have sat there an hour and more had Father asked.

“The battles fought over that land down there,” he said. “Troy didn't give as much trouble.”

He pointed out the Silvermines—he called them “mountains,” although Euclid said that they seemed like hills to him, “because by geographical agreement a mountain needs to be over a thousand feet high.”

Far away, across the fields, a tiny man herded thirty or more tiny cows up a patch of hill field and into another patch of pasture. We could hear his dog's distant excitement; and we sat for a little while longer in the glorious sunshine of the autumn, looking at the green and tawny and gold and brown patchwork quilt of fields.

The Shannon, when we crossed it at Killaloe, thrilled us as much as the Tiber might, or the Mississippi. We liked its width, and its refusal to be hurried. Soon the stone walls of the west appeared and the sun went down, leaving the sky red as a blushing face.

That night in the little town of Gort, as I reflected on our traveling across the country, and as I could hear Father's laughter downstairs, where he took a drink with our hosts, I would have said that it had been one of the most beautiful, serene days of my life. I have had many more since, but that day on which I first crossed the Shannon into the West of Ireland remains for me one of my most memorable.

Next day we bowled into Galway city, all bridges and cobblestones. I chiefly recall watching a basket-maker in the square outside our hotel, and being transfixed by the speed of his hands as he wove the hard strands into firm patterns. The hotel introduced me, I feel, to a taste for such comforts that still directs part of my life. For me, to this day, the most restful moments come when I luxuriate in a great hotel, receiving my meals with deferential service and sleeping between starched linens.

We stayed there for two days, and during our first breakfast, Father counseled Euclid, Nora, and myself to tell nobody of our destination. In the many conversations that we overheard in the hotel, the name of Knock recurred frequently. All remarks had the same tone: “Do you believe it?” and “I suppose it is possible” and “Don't you know what they have up there now? Miracles! They have a miracle nearly every hour.”

All of this threw Euclid and Nora Buckley into states of fantastic longing, with Euclid whispering to me at every turn, “Do you think we'll see an apparition?” Nora worried, “If such holy folks appeared—well, when they're gone, what's to stop the Devil comin'?” (She, of course, pronounced it “Divil.”)

My father, I know, also felt excitement, but his anticipation derived from the opportunity to meet those local people who had actually seen the Virgin Mary on the gable wall of the church in the rain. Yet he did not wish people to think him religious, and that is why he asked us not to divulge our destination. He justified his journey by saying, “You know, people should always make a pilgrimage to a phenomenon.”

After Galway, we spent two days out in Connemara, lingering by the lakes of Corrib, Mask, and Carra. My father had fished the mayfly there, and he told us of those brilliant early summer days when, for one week, men would come “from all over the world.” He continued, “Now if you fellows were here that week, you'd make a fortune catching that mayfly in glass bottles and selling it to the anglers for their bait.”

The light over the lakes seemed to change every half minute, and we saw rainbow after rainbow.

This paragraph comes from a County Mayo guidebook:

In August 1879, more than a dozen local people in the hamlet of Knock, in the county of Mayo, reported an apparition that is still venerated today. This was never rich land. Oliver Cromwell chose not to bring his marauders over here because one of his generals had reported that the country west of the Shannon contained “not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him.” The apparition, however, brought fame and fortune, as such mystical occurrences do. Hundreds of similar appearances by the Virgin Mary have been recorded, most prominently, Fátima, Garabandal, Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Medjugorje in Croatia.

In all those cases, and in Knock, too, the life of the surrounding countryside changed for the better. Lourdes, originally a village near a cave in the Pyrenees, gained a huge infrastructure. With a basilica and an airport, it attracts pilgrims from all over the world daily, to be dipped naked in the miraculous waters.

At Fátima, visitors rip the skin off their legs as they traverse a huge plaza on their knees, praying as they inch the hundreds of yards from the bus parks to the steps of the basilica.

Knock, when the apparition was reported, suffered the official Church skepticism with which all such reports are typically greeted. But the local people and their clergy prevailed. For them, whether they said so or not, this became a further liberation, an extension of Catholic Emancipation. It took some time for validation to arrive; today, Knock has its own devotional infrastructure, including an international airport. It was crowned by a Papal visit in its centenary year of 1979, and receives close to two million pilgrims annually.

We spent a night in a Claremorris boarding-house, where the landlady, who had fat earlobes, joked, “I s'pose people like yourselves are never going to Knock?”

Father replied jovially, “No need to knock, we're indoors already.” To us he murmured when she'd gone back to the kitchen, “Never give a nosy person room for a comeback. Humor is the great escape.”