America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (40 page)

In a while he came back. The liquor was locked up, the manager had the key, and the manager was gone. A sandwich? The pantry was locked up. I don't know who had that key. A copy of the London Times in the morning? They were all ordered and it was too late to order another one. He looked as though he wanted to return the bribe; he was a young, dark, sad-looking man. I found myself trying to explain to him.

“Does the young lady at the desk never smile?” I asked.

“Rarely,” he said.

“Is no rule ever broken at all?”

“I don't understand,” he said.

“Look,” I said, “my people came from hereabouts. They were law-abiding people, but there was a filament of illegality in them. My mother wasn't above putting too much catsup on her plate and sopping it up with a piece of bread in a restaurant.”

“Catsup?” he asked.

I said, “One of my uncles had a major difficulty in college for stealing chickens. Another of my uncles had to be disarmed when he had murder in his heart, and I, myself . . .”

I stopped, because the not-the-real-porter was looking at me helplessly, trying to make out my meaning. My voice was rising against a wall of frustration.

“What I am trying to say is this,” I said. “Has all illegality gone out of this rebellious island in three generations?”

“Sir?” he asked.

“I mean, if I should give you in your hand more than enough—twice more than enough—to buy a bottle of whisky, a loaf of bread and a sausage, couldn't you find some lawbreaker to sell them to you?”

“The rules are very strict,” he said, “I'm sorry. I wish I could help you.”

My heart broke for him.

“I'm not the real porter,” he said. “Good night, sir, I'm sorry.”

 

We sat in the window, looking across the street at the angry stone buildings and the small, locked-up shops. The street was deserted and a desolation came over us. I told my wife how brave and open my ancestors were, how full of lust and courtesy and fine laughter. I lied about them some—I guess I had to. The Sunday dark fell on that city which is somber even on weekdays and in sunlight.

Now my reluctance came on me tenfold and I wanted to give up the pilgrimage and go away quickly and forget it, because reality was violating every inherited memory and I was saying to myself that if the old folks went away from here, maybe they had good reason.

I put on a bathrobe and took the long, deserted, green-carpeted hall to the bathroom. From a room on the corridor came an old woman carrying a broom and a long-handled dustpan. I said good evening to her and her face wrinkled up into a smile that lighted the dark corners of that desolate corridor.

“Good evening, sir,” she said.

I stopped in front of her, because this was a tone I had not heard. “I know before I ask that the irons are locked up,” I said, “but can you steal an iron and take the wrinkles out of a pair of pants for me?”

“What room?” she asked, and then, “You'll have smooth pants.”

The front was broken. In an hour she had the trousers back, still steaming a little, and I tipped her until she begged for mercy. We slept better because of her.

In the morning, we had our driver, all right—he who knew the countryside—a rakish man in a torn cap, who assured us that he knew every nubbin of a hill in all directions. He didn't, but he was willing. His car was so old that it churned and clattered, and a blue, suffocating smoke came from it. We were looking for a place called Mulkeraugh. You can spell it half a dozen ways and it isn't on any map. I knew from half-memory that it was near to Ballykelly, which is near to Limavady, and I knew that from Mulkeraugh you could look across the lough to the hills of Donegal.

We clattered and smoked along eighteen miles from Londonderry, past thatched cottages and hedged little fields where the black bundles of the flax lay waiting to be taken in. The countryside was rolling and lovely and the blackness of the city went out of us. The Donegal hills were remote and sunny across the broad water of the lough.

We drove right through Ballykelly without knowing it was there, but at Limavady they turned us back. I guess I had thought of Ballykelly as a town; it isn't—it's what they call in Texas a wide place in the road. Except for two churches, it wasn't different from the cottage-lined highway we had been driving on. An old man stood in front of one of the churches. “Mulkeraugh?” he said. “Second turning to the left—a quarter of a mile.”

“Do you know any Hamiltons there?” I asked.

“They're all dead,” he said. “Miss Elizabeth died two years ago. You'll find Mr. Richey, her cousin, on the hill, though.”

Mulkeraugh isn't a place at all. It's a hill and three or four farms near about. Mr. Richey came to the door of the house on the hill and he looked like some of our breed—the pink cheeks, the light blue sparkling eyes.

He said, “The Hamilton place is sold, sold to the ground. You can find out about it at the lawyer's office in Limavady.”

I said, “I'm the grandson of Samuel; he left here a long time ago.”

“I have heard there was a brother,” he said; “went away to America. But wasn't his name Joseph?”

It was the same everywhere we asked—my grandfather did not exist. So far as Ireland was concerned, there was no Samuel Hamilton. Why should they remember? The tree of our culture had no roots. Maybe I'd known that unconsciously, and that was why I had been reluctant to go back. My grandfather's brother, he who stayed, that was different. And his children, they were different. And how much land they had, that was different. And how improved it was and how much it brought when it was sold. These were immediate things, and who could remember an old, old fact like my grandfather?

Everyone knew the three children of my grandfather's brother, Miss Katherine, Miss Elizabeth and Mr. Tom. It was a good farm they had—about two hundred acres—and a good house of two stories. These children never married, the two sisters and the brother; why? No one knew why. They were well-endowed, well-educated people, and they had more land than most. They had silver spoons and fine china and little coffee cups, so thin you could see through them, and all the collected things of the family for hundreds of years, pictures and books and records and furniture, to make them envied all over the countryside. But they never married. They were well known, well liked. They grew old together.

Miss Katherine was the efficient one, almost like Tommy's mother, and Tommy did just what she said about the farm. He plowed when she said and he sowed when she said and he harvested when she said.

Miss Elizabeth was more for reading and writing things, and she had a rose garden. She spent a great deal of her time cultivating her flowers. Tommy was a silent man, but good, and well liked everywhere. The three grew older on the farm and they never married.

Then, about twelve years ago, Miss Katherine died. The directing head was gone. The farm went to pieces little by little and month by month, so slowly that it was hardly noticeable. Tommy, with no one to tell him what to do, when to plow and when to sow, began to neglect the land, and he sold some of the cows and didn't replace them. When the roof leaked, he didn't mend it. The hedges began to creep into the fields. When his friends remonstrated, he smiled and agreed that he should keep up the land, but the directing head was gone and there was no one to tell him.

Elizabeth, the neighbors said, had her head in a book. She tended the roses and she and Tommy grew ever closer together. And then, about seven years ago, Tommy died. He got a scratch on his side from a nail and did nothing about it, because nobody told him to, and he died of blood poisoning.

People who told us about what happened next did so reluctantly, as though they didn't want to be gossiping. Miss Elizabeth, they said, grew strange after Tommy died—“strange” was the word they used. She'd be smart and clever as always, but there'd be things like this: she would be talking to a neighbor and at the same time listening to something far away. And right in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation, she would say, “Tom is going to take out that tree stump in the lane. We need a new tree there.”

And when neighbor women were having tea with her from those thin little cups you could almost see through, Elizabeth would say, “I'll have to ask you to excuse me now, Tom's coming in and he'll be very tired.” And she would usher them out of the house.

And then in the night they'd hear Miss Elizabeth walking in the lanes between the hedgerows and she'd be calling her brother, telling him it was late and his supper was waiting. And several times she was seen in the night, searching through the fields. She was in a nightgown and her feet were bare, but she wasn't sleepwalking, they said—she wasn't asleep at all. She'd just turned strange, they said.

It wasn't as though she was crazy. Except for that, she talked as good sense as anybody, but she just could not bring herself to believe that her brother was dead. And she did another strange thing that was unlike her, they said. She got herself a cause. She joined the party which resisted with all its strength the joining of the northern counties to Eire. She worked for her cause and she made a will in which she ordered everything she possessed sold on her death and every penny turned over to the party that resisted the joining of Ulster to Eire, and then she died.

The neighbors said it was a sorrow to see the house torn apart. It was well known that the Hamiltons had beautiful things. On the day of the auction, the automobiles and the carriages came by the hundred, and people bought pictures just for the frames: and the beautiful silver went, and the fine china, and the books, bought for the binding only—and all by strangers. Strangers bought the farmhouse. It was a sorrow, the neighbors said.

I went to see the house and there was nothing of us there. The rose garden was overgrown with weeds and only the whips of the rosebushes showed above the grass, with haws still on from the last year. The ivy had nearly covered the stone paths. The new owners were kind. But they were strangers, and, what was even worse, we were strangers.

The sexton of the church at Ballykelly is an old, old man, lean and dry, and his speech is like my grandfather's speech.

I asked, “Did you know the Hamiltons?”

“Hamiltons?” he said. “I ought to—I dug their graves. I buried them, all of them. Miss Elizabeth was the last, two years ago. She was a bright one.”

We looked at the graves, with the new cement coping around the plot. “Miss Elizabeth put it in her will about coping,” the sexton said. He didn't ask, but we felt that he wanted to know. I said, “My grandfather was William's brother.” He nodded slowly. “I've heard,” he said. “Went away—I forget where.”

“California,” I said.

“What was his name again?” the sexton asked.

The rain was beginning to fall. He left us for a moment and came back, carrying a full-blown red rose. “Would you like to have it?” he asked.

I took it. And that's the seat of my culture and the origin of my being and the soil of my background, the one full-blown evidence of a thousand years of family. I have it pressed in a book.

Galway, Ireland

 

Dear Alicia:

 

I'VE EDGED OFF from writing you about the ghost of Anthony Daly, not because it is a complicated story, but because every sentence I write can and will be challenged by any number, who will swear it wasn't that way at all. I have heard a half-dozen versions and there must be more. Meanwhile, I am sleeping and working in the Grey Room at St. Cleran's and that's the room Daly haunts. He has been often seen and felt and heard in this room, but so far unfortunately not by me, although he would be welcome. But maybe I'm not the kind he likes to haunt. And I do feel slighted because the ghost of Daly has walked this house and especially this room for 146 years, and he has every right to, as you shall hear.

In 1820 this house and the surrounding countryside was owned by the Burkes, once Burgos. They came to England with William the Conqueror and later held large parts of Ireland by English grant and English military power, to the hatred and pain of the Irish, who, like the American Indians, thought they had a right to the land because they were here first, a long time first.

One evening in the spring of 1820, James Hardiman Burke was returning to this house from the holdings at Laughrea when he was fired at from the bushes beside the road. He put spurs to his horse and escaped and immediately called for the military commander of the district, because shooting at a landlord was not regarded kindly by landlords. The soldiery combed the neighborhood and came up with a candidate for vengeance, a young and handsome and athletic Irishman named Anthony Daly, who was known to be a troublemaker and an organizer of rebellious attitudes among the subject Irish. There are some that say he had also found romantic congress with one or more of the St. Cleran's ladies, which, if true, put two handles on his coffin.

Daly was brought to trial for his life on evidence either bought with money or threats, while other evidence to the effect that he was other-where and probably equally untrue was rejected by the judge, who sat alone since the Irish did not rate jury trial by their peers because, if they had, there would not have been a conviction in a thousand years. Daly's defense was clear and reasonable to everyone but the judge. He swore that he was a crack shot and that the proof of his innocence was that Burke was alive. This logic was rejected and Daly was condemned to death by hanging.

It has always been the conviction of tyrants right down to our own time that terror is an effective weapon against a subject people. Daly's hanging must be impressive enough to be remembered by any future malcontent who might take it into his head to shoot a landlord.