Galway Bay (8 page)

“We went high into the hills,” Dennis said.

“It’s near Tonnybrocky, up the Ballymoneen Road,” Joseph put in.

My brothers had become Michael’s assistants, spared by Da from the boats because the fishing was so poor that the Claddagh Admiral had kept the fleet in. Da said the new English trawlers were ruining Galway Bay, destroying the spawning grounds by churning up the bottom. From time out of mind, Da said, Irish fishermen had caught only full-grown fish, leaving the others to grow and breed. “That’s why our nets have large holes, but now . . .”

A knock meant trouble. Friends and good news came right in. It was landlords’ agents and policemen who beat their fists against the door.

Da eased the door open. A stranger stood there, barefoot, wearing a frieze coat—a small, baldy fellow with a fringe of brown hair and quick blue eyes, about thirty years of age. He looked around to see into the room.

He’s hungry. Beggars often came to the door in the hungry months. Whole families, who traveled twenty or thirty miles so as not to embarrass themselves by begging in their own townlands, spent the month of July going door to door, then went home to find work in the harvest.

Mam always gave to beggars and treated them with respect. Any family could slip down very quickly, she said—eviction, the bailiffs battering down your cottage, and that was you finished and on the roads. Happening all the time—what Da feared for me—no land, living in a shelter dug into the side of a hill, a child on the way.

But this fellow was no beggar. “My name is Owen Mulloy, and I’ve come after thieves,” he said, pointing at Michael, Dennis, and Joseph.

“Thieves? Now wait a minute,” Michael began, standing up.

“What else is a man who sets his horse to eat the grass of another man’s pasture, tell me that?”

“Pasture? An abandoned field,” Michael said.

“I admit the pasture’s neglected. No use for it. I was a man with an interest in three cows and a horse, but now I have no stock at all.”

“A sad and familiar story,” Da said. “My sympathies, Mr. Mulloy.”

Mulloy nodded. The anger had gone off him—one of those fellows who flares up and sputters, then calms down.

Michael apologized for his mistake, and Mam asked Owen Mulloy to sit down and share our meal. After some toing and froing, Owen Mulloy accepted a prattie, but he wouldn’t eat the mussels Mam had added to the potatoes. Too slimy.

“The man who shared the cows with me was evicted,” Owen Mulloy said, “even after we sold our stock to pay the rent.”

“Bíonn siúlach scéalach,” Granny said.

“A traveler has a tale,” Owen Mulloy translated. “True enough, though I’ve come from only two miles away and my story’s a very short one, because what happened is not worth telling. The neighbor who shared the stock with me had three daughters. The oldest one wished to marry the son of a farmer near Minclough, a likely lad. They went to the landlord for permission.”

“Which landlord?” asked Da.

“The Pykes.”

“Which Pykes?”

“The Scoundrel Pykes,” Owen Mulloy said. “I’m sure you’ve heard the tales of the old Major, and they’re all true. A devil. He takes a bride’s first night. Droit du seigneur, the Pykes call it, but it’s rape, a criminal violation, and they’re never called to account.”

“Too many other landlords doing the same,” Granny said.

Mulloy nodded. “My neighbor sent his daughter off with her young man—they left the area entirely. When old Major Pyke found out, he evicted the family in spite of the rent being paid. My neighbor was a tenant at will, as are so many. No protection at all. So,” said Mulloy.

“And where did they go?” Da asked.

“Amerikay.”

“Oh, the poor, poor souls,” said Mam. “Leaving all they loved behind.”

Granny crossed herself, as did we all. Exile. Amerikay. The last resort.

“Mr. Mulloy, it was only that Champion needed feeding,” Michael started.

Owen Mulloy interrupted him. “I took a good look at your horse as I was coming in. She’s a fine animal. I see why you think she deserves the very best of grass. Faugh-a-Ballagh,” he said.

“Faugh-a-Ballagh!” I said. “The Irish Brigade’s battle cry when they served in the French army and defeated the English at Fontenoy—‘Clear the Way! Faugh-a-Ballagh!’”

“Faugh-a-Ballagh is the name of a racehorse,” Mulloy said.

“Oh.” Sometimes I
am
too smart for my own good.

“Your horse puts me in mind of his line, the mus-cu-la-ture,” Mulloy said, dividing the syllables. “She might make a hunter with the Galway Blazers.”

“A hunter?”

“You surely know the Galway Blazers. That gang of gentlemen,” said Mulloy, “who get pleasure out of chasing the dogs who are chasing a fox. They like to blow horns and dress up. Like children. Im-ma-tur-ity run riot.”

“Why are they called Blazers?” Joseph asked.

“Two reasons are given. One, after they drink in-or-din-ate amounts of whiskey punch, they get to fighting duels, blazing away at each other. Two, they set fire to a hotel out near Birr when they were visiting another hunt. Either one could be true, or both.”

“You seem to know a lot about them, Mr. Mulloy,” Da said.

“My father looked after the Pykes’ stables when I was a boy. I helped out a bit. Whatever else about the landowning gentlemen of Ireland, they love their horses, no question. The gentry might turn a blind eye to the Scoundrel Pykes interfering with the daughters of their tenants, but they wouldn’t stand for the Pykes mistreating their horses. The old Major and his son, the young Captain, ride with the Blazers. It’s the Pykes and their friends who put on next month’s Galway Races on the old course at Parkmore.”

“Where I’m entering my horse,” Michael said. “I have a sponsor—Mr. Lynch.”

“Well,” Owen Mulloy said, “very en-ter-pris-ing. The course has walls and fences,” he said, thinking aloud. “Steeplechases, you call them, the fashion ever since those two Corkmen raced from church to church. At Parkmore even stable boys can ride.”

“As you yourself did?” Michael asked.

“I did,” said Mulloy. “Won a few races, until one fall too many stopped me.”

“A fall?” I asked.

“Riders fall all the time,” Mulloy said.

So Michael could break his neck as well as lose the horse?

Maybe he shouldn’t . . .

But before the evening was over, Owen Mulloy had agreed to let Champion graze in his pasture and said he’d help Michael train her for the race. In return, Michael would weed Owen’s fields and give him something from the winnings.

“Only two weeks until the race,” Owen said. “Hard work ahead. We’ll start tomorrow.”

“Champion’s able for it, and we are, too,” Michael said.

Michael and Owen laid a course in a pasture enclosed within stone walls built by Owen Mulloy’s great-great-grandfather. They rolled whin bushes into bales, piled up rocks, balanced Joseph’s hurley on two boulders, and made the walls themselves into jumps.

They worked with Champion through long summer evenings when the sun never thought of setting until ten or eleven. During the day, Michael weeded Owen’s barley and oats, and in return Owen gave Michael an old shed to keep Champion in and to bed down himself. He’d been staying with Máire and Johnny, and she was ready for him to leave.

“Enough is enough, Honora,” Máire said to me the day Michael left. “Johnny and I have waited too long for our own bed to want to be overheard by Michael in the loft.”

Máire liked to hint to me about the joys of marriage. “Now I know why there are so many children running around Bearna,” she said to me, “though I sometimes find it hard to believe Mam and Da actually do the same thing Johnny and I do.”

“I wouldn’t ask them, Máire.”

“You’ll see, Honora.”

“Do you think I’ll learn as easily as you did?”

“Has Michael Kelly kissed you yet?”

“He hasn’t.”

“Do you want him to?”

“I do. From the first moment I saw him coming out of the sea—smiling, tall, with those blue eyes and the male part of him standing so straight and proud . . .”

Máire started laughing. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Always a good student.” She gave me a quick hug, something she hardly ever did.

“Michael said he’s going to buy me some books when he wins the Galway Races, and he says it will give him great pleasure to watch me reading by the fire.”

“He’s looking forward to watching you read by the fire? Ah, well, to each his own.”

A week into the training, I brought Granny up with me. We sat on one wall of the homemade steeplechase course. She was worried.

“I wish Michael Kelly didn’t get sick at sea,” she said. “Not good to draw attention to himself. What’s to keep some red-coated soldier from saying, ‘I want that Catholic horse; here’s five pounds’?”

“That’s not the law anymore, Granny.”

“The Sassenach don’t let the law get in the way of what they want. Couldn’t he find a Connemara pony to ride? They are the smartest animals in the country, and no landlord ever took one off a man.”

“Can’t run a pony in the Galway Races. And look at Champion! She’s mighty, isn’t she, Granny?”

Thrilling to watch Michael stretch himself along Champion’s neck. How quickly she had lifted herself up and over, then galloped straight at the next obstacle. A well-matched pair.

After a while Champion and Michael trotted up to us. “What do you think of her, Granny?” Michael asked, patting Champion.

“She’s a champion, a curadh, surely,” she said.

“Curadh,” Michael said. “I don’t know that word.”

“Curadh is the old word for champion, and the right name for her,” Granny said.

Owen Mulloy came up. He’d heard Granny. “Champion suits her.”

“Curadh,” said Granny.

“Best to use English. Easier for the bettors.”

Granny looked Owen Mulloy up and down. He stared right back at her. Da said Owen Mulloy was one of those “boys in the know,” with inside information about everything, from a parliamentary election to a marriage agreement—always predicting and analyzing.

Granny had no use for such talk. “Men like to think they put order on things,” she’d say. “Control what happens. Women know better.” But she only nodded as Michael walked Champion back and forth and Owen outlined his strategy for the race based on his own special knowledge.

“Major Pyke’s big dun-colored gelding—called Strongbow, would you believe—will take the lead, no question, followed by the rest of the field, then Michaeleen and her ladyship here. Stay back, Michael. The dun horse is mean and ter-ri-tor-i-al.”

“Territorial?” Michael asked.

“He likes plenty of space, fights any horse who comes too close. Forces them to fall going over the jumps. Young Captain Pyke, the son who rides, doesn’t mind fouling the other riders. Lay back. Wait. When the rest tangle up in confusion, take Champion over the barrier.”

“I understand,” Michael said.

Granny had been looking around as Owen spoke. “And how much of this land do you look after?” she asked.

Michael had told me that Owen Mulloy held acres and acres on an old lease and sublet to other tenants.

“All of it, in a manner of speaking. We still operate the old rundale system. Six families work the land together. Three on my lease. The other three rent from the Scoundrel Pykes directly, no leases, year-to-year payments. We all live in a clachán, our cottages close together, and go out to the fields. We share the plowing and the planting, the weeding, the turf cutting, and in happier days the care of the sheep and the cows and the pigs. Each man looks after the landlord’s crops and his own potato patch.”

“A good system,” Granny said. “The way the old Irish lived.”

Owen Mulloy nodded. “My father and his father and his father—seven generations of Mulloys did the dividing and shuffling for the whole community. Great crops from these fields then. Ro-ta-tion—change a field from oats to barley to potatoes to pasture. Saving the soil. And always a bit for a son or daughter who wanted to marry and start a family. But now the Scoundrel Pykes have sent agents around to make us stripe the fields, line them up. Every man separate, all tenants at will, easy to evict, pitting tenant against tenant, because who wants to be stuck with the bad land?” Owen said. “They want to force us to break up the clachán, put each cottage in the middle of a field, English style. But who wants to walk a long way over dark fields for a night of music or storytelling at a neighbor’s fire? I know a fellow named Francy Coyle out near Shantallow. His landlord set him up in a big square of land, no rent for two years and a cottage in the center. The idea was he’d work harder with no neighbors to chat with. An experiment. Francy couldn’t stick the i-so-la-tion. His Maggie got so lonely, Francy had to hire a serving maid so she’d have someone to talk to.”

We laughed at that, and Owen Mulloy said that one good thing about agents for the Scoundrel Pykes—they never stayed long.

“We outlast them.”

A lovely evening—the light softening, the smell of meadow grass, fuchsia, and whitethorn. I looked up at the sky—pink, reflecting the sun going down beyond Galway Bay below us.

I noticed a group of fields above us, rolling down from a small boreen. Wild-looking, no crops growing on them. “Those are some sad-looking fields, Mr. Mulloy,” I said.

“Askeeboy, you call them. They give our townland its name.”

“Askeeboy—yellow water,” said Granny. “Marshy.”

“You’re right, missus. Muck and mire. On my lease and the wettest fields for five townlands. Old Major Pyke’s kiss-my-foot-how-are-you agent thinks I should find some man foolish enough to take on those fields. In the old way, there’d be a use found for them, in rotation. But not now. Better to let them lie fallow—less rent to pay.”

“Must be a great view up there,” I said.

“There is that. Galway Bay in all its glory. You can see the sun set into the water in winter. Beautiful in every season.”

“Shall we go up and look?” Michael asked.

“Too much of a climb for me,” said Granny.

“You two go,” said Owen Mulloy. “Mrs. Keeley and I can enjoy a bit of a natter.”

“Granny. Call me Granny, Mr. Mulloy.”

“And I’m Oweny to you, as I was to my own mother, God rest her.”