My Father's Footprints (24 page)

The present is actually a gift from my parents.

In retrospect, it may seem like the crowbar that derails my
Lawyer Train, but that was never on their minds. They don’t dislike the lawyer idea. Sure, it’s a little crass, but a touch
of crass doesn’t seem like a bad idea just now. The Romantics have been getting shelled, after all. Maybe it’s time somebody
was crass.

The present is practical.

It’s a blue, manual Smith Corona typewriter. My first.

I’m not going to go into grandiose comparisons, but you know when a thing is right for you. A paintbrush, a baseball bat,
a steering wheel, a rolling pin, a piano. The objects of our destiny talk directly to our hands.

That Smith Corona speaks to me. Tack tack tacktack tack-tacktack. Ding.

I will use it steadily for eight years. It will go to college with me and clatter under my fingers through long nights of
term papers.

But it has one thing to say to me, right away.

“You’re not going to be any goddamned lawyer.”

Ding.

Sarah Whitman Hooker Pie recommended with this chapter

The Green Bastard

T
he protagonist of the preflight safety-features film on Aer Lingus is a peculiar, digitally animated man. He has nondescript
red-and-blue clothes, short dark hair, a ball-shaped nose, and— this is disturbing—no mouth. Blank space where the oral aperture
ought to be.

He does not speak, but even so the safety film seems to mock his mouthlessness. He holds up the tubes on the life vest, tubes
into which one blows air. How is he going to do this? The oxygen mask drops down, and the narrator says one must place it
over one’s nose and mouth. What mouth? Even when we are informed that this is a nonsmoking flight, the safety man is holding
a cigarette and lighter.

“He has no mouth!” I say to the screen. “What was that for? To save money?”

Safety Man moves with great deliberation, a kind of robotic t’ai chi, in which motion never speeds or slows, in which the
natural herks and jerks of the human body are cooled out. The animators have not solved the basic problem: Natural motion
is imperfect.

Safety Man is also oblivious to the Sartrean condition in which he finds himself. Occasionally the frame pulls back to show
him sitting amid rows and rows of empty seats. Safety Man is the only passenger on his flight. He doesn’t seem worried.

I am traveling to Ireland in April 2001. The flights do, in fact, tend to be uncrowded because Americans know, dimly, that
there is (or may be) foot-and-mouth disease in Ireland and that this is either the same as or quite different from mad cow
disease and that one or the other can kill you. They picture themselves placed on a pyre of burning carcasses, in a recently
purchased Aran wool sweater. They stay home.

I’m going to Ireland, which, I admit, is a pretty hopeless place to look for my father, inasmuch as he never set foot on its
soil. Still, as this book swims backward through time, I feel it dragging me back to the place we came from and the time we
decided to leave. To Ireland, in 1855, when there were fairies and giants and banshees—in other words, when the contents of
my father’s mind were real things afoot in the world.

I stay in the village of Mountnugent, about eighty miles northeast of Dublin. Mountnugent is tiny, not much more than a bridge
and a pub and a lake called Lough Sheelin and a few hundred good souls, mostly farmers. The farmland around here is some of
the best and richest in Ireland—which has caused people, over the centuries, to do fairly horrible things to one another in
order to get it.

I have picked it because of some marriage and baptismal records that show a Thomas McEnroe marrying a Mary Coyle in 1834 and
having a series of children. Thomas was my great-great-grandfather. But I am unprepared for the first sight I see as I drive
into town. It’s a little pub called the Bridge Inn, and etched on the smoked glass of the side door is “McEnroe’s.”

For some reason I am drawn to a place a few miles away called Ross Castle, a severe sixteenth-century stone phallus encircled
by a wall with slots for firing crossbows at one’s enemies. The inside has been renovated for guests. I have a room here.
I say “here,” because I’m sitting in the tower right now, writing this on a laptop. The children of innkeepers Sam and Benita
are milling around me, asking questions about the machine. The oldest of the kids, Mark, nine, is reading this over my shoulder.

At bedtime, however, they’re back at their farm, and I’m in the castle, in the room at the top of the tower, alone in the
green night.

The castle belonged for a time to the notorious “Black Baron” Nugent “whose power could wither and whose word was fate,” according
to the local histories, and who made the castle “a licensed haunt for perpetrating crimes.” The local histories do
not come right out and say it, but they manage to imply that the B. B. availed himself of all the perquisites of rank, including
having his vassals delivered up to him for sexual depredations. He also seems to have been fond of dispatching them. There
was a “Lug an Crochaire” (Hangman’s Hollow) near the castle and down the lane is a quarry that, when men began working it,
turned out to be full of bones and skulls.

Near the quarry are, supposedly, the graves of Orwin and Sebana. Sebana was a Nugent. Orwin was an O’Reilly. The O’Reillys
had a castle across the lough. This gets complicated because of local politics, but the Nugents were Anglo-Normans, the kind
of people who got land granted to them by the Crown. The O’Reillys were Celts, more indigenous, with quite a lot of land “beyond
the pale,” which means outside the enclosed areas that the English types cared about, which is how “beyond the pale” came
to mean what it now means—so far out that nobody respectable would care about it.

The O’Reillys would have managed to cut a deal with the Crown. As one of the townspeople tells me: “The local leaders would
have wipes and wipes of land, and they’d say to the Crown, ‘Look, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll fight for you in your wars.
But I want to be the boss of my own kingdom.’”

In this way, bosses inside the pale and outside it could coexist, uneasily, for centuries.

The law, for hundreds of years, forbade intermarriage between your Celts and your Anglo-Normans. You can see where this is
headed. Orwin, the native-grown Celt, and Sebana, the daughter of the occupying power, fall in love. Legend has it that Orwin
tries to get his beloved out of Ross Castle and elope by boat. They drown. It’s much better as a ballad. Anyway, the ghosts
of one or both of them are thought to haunt the castle, but I am the only guest and not so much as a single rattling chain
or mournful sigh do I hear.

There is also—I’m not kidding—“a fairy pass” between the
“hillock and the ringfort.” I have to go about twenty miles north to a research center in Cavan to find out there are fairies
twenty yards from my front door. Fairy activities are not heavily advertised anymore, especially in the “new Ireland,” which
is way too techy, too IT-savvy, to have any truck with fairies. Here is a dissonance that is almost Japanese, almost Zen,
in its delicacy: Outside the walls that ring the castle are black and white cows. Inside the walls, next to this sixteenth-century
hard-on of stone, sitting in the driveway, just as I write this, are two black-and-white faux-cow boxes from a Gateway computer
that Sam and Benita have just unpacked. If you threw those boxes over the wall, you might hit a fairy as it moved along the
pass. The “trooping fairies” use this particular right-of-way to go to and fro in their “macra shee,” their cavalcade, and
the whole idea is that if you build your house in their path, the fairies will get mad and beset you with all kinds of misery.
At night I go out and stand near the pass. There are shooting stars in the sky and flickerings of borealic light on the distant
horizon but nothing you could call a fairy.

The fairies are still there, but the Irish refuse to see them. Safety Man, computer guided and demouthed to silence blarney,
is the New Elf, their preferred type of mythological being now.

All of the above shows why it’s almost cheating to contemplate and write about your past in Ireland. There’s so much goddamned
atmosphere per square inch, the ground is heaving with it. All of the above—bone quarry, fairy pass, doomed lovers, hangman’s
hollow—is crammed into an area of maybe twenty acres. And I haven’t even mentioned Miles O’Reilly, “The Slasher,” who spent
the last night of his life in the castle (apparently when the Nugents and O’Reillys were getting along better) before going
down to the bridge at Finnea and doing a lot of slashing, holding off the enemy (Scots, I believe) until he himself died amid
the heaped up bodies of his foes. He has his own ballad, too.

Nor have I mentioned Mag Slecht, the “Plain of Adoration,” a site in the county where the pagan, pre-Patrick Irish worshiped
a foul god, a towering stone idol named Cromm Cruaich. The ancient Cavanians engaged in a form of human sacrifice that makes
the Aztecs look like a Bernie Siegel support group.

Here is a bit from a historically accurate poem, author unknown:

He was their god,

The withered Cromm with many mists…

To him without glory

They would kill their piteous, wretched offspring

With much wailing and peril

To pour the blood around Cromm Cruaich.

Milk and corn

They would ask of him speedily

In return for one-third of their healthy issue.

Great was the horror and scare of him.

You think
you
have issues with your parents.

Some of these are not exactly the feel-good stories of the summer, but if you can’t get interested in your own past in a place
like this, you’re just plain not trying.

Where is my past? After a few days here, it sinks in that the McEnroes were probably not players. We were vassals, victims,
crossbow fodder. You five guys run across the face of that drum-lin and draw their fire. McEnroe, Plunkett, Briody, Moylan,
O’Leary. Off with you, then. Good luck, lads, and Godspeed.

The McEnroes were laborers. They didn’t own land. They didn’t command troops. No one wrote ballads about their heroic, doomed
loves. They probably got hanged and raped by the Black Baron; but most of the time they lacked even the epic
qualities of victimhood. Most of the time they probably wobbled, like a unicyclist on a wire, between starvation and subsistence.

“They may have had other qualities, good qualities, the kinds of qualities that just don’t show up in the histories,” I say
out loud in the car. I am jouncing down a narrow lane in a rented Nissan, a boxy little thing the size of a large bathtub.
To an onlooker I would seem to be alone, but there’s a lesser session of the Court of Pie Powder meeting in the front seat.
The lanes are often spooky even by daylight. Swirling, brambly vegetation grows right up to the edges and forms walls on both
sides, and the roadbed sits low, so that you seem to be running down a chute into fairyland.