My Father's Footprints (25 page)

“Yes, they may have had skill sets that were not valued,” I tell the Court, and its officers chime in helpfully…

“You never hear about Miles the Nice.”

“John Who Ran Good Meetings.”

“Owen the Guy You Could Lean On.”

“Hugh Who Planted Peas the Same Way We All Did but Somehow His Were Just to Die For.”

This is what you have to face, sometimes. Not everybody can be storied. Not everybody turns up in the trilogy, stabbing a
troll with a sword.

Some of us stay home and hoe the bean rows while the big shots battle Sauron.

Sturm und Drang are, after all, the by-products of leisure time. I’ve been reading
The Lord of the Rings
out loud to Joey in the weeks preceding the trip—this is months before the release of the movie—and I’ve been getting a little
pissed off at the hobbits. It’s the first time I’ve read it in years, and it must have eluded me, in past readings, that
Frodo and Merry and Pippin are wealthy idlers. They’re all about fifty, and it is clear that none of them has ever had a job.
The fact that they live underground and have hairy feet and don’t wear shoes should not disguise the fact that they are essentially
British nobility. They put in one long
hard year of heroics and they’re set for life. The McEnroes of the Shire would have had some grinding agricultural job unremarked
by Tolkien—notwithstanding his tender enshrinement of the master-servant relationship. Rise up, Sam Gamgee! You have nothing
to lose but your trowel!

It’s a Friday evening in April. The air is cool and the sun is shedding golden light all over the farms. I pull into the driveway
of Father Francis X. O’Reilly, the parish priest in Mountnugent.

He comes to the door of his bungalow. He is dressed in a shirt and slacks and looks to be about fifty, with a spade-shaped
face and a thatch of gray hair and eyes that gleam with intelligence.

“I want to apologize for just barging in like this but…”

“Looking for your roots, eh?” he demands in an unfriendly voice.

“Um, yes.”

“Well go away and look for them somewhere else!” he barks and starts to slam the door.

I step away from the sill and turn toward the Nissan. He catches the door and flippers his hand at me. His face is tightening
up with a self-pleased grin.

“No, come in.” This has been an act.

“Sit down in there,” he says, pointing vaguely to several possible rooms as he goes off to finish a phone call. There is nowhere
to sit. The house appears to have been recently burglarized, perhaps several times, with each new ransack occurring before
the last one could be set right.

Everything sits in heaps. Books and books and papers and papers and packets of Silk Cut cigarettes and Cadbury chocolate bars
and… heaps. Heaps that appear to have been heaped on other heaps. Things waiting to be organized into heaps, stuck, as it
were, in the pre-heaping stage.

And Father Frank is a gem. He is funny and sad, words that describe eight-tenths of the men in Ireland, but Father Frank has
that look of a man who can savor the bittersweet ichor of the nation, let it loll on his tongue.

He digs through the old records written in spidery hand, and we do indeed find the birth notation of my great-grandfather
Patrick, in 1841. I tell him more of what I know (courtesy of assiduous genealogical researchers Kevin Curtis and Eileen Germano).
Pat was the son of Thomas McEnroe and Mary Coyle, married in 1834. The whole family—Thomas, Mary, and five kids—seems to have
emigrated in 1855 and wound up in New Britain, Connecticut, a midsize industrial city with a growing Irish enclave.

“I’m no help to you,” Father Frank says wearily.

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Look,” I say, “what I need from you is something different from what you’re used to being asked for. I already know all this
stuff, marriage certificates and baptismal records. I need you to close your eyes, and, based on what you know about this
area, tell me who you think they were and what they were doing.”

He smiles.

“There’s a chance my family evicted yours, you know.”

Father Frank is one of those O’Reillys, the slashers and drowners. He spent most of his adult life “away,” which in rural
Ireland could mean in Istanbul or half-a-county over. The McEnroes down at the pub explained to me that they were not from
Mountnugent at all. They were from Virginia. The way they said it you’d have thought they emigrated from Roanoke, but they
meant the town of Virginia, Ireland, which is about five miles from where we were standing.

Father Frank’s “away” included a stint in Oldcastle, which is about five miles from Mountnugent in a different direction.
When he came to Mountnugent, in the churchyard after his first
Sunday Mass, a woman saucily referred to him as a “blow-in” (a newcomer).

“Shut your mouth,” her husband growled. “The landlord’s back.”

I’m interested in landlords, I tell him.

The 1821 census shows a laborer named Henry McEnroe living in the Tonagh townland. A townland is the smallest geographical
unit in Ireland. There’s no American equivalent. It’s as if a neighborhood were drawn with exactitude on official maps.

Tonagh is a name meaning “quagmire,” and around Mountnugent it has a special significance. Mention it, and you’ll often see
a quick flicker of resentment in a person’s eyes, because of something that happened in 1847. The average Irish person is
not necessarily a scrupulous keeper of his or her own personal genealogy. The past is a world of dirt floors and pigs in the
house and chaos and hunger, not an orderly grid of lineage. But the Irish have a keen memory for outrage, and the evictions
at Tonagh are discussed as if they happened last week.

The Tonagh landlord turned seven hundred, maybe eight hundred people out of their houses, all in one day. This was accomplished
in a pointlessly brutal way, as we shall see—a manner calculated to visit hardship, sickness, and death upon the poor farmers.
Even in this country, pockmarked as it is by centuries of small hurt and titanic woe, the Tonagh story has a way of making
people suck in their breath.

“I’m wondering if the McEnroes might have been among the families who were evicted at Tonagh,” I tell Father Frank.

He looks at me, then looks away. It’s about 6:00
P.M.
, and the low, angling sun is streaking and smearing the land outside his rectory windows. His voice is gentle.

“It’s not necessarily true that they were evicted,” he says. “The presumption is that they left because of the famine.”

He has seen something that I cannot, at this moment, let myself see. That I am greedy for just a little nibble of this tragedy.
For my book? For myself ? For my sense of the McEnroes as a people who wander under evil stars? Who knows? I’m reconciled
to the idea that we did not famously hold any bridges or drown while escaping the family castle. But I’m hungry to find us
in the wretched hordes of Tonagh, so illtreated and direly beset that there is even a local ballad about our misery.

There was a family in one of his previous parishes, says Father Frank, who had roots in Mountnugent, and they knew that Frank’s
family constituted the end of the line of O’Reilly landlords. This family was prosperous, he says, but they were unclear about
their own history. One of them asked Father Frank to make inquiries.

Frank mentioned the name of this family to his own father who told him, “They took soup.”

During the famine, the Church of Ireland adopted the questionable strategy of offering food to the starving in return for
their promise to convert. Soup-takers were expected to be at Protestant services the first Sunday after they accepted the
food and to stay there ever after. Wherever possible, they were threatened with eviction if they reneged. Irish stubbornness
ensured that this program had very limited success. In a tiny town such as Mountnugent, only two or three families took soup,
but one was the family now inquiring of its roots. (Needless to say, they had found their way back to Catholicism.)

“Well, what am I going to do? Taking soup is a mark of shame. This is certainly news they don’t want to hear,” says Frank.

He let a little time slip by, but the man began to press him. They made a date to discuss what Frank had learned and just
as
the dreaded hour arrived, didn’t Frank get word that his own father had fallen and broken his hip, so the appointment was
broken, too, and the whole dodgy business was temporarily dodged!

More time slid away, and Frank dared to hope that the man had dropped the matter. The man invited Frank to a dinner at his
lovely new house on a lake. Frank arrived expecting a dinner party, you know, with various people from the parish attending.

No such thing. Frank arrived to find a full house of dinner guests, every last one of them—except Frank—from this man’s family.
He had invited to this dinner with Frank any person with two of the clan’s chromosomes. The jig was up.

Much food. Much wine. Frank was asked to stand and deliver the tidings. He had carefully ingested sufficient quantities of
the grape so that the Major Social Abhorrence Centers of his brain were in a kind of rolling blackout.

He stood. The clank of cutlery, the clink of crystal, the murmurs and mutters all stopped. He gazed around. “You took soup,”
he said finally.

“You know what?” Frank continues the story, “They pulled through it just fine. It turned out, I think, that they had kind
of suspected something of the sort.”

He lets the tale float over the heaps in the room. He lets its message sink in.

The past is not a good place to go digging for the story that you want. It’s a lane you walk down, unarmored, aware that almost
anything—wolf, hero, fairy, knave—could leap out of the brush at you.

Father Frank has an evening Mass to give in some other parish. I climb back in the Nissan, roll down the window.

“Take care, Father,” I tell him.

“I hate it when people say ‘take care.’ It drives me mad. And it’s Frank, by the way.” He launches into an explanation of
why he hates this pleasantry, and I don’t quite follow it. Because
it’s an admonition I guess, but one that’s hard to observe. In what sense is he supposed to take care? Is he supposed to watch
for pianos that have accidentally been tipped out of overflying airplanes or go a bit more slowly on slippery steps? What
made me think he was such a reckless person that he needed encouragement to take care? That’s the gist of his problem, it
seems.

I find myself drawn into the discussion.

“I had surgery to reattach my quadriceps tendon last year,” I began, “and I was gimping around in a leg brace. I noticed that
people would take leave of me by saying ‘get well.’ It seemed a little brisk, a little bossy, you know? Instead of wishing
me a gentle recovery, they were kind of telling me to heal myself, right away. ‘Get well.’ They don’t have time for this injury
thing. I blame it on computers.”

“That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about,” Frank agrees.

I’m ordinarily horrible at small talk, but for a moment I feel supremely Irish to be sitting in the driveway of a parish priest
talking to him about something completely pointless when at least one of us has somewhere pressing to go.