The Road to McCarthy (52 page)

In the top corner of the sheet, though, are the initials PP—the abbreviation for Point Puer, the island off Port Arthur where convicted children were sent. I remember its cliffs, “the traditional place of suicide,” and feel a terrible surge of shame at the comfort of my life, sitting here with a glass of wine leafing through these grim pages. For a moment I feel foolish; tens of thousands of people had these experiences, so what’s special about a handful of McCarthys to whom I can be connected only in the most remote and tenuous way? Then I realize that if it weren’t for the name, I would never have sought out these particular records. A name can connect us to people and places beyond our experience, and take us close to a specific, singular identity through which we can imagine a distant place and time. When I remember Port Arthur I’ll always imagine Timmy McCarthy arriving there, wondering how he might cope. Perhaps if he could just get hold of a needle and thread ….

I finish the wine, go to brush my teeth, and discover I have left my wash-bag behind in the last place I stayed. Or maybe the one before. I lost my trousers in Montana as well. Perhaps I should stay at home a bit more. Either that, or start traveling with an inventory. As I head for bed, I take a final glance at Timothy’s record.

“Concealing a fellow boy’s shoes—48 hours solitary on bread and water.”

Hard but fair, you see. You have to let kids know where they stand.

Seven hours’ solitary confinement later
, followed by coffee, bread, water, poached eggs, rashers and puddings both black and white, and I’m on the road for the last time. I know this particular stretch well by now, but I’m traveling it this time for reasons I hadn’t anticipated. I turn left at Glengarriff, and the Ireland of traffic jams and jacuzzis begins to feel like an elaborate hoax. The Beara Peninsula seems as wild and untamed as ever, though two or three times I spot brown tourist-industry signs proclaiming “The Ring of Beara,” a worrying indication that somebody in an office with a map and a tourism graph on the wall has targeted the coach-choked roads of the Ring of Kerry as a role model. I realize of course that people writing enthusiastic books about unspoiled coastlines and welcoming bars should bear in mind their responsibilities, and am therefore happy to report that substandard roads, impenetrable rain, lack of suitable accommodation and marauding packs of carnivorous wolves extinct for centuries in the rest of the country are all endemic here, and you’d do best to stay away. Book with the Celestials instead. They’re going to some amazing places. It’s just that she couldn’t remember what they were called.

“To be honest with you
, it’s an impossible task. If you had a date of birth, a father’s name, or especially a mother’s name, I might be able to help you. But as it is—well, I’m afraid you’d be believing what you want to believe. It is a wonderful photograph though.”

I’m sitting in the front room of a bungalow in a tiny, brightly painted village in Beara. The man talking to me is wearing a blue plaid shirt that I suspect he bought in Butte, Montana. John the Yank told me to come and see him next time I was in this part of the world. Riobard is a former teacher who has devoted many years of his life to tracing the genealogy of the peninsula, and has particular expertise in the fragmentation of families in the great exodus to America.

“Twenty thousand people lived here before the famine and the closure of the mines. There are little more than 4,000 now. Most went to America. Many were O’Sullivans and McCarthys. One of these families can have
more than forty branches. Parish records are full of errors, wrong dates, names misrecorded, births confused with christenings, funerals that never were. People went away, and were never heard of again. And this fella in Alaska”—he taps the photograph like a lawyer cross-examining a witness—“you say you don’t even know if he was Irish, or if his parents were?”

No, I tell him, but I figured with a name like that he wasn’t going to be from Budapest. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s been kind of him to give me his time. I’m sure he spends half his life besieged by the diasporic descendants of people who probably never existed in the first place, come back to the auld sod to play a little golf and trace their roots while the locals take their euros, and the piss. It’s not as if it’s going to change anyone’s life to know who a little town in Alaska was named after. It was just that—well, the name
and
the copper. It seemed too much of a coincidence.

“But when you phoned, I did a little work. I’ve come up with some possibilities.”

He passes me a slip of pink paper on which are written seven names. Well, one name actually, seven times. James McCarthy. At first glance it seems clear that the dates listed are not for the man I’m pursuing. The picture was taken in 1903, so I’m guessing the guy on it must have been born around 1870, give or take two or three years to allow for the hardships of life as a prospector. Riobard agrees. But there is one entry that might fit. “Born 1868. Eyeries parish. Emigrated. Butte, Montana.” The date is right, and he’s the only one with his occupation recorded. “Copper miner.” Copper. And the time frame is perfect: he could have grown up here, worked in Butte in the late 1880s and early 1890s, had breakfast every day in M&Ms, then gone off to Alaska as it started to open up, to take the opportunity to put his skills to good use. So what does Riobard think?

“I already told you. I think you’re believing what you want to believe.”

I drive out to Allihies, through the village, past the signs saying “Caution—Old Mineshaft,” and sit on the hilltop above the last of the stone and brick ruins that are all that remain of the mines, temples to copper on an island of saints. I try and imagine how it must have been when this empty mountainside, swaying today with wildflowers, was teeming with industrial
life; but I can’t. It hardly seems possible. So instead I turn my gaze on the Atlantic, a glacial shade of turquoise-meets-emerald where it pounds the cliffs, and think of the millions who traveled, or were sent, with nothing but hope. And I know what I must do. I will go across the mountain, to my favorite bar in the world, and raise a glass in their memory. Or two. Maybe I’ll have just the two.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pete McCar thy
was born to an Irish mother and an English father. He was a hugely popular British television personality. His critically acclaimed debut,
McCarthy’s Bar
, was an international bestseller, hitting #1 in Ireland, England, and Australia. He was the recent winner of the British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year Award and the Irish Post Award for Literature.
The Road to McCarthy
was also voted Travel Book of Year in the People’s Choice Awards.

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