The Woman from Kerry (3 page)

The journey from Ardtur to Casheltown was no great distance, but the heavily laden cart and the reluctant movement of the cow made progress slow. Bent forward against the scudding hail, they said not a word to each other but tramped along the rough, potholed track, eyes downcast, knowing that when they turned towards the next random gathering of cabins there would be some relief from the particles of ice that stung the face, caught in the hair and clung to their worn and shabby clothes.

As suddenly as it had come upon them, the squall passed. Through a gap in the cloud, the sun poured golden rays around them and they were dazzled by bright beams reflecting back from the skim of hailstones that lay as thick as a light fall of snow.

‘Thanks be to God,’ said Hannah, lifting her head and straightening her hunched shoulders. She wiped the moisture from her face and smiled as the bitter chill passed away, the golden light streaming
down from a widening patch of blue sky adding a touch of warmth to the evening air. She turned to the younger of the two boys.

‘Michael dear, run away on up to Daniel McGee and tell him we’re coming. If the door is maybe shut and barred, knock very softly and call his name.’

She tapped her long fingers on the wooden frame of the cart. Rose wondered if she was tapping out the beginning of a song.

Michael looked up at her, his face still damp from the melted sleet and solemnly repeated the rhythm on the rim of the cart. Rose knew he’d got it right, even before her mother smiled.

‘Good boy, yourself,’ Hannah said, as Michael took to his heels, pleased to be given a task after all the long hours of waiting.

Daniel McGee’s door was open by the time they arrived. Born in the 1780s and blind from birth, he stood waiting for them, greeted each of them by name, though only Hannah stepped forward to press his hand, for he was uneasy when people came too close to him. He always said he could ‘see’ people better if they were further away.

‘You’ve none of you taken harm?’ he said abruptly, when he had studied each one of them. ‘Are we to have one more night?’ he went on, addressing Patrick McGinley, who stood by the donkey’s head wondering what to do next.

‘Aye Daniel, we are. Sure haven’t Adair’s fine,
strong men worked hard and long the day. Won’t the factor want to see they’ve good food and rest against the work of the morrow?’

He spoke bitterly as he took the sleeping baby from the cart and put him in Hannah’s arms. Then he picked up Rose, swung her into the air, twirled her round his head till she laughed with glee and set her gently down again on her own two feet.

A look of desolation passed over the old man’s face at the sound. Wherever he ended his days, and those days might be few enough, Hannah thought, he’d never again hear the laughter of children in the valley where he’d been a child himself.

‘Come in, Hannah, be ye welcome as ye always are. I’ve little to offer, but what I have is yours.’

Daniel McGee’s house was about the same size as theirs had been, but there was no division to make a bedroom, so the single room seemed much larger than their own, its roof much higher, for it was raised in better times. Rose stared at the smoke-blackened sods that lay under the thatch. On the pale, silver-grey wood of the lowest laths St Bridget’s crosses had been nailed up each year on her special day. Some were woven from rushes. Some carved from the whitened tree stumps dug up with turf from the bog. A few were just pieces of sharpened stick bound together with a piece of rag. She began to count them softly to herself as her brothers brought the bundles from the cart.

‘Can I hold the child, Hannah?’

Rose was amazed when her mother lowered Samuel into his arms without a moment’s hesitation. He sat rocking him gently and crooning to him while Hannah and Mary made up the tiny fire with turf from the cart and put water to boil for the potatoes they’d brought with them. Samuel opened his eyes, sneezed and then lay still, his arms waving gently, his large dark eyes attempting to focus on the face of the unshaven figure who looked down at him focused but unseeing.

By the time they’d eaten, the sun had dropped far behind the ridge of the mountain. Inside the big room it was shadowy, the only light the pale oblong where the door still stood open. Every so often, even that source of light was dimmed as another man or woman slipped through to join the growing company.

‘Come away in and let ye be easy. There’s no one but old friends among us tonight,’ Daniel called out firmly. He greeted each of his visitors by name before they’d even spoken.

He’d insisted Hannah sit in the wooden armchair that faced his own across the flags of the hearth. Beside it, he’d placed a low stool for Rose. Here she sat, her back resting against her mother’s legs, watching the silent figures settle themselves around the room.

Behind Hannah, Mary shared a bench with her father and brothers, but many of the people who arrived had no place to sit. They dropped down on the floor or stood leaning their backs against the walls. For what seemed a long time to Rose, no one spoke in the crowded room and no one came. Then two men carrying a wooden bench slipped into the back of the room and seated themselves. As if that were the signal he’d been waiting for, Daniel cleared his throat and began to tell a story.

It was a familiar tale of heroes she’d heard many a night, listening behind the bed curtains when she was supposed to be asleep. What was new to her was Daniel’s way of telling it. There were long and elaborate descriptions of places and people, clothes and weapons, castles and great houses, she’d never heard before. Sometimes the hero would pause and break into verse, praising his friends and drinking companions, cursing his enemies, celebrating the beauty of a woman or the paces of a fine horse.

Often Daniel would pause and ask a question, as if to be sure he had their full attention. At critical points in his tale, he would ask his listeners to express their feelings. ‘Ah bad luck to him,’ they would chorus, if Daniel had spoken of treachery. ‘God give you joy,’ they’d cry, as ill-used lovers ran off together to the shelter of the mountainside.

Daniel spoke in Irish, for he’d never left the valley and had no Scotch at all, but there were many words and phrases Rose had never heard before. At first she didn’t understand them, but as they were repeated, over and over again, slowly the meaning came to her. She wondered what her mother was making of them. For over half her lifetime, Hannah had spoken everyday Irish to her husband and her neighbours, her own Scots-English to her children. If asked, though, she was sure to insist she had little Irish.

Rose noticed she’d not joined in the responses and cries of encouragement. She wanted to look up at her and see if she could work out why she was so silent, but she knew she must move only very slowly and gradually, for there was no greater discourtesy to the teller of a tale than a fidget. Even if you got a cramp in your leg or wanted to scratch your back, you must put up with it till there was a break in the story.

When finally, during a burst of applause, she was able to turn towards her mother, Rose was quite taken aback, frightened even by what she saw, for suddenly she looked so old, her face pale and drawn, the wisps of grey hair usually drawn back into the still-fair tresses of her thick hair, straggling down on each side of her immobile face. Her eyes seemed quite dead and lifeless, though they glittered with moisture, her fingers locked tightly on her lap
the knuckles poking out, white and angular, from the hands Rose so often admired for their softness.

A little later, the story ended. Cheers and handclaps greeted the triumph of the hero. There were cries of ‘Good man, yerself. Well told, God bless you,’ directed towards Daniel. Rose looked up at her mother again, saw her unclasp her hands and applaud with the others. At the very same moment, two large tears dropped silently onto the dark fabric of her skirt.

Daniel drew breath, the spell of the story broken. The forgetfulness it brought ended with it. The dark figures moved uneasily and took up again the burden that had haunted them for weeks and the fears became a reality this very morning with the news of the first evictions.

To Rose’s surprise, the voices fell quiet again and a sense of waiting returned. She wondered if Daniel would tell another story or whether he would call on someone to sing or play, though she’d seen no sign of anyone bringing an instrument.

‘Dear friends,’ Daniel began, stretching out his stiff and twisted hands as if to embrace them all. ‘I know what’s in yer hearts and minds. I feel it all around me. And yet in the midst of this great anxiety and fear, I feel something stir, a whisper on the air, as light as the perfume of the hawthorn in May and yet as wholesome as bread baking on a griddle.’

He paused and looked from face to face, though
the soft glow from the orange embers would have been little enough for a sighted man to see by.

‘There is something in this room that would sustain ye on a hard road better perhaps than a full stomach. I feel it near me, though I cannot put words on it.’

He paused and then threw out his arm slowly, his fingers still incurved towards his own body as he leant across the hearth.

‘Hannah, good neighbour, is there something that speaks in your heart?’

For a long moment Rose thought her mother wasn’t going to say anything. Then, at last, she spoke.

‘Daniel, old friend, I have no skill at all in your art of storytelling and I have little Irish. Or so I thought, till I heard you speak tonight. You have brought memory to life for me and, though my mind is troubled as we all are, I will tell you what I have remembered.’

Rose had never noticed before how soft her voice was when she spoke Irish, but of course, she’d only heard her say everyday things to her father and neighbours. Perfectly at ease in herself now, she smiled and went on.

‘I make but one condition,’ she said, looking round the company, ‘That you judge me lightly on matters of date for which I have no head and on words I may not have, though this little one here
may well supply me,’ she added, dropping a hand lightly on Rose’s shoulder.

There were murmurs of assent and words of encouragement from every part of the room. Daniel himself nodded vigorously. ‘Good woman, good woman yourself. We’ll not fault you for what is no fault at all.’

Hannah drew breath and began, her tone light, her soft voice floating effortlessly over the silent company.

‘My great-grandfather was John Mackay of Scourie in Strathnaver and his wife Hannah, whose name I bear, was of the same proud clan, but she was from Tongue on the north coast, a wild and beautiful place I’ve heard tell, for I was born in the south, in Galloway.’

Rose was entranced. When her mother spoke of her great-grandfather, her voice was full of a quality she’d never heard before. ‘John Mackay of Scourie’, she’d said. But it sounded more like ‘Victoria, Queen of England.’

‘My grandfather would be as old as Daniel, had he lived,’ she went on. ‘A strong-built man, but not tall. He had red hair and was a doughty fighter. He followed his lord into many a battle in a war that lasted for seven long years. He fought in Germany and in Denmark and many places whose names I never knew. But although the life of the camp was meat and drink to him, he always came home
joyfully to his glen and to his wife and sons. He was wounded many times, but his lord gave him both money and land for his faithful service and he was content. His family flourished. They had plenty to eat and could always pay their rent.’

The silence had deepened. Hannah’s tone was as light and as steady as ever, but something in the way she held herself upright in her chair seemed to warn her listeners that this pleasing picture could not last.

‘I know little of the doings of great folk, those who live in castles and raise armies and fight wars against other countries. What I do know is that what little we hear of such people, their lives and loves, their friendships and enmities, are often more story than truth. Rumours flourish round a castle gate even more than at our own lane-ends. But what seems to have happened is that the great Chief of the Mackay made bad decisions or was cheated, so that he lost much of his land. The man that benefitted from his loss was from England, but he employed a Scotsman called Patrick Sellar to do his work for him, and an evil work it was for the land of Sutherland and, most of all, for the Mackays of Strathnaver.’

She paused, as if the mention of Patrick Sellar had been hard for her. Then she smiled.

‘When I was a child I would have been punished for speaking that name,’ she explained easily. ‘But
time moves on. He has been judged by God long since. He was a man, like Adair, that had no time for the little people. Perhaps he was cruel, as some said he was. Perhaps he didn’t know the hurt and harm his action would cause. But whatever the truth of it, his agents sent thousands of people from the lands of Strathnaver to dwell on the rocky shores of the north. Men and women were driven from their homes, settled far away with no land to grow their food and no knowledge of the sea to provide what sustenance there might be. Many died trying to fish in the wild, northern waters. For the old and the weak, the children and the sick there was no future. They died, just as many of our friends and our family died in the bad time.’

Rose thought of her sister, who would be older than Mary had she lived, and her big brother Sam, who had red hair like the baby. Were they all going to die too, now that Adair had put them out?’

She looked up at her mother and saw that she was looking round the room, her dark eyes meeting those of everyone there.

‘Yes, many died. That is the heartbreak that the great ones inflict upon such as ourselves. And it may come to that for some of us,’ she said sadly. ‘But not for all.’

She took a deep breath.

‘My father and his brother walked the length of Scotland on burn water and berries from the
hedgerows and the scraps of bread kindness brought them. My father found work in Dumfries and then bought land. He worked hard. He had fifty acres before he sold his farm, for he had no son. My uncle earned his fare to Nova Scotia and settled among the Rosses from Skye. He traded with them and became rich. They’re both dead now, but while they lived they never forgot their family. It was not the hunger that took our Rose and Samuel from us,’ she added softly.