The Year of the French (65 page)

“First it was Wexford,” Laverty said, his two hands cupped around the glass. “And then it was Antrim and then Mayo. Now it is Longford and perhaps Cavan as well.”

“Perhaps,” MacCarthy said. “We went along the length of the County Sligo, and there were some people who came out to us on the roads, young lads of little judgement, and spalpeens with nothing better to do now that the harvests are in. But there were many more who stood in their fields and watched us. ’Tis a pleasant life to stand in a tavern singing songs.”

“If there is a God in heaven at all,” Laverty said, “He must see that the people of the Gael are spilling out their blood.”

“He sees it right enough,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis there to be seen. I have seen it myself and I am sick of it. ’Tis safe in Munster that I would be at this moment.”

“I will tell you,” Laverty said. “I have not composed a poem in three years. I will never compose another poem.”

“You will indeed,” MacCarthy said quickly.

Laverty shook his head. “I thought at first it was the blindness. But sure many a fine poet has been blind. I don’t want to. The thing has gone out of me, whatever it was. The way a harper will feel his fingers stiffen. I can put words together, but they are like dead fishes slapped side by side. At night here I have all the time a man could want, and I say over my own poems, and a few of yours, and MacConmara’s, and one or two of O’Tuoma’s. All by myself, without even the tinker to hear me, I am O’Rahilly, I am Ferriter. They make a world around me. I feast upon colour and sound until I am filled. But I thank God for my good memory. I could no more make a poem now than I could shape the hull of a ship.”

“The power will return to you, never fear,” MacCarthy said.

But he looked with horror at the blind man. Sunken checks, parrot’s beak, filmed eyes closed off from the splendours of the created world, long, placid hand stroking the soiled neckcloth. For a moment he was grasped by the fear that Laverty had been struck down by an infection which lingered in the dead, dusty air. The long months between poems was a familiar misery, a sour, metallic taste in the soul. But not three years. Locked in with death, the tongue heavy, words mocking him with their shifting weights.

“It will not,” Laverty said. “But no matter.”

Never a man to take chances in his verse, hugging safe to the conventions, but a true poet for all that. What had his gift become, a rusted lock with the key thrown away. MacCarthy poured a heavy measure of whiskey upon the image.

“You had me bested from the start, Owen, and I never grudged it to you. You had me bested and O’Tuoma did and O’Moran and MacConmara. The way O’Sullivan had the lot of you bested.”

“Jesus, man, will you give me a chance? O’Sullivan has the work of his whole life to be judged upon.” If ever I hear that name again. “You make too much of O’Sullivan. You all do.”

The lips beneath the parrot’s beak broke into a grin. “O’Sullivan bests you, Owen. Every poet in Munster knows that. Sure what does it matter? To be trotting after Owen Ruagh O’Sullivan is no shame. We are all of us trotting after that lad.”

MacCarthy finished off his glass and poured himself another. “There is many a botched verse has O’Sullivan’s name to it, and others I have heard praised that could have been written by a half-dozen fellows. It’s always the great lads who are safely dead. In O’Sullivan’s day it was O’Rahilly who drew the praise. I remember that.”

“There you have put a name to it,” Laverty said, holding out his glass. “We are all of us at the latter end of things, Owen, swaggering around the pothouses of Cork and Kerry, showing off our verses to each other like schoolchildren. But the line will drift away from us. There will be no young fellows after us to sweat blood over the shaping of a line. The world will move away from us, and will leave us gasping like fish on the strand.”

“I declare to God, Martin, the loneliness of the County Leitrim has driven you mad. How could there not be poets? An ugly world it would be of dumb beasts in the field and harsh sunlight falling on the streets of mean villages. We are the tongues of Ireland, man. Drink up your drink in the name of Jesus and put your mind in order.”

By noonday sun a lout wandered village streets, simple-minded, his eyes vacant, slack, whitecoated tongue lolled upon his lip. The terrifying vision rose for MacCarthy behind Laverty’s bent back. For a poet to speak against poetry was blasphemy: he had been punished, blinded, smashed into silence.

“Listen,” he said. He leaned forward, rested his hands upon his knees, and recited Laverty’s famous aisling, the poem known from Macroom to Tralee. He spoke quietly, straining several times to recall the words. His voice filled the room. Ordered intricacies of sound banished the slovenly scene. Meadows sprang from his words, spring flowers, a stream flowed between smooth banks, orchard trees bore fruit, round and red. As he spoke tears welled into Laverty’s eyes, slipped past the obscuring film. He ended quietly, his words sinking to stillness. Memory held them in the dusty air.

“It came to me as breathing comes,” Laverty said at last. “A score of men, to my knowledge, have that poem by heart, and I made it in a single evening. Scarcely five lines in it that needed mending. I remember well when I made it, a bitter January night in Ballyvourney, with frost on the fields, and the hills black as rooks. It made itself. My God, Owen, I was so happy that night that I could not contain myself. I knew so well that it was a fine poem. With every verse I knew that.”

“Damned well you knew it,” MacCarthy said. “So let us have an end to your dark thoughts. A man would think the world was coming to an end.”

But he felt the chill of the Ballyvourney winter in the air around him, the cold that steals through cuffs and neckcloths, the frosty silence of a lifeless world. Shivering, he turned again to the jug. Long lines of men trudged along Lough Allen, heads bent. Implacable behind them, the redcoated horsemen, their faces blurred by hatred, unknowable. Unknown roads lay before him, villages of strangers awaited him. Misfortune had brought him to this sightless man, dweller in a dark world, a throat strangled to silence. Blithe in the fields of safety beyond Manor Hamilton, he had flung the pistol from him, had set out to find himself again upon hedgy roads. Now he was again imperilled. There would be only bad luck for him on this side of the Shannon. Laverty, sightless, crooked-spined, sat nursing his drink, his mind moving in the past, a young poet crazed with the power of creation.

MacCarthy stood up and walked to the door. Beyond the village, in the final light before darkness, the river glistened, net upon silver net. Quick-waning sunlight fell upon the square stones of the bridge. In the silence of the airless room, the ear of his imagination caught the quick-beating French drums, the heavy tread of the pikemen. A child ran out from a cabin across the road, barefoot, small face beneath a mat of brown hair. Beyond a small field, birds flew homewards, a shower of dark wings.

“You have marched with the army of the Gael.” Laverty’s voice came to him from the darkened room, and the conventional, grandiloquent phrase jarred him. O’Donnell’s clansmen, Sarsfield’s cavalry: the army of the Gael. The lime white palaces set afire by Tyrone, array of ancient battle. Aughrim, Limerick, Kinsale—a poet’s litany. Not cowherds with scythes, scrambling awkwardly to die in pastures, spalpeens giggling and sobbing, blundering into eternity.

“The army of the Gael crossing over Drumshanbo bridge,” Laverty said. “You could make a poem of that.”

“I make you a present of the subject,” MacCarthy said. A proper poem for a blind man, who would not see the scarecrows, frieze faded by rain and weather, the baffled, frightened faces.

“You ran off from them,” Laverty said. His voice whined with accusation.

“Sure ’tis little you know of it,” MacCarthy said, resting his shoulder against the door. “ ’Tis a throng of country people from Mayo and Sligo, shoved this way and that by Frenchmen who don’t give a damn about them. The gibbets have been built for them.”

“Ach, ’tis all one. There is no luck in the country. What are we but a poor misfortunate people?”

“Jesus, but were you not the foolish man to abandon poetry,” MacCarthy said. “You have the stuff for a hundred weepy lamentations in you.”

“There is no call for you to take amiss everything I say. I spoke the truth. We were destroyed at Aughrim and at Limerick. The old stock sailed away from us after Limerick, and since then we have been sheep without a shepherd. A black, bitter century it has been, and there is no poem can put a shine on it.”

“True enough,” MacCarthy said. “The whiskey in me was speaking.”

The silent street of cabins and low shops was no different from the towns of his boyhood. Youth had magnified them, sent their names spinning like golden guineas across the lines of his verse. Tralee, Macroom, Kilmallock: what were they but dirty clusters of cabins, pothouses transformed into pillared palaces by whiskey and song? But the poetry was a potent magic, the bare feet of dancers moving across dirt floors, the sound of harp and violin. Alone, in the evening hour before nightfall, rising a crest of hill, a valley stretched before him, Aherlow, and Slievenaman in the distance. Shattered towers lay hidden behind hills, the delicate arches of ruined abbeys. A boy, barefoot, he had climbed their winding stairs. Winds whispered through smitten windows of a dead past.

They finished his jug, and then drank Laverty’s bottle. Thirsty, they walked through the village to Dunphy’s. Night had fallen. A clock in the trim, spare-spired Protestant church told him the time: nine O’clock. How far towards him had they travelled by now, drums and pikes and battered feet? Bent-backed, Laverty walked with a stick clutched in his right hand, stabbing the road. MacCarthy, drunk now, rested his back against the iron railings of the churchyard, and stretching out his arms above him seized their spikes.

“You are gloomy as an owl, Martin Laverty, but I am not. Oh, by Jesus I am not. I have my life before me to live.”

“You have your own two eyes to see the daylight with,” Laverty said.

Heavy-shouldered, MacCarthy held tight to the spikes and let his weight rest upon his arms.

“We are a fine pair to be washed up here in the County Leitrim. ’Tis a shabby place. Today I told a man that if the dogs and cats of Kerry knew about Leitrim they would come here to piss. They would come here to piss.”

He dropped his arms, and turned around to stare at the clock. Slender, gilt in moonlight, the hands of the clock formed a right angle. Protestant spires stretched across the kingdom, snug within their railings. Dowered by their own moon, they stood apart from ruined fortresses. Well-tended grass and polished gravestones shielded them from the mean cabins. English marched with the Protestant gravestones, mile by mile.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY. CONFIDENT THAT THE MERCY OF THE REDEEMER. DUTIFUL SON.
Language of order and power, tomorrow’s language. Somewhere along the road, past the village, would be the Big House, broad avenue of crushed stone, pillars by the entranceway, surmounted by stone eagles, hard of eye, beak, claw.

“What does the clock say?” Laverty asked.

“It is late,” MacCarthy said. “Time is running out.”

In Dunphy’s, the men were crowded around a stranger, a man from Granard. He was a fat, broad-shouldered man, a belt pulled tight against his bulging gut, and a pistol stuck in the belt.

“You would be fools not to believe me,” he said. “There is not a man from the countryside around Granard and Longford who is not in arms, and the men of Cavan are rising up. If there is one man there are five thousand.”

When his glass was empty, the tavernkeeper refilled it. He held it in his hand as he talked.

“ ’Tis the United Men who hold all the land between there and Mullingar. By God, you have never seen such a thing in your life. There have been yeomen killed and landlords killed. By Jesus, there are yeomen cowering in Mullingar and they don’t dare come out to meet us. We would slaughter them. We would cut them to tatters.”

Laverty rapped on the bar, and bought glasses for MacCarthy and himself. MacCarthy drank his off quickly, and bought a second. The room was close and sweaty. He steadied himself against the bar. Weariness tugged at him.

“By God, that is a wonderful thing,” one of the local men said. “First Mayo and now Longford. The people of the Gael are rising up.”

“It is wonderful that the people of Leitrim have not risen up as well,” the Granard man said. “It is wonderful that they are standing upon their own spittle in the taverns of Drumshanbo. Are you Irishmen at all?”

“ ’Tis a quiet place,” Dunphy said. “There have never been so much as Whiteboys in Drumshanbo.”

“Whiteboys, is it?” The Granard man hawked up a contemptuous gob. “Fellows slipping into pastures by night to hough cattle. The United Men are the boys for the task. ’Tis not a pasture that we have seized, but the whole of the County Longford.”

“By God, that is wonderful,” the local man said again. “You are a United Man yourself, are you?”

“Do you not know what this is?” the Granard man asked, and put his hand on the butt of his pistol. “ ’Tis a captain of the United Men I am. Hans Dennistoun made a captain of me.”

“You will have another glass on the strength of that,” Dunphy said, and held a bottle to his glass.

“I will,” the Granard captain said affably.

“He will,” MacCarthy said to Laverty. “A most courteous man.”

“He is a large man by the sound of his voice,” Laverty said.

“A large man,” MacCarthy said. “A captain. He has a great murderous pistol the size of a cannon.”

The Drumshanbo men were staring at the pistol, as though the tumult of Longford had been brought into their tavern, hardened into metal. They would turn away from it, seek out each other’s eyes, and then their glances would steal back to it, furtively.

“They have the towns,” the Granard captain said. “They have Granard and Longford and they are sitting frightened within them, but we have all the sweet County Longford in which to roam.”

“There is one of you,” Dunphy said cautiously, “that has roamed as far as Drumshanbo.” It was a question, and it hung in the air.