The Year of the French (79 page)

We were speaking in the long evening, the air clean after a brief shower. Soft light fell upon my poor bruised books. Despite my own sharp anxieties, I could not withhold sympathy from this perplexed young man, in whom a most evident goodness of heart warred against less worthy resentments and fears. He sat with his legs spread apart and rough farmer’s hands cupping his knees. From the window I could look beyond the mean street towards the sullen Atlantic, which had brought to us this cargo of ruin and murder. Rebel and loyalist alike, we were locked within a common misery.

With such delicacy and tact as I could muster, I pressed home to him the desperateness of his situation, but he himself knew it well.

“We have heard no word of the French,” he said, “but ’tis plain that the country has not risen up. There is scant hope for us unless the French send their second fleet, and for that they may have need of Killala. What has me puzzled is why the English have not moved against us. What have we to defend ourselves with but pikes and a few hundred muskets and three cannon that we don’t know how to work properly. That and a market house full of yeomen.”

It was a moment before I took the meaning of his words and then my expression must have spoken for me.

“Oh, to be sure,” he said. “I will not let O’Kane be butchering the loyalists of Killala while I can use them to bargain with.”

Being sorely afflicted by these words, I knew not what reply to make, and looked for inspiration to window, to mirror, to books.

“I will so,” he repeated, speaking, I felt, as much to himself as to me. “I will so.”

“I will not believe what I have heard you say, Captain O’Donnell. You would never give over yourself or your people to the slaughter of unarmed men.”

He jerked his head contemptuously towards the market house. “One of these days I may have to save my own neck and the necks of the fellows with me. And you may depend upon it that I will make use of that crowd. They are the ones who have tyrannised over us for a hundred years and held down our necks beneath their boots.”

“That is nonsense,” I said, “and well you know it. There are no landlords there save poor Cooper with his mortgages. They are hucksters. Coopers and carpenters. A miller. A few men with farms smaller than your own. They do not differ from you at all, save that you are Papist and they Protestant.”

“ ’Tis amazing,” he said, “how little you know of this country, Your Reverence.” And with this his mood brightened, in the mercurial manner of his race. “Sure it need never come to that. Did we not both see a strong army marching out with cannon and soldiers from France? They drove the English headlong from Castlebar, stumbling over each other in their haste to escape.”

“Do you believe,” I asked him, “that the British government will permit Ireland to be overrun? You are a man of good judgement, Captain O’Donnell. I implore you to make use of it,”

“Ach,” he said, “what use is there in talk? I put my plough to the furrow and I cannot turn back. How often used I to sit in my own house and listen to Owen MacCarthy saying his poems about the ships that would come from France and the deliverance of the Gael. The ships have come right enough, and see where they have left us.”

“You might have found better entertainment for yourself than the words of a tavern bard.”

“Tavern bard, is it?” he said fiercely. “ ’Tis little you know about us, or have ever troubled yourselves to learn.” He might for that moment have been the abominable O’Kane, but his language, unlike O’Kane’s, displayed no anger towards me. It was as though he hated history itself. “Our life has been a house with the door bolted and the shutters fastened tight.”

And saying this, he left me without a word of farewell, and I was once more alone with my room of books, which now seemed to me more precious than ever before.

In such a precarious manner we lived our lives. Upon rare occasions, word would reach us from the world which stretched beyond Ballina, brought by some pedlar or wandering fellow who had drifted through the British lines. Each had his sack of wild tales gathered in tavern or crossroads. From such tales it was possible for the credulous to accept that the rebels, a mighty host, with the French mere auxiliaries who worked the great-mouthed cannon, had swept across Connaught, gaining victory after victory, and then had vanished, perhaps into Ulster, perhaps into the midlands. These fables were made much of in the taverns of Killala, and each such messenger was applauded and drink poured down his gullet. We loyalists set but slight store by such braggart claims, and yet it was most unpleasant to hear them made and to witness the scenes of drunkenness which followed upon them.

But one afternoon in early September, a fellow of a different sort appeared, a prophecy man called Anthony Duignan, a middle-aged scarecrow with an enormous, ugly-coloured wen, who spoke in both English and Irish, moving from one to the other with scant regard for the needs of his auditors. I cannot recall whether, when enumerating the types of Ireland’s floating population, I made mention of prophecy men. Like pipers, fiddlers, poets, tinkers, dancing masters, they drift from village to village. As their name implies, they deal in prophecies, mixed with storytelling and a bit of simple magic, and are regarded by the country people as odd fellows indeed, unreliable and prevaricating, and yet gifted with occult and preternatural power. They could only flourish, I regret to say, among a primitive and credulous people, whose minds have already been weakened by the ceremonies and mumbo jumbo of the Papist creed.

I stood by the window looking down at him, and at the mass of men and women who gathered around him. A light rain was falling and all the world seemed grey—buildings, road, sky, and air itself. But his voice, a melodious chant, was a thread of bright, invisible colour. He had seized like a magpie upon old rumours, snatches of song, faded prophecies, and had stitched them to the soiled and frayed fabric of Gaelic fable, that tissue of incomprehensible wonders. The present, the future, and the fabulous past were all one to him, and he was beside himself with excitement, as though he had wandered into one of the grotesque epics of his race. The mob listened to him at times with laughter, poking each other in the ribs and once shoving him with good-natured contempt against the wall of my residence. But at other times they seemed beneath his spell, listening in slack-jawed wonder. But whether they scoffed or wondered, they kept him well supplied with malt liquor, which of course made him more loquacious and which he drank until it dribbled down his unshaven chin. Looking down into his mild, mad eyes, watching his lips fumble for words, I believed that I had been pitched backward into an abysm of time, a dark world which my own ancestors had abandoned centuries before.

“Mad Duignan,” O’Donnell said as he stood beside me at the window.

“If he is mad, why listen to him?” I asked. “A man like that should be chased from the town as you would chase a beggar.”

“He is on to the black pig again,” he said. “He was at that two nights ago in Ballycastle and he had the tavern roaring with terror and excitement.”

“Black pig indeed,” I said. Nothing now surprised me.

“The prophecy men have been giving out about it for as long as I can remember,” O’Donnell said. “It was a terrible magical creature that came raging across Ulster rooting up a great ditch, and at last it disappeared.”

Mad, it occurred to me, was too gentle a term. A man stood talking about supernatural swine and other men stood listening to him. O’Donnell listened with a superior smile, but his eyes revealed that a corner of his mind attended the swirling words.

“In the Valley of the Black Pig Ireland will be lost and won,” O’Donnell said. “It is a valley somewhere in Ulster, but no one knows where. Dead heroes will rise up out of the earth.” His heavy shoulders gave a slight shudder which he sought to suppress.

Duignan was speaking in Irish now, to the relief of his listeners. They had fallen silent.

“He has it all confused in his mind with what is happening now,” O’Donnell said. “That is how those fellows work upon simple people. Would you look at them standing there with their gobs hanging open? He knows how to play upon them. By God, we are a simple people. He says that a terrible battle has been fought at the place of the pig and the ground is dyed red with the blood of the people. Ballinamuck, that is, in Irish. The place of the Pig.”

The word now bristled with intelligibility in the fool’s torrent of Irish. It came again and again—Ballinamuck—Ballinamuck.

“Is that in Ulster?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There must be a score of places with that name.”

One of the men seized Duignan by the shoulder and shouted at him and Duignan shouted back.

O’Donnell laughed. “The clever rogue. They want to know if the battle was won, and Duignan says he doesn’t know. What he knows came to him . . . in . . .” He hesitated for a word.

“In a dream?”

“A dream or a vision. Something like that.” O’Donnell drew the drapery across the window. “There will be a battle fought somewhere,” he said, “and that fellow will be able to turn it to account. They will keep him in drink for weeks.”

In this extraordinary and inexplicable manner the news first came to us of the battle at Ballinamuck. I have cudgelled my brain to recall the exact date, for I reason thusly: Somewhere to the south, Duignan had learned of the battle, and cleverly stitched it to the rambling old tale of the black pig. That tale is, as I have learned, a very old one, being part of the body of Fenian lore that stretches back into the dark ages. And yet Ballinamuck is but a hamlet, and so for weeks afterwards it was to be spoken of throughout Ireland as the battle of Longford. And I have also a strange, persistent thought that Duignan came to Killala and spoke outside my window before ever that battle had been fought. This surely cannot have been the case, and I regret that I did not keep a journal during those days. My mind no doubt is playing tricks upon me, and small wonder, with the many grievous weights which had been placed upon it. Yet if these answers fail, what others remain? There are times even now when I look out from the same window upon a village street once again slumbering in its quiet decay and remember the mad prophecy man. In my imagination his voice breaks the silence . . . Ballinamuck . . . Ballinamuck. And I am touched by that icy hand which the occult can fasten upon us.

“He may have been a schoolmaster once, poor devil,” O’Donnell said. “He has the marks of learning upon him.”

Carrick, Mid-September

About seventy rebels survived the slaughter at Ballinamuck, but the numbers in prison increased each day as patrols brought suspects into Carrick. All were housed in a large grain warehouse at the river’s edge with circular barred windows set high against thieves. A few of the new arrivals were indeed rebels who had escaped across the bog or who had contrived to desert on the night march to Cloone. But the greater number had been seized upon suspicion or the accusations of loyalists—shebeen braggarts and faction fighters, a half-mad singer who nursed a smashed fiddle, a doctor and a grazier who held “advanced” notions, a squireen with a stock of quotations from Tom Paine and a Papist wife.

At first the squireen, Dominick Vesey of Carrick House, demanded legal counsel, but he gave that up and now sat dispirited with the doctor and the grazier, a small circle of gentility. What would be done with them or with the survivors of Ballinamuck, no one knew, neither the prisoners nor the Irish militiamen who guarded them. MacCarthy and Geraghty had been marked for return to Mayo when the army moved north, and this gave them a distinction which was almost enviable. The others hung in limbo, innocent and guilty alike. Innocence was battered like a twig in a rapid stream. All were conscious of being imprisoned, a stain accidental and deep.

It was an airy prison. A tall man, stretching to his full height, could look out upon the river and the wooded fields on the far shore. Often a gentleman rode down the path which followed the riverbank, hat cocked to one side, coattails falling away from the saddle. He could ride where he chose, that gentleman, to fairdays and market days, walk into a tavern and rap his shilling on the oak. As far distant as Chinamen, or black, barefoot Africans.

Geraghty’s arm had been shattered at Ballinamuck. MacCarthy ripped laths from the wall and bullied the doctor into setting it.

“I have had no traffic with treason,” Doctor Cumiskey said. “I would be a free man walking the streets of Carrick but for the spite of my neighbours.”

“You have traffic with it now,” MacCarthy said. “And you should keep your hand in at your profession. You never can tell.”

Geraghty sat patiently as Cumiskey wound strips of shirting around his arm.

“This fellow here,” Cumiskey said. “Does he have any English at all?”

“He does not. ’Tis as dark a mystery as the language of the ancient Egyptians.”

“I had the misfortune to serve as secretary in Leitrim for the Catholic Committee. An entirely lawful engagement. And after that I took no part in public affairs. I was never a member of the United Irishmen. I spoke out against them.”

“You’ve persuaded me,” MacCarthy said. “When you have the arm set, rap on the door and tell them to let you go.”

“It is a different matter for you. I have a wife and two little girls, one of them just learning to read. They came to my surgery and hammered on the door. I thought they had come for help with their own wounded.”

“I know,” MacCarthy said.

“What in the name of God have I in common with a wild omadhaun like this one, ravaging and killing out of the wastes of Mayo?”

“Think about that one. The answer may come to you.”

Cumiskey gave a practised tug to the cloth and then knotted it. “My God, Mr. MacCarthy, my home is in this very town. I could walk to it in ten minutes. It is as though Hell had opened up and dropped me into it.”

MacCarthy looked into Geraghty’s stolid face. “It will mend as good as new now,” he said in Irish. Geraghty shrugged. MacCarthy stood up. Bitter to be penned here and think of a daughter learning to read, her fingers moving over the letters, symbols that held wonder, mystery. The power of beauty was locked in them.