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Father O’Brien was glad that these old songs survived in the West. Like storytelling, they formed an important part of the oral tradition of Ireland. Not that the Church had much time for the old ways, many of which were considered to be leftovers from the pagan days. But these songs were neither Christian nor pagan: they were songs of the lives and times of the people.
The priest’s thoughts were interrupted by the first notes of Ellen’s song, cutting through the absolute stillness the crowd had accorded her.
Oh, my fair-haired boy, no more I’ll see You walk the meadows green …
As always, when she sang, Ellen would close her eyes, and go deep within herself, particularly when singing a goltraí – a sad song – like this one was. She would think of Cáit, her mother, from whom she had learned the songs and the art. She would think of Ireland and the great misfortune of its people, and she would think of Michael, her great love.
‘Hope with the sadness of no hope – love with the lament of lost love,’ was how Mattie an Cheoil described her singing.
So the story and air of the fair-haired boy, loved and then lost, became merely a vehicle for Ellen’s own feelings. She revealed herself most when she sang. This somehow connected the singing with those same deep places of the heart in her audience. Every so often between verses, she opened her eyes and looked at Michael. His gaze remained transfixed on her throughout, as he struggled to understand the turmoil of emotions which her singing raised in him.
The young priest too stood marvelling at how true she was to the melody, not needing to embellish it just to show she could. Being true – that was the quality she had, this red-haired woman.
Ellen opened her eyes and looked at the crowd. In the background she caught sight of Roberteen – fair-haired Roberteen – hanging on her every word, the sorrow of unattainable love etched on his young face. For the briefest of moments their eyes met and she gave him the flicker of a smile. Then she closed her eyes again and continued to sing, drifting away into the depths of her song.
Your ship waits on the western shore,
To bear you o’er from me,
But wait I will e’en to heaven’s door,
My fair-haired boy to see.
She had scarcely let go of the last note before the crowd began to cry for more.
But the magic of the moment was short-lived.
‘What the devil is going on here?’ The belligerent voice of Sir Richard Pakenham cut through the applause. Accompanied by Beecham, his agent, and three constables, he rode into the centre of the crowd.
‘Lazy swine!’ he shouted at the revellers. ‘More interested in merrymaking and drinking than tending to my land. Blight is forecast – you should be on your knees praying!’
Mike Bhríd Mike tried to take advantage of the commotion to slip away with his jugs of poteen, but Pakenham spotted him. ‘Constables – seize that man!’ he ordered the Peelers. ‘I won’t have him selling that devil’s juice they call poteen to my tenants!’
Mike Bhríd Mike, his progress hampered by the two large jugs of illegal brew he was carrying, was no match for men on horseback. The constables quickly apprehended him.
Then Pakenham turned on the priest: ‘And you, Father, a man of the cloth, encouraging this wildness, this lawbreaking – what have you to say?’
Father O’Brien stepped forward. ‘These people have done no wrong. Nor are they savages to be ridden down and rounded up. They are people of God who have worked hard all week saving their crops from the blight so that they can pay the extortionate rents you exact from them. This is their innocent enjoyment – can you not leave them even that?’ Having been well capable of matching the most fearsome of the French professors in Maynooth, the young priest would not now be faced down by a Protestant landlord.
‘Popery and Pope-speak, that’s all you priests ever have so as to keep the people enslaved to a Church which takes their last few pennies after paying their lawful rents. Did not your own people rise up against the high tithes demanded by your Church to baptize, marry and bury them? Shame on you and your kind, Priest! Cromwell was right: “Hang them high, and hang them plenty!”’
At the name of Cromwell, a muttering arose from the crowd. Pakenham jerked his horse round. ‘Silence! And you there – music makers!’ he sneered at Michael and Mattie an Cheoil. ‘You call this caterwauling music? Neither form nor grace to it. I know you, O’Malley. Fine time to be fiddling! Mark me, if the rent’s not on time, I’ll have you and that fiddle of yours out on the road, and you can diddley-i-di-diddle-i to the moon and the stars all you like, then, with no roof over your head.
‘Now, Beecham, let’s see what else we’ve got here in this happy little gathering, besides a priest, a lawbreaker, and a pair of tuneless musicians. And, of course, the singer,’ he said, pulling his horse around in front of Ellen. ‘Beecham, is this the sweet thrush we heard, whose notes floated across the Mask to greet us as we rode here?’
Beecham’s reply was drowned out by the landlord’s command to Ellen: ‘Step forward, woman, till we see you.’ Ellen moved forward. The children gathered into her, afraid.
‘Ah, a thrush with fledglings,’ Pakenham continued, leaning forward in the saddle. ‘Methinks I know this red-crested thrush. What is your name, woman?’
‘Ellen O’Malley,’ she said, not proffering the usual ‘your Lordship’. This was not missed by Pakenham.
‘Ah! I see!’ he exclaimed, looking back to Michael and then turning once more to Beecham. ‘A fine little nest of songmakers we’re raising here, Beecham – don’t you think?’
Beecham muttered again, but this time a ‘yes, M’Lord’ could be distinguished.
‘Well, we’ll see what sort of music you lot make on empty bellies, and what jigs and reels you hop to when you present yourself to me over the next few months.
‘And you, Priest, stick to your popish spells and incantations, and don’t meddle in my affairs.’
The priest did not respond to the taunt as Pakenham kicked the stirrup into the flank of his mount, emphasizing the threat. The mare responded with a high whinny until he jerked her around again to face Ellen.
That one’s trouble, Pakenham thought to himself. There was a defiance about her and that husband of hers not found in the other wretches – except for the priest.
Ellen stood, never flinching before the horse which, goaded by Pakenham’s rough use of the bit, bridled in front of her. She could see Michael tensing himself, ready to jump in if insult or hand was laid on her.
Pakenham addressed her again: ‘You’ll sing for your supper yet, my red-haired songbird – mark my words!’
Ellen’s eyes never fell from his for a second. But for now she would keep her peace.
Eventually Pakenham broke the moment, calling over his shoulder: ‘Come, Beecham, let us away from here and back to Tourmakeady, to whatever modicum of civilization is to be found in this damned country. For now we will leave these scoundrels to their dancing, but they’ll dance all right: any riotous behaviour on my lands, and dance they will – at the end of a rope!’
Ellen watched as they rode off towards Tourmakeady. Mary and Katie were in tears at either side of her, frightened by the menacing attitude of both horse and rider. Patrick meanwhile had moved slightly in front of her, instinctively stepping into the role of protector.
Suddenly, a shout rang out from the retreating landlord. ‘The devil! I’ve been struck. There he is – up there! After him! I’ll have his hands off,’ they heard Pakenham order his escort, all the while holding a hand to the back of his head where the well-aimed missile had caught him.
A cheer went up from the crowd, but Ellen was concentrating on the drama unfolding on the road below them. A movement caught her eye and for a moment she had a clear view of Pakenham’s assailant. There, in the murky shadow of the mountain, was a figure clambering up where no horse could go. The figure stopped and turned to look once, not at its pursuers, but back towards the villagers. Back towards her.
Ellen saw a young face exhilarated by the chase, and by the revenge exacted for the insult to the red-haired woman. Then the face was gone, and Ellen knew that the fair-haired boy would escape his pursuers.
The following day Michael came running to her, down from Bóithrín a tSléibhe. ‘Ellen, the Church – Lord Leitrim has torched the thatch of it again! A curse on him, I’ll wager Pakenham put him up to it this time!’ he cried out.
‘You’d think he’d leave the House of God alone,’ Ellen replied. ‘That’s a few times he’s tried to burn it since Father O’Brien refused the keys to him.’
‘Well, the priest is right,’ Michael said. ‘Even if Leitrim owns the church, no man is God’s landlord. He can torch it now, but one day himself will feel the torch of hell for it. We’ll see how he’ll landlord it below there!’ And he laughed.
It was true, Ellen thought, the landlords owned everything, even your religion. And they tried to own the people, not only their little bit of land and the botháns and whatever they produced, but their bodies and minds, too.
4 (#ulink_4fd1f7ef-0ee6-57e2-b110-deaa0f956a22)
Ellen was in the middle of the morning lesson with the children when first they heard it. The shout seemed to come from faraway, and Ellen, thinking it was the men in the fields calling to one another, paid no heed but carried on with her story. She was busy explaining to a very attentive trio of pupils how the potato first came to Ireland, why it seemed to have overrun the whole land, and as a result why this blight was so serious. It had been Mary who had raised the question. Indeed, the topic for today’s lesson was hardly surprising, given that so much talk recently, from church to crossroads, was about the blight.
The children listened enthralled as Ellen told them about the jungles of South America and the great river ‘longer than all of Ireland’. She told them of the Indian tribes who first grew the potato in the mountains, ‘long before the time of the infant Jesus’. Then she told them of the men who sailed across the world in great ships from Spain – sailed for a whole year to reach the lands of the Indian tribes, and how those men took the mountains and the great river from the Indians, and put their own names on them.
‘But it was not the Spaniards who first brought the potato to Ireland,’ she told them. ‘It was an Englishman called Sir Walter Raleigh. He would sail to all the far-off countries and bring back gifts for the Queen of England, and it was he who brought the potato to County Cork almost two hundred years ago.
‘At first there were many different kinds of potato grown in Ireland, not just the “lumper”. But you remember I told you about Cromwell driving the people to the poor land out here in the West?’ They nodded.
‘Well, when the people had only a little land on which to live, and the land was poor, they had to find a potato which would grow where other types of potato wouldn’t. That was where the lumper came in. Even up in the boggy lands on the top of the mountain, where nothing much but turf and heather grows, your father has the lumpers growing.’
‘Why didn’t we pick those ones?’ piped up Katie.
‘Because they’re our little secret, and we want to leave them another few weeks. Anyway, we haven’t room to turn in here, with potatoes on every side of us.’
The shouting outside had grown nearer, and now there seemed to be more voices added to the clamour.
‘Sit still here for a few minutes until I see what all this rí-rá is about,’ Ellen told them. Then she ran outside.
What she saw sent a chill through her. Coming up the bóithrín from the direction of Glenbeg was a group of men and women, all of them clearly distraught.
‘Tis here, ’tis here!’ they shouted. ‘Tis back behind in the Glen. The blight, God’s curse on it, has come down on us at last.’
As they drew nearer, Ellen recognized Johnny Jack Johnny to their fore. She ran down the bóithrín towards him. All around her the cabins of Maamtrasna emptied of people as the villagers rushed to hear the news they had dreaded.
‘Johnny, what is it?’ she demanded.
‘Oh, woman,’ he answered, his voice broken with the news he bore, ‘’tis a terrible sight indeed. Last night the fields were green with fine healthy stalks. This morning they’re as black as the pit of hell.’
‘Overnight?’ she said, reaching out for his arm in disbelief.
‘Yes, Ellen Rua, one night and every last one of them was gone – black and sticky with the smell of death on them.’
Johnny Jack Johnny held up his hands: they were coated with a stinking black substance – the likes of which Ellen had never seen.
‘But didn’t you lift them like the priest told you?’ she asked.
‘Some did, but most didn’t. Sure, we kept watchin’ them day and night, and there wasn’t a sign on them. They were the best crop ever – ’til now,’ the man said, shaking his head.
‘And are they all gone?’ Ellen wasn’t going to let up. There must be some hope – there had to be.
‘Every last one of them that was left in the ground is gone – like we never put them down at all,’ Johnny Jack Johnny said disconsolately, the murmurs of despair from those around him rising in a chorus of lament for their lost crops, and for themselves.
‘God’s pity on us all. What are we to do with the long winter bearing down on us?’ Johnny Jack Johnny asked of no one in particular, knowing no one could answer him.
By now the villagers had heard the worst. Those who had not lifted all their potatoes rushed to the fields. Without waiting for loy or slane, they tore into the lazy beds with their bare hands, hoping against forlorn hope that this blight hadn’t reached here, hadn’t come the extra five or six miles up the valley to Maamtrasna.
Ellen watched as one by one the frenzied diggers recoiled from the lazy beds, nothing in their hands save a mass of putrid black matter. The people remained where they were, immobilized by despair – fields of dead men, kneeling.
Like the contagion itself, grief spread among the stricken people. Some threw themselves upon the source of their grief, the diseased lazy beds, in desperate supplication, digging their fingers deep into the cruel, unresponsive earth.
Ellen, too, was seized by panic. She couldn’t think straight. Her first instinct, as always, was for the children. Somehow she got her unwilling legs to move, slowly at first, then running to the cabin, taking what seemed an eternity. She drew them to her. All three were sobbing, terrified of what was outside their cabin door without being fully sure why, but caught in the hysteria that swept on every side of them.
‘Shssh now. Where’s your father?’ she asked.
‘There he is!’ Patrick punched his finger urgently towards the mountain, glad to speak, glad to break through the tears.
Ellen followed the line of Patrick’s finger. A number of shapes were hurtling down the mountain at a dangerous rate of descent. Ellen could just about distinguish Michael, Roberteen and Martin Tom Bawn, half running, half sliding, knocking stones and shale before them, as they careered down to the village and the awaiting calamity. By now the cries of despair had dissolved into sobbing and the keening normally reserved for the wakes of the dead.
Michael ran straight to the cabin. Through the dust and sweat, Ellen could see the fear on his face. Neither of them spoke, only bundled their small family closer in to them.
In the fields, husbands, wives and children did the same, until everywhere were hapless little bundles of people cut loose from life. Hopelessly hanging together. Each thinking the same thought. Wondering when death would claim them.
Fear driving his body onwards, Michael O’Malley for the second time that morning climbed the mountain. This time the ascent which normally took him a leisurely forty-five minutes was completed in twenty-five. He was the first to reach the ridge. Behind him was young Roberteen and, a ways further back, Roberteen’s father.
Michael ran across the soft peaty ground, avoiding the swallow holes. His eyes were fixed on a small dip to the far side of the marshy area, where a few years ago it had occurred to him to try out some seedlings from the lazy beds below. The hardy lumper had grown well here and he had gradually extended the area of this mountain crop of potatoes. The natural fall of the land conspired with the planters to keep what was planted hidden from view, safe from the landlord’s prying eyes. Only his next-door neighbours, with their own crop growing alongside Michael’s, knew of this place. Each harvest-time the three of them would spirit away their secret crop, under cover of dusk, to their cabins below.
Michael found it hard to understand why more villagers hadn’t followed their example in reclaiming some of the wasteland to provide a little extra food for themselves and their families. Perhaps they had been deterred by what had happened over in Partry. There Pakenham had discovered his tenants’ secret potato patches, and had rewarded their enterprise by levying extra rent. ‘This extra ground which I have allowed you to cultivate in justice demands extra rent,’ he had told them. ‘How could I be seen to act even-handedly towards all of my tenants, as any good landlord should, if I were to grant additional acreage to some, and not to others, and all paying the same rent?’ So those who had worked harder, and made good land out of bad, were even worse off than before.
Here, on the far side of the lake from Tourmakeady, they were well away from Pakenham and the prying eyes of his toady, Beecham. The crop should be safe from the landlord, at least.
Michael slowed down just before he reached the dip where the potato patch was. Roberteen, still running, came up behind him. Together they stood on a lip of ground overhanging the dozen or so lazy beds, waiting for the older man to catch up with them. When he did, the three of them continued to gaze down on the stalks blowing hither and thither, gusted this way and that by the mountain breeze. Each was reluctant to make the first move, holding back the moment when they must discover that which they most feared.
Roberteen was the first to say it. ‘Look, Michael – look there, on the leaves.’
But the keen eyes of Michael and the older, silent watcher had already taken in the white substance which lay fleecelike on the green leaves. It was almost beautiful, glistening in the half-light of the October sun. Like mountain fog – a will-o’-the-wisp that hadn’t lifted.
Michael had never seen its like before. He looked first at the others, then slowly stepped down on to the patch. He went to his knees beside the nearest lazy bed and gingerly reached over to touch the mysterious mist. It felt as it looked – soft and dewy, yet sticky too. He tried to brush it from the leaf, but unlike the dew it did not melt with the heat of his hand. He took a closer look. This furry down was growing out of the green veins of the leaf. As he made to examine it, the smell that accompanied the rot assailed his nostrils. Panic setting in, he plunged both hands into the mound of earth, frantically searching for the hard uneven roundness that would tell him the lumpers were safe.
But there were no lumpers, just a stinking mass of putrefaction. He withdrew his hands in disgust, staring in dismay at the foulness dripping from his fingers.
‘They’re lost!’ he shouted.
The watchers, still and silent until now, jumped down beside him.
‘God save us, Michael – what is it?’ Martin Tom Bawn asked.
‘I’ve never seen the likes of it before today … It looks and smells like the very melt of hell,’ Michael whispered.
‘’Tis an evil thing, surely,’ young Roberteen added. ‘A fearful evil thing,’ the boy repeated in hushed tones.
‘And is there nothing at all down there, Michael?’ the older man asked.
Michael did not answer. Instead he said, ‘We have to be quick. What we’ll do is this: Martin, you start on the beds at the far side, and turn every bit of them – maybe there’s some can be saved. Roberteen, you start there in the middle and work towards your father, and I’ll start here and work in towards you.’
The three men set to their task without any great heart, but knowing that they must do it. If a few potatoes could be saved, it might carry their families just that bit further through the winter.
What was most frightening, thought Michael, was the speed with which the blight had struck, and then spread, destroying all before it. He noticed, as he worked along the lazy beds on his hands and knees, that the white fleece on the leaves was already rotting, turning each leaf into sodden decay before his eyes. He worked more furiously, trying to outpace the run of the rot. But the result was the same. No matter where he dug, the blight had been there before him, waiting for him, waiting to cover his hands with its black clinging cloyingness.
The more diseased potatoes he uncovered, the more the stench of them filled the air about him, until his body recoiled from carrying on. But carry on he did, as did the others, desperation driving them to turn every last handful of earth, to uproot every last stalk.
Time after time they were defeated, but still they persisted in the heartbreaking task. It was as if even one good potato would be a sign of hope. A sign that all was not irretrievably lost.
Fate, however, did not afford the three diggers even that slender thread of comfort. When they finally finished, they remained on their knees, aching and blackened, united in despair.
‘It can only be the work of the devil himself,’ Michael finally said.
The others nodded. Then all three silently raised their heads in grim prayer to the glowering heavens.
It did not seem to them that the heavens listened.
