The Cruelty Men Read online

  the lilliput press

  dublin

  Dedication

  To Pattie, who minded two generations of our family in Kilbride and Trim and was my childhood connection to the ancient world. Also to all who were incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries, Industrial Schools, and mental institutions in Ireland; their endurance and bravery inspired this book.

  Prologue

  As a spider, I pluck off my long legs one by one until, reaching the last two, I hesitate and become human.

  I am the hag. I am Ireland. I was here before you. And I was already old when you came. I was lonely and I let you come into me.

  My hair is a long, strong, ropey grey. My skin is crumpled and cracked. From my anus, I dropped the rocks that form the shore. I pinched the hills into small shapes. I sat into the mountains buckling with ferocious cramps, letting rivers spring from my monthly blood and, as they ran clear, the last traces of this blood turned the hook-jawed silver salmon red. By the time you arrived my sisters were already dead.

  One of them killed by the bull.

  By the sea alone, I was a shaper. I spat out hawks and scald crows as I danced to keep warm. The moon was wider then. Easier to jump onto. I don’t make those moon landings anymore. A bird whose eggs have been touched by human hands, I never return to that nest.

  I’m not ashamed to say I was lonely here; waiting for no one by the edge of a long frozen world. A second freezing. I scraped my nails along the edge of the land and made cliffs. Giant deer got tangled in my guts. My tears pollinated the island’s thawing interior. I screamed out wolves who darted, predatory grey in forests, then, sleeping, I whimpered foxes who left sea onion outside their dens to keep the wolves away.

  From the moment I saw you rowing down the horizon I put my fingers out to still the sea for your tiny vessels. The crags of my fingers left a granite trace.

  You left your boats behind and entered my forests. The trees accepted you. You felt you were home. My world had been a verb world. The trees were treeing. The birds were birding. The rivers were rivering. The pink salmon, sacred always with the knowledge of return, were salmoning.

  Everything was in dance.

  You came and marked it all out with those static, false nouns. You were wrong about that too. You didn’t fathom how it was all flowing back and forth and swapping. You didn’t know it never belonged to you; it never even belonged to me.

  A time of great change is coming.

  I have my end too. But it comes with the last swell of the sun. My time is not fettered by yours. This is the circle that spirals down and down and down and round and round and round. That’s why it was so familiar when you stepped from your boats. It’s why you recognized Ireland at first landing.

  For so long you didn’t want me. For so long you created and adopted gods to suit you but they’re all melting away. What did you end up saying about me?

  Is fuar cumann cailleach. The affection of a hag is a cold thing. And that’s the truth.

  Did you know before I was this, I was something else? Unlike you, I did not shift my shape from noisy ape. I was quiet as a spider – look at all I wove.

  I am spider no longer.

  You turned away from me, and you’ve said things about me and told stories full of lies. Over a teardrop of time, you did what I thought you couldn’t. In the end, within a mere ten thousand years, you had broken my insect heart.

  The change is coming.

  Your eyes are dead starlight.

  Your souls are sorrowing. You are shining – already gone.

  To hell with you! I’ll still be here on the grey edge of the Atlantic when you are done.

  PART I: DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT

  No one went ever to Bolus but in the hope of getting something there.

  Proverb from Iveragh, County Kerry

  Connaire O Mac Tire: Wolfland (1653)

  An English captain of General Ireton’s regiment who was present at a battle in 1647 reported, to king and country, that several of the slaughtered native Irish garrison of Cashel were found to have wolves’ tails.

  This came as no surprise. English people referred to Ireland as Wolfland. Wolves were long gone in England and they were horrified to find them rampant in Ireland.

  There was a long list of things that they wanted to rid their neighbouring island of: wolves, forests, rebels, the Irish language, harps, priests.

  I am Connaire O Mac Tire. I am the last of my line. I lived in the forests among the wolves for the last three years or so. They called us the Tories, ‘pursued men’. I grew up on a farm and there had been a war against the new English settlers since I was a wee boy. These settlers caused much bitterness. But nothing prepared us for what was to come. I was the only boy, and my mother quickly gave me a long knife. In all the confusion, she told me that I was the last of the line in Ireland and to run and hide while my father and all my uncles stood to fight Cromwell’s armies. I hid in a narrow space behind the sheds and covered myself with firewood. I could not see anything, but I heard the ugly screams of battle. When I finally emerged shivering I found my father and his brothers dead in the yard. They took my four sisters and my mother as slaves and sent them off to the tobacco lands. With my heart heavily burdened I slipped away from the Parliamentarian soldiers and I came to the forest. In the dark forest I chanted a prayer my mother had taught me.

  May the spectres not harm me during my journey.

  They had hunted the few of us who escaped their big guns into the thickest part of the forest. All the townlands were cleared of people, and the crops laid waste. There was nothing to eat. There were children hiding all along the roads, and if the wolves didn’t get them, they joined us rather than be captured. The black plague had broken out. They said the towns were full of it, and one by one all the towns fell to the invaders in a great tide of blood. The wolves grew in numbers, thriving on the chaos and death. All this I saw from the forest.

  May old age be mine

  And death not come to me until I reach it.

  Cromwell had warnings of an invasion of England from Scotland so he went back to England, leaving General Ireton in command. We were hoping our friends the Scots would give trouble and then come help us. We knew it was hopeless by ourselves. The enemy was formidable. In the end, even Black Hugh, son of Hugh Mac Neil, had to creep out of Clonmel and flee. All the news that got to us as we hid among the trees was mighty bad and we were sore tired to hear it.

  May my tomb not be prepared,

  May I not die on my journey.

  In these dense forests we lived close to the wolf. The settlers spoke of us in the same breath as the wolf. They hated the forests that sheltered us. We ran from drumlins, to freezing bogs, to dark forest, causing whatever trouble we could to settlers and soldiers. We picked up those hiding to join us. I was half starved, and my clothes fallen to rags. I killed wolves with my long knife and ate their flesh and wore their skin. We had a tailor among us who had lost all his family to the soldiers; he fashioned the wolfskins into clothes. We only ate wolf meat, and the abandoned pups we took with us, until we became a close pack, wolves and men wearing wolves.

  We looked out from the forest; the very branches trembled on the trees. The land lay empty and burnt. Everything we had ever known was dead.

  May my return be granted!

  May the headless serpent not catch me.

  Sometimes the chaos in my head could be stilled by lying against a tree and letting its rooted peace pass into my skull. I began to think tree thoughts. The trees could tell what was happening. I could promise them nothing. I would have died for them. But I wasn’t even sure I could save
myself or my pack. And the forest could hardly move with us.

  We few who had survived gave as much resistance as we could to the settlers and the army, but they began to set the woods on fire and the hunters were closing in, their barking wolfhounds as big as colts. We could continue no longer like this, and as we lost our terrain we began to make our way west under the cover of night. There was no time I was not frightened for my pack’s life. I hunched hungry in the trees, rattling with the cold. Most of our kind didn’t make it. Some talked of getting to the ports and sneaking off to France and Spain. I wished them well. But I could not leave the land. I remembered my mother’s words. I was the last of the O Mac Tires in Ireland.

  Before Cromwell came we had once lived with the wolf. We prayed to the wolves and wished them well so they wouldn’t harm us. We used their ground-down dung to soothe our colicky babies. We ate wolf meat to protect us from seeing ghosts. If you were plagued with nightmares, a wolf’s head under the pillow would chase any demons away. There was an entrance to the underworld in Co. Roscommon. Three women emerged every year from this cave in the shape of wolves.

  The foreigners knew nothing of all this. They only knew that the land and people were too wild for them.

  The Parliament in England was broke after the War of Three Kingdoms, as they called it, and they were using our land to pay their debts and placate their exhausted armies. Regiment after regiment, troop after troop, were being given our land as they conquered. Their New Model Army was vast, and as efficient in settling as in slaughter.

  There was no stopping them.

  May no robber harm me,

  Nor troop of women,

  Nor troop of warriors!

  Only the five counties of Connacht were reserved for the ‘home of the Irish race’. The Irish were forbidden to stay within ten miles of the Shannon River.

  ‘We’ll not go there. It’s too congested and Galway reeks of the plague. We’re going south,’ I said to my pack. We hunted only at night. By day we dug dens, huddled, and told each other stories to keep our spirits. Before he died of a fever, a young boy in my pack told me the story of the Bull Bhalbhae and that became my story to tell.

  ‘Where are we going?’ my pack asked me. I heard tell of a cave in Connacht that was an entrance to the other world. A wolf man called Old Ai came out of this cave. The wolves could use the caves to travel into other worlds. I thought of leading my pack there. If I could find another world I would surely go into it.

  One by one my pack was dying off. We found a terrified priest hiding by a riverbank and he joined us. At first he kept looking at me sideways, afraid. He was educated abroad and much travelled. He told us that Cromwell himself despaired of it all, and wrote:

  For if the priest had not been in Ireland, the trouble would not have arisen, nor the English have come, nor have made the country almost a ruinous heap, nor would the wolves have so increased.

  He was the one who told us that we were called Tories, and some called us Woodkern, since we dwelt in the woods. There was a generous bounty on every wolf, priest and Woodkern in the land. The adult male wolf got its killer five pounds, the same price as a priest. He said they were cutting off the balls of the priests. They found all the harps in the land and built a big pyre with them in Dublin, within the Pale, and destroyed them in flames. We were in grave danger so, for to subdue this land the forests would have to go, and so too the wolves. We knew this. The trees knew this. The wolves knew this. Though their numbers had increased since the land was laid waste, they were now as cursed as we were. Cromwell brought out a bill to destroy the wolves in 1653. I wondered where to lead my pack.

  When the new moon came out I would hunker down and try to gather strength. The priest shook his head and got on his knees. He ordered the men to pray. I recited my own prayers taught to me by my mother’s mother.

  May the King of Everything

  Cast more time my way.

  The men were caught between the two of us. I told them to get strength from the moon but to pray with the priest if they saw fit, and it benefited them. I told them they did not have to choose, but the priest warned they would be damned. I thought of killing the priest, but I had never killed any innocent man. In the end everyone followed me, though I didn’t know where I was taking them.

  ‘You are a born leader,’ he said, one grey day as we sheltered from the rain. ‘You should become a priest.’

  ‘I cannot, mister,’ I replied. ‘I am the last O Mac Tire in Ireland and I must carry on my name.’

  ‘Names are of little importance in these dire days,’ he said. ‘You are strange and wild. You are a wolf. But you have a great head for stories. Your memory is like a trap. We could smuggle you out to France, Italy or Spain and get you ordained and you could return and be a greater influence on your people.’

  ‘I’ll not leave Ireland. I’m looking for an entrance to the world underneath. It’s there I have to go.’

  ‘But you can’t go there alive.’ He frowned.

  ‘There are those who can live between two worlds,’ I told him.

  ‘I pity you.’ He shook his head.

  The priest and I vied for the souls of our pack. He told them to renounce violence and pray to God, to stay loyal to the Roman religion St Patrick brought to us. I told them to keep fighting the settlers, and beware of all things foreign. They were weary and sick for the past, before the world turned inside out and they had to become wolves among the trees. The stench of the plague was everywhere so we avoided the few ragged settlements that were left.There in the forest I saw the foxes lay sea onion at the mouths of their dens to keep the wolves away. I could not abide the stuff. We crept west through the forest, moving only at night guided by the stars. One dawn, as we were walking, there was a new bird in the sky. I pointed it out to the priest. Big and bold and black and white. It seemed to have been brought in on a great storm with Cromwell’s armies. The priest said it was called the magpie. It brought us no luck. I hurled stones as I cursed it.

  Magpie invader bird

  One for certain sorrow,

  Swept in with Cromwell

  We’ll never rid of you.

  The truth is we had been defeated, the land had been cleared and settled with those foreign-tongued, for them the land was not storied, it was just wealth. The woods were now gone, even our music, the mountain of harps in Dublin burnt to a cinder. We ran with the wolves to higher ground. To the great mountains. To the end of the world, looking for another.

  On we travelled to the southwest, to the kingless Kingdom of Kerry. We were ambushed by the English soldiers on the bogs. My pack scattered. The wolves made it to higher ground but I feared I was the only man left alive, the priest was badly wounded and I carried him on my back. For miles and miles I bore him, leaving a trail of blood in our wake. He was taken in, at great risk, and hidden in a smallholding. Though it was dangerous, the native Irish felt honoured to have him, and I stayed till he got some strength back. News went round that there was a priest among us. He said Mass in the strange Latin language out on a secret rock and the local people gathered with their heads bowed. I finally got down on my knees and prayed with all my heart and soul. I let his Latin inside me. No one knew what it all meant. But belief was something else.

  The priest said he’d stay a little there, disguised as a peasant, as the people were hungry for the Mass. We were sad to part as we had great respect for each other. Though our aims were different, we shared much, and he had many stories of saints and wolves. The last night he urged me to tell the story of the Bull Bhalbhae to all gathered.

  This was my last hiding place. Now all the forests were cut and burned. Solitary, I walked for aeons at night and slept in ditches at day, until I reached Bolus Head, the very end of Ireland. An old old hag, agile as a goat, found me wandering lost and lone, she brought me to her cave in a cliff overlooking the jagged Skellig Islands an
d fed me some broth. I had strange dreams that night. I woke up somewhere entirely different, on the side of a mountain among five stones standing. I saw a drove of hares on this mountain and they signalled for me to follow. They brought me to a family in the village of Cill Rialaig, called the O Conaills. One of the daughters invited me into her bed and I was welcomed. This was the strangest of times, where wolf and hare lay together. My name would live on. I had stories for them. They had stories for me. For though our English neighbours had gathered all the harps and burned them, the stories could not be burned, or cut down, or hunted. The stories were an unconquered place.

  I usually didn’t make anything up in the stories. But there was something in my head that came unbidden and I could not rid myself of it. A chant of words that I knew not its origins. Some kind of prophecy.

  Cormac Mac Airt,

  Son of a wolf,

  A thief took my eyes from my head.

  They said if I ate wolf meat it would protect me from seeing ghosts,

  But a wolf has eaten the moon,

  A wolf devoured the sun,

  Now it has turned wide-jawed

  To the ice cold frozen,

  Tide-wild earth.

  A wolf has eaten the world.

  Mary: We Lived in a Dream at the Edge of the World (1935)

  A man came up the mountain on a bicycle. We lived in Cill Rialaig village on Bolus Head by the township of Ballinskelligs in the Barony of Iveragh in Co. Kerry. Ten houses all in a row at the side of the road. As it was, the road was barely cut out from the mountain. There were no houses on the other side of this road because they would have fallen straight into the sea. There was no facing each other or gathering around each other. There was just a procession of us. Sometimes I felt the houses were the people. With their window eyes and their door mouths, and the wind came in through slate, stone skin and lashed about the insides. Often the hens were blown up onto the rocks that hung over us. There was no shortage of water coming down from the mountains: brown, soft, boggy and cold. We licked it off the mossy rocks.