The Cruelty Men Read online

  The Great Hunger was over when I was born but the living memory of it was still strong, and roads around us were jittery with ruins of houses. These ruins were just like the dead. Part of our world, we accepted their sadness, their crowded, blacker past; for this hillside had once been a busier place. Many had fallen from the hunger before they could get away. The ditches we played in as children were full of their bones. Some of them would have survived and settled elsewhere. And if you had family in America sending home remittances, you were on the pig’s back. But the majority who survived ran out of here and never looked back.

  We had heard that the English were finally gone after 800 years. Indeed they were gone about four years before I was born, but this had not made much difference for those of us on the last road in Ireland. We existed in a dream at the edge of the world. We spoke only Irish. We lived on the mountain and the mountain lived in us. Empires had fallen on the continent and wars had been fought, lost, won, epidemics had raged, but little mind we paid to it. I can recall the bony cattle standing in the deserted cabins looking with their blank faces out of the windows and the ragged curtains still hanging there. Not only were the houses ruined, but we were forgotten too, remember?

  That is until the man came up the road on his bicycle.

  He was pushing it up the steep hill and he had a big book strapped to the back. The sun was swollen up that day and the sea was hard and sparkling. The islands that lay just out from us were luminous in the water. Dinnish, Scarriff, and the long finger of the Beara Peninsula with three distant islands, the Bull, the Cow and the Calf. They looked like great floating whales. They were our family too. When you see them every one of your born days it becomes that way. Those islands and the mountains were as much part of me as my limbs.

  We children ran to him. It was our hill. We swarmed around him and asked him lots of questions. He was sweating and mopped his brow with a large, white, initialled hanky, the likes of which I’d never seen. He spoke mostly English and a different kind of Irish that didn’t flow, but we could understand. He sat most of the day on a stool outside the O Conaill’s house and instructed us to go fetch all the grown-ups. We ran into the hills and told everyone to gather that evening.

  It was the brightest day of the year and the longest, still light when we sat in front of the small fire. We didn’t need it for heat but we did all our cooking in a big black pot over it. There were about thirty people in the house and we ran in and out of the two doors at either side. We’d hare round the cabin and through it again.

  We all thought the man was from the Folklore Commission. There was a few of them who went around the country on bicycles and got the stories from the old people before they disappeared into their graves, and all their knowledge with them. For nothing was written down, all was kept in our heads. We welcomed folks from the Folklore Commission. Things were changing so fast, that every time an old person died they took centuries of knowledge with them.

  This man was not looking for our stories. He had come for us, body and soul.

  ‘I’m from the Land Commission,’ he announced.

  When the man laid maps on the table before us he explained that we could have land elsewhere, really good land. County Meath, the best land in the country. County Meath was the Royal County; the land had always been good and fertile. The kings of Tara were the high kings of Ireland. The most sacred river in Ireland was the Boyne where the Salmon of Knowledge had once dwelt. For these reasons it was the seat of the ancient kings and queens of Ireland. He told us, it was the part of Ireland where there were the most sacred places.

  The new government of Ireland would give it to us, just like that. A fierce excitement merged with deep suspicion, for why would anybody give land for free? The man drank his cup of tea and stood to give a speech. We sat on the floor in front of him and the women sat behind us and the men stood looking in the windows or at the doors.

  ‘Now that we are an independent country for over a decade, we want to decolonize the country. The Irish language, once outlawed in our very schools, has disappeared so quickly. From the time they hung a tally stick around your children’s neck and marked it everytime they spoke. And beat them for as many marks they had. Is it no wonder it has been so willingly surrendered by a broken self-loathing people? But we are free now and everything will be better. We must take pride in ourselves again, and our language is our pride. We want to revive the Irish language in the East and the Midlands. Everyone has forgotten how to speak there. Vast estates of absentee landlords are being redistributed as small farm holdings to poor farmers from the overcrowded Gaeltacht areas of Connemara, Mayo and Kerry.’

  ‘Why would ye do that for us? Why not just give us land around here,’ my mother, who was always a talker and afraid of no one, shouted up to him.

  ‘Look. There’s still too many here for this bad rocky land to support, and the aim is to redress a centuries-old imbalance. The English under Oliver Cromwell forcibly removed your ancestors from the land, shouting “to Hell or Connacht”. How do you think so many of ye got over here to this part of the country? Do ye not remember that? That was in 1649.’

  ‘Sure they didn’t want this land,’ a man said. The others nodded.

  ‘Precisely,’ the man continued, mopping his bright red brow with his white hanky. He could see he was winning people over and visibly relaxed. ‘Connemara has been designated as a congested district, and these parts of Kerry; they are overpopulated and the holdings are too small. Sure even in the time of famine the British were passing laws to clear people out from here and thinking the famine would just do the work for them. Am I right? Or am I right?’

  This got a hearty, rueful laugh and the man laughed with us. We were beginning to see the sense of what he was saying. The men were looking at each other and the women were wringing their hands to think that life might be changed utterly, as of this moment. As kids we just thought of the night that was in it and picked up on the thrill from our families around us. There were some of the old people who closed their eyes for they knew that they would be left behind. After all they’d seen, they trusted no man from any government, even if it was our own. Dublin felt as distant to these mountains as London once had.

  ‘This is the genuine article. There won’t be another chance the likes of this in your lifetimes. How many times do we have revolutions that clear the land for people who have suffered such as ye?’ He began to run his pencil around a big map of far-off Meath and draw lines from the west and the south going to it. ‘The Ráth Chairn Gael-tacht is to be established this year. We are offering about twenty-seven families from Connemara, mostly from Ceantar Na nOileán, to be settled on land previously acquired by the Land Commission.’

  ‘Who did they push off that land? If they’ve been there since 1649 they might have thought of it as home,’ my mother said, and the others looked at her and bit their lips. The man looked down at her and continued without answering.

  ‘The good news is that your district is designated too, as a congested district, so you are eligible under the scheme.’

  We couldn’t quite believe this. The adults wanted all the information. Free land was not something you came by in an ancient fought-over country like ours. The men said they had plenty to think about and the man on the bicycle was offered poitín, which he declined. But he knew well enough not to leave now, but to join in the gathering. Many came up to talk to him personally. He told them at one point that it was their patriotic duty to bring their lovely language back to the people who had lost it and were only left with the enemy tongue in their mouths. That won many a soul over, as we all like to pretend we’re doing somebody good when we’re helping ourselves.

  Though I was only a child of ten they pushed me out into the front and I told some stories. I had no voice for singing so that was what I did. My father and mother were proud that I had committed a whole welter of stories to memory by age five and I never
missed a word. That was my small gift. Not that it would bring me fortune or even luck but it did shorten the nights for all who gathered. But that night, as the stories were told by the fire and the songs were sung, many of the grown-ups were thinking of other things. They were thinking that leaving those islands out at sea was akin to hacking of their own limbs. They were thinking of going where the people were mute. Where they wandered around their own land unable to utter sounds. Where they encountered one another and could not speak.

  I would have loved to be a teacher. That was my dream when I was very young. But even in Bolus Head I had not gone to school; like most of the girls as soon as I was old enough to fend for myself I would be sent off to work as a servant in a town. I was ten now and already my father was making inquiries on my behalf at the market. There was a storyteller in one of the cabins and I listened to all his stories and kept them in my head. He knew as he was telling them that I was remembering. Sometimes I thought it was only me he was telling them to even though there would be a full room.

  The old storyteller’s greatest fear was that he would forget his stories, so he used to tell them to himself. While bringing the cattle home, he would come down the road with his arms flying and gesticulating, telling himself the stories out loud, lest they all just dissolved into the back of his brain. Like a fairy child I was only four when I would pad softly behind him listening, and he would brighten when he saw me.

  ‘Now that the old age pension came in, you don’t see the old people wandering the roads with their stories,’ he would sigh.

  The old storyteller died at a great old age and, before he went away from us, I came in and sat by him in front of the fire. He couldn’t speak but I told him one of his stories back to him and in his watery eyes I saw a glimmer. He couldn’t read nor write, nor could he speak English. Neither could I. But I would learn to do both.

  We were eligible as a family for relocation, everything was offered us and my parents decided to pack up and go. Mammy was only a girl and the cabin, and field near it, would belong to her eldest brother not her. She was some woman. Once a chick was in our house and a pot fell on it and split its stomach open. Mammy scooped it out of my hands and sewed it back up then and there, and sure enough didn’t the chick become a fine hen. Mammy was tough but I don’t know how tough my father was. He was a man of few words, who did not suffer fools, but he looked to her for everything and he did her bidding. He followed her as night followed day.

  My very body started to grieve as soon as I heard. Sure I knew I’d never come back. I walked up to the standing stones on the hill. I howled and raged and it echoed through the surrounding marshes. I stumbled down the mountain onto the road.

  We left in a pony and trap. Mammy said she would stay on until she had her baby. She was seven and half months pregnant and didn’t want to make the journey. My father kissed her outside the house. He kissed her on the lips like I’d never seen him do before. We turned away embarrassed. There were six of us childer then.

  ‘Don’t look so sad, Mary,’ Mammy said to me as I got down out of the cart and ran to her for a last hug. I had never been away from her for even a night. She grabbed my shoulders. ‘You are ten years old now. We’d have had to send you away into service in the town anyway. This way we can keep you for a few more years. That’s one of the reasons I’ve decided. I couldn’t bear to be losing you now but we couldn’t have kept you. You be their mammy until I have the baby and come to you. You are in charge of all the wee ones, do ye hear?’

  I nodded, crying now.

  ‘Whisht your crying girl. You take care of them for me? Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘They’re in your hands now, Mary. Understand? I’m relying on you.’

  My father whooshed me back into the trap. I felt important and scared.

  Suddenly Mammy’s face changed as if a cloud had come over her mind, she ran to us all in the trap and we held onto her and embraced her. All of us together. My father turned to the sea and shook his head. Like my mother, he had been born and bred on Bolus Head and him leaving the mountain would be the pain of having the mountain wrenched out of him. He looked away from us at the silver sea and the slate-grey sky with bursts of light like God’s fingers.

  She told him, ‘Look at me now. You’ll see the sea again. I saw on the maps there’s a biteen of sea at one end of Meath and I’ll take you to it. Now mind you take good care of all my chicks.’ I thought of her sure hand scooping the wee chick up and stitching it.

  Padraig was like a wild hare and had to be secured into the cart for he never could stop moving. Mammy hugged him even as he wriggled away from her, and Maeve and Bridget reached over and threw their arms around her. None of us had ever spent so much as a night away from each other. Seamus was a child with little patience and looked like he wanted to get on with it, he shook her hand curtly. She grabbed Seán, the baby, once more and raised him above her head until he squealed with laughter. ‘My beautiful wee Seán. This one will take care of us all someday.’ She handed me Seán and nodded to me. I knew she was entrusting him especially to me, for he was one of those lit babies, a light inside him that anyone could see. ‘I’ll take care of them all, Mammy.’ By God I tried to keep that promise.

  Daddy hoisted himself to the front and gave the horse a lash. We all looked back.

  That’s how I remember my mother, Grainne. At the door of the cabin. Her hand shielding her eyes from the sun. Her other hand resting on her giant belly.

  We expected to see the man on the bicycle in Co. Meath when we arrived but we never saw him again. There was a barn where they were organizing the arriving families. Each family was provided with a three-room Land Commission house and a farm of approximately twenty-two acres, a sow, piglets and basic implements. That was all they did with us and we were left to fend for ourselves. My father slept with the deeds to his new lands on his chest and his hands over them. Being the youngest of sixteen children, he had never owned land before. To some of the adults it was a triumph, they told us that the defeat of the Boyne was the beginning of our sorrow; it is that which left the stranger and the enemy directing and mastering us. Sure weren’t we pleased as punch that we had avenged the Devil, Cromwell.

  So that is how we were given land in Co. Meath and told to work it and speak the Irish. But no one outside the settlement wanted to talk to us. They were angry with us for getting local land for nothing. In their eyes, the government had seized it and given it to strangers, not the local Catholic families who had laboured for the Protestant settlers for centuries. Where was their retribution? We were viewed as colonizers, invaders.

  Daddy started to hate it. He had not wanted to go and it was my mother who insisted that life would be better if we did. It was herself that had been excited about the adventure. She was livelier than he was, quicker and funnier and more resilient. He knew it, and he pined for her. She was to have her wee one and join us. But she never appeared as the months went on. Daddy could not leave as there were six of us among strangers and we had to get a crop into the land so we’d have something to eat when it came round to harvest. The fear of starvation was strong in him. Daddy thought it might be too late already. He was given a few pigs and had a bit of money for three or four cattle. We had taken our chickens and they gave us eggs. But we were constantly hungry and missed my mother something awful.

  It wasn’t long before Daddy seemed to be leaving us also. He sank further and further into his own self. I asked him, as we worked in the field, what was wrong when I found him hunkered down just pushing the soil with his fingers.

  He said, ‘Mary, you tell me what this life is about.’

  I thought about an old rhyme.

  ‘Twenty years a child,’ I recited, ‘Twenty years going mad. Twenty years a sane person. And after that offering up your prayers.’

  With that he stood up and stroked my face with his rough farmer’s han
d. ‘You’ve listened well to the old man’s stories. I just can’t get used to it here. It’s all so flat.’ He groaned and pulled his trousers up under him. He was getting thinner and thinner.

  ‘I miss her too,’ I said. ‘She’s our mammy. We don’t like being without her. When is she coming?’

  ‘No word,’ Daddy growled. ‘If there was only a mountain here to walk up against. Sure I can’t think straight at all, at all, my thoughts do be flying out over the land before I can think them.’

  When there were clouds in the evening, rested blue on the horizon line, I’d squint my eyes and pretend they were mountains and it gave me some comfort and I could breathe again. In this grassy, fertile land we dreamt about the rough sea and the cold rocks on the hills. My younger brothers and sisters were put into the local Irish-speaking school set up for us, but I never went. Daddy said I could go as soon as Mammy came but until then I helped my father by running the house. A year and a half later he asked me to look after them all so he could go back to Bolus Head to get Mammy. He said he’d leave me with the pony and trap and he’d take the bicycle. ‘How are you going to go on a bicycle to the other side of the world,’ I asked him. He didn’t laugh. I remembered the journey to get here.

  ‘I’m a mountain man, Mary. I’ll never settle here.’

  ‘I do miss being in the mountains. And I miss the sea. Do you, Daddy? Sometimes I close my eyes and pretend I can hear it.’

  ‘And that priest, Fr Gilligan, always sniffing around. The good thing about the mountain we lived on was the priest in the parish was too fat to make it up the roads to us. We were left in peace.’

  I was shocked to hear him talk of a priest like that, but my father was his own man. Though we went to Mass he always told us to give the clergy their own side of the road.