No Country: A Novel (5 page)

I laughed with delight. This had been easy indeed. “Drink up your buttermilk,” she added. “Come back after the brave speeches. Remember, Son, it’s to hear you are going, not to speak.”

I left on the twenty-first day of September, well in time for the meeting. I had said goodbye to the others, many of whom marveled at my plan. Brigid had been gone for seven long months. By the time I returned, I was certain that she would be back among
us, her da tiring by then of his unaccustomed responsibility. If she had not returned by then, I decided to go again to Connemara.

All Brendan said was, “Come back home when ’tis time, Padraig.”

As I was about to round the corner on the road, carrying the small bag in which Ma had put her best cheese, bread, a couple of shirts, and such, I turned for a last look. She stood at the doorway looking grand, and her smile lit my world. I turned and set upon my road to Dublin, not knowing how long this journey would be.

But this picture of my ma standing before our cottage, the sun in her red hair, I held in my heart forever after.

•  •  •

I
T WOULD NOT
be difficult to find my way to Dublin, for all I would have to do was to travel east, with a little southerly meandering.

Unlike my good friend Brendan, I do not worry over much. If there be something to worry about, I worry when it arrives, and take care of it after. Even when trouble arrives, I try to whistle my way. My quick temper, Brendan never tires of telling me, encounters more conflicts than a reasonable man can hope to find. But he looks up at the sky and at his cape a dozen times, and worries about not taking it. Then he decides it will rain and returns after a few steps to debate at the threshold again. More often than not, it turns out to be a bright day with perhaps a whiff of mist. For these I would be teasing him, and he chuckling at me.

If I had a fear, it was not for the money, for my mother did skillfully sew a goodly number of shillings into my coat within a hidden hem; with my shirt tucked into my britches, these were invisible. I could easily extract, when need be, a shilling at a time.
No, my fear was of the clever people in Dublin who might find me a country dolt.

I headed along the road toward Drumshanbo for the first night’s stay, leaving Lough Gill to my left, towards the south of Lough Allen. I was tempted to visit the tomb of the great Turlough O’Carolan. That blind harpist’s music, Mr. O’Flaherty used to say, could make the very wind stand still. I had heard that he was buried in the old Kilronan Abbey, but I did not want to stray at the very start of my journey.

•  •  •

T
HAT FIRST NIGHT
I stayed at a shepherd’s cottage outside Drumshanbo. When he heard my purpose, he would not take my small coin for the dry pallet and a few potatoes—though he had naught else. I slept well and headed out again next morning, pausing at the ruined abbeys near Boyle along the way. The Curlew Hills rose beyond.

As I trudged east, county by county, I would fall into a daydream. I had a wild picture in my head of an Armageddon conflict, with all the Irish aroused and that angry, stirred by the words of O’Connell, all of Dublin, the counties around, the Boyne valley, the people around Dundalk and Malin Head and down in Glendalough and Wexford would rise as one, and the great rebellion would spread along the valleys of Liffey and Shannon, along Erne and Blackwater, across the Bann, the Bandon, and the Lee. The English would flee before this great wildfire.

The very name,
Boyne Valley,
rang through my being. Every step I took brought me towards some great name or another: Newgrange, Hill of Slane, Tara, and Mellifont, and then up to
Drogheda itself. It was as if I were treading through the great book of Ireland, and not on mere soil and rutted paths between farms and working fields. ’Twas crowded with the history of my race. I knew that O’Connell would give voice to everything that was clamouring in my heart. The mysterious sacred circles on the stones I saw at Newgrange seemed to capture the exultation swirling within my heart. I was sure I would receive one clear sign of the final battle to come.

•  •  •

A
S
I
APPROACHED
Drogheda, I began to feel in my heart that tragic core which underlay the green; how death was a part of all Irish tales, whether they are about love or any other matter whatsoever. So long as folks trod on this land and worked out their fates, there was a backdrop the colour of blood, and every step a tap on the vast drum of Irish memory.

What tales had I heard from my childhood about Drogheda and Cromwell! With his head full of stories of Catholic monstrosity culled from
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,
this Lord Protector descended on Ireland, planning mayhem and calumny. For full nine months in 1649, Cromwell devastated all he could lay his hands on. He besieged the walls of Drogheda. When it fell, he personally directed four days of slaughter. Women, children, the old, and especially the Catholic clergy were not spared.

Was this an aberration in the great man of prayer? Nay, indeed.

When Wexford fell to him, again came his bloody order to put thousands to the sword, children, women, nuns included, even in the sanctuary. “There before God’s altar fell many sacred victims. Others who were seized outside the church were scourged with
whips; and others were put to death by most cruel tortures,” wrote the exiled Bishop of Ferns, in Antwerp.

Canterbury had had its one Becket, a name remembered. What were the names in Drogheda and Wexford? There were so many that the very numbers became a matter treated like an Irish exaggeration, drivel and hyperbole from bogs and poteen huts. Drogheda and Wexford were iron nails in our Irish memory.

When first I came to Drogheda, I made straight for the heart of it, up the steep bank of the river, up narrow lanes, from one level of the town to the next terraced stage, flights of steps that took me above the river. I touched what remained of its medieval walls and felt a great organ’s chord ring through my soul as I passed through Butter Gate. In the lowering light, I had the strangest feeling that sounds from the very next lane might not have been made in this century or the last, but further in the past.

Here, in the heart of our Drogheda, I now felt I was truly standing on a stretched skin, a drum waiting to be thrummed. I was ready to wake to a different sky, a different earth. The great meeting at Clontarf was but a few days away. I felt Destiny was sending me an intimation of death or glory, and I would need to step out, beyond our usual Irish strifes and vacillation, to a Gideon’s trumpet that shrilled my being, and shook me down to my shoes.

I sharpened my knife on a Drogheda stone that night. Its sheath was snug and I tucked it behind my shirt and gathered my jacket about me. I was headed for Dublin.

•  •  •

W
HEN
I
REACHED
the harbour where the Boyne met the sea, I found a crowd of people already in long, snaking lines. They stood
about laughing, chatting, smoking clay pipes, and even a jostle did not bring out ill humour.

They were all for the meeting at Clontarf which, they told me, was a stone’s throw from Dublin harbour. Soon we were being turned away, for the ships were full. The only sour note that struck me was when I heard the angry tones of an old man with his grandson trying to board the ship. “Ye are charging thrice what ye charge for this day’s ferry, and all of us going to our meeting on Boru’s battleground. Are ye not that ashamed, turning a gombeen’s profit on Ireland’s great day itself?” I did not stay to hear the answer, but it was like a drop of ink in a clear bowl of water, its snaky coils invading the surge and joy of the day. We decided instead to walk south to Dublin, and our stream of folks did grow at every village. “Aye, aye,” we would sing out, “we’re for Clontarf and O’Connell!”

A tall man from Armagh, his green cap at a rakish tilt, shouted, “When the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed, King George was forced to sign it, weeping and raging. His royal blue nose did dribble, his baggy eyes did so drip, he needed brandy with the warm milk.”
Hahaha,
went our crowd, and the walking grew easier, for the mirth was contagious. “The right honourable Peel had to dry off royal tears with his own kerchief, and such was the quantity, he had to have two of his footmen wring out and hang it on the dozy Queen’s head—which Wellington mistook for garden topiary.”
Hahahaha.
At the end of the day’s walk, we lay down on the meadows outside Newbridge. We cooked our potatoes in communal fires, sharing willingly with those that had none, and all was joy and cheer under the coming stars.

I slept fitfully, exultant and troubled, and had a snatch of a dream: I was about to jump off the cliff-face of some high Ben, and a great wind came and swept me off, but taking me in a different
direction from where I had meant to fly. I stretched out my arms in desperation and found that I was sailing on that contrary blast—whirling away over a vast sea in a direction opposite and away from a red setting sun.

So vivid was the dream that when I woke with a jolt, I was astonished to find myself on the ground, beaded with dew. I covered my head, curled up, tired and uncomprehending, and fell asleep again and did not wake till dawn.

•  •  •

I
T SEEMED THAT
all the world was descending on Dublin. People streamed in to join us from the harbour at Howth. From the north and from the west, people from Fingal and Maynooth joined our column of walkers, waving festoons. As the groups met, we embraced and threw our caps in the air. Some came with their wives and old ones, and a good number had brought children. On a cart, one family even had a goat which the mother milked; her two small boys dipped their victuals, their faces all shiny with milky streaks.

People were coming from the south, with great huzzahs, from Kildare, Glendalough, all the way up from Wexford and Waterford, and hardy folks from Wicklow highlands. I could hear a shrill piping somewhere. I had not known what a heady feeling it was to be Irish—no, not in this way, ever before. I felt that a hundred, two hundred years, from today, the Irish across the world would remember this day. They would paint pictures, imagining this scene. And here it was, before me. Soon we were at the edge of Dublin.

Then we stopped dead.

A wall of red-coated English soldiers stood between us and Dublin, a sanguine wall. An officer came forward on his horse, and after a moment’s rearing and pawing of the hooves, the beast stood still. The rider cleared his voice to announce that the meeting had been banned, so there would be none at all, not now, not another day. Far down the right and to the left, more red-coat soldiers came forward. We laughed defiantly. And then, the news broke like thunderbolt: our Dan O’Connell had backed down.

No one in that great multitude believed it. “Liars, damned liars!” Cries filled the air, “Oh no, no no.”

The officer raised a white gloved hand. “Those who do not believe me, listen to the Dubliners.” The crowd fell silent. “Ask the Dubliners,” roared that voice again.

The line of red-coats was, at most, two men deep, for they were fanned out—not for resistance, but seemingly to spread the word. Behind them ordinary people—Dublin folks in everyday clothes, working men and women, stood in crestfallen groups. The wind seemed knocked out of them.

From our side, a tall man with a green kerchief tied about his head screamed loud and harsh into the late morning air, “What news of our O’Connell?”

The air smelt of hay and manure, trampled mud and laundry lye, the smells of a working day. Then a man stooping to pick up a shovel by a dairy cart from the Dublin side spoke, as if to himself. “He’s bowed to Peel’s command.”

We could have charged at the line of red, horsed as they were, and dashed them to the ground and gone on to the sacred soil of Clontarf, urging the latecomer O’Connell to come to us, rousing him from his nightmare of inaction.

But the moment, suspended in time, fell with a silent crash and died
amidst us. Weeping broke out, keening, as if the great crowd had just heard that Ireland itself had died.

“What strange nonsense is this?” barked the tall man from Armagh. “Our Dan has not bowed down to Peel, has he?”

The murmur which had begun in our midst rose and wavered around us.

“But,” I stammered to no one in particular, “but earlier he had laughed off the Duke of Wellington to his face, and called him a doting corporal!”

“Aye, so he did, and called him a screaming liar to boot,” added a man behind me.

“Our O’Connell called that Lord Alvanley a bloated buffoon—and that man the King’s favourite, isn’t he?” rejoined the Armagh man, twisting his green cap in his hands. Between clenched teeth, I nodded in agreement. Cunning Disraeli had called our leader the hired instrument of the papacy, but our Dan treated them all like barking street strays, did he not?

“Oh Lord, what strange malaise is undoing him now?” the man from Armagh said in a strangled voice. We stood staring at the ground, feeling our despair spreading like a fog about us. By the time I was able to raise my bent head, the Armagh man had left. The crowd began to thin in all directions. Some turned back the way they had come. Some stopped and began to cook and rest before they started for home, dejected journeys back to Cashel and Wexford, Ballyshannon and Limerick, to Cork and Kerry.

The world looked hazy and tainted. I was that tired, I could lie down where I stood and fall into a dead sleep. I wanted no food. I wanted no words. I sat where I had stood, now watching the laughing soldiers leave. I had lost all purpose. After an hour I decided to walk into Dublin, find its harbour, ask if any ship sailed to
Sligo or Mullaghmore, or anywhere to the western counties. I did not want to walk back across my sweet green land, dragging with me the news of our failure. I wanted it washed out of my memory, cleansed with Irish seawater and rough sea-wind.

I stepped into the city, like a blind man following a smell. I wanted to go home.