Irish Cream Page 4

  Ned’s introduction to the ms was indeed inviting.

  I’m not altogether sure why I am placing this manuscript in my archives. It depicts, fairly I believe, what life was like in Donegal at the outer edge of Ulster, in time after the Famine and before the Land League Wars. Father Lonigan was clearly an acute observer of this culture which is now dying out. I had accompanied my wife Nora on a return visit to her Irish home some twenty years after I had carried her off to America (along with her baby daughter Mary Elizabeth and her niece Josie) after her first husband Myles had been unjustly and cruelly executed in the Galway Gaol for a crime which everyone knew he had not committed. If I had not done so, the mother and child would surely have died of starvation.

  We visited Galway again and prayed for Myles Joyce outside the great, ugly jail where he was murdered by the British Empire and where he was buried in quicklime. Both of us wept for that great and good man.

  We stayed in the same room at the Railway Hotel in which we had consummated our marriage twenty years previously. It is a tribute to my wife to say that our love is stronger and more passionate now than it was then.

  Our reception in Maamtrasna was strained, as she knew it would be. Some of the actual murderers were still alive. While most of the people in the townland shunned them, their presence was a reminder of who had done the killing and of the silence of the townland when the innocent were hung. Nora’s presence reminded them of their failure. It would have been more in keeping with the melancholy mythology of the West of Ireland if she and Myles’s infant daughter had starved to death. Instead she returned twenty years later a beautiful and prosperous “Yank.”

  “Won’t they be glad to see us go?” She sighed. “Still we owed it to poor Myles to come back, didn’t we, Ned?”

  I could not have explained why we did, but I knew she was right.

  “Let’s see this Paris place,” she said with a wan smile. “No one there will know me.”

  She has read this manuscript carefully While she had never visited Donegal when she was growing up, she said that Father Lonigan’s picture of the fringes of Donegal on the edge of the Atlantic in the decades after the Famine fit the beliefs of the time. “It was bad in Galway, worse in Mayo, but worst of all out there on the ocean. Don’t they say that Colmcille might have gone to Donegal, but God stayed away.”

  Despite the silent resentment which greeted us at Maamtrasna, life was much better than it had been when Nora and Josie and Mary Elizabeth had rode away. It’s the twentieth century now. Ireland won the Land League Wars. It cannot be long before home rule finally comes.

  We showed the manuscript to Josie when we returned to Chicago. She read it carefully, then grinned her impish smile. “Isn’t it clear who the killer was, Uncle Neddie? But now’s not the time to name names, is it?”

  With that verdict I leave this diary of Father Richard Lonigan, D.D. (Salamanca) to whatever posterity might discover it.

  My wife believes that she is the same line as Josie and that some of her own fey traits are connected. She’ll even tell me that she knows that Josie and Nora expect us to solve the mystery. I learned very early in our marriage not to try to argue with such a conviction. Then I put aside Ned’s introduction and began to read the diary of Father Richard Lonigan.

  March 8, Feast of St. Cathal of Taranto.

  Another Irish exile. Fitting that I should begin my exile here on the brink of the Atlantic Ocean on such a feast day, though Sicily would be warmer than the outer edge of Ulster. The Cardinal has had his revenge for the strange ideas I brought to Maynooth from Spain. If I had simply given up those perfectly orthodox ideas, I would be sipping port in the Common Room at the College. I would not do that. So here I am, my fingers so cold that I can scarce hold the quill with which I write. The ocean roars in the distance, the wind howls through my crumbling parish house, bringing with it the foul smell of the sea, and I shiver because my slovenly and slatternly housekeeper is conserving firewood. I shall pension her off and replace her with someone who is less committed to the ways of my saintly predecessor.

  “Everyone adored the Canon, Your Reverence,” says Mike Pat Branigan, the bald, corpulent, red-faced publican who has appointed himself to educate me about the townland. “Sure we’ll not see his like again.”

  That is the none-too-gentle speech pattern of these sullen people. The new priest must understand that he should not attempt to change the ways to which his people have been accustomed.

  I do not reply to Branigan’s advice on this or any other matter. Rather I ignore him. He apparently takes my silence for agreement. I’m sure that when my piano arrives he will whisper in my ear that the people cannot understand a priest that plays the piano. I will ignore that advice too.

  I will also rebuild the parish house and hire some good and presentable woman who has no objections to a house that is clean and warm and to food that is edible. I will also set out to extirpate from the parish the three chief vices of the Irish peasantry—wakes, holy wells, and “patterns” as they call the patronal feasts which are little more than an excuse for drunkenness and violence, both of which are an insult to St. Colm. I will pry the school away from Dr. Landry, the local Protestant parson, and install a young Catholic who speaks both Irish and English. I’m sure Branigan will disagree with all these ventures.

  “Best not to disturb them, Your Reverence. Give them time now to get used to you.”

  They will indeed get used to me, sooner rather than later. Just as I have no choice but to be here, they have no choice but to suffer me as their parish priest for the rest of my natural life. If they don’t like me, it is their problem, not mine.

  April 24, Feast of St. Flann, Abbot of Iona.

  Branigan tells me that the people find my sermons “very intelligent.” By which he means they don’t understand my theology. After Mass on Sunday, a mother with three children clinging to her skirts offered a somewhat more positive opinion. “Sure, Fr. Lonigan, didn’t the old Canon preach a fine sermon too, but it took him three times as long to get to the point as it takes you.”

  A poor short sermon, our homiletics teacher told us, is much to be preferred to a poor long sermon.

  Ah well.

  “They’re not used to having a doctor of theology preach to them,” Branigan warns me.

  I beat him to his next remark.

  “Especially one who plays the piano a half hour every day.”

  A presentable woman, somewhere between thirty-five and fifty years old, came to the parish house two weeks ago, a child hiding behind her back. She was, I had reason to know, in desperate straits. She whispered meekly, yet bore herself with a certain grace that I might almost call elegant. She was a cut above the illiterate savages who constitute my parish, which was probably part of her problem.

  Her husband had died after ten years of marriage, collapsed in the field one day and himself a big man and a hard worker, though he was sixty years old. He had left nothing to her, of course. His family had reclaimed the house in which she and Eileen (apparently the child was a daughter) had lived. There was no one in her home townland down in Mayo to whom she could return.

  She had heard that I might be needing a housekeeper …

  Branigan had warned me about her of course. Some of the women in the parish disliked her and others felt sorry for her. Because of this “difference of opinion” she would not be “fitting” for my housekeeper, especially since the people had liked Mrs. O’Malley so much. I ought to be very careful to hire someone who was like Mrs. O’Malley and herself working so hard for the late Canon.

  The marriage patterns here in Ireland after the Famine are a disgrace. Her husband must have been at least fifty when he married her, a good twenty-five years older than she and finally brave enough to bring another woman into the family house where she was, technically, the one in charge. As soon as he was dead, the others got rid of her and her daughter.

  Branigan’s opposition disposed me towards the woman before
I met her.

  “Would that be Eileen hiding behind you?” I asked.

  “It would, Fr. Lonigan … Eileen, say hello to the good priest.”

  The child peered around her mother and smiled. It was a winsome, heartbreaking smile on the face of a tiny angel.

  “Jesus and Mary be with you, Father,” Eileen murmured in Irish.

  “And Jesus and Mary and Patrick be with you,” I replied. “Would you want to be living in the little house behind the parish house and helping your mother?”

  “I wouldn’t mind it, Father. I’m a quiet little one.”

  Somehow, even then I found that hard to believe.

  “It’s not good for a child to be too quiet, Eileen O’Flynn.”

  “No, Father.”

  “Mrs. O’Flynn,” I said to her mother, “I fear you will find me a harsh taskmaster. I expect a clean and neat house, food properly and punctually cooked, and peace and quiet.”

  “I’ll do my best, Fr. Lonigan.”

  “See that you do.”

  I had not the slightest doubt that she would.

  Several days later when I was indulging in my half hour of music in late afternoon, I noticed Eileen O’Flynn standing outside the window and listening with rapt attention. I almost warned her off.

  I am invited tonight to dinner at the manor house of Milord Robert Skeffington. We shall battle over control of the school and I shall win.

  April 26, Feast of Assan, Patron of Raheny in Dublin. Whence I come, not that he has ever done anything to protect me from the folly of my own mouth and the harshness of my own soul.

  On the way to the “Big House” I rode by the famed Holy Well of St. Colm (not to be confused with the one at Glen Colmcille). It is on a ledge a quarter mile from the sea, which was quiet yesterday under a blue sky and a bright spring sun that bathed the shrine in gold as it raced on towards America.

  It is more elaborate than most such “wells”—a steady flow of water from stone cairn, which fills a small pond and sinks back into the earth. Spring fed, I thought, though this close to the Atlantic it could be salt water.

  I tasted the water in the pond with my fingertips—fresh, sweet, and clean. This place surely had been a shrine as long as people had dwelt in the vicinity. Its marvelous appearance, so close to the sea, and its pleasant taste suggested that there was something sacred, almost divine about it. The stones, which lined the inside of the pond, could have been there for a thousand years.

  Next to the pond was a stone cottage, the “drying house,” since it was necessary if one was to gain the full benefits to walk into the water of the pond and climb out the other side. An English traveler, having nothing better to do, had described it forty years ago. He claimed that men and women disrobed on the patronal feast and immersed themselves into the pond. I could scarce believe that, though this part of the country is so savage that almost any pagan custom could survive. I consoled myself with the thought that the cold water would probably kill off concupiscence.

  In the distance, the vast rock—St. Colm’s mountain they call it—looms over our townland like a grim and punitive spirit, not unlike my friend the Cardinal. I’m sure its foreboding mass has made it a target for superstitious fear since long before St. Colm came out here, if he ever really did. Branigan tells me that my people never mention it to one another because that would be bad luck, not that they’ve had anything but bad luck since Cromwell invaded Ireland. I find myself thinking of it as the Cardinal’s mountain—massive, stubborn, and dumb.

  I resolved that I would denounce all superstitions at my Mass on Sunday, not that it would do much good.

  My parish stretches along the Atlantic coast in a half-moonlike curve with mountains behind us and hills at either end, the ones at the right leading to Colm’s mountain on the coast. A massive headland rises above the shingle strand, which appears and reappears with the tide. Some men do swim in the ocean though the huge rocks along the strand make it difficult and dangerous. The village—church, cemetery, the new school, pub, store, RIC barracks, a few homes that are a bit better than the surrounding farmhouses—is in the middle of the saucer created by the mountains, the hills and the headland, a kind of prison from which the outside world is entered only by an old road that winds through the valleys beyond the manor house at the right-hand end of the crescent.

  The land itself is poor, sustaining only corn, potatoes, a few peat bogs, some cattle, sheep, and goats. It might well be dairy country if the people, tenant farmers and the few day laborers left from the famine years, could purchase more than their tiny herds.

  Streams cross the land, generally draining towards the clefts in the headland, but sometimes towards a river that flows by Colm’s mount and drains an ominous lake set back in the hills, from which the local folks are afraid to draw fish though the occasional tourist fisherman draws a large catch. Somehow the lake is thought to be cursed, for reasons no one today can explain. There is no ocean fishing here because there is not even the semblance of a place that might be a tiny port

  Poor, wet, cold, rocky, and cursed.

  Lord Skeffington’s ancestors could not have been very important in whatever invading army he had fought. The land which had been taken away from the people and given to that ancestor was not very good land and the holding could not have been, even in the best of times, very lucrative. The “Big House” was not very big and was as worn and weary as the whole region. Bright flower gardens, however, lined the drive up to the house and ringed the house itself—an effort of the new Lady Skeffington if one could believe Branigan’s tales.

  “A lovely young woman,” Mrs. O’Flynn had told me. “Very kind and gracious.”

  Mrs. O’Flynn could not find a harsh word for anyone, even her in-laws, who had actually waited on me in the parish house to demand that I discharge her because she did not “belong to the parish.”

  I had told them that they were very poor Christians and dismissed them with a wave of my hand.

  Lord Skeffington had inherited the land and the title when his cousin had died—a hard, hard man, I had been told. He returned from India, found himself a proper wife in an impoverished noble family, and moved to Ireland, where he could hunt and fish to his heart’s content. Typical English landlord.

  Inside the house was cool away from the blazing fires and draft. However, Lady Mary Margaret had applied her woman’s touch to brighten the place up and make it habitable if not palatial. She was a pretty young woman with bright brown eyes, curly hair, and a quick smile. If she was depressed by her new home in a land at least as savage as India, she did not show it.

  “I’m told you’re a pianist of some talent, Fr. Lonigan,” she said. “Would you favor us with some music before supper? I’m afraid our house is not big enough to keep an orchestra.”

  I was both embarrassed and pleased, so I played Mozart, a divertimento followed by a minuet.

  Lord Robert Skeffington watched with a smile of generous amusement. He probably knew nothing about music, but he sensed that this papist cleric was hitting all the right notes. He was a tall, handsome man, with black hair edged in silver and a military bearing matched by the cut of his clothes. I noticed that he treated his young wife with affection and, more to the point, genuine respect. The latter you don’t see often in English gentry.

  Dr. Landry, complete in gaiters and a ruffle at his neck, was in my judgment a typical Church of Ireland parson—overweight, pompous, and losing his hair. He was also, unless I mistook the signs, not very intelligent. His wife was a tiny nervous woman with graying hair and an expression of permanent disapproval. They were the kind of people who lived off the taxes imposed on Irish Catholics and did nothing because their congregation was so small that they had nothing to do. Loyal servants of the Queen, of course.

  Yet the people of the townland were as polite and servile to them as they were to me.

  The worst thing about my parishioners, I had begun to think, was the servility behind which lurked disappro
val and resentment stored up through long years of incompetent clerical rule. They would be glad if I took the school away from Dr. Landry, but they would never admit it to me.

  “Bravo, Fr. Lonigan,” mine host applauded. “There are drawing rooms in England where Mozart has never been played so well.”

  “And some few which would even know it was Mozart!”

  He chuckled generously. I must be careful or I would begin to like the man.

  “‘Father’ is appropriate is it not? Or should it be ‘Doctor’?”

  “Salamanca,” I said and instantly regretted the boast. “Father, however, is just fine.”

  “An ancient and honorable university, is it not, Dr. Landry?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know, milord.”

  “Do you like it here, Father?” Lady Mary Margaret asked me.

  “I’m still feeling my way, milady. It’s a challenging assignment. And yourself?”

  “I love it! The scenery is so dramatic and the people so charming and when the wind blows I fancy that it comes all the way from New York and carries many loving messages from those who have left.”

  Her husband beamed with unabashed admiration. I realized that she was a better Christian than I was, though her exile to the end of Europe was as complete as mine. She shared it with an adored and adoring husband.

  On the other hand, I thought as Mrs. Landry twittered and tweeted about how poorly educated the Irish were and how much good would come from proper education, I decided that I would rather be lonely than share my life with someone like her—and like all the other Church of Ireland wives I had known.

  I said nothing about education. My opinions on the subject would wait till the ladies had withdrawn. Dr. Landry, however, bragged to Lord Skeffington about how much good the school was doing and how enthusiastically the previous lord had supported it. He was sure that there would be no trouble finding a new schoolmaster.