Tag: revolution

The Unquiet Land

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She used to stick up for Nora like an older brother. Fearless, she was. What a girl.”
Finn’s voice trailed away, but the wistful look remained. He was recalling scenes from long ago. “I was working on the boat one summer afternoon. Hot as an oven, I remember. Had been for several days. The children were playing on the harbour. Half a dozen of them. Boys and girls. They must have been ten or eleven years-old at the time. Clifford Hamilton was there. He was a bumptious young fellow even then. He started teasing Nora. I don’t know what he was saying because I was too far away. But you know Nora. Always sensitive, easily embarrassed. Whatever young Clifford said, Nora took it ill. It obviously upset her. That got Caitlin’s back up. Man alive, she lit into Clifford like a she-cat. Next we knew, Clifford was over the edge and into the water.” Finn chuckled. “It happened so quickly no one could do anything to prevent it. I saw it coming and I shouted, but I was too late. Even if they heard me, which I doubt. And Caitlin just stood up there on the lip of the harbour, hands on her hips, and continued shouting at poor Clifford who was swimming to the ladder to get out.”
“The tide was in then,” Padraig said.
“By good fortune it was.” Finn said. “Clifford would have been in one hell of a mess if it hadn’t been.”
Then the old man fixed his pale grey eyes on Padraig’s emaciated face for a few moments of silent but stringent admonition. “I hope you’ll leave Caitlin alone, Padraig. I hope you won’t try to force her to conform to your impossible Christian practices. Keep that nonsense for the saintly Nora. Caitlin’s different. She has pride in herself, and I want her to keep it. I want her to know that her accomplishments—and they are many—are her own, her very own. I would hate her to go through life thinking that she owed them to a non-existent god, that they were the hand-outs of divine charity. What pride can anyone derive from that? So leave Caitlin alone. Do you hear me?”
Padraig remained silent. He returned Finn’s unwavering gaze with a look of obdurate purpose. The two men sat in this dualistic pose for several seconds.
“So that’s how it is,” Finn said at last.
Still Padraig did not answer. He looked away from Finn with harrowing sadness and regret, his glance settling on the pale porcelain of the Victory of Samothrace.
“Damn you, Padraig,” Finn said with feeling but without raising his

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In Turbulent Times

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Then Liam was still. With a low moan his body relaxed, and she felt the full weight of it pressing on her. For a moment he lay upon her with his chin on her shoulder. Then he pulled himself away and rolled over on to his back with a sigh. Nora winced at the hurt of his withdrawal and burst into tears.
҂
Liam Dooley sat in his armchair by the fire reading an old, leather-bound copy of The Confessions of Saint Augustine that was old even when his grandfather bought it in Smithfield Market in Belfast many years before.
‘Grandda, if I was to ask you to name the book that most influenced you,’ Liam had once asked of the old man, ‘which one would you choose?’
‘The Confessions of St. Augustine,’ Grandfather Owen Dooley had replied with no hesitation. ‘That book gave me a whole new way to think about God and religion. It took me deep into the meaning of life, and continues to do so. He’s been the most influential thinker that I’ve ever read. I have an old copy in the bookcase there. Read it as often as you can. And when I die, I want you to have it and cherish it.’
When his grandfather died the book had indeed passed to Liam, the only physical keepsake Liam had of the old man whom he had venerated for as long as he could remember. Often he felt that his grandfather watched over him from Heaven, that everything he did had to be good because his grandfather was always there, watching. Liam’s great fear was that his grandfather could read his thoughts too. But he calmed himself by arguing that his grandfather would understand the often lustful thoughts of a young, single man. As long as Liam kept his lust on a tight leash his grandfather would appreciate the struggle and commend him on its victory. Only once had he surrendered; and since the day of his lapse with Nora Carrick he had taken to praying not to God, not to the Virgin, not to St Francis, but to his grandfather, asking his grandfather to forgive the humiliation he had caused him in the sight of God and begging the old man to intercede for him with the blessed saints, with God Himself.
‘I’m not like Padraig,’ Liam argued with the spirit of his grandfather. ‘I am not a priest. I have taken no vow of celibacy. Nora is an adult woman. She came to me of her own free will. Pressed her body against mine. I could not have done what I did otherwise. You know that. I would never touch a woman unless she encouraged me. And Nora encouraged me. It was she who suggested going to bed. She wanted to have sex with me.’
Liam looked up from his book. The fire was low.

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The Unquiet Land

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Finn MacLir dragged his feet back into the dining room after seeing his guests off into the night. He paused in the doorway, raised his outspread hands to his face, and drew them down over his cheeks. “Padraig, I’m tired.”
He was a tall man, over six feet in height. His broad, beefy shoulders were more rounded now, his waist wider than in his younger days. As Padraig remembered him, he had always been a burly, muscular man, full of energy and vitality. Now, at seventy-five years of age, that energy and that vitality had begun to ebb away.
He approached the table unsteadily, lifted the wine decanter and tipped it to his glass. But only a drop or two dribbled out.
“So much for that,” he said. He thumped the decanter down again on the table, and a few knives and forks jumped on their plates. Finn turned to face his remaining guest.
“These are troubled times to be returning to Ireland, Padraig.”
“When are there not troubled times in Ireland?” Padraig said.
“Ay, when indeed?” Finn sank into his chair with a sigh. “The last election left us in a pretty mess, didn’t it? A real shipwreck.” He paused in thought for a moment, tapping the empty wine glass with his finger. “Ay, a real shipwreck. The old ship of state, the S.S. Ireland—remember her?—she ran aground on rocks during a mutiny. A rebel crew tried to take her over. We didn’t know it then, but it seems this rebel crew, this Sinn Fein, had a lot of support on board. The passengers have since voted them into positions of command. Seventy-three of them no less, with Eamon de Valera, one of the old mutineers, escaped from the cooler and appointed captain. It could only happen in Ireland.”
Finn MacLir stared at the empty wine glass, silent, serious, disillusioned. “And half a dozen of the old crew, all that’s left of our old Irish Parliamentary party, cast adrift on a raft in very stormy waters. They’re doomed, I fear. But the situation doesn’t look too good for any of them; or even for the ship itself. They’ve renamed her the S.S. Republic but they haven’t got her off…

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In Turbulent Times

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‘Oh yes, I knew him well. And admired him. He’s a monk in Loughinish Abbey in south Armagh now. Why do you ask?’
‘He was epileptic too, wasn’t he?’ Nora’s hands rested on the table with the knife and fork still in them. She looked earnestly at Liam. She accepted the fact of her epilepsy with no embarrassment. She had long ago come to terms with it. It meant no more to her than the dark brown of her eyes or the black of her hair. But she wanted others to accept it, to regard it simply as a normal aspect of her being. Most of all, though she could not explain why, she wanted Liam to accept it. So she watched his face and was disappointed. Liam’s mouth twitched, and his eyes looked down at the bacon and eggs on his plate. He reddened a little and then said, ‘Yes, he was;’ but his voice could not hold the nonchalance he tried to charge it with. Internally Liam knew he had failed her. He wished he could kick himself.
Why do I react this way? he repeated to himself while silence extended into a solid barrier between them.
‘Do you believe the gossip that Padraig was my father, Liam?’
Nora’s question exploded in his face. The barrier disintegrated with a crash that reverberated through the house, through the empty schoolrooms.
‘Nora! How could you …? How can you … ?’ Liam struggled to regain his composure. The blast from her gelignite question had hurled him off his feet.
She smiled. The smile leered with malicious sadism. Liam was totally confused, disoriented, unbearably discomfited. He liked to feel solid, familiar ground beneath his feet. He liked the trodden paths of life, however narrow or however straight, and he did not stray from them. He was at one with those whom Grey elegised in his English country churchyard. He was one of the living dead, his life already past, like a swift, irrecoverable dream, his being already buried under a smothering mound of moral precepts, religious commandments, social expectations and private, psychological inhibitions.
‘Some people in the village have hinted that I might be Father Padraig’s bastard, haven’t they?’
Stop it, Nora, stop it, Liam cried silently. He gripped his knife and fork fiercely. He clenched his teeth. He pushed his back hard against the chair till he felt the wood bruise his spine. He drew in a deep breath. ‘Whatever put that silly notion into your head?’ he blurted out, and then realised how weak his question was. ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘You understand me well enough, Liam Dooley.’ Nora’s voice was hard, penetrating, like the bull the stoneworkers pounded into granite to split it. ‘I know what they say. I know that you know also.’

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The Unquiet Land

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“In one way they were right,” Michael interrupted.
“Yes, that’s true enough,” Caitlin agreed. “The doctor tried to tell the people it was epilepsy, but they said that epilepsy was just a doctor’s big word for seizure by the Devil. Then a fishing boat went down in a storm with the loss of all hands. The people in the fishing village blamed Padraig. They dragged him from the doctor’s house, but on the way to the harbour, where they might have drowned him, he suffered another seizure. He was writhing on the ground and foaming at the mouth when my father rescued him. The doctor agreed with my father that the best thing for his own safety was to let Padraig go.”
“What a terrible life that poor man has had,” Michael observed.
“Only the first dozen years,” Caitlin said. “He was twelve when he came here.”
“So he lived with the doctor and his wife for three years?”
“About that, yes. But he was mostly confined to their house. Children stoned him one day when he went outside.”
“Imagine being stuck in a house for three years.”
“It was a lot better than the house he came from. The doctor continued his education.”
“Padraig’s education?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘continued’ it?”
“His mother, the school-teacher, educated him herself as best she could under the circumstances in her brother’s house. She did a good job of it too. Padraig is a clever man. A very quick learner.”
“You should know, shouldn’t you?” Michael said. “You spent a lot of time over his books too, as I’ve heard.”
“I learned as much from Padraig as he did from me,” Caitlin said modestly, but honestly. “Old Shaughnessy, the schoolmaster, didn’t know what to make of Padraig. I did. I taught him what I could. Except for theology.”
“Theology?” This was a new word for Michael.
“The study of religion.”
“I see.”
“Padraig was quite well versed in that. The doctor or his wife must have known a lot about it. Padraig actually taught himself, Michael, in between the odd jobs he did for my father. He did well enough to get to university. After that there was no stopping him.”

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The Unquiet Land

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“And what would you have done,” she asked, “if you had gone to my room and found an empty bed?”
Michael paused. He smiled to himself and said, “No matter. I’d have slept in it anyway.”
“Even if I wasn’t there?”
“Why not?”
“You’re teasing, Michael Carrick. Wouldn’t you come to find me?”
“How would I know where to look? I would never have guessed you were up here all alone on this dark hillside.”
“I told Mother Ross. She was listening for you. She knows your tread on the stairs.”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“Oh no. Mother Ross knows all about us now.”
“No; I mean, weren’t you afraid coming up here alone?”
“What is there to be afraid of, Michael? I was born on this farm. I grew up in these hills. I know them as I know my own body. I know every stone, every boulder, every thorn bush and clump of whin.”
Caitlin’s arm came out from under the rug, and she raked the ashes with the blackened stick. “The whin bushes are getting more flowers,” she said. “In a couple of months the whole hillside will be blazing with them. Did you smell them in the air when you came up the loaney?”
“No. There aren’t enough yet to give out a smell.”
Caitlin tapped the glowing end of the stick on the hearth-stone and watched the fluster of sparks disappear. “They don’t smell like flowers even when there’s a lot of them,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever noticed that.”
Michael sat with his chin on her shoulder, his cheek pressed against hers. “What do they smell like?”
“They smell like bodies,” Caitlin replied. “They smell like love-making.”
Michael let his hands run down along the line of Caitlin’s arms and then held her round the waist. The rug rumpled up, baring her feet and her knees. He kissed her neck and her ear.
She twisted her body below the rug and kissed him on the lips.
“What were the things you had on your mind tonight?” Michael asked nervously as Caitlin turned her face back to the fire.
Her eyes stared at the yellow flames. “Padraig. You. My father. The future.”
“And the past?”
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In Turbulent Times

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But those same powers—satanic or divine, according to opinions prevailing from time immemorial—held her in their grip and demanded annual or even more frequent submission ever since. Her epileptic seizures were a constantly gnawing concern to Liam while Nora was his pupil and a cause of fright, excitement and storytelling among the other children in the school. Dr Alexander had declared that the fits were simply the result of some slight brain damage that Nora had suffered when she was born and that they were nothing to be alarmed about. More malicious tongues blamed the incompetence of the still unqualified medical student, Clifford Hamilton, who had been called against his will to perform a placenta previa delivery by Caesarean section on a wild, wet winter night when no other doctor was available. Local people said that he should never have been summoned that night to take control of such a difficult delivery. Dr Alexander, the current Corrymore doctor, admitted the possibility that someone more experienced than Clifford Hamilton might have handled the birth with greater proficiency but he added that the delivery was a difficult one in any case, and no one could guarantee that a more experienced doctor would in fact have done any better. To this day Dr Alexander commended Clifford for what he did under such testing circumstances. ‘If there is any brain damage,’ Dr Alexander often said, ‘it is obviously very slight and will not do the child any harm. You can see she is a budding genius already.’
҂
Nora bore her handicap with a fortitude unexpected in a girl so young, so insecure, so vulnerable, and for this Liam admired her. He took it upon himself to give this quick, intelligent girl, stumbling even at the start of her journey into womanhood, more than ordinary care. He could not resist the mute appeal for sympathy, for help, for encouragement that precocious pride had silenced in the darkness of her eyes. He could not resist the serious determination of the unformed scholar to escape from that strangely disturbed and disturbing mentality. He could see instinctively the intelligence that hid within that young but tortured mind as the sculptor saw the future form within the blank whiteness of his ivory or his marble. Patiently Liam worked upon it, chiselling away slowly and watching the chips of ignorance and childish superstition fall away upon the schoolroom floor.
All of Liam’s pupils were output shaped from blocks of stone or clods of clay or challenging curves of ivory. Passionately devoted to his art, Liam was happiest in the theatre of his creations.

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The Unquiet Land

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“But aren’t you trying to change souls with your sermons? Aren’t you trying to make them more acceptable to your God?” Finn leaned forward on the table, his massive hands cupped around his glass of wine. “The soul cannot be so untouchable.”
“With the word of God one can indeed reach into the soul,” Padraig consented. “But no instrument devised by man has the same power.”
“Ah, we have a conflict here,” said Finn. “Sweeney, fill up my glass and top up your own. Any of you others care to join us, help yourselves to whatever you want. That stage is getting set again. See why I prefer to act than to watch?”
“You don’t act, Finn,” Sweeney observed; “you direct.”
He poured the wine for Finn. The last drops from the decanter he shook into his own glass. His sunset face was blazing crimson, with purple only in the shadows. He replaced the empty decanter in the centre of the table and turned up the wick of the low-burning lamp. Shadows flickered on the walls, on the dark sideboard and the cabinets, on the tall clock and the pale porcelain of the Victory.
“So, Padraig,” Finn went on, “you think the word is mightier than the surgeon’s knife.”
“The Word that was in the beginning, yes; the Word of God that was made flesh as Jesus Christ.”
“What do you say to that, young Clifford?” Finn asked. “Does the Word of God tell us more of man and nature, life and death, than your brain and blade will ever reveal?”
“You’re confusing two separate realms, Finn,” Clifford argued in a precise, dry voice. “The brain is a material thing. We probe into it, repair it, understand it, with the aid of material instruments. The soul is immaterial. We change it, if we change it at all, with immaterial instruments: with words, thoughts, ideas, emotions, that reach it through the mind.”
“Body and mind; matter and spirit; material, immaterial.” Finn repeated the words reflectively. “That sounds reasonable enough. Conflict resolved.” He sipped some wine, then looked at Clifford. “You say that the soul is reached through the mind. So you separate mind and soul?”
Clifford looked around the table self-consciously. Michael was asleep with his head fallen forward on his chest. Seamus and Sweeney stared at their wine and looked as though they wished they too were asleep. Only Padraig, facing Finn across the length of the dish-and-bottle-laden table, stayed alert, leaning back in his chair with his left hand dangling and his right hand holding a half-emptied glass of wine.

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In Turbulent Times

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Liam Dooley was thirty-eight, going on thirty-nine. His fair, wavy hair was receding alarmingly at the temples. He believed a baldness was spreading at the back of his head also, like a threadbare elbow in an old jacket, but he could not see for sure in the mirror and he would have been embarrassed to ask. There was no one he could have asked in any case without feeling foolish. His parents were dead; his sister, after her twenty-first birthday, had moved to Belfast to marry the father of her daughter; and Liam lived alone in two rooms, a kitchen and a living-bedroom that the Church had built onto the back of the new school as accommodation for the teacher, but which could be converted to additional classrooms when the growing number of pupils made the extension necessary. Liam’s baldness and his forties were both approaching rapidly. Both inexorable. He could always have lied about his age to strangers who did not know him but he could not pass himself off as twenty-eight or twenty-nine when his hairline was almost as far back as his ears and threatening to meet up with the circle of skin he felt was spreading at his crown. He had to face facts. Liam Dooley’s youth was irretrievably lost. Lost, not squandered. Liam was no profligate. He was no philanderer. His intimacy with women extended only to walking one or two of them home from church. Once he went as far as holding Molly Noonan’s hand as they strolled home from a choir practice but he could not bring himself to embrace her, nor to give her a kiss as he left her at her door. He wanted to. He wanted to very much. But he was timorous and hesitant. Fearful of rejection, he held back. Molly did not ask him in for tea. Nor did she ever walk home with him again. Sean O’Sullivan, a tenor with large, yellowing teeth, escorted her home after that. Then Molly got pregnant, and she and Sean ran away to Belfast and were never seen again.
Liam often thought of Molly Noonan, of the pert looks she flicked his way, of the teasing scent from her red hair as he stood behind her in the choir, of the smiles she gave him when he entered Lizzie Martin’s shop where she worked. He remembered the late spring evening when they had last walked home together. They had paused where Killeenagh Burn trips down

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The Unquiet Land

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night beyond the window. But tonight was different. Tonight the heavy, unmoving air grew stagnant; it weighed upon the room unstirred by old Finn’s gusty tales. Tonight the old sailor’s verbal gales had died to barely audible sighs.
Finn appeared to be unaware of the deepening depression that had settled over the homecoming party. His mind was on the day many years ago when he first saw Padraig: a skinny boy in short pants, writhing on the cobbles of a market square, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. Never would he forget the sight. The crowd pushed back, staring in ignorance and horror at the boy’s convulsions. Two mongrel pups snapped at his legs and arms, and a sheepdog snarled and barked, its vicious teeth bared as if ready to rush in and chomp them into the boy’s neck.
“The whelp with the trousers isn’t putting up much of a fight,” someone said, and the crowd started to laugh. Ignorance and horror relaxed into mirth.
“I wonder what he’d do with a bitch in heat,” said another.
Finn waded through the crowd as through a field of barley, pushing the people aside in anger. He burst into the clearing where the boy was lying still now, his face in the muck that covered the cobbles of The Square. Finn kicked the sheepdog hard; it ran off into the crowd with a howl of pain. The pups pranced around him, yelping still, as Finn knelt down, rolled the boy over and picked him up in his arms.
“I spit on you all,” he shouted to the crowd and carried the boy away down the sloping street to where his fishing boat was tied in the harbour.
Now the Devil’s child, his own adopted son, was home again, a priest.
“I hoped to make a man of you, Padraig.” Finn was rising out of his reverie. “And I made a monk. Well, I suppose that’s not a bad accomplishment, considering what I had to work with. Come now, gentlemen, let’s not look as if we’re at a Presbyterian wake. Let’s drink. Let’s eat.” He turned towards the door that led into the kitchen. “Caitie! Jinnie! Bring us some supper. We’re half a dozen hungry men in here.”
Supper revived the company. Even Clifford forgot his headache and his queasy stomach. He enjoyed the food, the conversation, the dark red wine that everyone started drinking again in large measures. The more they drank, the more convivial they became. Only Finn MacLir seemed more subdued than usual.
“We had many more people here to welcome you last night, Padraig.” Slattery’s purple face was taking on a crimson cast like a spectacular sunset.

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