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  Law was something queer to us, as foreign as African tribal rites. Although we were under it, manipulated and maligned by it, it was ever kept as a grandiose and mystical force beyond our knowledge. All those connected to law--the Crown and the courts and the soldiers reading edicts — were bullies forcing us into a game played by their rules and spoken in a language only they understood … We knew little about our rights and nothing at all about the ability to use law. Law remained a bludgeon owned by Lord Hubble and the Protestants, and we'd no manner of defense against their judges all dressed up like princes and their documents all covered with seals.

  And then Kevin O'Garvey came along, able to read their statutes and pick them naked. Having someone to defend the croppies at their own game came as a shock to the British. After making the fool of their barristers, he tied the courts into knots, twisting and maneuvering their petty rules against them. Don't you know he became a bone in their throats. They tried pretty near everything, bribery, harassment and finally jail, but queer things would happen whenever he was put behind bars, like his lordship's hunting lodge mysteriously burning down. The authorities didn't like us having either knowledge or access to their laws, but they disliked the results of tampering with Kevin O'Garvey even more.

  After paying amenities to the Larkins and old Kilty, he was engulfed and listened to the endless woes with endless patience.

  On the second night of the wake Conor and I decided it would be prudent not to tempt the wrath of Tomas twice in so short a time, and went to my byre to sleep slightly before the rosary was to start. Liam and Brigid were already dead to the world and my brother Colm, destroyed by drink, ether and chasing the night before, lay on his back with his mouth gaping like a nesting bird let begging for a worm and snoring so loud we thought he'd wake Kilty from the dead.

  Voices came from the best room and natural curiosity brought us to the half door for a peek. All huddled around the fire and puffing away at their pipes were my daddy Fergus, Tomas, Daddo Friel and Kevin O'Garvey, as impressive a gathering as you'd ever want to see in Ballyutogue. Conor and I whispered back and forth excitedly. We were certain that it could only mean a highly secret meeting on republican matters.

  Then, just like his eyes could see through stone walls, Tomas flung the door open, tumbling us into the best room. "You'd think these lads would be dead from the lack of sleep," he said.

  "I'm sure they're just following your example," Kevin retorted. Knowing we wouldn't sleep now, Tomas glanced to Kevin, who nodded to say it was all right for us to remain.

  It was high honor indeed. On the other hand, nothing of a republican nature was ever kept from us. Our earliest heroes were escapees from the Crown hidden in the village and spirited to the next underground station.

  "Bring us a bottle from the widows," Tomas ordered Conor, and to me he pointed to a corner. "Make yourself even smaller than you are."

  When Conor returned we tucked away, keenly watching every puff and stare they made at the fire. The bottle was passed, swigged in turn, and followed by a great Irish sigh of remorse.

  "Kilty got away from us at a bad time," Kevin said. "Even as half a man he held a powerful image."

  "Aye," my daddy agreed, "we'll not see the likes of him passing this way again."

  "You'll have to keep on taking up the slack for him, Tomas," Kevin said.

  Tomas shook his head. "I'm not willing or able to carry Kilty's burdens."

  "You've already been doing it since he suffered his first stroke. Whether or not you like it or want it, everyone will be turning to you now. You'll not close your door on them any more than I've been able to."

  "It's the Larkin fate," Daddo said, "the Larkin fate."

  "I don't know," Tomas opined. "It's one matter to settle village quarrels or tell a man who he should coor his horse with. But taking up Kilty's war against the British . . . nae, it's not for me."

  "You've got to, Tomas. We're coming into a new era. For the first time in seven hundred years the tenant farmer has the right to vote and it's going to be up to you to see that everyone in these parts does."

  "You're digging with the wrong foot," Tomas answered.

  "There's a new atmosphere sweeping England. An atmosphere of reform."

  "They must have gotten wind about the revolution that took place in France last century," Tomas retorted.

  "Gladstone is of a different breed than the aristocracy," Kevin continued.

  "Gladstone, my old sow's tits," Tomas interrupted. "Scratch under his skin and you'll find an Englishman complete with an English heart. There's not been one born yet who understands that we're anything but a race of apes. What has their bloody Parliament ever doled out but cleverly worded destitution . . ."

  "Stop your jibbering!” Daddo snapped. "Can't you see that Kevin is attempting to tell us something?"

  It never failed to amaze me how Daddo, near blind and ancient as he was, could feel the mood of a person by the pitch or quiver of his voice or even the length of silence between thoughts. Indeed, he was right again, for what we witnessed was Kevin O'Garvey in a rare moment of hesitation.

  "What are you trying to say, Kevin?" Daddo repeated.

  "I'm running for the House of Commons for the East Donegal seat the next election."

  Well, you would have thought those fairies who had been hovering about waiting to snatch Kilty's soul suddenly turned on our best room and struck everyone into stone. It was that shocked. Kevin was unnerved by the sound of his own voice. The bottle passed silently but swiftly from hand to hand. Conor and I turned blue from holding our breath in tension.

  "Jaysus," my daddy mumbled at last.

  First to regain his senses, Tomas emitted a low whistle. "And I suppose," he said, "Lord Hubble will finance your campaign and all the Prods and Orangemen will carry you to London on their shoulders and Major Hamilton Walby, who's held the seat for thirty years, will be waiting to usher you in and dust it off."

  "I never thought I'd get it without a fight but we've enough votes if you stop leaning on your shovel."

  "And if it looks like you're going to prevail over Major Walby and the Earl and all that bunch," Tomas went on, acting the Devil's advocate, "what about mother church?"

  "I've not thought too much about it," Kevin answered, backing down.

  "I can see it clear as the lough in the full moon," Tomas went on. "All up and down Inishowen there's that old republican stirring. O'Garvey for Commons and pretty soon his lordship is drumming his fingers on the table top nervous like after figuring out the croppies may have enough votes. Quick! Right to the heart of the matter. His lordship and a few other lordships with the same problem will be paying our Cardinal a little social visit in Armagh. "Ah, Your Eminence, we extol the continued emancipation and betterment of the Roman Church. This must not be allowed to be deterred or reverted." They'll be ladling out good will drippings on His Holiness like they was the liberator, Daniel O'Connell. "Your Worship, we've been considering the next great steps forward . . . new legislation in your behalf . . . a new college . . . new privileges . . . new subsidies and increased gifts from ourselves for your various good works. Her Majesty's Government is all for that, you know. However, this program would be put in jeopardy by atheist Fenians trying to compel their way into Parliament and you know what that would mean to mother church. Fenians! The very sort excommunicated by yourself. Now, Your Worship, it would be a pity to see all the gains you've made go to waste. We respectfully submit you have a chat with your bishops and offer them a word to the wise." And Father Lynch and all the Father Lynches will be condemning you from every pulpit in Donegal. Have you enough votes to overcome Jesus, Mary and all the saints?"

  My daddy was red-faced and I tried to crawl inside my own stomach. I'd never heard so much revilement of the Lord in two days running. Tomas had worked himself into a small rage but Kevin and Daddo had been at war too many years to be jolted.

  Few men, including the priest, could admonish Tomas, Kevin being one
of them, Daddo the other, and he was between the two. My daddy sort of drifted out of range of the discussion, merely shaking his head at the implications of it. Kevin refilled his pipe with deliberate slowness, allowing Tomas' boil to slow to a simmer.

  "If the wind is out of your bagpipe," Kevin said at last, "let me try to put over what kind of stakes we're shooting for. Parnell calculates he can take an Irish Party into the British Parliament holding some seventy seats. Seventy seats, mind you, unquestionably the balance of power between the Liberals and Conservatives. His price for cooperation with Gladstone's Liberals will be a Home Rule Bill for Ireland . . ."

  "You're putting too much on Parnell," Tomas cut in. "In the end Parnell is a rich Protestant, a landowner. Oh, he's got a good line of gab all right, but what he's doing is using us and our misery in his own personal drive for power."

  It was not fair to say that Kevin looked Tomas in the eye, being that much shorter, but he flushed with anger. "I'll thank you to shut up, Tomas Larkin! Parnell has done more for this country than all the Roman collars put together."

  "Well, that's not saying a hell of a lot!"

  "I'm going to tell you once who Charles Stewart Parnell is and don't you forget it . . . he's an Irishman."

  "Same like Smith O'Brien and Isaac Butt," Daddo said, "who spent many an hour guiding me and Kilty in Young Ireland and the Land League. They was Prods, too . . . to say nothing of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, who was executed in the Liberties of Dublin on the very same year I was born. Hanged he was, and drawn and quartered and his blood sucked up off the pavement. He was a Prod but he was Irish."

  "God love you, Kevin," Tomas said, switching to the conciliatory, the icy logic and the cold approach, "there's not an iota of sense to this entire exercise. It's a dirty game you're playing with yourself and a dirty illusion you're holding up to us. So what if you do go roaring into London at the end of your rainbow with seventy members of Parliament and you force Gladstone to pass a Home Rule Bill . . . tell me . . . tell me one honest thing . . . will the House of Lords veto it . . . yes or nae?"

  "It's not the point at all."

  "Then what the hell is the point!"

  "Continuing the war on a new field of battle . . . taking the first step in a new direction open to us . . ."

  "You've no more chance of getting a fair hearing in their chambers than winning the straw game at the Derry Fair."

  "Nae," Daddo said with his old voice now showing its wear. "Kevin's got to do battle in his way like we all did before him in our own way. Are you telling Kevin that all the fighting he's done and all the rights he's won have been for naught?"

  "I would never tell Kevin O'Garvey that," Tomas said, "but I'll tell him this. In the end there is only one thing Lord Hubble and the Crown understand . . . withhold his rents . . . rustle his cattle . . . assassinate his gombeen men … boycott his fields when he needs our labor. But don't get yourself into his parlor and try to play his parlor games. It will never be his laws that make our life bearable, but our time-honored methods."

  "Up to this point his time-honored methods have been a hell of a lot more effective than our time-honored methods," Kevin retorted. "There is a sin in all of this, Tomas, and that sin is for you to tell me to stop trying."

  An uncertain silence fell on the room. My daddy set new turf in the fire while the other three sort of hung in mid-air with their thoughts. Tomas took up a slow pace that increased in sulkiness, then gave to tugging at his hair and cracking his fist in an open palm in frustration. As he did, the others closed in tighter to the fire, waiting for his last words. He stopped, held his. arms apart as though he could devour them in one sweep, then waved his hands about as though trying to pick thoughts from the air.

  "What we are," he said, "is consumed by the pair of Irish fantasies. We have submitted as a people to a Christ fantasy that has dulled our minds to think for ourselves and kept us on our knees pleading guiltily to a terrifying God whom we are not permitted to know as an intimate but only to perpetuate a vaguely defined, unquestioned myth of a land beyond the mountains. And . . . the republican fantasy that fills us with false, childlike courage when we're bragging about our manhood in the shebeen, telling each other what brave lads we are. Glorifying deeds that were never done and feeding ourselves republican saltpeter for a liberation we'll never live to see. Never! For God's sake, never, facing up to what is real. We're never out of our fantasies long enough to look at ourselves and say, This is what we are. The fields are real. The rents are real. Kilty's death is real as was his pain in life. Nae, but we have to smother in the sauces of fantasy, hovering fairies, the smile of Mary and her promises of the hereafter, the jail breaks that never took place. You deal in fantasy, Daddo, you're the shanachie."

  "Aye," the old man answered. "The problem being that most of the poor bastards aren't Tomas Larkins. Strip the fantasy away from most men and women and they won't be able to make it through this dirty life. All a dream is, is a bit of poteen to dull the pain. Is it all that bad? And are you telling me, Tomas, that Conor over there is not to be allowed to have a few dreams of his own?"

  Tomas came to us awesomely. "I'm telling Conor that I'm not the son of Kilty, only his follower. I'm telling him that the only thing that matters for his daddy is to farm his land well, pay his debts, feed his children, and pass his fields along in good order. Wrap yourself in Irish fantasies, lad, and it will end up crushing your chest like a giant boulder rolling amok down the mountainside and tumbling the cottage."

  I watched their four soiled and weary faces, hoping that a spark would ignite them, but they had stripped each other of their wild Irish dreams, and even as Tomas told Kevin he would support him there was no celebration in it.

  "You've my pity," Tomas said, "for the day Home Rule becomes a threat you'll have a reality all right enough. Howling Orange mobs whipped to hate and screaming for our blood. Is that fair enough, Daddo?"

  The old man's blinded eyes stared foggily into infinity. And tears of reality fell.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My daddy and Tomas left to see Kevin O'Garvey off. The Larkin house was still overrun with wakers so we were told to bed Daddo down before our hearth. Conor fetched another bottle of poteen from the widows while I made up a mattress of hay, covering it with Ma's prize goose-down quilt she'd got with her egg money from a, tinker at the Muff Fair before I was born. I puffed up the fire till Conor returned and directed a bottle into Daddo's hands.

  "Your daddy was the biggest dreamer of them all no matter what he says," Daddo said to Conor. "I knew Tomas from his first scream as a newborn . . . sure, he was no more than half the size of Seamus there when me and Kilty was carting him clear over Donegal to hear Daniel O'Connell."

  Yet another healthy measure of poteen found its way down that ancient gullet on the path well worn by many a gallon before it

  "Help me to the straw," he said.

  Conor and I moved him onto the mattress, his joints creaking like they were loosely welded. We propped his back up against the wall and dimmed the lantern, leaving only a wee glow from the turf fire. Being so little had its advantages. I nestled close to him while Conor pulled up a creepie

  "The biggest dreamer of them all," he repeated slowly, undoing the wrappings around his hands and revealing a mass of rheumatic swollen knuckles. He splashed them with poteen, rubbing it in and grunting as he attempted to flex his fingers.

  "Tomas is no less a Larkin than Kilty even though his ways are different. I knew all the Larkins. I knew your great-grandfar Ronan, as well as your great uncles. The family fled to Inishowen from Armagh shortly before I was born . . . that would be the year of eighteen and three, the selfsame year they hanged Emmet in Dublin."

  We became duly entranced by the spell as the ancient shanachie ascended on a wisp of reverie with his thoughts prancing about like a mischievous fairy. With merely the two of us, myself and Conor, as his honored listeners, he fished about for that moment in time to begin the odyssey of the Larkins.


  *

  By the end of the seventeenth century the Irish had dissipated their energy fighting a dozen rebellions against the British rule. The O'Neill clan had been the most troublesome, rising no less than three times during the 1600s alone. Most of their land had already been seized by the British aristocracy, who dispossessed them and replaced them by the importation of tens of thousands of Scots. Ulster was colonized in the form of a plantation to protect the Crown against the Catholic natives.

  Oliver Cromwell zenithed the slaughter against the Irish and, after crushing yet another O'Neill rising, took whatever land was left of the ancient pale around Inishowen and Ballyutogue for back pay to his officers and soldiers. When Cromwell was finished with his work the Catholics owned less than five per cent of their own country and the most of them were banished west of the River Shannon . . . to hell or Connaught.

  In order to break any future spirit of rebellion and to assure their conquest, a future Dublin Parliament of British Protestant ascendancy would pass a set of penal laws which were to reduce the Catholics to chattel status without human rights.

  • No Catholic was permitted to own land.

  • No Catholic was permitted to vote.

  • No Catholic was allowed to hold public office.

  • No Catholic was allowed to work in the civil service.

  • No Catholic was allowed to own a weapon.

  • No Catholic was allowed to own property of value over 5 pounds pence

  • No Catholic was allowed to be educated in or out of Ireland.

  • No Catholic could earn more than one third of the value of his crops.