Trinity: A Novel of Ireland Read online

  • No Catholic was permitted to practice as a lawyer, doctor, trader or professional.

  • The Catholic religion was largely forbidden, with no facility to train new priests, and foreign-educated priests were outlawed.

  • All Catholics were compelled to pay a tithe to the Anglican Protestant Church.

  This brought on secret masses. Priests returning from the Continent were hunted down, hanged, drawn and quartered in the diamonds of Ulster townships.

  *

  Conor snitched a puff of the pipe he filled and lit for Daddo.

  "England's darkest hour," Daddo said. As though he had heard those words spoken himself, he recited Edmund Burke. "The penal code was a contrivance for the impoverishment and debasement in the Irish of human nature itself as bad as ever invented from the perverted ingenuity of man." Daddo puffed and sighed. "Those were his very thoughts and, what is more, a Lord Chancellor once ruled that law doesn't presume that any such person as an Irish Roman Catholic exists. Well, they did us in so good that the most destitute beggar in London wouldn't have traded places with an Irish farmer."

  Daddo held the poteen bottle before his face as though he could really see it. "And they wonder why we drink so much, as if it weren't the only way to stave off total madness from what they imposed on us. But lads even in our most dire straits we kept the old language alive and never ceased the writing of music and poetry, and we clung as fiercely to our religion as we did to the bottle . . . as you know, I was a hedge teacher for your daddies."

  *

  A large part of the Scottish immigration to Ulster was a fleeing from English religious persecution. The Presbyterian soon found himself under many provisions of the penal code as an inferior "non-Anglican." This triggered a Scots-Irish exodus from Ulster to the New World, where they became a blood stock of the American pioneer movement, soldiers in the Revolutionary Army, forefathers of many great Americans, including a number of their Presidents, and a backbone of the emerging Canada.

  Those Presbyterians who remained in Ulster were liberal of mind and of a kindred spirit with the suffering Catholics. They were among the first republicans.

  To protect themselves from perverse landlordism, they banded together to fight the gentry and his agent. Steel boys, Peep o' Day Boys, Heart of Oak Boys all rode the night, bent on chilling the marrow of the oppressor and keeping rents and rights within humane limitations.

  Toward the end of the 1700s a dramatic change had come over the Dublin Parliament. Inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, a new breed of ascendancy — upper-middle-class Protestants, including descendants of Cromwell — began to consider themselves as Irishmen first. No longer acting as a rubber stamp for the Crown, they sought their own liberation from England. In a spirit of reform, the Dublin Parliament proceeded to roll back and repeal the vile penal code. By the 1790s Catholics were allowed to bid on land leases.

  So great was their starvation for land, the Catholics bid on leases, throwing caution and reality to the wind, willing to mortgage their souls to obtain it. They began underbidding the Presbyterian so that his privileged position eroded. It created a sense of anger, fear and panic, and Peep o' Day Boys who had ridden against the landlord now began to ride against the new threat — the Catholic native trying to regain his land.

  Catholic Defenders answered outrage for outrage and committed more than a few of their own. Ulster became a battleground of forays between a land-starved Catholic peasantry and an entrenched Presbyterian peasantry.

  "It was about this time that the Larkins of Armagh came into the picture," Daddo said. "Your great-grandfar Ronan, being the leader of the Defenders in that county. In the year of seventeen and ninety-five a showdown fight took place between the Peep o' Day Boys and the Defenders. It occurred near Armagh Township in a place called the Diamond, and was a most furious battle. Thirty of our lads were killed, including two Larkin brothers. Ronan never called the fight but had to come in to save our forces and, sad to relate, the Prods carried the day. "So sweet was their victory, the Prods likened it to King William of Orange's victory over James at the Boyne a hundred years earlier, and in honor of it they changed the name of their band to the Orange Society a name that was to ever make our skins crawl.

  "So we were split forever from our former Presbyterian brothers. The British aristocracy used them freely to apply the ancient principle of divide and rule."

  *

  The alliance for Irish liberation was a queer one. The intellectual and political front was led by ascendancy Anglicans joined in the countryside by the Catholic peasantry. These two factions allied loosely under the banner of the United Irishmen. It was led by a hopeless dreamer and maverick, Theobald Wolfe Tone, who had renounced his own ascendancy class.

  Thousands of Irishmen, remnants of defeated armies, had historically fled to the sympathetic shores of France. Paris of the 1790s was filled with the opiate of rebellion. Here Wolfe Tone pleaded the Irish cause. Catholic France had a certain affinity for Catholic Ireland, enough to become a reluctant ally on the eve of the United Irishmen insurrection of 1798.

  Catholic emancipation had become a goal of the United Irishmen. After the peasant land wars, the Presbyterians of Ulster stood in dire fear of their own survival. As the rising grew, thousands of them in the Orange Society joined the Crown through the Yeomanry, going after the Catholics with murderous vengeance.

  In the south of Ireland there was a short-lived rebel victory at Wexford. The rebellion collapsed in short order with a French-supported invasion turning into a fiasco by a gale at sea which debilitated their fleet. Two years later in *98 a French force landed. It was surrounded and captured.

  *

  "In Ulster the Presbyterians in the British Yeomanry conducted a blood orgy so revolting that one British commander resigned in disgust. Every village diamond in Ulster was crimson from the drippings of the whipping post," Daddo said, commencing to embellish the gory doings of the Orange Society among the English forces. "Floggings to get the names of Defenders and United Irishmen left victims crippled for life. Lord Cornwallis, who learned about losing revolutions in the American colonies, was making certain his sword would never be surrendered again. The madness to crush the Catholics was heightened by the arrival of regiments of Welsh and Hessians from Germany, determined not to be outdone by Presbyterian butchery."

  My heart and my stomach were both feeling it as Daddo related the horror in crushing the rising. Daddo hummed a tune but his voice was so crooked we could barely make it out, then recognized it as one of the songs we heard so often when the Prods celebrated around the Twelfth of July.

  Poor croppies ye know that your sentence was come

  When you heard the dread sound of the Protestant drum.

  In memory of William we hoisted his flag

  And soon the bright Orange put down the Green rag.

  Down, down, croppies lie down.

  "When it was over, Wolfe Tone had been captured and killed himself in jail. They say some fifty thousand was killed. Not on the battlefield but mostly in cold-blooded murder. Ronan Larkin and his brothers fled to hiding in the Mourne Mountains."

  *

  A new and permanent order had been born out of the rising. The Presbyterians were alienated forever from the Catholics. They had proved their worth and loyalty to the Crown and established that Ulster principle of fanatical loyalty to the British monarchy. The tragedy was that two peasantries had been driven into sectarian conflict with no one the winner except the British aristocracy who had stolen the land in the first place.

  *

  "Ronan was ultimately betrayed by an informer. Remember me, lads, when I say informers are the bane of Irish life. Beware of them for all your days. He was brought down in chains from the Mourne to Armagh Township and its bloody whipping post in the diamond. They lashed him with the cat-o'-nine so fiendishly you could see the bare bones of his body through the shredded flesh. And then they crowned him with boiling tar."


  "Jaysus," I whispered.

  Conor never said anything when he was aroused. His eyes only narrowed and his whole being tightened up ominously.

  "They left him with the life oozing from his body," Daddo continued, "planning to return the next morning to complete the punishment. He was to be drawn and quartered and then decapitated and his head stuck on a pike to display as an example for any future rebellious croppies

  *

  During the night the last of his band, including the two surviving brothers, stole back, overpowered the Yeomen on guard, cut Ronan down from the whipping post, flung him into a cart and raced away. Somehow, he continued to live.

  The three Larkin brothers found their way by the underground to Inishowen and Ballyutogue just as 1800 came into being. There was no decent land to be had, so they took leases above the seven-hundred-foot level so high in the heather it was little more than shelf rock. They busted the rock, clearing plots and using it for walls. Then they carried up topsoil two buckets a man at a time, mixed it with seaweed and kelp till it became fertile. In the meantime, they survived by poaching on Lord Hubble's fishing rights on Lough Foyle, becoming the first proficient fishermen in the area. By the second year, a crop was brought in and over a period of time they were able to increase the size and holding of their leases through monumental toil.

  *

  "Ronan was never a total man after his beating and he sired only three boys, Kilty being the oldest among them. Kilty . . . aye, there was a lad. He was born scrapping."

  Daddo was caught up in a sudden burst of enthusiasm which enveloped us too. As Kilty lay next door on the final night of waking, his legend was being birthed by a wizened shanachie drinking up the warmth of the fire with us two young wanes. During my days I was to hear the feats of Kilty Larkin over and over but never again would it be like that first moment of revelation.

  "You've heard tell that only pigs can see the wind but I tell you Kilty Larkin could see it. He rode in and out on the wind, raiding like an invisible scythe and never once did they touch him.

  "When Kilty took over the land at the passing of Ronan he already had a number of ideas. Just like that he refused to pay the tithe to the Anglican Church. The Constabulary came, dirty turncoat Irishmen that they are, and extracted the payment from his crops. Shortly thereafter their commander mysteriously disappeared, to be washed up on Dunagree Point two weeks later. This was a signal that a new dawn had come."

  For years no tenant would fix up his home or improve his fields, for if he did his rent would be raised on the grounds that his lease had become more valuable. Kilty studied the Protestant farms below, figuring they had better methods. He adopted what he could and beautified his cottage as well, separating the pigs and chickens from the main house and whitewashing his walls and fences. Sure enough, the land agent near doubled his rent.

  This sort of a landlordism led directly to a local war. The Constabulary was not up against a sloppily organized band of fence busters but a skilled and fierce raiding force that knew how to inflict damage. The first culmination was a master stroke by Kilty in organizing a boycott against the Earl of Foyle's fields at harvest. Outside labor was imported from Scotland and the harvest was carried out under the protection of Constabulary guns.

  The Earl's fields were vast and the Constabulary spread too thin. Before troops could arrive to reinforce them, the imported labor had been thoroughly terrorized, crops were burned and informers assassinated. Lord Hubble's losses ran into the thousands.

  Retaliation came in the form of evictions, rent raises and public floggings.

  "It was the eve of July 11 in eighteen and forty-three that Kilty rose to an epic moment," Daddo said with his voice now tuned to near singing. "The Prods was all swacked to the eyeballs, celebrating King William's holidays. Kilty set up a beautiful decoy. An informer he had suspected was fed false information about a planned raid to take place right at the Earl's castle at Hubble Manor. They fell for it, moving in Constabulary and troops, leaving the road to Derry wide open.

  "The likes of it were never seen from the ancient Celtic cattle raid of Cooley to this day . . . me . . . myself . . . riding on the left hand side of Kilty with a full moon lighting our way.

  "The cattle pens at Derry was bulging at dockside waiting for shipment to England. We struck so hard my bootlaces tore apart, busting open the pens and stampeding. Within an hour we had run over two thousand head of Lord Hubble's finest into Lough Foyle and drowned 'em, and disappeared on the wind.

  "The informer who had fed his masters incorrect information met a terrible fate at their hands. Other informers became very hesitant about stepping forward with information. Well they knew all along it was Kilty Larkin but they were afraid of jailing him and twice as scared to let him stay free."

  Daddo cackled a laugh at the memory of the event, no doubt enhanced in his mind by the passing of time.

  "Kilty became the first tenant to ever sit down and negotiate. And he broke the tithe Mind you, it was the days before any of the fancy protective leagues. Aye, there was a lad. Years later, me and Kilty became Fenians. The rising never amounted to much and we was excommunicated for our troubles just like Ronan and his brothers had been excommunicated for being United Irishmen."

  His mind drifted . . . "The Church always buttered its bread with British droppings . . ." Daddo suddenly became dry and paused for lubrication, now tired, and all the magic thoughts went floundering . . . "Oh, what a grand raid that ever was . . . Conor . . ."

  "Aye," Conor said, coming off the creepie kneeling before the shanachie, who reached his hand out and touched over his cheek and hair and grunted a laugh of sorts. "The shadow of Kilty has been a heavy burden for your daddy but he had dreams of his own, the same as you do. It was the famine that killed his dreams. No matter what we were before, we were never the same after the famine nor have we ever lived a day without the fear of it . . . Conor . . ."

  "Aye, Daddo."

  "Tomas is apt to be touched with the madness tonight. I've felt it coming over him. All the Larkins had the madness … Ronan . . . Kilty and your daddy as well. He'll be under the spell this night."

  Conor pulled away, his eyes already searching beyond the cottage for his daddy.

  *

  Conor made a hand leap over the wall between the cottages and was greeted by the drone of the rosary. He shoved the door open tentatively. The best room was filled with kneeling wakers, all beating their fists against their hearts in cadence, with mumblings calling to the saints who were surely watching from a place of glory, unknown.

  Conor's eyes played over them, searching for his daddy. Finola knelt near the corpse, her face hidden in her hands, completely spent from a second shrill of keening. She lifted her eyes slowly, making contact with her son in a way that needed no further amplification.

  Conor backed out quietly. The night was unusually plentiful with stars as he trotted down the path past a dozen cottages, then set off up the side of the hill toward the shebeen.

  The shebeen sat in blackness and there was nothing to be heard from it. Conor shoved the door open. As it groaned apart, heavy whiskey odors were set free.

  "Daddy."

  With no answer greeting him, he groped inside, feeling about for the taper which sat on a post, and managed to light it. The room glowed reluctantly from the smallness of the flame.

  Tomas Larkin crouched on a barrel, all doubled over like a defeated bull, staring as blind as Daddo Friel and completely unaware of another presence. Conor came above him.

  "Daddy."

  Tomas looked up and blinked, giving no recognition of his boy. "Kilty," he whispered with a tinge of horror shaking his voice, "the potatoes all turned black. They rotted right before me eyes. My God, Kilty, what are we going to do?"

  "Daddy, it's me, Conor. You're just off in a bad dream."

  "Oh, Jesus help us. We're going to die. All of us are going to die."

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Catholic fields of Bally
utogue were still of a May morning as the bells of St. Columba's tolled for Kilty Larkin.

  His coffin was lifted from its four supporting chairs which were then kicked over in accordance with custom that also dictated the coffin leave the cottage feet first.

  Finola had to remain at home, for a pregnant woman might surely have a stillborn if she attended a funeral and obtained the curse of the dead.

  Being that there were no other Larkin men than Tomas, the friends and neighbors rotated as pallbearers, carrying the coffin on their shoulders and switching around every several yards. Tomas walked directly behind them, his hands and forehead resting on Kilty's box. His children marched at his side. Behind Tomas a dozen men carried spades and behind them the entire village formed an entourage.

  Father Lynch approached the procession wearing a black vestment for death which had been embroidered along with his other vestments by the women of the village. Chanting and sprinkling holy water, he turned and led the way to the church.

  Tomas stepped aside as the coffin passed the churchyard gate with the mourners pouring in behind. A sense of pending altercation heightened as the priest and his curate tried to get the church filled and the doors closed. Conor shoved Brigid and Liam inside and edged back toward his daddy, who remained motionless by the gate.

  "I'll not be going in," Tomas said. "Fetch me at McCluskey's after the mass and I'll say good-by to Kilty at the grave."

  Father Lynch made toward Tomas with his face pinched tight as a walnut shell. Conor was waved away and joined a number of villagers at the door who were now poking about curiously but minding to keep a respectful distance. Father Lynch snarled an authoritative warning to stay back.

  "We're waiting for you," he said in a hiss to Tomas.

  "Nae . . . I'll not attend this mass."

  "Have you lost your mind?"

  "I'm doing what Kilty would have done had he been in his right senses. Here's your money for the mass."

  The priest's trained hand snapped in the fee with the speed of a striking asp, then edged ever so much closer. "Tomas Larkin. The sin you're about to commit is grave and dangerous. If you don't come in I'll not hold the mass."