Trinity: A Novel of Ireland Page 7

  Conor nodded in understanding. "Why did the crop fail?" he asked.

  "It was bound to happen, sooner or later," Daddo answered, standing and stretching a mite. He took to stalking about, for he never failed to become aroused when he spoke of it

  "All the fancy political jabber didn't do much for us," he said. "The croppies remained among the most wretched and destitute peasants in the world and, adding to our miseries, mother church was bent on helping the British attempts to Anglicize us. They no longer prayed in the old language. In the schools and the books there was never a mention of Irish history or legends. It was the shanachies and hedge school teachers like my own daddy, repeating his tales from village to village and giving secret lessons, who saved the culture."

  Daddo abruptly stopped his pacing as the sorrow of it rose in him and his eyes misted. He slumped and recited now in monotone.

  "We'd bring in the potato crop in September, same as now. If it was a very good year, we could barely scrape by, but the blue months always were on us by midsummer and food ran low. Those who had anything to pawn would pawn it. The rest went further and further into debt to the gombeen men. We were never out from under the shadow of starvation and, what with the rents, the tithe to the Anglican Church and the absence of human rights, the cattle and pigs got better treatment because we were lower than animals in British eyes.

  "Ireland of 1800 was a country of eight million. Two to three million had no land or jobs and wandered aimlessly, scrounging the countryside. When they went into the cities there was no work to be found, for the British didn't put in factories or ports or businesses or roads or schools . . . except for the Prods in Ulster. The cities were portraits of squalor inundated by tens of thousands of beggars, young and old, whose only alternative was a final damnation of the workhouse. This was the Ireland of British creation."

  The two of them remained silent for a time, Conor trying to digest it and Daddo pondering that eve of disaster.

  "When I was a lad people married young. They were content with a few wee acres chipped off the family lease. The farms grew smaller and smaller until barely a leasehold on Inishowen ran over fifteen acres.

  "The thin line of existence had become the potato. An entire family could exist off a few acres and the only tool needed was a simple spade to dig the lazy bed on almost any kind of land. An average man ate between eight and twelve pounds a day with the skins going to feed the chicks and pigs. With that and the turf for heat, we had the elements of survival.

  "As the population grew larger and the farms smaller, the land became overworked and played out. Total dependence on a single food crop was a courtship to catastrophe.

  "Tomas Larkin, lying there so still, had the spirit crushed out of him by the famine same as the Irish people were crushed."

  CHAPTER NINE

  SEPTEMBER 1845

  "Daddy! Uncle Aidan! Uncle Cathal!"

  Kilty Larkin and his two brothers, digging up the last of the potatoes in their lazy bed, turned from their work to see young Tomas racing up the hill, waving and shouting as he did.

  "Daddy! Uncle Aidan! Uncle Cathal!"

  Kilty tossed a handful of spuds into the big basket sitting on the runners of the sidecar and stretched to his limits, which was high indeed. The three brothers consumed a fair portion of ground just to stand on, they were that large. As he wiped his brow a gust of wind set his hair flowing, giving him the look of a red-bearded Moses. His son stumbled up the last yards. "Ho there, Tomas, slow down with you."

  "Ma," he gasped, "she wants you to come right away, all of you."

  "Aye, what is it?" Cathal asked.

  "Something strange is happening to the potatoes."

  "Now what could be happening? They were healthy looking enough yesterday."

  Tomas shook his head and bit his lower lip hard for fear he'd cry.

  "What's going on?" Kilty demanded.

  "They just started turning black right in front of our eyes."

  The brothers stared at one another puzzled, then all turned and moved out together on the verge of a run. There was already a small gathering of women and elders when they reached the large stone and turf clochan used for crop storage. Kilty's wife Mary, Aidan's Jenny and Cathal's wife Siobhan were among them.

  Kilty shoved through to Mary. Her face was screwed up with fright as she gripped his arm hard and pointed wordlessly to the clochan. He entered with his brothers following. The bulging bins emitted a sharp rancid odor. He scooped up a handful of potatoes and squinted in the half-dark. They had gone black and sogged into a dripping mush between his fingers. He poked deeper into the bin. They had all turned. The three of them pawed through bin after bin clear down to the end of the building. It was the same.

  "Mother of Jesus!" Aidan cried.

  "For Christ's sake, talk softly," Kilty snapped. The three gathered close in a head-to-head huddle.

  "What do you make of it?" Cathal asked.

  "Sure I don't know," Kilty said.

  "Do you think it could be the blight?" Aidan mumbled.

  "Sure I don't know," Kilty repeated, "I've never seen the likes of this."

  "I remember Daddy telling about how it hit in Armagh once. One day the crop was pulled up sound and looking good and just like that they turned."

  "Let me see," Kilty said, thinking fast. "Cathal, slip out of here quiet as you can with a sack. Take some chickens and a piglet and isolate them in a stall away from the other animals and feed them some of these."

  "Right."

  "Now, let's go out and look bravely for God's sake."

  Just as they emerged three of the neighbor men arrived, all reporting that the same had happened to their stores. As the gathering grew in numbers and mounted in confusion all eyes began to turn to Kilty. He remained almost aloof, speaking softly and assuringly, and for the moment everyone seemed calmed. Only Mary, his wife of fifteen years, was able to read the desperation whirling about behind that impassive expression.

  In a few hours Cathal had an answer. The animals which had been fed the black potatoes were dead. Kilty dispatched his brothers and Tomas north to Moville, inland to Glencaw Hill and south to Muff to gather in the titular clan heads. When they all arrived deep in the night the church was filled with weeping and praying women and sullen, terrified men.

  The meeting took place at an ancient abandoned Norman keep a mile beyond the village with all the men of Ballyutogue present as well. Daddo Friel was first to report that the harvest in his village of Crockadaw had started rotting a day before.

  After a long moment of utter silence came a burst of confused yelling. Kilty assumed control, waylaying a rising flood of fear.

  "When we break up, I want each of you to appraise his own situation and let me know exactly what you must have to make the winter and get the spring planting in. When I have all the information, I am appointing myself and Daddo as a committee of two to go to Derry and meet with the chief estate agent, MacAdam Rankin himself personally."

  "A fat lot of good that dirty bastard will do us."

  "I am going to insist that everyone shut up. We've had Our differences with MacAdam Rankin before but we've never been faced with a total loss of our basic food. Even Rankin has to realize we'll do his lordship no good if we all starve."

  It all seemed logical enough. The Earl of Foyle had to have tenants In order to make and keep his fortune. He would have to react in such a manner as to save his own goose.

  "Let me know your absolute needs," Kilty repeated forcefully, "and Daddo and I will negotiate for enough to keep body and soul together. In the meantime you are to make no loans from the gombeen men and for God's sake avoid spreading panic."

  Fortified by the rock strength of Kilty, they left on a note of hope.

  The Larkins consisted of three families numbering twenty lives. Kilty was the elder, the true son of Ronan who had fought the rising of '98 and made land yield a harvest where none had grown before. He and Mary had four children, three boys a
nd a small girl, with Tomas, at fourteen, the eldest. Tomas was large and strong in the manner of the Larkins but dawdled and dreamed and spent every possible waking hour sitting at the knee of the shanachie and the traveling hedgerow teachers.

  Cathal, the middle brother, was sorely burdened by an absence of a male heir, having four daughters to the age of seventeen and none married.

  Last was Aidan with six wee wanes from nine years down to infancy.

  They were close and their closeness gave them added strength In crisis. The family council talked things over with quiet sureness. The immediate problem was sufficient food to make the winter after the rents. There would be enough from their share of the crops to hold on but by spring there would be no money for seed and to meet other expenses.

  It was decided that one of them should cross the water to England and work the docks and late harvests. Kilty was the most likely to have good earnings and, otherwise, the only logical choice.

  Aidan had no replacement in his fields and it was nearly the same with Cathal. Two of his daughters could help him but could not run his acreage alone if he were gone.

  Young Tomas was almost capable of turning in a man's day's work if he got his head out of the clouds. Kilty imparted the importance and responsibility in assuming the place of the head of the house and the boy agreed he would do so.

  All in all the Larkins appeared in good shape with not much more than the usual struggle. But then reports from the neighbors and nearby villages came in and prospects for the others were bleaker.

  Armed with a detailed need of the tenants within the Earl of Foyle's pale, Daddo Friel and Kilty set off for Derry to see MacAdam Rankin.

  It boiled down to meeting the emergency with deferred payments. They would convince Rankin to let the tenants keep a number of livestock and other crops to use as food in lieu of the potatoes.

  The Catholic tenants of Inishowen and nine Earls of Foyle had had bloody bouts for two and a half centuries but all of that was in the past. The penal laws were long gone and a spirit of reform and compromise swept in from England. It had been well over two years since Kilty had taken to night riding. Negotiations were no longer out of the ordinary.

  Kilty and Daddo were in a mood of optimism. After all, it was eighteen and forty-five and they would be dealing with civilized men.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tomas rolled over on his back, shattering the air with a long spell of snoring that halted Daddo's tale. The shanachie utilized the pause to fortify himself and once again offered the jug to Conor. After his last swig Conor had felt a bit sick to the stomach and respectfully declined. Tomas tossed about, finally flattening out on his stomach so the roar dimmed to a whistle.

  "What happened when you and Kilty went to Derry to see the estate agent?"

  Daddo laughed sardonically. "We saw him all right. MacAdam Rankin."

  "Rankin? Of the same clan that still manages the land?" Conor asked.

  "The very same Rankins. But MacAdam was the Rankin. So crafty he could draw blood from the wind. A good number of our people trusted him, he was that clever. After all, they argued, he had agreed to pay our tithe two years before if Kilty stopped night riding."

  "What did he say to you?"

  "He bled from every pore trying to charm us off our perches. He said how sorely sorrowed he was. He had communicated with the Earl himself to return to Ulster, and was praying for some kind of help from the government But all the time he made this show of sympathy he was measuring us for a box because he'd made up his mind long before the blight what he wanted to do with the croppies

  Daddo shook his head, still disbelieving MacAdam's treachery. "While he spoke to us with utter sincerity he was pushing plans for us to have an early meeting with Jesus and Mary. Conor, if you're ever to remember one thing, it's never to sit and negotiate with those people. They're like goats looking through the hedge, with more tricks than the lowest tinker and honor unbefitting a sow.

  "MacAdam had an older brother, Owen, a sour brew of a man incapable of managing the estate himself, who was kept around as a willing hangman. And there was a nephew, Glendon, zesting for the day he would take over. It was an ugly crew, the afterbirth of three generations of estate agents. Satanic, pure satanic . . ."

  *

  During these months the Earl of Foyle, Lord Morris Hubble, and Lady Beatrice resided in Daars, their southern manor house near Kinsale. Daars had won a measure of renown as the most fashionable drawing room for the colony of high-ranking retired British naval officers and a troupe of nomadic gentry.

  News of the potato blight dominated most of the conversation. In fact, a number of untimely departures from Kinsale had all but ruined the yachting season.

  In response to his inquiry, MacAdam Rankin assured his lordship that everything was under control at Hubble Manor. The agent suggested a number of precautionary measures be initiated. In any event, Rankin wrote, there was no need for his lordship to rush home by subjecting himself to that torturous coach trip up the length of the country.

  The Rankin family had been in the earldom's service as estate agents for nearly a century. In the decade that MacAdam had managed affairs he had been granted an ever wider range of confidence and authority. It was an arrangement that left Lord Morris and Lady Beatrice free to enjoy the social graces at Daars and London.

  The Earl returned Rankin's message, giving him permission to move forward on his proposals, and suggested he would be booking his normal passage, a packet sailing from Queenstown to Londonderry several weeks in the future.

  Although Rankin had delayed Kilty Larkin and pacified the Catholic tenants, his greatest concern was a spreading sense of panic that could be followed by outlaw activity.

  The stoic older brother, Owen, was dispatched to Dublin Castle with a number of specific requests. Contacts and friends of the earldom within the ruling circles had been established for generations and he was certain to receive quick consideration.

  Young Glendon sailed for London to participate with other agents and gentry in making the ascendancy views known to the government.

  Rankin put his solicitors into motion preparing a mass of legal instruments to have at the ready for action against the Catholics.

  The earldom's most potent asset was its large settlement of loyal Protestants in and about Ballyutogue dating back some two hundred years. Presbyterians had come as planters from the Scottish Lowlands and the Anglicans later took acreage as payment for service to Cromwell. Yet they were isolated from the main body of Ulster Protestants and it created in them a feeling of being surrounded by those hostile neighbors up in the heather.

  The anatomy of Protestant fear was a handy tool in MacAdam Rankin's kit, one that could easily trigger them to fever pitch. Failure of the potato crop afforded the wily estate manager an opportunity he was not about to overlook.

  *

  "You see," Daddo said, "the blight was one of the few things to happen of a non-sectarian nature, ruining their potatoes as well. Although they never carried our burdens and poverty, the Prods were now in serious trouble. MacAdam Rankin plunged into their Orange Halls and their churches promising that the Earl would carry them through and at the same time warning they should prepare for the worst from the croppies The Prods never needed much convincing over that issue. They were still pissing and moaning and preaching about and living with the horrors of a Catholic rising two centuries earlier.

  "Just to tidy things up, Owen Rankin returned from Dublin Castle with permission to reactivate the East Donegal Yeomanry. And what a lovely bunch of lads they were. It was a unit of the reserve militia that had out flogged out dissected out razed and out tortured every battalion in Ulster from Cromwell through the United Irish Rising. In their isolation, their fears had always been translated to sadistic frenzy.

  "In exchange for the Earl's support, MacAdam strongly suggested that every able-bodied man take up arms to protect the land and his privileges. They hauled out the old banner, dusted it off, u
nfurled it and raised it over the Ballyutogue barrack and piped and drummed croppy hate songs so that nary a Catholic missed the point"

  "I don't mean to be interrupting you," Conor said, "or disputing your points, but how'd you ever know what was going on in Dublin Castle or the Orange Halls?"

  Daddo stared across the stall, startled at first, then dismayed. "Are you doubting my veracity, Conor?"

  "Well, not exactly," he answered, "but all of this is getting a bit queer, what with you being forty years younger than you actually are and you being so transparent I can see to the other side of the byre right through your body, telling me about events you could have hardly known about . . ."

  "Enough!" Daddo stood waving his hand in disgust. "Do you think I'd go to the trouble of sitting here through the night if I didn't want you to know? And besides" — his voice dropped off with a tinge of mystery — "a shanachie has certain ways of finding things out."

  "From the fairies?"

  "I'm not after telling you my secrets but I'll not be giving the confidence of my heart to a doubter. If you don't mind, I'll be taking my leave . . ."

  On that cue the image of him shadowed and began to wave before Conor's eyes. "Don't go!" Conor cried. "Please!"

  Daddo stopped his fading and pouted. "There are things you're not to question such as what you're seeing and what you're hearing."

  "It's only that my daddy and Kilty always told me to question everything, particularly never to let the priest get away with too many miracles. But honest, Daddo, I never meant to compare a shanachie with a mere priest," he added quickly.

  "Well now, you're thinking brightly," Daddo said, "therefore I'll continue," and he picked up the threads without so much as a pause.

  "When he was in Dublin, Owen Rankin obtained official orders to increase the size of the Constabulary. Oh, they were the bane of our life. There was never enough land for all our sons and being forced to join those devils was often the only way to make a living. We hated the Constabulary because the Crown was using us against our own people. The blight presented a perfect incentive for recruitment. Hundreds of families hovering on the brink were suddenly wiped out. A small enlistment bonus, Constabulary wages and bribes and a faint hope of protection by a son in the police was all that was needed to turn it into the size of an army. It was an ideal situation for the British of having Catholics to do their dirty work.