Boycott Page 6

  ‘Deirdre,’ he finally uttered with an accompanying cough. ‘I wish to thank you for your assistance this day. I’ll…I’ll see you are…rewarded…in your wages.’

  ‘Thank ye, sir. Thank ye,’ she replied and scurried away.

  Annie smiled and then felt her eyes grow suddenly heavy. She yawned.

  ‘I’ll leave you, Annie. Warmest congratulations again,’ Arthur said softly.

  ‘And my thanks to you, dear Arthur.’

  His brother departed and as Annie slid down beneath the blankets, Charles peered into the basket once more.

  ‘Mary,’ he whispered. ‘Mary.’

  CHAPTER 3

  In a neighbouring union a shipwrecked human body was cast on shore; a starving man extracted the heart and liver, and that was the maddening feast on which he regaled himself and perishing family.

  –J Anderson, Rector and Vicar of Ballinrobe, County Mayo, The Times, 23 May 1849

  It is indeed painful to consider the state of Ireland. In a land teeming with plenty and abundance we have a famine. More than two million Irishmen are starving while we export more provisions than would feed five times our population. Our state would be much improved were those who derive large incomes from this country to expend at least a portion of it among the people from whom they receive it.

  –The Anglo Celt, 1 May 1846

  OCTOBER 1848

  A leaden sky hung over them as they manoeuvred the body into the shallow, sodden grave. Appropriately, funereal clouds shrouded the mountaintops all around them in a sombre grey, and a drizzle, fine and penetrating, moulded their clothes to their bones.

  Fr Lally lurched up the hillside, Tawnyard Lough a barely discernible backdrop in the mist. Like most of his flock, his frame was gaunt and ravaged and his progress was interrupted time and again by the weakness of malnourishment and pauses for heaving breaths. They were lucky to have him at all. His duties of late demanded his recital of the last rites at a rate beyond measure, calling him to the gravesides of young and old spread across the entire parish of Oughaval.

  Thomas and Owen set about completing the interment of their father in the boggy earth just a stone’s throw from their home. Michael Joyce had died two days earlier, leaving his sons but one possession each in the world, that of a brother. They took turns shovelling the brown earth into the grave, the exertion of every swing of the shovel bringing savage protestations from their bodies. The soft beat of the rain on the tattered blanket that served as their father’s winding sheet made a sound that reminded Owen of the distant patter of approaching horses.

  ‘Stop, Owen.’

  Thomas had fallen to his knees beside the shallow grave. He reached out and laid a hand on the cloth, wet and sagging upon his father’s face, searching for a final mortal link, a last sense of Michael Joyce as a man and not some disembodied spirit or, perhaps worse, nothing but rotting skin and bones. The tears came again then. So profuse had Thomas’s weeping been these last days Owen wondered how he had not withered and shrivelled like a dead flower.

  His own tears had subsided soon after the end, replaced by numbness and near-insentience. For hours he’d sat and stared into eternity, even wetting his breeches in his utter torpidity. Fearful for Owen’s state of mind, Thomas had tried to return him to consciousness by striking him hard across the face and Owen had a faint recollection of lying on his back, his brother astride his chest, his face a mixture of rage and grief. Strange, but it was the taste of his own blood trickling from a split lip that finally awoke Owen from his stupor. It had seemed so long since any taste had enlivened his tongue. It was the most nourishing thing to enter his gullet in days.

  And so he came back to the land of the living, or at least the half-dead. Thomas told him that they must bury their father. He rose from the floor and looked about him, for a brief moment expecting to see his father, mother and sisters, but there was no retreat this time, no soporific curtain to hide behind. They were all dead except his brother. The room felt as hollow as his gut. But there would be no more tears, for the well had run dry.

  Finally Thomas rose from the grave, wiped his face with the back of his sleeve and in a blink replaced his wretched, grief-stricken expression with one of anger, his teeth showing through barely parted lips. He then began hurriedly to shovel the earth over the shroud until the last of the corpse had vanished under the Mayo soil. Owen caught a fleeting glance of his brother’s eyes ablaze with hatred. Owen’s retreat had been into senselessness. He now saw that Thomas had chosen refuge in a much darker cavern where his only company would be malevolence and loathing.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Fr Lally’s unusual taking of the Lord’s name in vain broke their gaze and the brothers turned in his direction. The priest’s chest was heaving, his hand clutching at his heart. ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you bury him in the graveyard yonder?’

  The priest was referring to the improvised cemetery that had been established on the valley floor where the others of their family had been laid to rest.

  ‘Sorry Father,’ said Owen weakly, ‘we hadn’t the strength to carry the body.’

  The priest shook his head and looked about. ‘Are you boys alone now?’ he asked.

  Thomas glared at him with undisguised contempt. ‘How could we be alone when there are two of us?’ He tossed his shovel away. It clanged against a rock.

  ‘Thomas…’ cautioned Owen.

  But Fr Lally simply nodded and pulled a crucifix and a book of prayer from within the damp folds of his robes. ‘Forgive me, lads, but time prevents me saying a mass for Michael. I must be in Leenane by nightfall.’

  The brothers said nothing. The reality was that they wanted the heartbreaking ritual done with as soon as possible. The priest made the sign of the cross and they lowered their heads respectfully as he began to speak in a deliberately mournful enunciation.

  ‘O God, by Your mercy rest is given to the souls of the faithful, be pleased to bless this grave. Appoint Your holy angels to guard it and set free from all the chains of sin the soul of him whose body is buried here, so that with all Thy saints he may rejoice in Thee forever.’

  Fr Lally turned a few pages in his Bible, leaning over it to shield its fragile paper from the drizzle, then resumed, speaking in Latin.

  ‘Requiem æternam dona eis Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiéscat in pace.’

  Thomas raised his head. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means: Eternal rest grant unto him–’

  ‘No,’ Thomas interrupted. ‘It’s meaningless. Everything’s meaningless. You and your God.’ He guffawed as though the very notion was hilarious.

  ‘Thomas. Stop.’

  The priest was calm. He wiped his face clear of rain again. ‘Sometimes our faith is tested sorely, Thomas. Your father would–’

  ‘Tested? Tested?’

  Owen seized his brother’s arm, restraining him.

  ‘I’ll finish up and leave you to your grief.’ Fr Lally stepped forward and looked directly across the grave at the young man who mocked him. ‘Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”’

  So cold and cynical was Thomas’s expression as these words were spoken that Owen saw the priest hastily avert his gaze. He added a final line to his jumbled, expeditious rite. ‘Michael Joyce, In paradisum deducant te Angeli. May angels lead you into paradise. Amen.’ He made the sign of the cross over the grave and put away his book. Owen blessed himself, while Thomas stood impassively.

  ‘Goodbye, lads,’ Fr Lally said as he began to depart, casting thoughtful glances around at their small patch of land. ‘You know, lads, Harris won’t let you stay now. You’ll be evicted. You have to go to the workhouse, it’s your only chance to survive.’

  ‘There’ll be no workhouse and it’s no business of yours what we do. We’ll starve before we go there,’ Thomas snapped.

  The priest sighed. ‘Then you’ll starve,’ he said an
d walked away.

  The rain stopped during the night and Owen now sat on a rock bathed in milky morning sunshine, staring at the small wooden cross that marked his father’s final resting place. He wasn’t feeling tearful or angry or guilty, only the colossal apathy of the inevitable approach of death by starvation. Cramps gripped him again and he tightened his arms around his stomach, expelling rancid gas from his behind. He remained doubled over for some time, head between knees, eyes fixed on the muddy ground between his feet.

  Thomas’s voice disturbed him. ‘The fuckin’ smell of ye. Here.’

  He looked up. Thomas held in his palm about seven blackberries. He studied them as though they were illusory; most of them looked half-rotten and none was larger than the tip of his small finger. He grabbed the berries and devoured them as one. As he felt the painful swallowing convulsion, a notion struck him and he looked up sharply.

  ‘Did you have some?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter now, does it?’ Thomas fixed him with a judgemental stare, then turned away.

  Their ears were pricked by the sound of approaching horses and they looked to the east where the road wound around the curve of the mountain. Two riders appeared and rested their horses a few minutes, the beasts worn from the effort of the climb up the steep, mucky road. Thomas pulled Owen to his feet.

  ‘It’s Harris, the land agent, and some other bastard. Listen, we’ll go te the field and pretend te be workin’. Father’s away visitin’ a sick relative.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘If he finds Father’s dead he’ll evict us right now and we’ll be dead in a week.’

  Owen was too weak to argue. Thomas pulled him by the arm to the wasted patch of land that still exuded the stench of the blight. The hillside was scarred with long ridges known as ‘lazy beds’ – the soil was so thin and peaty that to grow anything it was necessary to place a seed potato on the surface and fold a sod of turf over it – and it was across these ridges that the two now stumbled, surrounded by the withered, blackened stalks of the blighted potato crop. Owen stood there like a scarecrow for a few seconds until his brother pushed a spade into his hands.

  ‘Pretend to dig.’

  He walked a bit away and did likewise, both of them watching the men as they approached at a trot up the slope. Two bays, black manes and tails, all muscle and sweaty fur, carried the men to the Joyces’ threshold. The beasts snorted as their masters pulled back on their reins, hooves dancing in the mud.

  Owen recognised Harris at once, the other man he assumed to be Burrell, his lackey. He mustered his strength and tried to turn over a sod.

  ‘You! Boy!’ Harris called to Owen, he being the nearer. Thomas walked over and looked up at the land agent with his striking amber eyes, his face a mask as he struggled to contain his animosity. Harris sported long sideburns and both men had wide, wispy moustaches, their ends curled in the popular fashion of their class. Burrell wore a formal short riding jacket and a shiny bowler hat, while his master’s attire consisted of bright jodhpurs, a black short-tailed jacket and top hat. Owen thought both of them looked as out of place on an Irish mountainside as a snowfall in July.

  ‘You, then. What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Thomas Joyce.’

  ‘Yes, yes, and your father is Michael Joyce? Fetch him immediately, boy.’

  Thomas snarled. ‘My name is Thomas Joyce, not boy.’

  Without hesitation Harris raised his riding crop and struck Thomas across the chest. The horse danced away a little at the movement as Thomas staggered back clutching at his breast, his face aflame. Owen found the energy to speak as Thomas weighed his spade in his hands as a potential weapon.

  ‘Our father’s away, sir. Leenane. A relative is ill.’

  ‘Away, is he?’ Harris chuckled over his shoulder at Burrell, who didn’t smile. ‘He’ll be away a great deal more, I venture, if he doesn’t have his rent next week. Tell him that, when he returns. If not I’ll be back with a force of constables to serve you with a lawful notice of eviction.’ Though he spoke in answer to Owen, his eyes never left Thomas and a supercilious grin never left his mouth. Revelling in his elevated position, he manoeuvred his horse sideways so that he cast his shadow directly over Thomas. ‘Remember what I said, boy.’ The final word was protracted, designed to provoke.

  ‘Sir, we should be on our way, we’ve much ground to cover,’ Burrell interceded.

  To Owen’s surprise, Thomas simply met Harris’s gaze and replied in a restrained tone. ‘I’ll let my father know ye were here.’

  The land agent tutted in disgust and whirled away with a spray of mud.

  Owen, swaying on his feet, said weakly, ‘I thought you were going to hit him with the spade.’

  ‘Some day the likes of him will get more than a spade,’ Thomas muttered, turning his back and walking towards the edge of the once luxuriant field. He looked up and down the dying valley as though considering where next to turn. He heard a ‘whump’, like a pile of sacks being thrown on a floor, and looked around to see that his brother had collapsed face down in the mud and was lying there as still as death.

  Thomas mopped his brother’s brow with a rag soaked in bog water, fearful that Owen had been gripped by the fever. Like one skeleton dragging another, he managed with a monumental effort to haul his brother inside to the bed of straw.

  Owen was alive, but for how long? He recalled again his father’s final private words to him, emanating on a breath so foul it seemed his father was already rotting inside, the voice pleading with him to look after his brother. ‘I love ye both, Thomas, but Owen…ponders too much…ye’re the strong one…ye’ll need to act.’ In the next breath he had begun to converse with his dead wife’s imaginary form. Thomas had shivered at the notion of his mother’s unseen ghostly presence, then dismissed the idea as imbecilic superstition more befitting of a keening old hag. Both brothers had watched as their father had faded from life in the flickering light of a candle. He’d given up life’s struggle, Thomas considered, and simply allowed himself to slip away, perhaps in his mind to find his wife and children in eternity, unburdening himself of the mantle of family provider and protector, handing it to Thomas like a poison chalice. As much as he’d loved and admired his father, now he somehow hated him in equal measure.

  Owen moaned and blinked awake. ‘What happened?’ His voice was like a rusty hinge. Thomas held a cup of water to his lips. He sipped and spluttered.

  ‘Ye fell over in the field. It’s not the fever though, not like the others. Ye’re just…’ Thomas was at a loss to offer an explanation other than the obvious. Owen tilted his head away and began to sob quietly.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it!’

  Owen looked at him. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Thomas didn’t reply.

  ‘Father Lally was right. We have to go to the workhouse.’

  ‘Ye fuckin’ thick. Not while I’m breathin’. And anyway you haven’t the strength te walk te the door, never mind te Westport.’

  Thomas rose and wandered around the room, absent-mindedly picking up his father’s blackthorn stick. Without warning he raised the heavy stick and brought it crashing down on a cracked old earthenware jug, shattering it into a hundred pieces, projectiles shooting in every direction, the water spilling across the hardened earth.

  Owen was startled into a sitting position. Thomas stared down at the mess, his back to his brother, and then he threw the stick to one side. It clattered across the floor, rocked for a moment on a protruding nub, and settled into the silence.

  ‘I’ll find us food.’

  ‘But where?’

  He swung about. ‘How in Christ’s name do I know?’ He picked up his jacket and walked towards the door. ‘I’ll be back. You lie there.’ He had to check himself from adding ‘it’s all you’re good for.’ He slammed the door behind him and it rattled in its frame.

  Owen called after him as loudly as his body would permit, but Thomas was too far gone to hear.

  Thomas had no
clear idea of where he might find even a morsel of food. The lake below was as barren of fish as the earth was of potatoes. Even the sky had been near stripped of birds. Year on year as the famine progressed, the adult birds had been snared, lights thrust in their eyes in the bushes by night, a blanket thrown to forestall their flight, then their nests emptied of eggs, robbing each successive season of new young until they were all but obliterated. The lands were practically picked clean of wild edibles and you could only get by for so long eating dandelions, dock leaves and dog roses. He turned and started down the hill as the early evening approached, putting the sun to his back. He followed the road as it rounded the mountain, with a cliff dropping sharply into the valley on one side. He could just make out the point about two miles distant where the Glenlaur and Owenmore Rivers became one, flowing back through the Erriff Valley and far beyond into the Atlantic, a course he feared he might soon have to take himself, although he had no desire to depart the country he loved dearly, beyond being driven away by starvation. Fleeing on an emigrant ship, he felt, was like holding up a white flag and handing their land with absolute finality to a foreign tyrant. Thomas believed, as had his embittered father, that this had been their strategy all along, to deliberately use starvation to strip the land of people, of resistance, and leave Ireland ripe for utter subjugation.

  He drank his fill of the Glenlaur River’s icy mountain waters under Tullynafola Bridge, reflecting that this very spot had been the scene of the gamekeeper Geraghty’s demise. The road now swung northeast, under the shadow of Tawnyromhar Mountain. He looked up the mountain slope, and much as he dreaded the mammoth effort of walking up a steep hill, its foliage offered a slightly greater chance of locating food. Tawnyromhar’s slopes were also home to a few other tenant farmers, if any remained, and there was a chance he might beg a few morsels of food from them. He grimaced at the notion of how pitifully low he’d been dragged, stripped of the pride that his father and grandfather had handed down to him like they were passing on a fragile heirloom.