Ireland

  “The Liberator,” as O’Connell is always called, felt mortified that he had been responsible for the death of a husband and father. For the rest of his life he supported members of D’Esterre’s family financially. And for the rest of his life too, whenever he appeared in public, he wore a black glove on his hand, the hand that fired the gun in the fatal duel. And that’s why Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, said the freedom of Ireland wasn’t worth one drop of blood.

  Slowing down, Ronan read the last paragraph:

  “Once more I ask your pardon for letting you down and for offering you only a missive of brief proportions and at such short notice. I was never a man to worry about myself until now, and that is why I must go and try to get myself looked after. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Ronan handed back the sheaf of papers. Ray Cashman looked equally disappointed.

  “I’m afraid your old friend mustn’t be in great shape.”

  With expressions of regret, they left Derrynane, drove back to Killarney, and said good-bye. This time, Ronan found a bed-and-breakfast place where, to his delight, no one spoke to him all evening. In his room he opened out his rucksack and repacked all the contents. He had decided it was time to go home.

  On the way, he could yet pay homage to Brendan the Navigator; next morning, he caught a bus to Tralee. He walked seven miles to the village of Ardfert and, on a long strand with some cattle cooling their legs in the sea, he looked out to the west.

  No towers did he see, no golden fountains, no flocks of white seabirds who could speak like humans. No whales disguised as islands swam close; no icebergs shone their blue crystals across the surface of the waves. But he did see the green ocean, and he did watch its rolling waters, and he did envisage a boat round as a leather belly, full of men in dirty white robes, men with genial faces and brawny arms rowing into eternity. And he did make a decision to have one last search, one more try at finding his man.

  He stayed the night in the coastal village of Ballyheigue, where they told him stories of a graveyard out beneath the waves. People still buried their dead in it; at sundown they took the coffin down to a ledge on the cliff, and at dawn next day, high tide or not, the coffin had been taken out and rested gently in the cemetery under the ocean. And they told him too that in a nearby family burial plot sat a stone amulet; every time a member of that family died anywhere in the world, a blue light shone over the plot, and the stone amulet grew mysteriously wet for seven days and seven nights.

  In the morning, a truck full of bacon took him to Killimer, where the ferry crossed from north Kerry to Clare.

  “You’ll have an easy journey,” said the driver. “Although the Shannon can be choppy enough.”

  Few cars drove onto the ferry; the crossing took twenty minutes. The ferryman, who had a face like an ancient angel, said, “I’m Matt Doyle.” He took Ronan’s fare, cranked out a ticket from a hand machine, and then leaned against the rail, talking.

  “D’you see that man over there?” He pointed to a figure in a bright yellow waterproof. “He’s on this ferry every day. They call him ‘the Weather’—watch!”

  Matt Doyle called, “How’re you today, Maurice?”

  The man turned. “Hallo, Matt.”

  “How’re you keeping? I didn’t see you yesterday.”

  “Did you see that rain yesterday?” said the man they call the Weather.

  Matt nodded and turned back to Ronan. “He never lets me down. If I said to him, ‘Listen, Maurice, I’m after strangling your father and mother,’ he’d say to me, ‘This fine spell will never last.’ Where are you going to yourself?”

  Ronan said, “Toward Ballyvaughan.”

  “Someone said they have new potatoes over there—very early altogether, new potatoes at this time of the year. But they’re strange people in Clare—I’m allowed to say that, my mother was from Clare. D’you know anything about potatoes?”

  “Not much.”

  “Oh, the potato is a very interesting animal. They say that the English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh brought the potato to us. He had a house in county Cork.”

  “In Youghal?” said Ronan, recalling Mrs. Cantwell and “Yaww-ll” and Theresa who always interrupted.

  “That’s right, the very place, and maybe ’twas to that house he also brought back the tobacco. But you can’t eat tobacco and you can eat potatoes; what would we do without them? D’you like them yourself?”

  “Very much.”

  “So do I,” said Matt Doyle. “I think if you don’t like potatoes, you can’t call yourself an Irishman. D’you know why the potato grows well here? Moist and moderate temperatures, they told us at school, moist and moderate, that’s what we are. And of course, they’re great for all kinds of things. Look.”

  From a coat pocket Matt Doyle took a potato. He held the lumpy, washed tuber up to Ronan and pointed to four or five of its nodes.

  “These are the potato’s ‘eyes,’ and if you cut the potato in a certain way, leaving a number of these eyes in each half, you’ll have as many new potatoes as there are eyes. If I cut this diagonally, and in one half I have four eyes, and in the other half I have six eyes—where previously I had this one potato in my hand, now I’ll have ten. Now—ask me why I have a potato in my pocket. Go on, ask me.”

  “Why have you a potato in your pocket?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Matt took from his other pocket a yellow tobacco pouch and opened it. Nestling in the tobacco lay a wet slice of potato.

  “Tobacco’ll never go dry if you put a slice of potato in it. A great article altogether. A potato is like a chicken. You can boil it, you can roast it, you can fry it, you can bake it, you can mix it with cheese or onions or eggs, you can put it in stews with meat. Not only that, you can feed it to pigs. If the Chinese had potatoes, they wouldn’t need rice. What’s the odd one out between an egg, a drum, and a potato?”

  Ronan shook his head, mystified.

  “You can beat an egg. You can beat a drum. But you can’t beat a potato. D’you get it, do you?”

  Matt relaxed and looked out across the rail to the west.

  “There was a woman here who gossiped a lot, and they used to say that she had a mouth as wide as the mouth of the Shannon. Well, that’s the mouth of the Shannon. She must have been some woman. That’s America out there, by the way, straight out from here.”

  He walked away and began to talk to some other passengers. Ronan watched him and saw that the other people paid Matt not nearly as much attention. Within minutes, Matt had come back. This time, he could not be stopped.

  “God in his heaven only knows—how did any Irish people survive without potatoes? See that hill over there? Where we’ll be landing? In eighteen-forty-five, that parish had a population of nearly six thousand people, a big parish. Between them they owned about twelve beds, and two hundred chairs. Half of the houses were one-roomed cabins that had no windows. Those people lived on potatoes.

  “My grandfather was a man called Laurence, that was his first name. Laurence was born in eighteen-thirty, in a small village called Ballykill, a village that’s not there anymore, everyone left it. D’you know what the name Ballykill means?”

  Ronan said, “Doesn’t ‘Bally’ mean a town? And ‘Kill’ means a church?”

  “Yeah. Churchtown, it might be called now.”

  Matt took out a pipe and began to fiddle with it. He put it away again.

  “Ah, Jesus, I’m always forgetting it’s ‘No Smoking’ on the ferry. Anyway—Laurence—my grandfather.”

  ON THE MORNING OF THE SEVENTEENTH OF June, eighteen-forty-five, the day of his fifteenth birthday—it was, I believe, a Wednesday, and four days before the longest day of the year—Laurence set out from his home to walk the three miles into the town of Ennis. It was a beautiful day. Some days down here in the west of Ireland the weather can come straight from Paradise.

  Laurence had a sharp brain. They say that very intelligent people usually have one of the five senses
more sharply defined than all the others, and that’s the true source of their intelligence. Well, Laurence had a very keen sense of smell, and furthermore he had a scientific interest in the world—he liked to know what caused clouds and fog, why some flowers bloomed in spring and some in winter. A bit like myself—I have a keen interest in the potato, for example. And the way birds migrate.

  Swinging his arms, full of the joys of life, Laurence walked along this ordinary road, a happy boy. And then, as he passed a field of potatoes, where the crop had well developed, he wrinkled his nose. A peculiar smell caught his attention, a sickly smell, not strong but a definite stink, and even maybe a little sweet. He stopped and looked over the hedge at the crop in the field. The smell seemed to come from within the potato rows, whose leaves stood well above the ground and whose farmer had already been gardening carefully.

  Laurence climbed through a gap in the fence, walked into the middle of the field, and squatted down. He couldn’t say for certain if the smell came from nearby or from the air above his head or from some distant quarter of the field. But he had been hearing disturbing tales among his father’s friends, and so he reached down and gently pulled up a single potato stalk.

  At its root, white as little babies, he saw what he should have found—a crop of tiny potatoes, perfect and ready to mature. Laurence left that field puzzled; everything seemed all right with the little potatoes, but yet the smell still hung in his nostrils. Then he realized that something else had bothered him about that first field—it was unnaturally silent; no birds, not even the crows who are usually everywhere, no insects buzzing.

  Half a mile or so along the road, he came to another field of potatoes, and here he found no smell at all. The birds chattered and warbled in the trees, and the butterflies flitted along the hedges. He tried that field too, and the potatoes were as perfect as the first ones.

  Laurence’s journey that morning was to take him to the doctor in Ennis, an English gentleman called Crawford, who came from Yorkshire. Dr. Crawford, married to a local lady, had been looking for an intelligent boy to help him with such matters as delivery of medicines and the like and interpreting into English the Irish language of the local people. Laurence had taught himself English and could read and write it, very unusual in a country where education of the Catholics was forbidden by law.

  Dr. Crawford liked Laurence the moment he saw him, and after a few questions and answers he hired the boy—who at that moment became the sole breadwinner for his family.

  He says to him, “I like the name Laurence, and we won’t have it shortened to Larry or anything like that. Do they call you Laurence at home?”

  “They do, Doctor,” and Laurence went about his work tidying Dr. Crawford’s office.

  After a morning of observing the doctor at work, Laurence approached him.

  He says, speaking up and speaking brave, “Doctor, I saw something on the way here today that troubled me.” The doctor looked at him; Laurence had a very arresting manner.

  He says, “And what was it?”

  Laurence says, “Doctor, I was passing one field of potatoes, and I got a bad smell—and then I was passing another field of potatoes not far from the first and got no smell. And the first field had no birds in it, and no bees buzzing, but the second field was business as usual.”

  Dr. Crawford stopped what he was doing and says, “Why are you telling me this?” and him looking straight at Laurence.

  And Laurence says, “Sir, I heard some men talking to my father, men from Limerick, and they were talking about a potato failure. So I looked at the potatoes in the field with the bad smell, and there was nothing wrong with them. But these men, they were saying, the blight zigzags across the country, that it can hit one part of a field and ignore another.”

  Without a minute’s hesitation, Dr. Crawford put on his hat and called his coachman. Five minutes later, he and Laurence were rattling along the road to Ballykill in the doctor’s coach.

  They stopped first at the “clean” field, and Doctor Crawford went in among the potato stalks with a notebook in his hand. He walked up and down the drills, pulling up a stalk here and a stalk there, examining the little baby potatoes and making notes. Laurence watched him.

  After half an hour the doctor climbed back into the coach, and they went on to the field where Laurence had found the odor. If anything, it smelled stronger than before, and Laurence was relieved in case the doctor thought he was making it up.

  In fact, the doctor says to him, “Very well observed, Laurence. We’ll make a medical man out of you yet.”

  Into the field they went, and this time the doctor made many more notes, asking Laurence to pull up the stalks for him. As they progressed, and as they moved into parts of the field where the smell seemed sickliest and sweetest, Laurence observed that the doctor peered ever closer at the little white tubers. At last he held one up between thumb and forefinger.

  And he says, “Laurence, I can scarcely praise you enough—even though for very sad reasons.” He handed the little potato to the boy and said, “Examine this, Laurence, and tell me what you see.”

  A wee bit anxious, lest he not find what he was supposed to, Laurence turned the potato over and over in his fingers.

  And he says, “Is it this, Doctor?” and he pointed to a number of small bumps, like tiny hard brown blisters on the skin of the little tuber.

  And the doctor said, “Yes, Laurence, and now I’m afraid we must look at the leaves.”

  Even though he was wearing his good clothes, Dr. Crawford went down on his hands and knees and began to crawl along through the potato furrows. “Come on, Laurence! Join me!” says he.

  Laurence dropped to his knees too in the next furrow, much more worried about his clothes—Laurence didn’t own a second pair of pants, and he was sure the doctor did. In order to learn what he should do, he watched Doctor Crawford, who was peering up at the underside of the leaves on the stalks. Laurence did likewise, and for many yards of crawling he saw nothing but the nice blue-green leaves that he had known as potato stalks since he came out of his cradle.

  Then his nose began to sing again—and he saw that the leaves of one plant had begun to turn black. Laurence bent close and sniffed. That was the smell! Sickening, too sweet to be wholesome, a wrong smell!

  He said, “Doctor!”

  The good man looked up, a bit comical with his hat peeping over a row of potatoes that were no more than a couple of feet high. Laurence held up a blackened leaf between his thumb and forefinger.

  Said he, “Is this what you’re looking for, sir?”

  Dr. Crawford thundered on his hands and knees through the stalks. He took the leaf from Laurence’s hand and ripped it from the plant.

  Well—did that man wail! “My God!” says he. “My God in heaven!” and he began to cry—real, deep sobs. He sank back on his haunches and covered his hands with his face, and he sobbed like a little baby. When he took his hands away, brown clay was stuck to his face.

  In a minute he lifted his head and he said, “Laurence, would you go to the carriage, please, and bring me that wooden box I left on the seat. And my medical bag.”

  From the bag Dr. Crawford took some scissors, and with Laurence holding the box open, they went along the rows of potatoes, the doctor snipping black leaves from here, from there, from everywhere, and dropping them into the box. They did this until he had collected about thirty leaves, and all the time Dr. Crawford tried to restrain his sobbing and said out loud, over and over again, “These poor people! What’s to become of them?” Eventually he calmed himself, and they left the field.

  That was the first discovery of the potato blight in the west of Ireland. And we know what happened after that. Millions of people died. The road from here to Ennis was soon lined with people looking like skeletons, their big dying eyes full of hope that a food cart would go by. Eventually it got so bad the government dug long trenches on the roadside—so that when the people waiting for the food dropped dead of hu
nger, there was a grave already waiting for them; they just had to fall backward.

  The ferry klaxon blared, calling Matt back to the present.

  Ronan said, “What happened to your grandfather?”

  “He stayed working for Dr. Crawford, and because they were Protestants, they got all kinds of food—flour to bake with, food from England, all of that. My grandfather kept every one of his family alive, out as far as second cousins.”

  Matt Doyle stopped talking, and Ronan stopped writing.

  “And what’ll you do with those notes?”

  Ronan said, “I’ll sit down tonight and fill out the story as I remember it.”

  “In that case,” said Matt, “let me add something to your immortal record of me. Everybody talks about the Great Potato Famine. And everybody thinks they know how terrible it was—and it was terrible. Here’s how I know it was terrible. There was an old lady up here in Killimer, just up the hill from where we’re landing. Her father worked for the British government. When I was a small boy I heard that old lady telling my mother something her father told her. He went into a house near Kilrush, a small cottage, a kind of a mud cabin. There was a hen lying dead on the floor, dead of hunger, a scrawny hen, feathers all loose and raggedy. Hens don’t die of hunger. That’s how bad the famine was—even the food was dead.”

  The ferry nosed to the Killimer pier. Matt Doyle said, “Good luck now. Don’t walk across the Burren at night, ’tis very easy to lose your way.”

  At Hanafin’s, no light showed, no door opened. Ronan walked around the back; no one there. He felt he had come full circle. In boyhood, helped by his father, his first true search for the Storyteller had begun here, the pub where the Storyteller sometimes wintered. Now here he was again, still searching, still, as it were, knocking on a closed door. A woman in the next house watched his movements, and he walked over to her. He had no need to ask; she wanted to tell.

  “Him and the wife had a row. She’s gone off to her sister’s in Galway.”