The Scorching Wind Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  Contents

  Walter Macken

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Walter Macken

  The Scorching Wind

  Walter Macken was born in Galway in 1915. He was a writer of short stories, novels and plays. Originally an actor, principally with the Taibhdhearc in Galway, and The Abbey Theatre, he played lead roles on Broadway in M. J. Molloy’s The King of Friday’s Men and his own play Home Is the Hero. He also acted in films, notably in Arthur Dreifuss’ adaptation of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy of Irish historical novels Seek the Fair Land, The Silent People and The Scorching Wind. He passed away in 1967.

  After the Great Famine (1846), the spirit of nationhood was kept alive in Ireland by the Young Irelanders’ abortive revolt in 1848, by the Fenian Rebellion in 1867, and by the Land League, which by 1909 succeeded in winning for thousands of tenants the ownership of their small farms.

  Political affairs since the Union (1800) were handled by elected members of The Irish Parliamentary Party, who attended the British Parliament at Westminster. By 1906, when the Sinn Fein movement was founded with the aim ‘that national freedom should be sought not in London but at home’, these men were out of touch with the thinking of the young men in Ireland. Alarmed at the founding of the Irish Volunteers (1913) they forced their way into this organization and when the Great War broke out in 1914, on a vague promise of Home Rule after the conflict, they advised the Volunteers to join the British Army. A majority of the Volunteers did so, but a hard core stood fast and, led by dedicated men who believed the country could only be awakened from apathy by sacrifice, instigated and fought the Easter Rebellion of 1916.

  The majority of the people were aroused by the deliberately spaced execution of fifteen of the leaders of the Rebellion and by the imprisonment in camps and jails of thousands of young men and women. The Irish Parliamentary Party was wiped out at the General Election of 1918, and Dáil Éireann in 1919, with most of its elected members in jail, established a National Government at the Mansion House in Dublin, and the fight for Independence continued.

  The signing of the Treaty (1921) establishing the Free State brought the struggle to a close, but its terms, including Partition (dividing the country into Six Counties of the North and Twenty-six Counties of the South) led to a bitter split in the ranks of Sinn Fein. This split erupted into a state of civil war which persisted until 1923.

  Epigraph

  The scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.

  Psalm 10

  Chapter One

  THEY SAT with their backs against a haycock and looked out at the sea.

  Dominic was chewing a wisp of hay. It tasted quite nice. He noticed that his brother’s stretched legs were at least twelve inches longer than his own. He wondered if he would ever be as tall as his brother.

  The sea was very calm. There were about twenty black-sailed pookauns making towards the fishing grounds near Gregory Sound. They were having a patient sail. Now and again their tarred canvas would bulge and they would advance a few yards. A small warship, spewing dirty black smoke from its two stacks, smudging the blue sky and making white water at the bow, was steaming scornfully and purposefully in towards the harbour at Galway. The Aran Islands were quite clear. He could see the way the cliffs fell steeply to the sea on the Big Island, and he could see the Cliffs of Moher across the bay, buttressing the hills.

  He didn’t like his knickerbockers or black stockings, or the polished black boots. He would be out of them soon. He thought of the many fights he had been involved in for the wearing of them.

  ‘Nice to see the sailing ships,’ his brother Dualta said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dominic.

  ‘Pity to leave them,’ said Dualta, ‘but we’ll have to go. Trains won’t wait.’

  ‘Don’t go at all,’ said Dominic, suddenly feeling sad.

  ‘Not you too,’ said Dualta, heaving himself to his feet ‘Isn’t it enough to have Father on my back?’ He looked once more at the bay, crinkling his eyes against the glare of the July sun.

  Dominic looked up at him. Dualta was tall, nearly six feet tall, and well built. He was fair-haired. Dominic was black. Dualta’s father often wondered where he came from. All our side were low men, he would say, and dark. It must be from your mother’s side.

  ‘I wonder when I will see all this again,’ Dualta said, almost to himself.

  Dominic got to his feet. He bit back what he was going to say; that he needn’t go away from it all, at all. It was his own choice and a foolish one in Dominic’s opinion, who was only seventeen to his brother’s twenty, so kept his mouth shut. He followed his brother who jumped the stone wall into the lane. It was a narrow lane, very rutted, the flowering briars leaving hardly enough room to walk between them, and decorated with wisps of hay.

  ‘Go and get Saili,’ said Dualta.

  Dominic plucked some fresh grass from the side of the wall and jumped over it into another field. The pony was grazing at the end of the field. She looked up when she saw Dominic approaching her.

  ‘Come on,’ said Dominic, ‘nice grass.’

  The pony snorted, tossed her head. She was fawn coloured with a grey tail and mane. She is going to thwart me, Dominic thought. ‘Nice fresh grass,’ he said again. She just started to race around the field. Dualta was leaning on the stones of the wall, laughing. Suddenly he pursed his lips and whistled. The pony stopped racing, looked, saw him and ran towards him. If she was a dog she would be wagging her tail, Dominic thought in disgust.

  ‘You’ll never learn how to catch a pony,’ said Dualta. He was rubbing her face. She was nuzzling him. If she was a cat she would be purring, Dominic thought. He knocked a few stones and the pony went out. He threw them back again. Dualta was walking up the lane. The pony was walking by his side. Well, Dominic thought as he followed them, people like me better than animals do, I think.

  They came to the main road. They waited while a motor car passed in a cloud of dust. Motor cars were so new that they were still curiosities. The hood of this was down. The man driving the car waved cheerfully at them. The car was bumping up and down as it hit the many pot-holes in the dirt road. The man in the back, sitting upright, resting his hands
on the handle of a stick, managed to retain his dignity, even if he was bobbing up and down on his seat like a rubber ball. He inclined his head at them. They nodded. He was a Lordeen from way in. On the other side of the road a barefooted woman in a red petticoat was coming from the village shop. She was carrying provisions in a flour sack over her shoulder. She stepped off the road as the car neared her, and as it passed she bent her knee.

  Dominic felt his face burning. Why did she do a thing like that? This fellow was nothing to her. Why did she do a thing like that? Then he saw Dualta grinning at him.

  ‘Don’t be wild,’ said Dualta, ‘it takes a long time for the fear of centuries to vanish.’

  ‘She needn’t do it,’ said Dominic. ‘She owes him nothing. Not even courtesy.’

  ‘God be with you, Sinéad,’ Dualta shouted to her in Irish.

  ‘With you both, too,’ she shouted. ‘The day is red hot. Are you leaving us again, I hear?’

  ‘The birds have tongues,’ he said.

  She laughed shrilly. They were only yards from her, yet she was shouting as if they were the other side of the bay.

  ‘I was with Poric’s mother,’ she shouted. ‘She is settling the dust with her tears. He is off with Dualta below, they said, the son of the Master. So I know.’

  They crossed the road.

  ‘The young must travel,’ he said.

  ‘May God, and Mary and St Joseph and all the saints be with you in your dangers,’ she said.

  She called many more blessings after them. Dualta shouted ‘You too,’ back at her. In ten yards they turned into the gate beside the two-storey slated house.

  ‘Harness the pony,’ said Dualta. ‘ I’m in to the house to collect my things.’ Dominic caught the pony by the forelock and led her around the house to the yard at the back. He saw Dualta standing there, biting the nail of his thumb and looking at the house, before he squared his shoulders and went in. Dominic delayed the harnessing of the pony. He had a good excuse. She didn’t want to be harnessed. He had a job getting the bit into her mouth, dodging her kicking legs as he tightened the bellyband and finally backing her into the light shafts of the trap. He had no further excuse for delay, so he threw her a gowleog of hay from the barn and went into the house by the back way.

  Brid was in the scullery. She was peeling potatoes. She was crying. She was a young girl. Her hair was caught back with coloured slides. She was too fat for her age.

  ‘What are you roaring for now?’ he asked.

  ‘Not,’ she said. ‘I was peeling onions before.’

  He knew this was not true. She was fond of Dualta too. He went into the kitchen. His mother was sitting in the wooden chair in front of the fire. She was stitching buttons on a shirt. She looked up at him. She was a tall thin woman with white hair and deep-sunken eyes. Mostly there was a glint of humour in them.

  ‘We won’t need salt on the potatoes tonight,’ said Dominic.

  ‘Brid is not happy unless she has something to cry about,’ his mother said.

  It was a big open hearth fire with two stone seats one each side of it. Dominic sat into one of those. He kicked at the turf fire with his boot.

  ‘You don’t cry,’ he said.

  ‘Dualta is a restless boy,’ she said. ‘He has been away before, many times.’

  ‘And back again,’ said Dominic. ‘He tried to be a teacher like my father; he tried to be a doctor. Why doesn’t he settle on something?’

  ‘Will you be different?’ she asked. She was smiling at him as she bit off a thread with her still good teeth.

  He laughed.

  ‘I hope so,’ he said.

  They heard raised voices from the other room. They looked at one another.

  ‘Maybe I better go back,’ said Dominic. She left the decision to himself. So he sighed and rose and went towards the closed door. He didn’t knock. He just raised the latch and went in. It was a darkish room. There was a mahogany table his father used for his books and reports. There was a high-backed chair that he used. He was sitting up straight in this. Dominic knew he was angry because his short white beard was jutting and his cheeks were flushed. Dualta was standing. He was dwarfing his father. The muscles were tight at the sides of his jaws.

  ‘It’s nearly time to go,’ said Dominic diffidently.

  ‘You are betraying your people,’ his father said as if he had not spoken. ‘You are betraying seven hundred years of the blood of martyrs.’ He hit the table with his fist ‘All those.’ He was waving his hand at the pictures on the walls. They were all engravings of drawings or framed ballads. Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet Meagher of the Sword. Mitchell, Davis, Davitt; the place was like a museum.

  ‘Has all the struggle of the centuries, our own sufferings with the Land League, the crucifixion of the Fenians, meant so little to you that you will join the army of our oppressors to uphold their Empire?’

  Dualta was tight lipped. He spoke low. ‘I am a Redmond Volunteer,’ he said. ‘ I am going to fight to free a small nation so that we can win freedom for this small nation.’

  ‘Delusions,’ his father shouted at him, ‘Here is the place to fight, not there. How am I to hold my head up again if you do this thing? How can I live with the shame of it? Redmond is a man who is betraying thousands of your young men to death with a delusion. Not even a carrot for donkeys, just a delusion. How can you be so blind? Has everything I told you over the years meant nothing at all to you? Would I have been better off trying to teach patriotism to the pigs?’

  ‘Too much of it!’ Dualta suddenly shouted. ‘ Too much of it. I’m sick of it! Sick of dead martyrs. It’s in the past. It’s gone. It’s here and now, we want. Here and now. I’m sick of you raising the dead!’ His voice had risen to a shout. He seemed to hear this and was appalled. Quickly, he said: ‘I’m sorry, Father.’

  His father’s head dropped. His forehead was creased. Dominic noticed how the hair of his head was thinning. Of course his father was becoming an old man.

  ‘It’s time for us to go,’ said Dominic.

  Dualta went to speak, looked at his father’s bent head and then said nothing. He went into the kitchen. His mother was putting the shirt into the tapestry bag.

  ‘It’s all ready now, Dualta,’ she said. She was bending down, closing the lips of the bag. He got down with her.

  ‘He feels bad with me, Mother,’ he said. ‘I cannot go back all those years with him. After all, this is 1915.’

  ‘You don’t know what we went through in Mayo in the old days of the Land League,’ she said. ‘You have no memory of them. They were days of great sufferings. But he is afraid for you. He is human too. He is just afraid for you.’

  He stood up. ‘ Bring the trap around, Dominic,’ he said.

  Dominic left them. He stuffed a bag with hay and put it on the floor of the trap. Then he sat in, left the small door at the back swinging open and drove the pony around to the front. Dualta and his mother were at the front door.

  ‘I believe my way is right,’ Dualta was saying. ‘Redmond is a good man. He said if we fight for them we will get Home Rule. I believe this. So am I wrong in doing what I believe is right?’

  ‘Do what you believe is right,’ she said. ‘Write to us when you can.’

  ‘I will,’ he said. Then he threw the bag in on the hay and got into the trap and took the reins. He waited for a moment, but his father didn’t appear, so he clucked at the pony, slapped the reins almost viciously on her rump so that she jumped, and then set off out of the gate at a fast rate and turned on to the road like a racehorse.

  Dominic, even as he held on to the side of the trap, saw his father’s face at the window of the room and he thought his father looked sad. Then the dust was rising and the wheels of the trap were leaping in the pot-holes. His brother’s face was tight.

  ‘Slow down,’ Dominic shouted at him, ‘or you’ll make matchsticks of the wheels.’

  His brother grinned suddenly and hauled on the bit. The pony fought the bit but slowed to a
more sedate pace.

  ‘He is a one-minded man,’ said Dualta. ‘He doesn’t see that times have changed.’

  ‘Times might change,’ said Dominic, ‘but if you have principles, they don’t change. He has principles.’

  ‘Did you do philosophy at school, then?’ Dualta asked.

  ‘No,’ said Dominic.

  ‘He makes it hard to love him,’ said Dualta.

  They saw Poric waiting for them half a mile away. He waved a hand at them. It was a long straight road here, running yards from the sea. They pulled up near him. Poric was very big. He was dressed in a navy-blue suit and brown boots. He had curly hair that was coming out from under his new cap.

  ‘Anyone would think it was going to get married you were, Poric,’ said Dualta, ‘ instead of where you are going.’

  Poric laughed as he swung his straw trunk tied with a rope at their feet. He had big teeth and very clear sunburned skin. Dominic marvelled at the thickness of his wrists as he held the side of the trap to come in with them. He sat beside Dominic.

  ‘I’d be saying it’s safer where I’m going,’ he said. They spoke in Irish. Poric’s English wasn’t very good yet, and embarrassment made him slow and diffident in the speaking of it. ‘How did the Master see you off?’ he asked. He was anxious about this, his forehead creased.

  ‘How do you think?’ Dualta asked.

  Poric shook his head.

  ‘He gave myself the rakes yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘He said nothing of you going off to their army.’

  ‘What are you? An enemy of the people?’ Dualta asked.

  ‘More than that,’ said Poric ‘He said: What do they call the places where policemen congregate in England? That set me back. What do they call them anyway, tell me?’

  ‘Police stations,’ said Dualta.

  ‘Damme, that’s it,’ said Poric. ‘I didn’t know. What are they called here? he asked, then. Police barracks, he said. You see the difference: There are centuries of oppression between the meaning of these two words, Station and Barracks. Policemen in this land are not policemen, they are a military force trained to shoot down their own people. You hear that, Dualta. I don’t want to shoot down anyone.’