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  Contents

  Walter Macken

  Dedication

  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 I

  Walter Macken

  Quench the Moon

  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.

  Dedication

  TO MY MOTHER

  AGNES MACKEN

  THIS BOOK

  AS THE FULFILMENT OF AN AMBITION

  AND AN INADEQUATE TRIBUTE

  TO HER COURAGE AND

  FIDELITY

  Chapter One

  The seagull soared in the sun-misted air, high, high over the village of Killaduff, and far from his comrades resting lazily on the weeded rocks, or planing languidly over the summer-warmed seas of the Atlantic.

  The boy lying stretched on his back, cradling his head in his arms, regarded the seagull and thought that it would be a good thing to be able to fly effortlessly like that, if you could get used to keeping your wings outspread. The boy was dressed in the coarse white ‘ bainin’ coat, an open-necked, striped shirt and homespun ‘ceanneasna’ trousers stopping short at the shin. His build made him look much older than his ten years, and the big chest and well-filled coat arms gave promise of great strength and bigness. His eyes were as blue as the cloudless sky, but it was probably the yellow colour of his fair hair which attracted the seagull. From his great height he may have mistaken it for a patch of the Ourish sand, planted miraculously on a brown Connemara hillside.

  However it was, he came down from the vault of the sky like a star falling from the firmament, and then climbed again screeching shrilly as the boy rose to his feet. Stephen O’Riordan laughed, because he thought it very funny to see the flooster that descended on the frightened gull, who had indignantly spread his wings, turned his tail on the human being, and headed back to his usual haunts.

  Stephen stretched himself and then looked back at the schoolhouse to see if there was any sign of his friends. It was a very ragged-looking schoolhouse lying there under the colossal shadow of the mountain that was known as the Brooding Hen. It was one-storeyed and you could clearly see where the two slates were missing from the roof. The roof had been patched up with something, but not sufficiently well to stop the rain-water from percolating and staining the wall inside a dirty green, like the colour of Ireland on the map that graced the opposite wall. The interior of the school house was very shabby and decrepit, like an old grandmother who is living alone, waiting to die, and existing on a hand from the neighbours now and again. But indeed the teacher, Andrew McCarthy, was as decrepit as the school and was the reason why Stephen was waiting, quite patiently, for the release of his friends Paddy Rice and Thomasheen Flannery.

  Ten years ago when he had first come to Killaduff, McCarthy had been a much different man. Fortunately for himself he had no photographs of himself as he was then, or, looking at the dapper, small, neatly-dressed young man in a blue pin-striped suit, with glossy black hair and a friendly smile, and comparing this with the very fat, sloppy, badly-dressed unshaven edition of today, he might have been tempted to end it all, or to become a worse boozer than he was at the moment. It was a pity about McCarthy in a way. He might have gone places, because he was a well-read man. He had married unfortunately, more because his wife had a large family of fierce brothers who, when he had committed an indiscretion, insisted on an early wedding, than from love. His wife was probably the most stupid woman in Connemara, and that’s a great boast, and she bore children with amazing regularity, so that before poor McCarthy was properly aware of it, he was bound to Connemara with chains he didn’t have the courage to break; so he settled down to go to seed, drinking fairly heavily, when he could afford it, and beating the devil out of the scholars at school as an outlet for his repressions. But he was wise enough and he never beat them indiscriminately. He would judge what their status in local society was and hammer them accordingly. Paddy Rice now, was the son of Rice the man with the pub and shop in Killaduff, so, although everybody knew that Paddy was the devil himself on two legs, he got off fairly lightly. Thomasheen suffered more but not too badly, because everybody was aware that he was his father’s favourite, and since Thomas Flannery was a very big man with a temper to match, McCarthy thought discretion in his case would pay dividends. If it had been any other two who had done today what they had done, they would have found it difficult to sit down for a week. They had annoyed McCarthy’s eldest son Padneen, a big stupid lout who took after his mother, had become involved with him, and, while Thomasheen held the school-bags Paddy had delivered a sound trouncing in a fair fight. McCarthy was secretly delighted that his son had taken a beating, because he had one day heard the Padneen, who gave promise of turning into a strong man like his uncles, say that he only wanted to grow up so that he could hammer a job on his oul fella. Instead of beating the combatants McCarthy had kept the lot of them in after school to do extra lessons, thereby punishing himself more than them, because his throat was parched and he was longing for a pint.

  Poor old Bigbum, thought Stephen, turning away from the school to look down into the valley, I wonder if he knows that we call him that. Only too well did McCarthy know, since Padneen had called it to him to his face one day after he had been severely beaten.

  Looking at the land spread at his feet, Stephen felt dimly that he was looking at something that could not be put into words. The road on his left was a yellow ribbon meandering down into the valley. You could see Ourish Island way out in the distance, separated from the mainland by a two-mile stretch of sand, coloured like ripe oats. Below, at the bottom of the Brooding Hen, lay a small tree-dotted lake which drained the silver streams coming down from the mountains. The floor of the valley was dotted with other lakes and streams, broken up by the interlacing flint roads, brown cultivated patches of earth, and some small green pastures clinging desperately to the sides of the brown rocky mountains. Away in the distance Stephen could see his own house at the side of the road leading to Ou
rish Strand. It looked like a toy house down there, long and white with a yellow thatched roof, and the green fields around it which had been carved with courage and tenacity from a reluctant and stony earth.

  Looking at his house made him think of his mother, Martha, who was the reason that the people thought that the young Stephen O’Riordan fella was different – talks just like the mother, not a Connemara woman at all, a Dubliner, if you don’t mind. Martha had told Stephen how she had come to Connemara, and it sounded good to him although a bit sorrowful in spots. She had been educated in an orphanage in Dublin by nuns, and the chaplain to the orphanage had been a certain Father O’Riordan, a most unorthodox priest by all accounts, who had taken a great interest in Martha. He had set out to educate her, starting her on the most peculiar books about pirates and robbers, with bad fellas who were very bad indeed and good fellas who were sickeningly perfect. From those he had progressed her to better books, to histories and classics and plays and poetry, so that when her time came to leave the nuns she had a better education than a first-year university student. She had formed the habit of grading people according to her early reading, and if a person wasn’t a Pirate with her, he was a Hero, or a mixture of both was a hybrid known as a Piro. Stephen gathered that Father O’Riordan had a very poor opinion of the world in general and of mankind in particular, and since he moved such a lot amongst mankind he ought to have known.

  Anyhow, he had got a few jobs for Martha in Dublin, and then one day his brother from Connemara, Martin O’Riordan, had come to the big city looking for a girl who would come back and work in his house for him.

  Father O’Riordan had allowed Martha to take the job, reluctantly, because he was not very sure of his brother. They had seen little of each other since the day they were born, and what little they had seen they were not so keen about. Martin had been in America for many years, and when their father had died, returned to run the farm in Connemara, and appeared to have amassed plenty of money in the meantime. But Father O’Riordan thought that Martin was carrying something in his mind that was weighing him down. In the end, Martha, who was keen on seeing Connemara, won the day and she came to work for Martin, and according to the rest of her story, which was always short, she had fallen in love with Martin and married him and lived happily ever afterwards. Stephen wasn’t so sure. All he knew was that his mind always shied away from thoughts of his father.

  What Martha didn’t tell him was that she no more loved Martin O’Riordan than Martin O’Riordan loved her. When he had met her at the station at Galway and taken her to Clifden in the train, which at that time plied a leisurely course through the most beautiful scenery in the world, she had been attracted by the bigness and the silence and the good looks of Martin. It had not taken her long to realize that that was all that lay between them, a physical attraction that vanished almost overnight. She might never have been content to remain if she had not fallen heavily in love with Connemara, with its barrenness, and its strength and cruelty, because there are no half-measures with this place. You either loathe it or love it, and that’s that, and whether or which, you are going to have a fight on your hands, a fight for existence with your body, or the fight of your lungs against the air and the weather. It seemed to suit Martha. And then Stephen had been born and that clinched it for her. He had not been born without trouble. She had had to have an operation, as a result of which Stephen could be her only child. This seemed to alienate Martin further from her. She had found out that he drank quite a lot, but that he was better humoured when he had taken a drop. He was a surprisingly good reader of good books, and had built up a respectable library. He did not seem to be very keen on his only child. With a consequence that Martha lavished on Stephen everything that she had in herself, but even so life with her husband was not easy. Eleven years ago, when she had come to Connemara first, she was a tall girl with jet-black hair and regular features. She was still tall, and her features were still regular, but the hair at each side of her head was as white as the inside of a cloud and her race was not free of lines.

  Stephen turned back to look at the school again and saw the figures of the two boys chasing out of it as if the devil was on their heels. He picked up his school-bag from the ground and waved at them. This served to increase their speed, so that when they approached him they were breathless.

  Paddy Rice was low-sized, with a mop of unruly black hair and the restless eyes and limbs of the true harum-scarum. He was dressed like Stephen, and kept shifting impatiently from one foot to the other.

  Thomasheen was an engaging youngster. He was tall and thin, and woefully untidy. Instead of a bainin he wore a knitted jersey, which was rent here and there to show the clean striped shirt he wore underneath. His trousers, despite the best efforts of his mother, seemed to be always needing buttons. He had a great tuft of red hair, and fair eyebrows over wide innocent eyes which gained him forgiveness from all for the most heinous crimes.

  ‘Ora, Stephen,’ said he breathlessly now, ‘oul Bigbum had a rale grind on today, so he had. I was afraid a me life he was goin’ t’ clatter the divil out ’f ’s.’

  ‘Don’t mind ’m,’ said Paddy, throwing himself on the grass. ‘Anyhow, I’ll be lavin’ ’m after the summer. The oul fella is sendin’ me to a secondary school somewhere.’

  Stephen and Thomasheen were dismayed.

  ‘You mean you’re goin’ to leave Killaduff?’ Stephen asked.

  Paddy was uncomfortable.

  ‘Yen,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I am.’

  ‘Jay, that’s terrible, so it is!’ said Thomasheen.

  ‘It’s me oul fella,’ said Paddy, in explanation. ‘What can I do? He’s makin’ me go, so he is.’

  ‘Ah, jay!’ ejaculated Thomasheen again.

  ‘Arra, cheer up, Thomasheen,’ said Paddy, slapping him on the back, ‘ I’ll be comin’ home on holidays, won’t I, an’ we’ll kick up murder like always.’

  ‘School won’t be the same,’ said Stephen, ‘ with you out of it.’

  The school will be a very flat place without Paddy all right, he thought. Nobody with the courage to cheek McCarthy or to stand up to him, tempering the other children’s great fear of him. Stephen himself was not in the least afraid, and McCarthy treated him decently enough, but he could never wave an invisible banner of revolt like Paddy, nor restore the scholars’ self-respect with a well-aimed Paddy Rice jibe. Then another aspect of Paddy’s departure struck him suddenly.

  ‘Look, Paddy,’ he said, waving a hand in front of him, ‘won’t you miss all this when you go away?’

  ‘All what?’ Paddy asked, surprised.

  ‘I mean all this down there, the mountains and rivers and things … well … it’s hard to say … just all that …’

  ‘God, that’s a quare wan,’ said Paddy. ‘Miss that dirty oul mountain is it, and thim oul streams and a few oul houses that should ‘ a’ been knocked down years ago. No fear! It’s me for the big towns, boy! I was in Galway once, remember? Jay, they’s somethin’! Talk about people and boats and big houses, an’ pictures an’ thin’s an’ trains an’ motor cars an’ everythin’. Jay, that’s where I want t’ go always, not t’ be stuck in an oul hole in the wall like here.’

  ‘Will yeh see all thim thin’s?’ Thomasheen asked, his eyes wide.

  ‘Yeh, sure,’ said Paddy, starting to strut. ‘Jay, wait’ll I get at’m! Just wait’ll I get at’m! Come on, an’ I’ll chase ye down to the ind a the road.’ With a whoop they started off, Paddy having taken an unfair advantage.

  The road was dusty and their bare feet raised clouds-of it in the air. They approached a turn in the road, their school-bags floating out behind them, and Paddy started to imitate a motor car, turning an imaginary wheel and making honking noises. They flew around the bend of the road close together and burst like an exploding bomb on the figure of a man who was trudging up the hill. The four of them collapsed, the man with a shout of fear that was strangled as he fell. The three boys were quickly on their
feet and they retired to a suitable distance so that they could beat a hasty retreat if their victim turned nasty. They looked at him very warily. They saw a smallish man, dressed in a bainin coat, ceanneasna trousers, and a high-necked blue jersey, the whole topped by a black Connemara hat which he was now dusting carefully. He had a small wizened face, creased with wrinkles and tanned by the suns of fifty years to the colour of old mahogany. He looked at them with one of his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Well, the curse a the seven blind bastards on ye!’ he said in a low, clear, venomous tone.

  The boys remained completely unmoved.

  ‘So is your oul mother!’ Paddy answered rudely, and the three of them prepared for flight, but to their amazement the man on the ground laughed and started to haul himself to his feet.

  ‘A chip of the oul block, hah,’ said he. ‘Now I bet you’re oul Paddy Rice’s son from over beyant.’

  ‘Mebbe yer wrong now,’ said Paddy, visualizing the hard hand of his father descending on him.

  ‘I couldn’t mistake that oul dial,’ said the other. ‘ What in the name a God are ye chasin’ over the country like that for, knockin’ down oul men left, right, an’ centre?’

  ‘We didn’t know you were coming,’ said Stephen.

  ‘And I bet you’re a son a Martha O’Riordan’s, are yeh?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Stephen. ‘She’s my mother.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ answered the man, ‘and a damn fine woman, too, and I’m ashamed teh see a son ’f hers committin’ assault an’ battery on a poor oul man.’

  ‘You’re a quare poor oul man,’ said Thomasheen. ‘I know yeh well. Yer Michilin Fagan from Crigaun an’ me father says yer the toughest oul ram this side a the Twelve Pins.’

  Michilin laughed loudly.

  ‘All God, isn’t that something! Outa the mouths a babies. Is that a nice way for yer father teh be talkin’ about a Christian?’