Seek the Fair Land Page 11
Dominick wasn’t sure what was going on. He had heard the voices hut not what they were saying. There seemed to fee a terribly intense silence coming from the inside of the house. He remained unmoving, and so did the children as the rain beat on them and dripped from the thatch. Some time and then Sebastian was back with them.
‘Come and meet a great lady,’ he said.
They followed him in curiously. They stood there dripping water on to the beaten mud floor. Then after a time they could see her face.
‘Children?’ she asked.
‘This is Mary Ann and Peter,’ said Sebastian.
‘You are welcome to my house,’ she said. ‘ They will own land one day. We had the desolation.’ Mary Ann went close to her and sat on her heels.
‘Are you sick?’ she asked.
‘I was,’ said the old woman, ‘but soon I will be well. It makes me well to see a young face. You own the world. Now the world belongs to you. God bless you.’
Sebastian had walked out into the rain. Dominick followed him. Sebastian was standing outside with his face to the sky, and tears were mingled on his cheeks with the raindrops. Dominick came close to him.
‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘not now. We haven’t time. You know that?’
‘ ‘‘With desolation is the whole land desolate,’’ ’ Sebastian quoted. ‘ ‘‘Our adversaries are our lords, our enemies are enriched; the enemy has put out his hands to all our desirable things, our persecutors are swifter than the eagles of the air; they pursue on the mountain and lie in wait for us in the wilderness – we have found no rest; our cities are captured; our gates broken down, our priests sigh; our virgins are in affliction.’’ ’
His voice seemed to rebound off the low clouds.
He lowered his head.
‘Is that true, Dominick?’
Dominick thought back on all they had suffered, all they had seen, the rich lands turning wild, the desecrated churches, the empty villages. ‘It has gone on since the beginning of the world,’ he said. ‘We are not the first and we won’t be the last.’
‘Yes,’ said Sebastian, ‘I saw it all and it meant not as much as it does at this moment on account of the faith of an old dying woman. A little woman. Her name we don’t know. But God knows it. And it came to me then, Dominick. There are millions like her. Even if the whole land is reduced still more there will be thousands like her. You see. And there is our salvation. That’s where we rise again from her ashes. Do you see?’
‘No,’ said Dominick, ‘I don’t see. I feel something. But I don’t see it. I’m going down now. I will be back. Maybe I won’t be back. If I have my life I will return. If not, you have Mary Ann and Peter.’
‘No man could have a better legacy,’ said Sebastian. Then Dominick walked away from him, towards the town, and he didn’t look back either.
Chapter Eleven
THE DAWN brought no easing of the dreadful rain.
Sebastian stood at the doorway of the house and looked towards the town. There was no sign of Dominick. I won’t despair, he thought, Dominick is indestructible. He went back in. He had a fire of sticks burning in the hearth. It was a very open chimney, more of a hole in the roof than a proper chimney. The rain fell sizzling on the damply burning wood. In one corner the children were sleeping under the skins. In the other corner there was a mound where he had buried the old woman. He got a sharp stone now and proceeded to write roughly with it over the head of the grave. The walls were built of limestone rocks loosely put together. Over the mound in the corner he wrote, a stone on a stone:
CATHERINE O KANE, Saint.
‘I’m hungry,’ said the voice of Mary Ann.
He went over to her. She was sitting up. Peter was awake too, looking at him. Their eyes were top wide, he saw.
‘Soon, now, Man,’ he said, ‘your father will come back to us.’ What am I going to do if he doesn’t? he wondered. How could a priest on the run rear two children? He would have to continue his journey and find people who would look after them.
‘Where is the old woman?’ Mary Ann asked.
‘She’s gone away,’ said Sebastian.
‘Like Mammy?’ Mary Ann asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘She was a nice woman,’ said Mary Ann. ‘She was holy. Is she in heaven?’
‘I’d say so,’ said Sebastian.
‘It’s well for her,’ said Mary Ann. ‘She won’t have to do any more walking like us.’
‘Some day, Mary Ann,’ said Sebastian, ‘your walking will be ended. You’ll be sitting down in a nice house spinning wool in front of a great fire.’
‘I wish it would hurry up,’ said Mary Ann with a sigh. ‘Come on, Pedro. Outside morning absolutions,’ Sebastian laughed. ‘Is there nothing to eat at all?’ she asked then.
‘No, Mary Ann,’ he said. ‘Last night was the last. The old lady had nothing in the house at all. Nothing at all.’
‘Had she no neighbours?’ Mary Ann asked.
‘They are all gone,’ said Sebastian. ‘ Cover yourselves going out into the rain.’
They put the skins over their heads and went out. Sebastian searched the house again. It was easy to search. There were a few pieces of crockery, wooden platters, iron pots and griddles, but not a grain of wheat, or a head of oats. He gleaned every corner. How long had the old lady been starving? he wondered. How had she held on to life until their coming? Over the fire there was a kind of loft. He reached and hauled himself up there. It was a boarded-off part of the roof. It had been used as a sleeping-place. Now there was nothing, just the scurrying of mice in the faded rushes. There were woven St Bridget crosses, fixed to the black wooden beams supporting the scraws and straw of the roof.
While he was there, Dominick came into the house from below. He carried a bundle under his arm. He was breathless from running.
He came in the door, and when he saw nobody there he was frightened. He called loudly, almost in a panic, ‘ Mary Ann! Mary Ann! Peter! Peter!’
‘Easy, Dominick. Easy, Dominick,’ said Sebastian, putting his head over the loft.
Dominick looked up at him. Sebastian noted the white panic of his eyes. ‘They are at their morning absolutions,’ said Sebastian.
Dominick just sat on the floor. He was very wet.
‘I thought they were gone. I thought they might have been grabbed,’ he said.
‘God help anybody that touches your children, Dominick,’ said Sebastian.
‘God help them indeed,’ said Dominick. He opened his bundle.
‘Look,’ he said. Sebastian looked. He saw bread and a filled bottle. Dominick carefully then, out of his pocket took, eggs, one two three four five six eggs. ‘ Oh,’ said Father Sebastian, ‘and what’s in the bottle?’
‘Milk,’ said Dominick. They hadn’t tasted milk for nearly a year.
‘The simple pleasures of the poor,’ said Sebastian.
‘And this,’ said Dominick, taking out of his pocket a rectangle of salted bacon. ‘ Cook them. I’ll get my children.’
He went quickly out of the door, looking for them. He saw them coming towards the house wrapped up. He sat on his heels at the door and waited until they bumped into him. They were surprised. They were glad to see him. He was glad to see them. ‘Soon it will be over, Mary Ann,’ he said. ‘Soon we will find rest, you’ll see.’
‘I’m happy you’re back, Daddy,’ said Man. ‘We were afraid.’
‘I told you not to be afraid,’ he said.
‘You can’t help it sometimes,’ said Mary Ann.
‘We will go and eat,’ said Dominick. ‘What would you like for your breakfast. Miss MacMahon? Some milk maybe and an egg or a little bacon and wheaten bread?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Mary Ann.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Dominick and brought them in.
They savoured the food, as Dominick half dried himself in front of the fire.
‘It is bad in there in the town?’ Sebastian asked him.
Dominick thought.
‘Better to have life alive than dignity dead,’ said Sebastian, reaching for the soot. Dominick laughed.
They gathered their belongings. Very diminished now. Which is why. Dominick told himself, we will have to get to town. This is not an excuse to get to a town, he told himself severely. But things must be bought. Necessary things, even if you are seeking a fair land where you will be free from fear. You can’t eat grass.
‘Don’t eat all the food,’ he said. ‘ We will be waiting for a long time. I hope we will be able to get across before nightfall.’
They left the house. Before heading down towards the town they tried to close the door. They got it almost shut and then blocked it on the outside with a stone.
There was a sort of track all the way down, but it was very slippery now from the rain. Rocks moved under their feet and there were many filled potholes which they could not avoid. But their eyes were on the town, it wasn’t a heavily fortified place. The walls were low and not thick, but there were a lot of stone towers and one main gate leading into the town from the east. There were many lines of figures converging on the gate. All of them were in distinct groups, Sebastian saw, as they came close to them. There would be a gentleman on a horse and a lady on a farm cart with maybe children with her there or grown children walking by their father’s stirrups. And behind the family came other families of poorer-dressed people, driving a skinny cow maybe or sometimes even two cows, a few sheep and pigs. The lady and her lord would be wearing once fashionable clothes, or silks or damasks, with woollen cloaks lined with coloured satin. But their journey had soiled their clothes. They were grubby from the rain and the mud or thorn-torn. There were many such families, making Sebastian think: How low have the mighty fallen! When he looked at those groups and then looked at the others, sturdy phlegmatic farmers with heavy bodies and blank faces, trudging with their women and children, carrying their possessions on their backs, he thought: How many of the gentle will be able to revert to being poor or hardworking? He could see the white hands of the ladies. He saw the pain in their faces, but they still hoped. It was like the Exodus, he thought, only in that nearly all had been on the same level starting out. His heart missed a beat as he thought of his own family. What had happened to them? Were they also wanderers or were they peaceably dead? He hoped they were dead.
‘Do you feel very sorry for them?’ Dominick asked. He had been watching the expressions on Sebastian’s face.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Sebastian.
‘Why? Dominick asked. Their turn has come. Thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred years ago, they drove out other people. They were the planters then. Now they are the transplanters. The wheel has just turned.’
‘They are human beings,’ said Sebastian. ‘It will be harder on them than on the hard-working men.’
‘It will be harder even than they think,’ said Dominick. ‘They have to leave their castles and their mansions and their broad acres to go to Connacht. They have been promised the same amount of land there. But this is the thing. There isn’t enough land to go around. They won’t even get what they think they will get. The poor creatures! Look at them. They are still proud. Watch how they scorn the common people. They still think they have those possessions at their backs, when the only real possessions they have are on their backs.’
Sebastian watched. The proud old man on the horse with his white sweeping moustache, and the whip in his hand. If he was held up, he used the whip, without expression, on the backs of the plodding, dirty, soaked people who were holding him up. And worse, Dominick thought, the whipped ones got out of his way.
‘Don’t be hard, Dominick,’ said Sebastian.
‘You be dumb, Sebastian,’ said Dominick, as they squeezed their way into the throng and approached the gate. Dominick was carrying Mary Ann. Sebastian was carrying Peter.
They were squeezed tightly, and advanced very slowly. Dominick thought how terrible the silence was. Just the shuffle of feet, and the sound of the horses’ hooves as the throng was forced upon to let them pass. Just a woman coughing, or a man clearing his throat, and the smell of woollen cloth soaked with rain, smelling like the smoke of a turf fire. And the way that no man’s eyes met. Nobody looked or spoke. It’s the helpless feeling of shame, he thought. Why haven’t we swords in our hands slashing all around us? He had counted the soldiers. There were only about two hundred of them in the town. There were at least two thousand weary transplanters, as docile as driven sheep, making their way in, to be docketed, stamped, certificated, as if they were animals, and sent to their stalls, or else the butcher’s block.
He was uneasy with so many people around him. The so-called freedom which they had had for two years, when meeting a person was a miracle, had been good in comparison with now. As they shuffled down the streets of the town, he noticed the houses. Most of them were thatched, one-storey. One or two of them were two-storey lath and plaster with brown wooden beams. But they were no longer homes or shops. They were stables and quarters for horses and men. He had never noticed before how pungent and almost unbearable to the nose could be the droppings of horses. If he ever smelled it. It again it would for ever bring to his mind the sounds and sight of this town of the ford.
When they had reached the end of one street he could look and see the guarded bridge that led off into Connacht. There were a few people crossing it. They were held up there while the soldiers examined their papers. He watched to see if any of them looked back once they had crossed the bridge. They didn’t look back. This seemed strange to him.
His arms were aching from holding Mary Ann. He had to heft her several times. ‘Am I too heavy, Daddy?’ she whispered once. Why did she whisper? Because nobody was speaking. At the crossing there were soldiers watching. There were some at windows watching. The line of people slowly approached the church.
Here the people joined with the men on horseback and the ladies and children on the carts. The carts and horses were turned off into the churchyard. There were a lot of them. They had to be driven over the graves. The tombstones were knocked and the carvings on some obliterated by the heavy cartwheels. You could hear some of the people sucking in their breaths as the beaten horses, flogged by whips, pulled over the obstacle of a flat stone, and the iron of the wheels screamed.
The approach to the church was up an incline. This is where Sebastian is going to suffer, Dominick thought.
Over the door there had been a statue of Our Lady holding the Infant Jesus in her arms. The statue was still there but both the Lady and the Infant had been beheaded. The beheaded statue looked terrible in its niche. The heavy oak doors of the church had been beaten in with some sort of battering-ram. They lay back, open and burst, hanging on twisted iron hinges. Inside there was light. All the long narrow Gothic windows had been made of stained glass. None of the glass remained. It had been shot out, knocked out, beaten out, all that was left being a little piece of coloured glass here and there gripping tightly to the twisted lead. Up where the main altar had been, long rough tables were stretched across, in three sort of distinct sections. The confessionals had been ripped out at the sides. The slabs of stone on the floor were thick with mud, and even in here there was a prevailing smell of horse droppings. There were armed soldiers all around, pushing with long-handled pikes, chewing tobacco and spitting. They didn’t care where their spit landed. They laughed about this. They had bets on some of the spits, where they would land.
Dominick put Mary Ann on her feet and edged his way so
that he remained in the centre and they were making then way towards the table in front of the high altar, or where the high altar had been, because none of it remained, except the steps leading up to it, and here where Christ had rested there was a rough table with a man standing up interrogating the people, and two clerks writing, and a man with a hooked nose and a ripe red face, with prominent teeth and red-rimmed eyes, looking and looking, and taking draughts from a bottle and grunting. It was towards this table that they were aiming.
Dominick looked at the standing man. He was handsome. He wore his hair longer than the puritan rules would have it, and a white lace collar over a dark-blue silk coat. He was tall, and his face was lean and his teeth were white. As they got closer they could distinguish the words.
‘Sir Nicholas Comyn of Caltra House.’ Standing on his toes, Dominick could see that this was the proud gentleman who had used the whip.
‘Sir,’ Sir Nicholas began.
The red-faced man leaned forward.
‘Be silent!’ he ordered. Dominick saw that he was sitting on the red plush chair that the Bishop would have used on a visit to this church.
‘But Mister Cole …’
‘Silence!’ Mister Cole ordered. ‘I am the magistrate, sir. I ask the questions. Now, have you got a Particular?’
The old gentleman reached forward a document.
‘Read it, Doyle,’ said Mister Cole, taking a drink from the bottle and looking at Sir Nicholas as if he hated him.
The elegant man took the document and read.
‘Sir Nicholas Comyn, pale complexion, white hair, indifferent stature, his wife Alison Netterville, otherwise Comyn, with two children, aged twelve and fourteen, one boy, blue eyes, dark hair, and the other a girl. Said Sir Nicholas no proof of Constant Good Affection to Parliament. Acted in the service of the King.’
‘But, sir,’ Sir Nicholas interrupted, ‘ at that time the King was the legitimate Government.’
‘Silence, sir,’ Cole roared, ‘or I’m damned if I won’t confine you for contempt. You worked with the enemies of the Parliament. Are we too tender with you? Read on!’