We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

by Tom Phelan

  Stepping on each other’s heels like a herd of nervous gnus hearing a rustle in the dry savanna grass, the pilgrims shuffled inside. Their fearful glances swept the length and width and height of the cathedral; the space; the brightness; the size of the pillars; the shapes; the colors and colors and colors. It was angels who had splashed the colors all over.

  Heaven had been trapped within the massive structure. It was a miracle, for only God could build a house and have colored light streaming through the walls. And then they saw people and goats and sheep and cows in the colored light. The things God could do!

  The walls themselves were higher than the highest fir tree. It was God Himself who had made the enormous, glistening pillars. He had made the towers in heaven and then stuck them down in the ground so that men could climb up and talk to Him, see the edge of the world, see mountains they thought were monstrous blue snails.

  Again their knees gave out; they were in the presence of God in God’s own house; they were inside God. They did not, and never would, have the words to tell the village back home what they were seeing. How could they describe the size and the towers and the colors to people living in a tiny forest clearing, people who had never seen a sunrise or a sunset because the trees were so tall, whose hut floors were earthen, with holes large enough to break an ankle in; who did not have “clean” in their vocabulary?

  The pilgrims would not have had the words to describe the steady flames or the candles that gave them life, or the richly colored and gold-threaded vestments, the smell of incense, the voices of the choirs echoing off the distant vaults. How could they ever imitate those sounds for the folks back in the woods?

  The pilgrims would eventually return home, but they would never be the same again. Some became so dissatisfied with their surroundings that they went back to the cathedral and offered themselves to the service of the magnificent edifice as a doorkeeper, reader, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, or priest. Of course, if they were accepted they would have to throw away their skins, go sit in the nearest river, and scrub themselves with sand for a week. “And cut the talons off your toes! Here’s my axe.”

  I could not claim to have had the same cathedral experience as my ancestors when, in the middle of the Second World War, I first toddled into our local church holding Mam’s hand. But over time, everything beautiful and stupendous about the building seeped into my consciousness. With each attendance at Sunday mass I became more aware of the colors; the saints and animals in the stained glass windows; the geometric designs with no beginning or end; the bloodred flame in the filigreed, enormous silver sanctuary lamp hanging from the depths of the ceiling; the brilliant whiteness of the intricately carved marble reredos; the six tall flickering candles in front of them; the polished terrazzo floor; the arches dividing the nave from the side aisles, the marble angels on top of the pillars holding up the arches on their backs; the sky-high brown wooden ceiling looking like it had been knitted into patterns by giant women with giant knitting needles; the lights hanging on ropes that disappeared into the ceiling folds; the gold of the tabernacle door when the small silk curtain was pulled aside; the liturgical colors draped on the altar and embroidered into the priests’ vestments; the embossed, golden-threaded symbols all pulling the eye to IHS in its circle; the smell of snuffed candles and billowing incense; the sound of the curved brass gong announcing the Consecration; the red cassocks of the altar boys; the vases of jumbled flowers; the little arches of the altar rails, with their black and green pillars of Connemara marble and the filigreed brass gates allowing access to the sanctuary; the huge pipes of the organ shaking the air, followed by choral voices filling every little space; the life-size statue of Saint Joseph holding a lily; the statue of the Virgin Mary looking up to heaven, her hands joined and her blue scapular falling in folds to the floor.

  Over time, the colors and warmth and cleanliness and smoothness and dryness made me aware that not everyone lived with muck and dung and soggy fields or with chilblains and cold and bedsheets that were never fully dry. What had been enkindled inside me was some version of the awe felt by my ancestors when they stepped into a cathedral, and the longing that burned inside them after they returned to their dark, leaky, smoke-filled shelters.

  9

  PRAYING FOR THE DEAD

  Beside my bed, shared with my brother Eddie, Mam knelt with me every night until I knew my prayers by heart.

  I was six when “God have mercy on Granny’s soul” entered into my bedtime devotions. I loved my grandmother and I knew she loved me.

  In the hedge at the far end of Granny’s yard an iron gate hung between two glistening granite pillars. Ten feet away, on the other side of the gate, was a single railway track where once a day a fearsome train, big as a mountain, trundled by. One morning, Granny and I stood at the gate waiting, me with clenched hands on a lower bar, while Granny, high above me, held on to the top bar. As the unseen, grunting monster approached between the tall hedges, I could not have borne the mixture of fear and excitement had my grandmother not been with me. I grasped her hand. Then the enormous black engine appeared, blowing out exotic-smelling smoke; the ground shook, and the wagons rattled by on their way to Mountmellick station a mile away. As the train and the noise faded, I saw a stream of water flowing out from under Granny’s long black dress.

  A few months later Mam slipped silently into our bedroom and knelt beside the bed. “Poor Granny died last night,” she said. The gash in my heart has never completely closed. I still see Granny’s coffin sinking into the deep and narrow grave, Mam holding my hand.

  God have mercy on Paddy Cleary’s soul.

  Paddy was a young man who oversaw a wheat crusher in Odlum’s Mills in Portarlington. On the feast day of the Epiphany, a holy day when the Church demanded abstinence from servile work, Paddy found himself with nothing to do. All his friends were Protestants, and they were working. From a neighbor’s farm two fields away he could hear the whine of a mill saw. Paddy had grown up with this neighbor’s children, had played cowboys-and-Indians, hide-and-seek, and Sherwood Forest with them, had eaten in their house as often as they had eaten in his. To Paddy, the only difference between Protestants and Catholics was that he got more days off than they did.

  The sound of the distant saw on that holy day drew Paddy across the fields. In those years if a man with time on his hands happened on a laboring group of neighbors, he joined in. So Paddy took off his coat and got to work. While he was standing at the end of the table pushing a short piece of tree trunk toward the large whirring saw, the blade broke out of its moorings, and as it flew up into the corrugated roof, it split open Paddy’s head. Some Catholics whispered that God punished Paddy Cleary for helping the Protestants on a holy day.

  God have mercy on Missus Whittle.

  The Owenass River was in flood when old Missus Whittle took the shortcut along the river’s bank from Irishtown to the Convent Bridge. In several places the Owenass’s earthen pathway twisted around indents made by cattle looking for water in thirsty weather. On the evening when Missus Whittle slipped and fell into one of these drinking holes, the river was eighteen feet wide.

  The river in flood was a frightening thing. Its summer depth was a few inches, but after days of rain in the Slieve Bloom Mountains it became a roiling, eddying brown water slithering under the Convent Bridge like a snake that grew bigger every time it sucked up a tributary drain. Sometimes, not even the ten-foot banks were high enough to keep the monster in its place.

  It was getting dark when Eddie and I came across a crowd of people milling about on the humpbacked Convent Bridge. Alarm and anxiety were in the air, and we soon heard about Missus Whittle’s disappearance. Each of the bridge’s parapets was lined with men and women hoping to be the one who spotted her body first. Someone shouted, “There she is, just going under the bridge!” and everyone ran to the opposite side. But it was only a piece of wooden fencing bobbing along.

  We squeezed our way into position against the pa
rapet. Even though the sight of the surging river and the idea of seeing the body twisting and turning in the water were terrifying, I clung to the top of the wall and held my place. But unless Missus Whittle was floating, it would be impossible to find her in the dark and speeding water. When I looked straight down, I saw Nurse Byrne kneeling on a coping stone within inches of the rushing flood. She was holding her bicycle lamp a foot above the water, but its weak beam could not pierce the murk.

  More than Missus Whittle’s drowning, it is the memory of the Jubilee Nurse doing what came naturally that I recall most clearly. In later years, I came to understand that she was searching for a close friend, while knowing that her efforts were in vain and her friend’s battered body was being swept like a sodden sack along the bottom of the river.

  God have mercy on Peter Collins.

  One Sunday Dad took Mam and the five children in the pony-and-trap to a football match in Tullamore in County Offaly. County Laois was playing, and the road from Mountmellick was spotted with horse carts, pony carts, donkey carts, pony traps, and bicycles.

  When a lorry passed us, with sides almost as high as a man and flying the blue and white county colors, the jam-packed group of young men on board roared, “Up Laois!” Our pony, Red, flung his startled head into the air, but Dad kept a strong grip on the reins.

  A man on a bike was holding on to the side of the lorry, using it to pull him along. “That’s Peter Collins holding a tiger’s tail,” Dad said.

  An hour later, when we saw the Tullamore water tower in the distance, Dad said, “There’s a whole lot of people on the road up ahead. Something must have happened.”

  The lorry with the Laois flag had stopped, its tailboard was down, and it was empty. Dad opened the door at the back of the trap and got out to lead the volatile Red through the milling crowd. When they moved aside to let the trap pass by, I saw Peter Collins lying still on the grassy bank. There were deep marks on his ashen face.

  God have mercy on Pakie Moore.

  In the early 1950s the Industrial Revolution finally reached rural Ireland, and its most ubiquitous symbols were the grey Ford and Massey Ferguson tractors. Some people believed that not only were farm horses gone forever but also that the farmer had been removed from contact with the soil. Now, perched on his tractor, he sailed along on a seat three feet above the fecund, life-giving clay that for millennia had transmitted its placid goodness through his skin and into his soul.

  The protective steel cage that now surrounds tractor drivers was devised in the 1960s because so many inexperienced drivers caused their machines to flip over and crush them. Pakie Moore was not in touch with his tractor’s center of gravity when he attached it with a steel rope to a tree stump that he intended to pull out of the ground. He backed up to the stump, pushed the accelerator lever as high as possible, and then took his foot off the clutch. When the tractor snapped to a sudden standstill, the front reared off the ground and came back over the rear wheels. The steering wheel cut Pakie in two. His death revived the debate over whether the old ways of farming were safer than the new ones.

  God bless Mammy, Daddy, and my sisters and brothers. Amen.

  Mam hugged me and ran her fingers through my hair. I climbed into bed knowing that while I slept my guardian angel would have her protective wings spread over me.

  10

  THE STORYTELLER

  Up the lane and on the way to the town, a straw-thatched, whitewashed cottage with a gravel front yard snuggled among tall whitethorns. The eaves of the thatch came almost to the tops of the three windows, making the house look like Father McCluskey glaring from under his beetling brows.

  Missus Fitz and her husband, Paud, lived there. If Missus Fitz had been a witch she couldn’t have baked us in her oven because she didn’t have one. Nor did she have a fireplace; her fire was on the hearth under the chimney, which had a square-foot opening at the top. The wall behind the fire was coated in thick soot. Over the years, the rain coming down the chimney had polished the soot, and it glistened and reflected the short flames of the burning turf. Most of the heat given off by the fire was sucked up into the countryside, but somehow Missus Fitz baked her bread and cooked the dinner even if, at times, rain was falling onto her pots and pans, sizzling and hissing like the snakes I’d seen in Tarzan.

  “Missus Fitz wears her topcoat in the house because she doesn’t have much meat on her bones,” Dad said.

  There was no ceiling in the house, just the underside of the thatched roof. Sometimes a short piece of straw floated down out of the darkness and settled into a teacup. The rafters were ancient, rough-hewn poles, black from decades of turf smoke.

  Missus Fitz was very tall. From top to bottom she dressed in black, and the hem of her dress touched her calves. Her ankles were too thin to fill her purplish stockings, and she limped because of a broken hip that had been badly set. “I should have gone to the vet,” she joked.

  Her grey hair was kept in place with long staples, shaped like the ones Dad used to attach barbed wire to fence posts, only hers were thinner and longer. Her face was as wrinkled as the skin of an old potato lost in the dark for years, and her fingers and the backs of her hands looked like crinkly, brown butter paper.

  In the vegetable garden at the back of her house Missus Fitz grew onions. When she harvested them she wove their haulms together into skeins, three onions on top of three onions until the cluster was twelve onions high. Then she hung them on nails in the chimney.

  “She always has the smell of onions on her,” Dad complained. Dad hated onions.

  Poor as a church mouse, Missus Fitz was as proud as a peacock. One time Dad sent me in the pony’s cart up to her house with a sack of midwinter potatoes. Dad was being neighborly, but Missus Fitz saw his kindness as charity. She insisted on giving me a half-crown “for delivering the spuds.”

  When I showed Dad the coin, he snarled, “I told you not to take any money from her.” Then he added, “I hope she chokes on them.”

  One corner of Missus Fitz’s front yard was fenced with three-foot-high chicken wire, and in there grew a profusion of fairy-tale colors sending forth fairy-tale smells. A laburnum tree, with its yellow chandeliers, overhung the flower garden and shed its light onto every petal below.

  “What’s she looking at?” Dad asked Mam when he saw Missus Fitz standing on the lane for a long time.

  “Her garden,” Mam said. “Her flowers are the only bit of pleasure she has.”

  Missus Fitz came to her door every morning when she heard us on our way to school. “Learn well,” she’d say, or “Study hard,” or “Pay attention.” Often she’d add, “Remember, yee’ll all have to take turns reading to me when I’m old and blind.” To me, she’d sometimes say, “When you’re a priest, Tom Phelan, you’d better remember me in your first mass or I’ll come back to haunt ya.” Then she’d turn to my younger brother: “Don’t forget you promised to push me wheelchair when me oul spindles give out.”

  Every day except Sunday, Missus Fitz limped down the hundred yards to our house to get fresh water and milk. First, she filled her white enamel bucket from the farmyard pump and left it outside the wicket door on the lane. Then she came to the kitchen door and called, “Are you home, Nan?” She always waited for Mam to answer, “Come in, Missus Fitz.”

  Mam liked to hear Missus Fitz’s voice because the old woman had the gift of turning her life’s pains into laughter. In private, Missus Fitz confided to Mam some of the deep verbal cuts inflicted by her drunken husband, whom she never referred to as anything but Yer Man. But she was never downcast in front of the children.

  Every Thursday, Missus Fitz limped into the town to clean Doctor McSharry’s office. She wore her good topcoat, the head of a fox on each lapel threatening with its beady eyes. The fox-bodies, attached to the collar to keep Missus Fitz’s neck warm, frightened my sisters. But I liked to touch the foxes because they were wild once, had traveled the fields at night, sneaked into henhouses, and run off with dinner for the
ir kits.

  On her visits to the town Missus Fitz picked up volumes of gossip, and so her Friday visits to our house were her newsiest. Sitting on the little hob to accommodate her hip, she dispensed the latest dirt to Mam. “Father Kelly and Father Minogue nearly murdered each other outside the priests’ house last Monday. Fists flying like two drunk tinkers.”

  Missus Fitz brought fearless gaiety into our house when Dad was not there. In different accents, she told stories about Kitty the Hare, which she had read in Ireland’s Own, and stories about banshees and pookas and nasty leprechauns and badly behaved fairies. But she edited and softened the stories for young ears; there was no coarse language except for a “bloody” now and then. We children loved to hear Missus Fitz swear, but if we ever said “bloody,” Mam would reach for the rod under the high mantelpiece, or Dad would give us a whack across the side of the head, squishing an ear between hard hand and hard skull.

  When Missus Fitz was present and Dad was absent, there was loud, unrestrained laughter in our kitchen. But if Dad was in the farmyard the merriment was subdued. In Dad’s struggle to extract a living from the land, there was little room for joy. As well as that, if God saw people being too happy he would send heavy rains and high winds to put them in their place. Whenever Dad barged into the kitchen clanging buckets while Missus Fitz was visiting, she’d say, “Hello JohnJoe.” Then she’d get up and go home.

  “That one,” Dad would say, “keeping everyone from their jobs. Tom, put your boots on and scrape the mangels.”

  Unlike Dad, Mam had a wonderful sense of humor. She even laughed at his angry encounters with people when enough time had passed and nothing remained but his spluttering and dung-fork waving and the daft things he had shouted.