We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

by Tom Phelan

  The lowly title “Penny Catechism” did not come from the bishops of Ireland who oversaw its composition. They called their effort the Catechism of Catholic Doctrine Approved by the Archbishops and Bishops in Low Week, 1911, for Infants and Standard 1.

  The Penny Catechism was our introduction to the Church’s dogma and its interpretation of the Ten Commandments. As this theology was absorbed, I developed a sense of guilt about breaking the sacred rules. Disobeying my parents, lying to my teacher to avoid being whacked with a hazel stick, and wishing Paddy Connors would drop dead put dark stains on my soul.

  Mam and Dad believed there was nothing worse than failing at catechism.

  “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, and your aunt Teresa a nun? Not knowing your catechism, and throwing stones at a cat in the town where everyone could see you!”

  The nuns in our local convent belonged to the same order as Aunt Teresa, and Dad and Mam imagined that gossipy letters about the Phelan offspring flew daily from Mountmellick to my aunt’s convent.

  Many mornings when Mam was not convinced I knew my catechism homework, she rousted me out of bed and sent me to the cow house, where Dad was milking one of our five cows. Three semiferal cats waiting for their morning treat reluctantly moved as I made my way to the extra milking stool.

  “Who made you?”

  “God made me.”

  “Why did God make you?”

  “To love, honor, and obey Him here on earth and live happily with Him forever in heaven.”

  “Say that one again.”

  I stumbled through the responses until I finally got them right. Sometimes when Dad lost patience with me, he squirted me in the face with milk straight out of the cow’s pap. I may have gone to school knowing why God made me, but the stink of sour milk wafting off me reminded the town children, as if they needed reminding, to call me a smelly oul farmer.

  * * *

  WHEN I GRADUATED to the Boys School, I discovered that once a year the diocesan examiner, Father Kaye, visited each classroom to ensure we were being successfully indoctrinated. This was a day of high anxiety. Under threat of visitation from the hazel rod, everyone was on good behavior. Everyone was dressed in their Sunday best which, for some, meant wearing their long-outgrown First Communion suit. There were many ripped seams and choking collars.

  When Father Kaye entered the classroom, we became as still as a school of perch in the canal. Then we all stood.

  “Good morning, children.”

  “Good mornin’, Faaa-der.”

  “Please, sit down, boys.”

  Father Kaye’s freshly shaved face was aglow and his hair was like painted waves in the picture of Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. His hands were so clean that I knew no soil or weed sap had ever stained his fingers. His Roman collar gleamed, his spotless suit was a perfect fit, the trousers creased. His shoes were shining brightly.

  Father Kaye had never worn a patched coat over his head when it rained nor walked through muck and cow dung and hen dung and duck dung and turkey dung in leaking wellingtons. He had never scraped the clay off mangels with a broken kitchen knife while kneeling on a cold floor in a cold shed. He had never prepared buckets of mash for winter cattle nor flung animal dung through a barn window.

  Father Kaye turned every catechism answer to the credit of the child no matter how senseless it was.

  “Next boy . . . How many sacraments are there?”

  “A-leven, Faaa-der.”

  “Seven . . . very good.”

  “Next boy . . . What’s an angel?”

  “A big white burd with a ring around its head.”

  “Very good. Angels remind me of birds, too.”

  When the ordeal was over, Father Kaye congratulated the teacher and the students. Then he said, “You are a very polite group of boys. Your parents work hard to dress you in such grand clothes, so be sure to love and obey them.”

  We knew Father Kaye liked us. He was not like our parish priest, Father McCluskey, who snapped and snorted and snarled and growled at everyone in a mixture of Irish and English. I knew that when I became a priest, I would be kind like Father Kaye. I would be clean and gentle and never raise my voice to children.

  14

  SCARY SURPRISE FROM THE DARK CONTINENT

  One day when I was in First Class, Sister Martha opened the door of the tall cabinet with a dramatic flourish to reveal a statue of Blessed Martin de Porres of Peru. She said that if we brought a penny for the Black Babies in Africa and dropped it into the slot at Blessed Martin’s feet, he would nod his head in thanks. Then she told us how Martin could talk to dogs and cats and mice, float in the air, walk through locked doors, and be in two places at the same time.

  “Sister! My father talks to our ass and tells it to ‘hupp and go,’ and the ass does it,” Jack Deegan said.

  “Sister! If I could float in the air, I’d get the high apples off the apple tree in Father McCluskey’s garden,” Billy Marshall said.

  “Sister! If I could be in two places at the same time, one of me would stay in bed all day warm, an’ I’d send the other one to school,” Sheila Feeney said.

  Besides pennies for Black Babies, Sister Martha encouraged us to bring in cancelled stamps and silver paper from the insides of cigarette boxes for the foreign missions. Thus the Irish mania for the conversion of happy pagans into miserable Catholics was instilled in me at an early age.

  When Sister Martha taught us to sing a hymn, she began by whacking her tuning fork on the edge of her desk and then humming till her hum matched that of the fork. Still humming, she put down the tuning fork, walked to the center of the classroom, hummed louder, and used her hands to tell us children to hum along with her. As we took up the hum, she pointed to the blackboard where she had written the verses of the hymn. With her bobbing head, she counted out, “One, two, three!” And then waved us into song.

  “Hail, Queen of heav’n, the ocean star!

  “Guide of the wand’rer here below!—”

  Suddenly a demanding knock on the classroom door interrupted our uplifted voices. When Sister Martha opened it, a priest was standing in the corridor holding a suitcase. As he stepped into the room, we stood up and bleated, “Good morning, Fa-aa-ther.”

  “Good morning, children. You may sit down,” the priest said, smiling at the room of seven- and eight-year-olds. I could see he was not thorny like Father McCluskey.

  “Children!” Sister Martha said. “This is Father Dalton and he is home from the foreign missions. He’s going to tell us about his life in a country in Africa that’s full of jungles and monkeys and zebras and elephants.”

  Having a real live missionary in our classroom was almost as exciting as a visit from a clown in Duffy’s Circus.

  Father Dalton plonked his suitcase on Sister Martha’s desk. Then he opened it slowly, as if something might jump out and bite him. I held my breath.

  “You are the first children to see my surprise from Africa,” he said. Carefully, he put his hands in the suitcase and began to draw out a piece of cloth the color of burnt orange, with diamond shapes made by two black lines crisscrossing each other. He moved away from the suitcase and the cloth kept coming. Slowly he walked backward through the rows of desks until he was at the rear wall, one end of the cloth in his hands and the other end still in the suitcase.

  I was goggle-eyed at this un-priestly behavior.

  “Who can tell me what this is?” Father Dalton asked.

  Wagging hands filled the air.

  “A scarf for a giant?”

  “No.”

  “Wallpaper?”

  “No . . . I’ll give you a hint: hisssssssss.”

  “A goose?” a chorus of children sang out.

  “No.”

  “A cross cat,” a boy yelled.

  “No.”

  “A bike wheel after someone rides over a bush that’s full of thorns?”

  “No,” Father Dalton said. “It’s a snakeskin.”

  He may as well
have said “It’s a lion that hasn’t eaten a child for a month.”

  Screeching and screaming, all the girls and boys scrambled out of their chairs and pressed themselves in bunches against the classroom walls.

  Sister Martha laid down a blanket of calmness by walking over to the snakeskin and running the flat of her hand along it. “See,” she said, “it’s not alive.” But at that moment, as if to show how wrong she was, Father Dalton sent a ripple running along the hide of the dead reptile.

  As the children teetered on the edge of hysteria, Sister Martha gave the priest a withering look, as if to ask, “What kind of a fecking eejit are you?”

  Then she lifted the end of the snakeskin out of the suitcase and began to roll it up. The priest had no choice but to do the same from his end.

  When the suitcase was firmly hasped, Father Dalton asked if any of the children were going to be missionaries when they got big.

  “Would there be snakes, Fadder?”

  The priest looked at Sister Martha. “Are there any snakes in Ireland, children?” she asked.

  “Nooooo, Sister.”

  “Who drove the snakes out of Ireland, children?”

  “Saint Pa-aa-trick,” chorused thirty-four mouths.

  “And why did he drive them out?”

  Only one girl answered. “Because they frighten little children, Sister.”

  Sister Martha looked at the priest. “Isn’t that right, Father? Snakes frighten little children?”

  “That’s right, Sister. But it was just a ski—”

  Sister Martha interrupted him. “Out of the mouths of babes, Father,” she said, and she raised her eyebrows into spears.

  Father Dalton lifted his suitcase off Sister Martha’s desk, and the nun waved us children to our feet as he left.

  “Goodbye, Fa-aa-ther.”

  We all sat down.

  “We’ll start the hymn again, children,” Sister Martha said. She held up her tuning fork for all to see and then whacked it on the edge of her desk. Holding the fork to her ear, she nodded us into song.

  “Hail, Queen of heav’n . . .”

  15

  THE RED MOTORCAR

  Sister Claire, my Second Babies teacher, was very tall, and her face, framed in its white wimple, was the face of a saint in a holy picture. When she moved, her veil moved, too, and it was like the black smoke from the chimney of the ship taking Aunt Kit back to England with her bike. Sister Claire sailed around the room all day like she had no feet, like she was a black swan on water.

  On the first day of school after the summer holidays Sister Claire announced there would be a prize for the child who was best behaved and who didn’t talk once during the day, except to answer her questions. She showed us how to put a finger across our lips to keep them sealed.

  All day I kept my right elbow on the desk and my finger across my closed mouth. When I grew tired I put my two elbows on the desk. My nemesis, Paddy Connors, turned around in his seat and imitated me. Then he put his fingers up his nose, pulled his lips off his teeth, crossed his eyes, and made them nearly pop out.

  Just before the end of the day, Sister Claire held up scissors and two Friendly matchboxes as red and yellow as cowslips in the Limekiln Field.

  The light glinted off the long legs of the spinning scissors as Sister Claire cut and glued and stuck half of one matchbox on top of the other one. She waved a piece of red paper at the children, and in a flash the joined matchboxes had changed color. Then there were white wheels between her fingers, and the matchboxes became a shining motorcar. Sister Claire was a magician.

  “This is the prize for the child who was best today,” Sister Claire said. She looked around the room.

  I wanted to take my fingers from my mouth to say I had been the best, that the other children had only been good while the motorcar was being made. But I knew if I spoke I couldn’t win the prize.

  While Sister Claire scanned the classroom, my eyes started to scald at the back because in my mind I knew I should be the winner. But I would not cry. I would not give Paddy Connors a reason to call me an oul girl.

  Sister Claire turned sideways and sailed through the spaces between the long desks to the back of the room, and I didn’t think I could keep the tears from bursting out. Paddy Connors looked around again and stuck out his tongue and scrunched up his face. He tickled himself under his own arms like Tarzan’s chimpanzee and laughed with no sound. He put one finger up his nose and another across his mouth and pressed till his lips turned white. His were the red eyes of the devil in the Penny Catechism. I was too unpracticed in the ways of the world to know how to respond to Paddy’s taunts; all I could think of doing was putting him in the turnip pulper in our boiler house and then mixing him into the mash for the sows.

  “There was only one child who was good all day,” Sister Claire said, and I felt her hand on my shoulder. Then she stooped and put the motorcar on the desk near my elbows. I got the faint and lovely smell of roses as the edge of her veil touched my face. She put her hand on my head and whispered, “You’ll be a grand priest when you grow up, Tom.”

  I took the prize in my hands as if it were a day-old chick. The smoothness of the paper and the redness! Redder and shinier than haws and hips in the winter hedges.

  This was one of the happiest things that had ever happened; it was as exciting as getting Aunt Teresa’s birthday parcel from Dublin.

  When the end-of-day prayers had been prayed, some of my classmates came over to examine the little car. When a girl reached out to touch it, I said, “You can only look.”

  “You can on-ly lo-ok,” Paddy Connors said, imitating me. He reached out to grab my prize, and when I turned away he punched me in the back. But I wouldn’t cry.

  “You can on-ly lo-ok,” he jeered again, making his voice sound high like a girl’s. I dodged away through the desks and toward the classroom door where Sister Claire was saying goodbye to each child. She patted my head as I went by.

  The second I got outside I held the motorcar close to my chest and ran like a hare. In my fear of the bully Paddy, I did not wait for my brother and sister.

  Along the tarred road between the rows of houses on Harbour Street, I galloped until I came to our lane. Then I slipped around the corner of the Harbour Master’s house, stopped, and peeped back. Even though there was no sign of Paddy, I turned and ran along the Canal Line, over Rourke’s Bridge and up the Furry Hill, and then I saw Missus Fitz bent over in her garden in her long black dress and her grey war-stockings.

  When Missus Fitz straightened up, she was all legs and wings like a heron stretching itself after standing all night on one leg in Rourke’s Drain waiting for a minnow. She went up into the sky until the grey bun on top of her head was out of sight. Her face was the color of turf ashes. She did a little pantomime of holding her hand over her heart and gasping, “Mother of Mary, Tom Phelan! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  “Look what I won, Missus Fitz,” I said, and I handed her the prize over the rabbit fence.

  “Ah, Tom,” she said, “and on your very first day back to school. Isn’t it grand? I wonder where the nuns get such lovely paper.” She held the motorcar at arm’s length and made engine noises with her lips, drove the car around in a circle high above the flowers.

  “I wish I had a motorcar like this,” she said. “I’d drive to Dublin every day and go to the Fun Palace to see myself fat in the looking glasses.” She drove the motorcar around in the air again and imitated the sound Malachy Quigley’s tractor made three miles away on a frosty morning. The noise of the engine changed when the car went up and down hills and around corners. She made the horn squawk like the one in Doctor Duane’s car, sounding like a duck halfway through swallowing a frog. She brought the prize car to a slow stop in front of my eyes. “Mind that motorcar now, child,” she said. “Be careful when you’re driving and don’t crash into a cow.”

  As I trotted away I tried to make the sound of Doctor Duane’s horn, but in the end I se
ttled for beep-beep.

  If I’d had a tail that afternoon, it would have been as lively as a lamb’s at a milky teat.

  16

  TO SCHOOL WITH UNCLE JACK AND RED

  Like the Eskimos, who have learned to live in snow, the Irish have learned to live and work in rain in all its manifestations, except for one—“spilling” rain.

  “It’s spillin’, lads.”

  Spilling rain, like bullets from machine guns, goes clean through overcoats, shirts, socks, and caps; it happens when God wrings out the black clouds and crashes his thunder to blast the piercing water from the skies.

  My siblings and I walked to school every day unless it was spilling. On those days, Uncle Jack tackled and yoked the red pony to the cart in the shelter of the car shed. Red was bigger than our black pony, but where Black was a sedate female, Red had maintained the mind-set of an aggressive stallion who did not want to believe his equine jewels had been removed at an early age. Mam and the children drove Black; only Uncle Jack and Dad dared drive Red.

  By the time we were ready to leave for school on a spilling morning, a thick layer of barley straw had been spread on the floor of the pony’s cart. Amid a long duet of man-shouts and equine snorts and squeals, of threats manual and dental, Uncle Jack had enchained Red between the shafts, and in a state of high excitement, the pony trembled as he struggled to suppress the roiling energy confined beneath his red hide.

  When we ran from the kitchen to the car shed, Uncle Jack was already outfitted against the weather. Standing in front of Red, he had an iron-fisted grip on each side of the pony’s bit. Dad caught each of his children and flung us up over the wingboard into the straw. We lay flat with our feet to the rear of the cart; our schoolbags became our pillows. Two capes were spread over us. Then Dad took over the controlling of Red, and Uncle Jack sprang into the cart, settled himself on the seat, and clutched the reins in both hands. Finally, bending his head to avoid smacking it into the lintel, he signaled to Dad to step aside.

  From the floor of the cart, I could not see Mam standing at the kitchen door. But I knew she was there, that she heard the wild neighing of our immortal steed, and that she gasped when thundering Red broke out of the darkness of the car shed into the shooting rain. I knew Mam moved back into the doorway when she heard the clattering of the iron-clad wheels as they bore her children out through the gates onto Laragh Lane. As the spinning wheels passed, she saw the charioteer with rubberized cape floating behind in the wind, girt around the temples with a sou’wester, leaning backward as he labored to restrain Red’s fury.