We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

by Tom Phelan

  I knew Mam was waving goodbye, saying, “I love you” in her wave, saying, “God bless you,” and praying we would have a safe journey.

  Lying in the soft golden straw beneath the bulletproof capes, I knew by the twists and turns and jolts where we were on Laragh Lane. I was in Cuchulain’s war chariot in a cacophony of whipping chains and whacking metal-bound wheels, Uncle Jack’s shouting, and the pounding of Red’s iron-shod hooves. I was beside Cuchulain’s charioteer, Laeg, lashing and yelling and driving with the speed of a swallow; I was a postilion clinging to the mane of the lead horse in a team of four, racing a ghostly, black hearse beneath a speeding moon in storm-ragged clouds, and driven by a flailing black phantom.

  As Red sped off the lane onto smooth Harbour Street, I knew his iron shoes were blasting sparks out of the wet tarmac; I knew the chariot’s wheels were leaving trails of fire behind them in the flowing surface of the road; I knew the earth was shaking and trembling with the velocity of our motion; and all the time the cart brayed and shrieked as the wheels of splashing iron went round, and strange cries and exclamations were heard in the air, as the ghosts of generations of Reds followed us.

  I always felt safe because I knew Uncle Jack was in control of the reins, knew that Red could never beat him; knew that Uncle Jack, if the need arose, could bring Red to a shoe-and-hoof-melting stop within his own length. Uncle Jack was Hector, tamer of horses.

  When we thundered past the rain-lashed, school-bound children on the footpaths, they turned to squint at the approaching fury, and put their terrified fingers to their mouths and pressed themselves against the fronts of the houses lining the street. The old people, wetly afoot, looked in amazement at this furious fairy-blast of noise, water, fire, and motion, and nodded to themselves in recognition of these descendants of the Tuah Dé Dana, who had arrived in mythical Ireland by way of magical whirlwinds.

  17

  ALTAR BOY DAYS

  Learning the responses for the Latin mass was a time of warmth, love, and delight: warmth, because our group of eight potential altar boys sat outside on the steps of the sacristy in the autumn sun; delight, because I was being let in on the mysterious priestly language that rolled exotically around the tongue; and love, because I fell in love at age ten with the sweet voice, beautiful face, and slender soft fingers of Sister Carmel, the nun who was instructing us. No other part of her body was visible, and anyway I was too young to be interested in what was beneath her habit.

  With her back against the black iron railing, Sister Carmel intoned, and eight voices eagerly repeated. The trace of a bemused smile put sparkles in Sister Carmel’s eyes. Perhaps she was not used to dealing with boys of our age, or perhaps she was trying to keep from looking up our short trousers, our legs sprawled and spread; in those days only oul girls wore underwear.

  “Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea . . .” The lovely lips sent the words out sweetly into the air. Sister Carmel smelled like lilacs.

  On the warm steps we almost sang the words she placed before us. When we had memorized the first page of responses, she recited the priest’s lines, emphasizing the last syllable to wave us into our part.

  “Introibo ad altare Dei!” I will go unto the altar of God.

  “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam!” To God who gives joy to my youth.

  The possession of the magical Latin words, the informality of the sunny setting, the feelings that Sister Carmel aroused, the mesmerizing sound of a group chanting a lesson by rote—all these created joyous moments. Before the instruction was over I was looking forward to the next one.

  “Boys! Now that you are going to be serving mass you must always behave better than ordinary lads. You must give example by doing your homework and not getting into fights in school.”

  “Boys! You must always have a handkerchief in your pocket—no more using your sleeves.”

  “Boys! You may not serve mass with dirt under your nails or your hair not combed.” I wondered who she was talking about until on the way home I noticed my filthy fingernails on the bike’s handlebars.

  As the lessons progressed during that autumn, not even the bully Paddy Connors’s schoolyard jeering—“Cluck, cluck! Here comes the holy water hen!”—muddied my feelings of specialness, of being one of the chosen.

  With the responses firmly embedded in our memories, we learned to genuflect in unison in the altar boys’ sacristy: back straight, prayerful hands at chest, thumbs crossed, right knee landing beside left shoe, back straight when resuming standing position. If a boy lost his balance or bent over on the way down as if he had been kicked in the balls, we did the exercise over.

  Learning to bow in one fluid movement was not easy.

  “Boys! Bend your hips slightly, bring your shoulders forward slightly, and bow your head.”

  While I was inwardly gloating about the contortions of some of the others, Sister Carmel said, “It’s hips, shoulders, and head, Tom Phelan! You are doing shoulders, hips, and head, and if you try to bow that way you’ll kill yourself.”

  Our first entrance from the priests’ sacristy into the sanctuary was held in suspense as the nun tested, for the last time, each boy’s Latin, genuflecting, and bowing. When she examined our nails, she bent down to my ear and whispered, “You have the fingernails of a priest.”

  “Boys! What kind of shoes must you wear to serve mass?”

  “Black plimsolls, Sister.”

  “You carry the plimsolls from home to the sacristy, and then put them on here. Why must you wear plimsolls when you are serving mass?”

  “So we won’t be making noise like an oul farmer with hobnailed boots, Sister.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “So we won’t squash cow dung into the pictures in the floor, Sister.”

  “Mosaics!”

  “Mosaics, Sister.”

  “What time must you be in the altar boys’ sacristy?”

  “Ten minutes before mass starts, Sister.”

  At last Sister Carmel opened the door of the priests’ sacristy, and we got our first glimpse of the nave stretching away into the gloaming distance, hues from the stained glass windows hanging in the still air. I could see off to the Derryguile Corner, where men from that townland, kneeling on their caps with one knee and resting their leaning bodies on the other, congregated for Sunday mass. There, they gossiped and sometimes sold calves to each other, spitting on their hands before sealing the deal with a slapping of palms.

  “Boys! You must be absolutely silent when you step onto the sanctuary floor.”

  In our socks we paraded like two rows of chicks following their black mother hen until we came to a stop in front of the enormous marble altar. Standing so close to it, I gasped at its height, its intricate carvings, and the angels and saints in their niches. The white of it!

  In my excitement I did not see that the rear wall of the altar was undressed stone scarred with chisel marks. Nor did I notice then that in the space between the altar and the back wall of the church were stored the props used during the yearly liturgical cycle: the tall filigreed holder for the Easter candle, the folded Christmas crib, the purple penitential cloths of Lent, the six black candles used at funerals. In their untidiness, their symbolism was lost until nothing remained but pieces of wood and metal and cloth. This was the glamourless backstage of any theatre that is kept out of sight lest it spoil the illusions spun on the other side of the curtain. But I was seeing the church through the golden nimbus of youth and inexperience where there was no squalor.

  Acting as both priest and conductor, Sister Carmel took us through the strict rubrical dance of assisting the celebrant of the mass. Every move and every step was choreographed.

  “Boys! You must move so quietly, so smoothly, that only the priest is seen. You must become invisible to the people in the church.”

  We learned when to genuflect, when to stand, when to move the missal from one side of the altar to the other, when to bring the water and wine to the priest, when to strike
the gong, when to bring water to the priest to purify his fingers, and when to get the paten to hold under communicants’ chins. This last job turned out to be the best: sometimes a person’s false teeth fell out, and to be holding the paten when the dentures came in for a landing gave an aura of specialness to the altar boy who caught them. And in the sacristy after mass, we would imitate the distorted features of certain parishioners when they stuck out their tongues for communion: the Tooth, Glass Eye, No Nose, Snake Tongue, and Tonsils. Their facial contortions became legend among generations of altar boys.

  Eventually Sister Carmel was satisfied perfection had been reached, and with our heads full of liturgical Latin, we were altar boys at long last.

  On the days when it was my turn to serve mass, I pedaled with delight along sun-brightened, dusty Laragh Lane that in fine summer weather was as different from the mucky lane of winter as sweetened tea is from castor oil. On mornings when tiny dewdrops glittered in the slanting sun, so many cobwebs on bushes and grass and weeds lit up that it seemed the whole world was tied down under a million strings of diamonds. In the joy and innocence of my youth I imagined the jewels had been strewn on the world by a happy and well-pleased God.

  In my four years as an altar boy, I never once had the triumph of catching anyone’s false teeth.

  18

  THE RECRUITER

  One day a man dressed like a priest visited our classroom in the Boys School. But our teacher, Mister Sheehan, said the man was not a priest at all; he was a Christian Brother. I expected him to tell us an exciting story about some saint or martyr, maybe the one about Saint Lawrence roasting on a grill and instructing his torturers to turn him over so he would cook evenly, or the one about Saint Sebastian tied to a tree and getting shot to death with arrows. That’s what I wanted to do to Paddy Connors.

  If a person dies a martyr for the faith like Saint Lawrence, he goes straight up to heaven, like a woodquest shooting up out of a bush. If I died for Christ I would zoom right into heaven no matter what terrible sins I had committed. Even people who were not baptized, but who died for the faith, could be martyrs because their own blood would baptize them. It was better to die a happy martyr like Saint Lawrence on the grill than to die shouting curses at the lads cooking you because that was a sin against charity and then your place in heaven would be in the cheap seats far from God’s throne.

  Good health beamed off the Christian Brother. His black suit was without a speck of dirt; it looked new and fitted him like a glove. Beneath the suit was the body of a senior county footballer. His shoes were shining, with not even a daub of muck or dung on them. He spoke differently from the way we spoke; he sounded posh, and his lilt was pleasant to listen to.

  “My name is Brother Conleth,” he said, “and I am looking for a few good boys to join my religious order.” Then he told us about a man from County Kilkenny, Edmund Rice, who founded the congregation of the Christian Brothers nearly one hundred and fifty years ago to educate poor children.

  Brother Conleth said he was hoping to find a few hardworking, clever boys who could become famous like Edmund Rice. He talked about Saint Mary’s College, the Christian Brothers school in Marino, in Dublin, where brothers in training lived manly and exciting lives and ate sausages for breakfast four times a week. Every boy there was given his own tennis racquet; the football and hurling pitches were as smooth as the tops of our desks, and nobody in Marino ever broke an ankle in a hole made by a cow’s hoof. When the weather was bad, volleyball and badminton—games none of the students in the Boys School had ever heard of—were played indoors. Our education at Saint Mary’s College would go all the way up to the H.Dip. and would be free. We would go to games in Croke Park. On warm, sunny days a bus would bring us to Howth Head to run up and down the grassy hills above the sea. And we would never be cold because the college had the most up-to-date central heating system.

  Brother Conleth passed around large photos in which smiling and laughing boys were climbing ropes hanging from high ceilings, vaulting over gym horses, clambering up cargo nets, whacking speed bags while wearing real boxing gloves, diving into a swimming pool, and playing football and hurling in the sunshine. And there were photographs of boys dressed in the long cassocks priests wear. Brother Conleth said we would become teachers devoted to God and the saving of souls. “Your parents will be very proud to have a son in a religious order.”

  Before Brother Conleth had finished, all my prior priestly dreams collapsed into ashes—dreams of going on African missions dressed in a white cassock like the priests in the photos in Far East and preaching to smiling little pagan children with pearly white teeth, telling them how Christ died to save us from going to hell and burning in never-ending brimstone, and teaching them the times tables, too.

  But now I decided to be a Christian Brother. I told Brother Conleth I wanted to go to Marino.

  That evening Brother Conleth unexpectedly arrived in our farmyard. In the kitchen, he spoke to my parents, told them a God-sent vocation to the religious life should not be interfered with. He described the educational opportunities I would have in Marino, pointed out the social advantages they themselves would discover once they had a Christian Brother in the family.

  The next day, after school, I changed into my damp work clothes and wellingtons. But I was dreaming of sunny Marino, where I would wear clean dry clothes and no longer have to slog through muck and mud.

  Soon I was sitting on the seat of the pony’s cart with Dad. We were crossing the pasture on our way to mend a fence. Just as I moved to get down to open the Bog Field gate, Dad stopped me.

  “Tom, do you know those lads who come from Dublin to the Fair Day every month to sell stuff—the lads with penknives, tin openers, kitchen knives and forks and spoons, scissors? They stand up on a box and tell everyone how great their yokes are. The lad with the penknives claims they’re made with steel that fell out of the sky a million years ago and landed in Germany and the blade never has to be sharpened.”

  I squirmed a bit on the seat. When I was ten I had bought one of those penknives against Dad’s advice, and it fell apart after a few weeks.

  “You’d think by the way the huckster talks, his penknives would cut stones and last forever. He will say anything to get people to buy the knives. But the knives break. The sharp edge lasts till you cut a twig.”

  Dad was staring at the wooden, tarred, barbed-wire-wrapped gate in front of us. I had never heard him speak for so long and I wondered why he was talking about the Fair Day hucksters. Maybe, I thought, he was going to give me a man’s real penknife, one that I’d have all my life.

  “Tom, that Brother Conleth is a bit like your man with the penknives. He goes around saying great things about the Christian Brothers to get young boys excited about going away to his school. And I suppose there are good things about the school. But he didn’t tell you everything, the way the Fair Day hucksters don’t tell you everything.

  “Do you think if the huckster told you the blade will fall out of the knife in a few weeks that you would buy it? The Christian Brother didn’t tell you you’ll get homesick being away from your brothers and sisters and mother and father and your friends in school. He didn’t tell you you’ll have to get up at six o’clock every morning and wash in cold water and then make your own bed. He didn’t tell you that every day you’ll have to eat lumpy porridge for breakfast. He didn’t tell you that whether it’s warm or cold or rainy, you’ll have to go out for a run every morning; that you’ll be in a classroom from half eight to half twelve and then you’ll have to eat whatever they give you at dinnertime whether you like it or not, and then you’ll have to go back to school for another three hours. He didn’t tell you that on Sundays you won’t have Mammy’s curranty cake or be able to go off across the fields with your brothers for hours or ride your bike to Tinnakill Castle. He didn’t tell you that they harden up softies by letting the older lads teach them how to be tough. He didn’t—”

  “Dad, will you talk to
him, tell him I don’t want to be a Christian Brother after all?” I said.

  “Sure, I’ll tell him.” Dad squeezed my shoulder. “Get down there now and open the gate like a good lad. We have a fence to mend.”

  19

  BLESSED OLIVER

  Every year on the Sunday closest to the feast day of Blessed Oliver Plunkett, Father McCluskey became an orator who grabbed his audience by the back of the neck and pushed its head into the blood and gore of the martyr on the Tyburn place of execution. Some parishioners had heard the sermon so many times that they mouthed the words along with the priest at the most memorable places.

  Whenever I realized Father McCluskey was heading into the death throes of Oliver Plunkett, I listened anxiously, but assured, like a child knowing the outcome of an oft-told Jack the Giant Killer story at bedtime.

  “Queen Elizabeth the first was the greatest heretic in the world. She was so cruel to Catholics in Ireland that when she was dying she armed herself with a red hot poker to fight off the devil, who had come to take her soul to hell. Three hundred and fifty years later she is still there and she will be there for all eternity. It’s what she deserves. Blessed Oliver Plunkett may not have been martyred until eighty years after Elizabeth was dragged down to the depths, but it was because of the laws that great heretic made that he was martyred in the way he was.