We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

by Tom Phelan

  “The English stole everything from the Irish for eight hundred years; they banned education, outlawed the Catholic Church, and paid rewards for the heads of priests, just like the Irish government pays a reward for a dead fox. When a priest was captured, hot pitch was poured over his head. When the pitch cooled, it was ripped off, and the priest’s skin and ears and lips and hair came off with it. Sometimes, turpentine was poured over the priest’s pitch cap and set afire. Then the priest was let loose to run all over the place like a human torch until he collapsed and died. Only the English could have invented punishments as cruel as pitch capping for the Irish and scalping for the Red Indians in America. But pitch capping wasn’t good enough when it came to Blessed Oliver Plunkett. Oh no! He was the archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, Catholic Ireland’s first citizen.”

  Every time Father McCluskey mentioned pitch capping, I touched my ears and lips.

  “The English thought Archbishop Plunkett was becoming too popular and that he might get around to leading a rebellion, with all the Catholics in Ireland following him. So the heathens arrested him in Armagh and took him to Westminster to try him because they couldn’t find witnesses in Ireland. He was found guilty of treason because by law that allowed the English to hang, draw, and quarter traitors at Tyburn. Drawing was like your mother pulling the intestines out of the Christmas turkey, only Blessed Oliver was alive when that was done to him.”

  I leaned forward and hugged my stomach.

  “The English were barbarians who talked like they had harelips. That’s why so many Irish place names were corrupted, like Carlow for Ceatharlach and Dublin for Dubh Linn. They took the music out of those names; they were a herd of buffalo grazing everything good out of the earth and leaving nothing behind except their dung.”

  I had never heard dung mentioned in church before. I wondered if Father McCluskey would have to go to confession.

  “When Blessed Oliver was brought up onto the scaffold for execution, he forgave all those who had told lies about him, and those who were about to kill him. Then the Protestant butchers started in on him. First, they ripped all his clothes off and made him stand naked in front of the laughing mob. They tied his hands behind his back and put a rope around his neck. They threw the rope over a beam and pulled it until his feet were off the ground. Then they swung him back and forth to each other across the scaffold like he was the pendulum of a clock. The crowd of heretics looking on joined arms, and swayed with every swing, and sang ‘See-saw, Margery Daw.’ ”

  If I had been Blessed Oliver Plunkett I would not have forgiven the people who were going to cut me to bits, and from the tone of Father McCluskey’s voice, I knew he would not have forgiven them either.

  “When Blessed Oliver was nearly dead the executioner shouted out, “Behold the twitching bishop,” and the people roared. The executioner teased them by twisting Blessed Oliver around and around and letting him spin like a child’s toy. At last he was dropped to the floor with a bang and he collapsed onto the boards. They took the rope off his neck, dragged him over to the torture table, and threw him up on it like a side of bacon. The table was on a steep slope so that all the jeering heretics could see what was going on. Buckets of water were splashed over the bishop until he was revived.”

  I thought about the pig Dad killed each year and how I helped with the rubbing in of the salt. I hated the feel of the cold, dead flesh.

  “The Protestant executioner stepped forward to the edge of the scaffold, held his sharp knife over Blessed Oliver’s body, twirled it, and threw it up in the air. Then he spun around on his toes and caught the shining blade as it fell. The crowd screamed for him to start the butchering, but he kept on with his tricks; he dropped the knife onto his feet and then made it spring into the air above his head; he twirled around again and this time caught the blade in his teeth. The crowd bawled like cattle for him to use it on the archbishop. The executioner danced back to the torture table and pretended to stab Blessed Oliver, but kept pulling back at the last second. The heretics squealed like pigs smelling food.”

  I wanted to shout, “Say it! Say what he did with the knife!” But as soon as he said it, my hands dropped to my crotch.

  “The executioner grabbed the archbishop’s private parts and with one quick slash sliced them off. He held them over his head and the crowd went delirious with delight. Then he flung the private parts out to the savages and they fought over them. The executioner spun his bloody knife again and the cries of the crowd became roars. He plunged the blade into the bishop’s belly and sliced it open from chest to crotch.

  “An assistant ran over, sank his hand into the open stomach and grabbed the end of the intestines. He walked backward across the scaffold while another man yanked out the guts. Then the two men started swinging the long piece of purple intestine like it was a rope. The executioner stepped into the rope and did all kinds of fancy skipping, the knife spinning up into the air and sprinkling the sacred blood of the martyr all over the place. The crowd—men and women and spiteful little Protestant children—cheered. An Englishman poured water on the archbishop to keep him conscious enough to feel the terrible pain, and another man pressed a dirty rag between Blessed Oliver’s legs to slow down the bleeding and keep him alive as long as possible. The executioner stopped skipping and bowed to the audience while one of his assistants wrapped the intestinal rope around a stick to sell as souvenirs for a penny an inch.”

  Oliver’s purple guts were the same color as the guts of our slaughtered pig slipping down into the galvanized tub we used for baths on Saturday nights.

  “The executioner went back to Blessed Oliver. One after the other, with his bare hands, he ripped out the kidneys and liver and spleen and pancreas and threw them into the crowd of hungry Protestant dogs. Then he dug his hand into Blessed Oliver’s chest and yanked out that noble heart, that still-beating Catholic heart. That brave heart was held high for all to see.

  “As slowly as they could, the savages on the scaffold chopped off Blessed Oliver’s legs and arms and then the head, the crowd making a hupp sound with every fall of the axe. The head was put on display on a spike at the Tower of London, but some brave Catholics stole it and secretly brought it back to Ireland.

  “God showed how wicked the English are, and how right Irish Catholics are, by preserving Blessed Oliver’s head and not letting the flesh rot off it. His holy head is now in a glass case in Saint Peter’s Church in Drogheda, and after all these centuries the hair still grows on it. Every Irishman and Irishwoman should visit that sacred head and kneel and pray in Irish to show their Irishness and to remember that the English are savages. A n-anamacha leis an diabhal! May the devil take their souls!”

  The sermon was finally over. I sank back in the pew as if I had just run a hundred miles. Then, from the Derryguile Corner of the church, Durt Donovan was heard to say, “Jazus, lads, wasn’t it a good job they didn’t save Blessed Oliver’s arse?”

  20

  THE SWEET PAPER

  “Tom Phelan, say the Tenth Commandment.”

  “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods, sir.”

  “Neighbors” to my childish brain meant the people who lived on Laragh Lane, so this commandment was easy to obey. None of them had a radio, Aladdin lamp, gramophone, or fourteen piglets slobbering at their mother’s milky teats; nor did they have a shed full of dry turf as winter approached. There were rumors that Durt Donovan had bags of money, but if he did, I wondered why he dressed like a tinker and was as dirty as a dog that has rolled around in another dog’s dung.

  If God had warned us that envy can land a person in trouble, instead of just telling us it’s a sin, he might have saved me from lasting embarrassment when I was in third class.

  Paddy Connors was one of the occupants of the two-seater desk in front of me. On a hot June day, when many townies had come to school in their bare feet, I saw Connors surreptitiously removing a toffee sweet from its wrapping and slipping it into his mouth. T
he sweet had softened in his pocket and the thin shape of the square was imprinted in toffee on the paper. When he threw the wrapper on the floor it landed toffee side up. Covetousness grasped me in her slimy, scaly tentacles, and I soon developed an all-consuming desire for that thin outline of toffee. I sank down in my seat, put my heel on the wrapper, and pulled it toward me. Then I picked it up, licked it quickly, and dropped it. Before it hit the floor, Paddy Connors raised his hand to get the teacher’s attention.

  “Mister Sheehan,” he said, “there was a sweet paper under my desk and Tom Phelan just took it and licked it and I had stepped on it and there’s cow dung on my foot. He might get sick, sir, and vomit.”

  “Is that true, Tom?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He did so, sir,” Paddy insisted. Then he bent down, retrieved the wrapper, and held it over his head.

  “Did anyone else see Tom Phelan licking the paper?” Mister Sheehan asked. Several hands shot into the air.

  I knew I had been caught in a lie. With his cane, the teacher instilled virtue by giving me six of his hardest whacks, three on each hand. The burning pain in my fingers and palms was gone by the end of the day, but the chant that followed me in the schoolyard and on the way home—“Rich oul farmers eat cow dung! Rich oul farmers eat cow dung!”—lasted until the jeerers’ paths and mine parted at the top of Lord Edward Street.

  21

  SHERIFF JOHNNY’S GUN

  Johnny Canning and I shared the same desk in Mister Sheehan’s classroom. He was the nearest thing to a friend I had among the townies; at least he didn’t say rotten things about oul farmers or push me for no reason whenever he passed me. I sometimes gave him a piece of Mam’s curranty cake.

  One day Johnny came to school with a silver-coated, ivory-handled cowboy gun and its leather holster in his schoolbag. Pinning on his lawman’s badge at lunchtime he strapped on his weapon and strode around the playing field practicing his fast draw and shooting people. Boys of all ages, especially ones from the countryside like me, crowded around begging to pull the trigger.

  “Ah, go on Johnny. Let me try it.”

  But Sheriff Johnny was a careful protector of his peacemaker, as he called it. “Mah name is Randolph Scott and this here is mah Colt .45, the fastest gun in the West. Don’t touch mah weapon or ah’ll drop ya. . . . Stand back or ah’ll drill anyone makes a move,” he drawled in his best Wyoming accent, and he quickly fired two shots into the crowd. A young country boy cried out in fright and Paddy Connors shouted, “Kill them all, Johnny! They’re all sodbusters putting up barbed wire to keep out our cattle.”

  “You don’t even have a sheepdog, Connors,” I said, and Paddy knocked me onto my back, straddled me, knelt on my arms, and kneaded my nose into my face; all snot and spit, I twisted away from his torturing hand.

  “Next time I’ll rip your balls off, Phelan,” Paddy said as he stood up, and to prove he could do it, he ran his hand up the leg of my short trousers and yanked down on whatever he found.

  As Paddy turned away I jumped up and punched him in the middle of the back. He fell. I took off and sped around the corner of the ball alley. It wasn’t long until I heard Paddy coming after me shouting, “I’ll kill you, you fuckin’ farmer.”

  As I rounded the corner at the low end of the alley Paddy was getting closer. Up ahead, Johnny Canning was still shooting and killing the bad guys. “Lie down! You’re dead, you old cow puncher.”

  Paddy called out to his townie followers. “Make a posse! Stop d’oul farmer, lads. Stop the bushwhacker.”

  The posse rode out from the gun-slinging action and pounced on me, and just as Paddy fell down on me, Mister Sheehan shook the hand bell on the steps of our classroom. But Paddy got in a few smacks and face-slaps before he stood up. “Only a coward hits from behind,” he said, and he put his fist in my guts to lever himself up.

  Everyone ran to the teacher’s bell but Johnny Canning and I stayed behind, he removing his holster and hiding the gun in his waistband, I putting my disheveled self back together. Before we got to our classroom, I had persuaded him to swap his six-shooter for the telescope I got from Aunt Teresa for my birthday. “Look, it’s made of brass and it once belonged to a pirate.”

  The next day Johnny asked me to return the gun. “My uncle brought it from England and if you don’t give it back my father will kill me.”

  “A swap is a swap,” I said.

  Ownership of that gun was so consuming that for weeks Paddy Connors, acting as Johnny’s deputy, ambushed me, kicked me, beat me, pulled my scrotum, squashed my nose, and called me a crook to persuade me to hand it over. But I never did.

  Even after the spring mechanism broke, I still used the gun to kill my brothers as we shot it out between the ricks in the haggard. With my six-shooter in hand, I was a white hat behind a rock in Arizona where the sun was shining and I always won.

  22

  MY BOXING CAREER

  Father Flood, one of two curates in the parish, was as friendly and happy as a spinster’s spaniel. Gentleness beamed eternal out of the round pale face haloed by a generous surround of white hair. He remembered everyone’s name and chatted with Protestants as if they were Catholics. He did not play golf. Everyone said, “Sure, he’s just like one of ourselves, so he is.” And yet, in what seemed to be against the nature of the man, he founded a boxing club for the boys of Mountmellick.

  Dad thought the club was a great idea. “You have to join, Tom. It’ll make a man of you,” he said.

  I was eleven and I had come home from school many times in tears after bloody encounters with town boys. It had not yet occurred to me that on most occasions, I had brought the rage of the townies down on my own head by backing myself into corners with big-mouthed talk and scurrilous name-calling that could only be defeated with fists and boots.

  Dad’s first cousin, Paddy Horan, had once been the all-Ireland middleweight boxing champion. But twenty years later, when he returned home from “working on the buildings” in London, he was in no shape to climb back into the ring.

  In Smith’s butcher shop in the town, Don Tynan, in his blue-and-white-striped apron, chopped and weighed meat for customers all day. Tynan was young enough to still be boxing in local tournaments, and so he sometimes turned up to work with black eyes and a swollen nose. Until his wounds healed, Don was subjected to the smiles and comments of his customers.

  “I see d’ass kicked you again, Don.”

  “Rasslin’ with the wife again, Don?”

  “Castrating another bull, Don?”

  Don’s reply was always the same. “You should have seen the other lad; mincemeat his face looked like, so it did.”

  For the opening night of the boxing club, Father Flood persuaded Paddy Horan and Don Tynan to give a demonstration match. There was no referee. There was no ring except for the circle formed by the boys in the middle of the upstairs floor of the Town Hall. Several townspeople also turned out to see the battle of the local Titans.

  Paddy Horan, trailing his withered glory, was decked out in gallused trousers, old shirt, Sunday shoes, and boxing gloves; he was five feet seven inches tall. Don Tynan, ambitious to flatten a former champ, was dressed in above-the-knee shorts, maroon singlet, black socks, and canvas shoes; he was six foot one.

  When they walked into the circle of boys they smiled at each other and touched gloves. Instantly, they began beating the living daylights out of each other. They were like two gamecocks fighting because it was in their nature to fight.

  I sidled my way to the outside row of spectators. This wasn’t sport. This was total war. This was the savagery of savages. This wouldn’t be over until someone was dead.

  Hatred and pain glistened in the cruel eyes of the boxers like a boy’s eyes shine when he’s getting six furious wallops on the hand from a stick-wielding teacher. With sweating faces as ugly as blisters on a larch tree, each man sent murderous punches into the other’s upper body. They beat each other around the head, crushed each other’s
ears. Some punches caused knees to buckle. When one boxer staggered backward, the other followed and launched as many merciless blows as he could before the other recovered. Horan landed a nose-breaker on Tynan’s face. Blood sluiced down the victim’s philtrum, ran over his top teeth, and dripped off his chin, but despite his faltering knees and spurting blood, Tynan made a lightning recovery, and with a twisting, swiping punch he sliced open Horan’s left eyebrow.

  “Stop!” an angry voice shouted. “There was an agreement—”

  “It was an accident,” Paddy Horan gasped.

  “Accident, me arse!” Tynan shouted.

  Other big men ran in between Horan and Tynan and the gladiators were shuffled toward the door, one holding a sopping red handkerchief to his nose, the other trying to squeeze the gash in his eyebrow with his bare bloody fingers, the blood running down his arm to his elbow and then dripping onto the floor.

  To the sounds of the boxers’ shouting and heavy steps descending the stairs, the boys pointed in awe at the globs of blood blooming on the floor. As I gazed at the gore, I knew in my heart I did not want to be a boxer.

  Dad was adamant that I belong to the club. “You have to learn how to fight off the townies when they go after you. As well as that, Mam has made you togs and dyed a vest maroon for you. And she ordered a pair of plimsolls in Shaws shop today.”

  “I won’t get into trouble with the townies anymore, Dad . . . and it’ll be too dark when I’m coming home from the boxing club—”

  “Your brother can go with you.”

  And so, the following week, like Shakespeare’s schoolboy creeping like a snail unwillingly to school, I walked the mile to the Town Hall accompanied by my little brother. The wooden stairs to the second floor were the steps to a mile-high gallows. As I dragged myself up, other would-be boxers flitted past me like moths flying straight to a flame.

  I was wearing my shorts and vest under my clothes, and all I had to do was shed my outer layers. I was the only boy dressed like a boxer.