The Killing Snows

by Charles Egan

  The next morning, they left early. It was only now that he saw the poverty around him. The boarding house stood in stark contrast to the rest of Scotland Road. Again he saw the miserable people with shrunken faces, some begging in the rain, others just standing at street corners. He could see through filthy courtyards and down stairways into rooms and cellars crowded with people.

  They walked to the George’s Dock and paid their passage on a steamship for Dublin. As they waited by a shed on the pier, they saw a cattle ship tying up on the other side of the dock. The hold was open to the weather, the cattle steaming from the rain. As the drovers started driving the cattle off, Luke saw hundreds of people disembarking from the hold alongside them.

  ‘They’re travelling with the cattle!’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t it the cheapest way over,’ Corrigan replied. ‘Thruppence a man, why wouldn’t they? There’s not many can pay two shillings for their passage, you know.’

  Luke walked to the end of the pier and watched as the stream of cattle and humanity flowed along the docks.

  A young woman walked past him in the crowd. Her face was thin, but it carried its own gaunt beauty. She wore a patched shawl, washed out to a dull grey colour. Her hair showed wet and lank beneath it. Her shift hung loose from her shoulders, torn in places and shredded at the hems. She had bare feet, and her ankles and shins were streaked with manure from the cattle. She saw him staring and stared back with a look of contempt and defiance. Startled at the aggression in her eyes, he turned away. When he looked again, she was gone.

  He returned to Corrigan and McGlinn. An hour later, their own ship slipped its moorings and set sail from Liverpool.

  Chapter Two

  The Liverpool Mail, April 1846:

  As to famine in Ireland, in what year since the traces of history can be relied upon, was there not more or less famine in some part or parts of that apparently doomed island? Where there are from two to three millions of beggars, the want of employment and the prevalence of abject poverty, of disease and other evils, must be perennial and co-existent. There is always famine, because there is nowhere where beggars are not in multitudes; in rags, inured to filth, lazy, insolent, professional and incapable of improvement.

  They docked at Dublin. Six days of hard walking lay ahead of them.

  In the city, there were hundreds of ragged people walking towards the docks. One family stopped them, asking for directions and questioning them about England and the railways. Luke knew they had no prospect of work on the rails.

  On the west of the city, they met families making for the Workhouses – the North Dublin Union or the South Dublin Union. Luke wondered if either still had the space for them.

  Lucan, Leixlip and Maynooth. In the small towns, there were beggars everywhere. Every day on the roads, they met groups of silent people walking towards Dublin.

  Kilcock, Enfield and Kinnegad. They questioned more people. Some were young men going to spend the summer working on the English harvest, as they always did. But most told a different story, one of hunger, fever and despair.

  Mullingar, Edgeworthstown and Longford. More beggars, crowds of them outside the Midlands Workhouses. More ragged families trudging across the bridge on the Shannon.

  Termonbarry, Strokestown and Tulsk. West of the Shannon the solidly built houses of the midlands gave way to smaller thatched cottages and mud cabins. The fields were smaller and stonier. There were fewer hedges and no fences; only blackthorns and rough-built stone walls along the sides of the fields. The roads were deeply rutted after the winter.

  Bellanagare, Frenchpark and Ballaghaderreen. On their last night on the road they slept in a barn just outside Knockanure. They were worn out, and it was well past dawn when the farmer roused them. They went through the town and past the Workhouse. A crowd of hundreds of thin and ragged people stood in line along the outside wall.

  They walked on towards Carrigard.

  Two hours later, they arrived. He shook hands with Corrigan and McGlinn. They left him and walked on to Kilduff.

  He stood at the gate to observe the house. The gable that had collapsed in the 1839 storm had been rebuilt with carved lintels over the windows. The walls had been freshly whitewashed. The thatch on the roof had gone, replaced by regular rows of grey-black slate.

  The door was half open. Silently he stepped inside.

  His mother was sweeping the floor with a rush broom, her back to the door. So much had changed, but she had not. She was dressed better than he remembered though. Her long black skirt hung straight, with no rips or patches. A grey jumper clung tight into her back, the folded black triangle of her shawl hanging down over it, loosely tied around her neck. Over both hung her long hair, black as he had always remembered it.

  ‘God with you, Mother.’

  She spun around. The broom clattered on the floor. For a few seconds, she stared at him in fright. Slowly she began to recognise his features. ‘Luke?’ she whispered. ‘Luke? Oh, my God…LUKE.’

  She ran over and hugged him, her head into his chest. She had started to cry. ‘Luke. My son, my son…’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, not knowing what else to say. He had not expected this. He waited for her to finish, but the sobbing went on. He put his arms around her. ‘Don’t be vexing yourself. You’ll be fine, I tell you.’

  Suddenly she pushed back from him, rubbing her eyes. She pulled his head down and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’re a right fathead, do you know that?’

  ‘Oh, I know it well enough,’ Luke said.

  ‘You put the heart crosswise in me. All these years, and you just walk in on me like that. You could have been the death of me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And so you should be. Why didn’t you tell us you were coming today? I wasn’t expecting you.’

  Within minutes, he was sitting at the table, trying to answer his mother’s questions through mouthfuls of buttermilk and oatmeal porridge.

  The table was solid smooth-planed timber, four inches thick he reckoned. The earthen floor was gone, replaced by flagstones, squared off with mortar between. They had been scrubbed and brushed clean. The stone walls were scrubbed too. A ceiling made of long wooden planks covered the entire room, with no sign of staining from smoke.

  At the gable end, where there had been a hole to let the smoke out, there was now a well-constructed chimney over a large, wide hearth, pots on a ledge down one side, two more hanging on small cranes over the fire, bubbling. On one side of the hearth, there was a creel of turf, a stack of logs just beside it. Against the back wall, there was a butter churn he had not seen before, a spinning wheel beside it.

  ‘God knows, you’ve become a powerful man,’ she said to him. ‘Those English fellows know how to work men, didn’t I tell you so?’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t the English.’

  ‘It must have been tough on you all the same.’

  ‘It surely was. Farrelly would never let up. He had us working day and night.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it was best you were with Farrelly. He’s a man you can trust, and we knew he would take care of you. You were only a child. Fourteen years old, and to have the whole family depending on you. It wasn’t fair.’

  ‘But it had to be done, Mother. Wasn’t that the way of it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Maybe it was, but I couldn’t stop worrying. Lying awake every night I was, thinking of you over there in England. Hard work expected of you, and money expected of you every week.’

  ‘But wasn’t it hard for ye here too?’

  She flinched, as if the question had not been expected. ‘Yes, it was hard. That first year you left was desperate. God, we were hungry. Never enough to eat and the rent to pay. There were times I cursed Michael in my heart for the promises he made. The rent, the back rent and interest too. No one else around was able to do that, and they weren�
�t evicted. But it was his pride, his cursed pride, that made him do it. It was fine for him, wasn’t it? But it was you that had to do the paying, taking a man’s work on a boy’s shoulders. Oh God, how I’ve missed you.’

  She reached across the table, putting her hand on his arm. ‘You’re not to go away again.’

  He gulped down his porridge. ‘No, Mother,’ he said. ‘But tell me about the farm. How is it going?’

  ‘It’s safe now you’re home. Now you’re the one that will be the farmer.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and nearly wasn’t, from what I hear. Two years without the lease. You’d think he would have told me before.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. Maybe he didn’t want worrying you.’

  Or maybe he was too damned proud, he was thinking. Too proud to admit he was getting old, and they wouldn’t give him the lease.

  To hell with that. There were other matters to think about. What future had Mayo if the potato had failed again?

  But everything here seemed so normal; far, far better than when he had left. Yes, his mother was a few years older than she had been in 1840, but even that was difficult to detect. She most certainly was not hungry.

  It made no sense.

  ‘What about the hunger?’ he asked.

  She looked up, startled. ‘Who told you about that?’

  ‘No one. Couldn’t I see it with my own eyes, and I crossing the country?’

  ‘Yes…I expect you could. Well, we’re doing well enough.’

  ‘No hunger?’

  ‘No hunger.’

  ‘And Murty?’

  ‘Murty and Aileen too. And why wouldn’t they? Don’t they get the money from Danny?’

  ‘And everyone else?’

  She looked away, avoiding his glance. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Sure we’ll talk about it all some other time.’

  Some time later, Michael and Pat entered. Michael sat on the bench by the door and started unlacing his boots.

  He had certainly changed. It was almost as if he had gotten smaller. He had aged too. He still had the powerful arms and chest of a man of half his age. But his hair was grey now, cropped close, but thinner and showing bald on the crown. The face was older too – still tough, but more wrinkled and weather-beaten. But his eyes had not changed; they still reflected a hard life and the hardness to deal with it.

  ‘We’ve got a visitor,’ Eleanor said, speaking in English now.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Michael said, peering into the room. He kicked off his boots and strode over towards the stranger. ‘Who in hell…?’

  ‘It’s your son,’ Eleanor said.

  His eyes lit up. He grasped Luke by the arms. ‘Well, by God…So you’re home.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘You got my letter, then.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You took long enough in the coming.’

  ‘I’d to stay another few weeks. We had to wait out to the end of the work before we were paid.’

  The men sat, and Eleanor started to ladle out cabbage.

  ‘You’ve changed a lot,’ Michael said. ‘I didn’t know you.’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Eleanor asked. ‘Wasn’t he only a scrap of a lad when he left?’

  ‘It’s not just that he’s taller, he’s full of muscle too.’

  ‘That’s what hard work does,’ Eleanor said, as she placed the pot of corn on the table.

  ‘Harder than here?’ Michael asked.

  ‘A lot,’ Luke said. ‘And longer working too.’

  ‘You’ll be well able for the quarry so.’

  ‘Ah now, would you leave the poor fellow alone,’ Eleanor said, ‘He’s only just home.’

  Michael scooped corn from the pot and ladled it on to Luke’s plate. ‘And what of Danny?’ he asked. ‘Going to Leeds, I hear.’

  ‘For a few years anyhow,’ Luke answered, chewing on the corn. It had the toughness and feel of gravel.

  ‘Will he come home then?’ asked Eleanor.

  ‘I don’t know, Mother.’ The corn tore at his throat as he swallowed.

  ‘I think you do,’ Michael said. ‘You just don’t want to tell us. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘Maybe it is.’ He took another forkful of corn. This time he chewed it more carefully.

  ‘You’ll tell us later, so’ Michael said. ‘We’ll be seeing Murty and Aileen this evening, you’ll tell us then.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  That afternoon, he walked the farm with his father.

  ‘You’ll find a lot of changes,’ Michael said.

  ‘I know,’ Luke said. ‘I saw the slate. It’s well set.’

  ‘Isn’t it. And the first slate roof in Carrigard.’

  They walked across the yard. There was a new paddock with a horse Luke had not seen before. They climbed over the fence and walked up to it. It was frightened of Luke and reared up, but Michael calmed it. ‘Easy there. Easy, easy.’

  He held the horse’s head back. Luke pushed up the horse’s lips, looking close at the teeth. Then he lifted one of the front legs, looking to the fetlock.

  ‘You’ll not find lameness there,’ Michael said. ‘I know how to buy horses.’

  They climbed back over the fence and stood leaning against it.

  ‘I’d say there’s not many around here have horses,’ Luke said.

  ‘Horses, is it? It isn’t horses they’d be worrying about now. Sheehys have gone, you know. Byrnes too.’

  ‘I know. I’d heard.’

  ‘Murtaghs and Tolans, all gone.’

  ‘Tolans? I hadn’t heard that.’

  ‘Last week only. What chance had they? Nine children, all under twelve. They had no sons to be working on railways, I tell you.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Liverpool they were making for, but whether they’ll get there or not, God only knows.’

  Luke thought of the pitiful families he had seen on the road. He would not have known them anyhow. Hunger changed the look of people.

  ‘It’ll be hard on them,’ he said.

  ‘It will,’ Michael said. ‘And on everyone else too. It’s been tough, these past months, and it’s going to get tougher. We’d heard stories from England of potatoes rotting in the ground, but we had them all saved, we thought it had missed us. And then, in a few days there before Christmas, we lost the half of them. If it wasn’t for the amount I’d planted and the corn we were buying in, we’d have been like Tolans and the rest of them, off on the road to England.’

  He followed his father through the fields – meadow, corn and potatoes. They stopped by the potato field.

  ‘You’ve enough planted right enough,’ Luke said.

  ‘What did you think? There’s enough to make sure we won’t run low.’

  ‘Unless the rot gets worse.’

  ‘Arra, no. It can’t rot them all.’

  They crossed the meadow down to the quarry. Luke whistled when he saw the piles of rocks and stones that had been broken from rocks. ‘Would you have call for all this?’

  ‘By God, we would. I never told you – we’re repairing more roads than we used to. Got Sheehy’s contract when they left. Worth twelve pounds a year now. Half to Burke and half to us.’

  ‘Six pounds. That’d damned near pay the rent on its own.’

  ‘It would. And your mother wants me to get more contracts around. She’s hoping to keep Pat here working the quarry.’

  ‘You reckon we could get more?’

  ‘She thinks we could, though I think she’s only trying to believe it herself. She doesn’t want Pat going away on the railways.’

  ‘Working the quarry on his own would be tough enough with that number of contracts.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Michael said, ‘but it’s not just that. It’s all she
hears about the fighting, the drinking, the women…’

  ‘God, Farrelly would never allow that sort of nonsense.’

  ‘Tell that to your mother.’

  They scrambled down into the quarry. Luke walked around, examining each pile of stone and gravel. ‘So what are Pat’s plans now? Will he stay?’

  ‘I’m sending him on the harvest to England. When he’s home again in September, then we’ll decide.’

  They climbed out again and walked back towards the house.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier, Father?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the lease. You could have told me two years back.’

  ‘Why should I? It didn’t matter to you. I didn’t want you home then. I do now.’

  ‘But you could have been evicted.’

  ‘That wasn’t your concern,’ Michael said.

  ‘But it was.’

  ‘You stayed in England because that was what I wanted. And you came home, because I ordered you home. That is all for you to know.’

  ‘No, it is not…’

  ‘You will not defy me, Luke. Not now. Not ever.’

  Luke said nothing for a few moments. ‘Damn it to hell,’ he said at last, ‘let’s not argue about it. We’ve got the lease to be signed, and the sooner we get that done the better.’

  They walked back to the house.

  ‘Where’s Pat, Mother?’

  ‘Over milking.’

  He walked across to the shed. It was dark inside, and he could barely make out his brother’s form against that of the cow. He breathed in the familiar stench of cow manure together with the mustiness of the shed and the warm smell of milk. Pat was working fast, milk from the cow’s teats splashing into the pail.

  Luke walked up behind him. ‘You were a bit quiet there earlier.’

  His brother turned around, startled. ‘Damn it, don’t come up on me like that.’ He turned back to the cow. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so quiet. Of course I’m happy to see you home, we all are. It’s just…’

  ‘Yes,’ Luke said. ‘It’s the farm, isn’t it?’