The Killing Snows

by Charles Egan

  He tried not to think about them, but from time to time they passed close to him, going to and from the well. Sometimes he recognised women he knew and spoke to them, but very few had much to say. On one occasion he saw a very old woman struggling from the well with a bucket that was too heavy for her. He went to help her, but she shook her head.

  As he worked, he saw a young woman coming towards them. At first he did not know who she was, but as she came closer he recognised her as one of the Cunnanes who lived a little further out towards the Mountain. The eldest perhaps. Kitty? Kitty Cunnane? Yes.

  She wore a patched grey shawl, and the hair that showed beneath it was straggled. Her dress was hardly a dress; more of a shift, patched and stitched many times. It was torn and muddy at the hem; more mud on her shins showing over bare feet. Her appearance would not have surprised him since her family was a large one with little enough for clothes.

  But what was it about her? He had not seen her for years. She was no longer a girl. He reckoned she would have been some years older than him. But it was more than maturity, more than the lack of familiarity. It was the look in her eyes, the way she walked, and even the way she wore what she wore. Where her shift was torn in the centre, it had not been stitched. Through it he could see the round brownness of her breasts, and the material had been rucked in under them to emphasise them more. She walked erect, head back, breasts forward, her hips moving from side to side, swinging the shift over her bare shins.

  As she crossed the road, he turned to greet her.

  ‘Kitty Cunnane, if I’m not mistaken…’

  ‘Excusing me, Mr. Ryan, we’ll have none of that. Mrs. Brennan, if you please.’

  He made a mock bow and opened the gate to the well. ‘Yes, Mrs. Brennan…’

  He stood with Pat, watching her walking down the narrow gravel track to the well. ‘Mrs. Brennan?’ he asked. ‘Who’s Mr. Brennan then?’

  ‘Fergus,’ Pat replied. ‘Surely you remember Fergus Brennan.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They were married last year.’

  ‘By God, wasn’t he the fast mover?’

  ‘Wasn’t he ever. We were all surprised. From all the talk we heard from the lads in England, we thought he’d be bringing back an English wifeen.’

  ‘Aye. We’d all heard stories about that.’

  She filled her pail with water. She took off her shawl, twisted and knotted it, and wrapped it around the top of her head, almost like a crown. Then, with a quick swing of her arms, she hefted the heavy pail and stood it on her head. None of the other women spoke.

  She started walking back the track towards the gate, holding her left arm akimbo, her right arm angled up balancing the pail, her hips swaying ever so little. Then she brought both arms down to her sides, still balancing the pail on her head. She kept walking, eyes forward.

  As she came to the gate, he went to open it.

  ‘I’ll be thanking you not to be so forward, Mr. Ryan.’

  ‘I never said a word.’

  ‘You didn’t have to.’

  She side stepped him, and in one quick movement she swung the pail from her head and walked off. He watched until Pat interrupted him. ‘Are you there? Are you with us at all?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Luke answered. ‘Only watching.’

  ‘Just like all the fellows. Takes a lot of watching, our Kitty. Did you see how she knew you?’

  ‘She was only guessing. I was with you, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Perhaps. Still, she must have known you were home. She’s a sharp one, she is. She was the one got Nessy into trouble, you know. Best of friends, the pair of them. Out with the lads all the time. But Kitty’s got Fergus now, and Nessy’s got no one, only the baby coming.’

  When they had spread the third cartload of stone and gravel, they led the horse and cart back to the barn. Two young men approached them.

  ‘We have nowhere to sleep,’ one of them said.

  ‘Ye may sleep on the hay,’ Pat replied without hesitation.

  ‘That God may bless you.’

  ‘Have ye come from far?’ Luke asked.

  ‘Mulranny,’ one of them replied. ‘There’s little enough potatoes there. We had to leave, or the rest would go hungry.’

  ‘Where will ye go?’

  ‘Liverpool. America perhaps.’

  Pat let the two men into the shed. Then he unhitched the cart and led the horse to the paddock.

  ‘You didn’t invite them into the house,’ Luke said.

  ‘Into the house! They might have fever.’

  ‘They’ll be cold in the barn tonight.’

  ‘What are you saying? That we should give them a blanket?’

  ‘Well, perhaps…’

  ‘And get fever ourselves?’

  ‘They don’t have fever.’

  ‘How do you know? And anyhow, they’re crawling with lice. Look, we’ve done what we can, now let them be.’

  He lay awake in bed that night. There were images he could not get out of his mind. The quiet, haggard women at the well. The ragged appearance of the two lean men begging for shelter. He thought of Pat’s comments about fever and lice and remembered the pitiful families on the road and in the long lines outside the Workhouses in the towns.

  But there were other images too. Tight breasts. Tight hips. A torn shift swinging over bare ankles. Why should it matter? And at a time like this too. But it did.

  ‘I didn’t think that business of the spikes was going to work,’ Michael said to Luke as they walked to the quarry. Pat was still cleaning out the cowshed.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure either. The rock’s a little different here.’

  ‘Aye, but it worked. Saved us a lot of hard labour too. I never thought we could do it so fast.’

  ‘It’s fast alright,’ Luke said. ‘The lads on the railways though, they had faster ways of doing it.’

  ‘Faster!’

  ‘Faster, but bloody dangerous. What they’d do was to dig in under the lift when the fellows on top were trying to split the rock.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They’d put a gang of lads down below working their way in underneath with their picks. That way the rock would collapse faster when there’s nothing beneath to hold it.’

  ‘And what about the men down under?’

  ‘They’d run like hell as soon as it started coming down.’

  Michael looked at him in disbelief. ‘That’s mad. Pure madness.’

  ‘It is. Still, there were lads that would do it. The Donegal fellows – they’d do anything for money.’

  ‘And you lot? What would ye do?’

  ‘Oh, Farrelly would never let us work like that. Dig in a little – fine – but not all the way until it was ready to go. Danny and me, we once saw two fellows killed right beside us. Donegal lads of course. After that, we never wanted to do it neither, money or no money.’

  When they arrived at the quarry, they started smashing rock. Luke watched his father as he did. There were questions in his mind, questions he hardly dared ask. Michael was still as he always remembered him – tough and stubborn. But what had made him that way? Michael had supported his own father’s family from a young age, but what was so different about that, he himself had done the same. Hard work perhaps? No different than the railways.

  It all came back to 1798. He had never lived through a rebellion. Michael had, but would never talk about it. Luke wanted to know more about the Rebellion, and it was not just curiosity. He felt he would never understand his father, far less Mayo, until he understood what had happened in 1798.

  After ten minutes, they stopped, both leaning on their sledgehammers, gasping. ‘There’s something I’d like to ask you, Father,’ Luke said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The Rebellion.’ />
  His father looked at him, eyes narrowing. ‘The Rebellion, is it?’

  ‘Yes. I’d like to know more about it.’

  ‘The devil, you would,’ Michael replied. He hefted the heavy sledgehammer over his shoulder and brought it smashing down on a rock between them. Luke jumped back as the rock shattered.

  Pat arrived. They worked the rest of the morning smashing rock into smaller rocks and then smashing those into stones. Pat and Luke spent most of the afternoon shovelling shale and stone on to the riddlers to separate out the finer shale and gravel.

  Michael worked alone on the other side of the quarry, breaking stone and thinking.

  1798:

  Baile na Mhuice he called it. Pig Town. Ballinamuck.

  For days desperate men had been passing the house in Carrigard, most travelling at night, alone or in pairs. Now one had come in, begging for refuge. A local man.

  Michael’s father looked at the man in horror.

  ‘So it’s all over?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye, it’s all finished.’

  Murty, still the baby at four years, cowered behind his mother, staring at the monster. The gash across the man’s forehead had turned to a black scab, and where it crossed his left eye the eyelids were closed and oozing pus. Two fingers on his right hand were short blackened stumps, his clothes were tattered, and the stench was sickening.

  ‘And the French? What about the French?’

  ‘They gave up. Humbert surrendered to Cornwallis without even fighting. They just went over to the Redcoats and left us to be slaughtered.’

  ‘Paudeen Brennan?’ Michael’s mother asked suddenly. ‘Where’s Paudeen?’

  ‘Dead. Skewered on a bayonet. I saw it myself.’

  ‘And Mikey Lavan?’

  ‘Dead too.’

  ‘And Bernie O’Kelly?’

  ‘I last saw him with the Knockanure men in the bog. They were cornered by the Cork Militia, and butchered like pigs.’

  ‘And you?’ Michael whispered in English.

  ‘I ran,’ the rebel replied. ‘I cursed Humbert, I cursed Ballinamuck, and I ran and ran.’

  Over the next few days, they heard stories of rebels being shot on sight or hung before sullen crowds of silent people. By the time the militias reached Kilduff, it seemed their fury was spent, but an unnatural quiet came over the town and the area around.

  Now the Ryans were in danger. They had agreed to shelter the rebel and had hidden him above the cattle, hoping no one else knew of it.

  After a few days, Michael’s mother sent him to Kilduff to find the rebel’s wife and tell her that her husband lived. All the rebels’ houses were being searched, and it was far too dangerous for the man to return to his family.

  Afterwards Michael returned to the potato digging with his father. He had not mentioned anything about calling into the rebel’s house. It hardly seemed important. When they came in for their midday meal, the rebel’s wife was with him in the kitchen.

  ‘Where the devil did she come from?’ Michael’s father shouted.

  ‘She only came to see her man,’ his mother replied. ‘It’s a natural thing to do.’

  ‘It’s also a bloody dangerous thing to do. She might have been seen.’

  They sat and ate in silence.

  Michael was the first to leave the table. He opened the door. The house was surrounded by militia men. An officer sat impassively on a horse.

  ‘Search it.’

  The soldiers dragged Michael’s father into the haggard. The rebel ran up the ladder to the loft above the cattle, trying to escape through the tiny window though there would have been no way through the ring of soldiers. He was dragged down, kicking and screaming. The officer never dismounted, nor said a word. His face was expressionless, bored even.

  The two men had their hands tied behind their backs. The rebel’s feet were tied too. His woman was screaming, Michael’s mother holding her back, her own face white with shock. His father was grasped by both elbows and pulled out onto the road. The rebel was dragged under a tree in the haggard, a rope was thrown over one of the branches and fixed around his neck.

  ‘Finish the business,’ the officer shouted at a corporal, as he wheeled his horse away. Another length of rope was looped around Michael’s father’s waist, and he staggered as he was jerked along by the soldiers following the horse. Michael ran after them. A militia man stopped him, a gun pointed at Michael’s stomach.

  ‘Where are you going with him?’ Michael shouted.

  The man stared at him, uncomprehending. Michael realised he did not understand English.

  ‘Where are you going with him?’ he asked again, in Irish now.

  ‘Clár Chlainne Mhuiris,’ the man replied. Claremorris.

  ‘Will they hang him also?’

  ‘If they didn’t hang him now, he won’t hang later. But he’ll rest a while in the gaol.’

  Michael ran back to the haggard. The women were being held back by two of the remaining soldiers as the noose was tightened around the rebel’s neck, and he was pulled high. His face turned purple, his tongue protruding, a dark patch spreading down his trousers.

  The rebel’s wife broke free, running forward. One of the militia men swung around and smashed the stock of his gun into her mouth. She fell to the ground, bleeding through her broken teeth, screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming.

  Chapter Three

  Telegraph or Connaught Ranger, April 1846:

  Provisions have been landed at Westport from war steamers. This supply has not, however, contributed to increase the quantity of provisions in the country, for at the very time the Indian meal was landing, several vessels were receiving on board, for export, cargoes of Irish oats and meal. This, we submit, is a strange process for providing food for the starving Mayonians.

  There was a letter waiting. Luke glanced at the Leeds postmark. That was quick, he thought. He sat on his bed in the outshot, reading the letter.

  Mr. Luke Ryan Price’s Lodging House

  Carrigard Bramhope

  Kilduff Yorkshire

  Co. Mayo

  Dear Luke,

  I have not written to you since arriving a few days back, so I thought I might write now and tell you about the railway here. We are working in Bramhope, a small village convenient to Leeds. There are hundreds of other Irishmen here, so we have no need being lonely. We are all happy to be working under Brassey again. Our own contract, so we are free to do as we please. With Martin that means working 14 hours a day.

  There’s few enough of the other Irish gangs that would be up to that kind of work. I do not know what has been happening in Cork and Kerry and even the far ends of Mayo, but as far as working goes, they are a miserable lot. Many of them get better when they are here long enough and have enough food inside them, though God knows it takes time.

  There is talk here of starting a second gang, and we might try to get some of our own fellows who have been working on the harvest, since they will be better fed after a few months in England.

  But what about you? There is good money to be made in this country, and there will be for some time yet. Would you not come back over?

  Daniel

  *

  England? Could he never get away from it? Six years ago he had thought he would be there for six months, a year at the outside. Before that he had never thought he would go there at all.

  1839 had been a year of disaster. The hurricane on Little Christmas had devastated Mayo. Michael’s house had been destroyed, and the family lived in the old cabin with the cattle for six months, while Michael, Luke and Pat rebuilt the house. It was then too that Alicia had died. In August, the final disaster arrived.

  The potato failed.

  As the food slowly ran out, Luke had felt the gnawing pain of hunger for the first time. Both
families, Michael’s and Murty’s, joined the long queues for the Soup Kitchen in Kilduff. Luke never forgot the gaunt figures carrying their bowls, shuffling forward towards the giant pots. But most of all he never forgot the look in his father’s eyes, the look of humiliation and broken pride.

  The early harvest in 1840 was a good one. They had survived the hunger, but they had not paid the rent for many months. They were in breach of their contract and could be evicted.

  Their landlord, Dominick Burke, was not the evicting kind. He was seen as being a fair landlord, which was perhaps the main reason that the Ryans held a twenty-one year lease. But they knew that Burke might be close to bankruptcy himself, and events could force his hand. Already there were stories of many evictions in the west of the county.

  So when Burke’s agent appeared in Carrigard trying to collect the little rent he could, Michael had guaranteed him not only that he would pay the rent from now, but also that he would pay every penny of the back-rent, with interest, and within one year. When the agent questioned how this could be done, Michael replied that Luke was going to go to England to work on the railways and would send his wages home to pay his father’s rent. It was the first that Luke had heard about it.

  When he had first arrived on the Great Western Railway, even his years of working in the farm and the quarry had not prepared him for the shock of what was expected of him at Box Tunnel. If this was because hard work was expected of any man in building England’s railways, it was also because he worked on Martin Farrelly’s gang.

  But the impossible had been done. After a year working on the cuttings, embankments and tunnels of the Great Western Railway, Luke’s wages had paid off all the back-rent on the farm, with interest, and the lease was secure again. He was fifteen years old.

  But that was then. What now?

  ‘So what does he have to say?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘Not much, Mother. Just telling what Leeds is like, and how hard Farrelly is working them.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘He says Farrelly might be starting a second gang in the autumn.

  ‘Where would he get the fellows for that?’

  ‘He reckons on waiting until after the harvest and getting some of the Mayo lads in England before they come home.’