The Killing Snows

by Charles Egan

  Eleanor looked at him in alarm. ‘From Bromwich?’

  ‘Perhaps. Who knows?’

  She came across to the outshot and stood beside him, staring at the letter. She shook her head. ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention that to your Aunt Aileen.’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  He stood and took a stool by the fire, staring into the flames. The letter had disturbed him too. ‘Would you not come back over?’ Not an order. Only a suggestion, but a very strong one. He lay in bed that night, unable to sleep.

  Before his father’s letter had arrived, he had reckoned another three years on the railways would give him enough to buy a farm freehold. But now there would be no second farm, and he had to stay and help his father, though he no longer knew if that was what he wanted. Pat was the lucky one, though he did not know it yet.

  The next morning, Pat and Murtybeg left Mayo for England. It was a Fair day, and the harvest gang had arranged to meet in Kilduff.

  It was still dark when Murtybeg arrived down at Michael’s house with his family. Aileen was there already. She was crying.

  ‘You’ll be back in the autumn,’ she said, hugging Murtybeg.

  ‘I will, of course. We both will.’

  Eleanor packed a brown loaf and a clay jar of butter into Pat’s pack.

  ‘I’ll just go down with you,’ Luke said.

  Aileen hugged her son again, and then they were on the road towards Kilduff.

  ‘Where are ye all meeting?’ Luke asked.

  ‘McKinnon’s,’ Pat answered. ‘We’ll need a good hot whiskey inside ourselves before we move on.’

  They walked past men and women driving cattle and sheep towards the Fair, others driving donkeys and carts carrying trays of eggs and barrels of butter. Even in the early light, Luke could see that many people were thin from months of hunger.

  They made their way to McKinnon’s bar and past the donkeys and horses tied to the rail outside.

  *

  The bar was owned by Michael’s sister Sabina and her husband, Ian McKinnon.

  Sabina had been born at the wrong time. In 1799, her father was only beginning his sentence in Claremorris. For three years her mother struggled to rear her, before Michael decided she would have to be fostered. She had been sent to a sister of her mother, who lived with her husband high up the Mountain.

  Her foster-parents were childless, and they looked after her as they would any child of their own. But they too were poor, and when her foster father died, her foster mother moved in with another sister, and Sabina had to leave the Mountain. She worked as a barmaid in Kilduff and learned to speak English. Over the years, she gave up any hope of marriage. Then one night in 1838, a Scottish surveyor walked into the bar and changed her life forever.

  Within weeks an attraction developed between them, and in 1839 McKinnon had approached Michael who, as Sabina’s eldest male relative, accepted his proposal of marriage on her behalf. They were married in the summer, and Sabina continued to run the bar while McKinnon found occasional work as a roads surveyor either with the County Council in Castlebar, or later with the new Poor Law Union in Knockanure. They lived on her wages, and after five years they had saved enough from his commissions to buy the bar.

  Luke pushed his way through to the bar, Pat and Murtybeg following. The bar at least had not changed – the same rough sawdust sprinkled on the floors, the same grubby walls, the same tobacco-stained ceiling, the same smell of tobacco, beer, whiskey, burning turf and unwashed bodies.

  Sabina looked up for the next order, staring at him, not recognising him. Then she saw Pat and looked back to Luke. Her eyes lit up. ‘Luke?’

  She leaned across the bar and grabbed him to kiss him on the cheek. ‘We’d heard you were home.’ She flicked a wet cloth at Pat. ‘Isn’t it time you brought him down to see us, you eejit.’

  ‘Oh, he hasn’t had a chance yet,’ Pat said. ‘No time for idle chatter, Father says.’

  She came out from the bar and hugged Luke. ‘It’s great to have you home again. You’re to stay this time, do you hear me? Leave the travelling to the young lads now, and take care of your mother.’

  ‘I will,’ Luke said. ‘You needn’t be fretting about that.’

  ‘And what about Danny? Did you not bring him with you?’

  ‘Oh no. Danny’s gone to Leeds. Hadn’t you heard?’

  ‘I’d heard right enough, but I didn’t believe it. What would he be wanting to go to Leeds for? Shouldn’t he be coming home now? Find a nice girl and take care of his mother.’

  ‘Aye, he should,’ Luke said.

  She returned to the bar and poured out three whiskies. ‘Here you are, lads. Get yourselves around that.’

  A barman walked down from the far end of the bar and started to draw beer from the keg beside Sabina.

  ‘See who’s here, Ian,’ Sabina said.

  McKinnon turned around. ‘Pat and Murteen, is it? Off to the harvest?’

  ‘We are,’ Murtybeg said.

  ‘Do you not see who’s with them?’ Sabina asked. McKinnon stared at Luke. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s Luke, you amadán. Luke.’

  ‘What! Luke? By God, so it is.’

  Luke had known McKinnon even before Sabina had. He had been twelve years old in 1838 when McKinnon had first arrived in Kilduff and introduced him to a wider world, far beyond Irish farms and even English railways.

  They had first met when the Scot was measuring out one of the Ryan fields for the Ordnance Survey. Luke had been intrigued to discover that McKinnon had fought in the Napoleonic Wars right up to the Battle of Waterloo. He extracted a promise from McKinnon to tell him of all the battles he had fought in Spain and France. McKinnon had kept his promise, and for as long as he was working around Carrigard, Luke followed him everywhere. He was entranced by the many names of battles and places which were far outside his experience.

  Busaco, Torres Vedres, Santarem and Almeida.

  He would make McKinnon write down the names on a scrap of paper and pronounce each; repeating them himself until he was happy he knew them.

  Almarez and Salamanca. Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz.

  At night he would still think about them, puzzled by the odd sounds of them.

  Vittoria and Pamplona. Roncesvalles and San Sebastian. Bayonne and Toulouse.

  Luke had been intrigued by the romance of them, but McKinnon had never forgotten the horror of them. He remembered the thousands who had died of fever in those places. He could still smell the stench of the camps – human excrement and horse manure everywhere. He could see the fever tents in rows, the fever sheds made out of rough branches, the lines of fevered men lying in the open. The shrunken faces of men he had known for years. The desperate, hollow eyes. The wasted corpses piled high like turf ricks, waiting for mass graves as the rats gnawed at them.

  They died in battle too. Men shot or bayoneted or knifed in close combat. Artillerymen torn asunder by precision bombardment from the French guns. More bodies to be flung into the ever-lengthening trenches. More sackfuls of men’s guts, limbs and carcasses to be slopped on top. More rats.

  But he told Luke none of this. At times he talked of the brutality of war and fever and killing, but in 1838 Luke was too young to understand and more interested in fighting than dying.

  McKinnon had told him too that he had been present at the battle of Waterloo, where he was one of the very few who had broken Napoleon’s last attack. But this was all he would say about it. Luke was wildly curious about Waterloo, but no matter how much he begged him, McKinnon said nothing more. He had promised to tell him of Spain and France. But Waterloo was in Belgium, and that had not been part of the bargain.

  McKinnon shook his hand. ‘By God, you’re most welcome. Now you just wait there a moment…’

  ‘I’m not going nowhere.’

  McKin
non brought the full mugs of beer to the other end of the bar. He came back carrying empty mugs and started drawing more beer. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we’d heard you were home. I couldn’t believe it when they told me. Couldn’t understand it either. You were making good money, from all accounts. Why would you come back to this?’

  ‘Father’s orders,’ Luke replied.

  McKinnon shook his head. ‘Michael ordered you home, did he? Now why the devil would he do that?’

  ‘It’s all to do with the lease,’ Luke answered. ‘They reckoned he was too old. They won’t sign us for another twenty-one years unless I sign it too.’

  ‘Couldn’t Pat here sign it?’

  ‘Too young. They won’t take him.’

  ‘But will Burke hold to the twenty-one years?’ Sabina asked.

  ‘Seems like he will.’

  ‘There’s few enough leases like that around here.’

  ‘You won’t find twenty-one year leases up at Gort na Móna,’ McKinnon said. ‘Clanowen won’t have any truck with leases.’

  ‘That bastard,’ Sabina whispered. She turned to serve a drover at the other end of the bar.

  ‘We’re busy this morning,’ McKinnon said. ‘Eddie Roughneen and the others are in the back room there, waiting for Pat and Murteen. Why don’t you go and see them all. We’ll talk to you after though; you can tell us all about it.’

  They struggled through the hard-packed mass of dealers and farmers to the back room. There were a dozen men or so, some with wives or mothers. Many of the men were too lean. Luke wondered how easy they would find it to cross Ireland and work on the harvest when they arrived in England. He knew some of them, but there were more he didn’t recognise. In the corner, he saw Fergus Brennan, Kitty sitting alongside him. Their glances met, but she quickly looked away.

  When Pat and Murtybeg had left with the other harvesters, Luke returned to the bar.

  ‘You’re busy enough this morning.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let that fool you’ Sabina said. ‘It’s the drovers and the dealers; they’re the ones with the money. There’s few enough of our own fellows here now. Once today is over, you won’t see a sinner here from one end of the week to the other.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’

  ‘How would it not be? Sure no one has any money, and any they have they’re spending on corn. I don’t know what we’d do if it wasn’t for Ian, surveying roads whenever they ask him. There’s little enough of that work around either, but it’s enough to keep us in corn, and I suppose we should be thankful for that.’

  ‘Thankful is right,’ McKinnon said. ‘And I’ll tell you this. It’s bad here, but it’s not the worst.’

  ‘So I’ve heard. Pat was telling me it’s worse further west.’

  ‘By God it is, you’ve no idea. I was out that way last week. Mulranny up to Belmullet and back by Bellacorick. Erris is in a terrible way. They’re all leaving, anyone who can walk.’

  ‘And all heading to England, from what I can see.’

  ‘England, America, it doesn’t matter. Anywhere but Mayo.’

  ‘Enough of that talk,’ Sabina said. ‘Tell us about England. Six years away, you didn’t come back to be talking about hunger.’

  For a long time they talked of railways and the men in Farrelly’s gang. But Luke kept bringing the conversation back to Mayo and hunger. He knew enough of railways. He had left all that behind. What worried him now was what lay ahead.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about the pair of you,’ Sabina said at length, ‘but I’ve got work to do, so I’ll leave you to it.’ She refilled their glasses and went back behind the bar.

  ‘I can understand your concern,’ McKinnon said to him. ‘There’s hunger coming, and it may well get worse across the summer if the harvest isn’t a damned good one.’

  ‘It’s not just that, though,’ Luke said. ‘I’m getting to think like the English, that’s what it is. Mayo scares the hell out of them, they reckon it’s the poorest place on God’s earth and we’re all wild men. If you said to any of them lads they should come to Mayo, they’d run a mile. Danny too. He reckons there’s no future in Mayo.’

  ‘But you don’t think that way, surely?’

  ‘I didn’t. I’d always looked forward to the day I’d come home. But then father’s letter arrived, and I can tell you, it gave me one hell of a shock. It was only then it hit me, I’d no wish to come back at all. Danny told me I was a fool, and I’m inclined to think he was right.’

  ‘So what will you do then? Go back on the railways?’

  ‘I don’t know that I can. The lease has me trapped. I can’t have them all thrown out on the road. So I’ll have to wait around a while, at least till Pat is old enough. By that time I might think better about it, and a few good harvests will see us right. But I don’t know, I just don’t know.’

  Owen Corrigan came in. ‘Well, Luke, settling back?’

  ‘Pretty well. What about you?’

  ‘Well enough. I’ve found a farm – nearly got it bought.’

  ‘Which one is that?’

  ‘The widow Malley’s.’

  ‘Over by Árd na gCaiseal?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘She’s selling?’

  ‘She is. She’s got the freehold. Mick Malley bought it from Clanowen twenty years back.’

  ‘Why would she want selling it?’ Sabina asked. ‘Isn’t young Tommy well able to farm?’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ Corrigan replied ‘but she’s six other children apart from Tommy, and the farm sure as hell won’t support them all. They need the money.’

  ‘For corn?’ Luke asked.

  ‘For that and for travelling. They’re leaving, the whole family, heading to Liverpool.’

  Corrigan and Luke left together. They walked through the stink of animal dung. The street was covered in it, the walls were streaked with it. Most of the farmers had left town, and only a few drovers were driving the remaining cattle and sheep away. Luke thought of the cattle being driven off the boat in Liverpool. He thought of the famished people coming off with the cattle and the look of contempt in a young woman’s eyes.

  ‘You heard about Nessa?’ Corrigan asked.

  ‘Yes, I’d heard.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Luke said. ‘Jimmy’s not your son, is he?’

  ‘He’s not. But it’s just I feel bad about it.’

  ‘Where is he now, do you know?’

  ‘God only knows,’ Corrigan said. ‘The story was he’d gone to England.’

  ‘Can we catch him there?’

  ‘I doubt it. And even if you did, what good would it do?’

  ‘We might get him to pay,’ Luke said

  ‘I don’t think you’d get him to pay much. But he’s still my nephew. There’s no one else to take the blame apart from me.’

  ‘There’s not. But still…’

  ‘Look, would you ever have a word with Murty? Nessa too. Ten pounds might help. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ll say it to them,’ Luke said.

  He told his father of Corrigan’s offer that night.

  ‘Yes,’ Michael said, ‘that might help. It’s not a bad offer, seeing as it’s not Owen should be paying it. Will you have a word with Murty?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  As he walked up to the quarry the next morning, he could already hear the sound of a sledgehammer and the rhythmic pounding of iron on rock. Looking down from the edge he could see his father, stripped to the waist in spite of the cold. Michael still had a powerful chest at the age of sixty three. He glanced up as Luke came towards him, but hardly broke the rhythm. ‘Aren’t you the great fellow? You go out before me and arrive after me.’

  Luke smiled. ‘I just went up to Murty and Aileen as you asked me.’

  ‘S
o what did they have to say?’

  ‘Murty reckoned Owen’s offer was fine. They’ll take the ten pounds.’

  ‘Well, that’s one good thing. But it shouldn’t be Owen paying it.’

  ‘I know.’

  He took up the second sledgehammer, and they started working together. The rhythm was the same, beating out the smashing tattoo. Luke stopped to remove his shirt.

  It began to rain. Both men put their shirts on again and sheltered under a whin bush at the side of the quarry. Its roots disappeared into a crack in the rock; it almost seemed to be growing out of rock.

  Michael picked up the coat he had left there, a very old one with string tying it together. ‘Did you bring your coat with you?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘God, do you never learn. Sit down here.’

  Luke sat alongside Michael, the old coat covering their heads as the rain got heavier. It was dripping off the whin bush, soaking the coat and running down their faces and off the ends of their noses. It was flowing in rivulets down the sides of the rock walls, forming pools of grey slush in the ground of the quarry.

  ‘What else did Murty and Aileen have to say?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Aileen said nothing at all.’

  ‘Not a word?’

  ‘Not one word.’

  Michael shook his head and hunched over his knees, staring at the ground. Then he picked up a stone and flung it at the handle of one of the sledgehammers thirty feet away. It hit the handle in the centre.

  ‘I’ll bet you couldn’t do that, young lad.’

  Luke picked up a stone and threw. He missed by six inches. Michael laughed. Then he went quiet again. He picked up a twig and started to draw circles in the slush.

  ‘I’m worried about Aileen. Your mother is too.’

  ‘Well, she is her sister.’

  ‘God knows, it was bad enough already. She works all the hours God sent, Aileen does. Weaving and spinning and weaving and spinning, but you know what it’s like with the linen market. They’re paying them almost nothing.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘Do you know there’s times I haven’t seen her for weeks on end. If we go up, she disappears behind the curtain, and she’ll only talk to Elly. And sometimes not even to her.’