by Leon Uris
All the trappings of his aristocracy suddenly drained from him. "Just how many does that represent?"
"Twenty per cent of the tenants to begin with. There will be more by spring. M'lord, I get no satisfaction of this. Yet the figures do not lie. Overpopulation is so great that within a few years almost every available acre would have been planted into potatoes just to feed them. That is why the earnings have been declining so steadily. We must think of the blight as a blessing in disguise, a message from the Almighty to save this land for the deserving."
MacAdam Rankin was a pragmatic man and his outburst of religious zeal seemed out of place. Yet Ireland, and Ulster in particular, had its pragmatism centered in the Bible as well as the sword. Total belief that their interpretation of God and God's word was the only one, their complete righteousness, their piety through devoutness, all of this was basic Presbyterian Ulsterism, so MacAdam Rankin was keeping strangely in character even for a thick-skinned businessman.
For a fleeting instant it crossed Lord Morris' mind to call a congress of the landowners and shut the ports and feed the people. The idea went as quickly as it came. Ireland been raped to the brink of bankruptcy and any such notion would have resulted in massive foreclosures on unpaid mortgages. The Earl's own notes were calling for payments of several thousand pounds which simply could not be met unless crop and cattle went to England.
"You've had the authority all along to sign these eviction notices, Mr. Rankin."
"I don't mind evictions in the normal course of duty, m’lord, but I cannot take responsibility for something like this. It is a basic decision affecting the course of your own life and, after all, you are the Crown here. If you'll affix your signature, I'll do the rest."
"Thank you, Mr. Rankin," he said harshly. "I'll call you when I want you."
MacAdam Rankin nodded and bowed slightly. "Thank you, m'lord."
Morris Hubble was quickly overtaken with a roaring headache as he brooded into infinity while nibbling at his fist. A servant entered and trod about in a whisper, lighting the candles as darkness overran light. Their flames glowed up the polished mahogany grains of the high rows. He tossed about the room in muted pain and appeared somewhat wild-eyed. And he searched the stacks for a word of consolation, his hand mystically stopping at a small volume of Alexander Pope. The flame light licked close to the page as he read aloud in agonized monotone.
"Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public flame nor private dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire Chaos! is restor’d
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all."
After a short eternity he lifted the first batch of eviction orders from the trunk, all properly bound in red tape. He unknotted it, taking up the top document. His hand trembled so that he had to lay it flat on the desk to read it. It described a pathetic little lease of sixteen acres scattered around the hills in nine separate plots. One Grady MacGilligan. No doubt a toothless number with eyes bleary from drink and emitting unwashed odors. All of it was vivid: the cottage, the flabby woman leading a cow past the fire, the squalling mob of children, the crucifixes and omens, a best room filled with scrambling chickens.
Morris unsheathed the quill from its holder and dipped h in the inkwell. As the first scratch of his signature sounded he looked up startled. "What the devil!"
Young Arthur stood near the desk.
"What are you doing sneaking in here!"
The boy's cheeks flushed. "I'm s-s-s-sorry, Father. I knocked b-b-b-but you didn't answer."
There he goes with his bloody damned stuttering! Morris threw the quill down. "Well! What do you want!"
"I only w-w-w-wanted to b-b-b-borrow a b-b-book."
At that instant Lady Beatrice appeared. "There you are, dear," she sang. "We saw Mr. Rankin leave. Everyone is gathered in the family room. Brooke is going to read us a few chapters of the new Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit."
"Is there nothing better to read to our grandchildren than that damned radical!"
Beatrice arched her back and her eyebrows at the same time while Morris battled for control of himself, blurting out an apology for his outburst as he did. "Sorry. I've a lot to do yet tonight. Please go on without me. I'll just take a light supper here."
"Very well."
"And, Beatrice," he called as she reached the door. There is a change of plan. We shall be leaving Hubble Manor within the fortnight. Arrange to send some of the staff ahead and open the town house in London. We shan't be returning to Ireland for some time."
"Morris, are you quite serious?"
"Don't . . . argue . . . with . . . me . . . Lady Beatrice," he emphasized, "don't argue with me."
She remained in place, utterly perplexed, then turned on her heels. "I'll talk to you later when you are in a civil mood," and departed, banging the door closed.
Arthur crept closer to the desk. "F-F-F-Father, is there anything . . ."
"No, my son," he groaned. "Just try to understand someday . . . and be generous."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tomas remained ever so peaceful, barely budging for two hours, during which time Daddo had talked himself dry. The shanachie went so often to the jug that himself was getting a bit fuzzy. He stretched, brushed the hay off and strolled unevenly to the byre door. The night had turned entirely sweet with a warming zephyr rushing up the hill. He drew a bucket of water from the well and dunked his face, then settled on a place on the wall worn smooth by generations of Larkin backsides.
Conor followed him to the bucket, then the wall.
"Did you know," Daddo said, "that there's a star for every Irish lad and lass who's had to cross the water?"
"Nae, I didn't know that."
"Neither did I," Daddo said, "I just made it up. But there must be. I waited here, right in this very spot, while Kilty was making his farewells to Mary and his brothers. When the fishing rights were denied and our arms uncovered, we fell into a fearsome funk, knowing it would be days, weeks at the most, until evictions would begin. That was more than Kilty could stay and bear.
"They came out of the cottage, Mary, Kilty, Aidan, Cathal and your daddy Tomas, walking to the crossroads like a funeral procession, stuffing in the hurt. Kilty stopped, mustering all his courage and said, "You'll go no farther."
"Tomas was about your age then, perhaps a bit older. He asked if he could go with us to the diamond in Ballyutogue. Kilty nodded and took his hand. At the edge of town we were suddenly run off the road by a pair of racing carriages spattering us as they rushed past and pulled to a halt before the Anglican church. The yard was crowded with people waiting for his lordship's arrival. As we stopped to watch, Hubble and his son, the same scrawny specimen who is now the Earl, passed within touching distance of us. In a queer kind of instant Kilty and the Earl stared eye to eye, then he quickly disappeared inside with the rest of the folk piling in after.
"The weather didn't let us down. It was one of those thunder plumps pouring down hard enough to split rocks. It was as though every Irishman in heaven was weeping for us.
"We reached England on a cattle boat and got a bit of work unloading it in Liverpool but that was all. The only jobs open were for dust men working in the sewers. So we unplugged sludge beneath Liverpool by day. Now your grandfar had always been quick and splendid with his fists so he was able to get a job keeping peace in a dangerous public house in Liverpool's Irish town."
Daddo came off the wall, preening a bit before Conor. "Forty years ago," he said, "as you see me now, I had a voice that could lilt a bluebird out of an arbutus tree. Aye, I could turn a ballad that would make an angel weep. While Kilty kept peace, I sang and told tales for a farthing or ha' penny. Between the sewer and the public house we managed to save a few quid, g
etting the money back to Ireland when we could, through traveling priests.
"The quickest wages we could come by in spring was scything the winter wheat, where a man was paid by the acre. The size of Kilty always caught the eye of the foreman when we answered calls for work. Scything five or six acres a day might have soon done in a normal man, but Kilty Larkin, with thoughts of Mary and his wee Wanes beating through his brain, cut down six to eight acres a day, day in and day out, working so furiously it took two teams of bundlers to stay up with him. The pair of us lived off less than sixpence a day, sleeping in the ditches to save room rent.
"After the winter wheat harvest was in, thousands of desperate Irishmen were roving England looking for work at any price. We was as welcome as the blight."
Daddo looked to the sky for a moment, shaking his head and grunting, still not believing what had happened forty years before.
"We were utterly desperate," he continued with a voice Still echoing the urgency, "so we concocted a desperate plan. We followed county fairs and carnivals with me hawking up business and Kilty taking on all corners in a winner-take-all bare knuckle fight. Maybe you wondered why his hands were so crippled and his face so busted. It was over a hundred fights that did it. More than once it would go on for three or four hours, with teeth coming out and so much blood you couldn't make out his features. He lost a few fights, all right, but he had to be beaten unconscious before he quit."
"Oh, Grandfar," Conor whispered.
Daddo stopped his story and looked long over the tired land. "Eighteen and forty-six," he whispered with obvious pain, "was the year that God abandoned Ireland. The blight struck again and the potato crop was a total loss."
*
Evictions went on with methodical repetition. Four or five times a week a small legion of Constabulary paraded into Ballyutogue behind Owen Rankin, who oversaw it with fanatical lust while his brother, MacAdam, continued to link up shaded plots on his map.
The police deployed around the victim cottage. A squad then moved in and threw the family out. Screams and prayers met deaf ears. Resistance met swift, merciless subjugation.
Owen Rankin read the riot act, a warning that Queen's business was about to ensue and must not be interfered with. Next he read the eviction notice. The man, his wife, his parents and his children watched in helpless terror as their home was bashed in with battering rams and tumbled to make it uninhabitable, and what was burnable was razed. They sat in stunned little huddles with their belongings on a single cart as the Constabulary reformed and marched on to the next cottage and the next.
Owen Rankin read the riot act before a dozen, ten dozen, ten hundred with the echo of the battering ram reverberating around Ireland by the tens of thousands. Cottages jammed with homeless refugees. When these were tumbled, hundreds of thousands burst out onto the roads, open to the elements, scavenging the hills as pack animals.
*
"Kilty managed to keep his family alive. Aidan was the youngest brother with the largest family and some of the poorest land. Even working as one large family unit, it became apparent that he was going under. Night after night they'd talk it over, begging him to split up the family between Mary and Cathal, and give up his own land. He was draining the others to keep him afloat and everyone's chances would be better if he did.
"Aidan and his wife, Jenny, could never quite bring themselves to agree and one morning a platoon of Constabulary had surrounded the cottage and Owen Rankin was reading the riot act. It was a particularly sweet moment for the Rankins, for they had craved vengeance on the Larkins for years. Well . . . Owen never got to finish because Aidan went into a rage, unearthing a hidden musket, and blew his face off.
"He and Jenny held the Constabulary off for three hours until he was shot dead and she wounded. The Constabulary broke in and she and the six wee wanes were hauled off screaming and struggling as the cottage was tumbled."
"What happened to her, Daddo?"
"They were carted off to Derry and taken before a magistrate. She was charged with being an accomplice to the murder of Owen Rankin and interfering with Her Majesty's police."
*
The winter of 1847 was a bitter recurrence of icy rains. Hunger was joined by the lethal ally of disease.
Young Tomas took the responsibility of finding his Aunt Jenny and her children. The walk to Derry was over twenty miles. Gangs of bony, ragged, evicted farmers, their wives and children, worked on public projects for a few pennies a day, dragging about, keeling over in the chill and wet, making roads to nowhere.
MacAdam Rankin had obtained a large government grant and set his work gangs to building high stone walls to seal off the Earl's fields and fishing areas. Famine walls. Even as the gangs toiled they were berated by their British overseers as useless for not attending to their farms.
As Tomas neared Derry, the open fields were filled with thousands of beggars squatting without food or shelter. Ancient men and women of forty and little old men and women of four and five. These had been driven out of Derry by gangs of "bang beggars," other wretches who were beggars themselves now earning a few pence a day to keep the beggar population from growing.
The poor law and workhouse system had been particularly alien to the Irish, for it spelled a final loss of hope and dignity within the hollow cavernous halls. Tomas arrived there as the first stop on his search, house was now a mob scene, besieged by hundreds of screaming, maddened human skeletons pleading to be allowed in, crawling over each other to get to kitchen where they were slopped like pigs. In the workhouse yards fever sheds held hundreds more dying, too far gone to do much more than moan their agony, low.
The boy passed from row to row, mat to mat for hours, looking in vain. He roamed Derry for four days in utter futility until hunger began to overtake him. As a last desperate measure he found an old retired priest who had known his grandfather, Ronan, in County Armagh, who was able to ascertain that Jenny had been taken to the bridewell as a convicted criminal and confined in the black hole. The children had been removed to a foundling home.
For another three days Tomas was driven from the prison but persisted until one of the wardens promised to find out. He got the word that his Aunt Jenny had been found dead four days after her imprisonment. No one seemed to know or care how she died but, being profoundly religious, it was doubtful she took her own life. Perhaps' grief, perhaps her wounds, perhaps … something else.
The search for the children was even more frightening, for if anything was feared more than the workhouse, it was the foundling home. The old priest took Tomas into his own home and after another agonizing week got permission for him to get inside the orphanage. Hundreds upon hundreds of children lay on the floor in rags in the odorous, damp gray light. Their skins spotted and bleeding from advance stages of scurvy, lice-ridden and burning with fever. The institution workers were no longer sound of mind, having worked themselves into exhaustion. The smell of death intermixed torturously with monologues to a God who apparently did not hear. The children of Aidan and Jenny Larkin were not found or heard of again.
Tomas retreated back to Ballyutogue. Dozens of dead now lay in the ditches. Winter was only half through. Communal life, a key to past survival, had been destroyed by the evictions and, with it, life itself.
People of the villages, too proud to die in front of their neighbors, staggered up to the scalps, the bog caves, to meet their end. Once the husband crossed the water or came swiftly for the balance of the family.
They would lie in their awful agony huddled together, covered with whatever rags they could carry . . . the ma, all still and moaning with no more than skin over bones and filled with stinking sores and dropsy. Often, one or more would be dead for days and just remain among the others.
An only alternative was emigration for those who could scrape fare together. Although the Irish were British citizens according to laws enacted by the British, the people in England were hostile and of a temper to keep them out.
British
authorities channeled the fleeing Irish to Canada and America by whatever means and no matter in what condition. Cattle boats were rushed into passenger service and they poured out of Ireland by the hundreds of thousands. This was the opening round of the most penetrating of all Irish tragedies, the export of her greatest resource, her people.
*
"Me and Kilty were on hard times in England. Communication was near impossible. The few available priests spent every waking hour writing letters but getting one from Ireland was a mighty chore. Finally a message did reach Kilty telling him to get home.
"The situation with the Larkins grew more desperate. A decision was made that the last of their money should go to buy passage for Cathal and his family to America. Three days before they were to sail it was discovered that the ship was fictitious and the passage money taken as a swindle by gombeen men.
"MacAdam Rankin, moving feverishly to finish his chores, chartered a ship and offered free passage in a move to clear the rest of the croppies from the earldom. Most of the boats were no more than floating coffins but what Rankin chartered turned out to be the worst death ship of the entire famine. Half the passengers died en route and, among them, Cathal's two youngest daughters."
Daddo walked to the byre door again and pointed to Tomas sleeping in the hay. "One by one, your daddy lying there watched his sister and brothers and his mother die and put them under with his own hand. All of them died with green mouths like so many of our people did. Green mouths from eating grass.
"And then the fever got him. The boy lit a turf fire and set himself near it with a few roots and berries and waited for his end. That was how Kilty found him."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Daddo and Conor returned to the byre as the first half-light edged over the lip of the lough. Daddo's voice was ever so weary from the sorrows and length of his tale. After he made himself comfortable he bade Conor lie down and rest his head on his lap and, stroking the boy's hair softly, hastened to bring his story to a close before the daylight should cause him to vanish.
