Cursed! Blood of the Donnellys

by Keith Ross Leckie

  One night when Johannah was ten, she was in the library reading Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian when she was surprised to hear her mother’s voice raised in anger. Her father had returned that day from one of his business trips to London. Johannah entered the foyer just in time to see her father slap her mother’s face with the back of his hand. When Johannah gave a little gasp, both parents turned to her and it was her mother who spoke.

  “Go to your room!” she said angrily, as if it was Johannah who had inspired the slap, and the command sent her bolting up the stairs.

  Later, as Johannah brooded on her bed, Raffy brought her tea to see that she was all right.

  “It will pass, Johannah.”

  “I hate him.”

  “Don’t hate your father.”

  “Why does she let him do it?”

  “It’s not easy to understand the bond between a man and a woman. Sure each one’s a mystery, as you’ll find out.”

  “She’s a fool to put up with it.”

  “Now don’t you be talking like that about your mother. She’s a fine woman that loves you and she does have a lot to be dealing with. Drink that tea before it gets cold and I’ll tell your fortune.”

  In following days Johannah would often catch her mother sadly daydreaming.

  “Mother? Are you all right?”

  “Of course,” she would say. Then something unrelated, like, “Have you tried on the new petticoat? I want to know if it has to go back. Go and try it on now or you’ll forget.”

  Johannah thought that they did share something, perhaps. Maybe her mother also felt as if she had been abducted by kidnappers and her real family, beautiful and idyllic, was still out there somewhere, searching for her.

  * * *

  On Johannah’s eleventh birthday, her father surprised her by giving her a remarkable gift. He was a three-year-old gelding of a milky white colour including tail and mane, just shy of fourteen hands, making up in agility and speed what he lacked in size. He had been named Cuchulain after the great warrior of Irish myths. Her father had bought him for her at Smithfield Square on one of his many trips to Dublin.

  She insisted, against the strong wishes of the stable boys, on bridling and saddling him herself. On that day and almost every day thereafter, Johannah and Cuchulain rode across the rough pastureland of the broad estate, Johannah straddling him barefoot with her dress tucked under her knees and his sure hooves beneath her, his legs pumping, as if she were mounted on a warm little whirlwind.

  Though Johannah and Cuchulain became close comrades-in-arms, she also had many playmates among the two score of tenant children whose parents worked for her father. Their whitewashed stone cottages with thick thatch roofs dotted the verdant pastureland west of St. Patrick’s Parish Church on the edge of the estate. Each had a yard and animal pens for a pig or chickens, sheds for tools and a garden patch for peas and beans and potatoes, and children were always playing outside among the animals. There were the Ryan twins, Devon and Michael, and the Donnelly children, Jim and Theresa, and little Donald Murphy, known for his angelic singing voice, and his blind sister Maive, as well as Martin and Brid O’Day, who won the Waterford junior dance championship, and several more.

  Her favourite and best friend was Lucy O’Toole, her same age and as Viking fair as Johannah was dark, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed waif with skin so translucent you could see the purple lines of her veins pulsing in her arms and temples. Lucy had a firm belief in the existence of fairies and the little people as passionate as her belief in God and his angels and she would tell such good stories about them and their meetings with humans. Johannah found the lives of the tenant children substantially more interesting than her own. She did of course know that she had privilege—she resided in the manager’s house, her clothes were expensive and her father had power—but with these friends she felt, for the most part, as accepted in their warm homes as anyone else, given neither fault nor favour.

  Almost every day after tea, in good weather, Cuch and Johannah left Ballymore and took the long way to Lucy’s, across the glen and up onto the ridge, behind which you could see beyond the estate to the brown Ballyfinboy River meandering through the fields and small woodlots on its untroubled way through Lough Derg, past Limerick and on down the Shannon to the sea. It was the route by which she and Lucy vowed they would one day set off to find the house of the Black Dwarf from Walter Scott’s book, or journey to London like Jeanie Deans did in The Heart of Midlothian.

  On one particularly fine afternoon, Johannah and Cuchulain rode up along the ridge and then through the woods, then down again, skirting well wide of the leg-breaking bog. Johannah slowed Cuch briefly for a walk along the long, cool, willow-shaded path by the fishing stream, a tributary of the Ballyfinboy, then brought him back up to speed across the hard pasture, where they cleared two of the sheep walls her father had forbidden her to jump. Johannah was a skilled rider for her age, instinctive and without fear, following Cuchulain’s moves through whatever jumble of rocky paths they would careen. Lucy once told her she must have led great cavalries in one of her previous lives. It was only on Cuchulain she felt such freedom, practically free of gravity itself as Cuch barely touched the earth. It seemed entirely possible they could simply ride on like this forever.

  Approaching Lucy’s cottage, Johannah steered clear of the vegetable patch and the great blind pig named Rosie, which the O’Tooles kept on a tether west of the house, and pulled up outside the door.

  The O’Toole cottage was as tiny as the other tenant houses, with a dirt floor and tattered curtains, braced-up broken furniture and a small pen inside holding three younger pigs without names and a goat named Willy in one corner. Blue peat smoke hung in a cloud just above their heads and completed the host of rich and pungent aromas assaulting Johannah as she stepped inside the crowded little hut. But it was the place where children from the other families gathered before supper to tease and be scolded, play cards and checkers beside the fire and listen again and again to Granda O’Toole’s tales of monsters and little people and The Great Disaster. Irish history was all divided between the time before and after The Great Disaster, which was the invasion of Ireland by the English armies in 1649 under the commander they called Cromwell. Johannah’s father would never have allowed such talk against the English, who were his bread and butter, though he was as Irish born as anyone can be, and Johannah was thrilled by the forbidden stories. On this day she and Lucy, leaning against each other, braiding each other’s hair, listened closely to the old man’s dramatic retelling.

  “The armies from hell under the devil himself Cromwell set forth across the sea in huge black barges. Sure we prayed for God to send bad weather but it did not come. The barbarians landed on the beach and our lads come down to beat them back from whence they came. We fought with spirit and courage under several of our great lords. Chieftain Peter Donnelly, the great-great-great-granda of the Donnelly family, led the charge. In those times we had only clubs and spears and short bows, not the broad steel and armour of the English, nor their crossbows, and only a tenth of their cavalry. And so the miracle did not happen and our men were defeated, falling before Cromwell, wave after wave after wave.”

  Though all were familiar with the story, no one spoke for fear of interrupting the rest.

  “Then came the day the English soldiers surrounded our town of Borrisokane. The old men and older boys that were left fought them with sticks and stones but in moments they were overwhelmed, captured and taken away. The next morning, the women, the great-great-grandmothers of the women here, they went to the Englishman’s camp to bargain for the release of their men and boys. As they approached, they found the path was lined either side with what looked like long piles of turnip or cabbages. Ah, but they weren’t cabbages, my loves. These were the heads of their husbands, sons and fathers, every one. They had refused Cromwell’s demands and met their fate.” He was coming to Lucy
and Johannah’s favourite part. “Cromwell’s demands were simple. The Irish would give up ownership of their lands, curse the Pope and swear fealty to the English king or die. As their men had done before them, the women of Borrisokane refused and offered their heads instead of submitting to the Englishman’s conditions. They do say that in the face of such courage, Devil Cromwell’s frozen heart melted and for one day he grew weary of slaughter and let the women live, and their children too. So Borrisokane survived and the women kept their heads. Cromwell seized their lands, mind you, writing up legal deeds for his lords in England. And that is why the O’Tooles, the Ryans and the Donnellys are tenants on their own land to this day.”

  Lucy’s father was usually a quiet man, listening to his father-in-law’s stories, but on this one day his eyes grew intense as the story ended. He spoke out as if the events had happened last Thursday.

  “What gave them the right? What gives them the right now to raise our rent and restrict the common land? Them, old Cavendish and that thief Magee…”

  “Quiet now, Tom,” Mrs. O’Toole chided under her breath. “The child…”

  His eyes glanced over at Johannah. “She should hear it. If she comes to us, eats our bread, she should know. I won’t seal my lips in my own house!”

  “Shhhhhh.”

  “I won’t be shushed!”

  Lucy’s mother patted Johannah’s hand.

  “Maybe it’s time for you to go, my dear. But come again tomorrow.”

  Johannah tried to cover her embarrassment. “Thank you, Mrs. O’Toole,” she said with a slight curtsy. “Tea was very nice.”

  Johannah was not unaware of the feelings against her father on the estate. Often the tenants suddenly stopped talking when she arrived and more than once she had overheard her father’s name spoken in anger when her presence was unnoticed. She had once asked her father about it, without betraying names, and also about The Great Disaster and the “English Devils.”

  “Such nonsense,” he replied. “The tenants are jealous and greedy, some of them, and want what we have, but they’re too lazy to work for it.”

  She had thought about her father’s words and accepted them at the time, but she sensed it was not so simple. She saw how hard and long the tenants worked on the estate and yet their clothes were old and patched and it was rare that any meat was in their pot, only potatoes, and their kettles held only rough, thin tea leaves that were reused many times. Johannah certainly knew enough not to repeat Mr. O’Toole’s word “thief” to her father, for it would mean trouble to Lucy’s family, but a part of her wondered if there was truth in it.

  As Johannah left the cottage, Lucy followed her outside.

  “Sorry about my da,” Lucy told her. “You won’t say anything?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Want to go for a short one?”

  “Sure. Long as you want. Let me get on.”

  As they would often do this late in the day, Lucy hopped on Cuchulain behind her and they rode with the golden sun low in the sky, Lucy holding tight against Johannah’s back and urging speed. Given her slight build, Cuchulain could gallop just as fast with Lucy on as with Johannah alone. Lucy usually hummed a tune like “The Croppy Boy” or “Irish Soldier Laddie” when they rode, her mouth close to Johannah’s ear, her thin knees embracing Cuchulain’s flanks, her hands locked around Johannah’s waist. Almost always they would find themselves at the enchanted woodlot. Lucy and Johannah had secretly visited it since they were very young, for this modest copse was notorious in tales of the supernatural, the home of fairies and ghosts, a place of magic. Only a few years earlier, a young girl named Maher had wandered there and, despite a long frantic search by her family and the villagers, was never seen again. When a rag doll that she had carried with her appeared on her little bed at home, it was a sign, everyone knew, that she had been taken by the fairies.

  Here, in this small meadow surrounded by tangled bushes and low, gnarly evergreens, the girls sat and waited to be taken. When they heard rustlings in the leaves and branches, Johannah’s head said it was a jackrabbit or weasel or grouse but her heart longed for it to be nymphs and fairies. They were sure they heard small voices, whispered conversations all around them, and Lucy impressed her by addressing them boldly.

  “Creatures of the woodlot! We are Lucy O’Toole and Johannah Magee and we command you to come forward.”

  Whatever their reason, as with other days, the fairy folk chose not to obey. It was here in this woodlot Johannah and Lucy had made certain promises. They would have to approve each other’s husbands. They would have numerous children and bring them up together, encouraging marriage between a few. However, first they would travel around the world, at least as far as China to see the Forbidden City, a name that in itself demanded their presence. And it was here they made grand oaths, swearing by the moon that their friendship would go on forever, even after death, when their freed souls would take each other’s hands and fly up from the earth together to become two stars in the midnight sky.

  The Poacher

  One warm spring evening about a week before the day of her confirmation, Johannah was setting out from Lucy’s to Ballymore and made a slight detour along the hard-packed bridle path under the leafy canopy beside the mumbling stream. Like the woodlot, this was a special place she had always felt drawn toward. It was part of the estate and she and Raffy came here for picnics, to wade in the cold water and read, and it was here she had learned how to fish. So when she heard the clear notes of someone whistling a tune up ahead, it was an intrusion. She guided Cuch carefully and quietly into a clearing to find a boy standing near the stream, his back to her as he nonchalantly rigged up his fishing gear. She mustered a forceful authority.

  “You there. These are estate lands. What are you doing?”

  The boy turned toward her and she blushed to recognize him. He was Jim Donnelly, one of the tenant children, two or three years older than her, who worked long days in the fields with his father. Though she had known him all her life, she hadn’t paid him much attention until recently, when she had spoken to Lucy about him. Jim was an altar boy at St. Patrick’s. He faced the congregation and she had to admit she had noticed his sad smile and beautiful lips. She and Lucy had compared his dark eyes and face to the plaster statue of the Archangel Gabriel that stood in the dusty east chapel. And now here he was and they were alone together.

  “You mean with this fishing gear, miss? Why, I’m picking wildflowers.”

  “You are poaching, Jim Donnelly! There are game wardens patrolling. They’ll have you arrested, so they will.”

  “I guess I should just drown myself and get it over with, miss.”

  He turned away from her as if she were a dismissible irritant and tossed his baited line into the pool.

  “You don’t realize the trouble you could be in. I have a whistle I could blow. The warden’ll be here in a minute.”

  “And just who gave you the right to these fish. They are God’s free creatures to be caught by whoever they like. You go ahead and blow, miss, if you must. I need to catch some dinner so my family can eat.”

  Johannah hesitated, then looked down with interest at the deep pool in the stream where he was slowly bringing in the baited hook.

  “That does look like a rather good spot.”

  She studied his back, brought Cuchulain a few steps closer and dismounted. She stood beside him in the tall grass, looking into the deep pool in the otherwise shallow stream. He tossed the bait again and it landed with a plop. She watched him critically.

  “That wasn’t the deepest spot.”

  “They lie in the tree shadows on the right,” he whispered.

  “You’re still short.”

  “The current will take it there,” he whispered again.

  “And you should have more leader,” she spoke at normal volume.

  “Shhhh. They
can hear you.”

  “That’s what people say but only an eejit would believe that fish have ears.”

  “Shhhhh!”

  Suddenly the line went tight and, as easy as that, Jim had hooked a good-sized salmon. He set the hook and struggled a little to bring it in.

  “Gently! You’re yanking it,” she told him. “You’ll tear his mouth and lose him. Here. Give it to me!”

  “I caught the blessed thing,” he protested.

  “With my advice.”

  “Oh yes, your great wisdom.”

  She turned and glowered at his sarcasm.

  “It’s an estate fish. It belongs to me.”

  Jim resisted giving her the line at first but as they both struggled for it, he glanced over her shoulder and something changed his mind.

  “As you like, my lady,” he whispered, releasing the gear into her hands and sinking down into the high grass. Her attention was completely on the fish, for she had lost a few in her time at this critical point. She brought the catch in slowly, smoothly, letting a little go when he fought but keeping it tight as Raffy had showed her, then when he rested, bringing the line in, wrapping it neatly—no snags—around the spindle. The silver back fin of the salmon broke the surface.

  “Oh look, he’s a beauty!” she cried. As she brought the fish in to shore she was laughing with delight, lifting the big, flopping salmon up high and needing both hands and all her strength to do so.