The Hunger

by David Rees

  The reason why he was twenty-seven before he had permitted himself to be happy was that he had considered that his way of life ― in part carefully and deliberately chosen, in part the consequence of intense feelings ― would lead his soul to be damned for all Eternity. He went to Mass every Sunday, but had not received Holy Communion for four years, not since he had moved in with Anthony at Eagle Lodge.

  The traditions of Roman Catholicism in Ireland are penitential, puritanical and monastic, their spirit much influenced by the French Jansenists of the seventeenth century. There is conflict between agape and eros: sex is strictly for procreative purposes within marriage, and is not, even in that area, to be enjoyed. Man is essentially a feeble, sinful creature, and requires constant acts of self-denial and contrition. Life is a vale of tears to be got through as best we may. The body must not be seen, must not be a source of pleasure. Such thinking is older than the Jansenist heresy, which merely reinforced what was already engrained in the character of Irish Catholicism. Even Saint Patrick is said to have been alarmed by his converts taking so easily to ascetic celibacy in such numbers.

  Michael was not, by nature, inclined to be celibate or ascetic, but he might, all other things being equal, have managed to conform. His sexual experiences, however, were not procreative, and he had learned to enjoy them; nor did he think ― now ― that his body should be unseen and untouched. But he knew he could burn in Hell for this. It was the influence of Anthony who had altered “would burn” to the more comfortable “could burn”; without this change Michael might have suffered a complete mental and emotional breakdown.

  He had discovered that his body was not vile; sometimes he even thought it beautiful. Which it was. He was tall, slender, and graceful, which had caused his father ― who was short, stout, and thick-set ― to look at him on one occasion and say, with a certain disgust: “girlish!” Mr Tangney was not alluding to sexual orientation, which he would have assumed in any man was the same as his own, but to Michael’s apparent want of strength. Though Michael would never have made a blacksmith, Mr Tangney was wrong; there was plenty of muscle on his son’s frame. He had not seen it since Michael was a young boy. Maybe Eugene was also referring to the face, which matched the gracefulness of the body ― a fine skin drawn taut over prominent cheekbones, full lips, soulful, dreamy eyes, and a mass of dark curls that fell to his shoulders. Mr Tangney’s own face was florid, coarse-skinned, and inclined to fat, and his hair was lank and lifeless.

  Father and son had an uneasy relationship. Eugene was glad that Michael was bookish, “learned” as he proudly told neighbours, and that he had a secure job at Eagle Lodge, even if Anthony Altarnun ― here he would not have argued with Mrs Peacock ― was a bit queer, and that that queerness was something more than being good to the tenants and living a bachelor existence with only one servant. But Eugene had hoped Michael would follow him in his own craft. It was customary for a forge to be handed on from father to son; the smith’s secrets were family secrets. Five more children had followed the birth of Michael. Three of them had died in infancy: the two survivors were girls. One day the forge would have to be sold to a stranger.

  Michael’s decision to work elsewhere was not because he wanted to quarrel with his father; on the contrary, he was saddened that he had turned out to be such a disappointment. He suffered in childhood and adolescence from what would nowadays be recognized as an allergy to horses, but at this time the condition was totally mysterious. Was it a punishment, Mr Tangney asked himself, for his family’s climb up the social scale? Or a mark of the fairies, his wife wondered? Doctor Lenehan was baffled.

  It is a rare allergy, and no one in Clasheen had ever seen anything like it. If Michael came too near a horse, he broke out in hives, his face swelled, and an hour or so afterwards he would suffer from a terrible fit of asthma. His parents constantly feared for his life when he was young. It is difficult to be the son of a blacksmith and not be close to horses; indeed in the Victorian age it would have been impossible for anybody to avoid some proximity. Michael knew that one day he would have to leave home to find work.

  For some years he was employed as a servant on Lord Smithers’ estate at Coolcaslig, twelve miles from Clasheen. Then he met Anthony Altarnun, who possessed only three horses and who did not ask Michael to have much to do with them. Michael, in any case, had grown out of his allergy in his early twenties, but, nevertheless, he felt that his father never quite forgave him for something that was entirely outside his control.

  “Michael Tangney!” he said aloud, which made a bullock look up from the field it was chewing and stare at him. He laughed, and childishly yelled “Moo! Moo! Moo!” The bullock, perhaps thinking he was mad, plodded slowly away. “Tangney!” he repeated. His mother’s maiden name was Polyphant. “Elephant! Elephant!” kids had called after her when she was at school, though nothing less like an elephant than Michael’s mother could be imagined.

  The name was not Irish. In the multitude of Reillys, Healys, Kearneys, Kennedys, Maloneys and Macarthys, related and unrelated, it stood out like a sore thumb and was another factor contributing to Michael’s family thinking they were not of the bog-trotting Irish. No Polyphants existed in Ireland, his mother told him, other than those who were cousins, second cousins, third cousins of the same clan. Polyphant is a village in Cornwall, and from there, generations back, their ancestor had originated; a sailor, shipwrecked off the Galway coast, who had decided not to go home. Cornish Celts they might once have been, but Mrs Tangney was as Catholic and Irish a Celt as the Maloneys and the Macarthys. Altarnun is also a village in Cornwall. ‘‘That’s about the only thing you and I have in common,” Michael had said rather sourly to Anthony on one occasion.

  His high spirits soon left him. As he approached Clasheen he saw an astonishing amount of activity in the potato gardens, a great crowd of men, women and children milling about. Women were throwing their aprons over their faces and shrieking dementedly. What on earth was the matter? Then he detected a smell more disgusting than any he had ever experienced, worse than muck-heaps outside peasants’ cabins, animals wallowing in their own filth, or fish stinking on Galway quay. It was like nothing he could describe, and it seemed to be drifting towards him from the potato gardens. The potatoes! What had happened to them? Where there should have been lines of green-leafed plants, there was a blackened mass of foliage and stalks as if a fire had blasted them. He stood, amazed, then ran towards the crowd.

  Father Quinlan, who was trying to restore some sort of order, stopped what he was doing when Michael appeared and said “This is calamity. Calamity. We have the blight.” He was as Mr Peacock said, a tall rock of a man, his face as grey as his hair, lined, weather-beaten. His nose was a round knob of stone that had been stuck on the rest of him as if it was an afterthought. Michael was more afraid of him than any other man in the world. He had not received Holy Communion because he had not confessed his sins; if he did, Father Quinlan would know what caused his fear of damnation and be appalled. The priest would never look him in the eye again without squirming.

  “Calamity,” Father Quinlan repeated. “If the Government does not bail us out we shall all starve. May God have mercy on us.”

  “Mrs Peacock spoke of Relief Committees,” Michael said.

  The priest raised his hands in a gesture of despair. “That will be a drop in an ocean,” he said.

  Michael hurried away from the revolting stench and the slimy, black caricatures of potatoes to his father’s house. He went in by the side door to avoid the forge. Though he had not been laid out with asthma for years, he hated the forge, the reminder.

  MICHAEL saw his parents every weekend, even though he sometimes found he had little to say to them. These visits did not often make a complete gathering of the family as the second daughter, Noreen, was married and lived in Galway City. Not a brilliant marriage, in Eugene’s opinion, for the husband she had chosen was a grocer. It was a step down the ladder, even though this man kept a good shop and
was relatively prosperous. Noreen had produced a baby, a boy, “but,” Mr Tangney had said to Michael, “he does not bear our surname.” Michael had taken this as a hint that he should look about him for a wife; he had not answered his father’s comment, however, so uncomfortable did it make him feel. The first daughter, Madge, was single. She helped her mother in the house, “until,” she said, “the Lord is willing and the right man finds me.” She and her sister were copies of Margaret, their mother, as was Michael ― the same high cheekbones, dark curly hair and dark eyes, though Mrs Tangney’s hair had long ago turned grey.

  When he arrived, his parents and Madge were in the best room of the house drinking tea. He slipped in quietly, his “God bless all here” a murmur, for Mrs Tangney was telling a story and she did not like to be interrupted. He sat down by the piano.

  “This old woman,” his mother was saying, “is a hundred years old and sick unto death with a mortal sickness. But she cannot die. The priest comes to give her the last sacraments, and she confesses a terrible sin she has never told in all her life.” Michael shifted uneasily; Mrs Tangney glanced at him, then continued: “It was nearly a century since and she a little girl that the sacred host dropped from her tongue at Communion and hit the floor. She left it there. That is a fearful thing to do, of course, but her punishment is even more fearful: though suffering in her sickness all the pains of our Lord on the cross, she cannot die. The host, do you see, has to be found.

  “So the priest gallops off on his horse, and comes to the church which he finds in ruins, plundered I don’t doubt by Cromwell. Among the stones is a beautiful tree in full blossom and in its roots is the host ― the body and blood of our Saviour. The priest digs it out and takes it to the old woman and puts it on her tongue with the words from the Mass ― corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuant in vitam aetemam. Amen. The old woman dies, and her soul flies up to Heaven at last.”

  Madge seemed thoughtful, but Mr Tangney said “Prut, Margaret, have you nothing better to do than tell old women’s tales? Fiddle-faddle church stuff!”

  “It is only a story, sure,” Mrs Tangney agreed. “But it is important the way you receive the Blessed Sacrament.” She looked at her son. “It is important to receive it at all.” “Michael, these women will unman us and I the only male in the house now.”

  “I will play the piano for you,” he answered, wishing to change the subject. He turned in his seat and struck out a ringing arpeggio in F major.

  “When we have eaten!” his mother cried. “We haven’t eaten! First things first.” She went out to the kitchen.

  “How are you, Michael?” Madge asked. “You look fine!”

  “I am fine, praise God.”

  “Any girl would turn her head to see you. But you don’t see them.”

  He smiled, and said “I’m waiting for the one who is as beautiful as you.”

  “You always say that,” she answered, laughing. “Don’t wait too long. It’s as easy for a man to end up on a shelf as it is for a woman.”

  “Let the boy alone,” her father said.

  “Do you have enough to eat up at Eagle Lodge?” Madge asked, a little anxiously. It was difficult for her to imagine that two males could between them cobble together a dinner that was fit for human consumption.

  Michael smiled again. “We eat like lords,” he said. “Don’t fret yourself. It’s a grand life there, with a view of the bay from the rooms at the front of the house and the mountains at the back. I’m busy with work I enjoy, out of doors hoeing and trenching and weeding the garden, and that improves my muscles, do you see?” He flexed his right arm; she felt his bicep and said “Oooh!” “Then indoors I’m cooking and dusting and polishing. At night I improve my mind, for himself lets me read his books. It’s Shakespeare I’m onto now. And he pays me handsomely for my work.”

  “Isn’t it a lonely life you are leading?”

  “Not so.”

  “It isn’t good for a man to stay single,” said his father, “it is unnatural.”

  Madge sighed. “And for a woman. I don’t like it one bit. Brother, you should come down to Clasheen one evening, a Saturday, and take me out dancing.”

  “I will. Yes, I promise you that. But I warn you I’ll look at all the girls.”

  She laughed, content with him now. “You’re a terrible man, Michael Tangney. Wicked.”

  How exhausting it is to lead this double life, he thought to himself. The secrecy. Being constantly on edge.

  Mrs Tangney returned, pushing a trolley on which were plates of salad, cold meat, bread and butter, and another pot of tea. “We don’t dine like cottiers yet,” she said. “Come all of you, sit at the table.”

  “What news do you have, Michael?” Eugene asked, as he helped himself to enormous quantities of ham and bread.

  “You have not heard? I would have told you, but I did not wish to spoil my mother’s story. The blight is upon us.”

  Mr Tangney dropped his fork. “Potato blight? Where? I was not in the forge these two hours, and I miss all the chatter.”

  A loud knock on the door startled them. “Lord save us, who can it be?” said Madge, getting up to answer it.

  It was Father Quinlan and the Reverend Peacock. The Tangneys looked at them, astonished. Never before had the Protestant minister been inside their house, though he had taken his mare to the forge more than once. But most remarkable was the presence of the two men of religion together. Something extraordinary must have occurred. They were soon told what it was; the entire potato crop had been destroyed in every field within a two-mile radius of the town. Beyond that the potatoes seemed, for the moment, to be in excellent condition.

  Mr Tangney got up and rushed into his garden. He did not grow many potatoes for he had money to buy them: he had a mere two or three lines, and he found them, as Mr Peacock said he would, in a state of stinking black decomposition. He stared in bewilderment, then checked the other vegetables ― turnips, cabbages, onions, carrots. They all looked perfectly healthy.

  He went back indoors. Father Quinlan was underlining the significance of the event. Many families now had nothing to eat until the next crop was ready for digging, which would not be till the following autumn: a year without food. Some people might want to eke out their existence on the corn and dairy produce of their holdings, but that was a temptation to be resisted; corn and dairy produce were the rent money. Eviction was inevitable if it was not paid.

  “What has happened to the potatoes already dug?” Michael asked. “Surely the crop has been lifted in many fields?”

  “They are destroyed too,” Father Quinlan said. “Destroyed utterly.” The usual method of storing potatoes in Ireland was to keep them in a pit covered with turf sods; the blight had been just as successful at getting inside these pits as it had been in decimating the living plants and their tubers.

  “What is the cause of it?” Mrs Tangney asked. “An act of God to punish us?”

  “I do not think it is God’s handiwork,” Mr Peacock said.

  There were many arguments in Clasheen that day as to whether the disease floated, invisibly, through the air, or whether it was some kind of poison in the soil. Nobody at this date had heard of the fungus phytophthora infestans, which arrived in Europe in the 1830s, probably in a diseased potato from North America. “If a man,” writes E. C. Large in The Advance of the Fungi, “could imagine his own plight, with growths of some weird and colourless seaweed issuing from his mouth and nostrils, from roots which were destroying and choking both his digestive system and his lungs, he would then have a very crude and fabulous, but perhaps an instructive, idea of the condition of the potato plant.” The people of Clasheen had no knowledge of this; all they understood was what they could see and smell: ruin.

  The potato is an extraordinary vegetable. Great quantities can be grown for a minute financial outlay; an acre and a half will feed a large family for a year. Pigs and cattle can also be reared on it. As a diet it is probably the most usefu
l food known to man: no other gives so much varied nourishment, and its taste does not pall. It is perhaps for these reasons that the population of Ireland grew far more rapidly than that of any other European country in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.

  Before the Famine emigration from Ireland was virtually unknown, so that by 1845 the country was almost literally swarming with people, most of whom were so poor that they had to live on a single food. For a nation to be forced to rely on one food is extremely dangerous; if it fails, what then? The potato was vulnerable because it could not be stored for long. It couldn’t then be pickled or preserved or frozen, and the Irish had nothing at all to replace it.

  “We are forming a Relief Committee,” said Mr Peacock, assuming his most pompous voice, “under the joint chairmanship of Father Quinlan and myself. Its purpose is to consider ways and means of helping those who may otherwise starve. We would be delighted, Mr Tangney, if you will serve on it.”

  “I would think it an honour,” said the blacksmith.

  “Dr Lenehan,” Father Quinlan said, “will serve too, and, we would hope, Mr Altarnun. But he was not at Eagle Lodge when we called, so, Michael, would you ask him on our behalf?”

  “Certainly,” Michael replied.

  “We are meeting at Dr Lenehan’s house at ten o’clock on Monday morning.”

  The two clergymen departed. “I must go too,” Michael said, when he had finished his dinner. “If the potatoes at Eagle Lodge have rotted, himself will be needing me.”

  “But you haven’t played the piano!” Margaret Tangney protested. “Why … you’ve not been with us two hours!” “Mother ― go out and see what has happened. There are whole families left with nothing.” At the door he stopped, turned, and looked at his parents and sister. “I promise that no one in this house will go hungry,” he said.

  “What talk is this?” his father answered. “We do not live on potatoes here!”