The Hunger

by David Rees

  The sermon over, the Mass continued in Latin. What does it all signify, Michael asked himself for the hundredth time. He knew the literal meaning of the words, of course, but did they contain any real meaning now? This constant arid repetition of syllables― the monotony had been going on for the best part of two thousand years ― like the words of a spell. It wasn’t so far removed from paganism or witchcraft. The supposedly purposive tropes said aloud ― Orate, fratres; Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare; Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi ― were merely indicators pointing to sites of importance in the fifth century, villages long since vanished and buried in grass, the only token that they had existed a green mound or a dried-up ditch.

  So, too, in a few years’ time, the present villages of Ireland: signposts would direct the traveller down lanes of almost impenetrable branches to communities quite dead, the inhabitants now in America or entombed under the soil of neglected graveyards, the cabins heaps of mud, the churches piles of broken stone.

  He pulled himself together. It was just before the Communion; Father Quinlan was raising the sacred host: Ecce agnus Dei. Where, Michael asked himself, did he now stand, coldly and logically, in relation to all this? He would examine his conscience, as the priest had suggested. The words of the Mass were hocus-pocus. He did not believe in the existence of a good and just God; there was too much inexplicable suffering and pain. Did that mean he believed in a vengeful God of retribution? No, though he took a while longer to dismiss that idea. If it caused no comment, no adverse reaction, would he come here at all? What would he do on a Sunday morning if he was in London or New York? Lie in bed in Anthony’s arms.

  That was all cold logic, but, like most of us, Michael did not act according to the dictates of his reason when it was in conflict with his feelings. He stayed till the end, not just because of the tongues that would clatter if he did not, but because he might be totally wrong. To attend Mass was an insurance policy. If he did not attend, there was still a chance that God could damn his immortal soul for disobedience, pride, and not fulfilling his Christian duty. But if God should now want to condemn him for the sexual nature of his relationship with Anthony, he would give the Almighty a short, sharp sermon on His inability to understand and to love. Even Father Quinlan had once said― admittedly codding over a glass of poteen ― that the Jehovah of the Old Testament was somewhat deficient in Christian compassion.

  Outside the church he greeted his parents. “Will you eat with us today?” Mr Tangney asked. “We have a chicken.”

  “Where in God’s name have you found a chicken?”.

  “Galway market. I bought it… I have sold some of the tools from my forge.”

  Michael softened. He had wanted to make an excuse, though it would have been difficult. Anthony was not at Eagle Lodge waiting for him to return; he was lunching at the Peacocks’ house. The minister needed advice with a letter he was sending to the authorities in Dublin, a request for help ― food or money, however little ― to keep the soup kitchen going. His own resources were trickling away, despite the stinginess of his wife’s recipes.

  “Very well,” he said. “Is it a special occasion?”

  “It is,” said his mother.

  Madge came out of the church, and went up to Dan. She saw the family group and turned away, but her father hurried across to her. Now what is going on, Michael asked himself. Eugene came back, Madge and Dan following. Madge looked pleased.

  “I cannot let them sail to the other side of the earth without my blessing,” Mr Tangney said, when he noticed the surprise on Michael’s face. “They go tomorrow and I shall never see her again. To part in some form of friendship… it is a small consolation.”

  Father Quinlan, as he walked by, smiling and nodding at his parishioners, said “I am glad to see you reconciled.” They stared at him, too embarrassed to answer.

  Special occasion it was, but there was little warmth and ease; too much had happened. But they were all polite, assiduous in ensuring that everyone had enough on their plates. Dan, feeling very awkward, was totally silent, but, Mrs Tangney said to herself, he does have remarkably good table manners. She and Madge kept the conversation going; it was mostly about the baby. “To think I shall have a grandson born thousands of miles off! And I never to see him!” Mrs Tangney said.

  “You may well see him,” said Madge. “You may follow us.”

  “Ah … now that would be hard.”

  “We shall call him Michael. It is a most fortunate choice, for Dan’s father and my grandfather have the archangel’s name. And my quiet brother sitting over there, though he does not deserve it.”

  “What if he is a girl?” her mother asked.

  “He will not be,” Madge said.

  Eugene belched, and said “Emigration will be the ruin of this country. The best of the men go, and the finest of the women.”

  “And the others are left here to rot,” Margaret said. “This island is accursed. How will we sing our songs and hand down our stories when there are none to listen? The music is broken. The words are broken.”

  “We shall keep the customs in the new country,” Madge answered. “We shall sing the songs in a strange land. No one will forget. The Irish have memories longer than the elephant’s.”

  “Of catastrophes,” her mother said. “Cromwell, King William, Wolfe Tone. Emmet.”

  “But remember the Races of Castlebar,” Michael said. “There is surely no cheering you today at all. Nor my father.”

  “You are right; there is not. The Races of Castlebar was a French victory, not to do with us. This house is broken. Madge disappearing for ever! It is a death sentence. I sometimes think sorrow will finish us all before the hunger.”

  “This is no way to talk!” Madge said. “There is always hope.”

  “Hope! What hope have we? You are young enough to start again; we surely are not.”

  “The chicken is good,” Michael said. “I have not eaten so well in weeks.” That ended the conversation. It is a death sentence, he thought. I shall not see her again. What will I do without her?

  When the time came for Madge and Dan to leave, it was scarcely possible to exchange good wishes, last words with her parents; there was too much emotion, too many tears. And I will have to go through a repetition of this tomorrow, Michael said to himself: he was travelling with them to Galway, as far as the quay where the ship was already at anchor, waiting.

  “This is terrible,” Dan said to him. “Terrible!”

  Michael left at the same time, ignoring his mother’s plea of “Don’t go just yet! Stay with us!”

  “I cannot,” he said. He had an overwhelming desire to be alone. He walked a short distance with Madge and Dan, then turned up a path that led between fields towards the mountains. He wanted to put his back to the ocean, to his parents’ house, to Clasheen. He too, he decided, would like to desert it all, to be gone for ever ― with Anthony. Where? How? He was surprised to hear the noise of trickling water; had in fact heard it all the while since he had left the road, but he had not heeded it. He noticed green patches of grass, buds in the hedges. The thaw had begun. The Great Frost was melting. “O winter! Bar thine adamantine doors!” he shouted aloud.

  And felt hope.

  TY Keliher was not the village idiot Michael thought him. He wasn’t mad, schizoid, retarded, autistic, brain-damaged: just slow and odd. He had no real friendships with his brothers and sisters or with any of Clasheen’s young people. He liked his own company, and he was at his happiest wandering about the countryside, pretending to hunt not only prehistoric elks but any sort of animal. Including humans. He was proud of his ability to be silent, stealthy, and cunning. He frequently stalked his own parents, the O’Leary kids, Dr Lenehan, Dan Leahy, Mrs Peacock, Michael and Anthony: none of them had ever spotted him.

  This successful espionage gave him all kinds of information that nobody else knew of: his father had a gold coin hidden in their thatched roof; the eldest Scannell boy was a thief; th
e Widow O’Gorman wore scarlet underwear and loved looking at herself in it. Ty lived through the Famine relatively unscathed and, when he reached adulthood, he emigrated to Canada where he became a fur trapper in the Yukon; he married, had two children and died during the First World War. Old, frail, and sick, a stroke finished him when he heard that his only grandson, a soldier in the Canadian army, had been killed at Vimy Ridge.

  Anthony and Michael he considered his prize catches. His curiosity had been aroused by the episode he had observed against the tree, and in the months afterwards he noticed similar occurrences ― the two of them holding hands, or standing in the garden with their arms round each other. Several times he peered through the windows of Eagle Lodge, at dusk before the curtains were closed, but he found nothing more unusual than one of them reading a book, the other washing dishes or watering a potted plant.

  Until the day ― at first he thought they were wrestling ― he saw them in front of the fire, making love. Two men. He was not the innocent now who could form no attitudes; he knew that what they were doing was supposed to be between a man and a woman. But he felt no horror, shame, or disgust. In fact, he was sexually aroused, and for the first time in his life he masturbated. As he made his way home he was more worried about what he had done than what he had seen. Playing with himself, now that really was wrong: the priest had said so.

  Father Quinlan, listening to the confessions of adolescent boys ― details of lies, fights, petty thefts ― was in the habit, if the boy had not mentioned anything sexual, of asking questions about lewd thoughts and impure desires. He was not being prurient, not satisfying his own impure desires; it was his duty to warn teenagers of the evils of the flesh ― particularly masturbation. He did not believe, as some Victorian tracts on the subject stated, that it caused warts to grow on the offending fingers, but he did believe like most of his contemporaries that it led to insanity or blindness, that it wasted the seed, made intercourse in marriage difficult, sapped bodily strength. Above all, it was a mortal sin, and it was incumbent on him to lead souls away from the dangers of hell-fire.

  Father Quinlan had asked the usual questions, but Ty didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Of course I do touch myself,” he said.

  “Whereabouts on the body?” the priest inquired.

  “Well… my face, my arms …”

  “No, no!” Father Quinlan was becoming impatient. “Lower down!”

  “My legs?”

  “No!” He thought for a moment. “Between the legs.”

  The penny dropped. “Father, you mean when it is stiff?”

  “Yes … I do mean … that.”

  “I do touch it. What is so wrong?”

  “What do you think about when you touch yourself … it?” There was a long pause. “Nothing,” Ty said. “Nothing I remember. It only feels … good.”

  “You do not think about girls at these moments? No impure desires?”

  “With respect, Father, what are impure desires?”

  It was useless, Father Quinlan decided, to go on with such questions. “It is very wrong, Timothy, to touch yourself there, however good it feels. It is a mortal sin. You know what a mortal sin is?”

  “I would go to Hell, Father, when I die.”

  “If you have not confessed it, yes. The purpose of that part of the body is to make children when you are married. It is a sin, a most displeasing sin in the eyes of the Lord our God, to play with it in any way, in any kind of situation, before you are married. It can lead to madness.”

  “People do say I am not right in the head now, Father.”

  “I’m sure that has nothing to do with what we are talking about.”

  “But… if I touched it… would it make me more mad?”

  “Yes. It certainly would.”

  Ty went off to say his five Hail Marys, petrified with fear. Was he crazier than he would have been because he had frequently touched it? How could he avoid touching it? For some time afterwards he didn’t even hold his penis when he urinated.

  Now he had seen two men touch, do a lot more than touch, and brought himself to orgasm, which, even if it was forbidden, was a marvellous sensation. Were Anthony and Michael mad, what they were doing a sign of madness? And he ― was he less right in the head than half an hour ago? He couldn’t tell.

  His spying at Eagle Lodge increased after this, and he was disappointed not to observe his catches making love on any of these occasions. He masturbated from time to time now, and began to have what Father Quinlan would call lewd thoughts about girls. He confessed these sins to the priest, who, he was amazed to discover, did not blast him with a torrent of angry words. He was told, rather wearily, not to do it again, to feel sorry for what he had done, and to say as a penance five Our Fathers, just as if he had confessed to a commonplace lie or to punching somebody on the nose. He worried continually about madness, however, and the size of his organ, which, limp or erect, was of prodigious girth and length. It seemed, after he masturbated, to be always a little larger than it was before. If he played with it too often, he reasoned, it might become so big that everyone would notice it and be aware of what he had been doing.

  Anthony and Michael were in no danger from him, direct danger that is. He never told anybody about his finds; they were his secrets, his captured animals, like those he was later to hunt in the New World. A girl wandering alone in the mountains might have been more at risk than were Anthony and Michael. Ty had his fantasies; would he or wouldn’t he dare? He sometimes saw courting couples (a clandestine relationship between two members of those warring families, the Leahys and the Cronins, had come under his scrutiny), but he rarely saw a girl wandering alone in the mountains. When he did he was so tongue-tied and so awkward he would dash off after bidding her good morning.

  Rape and attempted rape were virtually unheard of in Ireland. More than one female traveller of that period from England noted she could go anywhere and never be molested, quite the opposite of what could happen to her back home. Ty Keliher was a characteristic example of the repressed sexuality ― and the diffident gentleness ― of Irish men.

  THE attachment of the people to their country, however dreadful the conditions of life, and the considerable expense involved in crossing the Atlantic, made emigration from Ireland before the Famine very unusual. But a passage to Canada or the United States had recently become a great deal cheaper; ships bringing cargoes of timber to Europe needed something to transport back, both as ballast and to make the journey profitable. The passenger trade began.

  The United States at this time was not at all keen on opening its arms to hordes of poverty-stricken European immigrants, particularly the penniless, starving, fever-ridden Irish, so it raised the price of the fare, and imposed both a limit on the numbers of people a ship might carry and strict conditions concerning their health and comfort. But to travel in a British ship cost very little, and the few rules and regulations applying to numbers, health and comfort were almost universally ignored.

  Emigrants were crammed between decks; the crew was often drunk or incompetent; food and water were below subsistence level; a doctor was not required; sanitation was sometimes nonexistent. If there were passengers who already had the diseases that attacked the starving ― typhus, dysentery, relapsing fever ― everyone on board was at risk. In the Famine years thousands who left Ireland quite healthy became infected and died at sea or in the totally inadequate quarantine stations in Canada and the U.S.A.

  The ships themselves were often so leaky and old that many sank, with immense loss of life. At Westport a ship sank before it reached the open sea; nearly everyone drowned, watched by an appalled multitude of friends and relatives who, less than an hour previously, had been saying good-bye to those who were now shrieking for help.

  When Madge and Dan decided to leave, the exodus was at its height. They were unaware of the horrors the voyage might produce, and torn, sad, and distressed though they were to go, they kept themselves cheerful by thinking th
at once they arrived in America all would be well. “Why, you can have a plot there so big you have difficulty seeing its edges!” Dan said. “And you don’t rent it; you buy it for next to nothing! Sometimes nothing at all. If nobody is living there you just claim it for yourself. We’ll be rich in no time and sending the money back for the rest of the family to follow.”

  “I wouldn’t be happy with the Indians,” Michael said. “In the United States there is a different meaning to scalp.”

  “You are codding us, brother,” said Madge. “It is a land of milk and honey. A land fit to have children in.”

  They had no knowledge of the conditions in America they would have to face; they were as naive as kids who think the streets of New York are paved with gold. Michael knew nothing either, and Anthony very little, so they had no one to dampen their enthusiasm or to prepare them for the shock of reality.

  Their last night in Ireland was spent with Michael at the grocery shop in Galway where Noreen, the married sister, lived. As they went along the streets to the harbour, Michael said to himself: “Seaport views which landmen love to see.” He had been reading Crabbe. But this seaport was not as he remembered it. Where once there were well-dressed men and women on their way to a fair or to buy produce at the market, thin, pinched beggars in rags, their faces grey and skeletal, now grubbed in gutters or heaps of rubbish for a scrap of food. Shops were closed and derelict. Crowds sat in the squares or on the steps of churches, doing nothing, seeing nothing; defeat and hopelessness in their eyes.

  Everywhere there was filth, disease, squalor: it was as if the heart of the city was dead. A disgusting stench of decay drifted from all the courtyards and alleys. A few feet in front of them an old, tottering broomstick of a man fell down and did not get up. People tried to help him, but he waved them away. “The fever is upon me,” he said, and they shrank back. “I may as well rot here,” he mumbled, “as anywhere.”