by Anne Doughty
Long ago, in a cottage opposite the forge at Salter’s Grange, he’d broken it to Rose that he was going to America carrying letters for the Land League. A year later, after he and Eva had fallen in love, he had told Rose and John he was going back to America. He’d spoken with such sadness of the Ireland he was leaving that John, usually so silent on matters of feeling, encouraged him by suggesting he might achieve more for Ireland in America than he’d ever achieved in Ireland itself.
Sam poured himself more tea, smoothed out the letter, ready to read it again and then sat looking up at the sky. In the world’s terms, he had been successful. He’d worked hard and bought small pieces of land on the outskirts of New York with his savings. When he’d begun to sell them, to help his sons and daughters set up their own homes or businesses, twenty years later, he’d been truly amazed at the extraordinary sums of money he’d been offered.
But making money was not what he’d set out to do. Sometimes he wondered whether he would have been able to achieve some satisfaction through philanthropy had he put his mind to making money, but the question was academic. He hadn’t made the huge sums that would have made a real difference, like Rockefeller or Carnegie, nor had his work for the labour movement produced the growth in numbers and activity needed to lift thousands of workers out of abject poverty in a flourishing land.
He pushed away his sad thoughts and took up the letter.
Ballydown
10th May, 1913
My dear Sam,
I was so delighted to get your long letter and know that you and all Mary’s family are finally well again. John and I have both recovered though his cough went on for weeks. Little Hugh caught a chest infection when he went back to school and was too ill to come home again. Sarah went and stayed with friends in Lisburn until he was over the worst, but it upset her badly. She’s not like her old self at all at the moment.
I must tell you that you’ve become a great-uncle, yet again, up in County Armagh. Martha had a little girl last week. That makes eight. I sometimes wonder if losing her first two children so soon after birth made her determined to show everyone how good she really is at rearing children. I have to say they are all remarkably healthy though it still breaks my heart to see them running barefoot in winter when it is not necessary.
What news from Pennsylvania, Sam? Is Patrick still planning to visit Eva’s family in Germany? Are you still concerned that his visit is political and that he’s not telling you the half of it, as John and I would say? What do you think of the situation in Germany at the moment?
As for our own country, I sometimes despair. Given the way all the young men here are flocking to the Ulster Volunteers, it is hardly surprising that Brendan and young Sean have joined the Irish Volunteers, especially as you say the Gaelic League is so active in Donegal. It seems as if our poor island is turning itself into two opposing camps, while all the time the news from Germany becomes more and more alarming. Sometimes I just try to give thanks that all is well for the moment, though often it’s difficult when John comes in with a long face and not a word out of him till he’s put the day behind him.
I’ve been meaning to ask you about Lily since your last visit to Dublin. Did she have her pictures hung at the Academy? I think they are very good, but then I am totally captivated by her way of representing sea and sky. I was so delighted when she sent me the watercolour of Currane Lodge she’d promised me. Can one really be objective about pictures of places one has once loved? Do you think it is our advancing age that makes us so willing to collect up fragments from our past?
You asked me how Helen and Hugh had resolved the problem of your name, following your relocation. Sarah tells me she overheard a most serious conversation in which Helen insisted that you were still Uncle Sam America because you hadn’t changed, only where you lived. Hugh, ever logical, disagreed. Uncle Sam Richhill had become Uncle Sam, Liskeyborough, when he moved, he said, so therefore you had to be Uncle Sam Donegal. As always, in such matters, Hugh carried the day.
Now, my dear, I must stop. I have been turning my back on a number of jobs and if I leave them much longer I can be sure my sins will find me out, the weeds in my flowerbed will be even further entrenched, there will be no clean shirts and only crumbs left in the cake tin.
A shaft of sunlight struck the surface of the table. The clouds were now dispersing in all directions. It was going to be a good day after all. He cleared away his breakfast dishes, made neat piles of his papers, tidied his books, walked out the back door and climbed the dozen steep steps he and Brendan had cut and laid with stone one windy day the previous autumn.
From the top, he could look out over his own slate roof, but he strode on up the narrow path he had trodden day by day to the fence which bounded the mountain land where he kept the sheep in summer. He leant on a stout corner post and surveyed the whole of the countryside spread out before him. To his right, the great hump of Muckish Mountain was still wisped with cloud, but the valley below was bathed in sunlight, his own small fields and those of his neighbours green with new growth, dotted with sheep and the sturdy crop of lambs the mild winter had brought. To his left, the rough trackway that passed his own front door led down to the coast. He shaded his eyes from the dazzling light and saw the dark blue waters of Sheephaven still ribbed with white horses from the strong wind that had wakened him in the night, whistling and roaring round the eaves.
He climbed over the fence, scrambled up a slab of rock and found himself in the eye of the breeze. On this exposed point, it threw locks of red hair across his forehead and made his eyes water but long ago, he’d accustomed himself to wind and cold. He looked around him once more and listened carefully.
From somewhere up near Muckish, he heard the harsh cry of ravens soaring in the uprush of air that rose all along the flanks of the great, bare mass of rock, its sides scarred and seamed like an ancient creature, the survivor of many battles. He smiled, satisfied.
The fuchsia bushes surrounding the house were recovering from the fierce pruning they’d needed when he first began work. Soft new growth concealed the saw cuts that had opened up the path and let the wind dry out the sodden earth. Soon there would be a mass of blood-red tassels swinging in the breeze. Already on the mountainside below him, orchids bloomed in the grassy spaces between the heather covered peat hags. Where the rock broke through the thin soil, milkwort, thyme and silverweed had found a place, plants he had never even heard of till he saw them at his feet and bent to look at their delicate colours and bright faces.
‘Uncle Sam Donegal,’ he said, smiling to himself, as he looked around him.
Whether it was the soughing of the breeze or his preoccupation with his own thoughts he wasn’t sure, for he had heard no sound, but suddenly, there at fence was Brendan, the youngest of his sister’s children. Now in his mid-twenties, short and robust with a shock of straight, black hair, Mary always said Brendan was the image of their father. Sam took her word for it, for he had no memory at all of Patrick McGinley, only of Rose and Hannah, his mother.
‘Well, have ye still a mind to go?’ Brendan asked, as Sam climbed down from his perch, tramped through the rough grass and climbed back over the fence to greet him.
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding vigorously. ‘Isn’t it going to be a great day? Did your father lend you the trap all right?’
‘He did. He said if we went, it wou’d make him sit in the back room and do up his books. Shure he’d far rather be out.’
Sam laughed as they made their way down to the road where the tethered pony stood nuzzling the new grass by the gatepost.
‘Ma made us sandwiches and cold tea,’ Brendan announced, as Sam pulled shut the front door and pocketed the key.
‘That was good of her,’ Sam replied warmly. ‘Did you ask her to come herself?’
‘Oh I did, aye,’ he replied, nodding vigorously. ‘Sure ye told me to be sure an’ ask, but she said no, that maybe Aunt Rose wou’d come if she were here, but no, she diden want t’ go.�
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The journey took much longer than Sam had expected. What the map he had studied could not tell him was how broken and potholed the tracks were after the frost and rain of winter. Where they served a scatter of farms, they’d been roughly mended, but where houses stood empty, the thatch grass-grown, the bushes run wild, then their progress was slow, the holes neglected for many a year, filled now with rainwater from the previous night’s storm.
It was a rough and bumpy ride, but the freshness of the day, the warmth of the sun and the brilliance of the morning sky made up for their discomforts.
‘Will we give her a bit of a rest?’ asked Brendan, as they crossed the Calaber Bridge and joined the road that turned east.
Above them the curved slopes of the Derryveagh Mountains were crossed with the straight lines of the deer fences which surrounded the Glenveagh estate. The road eastwards was well-mended for the benefit of the coaches and the motors of those who were invited to visit the Adair castle down by the lake.
They sat on the parapet of the bridge, the countryside brilliant in the morning light, silent, but for the noisy babble of the river below and the cheeping of finches flying from bush to bush in small oscillating flights. Even through his tweed jacket, Sam could feel the sun’s warmth on his shoulders.
He watched Brendan scanning the mountainsides, his eyes half closed against the light.
‘There was a golden eagle here last year,’ the young man said suddenly. ‘One of the gamekeepers told Da. But sure it stayed by the lake where the feedin’s good an’ the likes of us aren’t welcome,’ he added bitterly.
Sam smiled wryly as he got to his feet. For all the struggles of the Land League and the Land Acts that had given opportunities for tenant farmers to buy their land, there were still these vast estates, owned by people so rich they could afford to run a castle and dozens of square miles of mountain and lough simply for the hunting or the entertainment of guests in summer.
Adair himself was dead but it was said his wife loved the place. With her income from the Adair estates in Texas, she could afford to keep up a holiday castle.
‘She does provide some employment,’ Sam said steadily, ‘and I hear she’s not as indifferent to starvation as her husband was,’ he added wryly, as the two of them climbed back up into the trap.
‘I’ve been this far with m’ Da,’ said Brendan, some time later, as they rounded a corner and found themselves looking along the length of Lough Gartan, calm and shimmering in the noonday sun. ‘But I don’t know m’ way from here.’
‘We go right here towards Glaskeelan Bridge,’ said Sam, consulting a small notebook. ‘Provided we find the bridge we’re on our way. The track runs the whole length of the lough, but Ardtur is only just over halfway.’
They heard the river before they saw it. Swollen by heavy rain in the previous week, it poured down the hillside, collecting small streams from the sodden vegetation as it went. The brown, peat-stained waters had spread wide on each side of the single arched bridge, but the roadway itself was dry.
Apart from signs of repairs to the deer fence, there was no mark of human hand on the lower slopes of the mountains or on the damp margins of the lough. Everywhere, bushes and moisture-loving trees, newly-leafed, gleamed in the sunlight. On bare mossy banks, primroses bloomed prolifically, ivy and bramble scrambled over low stone walls and the golden flare of gorse blazed out against the dark residues of last autumn’s heather. Already tall, the vivid green branches of young bracken were beginning to unfurl.
‘Have ye any idea where yer goin?’ Brendan asked, as he slackened the reins and let the pony pick its own way on the grass-grown track.
‘Well, there was a school,’ said Sam doubtfully, as he ran his eye over the rush-filled land to their right where no trace of habitation could be seen. ‘It would have been on the left,’ he added, waving his arm towards a cluster of hawthorns whose creamy blossom was just beginning to show white on the green branches.
The track steepened. They got down from the trap and Brendan led the mare, his eyes still seeking any sign of human life in the prolific but unpeopled landscape.
‘There it is,’ said Sam suddenly, his voice high with excitement.
‘Where?’ demanded Brendan, who could see no trace of a building of any kind.
Sam beamed at him as he strode ahead and hurried up the slope.
‘The apple tree,’ he said, waving his arm in triumph. ‘Rose told me a man who only spoke English came and planted it at the gable end. There it is. Would you look at the size of it!’
Brendan caught up with him. High above their heads, its crown rising above the birches and elderberries, the pale grey twigs were newly leafed. Here and there, where the morning sun shone most directly on the low, sheltered branches, tight pink buds were already beginning to open.
‘It was here all right,’ said Sam, kicking his way through the undergrowth. ‘Look, here’s one corner. They must have missed this bit. You can see where even the foundations have been dug out for the stone.’
‘And this was where Ma and Aunt Rose went to school?’
‘Yes, it was a brand new National School. They came in different sizes. This one was the smallest. I’ve seen the specifications in the Public Records Office in Dublin,’ Sam explained. ‘But it only lasted two years,’ he added, as he turned his back on the apple tree, ran a practised eye back and forth across the track and the low stone wall bounding it.
‘Why? Why was that?’
‘Adair,’ he said abruptly, as he considered the overgrown fields beyond. ‘If you evict all the families, there’ll be no children left. No need for the school. I wonder who it was carted away the stone and what they built with it.’
‘May he rot in Hell,’ said Brendan softly, as he followed Sam across the roadway and along the side of an overgrown stonewall that joined it at right angles.
After a short distance, Sam struck to his right, heading for a small bracken-covered eminence.
‘Where are ye goin’?’ Brendan protested, as he struggled to follow him through the undulating ground. ‘’Tis desperate rough goin’.’
‘Spade rigs,’ said Sam without stopping, as he pushed through the thigh-high bracken and made a beeline for the highest point of the low rise.
Brendan watched patiently as Sam kicked his way through patches of nettles and brambles and walked up and down, casting an eye first towards the school, then towards the piled up stone boundary wall which ran along the foot of the mountain itself. He stopped eventually on a slight rise covered with shorter grass.
‘Here, Brendan, here,’ he said at last, dropping to his knees and studying the ground in front of him. He took out his penknife and made three long shallow cuts. Then he peeled back the sod like rolling up a mat and revealed a broad, smooth-worn stone. On either side of it, half hidden in brambles were the fragments of two rotten posts.
‘That’s the doorstep of your grandfather’s house,’ he said firmly, as he rubbed soil from his hands and stood up. ‘Part of what we walked across would have been his potato garden. And over there,’ he went on, pointing to where bleached, straw-pale heads of last year’s corn stood swaying in the breeze, ‘is where he kept a horse or pony.’
He looked back again the way they had come, his eyes half-closed in the bright light, his arm waving in a leisurely way.
‘Where the grass is shortest is where the street was. The houses weren’t lined up, they were set at angles to each other,’ he began. ‘Nettles thrive on human waste, so where the nettles are thickest is where the barns were. You can see a patch at the back of each house and this one here, McGinley’s, is just a wee bit higher than its neighbours. Rose remembered that from the day she set off to climb the mountain to see what was on the other side. She stood and looked back and she still remembers everything she saw, even the apple tree at the school gable.’
‘So what happened all these people?’ Brendan asked sharply.
‘Did your mother never tell you?’
&
nbsp; ‘No, she always said it was better forgotten. She told me Granny took you and Auntie Rose to Kerry and my two uncles went back to Scotland after Granda died. I know one of them went on to Nova Scotia. But she didn’t know where any of the neighbours went.’
‘Those that survived,’ Sam added automatically.
Brendan looked startled.
‘Do you really want to know?’ he went on, raising an eyebrow.
Brendan nodded and sat down on one side of the newly-excavated doorstone. As he waited for his uncle to seat himself on the other, it occurred to him that this must be a very strange homecoming for the older man. Of it being also a homecoming of his own, he was completely unaware.
‘I was a babe in arms when it happened, so I’ve no memory at all of my own,’ said Sam, twisting a stem of grass between his fingers. ‘But your Aunt Rose has never forgotten that day. She remembers how cold it was and how she knew something was wrong, but nobody would tell her. She saw Ma and Da out talking to a neighbour and watched a lad they knew bringing news from further up the valley where the evictions started.’
He shook his head and smiled.
‘She was only eight and so small for her age, they put her in the wee turf cart with me and a few odds and ends of food and kindling. She says they just walked away when Adair’s man told them to get out. Your Granny told them all they were not to look back.’
‘And they destroyed the house?’
‘Oh yes. In other parts of the country where they pulled the roof off or knocked down the walls, the people came back and lived in the ruins. A bit of a wall’s better shelter than nothing. Adair’s men had orders to do a good job. He didn’t want anyone sneaking back when they’d gone.’
