That was three years ago. Now when PJ tried to sneak in for a meal the older lads frequently chased him off before he even made it through the stone archway into the kitchen garden. With Sullivan’s death, an invisible sheltering wall around PJ had suddenly collapsed.
‘Want some grub?’ Cain, one of the teenage grooms, would shout, holding out a bacon-rasher rind or a boiled potato. ‘Come on, take it.’
PJ knew that this was more bait than charity but his hunger was so intense that he’d lunge forward in an attempt to get the food.
‘Jump!’ Cain said, raising his arm further above PJ’s head. ‘Higher now — can’t yiz do better than that?’
PJ increased his efforts while Cain laughed.
Food was not the only means the lads used to make PJ’s life miserable. ‘Look at here,’ one of them would bellow, and as soon as PJ turned, a stone or piece of dung would hit him full in the face. ‘Cry baby cry, stick a finger in yer eye!’ they’d shout as PJ’s eyes filled with tears.
Worse was when they started on about Mick. ‘Where’s yer grand Fenian joxer now?’ or ‘Tiddley tum, a bullet up his bum!’ the voices called after PJ in the stable yard or lane. Incensed, PJ would turn and, arms flailing, charge his tormentors. The youths, laughing at the ten-year-old’s furious response, would catch his whirling body and drag him face down along the muddied track to dump him in the horse trough or toss him into a patch of nettles.
PJ had loved Sullivan and his death was a grief that bore down on the boy, tainting everything with darkness. Of course neither the Royal Irish Constabulary nor the other workers knew that PJ had been part of the Fenian arms raid the night Sullivan was killed. Sunk in grief, PJ’s enthusiasm for work waned, and days and months passed with the boy skulking among the ruins of the old castle or wandering desolate about the boreens and hedges.
Sundays were what kept PJ going: on that day he walked the miles to Kingstown to share a tea of boiled eggs and soda bread with Mick Sullivan’s widowed mother. He never told her how bad things were, but now that she had gone, he wished he had. Some months previous, PJ had been sitting in Molly Sullivan’s kitchen fiddling with the pins in the faded pincushion. Molly was at the other side of the table altering one of Mick’s old jackets to give the boy.
‘You know, PJ, that I’m a nurse. That I go out and look after them sick ones.’
‘Haven’t you told me that?’
‘It’s like this, PJ. The gentleman I look after has a notion to leave Sandycove and go back to where he came from in the King’s County. Says he wants to die at Killeigh, where he can see them Slieve Bloom Mountains.’
‘And yiz are going, going with him?’
‘Ah PJ, I have no choice. Isn’t it my bread and butter?’
‘But I can still come Sunday to this there King’s County?’
‘God love you and aren’t I heart-scalded to say it, but it’s too far, too far to walk. It’s way down the country, right in the middle of Ireland, near Tullamore where the Grand Canal goes.’
‘Would yiz let me come with you, Mrs Sullivan?’
‘Sure, I would if I could. But the Hamiltons want a nurse not a mammy. Better to stay where you are at Kinross House, with a roof over your head and food on the table. And it won’t be forever. Haven’t the doctors said poor Mr Hamilton won’t last the season? I’m off on Tuesday and I’ll be back before the year closes in.’
PJ had just worked his way down one branch of the blackberries and was about to start on another when he heard them calling. He ran towards a rotting, upturned cart, hoping to hide as Cain and O’Toole came into view.
‘There’s the bloody little bugger,’ shouted Cain.
‘Yeer wanted, PJ.’
‘And yeer in trouble,’ said Cain, smiling slightly.
PJ stumbled on a stone projecting through the grass. O’Toole gave a flying leap and landed on top of him.
‘So the little gurrier has a notion to be off,’ said Cain. ‘Sure we can’t have him escaping now, can we, O’Toole?’
‘Jaysis, we cannot,’ said O’Toole, standing up and yanking the lad to his feet. ‘Have yiz got something for the restraining-like?’
‘I have now,’ said Cain, pulling some string out of his jacket pocket.
Good God, thought Frazer, as PJ, his mouth and chin stained purple, appeared in the stable yard, pushed along by Cain and O’Toole. Something certainly needed to be done about the boy; he’d become a damned nuisance. Never seemed to be about when there was work to be done, spent his time getting into fist fights with the older lads or sneaking about the place. Little wonder the colonel said to get rid of him: no gentleman would welcome his guests being confronted in the shrubbery or on the drive by glimpses of this filthy child with his torn clothing and bleeding feet. The boy was a helpful enough little tyke when Sullivan was alive but since then he’d gone to pieces. And now there was this bloody business of Kitty Flynn.
‘Well,’ said Frazer to PJ, ‘and what have you to say for yourself?’
‘What about, mister?’ said PJ, glancing up at Frazer and then looking at his own feet.
‘Ah, don’t give me that, lad,’ said Frazer, flicking the riding crop he held across the palm of his hand.
‘Sure, I don’t rightly know what yiz are talking about.’
‘Kitty Flynn,’ said Frazer. ‘Mrs Fitzgibbon’s maid.’
‘I’m not after knowing which wan she is, mister.’
‘Two pup Titty,’ said Cain, describing large breasts with his hands and smirking.
‘That’s enough bloody guff from you, Cain,’ said Frazer. ‘Well, just to jog your memory, PJ, Kitty Flynn has complained to the housekeeper that she is being spied on in her bedroom. And O’Toole and Cain here say they’ve seen you up there peeping.’
‘I never,’ said PJ.
‘Dirty little liar,’ said O’Toole. ‘It was Tuesday night, sure to God, and Cain and I had just come out to see to Juno’s foal and we saw yiz up there where the roof dips, squinting in under the shutters. And hasn’t Titty — just a slip of the tongue, Mr Frazer — hasn’t Kitty herself said she saw you?’
‘She said she saw an eye, though it beats me how she did if the shutters were closed,’ said Frazer.
‘Them shutters are broken a bit at the side,’ said Cain.
‘And how do you know that?’ said Frazer. ‘You’d need pretty good sight, my lad, to see a break in the shutter four floors up.’
‘Just speculation-like,’ said Cain, realising his mistake and beginning to panic.
‘Was it indeed?’ said Frazer.
‘Jaysis, Mr Frazer, I swear to God I didn’t do it,’ said PJ.
‘Maybe not,’ said Frazer, looking at the child and then at Cain and O’Toole. ‘And what have you two got to say?’
‘Haven’t we been after telling yiz, Mr Frazer, we were with Juno and the foal?’
‘Frankly,’ said Frazer, ‘I don’t bloody believe you. But you can have the benefit of doubt this time. But rest assured I’ll leather the daylights out of the lot of you if anything like this comes to my ears again. Do you hear that?’
‘We do, Mr Frazer,’ said O’Toole and Cain together.
‘And PJ, there’s something else,’ said Frazer.
‘I’ve done nothing, mister.’
‘We’ll let that rest, lad, but we’ve decided you can’t stay here any longer. You’re too young, you’re not pulling your weight and the colonel won’t have it.’
PJ looked at where he was moving one naked foot through the crescent of mud that separated the cobbles.
‘I’m told your parents died and you’ve no other family. Is that right?’ continued Frazer.
‘’Tis,’ said PJ.
‘Well, don’t worry, lad, we’ll find a home for you somewhere.’
A home. PJ didn’t say anything but he knew what that meant. It would be the Union workhouse in Dunhinch, as sure as eggs. And if there was one place in all Ireland he wasn’t going to, that was it.
PJ
’s father had been a day labourer, a spalpeen. He was away a lot, walking the neighbouring parishes carrying a shovel to dig potatoes, clear a ditch, make a trench. Sometimes there was work, sometimes there wasn’t. PJ’s parents lived in a cabin in a field. Once it had been a cow byre. There were no windows, and an opening in the thatched roof served for a chimney.
It was not the cabin that PJ liked to remember but the field outside full of cows. Every night just before sleep PJ would will himself back into that field with its thick smell of cattle. He would go back to a May afternoon when he was three or four years old. The sun was bright on the land and the field glowed green. PJ was lying on the ground. There were tiny blue flowers in clumps in the grass and he was looking at them very close up. His mother was making a daisy chain for him to wear. PJ wished he could remember his mother’s face or her hair, but he couldn’t. All that memory brought back to him were her pink hands holding the flowers and the way her little fingernail, which was very long, split the stems. Both of PJ’s parents had nails like that. They used them to peel potatoes when they ate them by the fire.
PJ tried not to think about the other memories: of his mother, of her crying out with birthing pains from the dark floor, or of all the babies that had died. He remembered being sent out to fetch Mrs Dempsey to bring a new baby into the world, and Father McMahon who gave the baptism and the last rites to help the little one out. PJ could hardly recall his father at all, except at the end. The last year the family had spent together was the worst. PJ’s father was out of work, an ill man coughing blood on the hay that served for bedding. ‘Destroyed,’ was what he said, and none could contradict him.
PJ and his mother would scour the fields for any forgotten potatoes but pickings were few. People nearby gave what they could — a turnip maybe, or a handful of oatmeal — but neighbours had little enough themselves.
It was early summer, the hardest time: the old potatoes long exhausted, the new far off. There was nothing to eat except the turf to stuff in your mouth when the hunger became unbearable.
‘The Union,’ PJ’s mother had said. ‘We’re going to the Union.’
‘Union?’ said PJ. ‘What’s the Union?’
‘Won’t you find out soon enough,’ said his mother, her eyes laden with tears.
When they climbed the stile by the gate PJ’s father put his arms around his wife’s waist, too weak to help himself over. He began to cough. Blood splattered the dandelion flowers.
They walked into the village, past the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the forge, the public house, the pump and the green. People they knew turned away as if to spare them shame. They walked past the rows of cottages and out of the village on the other side. PJ felt ill. The world of trees and grass fluttered oddly in the boy’s vision. His body ached. They walked for what seemed like a long way. And they stopped often, slumping against the hedgerows. Walking was hard work on an empty belly.
The Dunhinch workhouse rose up suddenly out of the fields, a small flock of heavy grey beasts. A group of two-storey, rectangular, stone buildings grouped around their own small church.
‘The Union,’ PJ’s mother had said.
‘The place of no return,’ said his father.
‘Hold your whist,’ said his mother. ‘At least there’ll be eats. Think of that, PJ — and there’ll be doctors for your da and won’t they give him medicines to make him well.’
‘A coffin, more like,’ said PJ’s father. ‘That’s all I’ll be getting. To think I’ve brought yiz to this.’
‘There’s no thinking about it,’ said PJ’s mother as she took her son by one hand and her husband by the other.
At the Dunhinch workhouse there were no seasons, no passage of time, or so it seemed. PJ had no idea how long he stayed. The family had been parted as soon as they were admitted and PJ never saw his parents again. Afterwards all he could remember was the muffled crying from the rows of boys on the low platforms of the long dormitory where he slept, the enforced silences, the loneliness. The loneliness was the worst.
It could have been a month — or a year — later when they told him his father was dead. And then again on another night, the housekeeper took PJ into her room at the end of the dormitory and said his mother, too, had gone ‘to be with her maker’. When PJ began to weep the housekeeper gave him a broken biscuit from a tin she kept on the mantelpiece. It was such an unimaginable treat PJ wasn’t able to put the biscuit in his mouth. His hands shook and his throat seemed closed over. All he wanted was his mother. His mother, sitting on the grass surrounded by tiny blue flowers, a daisy chain in her hands.
That night PJ decided to run away. His chance came several mornings later when the younger boys were sent to clear a field of stones. PJ asked to relieve himself and slipped into a group of hawthorn bushes on the hedgerow. On the other side of the trees was a ditch: PJ ducked into it. Crawling through the brambles he made his way along towards a spinney of trees. Once there he began to run and run.
PJ had no plan, no idea where he was or where he was running to. He just knew that he must go far away and not be seen. Fear of being returned to the workhouse drove him. He lived on milk he stole from cows — squirting it directly into his mouth as best he could — or eggs he found near houses, and late blackberries clinging to hedges. Once a tinker woman, who came on him asleep under a bridge, gave him a cup of bread and milk. Several times he was almost discovered. He cried a lot and slept little. He was exhausted, soaked, feverish and dropping with hunger: if he hadn’t got to the stables of Kinross House, to be found and fed by Mick Sullivan, he would have died within the month.
Now PJ owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in, an ancient satchel that Mrs Sullivan had given him and a half-crown piece. The satchel was PJ’s pride and joy. He kept it where he slept, at the far end of one of the disused stables, hidden in an old sack under a mound of straw. The half-crown, knotted in a handkerchief, was tied around his neck.
Mrs Sullivan had given both coin and satchel to PJ shortly after Mick had been shot. ‘I want you to have this,’ she said, taking down the satchel from the top of the press in her room in Kingstown, ‘to remember our Mick. He used it when he was at the Christian Brothers school. And haven’t I put something in it for you, PJ? Don’t I thank Our Lady every day that you were with poor Mick in his dying? Sure, I feel at times that in losing one son I was sent another.’
Inside the satchel was the half-crown. PJ, who had never in his life had any money, not so much as a farthing, looked at the silver coin with awe. ‘If it isn’t a fortune,’ he said.
‘’Tis little enough, God knows,’ said Mrs Sullivan.
In the months that followed, the coin hung around PJ’s neck, a comfort and a talisman, not something to be used. Hungry as he was, the thought of exchanging the money to buy a farl of soda bread or a drink of buttermilk seemed too far beyond experience to consider. Food was worked for, grown or gathered: not bought.
He pulled out the satchel from inside the sack and brushed some straw off of it. The leather, dark and battle-scarred as a conker, had a reassuring quality that made PJ think of Mick. Since Mick’s death, the boy had taken to talking to his dead friend. ‘Mick?’ said PJ, sitting in the straw. ‘Are yiz there?’ He was uncertain whether the church permitted speaking with the dead, other than saints. But as Mick was the nearest to a saint PJ had ever met, he decided to risk it. In the beginning the boy thought it better to pray to the Virgin first, tell her his problems, ask for a word with Mick, but as time went on he’d dispensed with this formality.
‘I’m going, Mick,’ said PJ. ‘Haven’t a dog’s chance if they put me in the workhouse. I’ll be making for yer Ma’s. Didn’t she say it was near Tullamore on the canal? It’s a desperate long way off and I’m knocked all of a heap just thinking of it. Don’t I need yiz, Mick, if yer not busy-like.’
A bar of sunlight lay across the floor. As PJ finished speaking a solitary swallow swooped through the brightness and vanished into the soft dar
kness of the barn. PJ crossed himself. He touched his throat to ensure the coin was still there, slung the empty satchel on his shoulder and went out into the courtyard. Making sure no one was about, he moved quickly behind the coach house, past the implement sheds and out onto the lane.
‘Now, run like hell,’ Mick’s voice said.
And PJ did.
Chapter 9
PJ walked along the towpath whistling. The canal was on one side of him and a field of cows on the other. The morning was silky with sunlight and buxom clouds, and PJ was feeling cheerful. His fear of capture and imprisonment in the Dunhinch workhouse had decreased with every mile he went. No one cared enough about him to look very far and once PJ had reached Sallins he knew he was free.
A flyboat on its way to Dublin came towards him. Pulled by a horse led along the towpath, the boat was crowded. People stood on the deck; through the portholes of the cabin PJ could see other passengers. They sat tightly around a table loaded with baskets, parcels, hatboxes and dressing cases.
‘Grand morning,’ said the driver.
‘Thanks be to God,’ said PJ as he moved off the path onto the grass, letting the horse pass.
When the canal reached the lock gates of Rathbeggan, PJ decided to go into the town and get something to eat. A group of Royal Irish Constabulary officers in their distinctive navy-blue uniforms were stopping men in the street. A troop of soldiers marched by, though PJ didn’t know which regiment they came from. Ever since the night of the Fenian arms raid, the night Mick had been killed, PJ felt a sense of dread when he saw such figures of authority. He ducked down an alley to avoid the main street and came to a row of cottages. A group of little girls was holding hands and running about in a ring. A woman with a shawl over her head was at a half door emptying a bucket; a man with a fighting cock in a harness was leading it along on a leather strap. There was a kitchen table outside one of the cottages and a woman selling large triangles of potato bread.
The Love Apple Page 11
