The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  Mad, it occurred to me, was too gentle a term. A man stood talking about supernatural swine and other men stood listening to him. O’Donnell listened with a superior smile, but his eyes revealed that a corner of his mind attended the swirling words.

  “In the Valley of the Black Pig Ireland will be lost and won,” O’Donnell said. “It is a valley somewhere in Ulster, but no one knows where. Dead heroes will rise up out of the earth.” His heavy shoulders gave a slight shudder which he sought to suppress.

  Duignan was speaking in Irish now, to the relief of his listeners. They had fallen silent.

  “He has it all confused in his mind with what is happening now,” O’Donnell said. “That is how those fellows work upon simple people. Would you look at them standing there with their gobs hanging open? He knows how to play upon them. By God, we are a simple people. He says that a terrible battle has been fought at the place of the pig and the ground is dyed red with the blood of the people. Ballinamuck, that is, in Irish. The place of the Pig.”

  The word now bristled with intelligibility in the fool’s torrent of Irish. It came again and again—Ballinamuck—Ballinamuck.

  “Is that in Ulster?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. There must be a score of places with that name.”

  One of the men seized Duignan by the shoulder and shouted at him and Duignan shouted back.

  O’Donnell laughed. “The clever rogue. They want to know if the battle was won, and Duignan says he doesn’t know. What he knows came to him . . . in . . .” He hesitated for a word.

  “In a dream?”

  “A dream or a vision. Something like that.” O’Donnell drew the drapery across the window. “There will be a battle fought somewhere,” he said, “and that fellow will be able to turn it to account. They will keep him in drink for weeks.”

  In this extraordinary and inexplicable manner the news first came to us of the battle at Ballinamuck. I have cudgelled my brain to recall the exact date, for I reason thusly: Somewhere to the south, Duignan had learned of the battle, and cleverly stitched it to the rambling old tale of the black pig. That tale is, as I have learned, a very old one, being part of the body of Fenian lore that stretches back into the dark ages. And yet Ballinamuck is but a hamlet, and so for weeks afterwards it was to be spoken of throughout Ireland as the battle of Longford. And I have also a strange, persistent thought that Duignan came to Killala and spoke outside my window before ever that battle had been fought. This surely cannot have been the case, and I regret that I did not keep a journal during those days. My mind no doubt is playing tricks upon me, and small wonder, with the many grievous weights which had been placed upon it. Yet if these answers fail, what others remain? There are times even now when I look out from the same window upon a village street once again slumbering in its quiet decay and remember the mad prophecy man. In my imagination his voice breaks the silence . . . Ballinamuck . . . Ballinamuck. And I am touched by that icy hand which the occult can fasten upon us.

  “He may have been a schoolmaster once, poor devil,” O’Donnell said. “He has the marks of learning upon him.”

  Carrick, Mid-September

  About seventy rebels survived the slaughter at Ballinamuck, but the numbers in prison increased each day as patrols brought suspects into Carrick. All were housed in a large grain warehouse at the river’s edge with circular barred windows set high against thieves. A few of the new arrivals were indeed rebels who had escaped across the bog or who had contrived to desert on the night march to Cloone. But the greater number had been seized upon suspicion or the accusations of loyalists—shebeen braggarts and faction fighters, a half-mad singer who nursed a smashed fiddle, a doctor and a grazier who held “advanced” notions, a squireen with a stock of quotations from Tom Paine and a Papist wife.

  At first the squireen, Dominick Vesey of Carrick House, demanded legal counsel, but he gave that up and now sat dispirited with the doctor and the grazier, a small circle of gentility. What would be done with them or with the survivors of Ballinamuck, no one knew, neither the prisoners nor the Irish militiamen who guarded them. MacCarthy and Geraghty had been marked for return to Mayo when the army moved north, and this gave them a distinction which was almost enviable. The others hung in limbo, innocent and guilty alike. Innocence was battered like a twig in a rapid stream. All were conscious of being imprisoned, a stain accidental and deep.

  It was an airy prison. A tall man, stretching to his full height, could look out upon the river and the wooded fields on the far shore. Often a gentleman rode down the path which followed the riverbank, hat cocked to one side, coattails falling away from the saddle. He could ride where he chose, that gentleman, to fairdays and market days, walk into a tavern and rap his shilling on the oak. As far distant as Chinamen, or black, barefoot Africans.

  Geraghty’s arm had been shattered at Ballinamuck. MacCarthy ripped laths from the wall and bullied the doctor into setting it.

  “I have had no traffic with treason,” Doctor Cumiskey said. “I would be a free man walking the streets of Carrick but for the spite of my neighbours.”

  “You have traffic with it now,” MacCarthy said. “And you should keep your hand in at your profession. You never can tell.”

  Geraghty sat patiently as Cumiskey wound strips of shirting around his arm.

  “This fellow here,” Cumiskey said. “Does he have any English at all?”

  “He does not. ’Tis as dark a mystery as the language of the ancient Egyptians.”

  “I had the misfortune to serve as secretary in Leitrim for the Catholic Committee. An entirely lawful engagement. And after that I took no part in public affairs. I was never a member of the United Irishmen. I spoke out against them.”

  “You’ve persuaded me,” MacCarthy said. “When you have the arm set, rap on the door and tell them to let you go.”

  “It is a different matter for you. I have a wife and two little girls, one of them just learning to read. They came to my surgery and hammered on the door. I thought they had come for help with their own wounded.”

  “I know,” MacCarthy said.

  “What in the name of God have I in common with a wild omadhaun like this one, ravaging and killing out of the wastes of Mayo?”

  “Think about that one. The answer may come to you.”

  Cumiskey gave a practised tug to the cloth and then knotted it. “My God, Mr. MacCarthy, my home is in this very town. I could walk to it in ten minutes. It is as though Hell had opened up and dropped me into it.”

  MacCarthy looked into Geraghty’s stolid face. “It will mend as good as new now,” he said in Irish. Geraghty shrugged. MacCarthy stood up. Bitter to be penned here and think of a daughter learning to read, her fingers moving over the letters, symbols that held wonder, mystery. The power of beauty was locked in them.

  “We brought this upon you,” he said to Cumiskey. “It was none of your making.”

  “Indeed it was not. Nor of anyone I know.” He had been neat when he came to the warehouse; now grey stubble covered his cheeks, and his coat was streaked with dirt.

  “This began at the edge of the world,” MacCarthy said, “with men wild from cruel treatment and tall-masted ships from France.”

  He walked away, picking his path between men sitting with slack shoulders on the flagstone floor. Cumiskey followed him.

  “The Catholic Committee were loyal subjects of the Crown. We were drawn from the most respectable classes, solicitors and doctors. Merchants with a stake in the community. We sought only a redress of our many grievances, in a peaceable and constitutional manner. Our address to the Crown spoke cheerfully of our loyalty to King George.”

  “Excellent,” MacCarthy said. “The King will not forget you in your time of trouble.” He shrugged himself against the wall.

  “You hedge schoolmasters will have much to answer for,” Cumiskey said. “Teaching bog-Latin and sedition. You call that education, do you not?”

  “I don’t know what I call it. It
is what I have.”

  “Stuck in the past like a calf in a bog. Some of us were proving ourselves as civilised as any Protestant. And then you bring wild peasants down upon us from mountainy wastes.”

  “Good God, man. There is no special virtue in living on flat land. It wasn’t these lads turned the militia on you, it was your civilised Protestant neighbours. ’Tis tired I am of your reproaches, and I begin to think that they are too high a price to pay for the setting of Michael Geraghty’s arm.” He drew up his own arm suddenly, and rubbed the back of his hand along his cheek.

  Cumiskey leaped back a pace. “Go on so. Strike me. What other argument has a hedge master when his store of tags is empty.”

  “I have no wish to strike you, Dr. Cumiskey, but I wish to Jesus you would get back where you belong, with Mr. Vesey and your friend the grazier. It is sick at heart I am, and I need no terrier to pull at my stockings.”

  Suddenly Cumiskey’s anger collapsed. “I am sick at heart myself, Mr. MacCarthy, and frightened as well.”

  “We are all frightened,” MacCarthy said. “The room stinks with our fear.”

  “What was it for, Mr. MacCarthy? Can you tell me that, at least? Peasants and Frenchmen cutting Ireland open like a knife wound.”

  MacCarthy shrugged. “It was all written out in a proclamation. The French brought it with them, together with a green flag.”

  Last seen on the bog, a body half hiding it, the colour of hope.

  After that Cumiskey and Vesey and the grazier, Hickey, made a place for MacCarthy in their conversations, but they were always aware of his guilt and of their own innocence. They would not be long imprisoned. Placed there by hate and hysteria, they would in time be released. “The King,” “Lord Cornwallis,” “Mr. Grattan,” “Counsellor Curran,” vague, beneficent deities filled their speech, guardians destined to discover the wrongs they had suffered. But at times, in bold whispers, they would praise the rebels.

  “Jesus, boy,” Vesey said, “you gave it to them at Castlebar. I have no use for your cause, but you gave it to them at Castlebar.”

  “I have no cause,” MacCarthy said.

  Geraghty was interested in the life of the prison, learning the name of each arrival and the circumstances of his arrest.

  “I declare to God, Owen, they will not rest until they have every man in Ireland inside a gaol.”

  Edmund Spenser’s plan.

  “This could be worse,” MacCarthy said. “ ’Tis a terrible gaol they have in Clonmel, and the gaoler is a brute. I spent a month there and I came out half dead.”

  “What in God’s name ever landed you there?”

  “Mischief. ’Twas years ago and I a young lad. There was a lad there not much older than myself that they took out and hanged. I made a song for him.”

  “When we are back in Mayo they might let my wife come to the gaol.”

  “Yes,” MacCarthy said.

  “They might.”

  “If she has let the harvest waste I will take a stick to her. I declare to God I will.”

  Vesey the squireen was turned loose, upon the intercession of friends, and left the warehouse much subdued, not a swagger left in him. Prison had wrung out his quotations from The Rights of Man. His place was taken by a wild-eyed lad who had drifted south from Roscommon, a boaster in taverns that he had done wicked deeds with the rebels. Geraghty despised him.

  “He chose a poor time for his boasts,” MacCarthy said. “Let you wait a few years. You won’t strike a road in Connaught without some rambler on it telling you he was with the Whiteboys or the United Irishmen.”

  “Before this thing I was never ten miles beyond the baronies,” Geraghty said.

  Nightfall, and the dip of the road into an unknown village, a tavern waiting with tumblers of whiskey and men to hear his songs. Unfamiliar hills dark against the sky.

  “You had the best of it,” MacCarthy said. “Your own fields waiting for you in the morning.”

  “I do,” Geraghty said. “I do have the best of it.”

  The round window with its rusted bars drew MacCarthy to it for hours at a time. Down along the river road labourers would walk at evening, without haste, the evening air cooling sweat-soaked shirts. Or that gentleman whose hat was always cocked to one side, saying “Damn you” to the world, “I have a horse and a well-brushed hat and a gold watch.” The river which separated him from them flowed toward Munster. The spacious Shannon, spreading like a sea: Edmund Spenser, exterminator and poet.

  Cumiskey joined him at the window, precise and fussy, no brushing could keep the prison grime from his trim brown coat. Local savant, organiser of petitions, civilised as any Protestant.

  “You are not a Mayo man yourself, Mr. MacCarthy. Your accent speaks to that.”

  “Kerry,” MacCarthy said. “I was born near Tralee.”

  “The classical kingdom. A great nursery for schoolmasters.”

  “And poets,” MacCarthy said.

  “All of the island breeds poets,” Cumiskey said. “Oliver Goldsmith. ‘Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain.’ The Deserted Village. You must know it.”

  “Yes,” MacCarthy said. “I have a better knowledge of poetry in Irish.”

  “You have the better of me there.” Had he snuff left, he would have taken a sniff of it, brown flecks resting on downturned wrist. “It is still being composed in the rural areas. Very beautiful, some of it.”

  Beyond the river, a magpie rose, black and white, low-flying.

  “Some of it,” MacCarthy said.

  “Have you ever thought of producing English versions of the best of it? So that it might become better known to the educated public.”

  Where was the second magpie? One for sorrow, two for joy. A small boy sat beside his father on a Kerry ditch and studied the flight of birds. I heard that said by my father, boy, your grandfather, and he was as full of wisdom as an egg is full of meat. Wonderful that wild creatures of the air should carry messages to men, warn them of changing fortune.

  “My grandfather could rattle away in Irish whenever he chose,” Cumiskey said. “His English was perfect, of course. He needed Irish to deal with the labourers.”

  “Of course,” MacCarthy said.

  Words wedded to spade and furrow, intricacies of sound tethered to the dark soil.

  Lying at night near the Killala men, he heard their voices speak in the cadences which had shaped his world. To speak in English was to wear another man’s coat, stiff against shoulders and back. Doctors spoke it, middlemen, shopkeepers, lawyers. Someday soon, in Castlebar, they would use it to sentence him. English did the world’s work, set broken bones, made laws and books. Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain. English shattered us. We live in a pool of darkness at the edge of the world. A poem by O’Rahilly leaped into his mind, austere, sardonic. A world flowered within its turnings. Labourers used it. Lying in darkness, he recited poetry in soft whispers, unheard, O’Brudair, O’Rahilly. Beyond them he saw taverns, valleys, massive keeps on Kerry headlands, the swift feet of dancers.

  Martin Brady, the singer with the broken fiddle, was a poor misfortunate creature, not right in his head. The yeomen found him singing rebel songs in a crossroads tavern, but he might as easily have been singing “Bumpers, Squire Jones,” or “The Loyal Briton.” His luck had run out. Whatever the company desired, he had it for them, and a clear, light tenor voice to sing it with. He was a scrawny man, with a frame built for more flesh than he carried, long, gesticulating arms, and narrow feet that were never at rest. Lank black hair matted his face and fell beneath his collar. A musket butt had smashed in the fiddle, but he held on to it, swearing that he knew a man in Athlone who could repair it. At night or in the long afternoons, motes dancing in beams from the windows, he would sing quietly. Few heeded him.

  “I have songs of yours,” he told MacCarthy. “ ’But when I’m drinking, I’m always thinking—’ ”

  “I did it in Irish and then in English,” MacCarthy said, “to see could
I catch how the sounds moved. A foolish notion it was.”

  Brady’s songs were a patchwork of English and Irish, like an old coat. MacCarthy could see him by tavern hearth, black eyes darting beneath matted hair. “Come on now, boys, what will you have? ‘The Coolin,’ is it?” Or in the kitchen of big house or strong-farm. “Not a song you can name that I haven’t it locked in this fiddle. Name it and I’ll turn the key.” Had they escaped from the smashed fiddle, battalions and regiments of sound rushing out from the shattered wood? There was magic in a fiddle. It had a life of its own.

  “Listen to this one,” he whispered to MacCarthy. “There has no one heard it yet. I have carried it all over this county.” He leaned back his head and closed his eyes. Adam’s apple bobbed to his prefatory swallow.

  “Have you heard of the battle of Ballinamuck,

  Where the oppressed people they ventured their luck. . . .”

  “Good man,” MacCarthy said. Running in blind terror across the treacherous bog. Everywhere the down-slashing blades of the cavalry. The screams of butchered pigs. Ballinamuck: the place of the pig.

  “I can make a song the way another man would turn over turf with a loy. As easy as that.”

  “ ’Tis a gift, surely,” MacCarthy said politely.

  “ ’Tis my misfortune I was seized up when I was. There were half the men in Grogan’s spoke English. Bargemen on the big canal. I was singing ‘Monaseed.’ Do you know that song?”

  “Yes,” MacCarthy said. He didn’t want to know it. Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain.

  “There is the world of difference between yourself and me,” Brady told him. “They will call me a liar in Athlone when I tell them Owen Ruagh MacCarthy heard my songs. Isn’t that a good one, though? ‘Have you heard of the battle of Ballinamuck, Where the oppressed people they ventured their luck?’ ”

  “ ’Tis a good rhyme,” MacCarthy said. “You could not best it for a rhyme.”