The Banished Children of Eve

by Peter Quinn

  Margaret always liked to imagine them in their first days together, her mother young and beautiful, so in love with the tall, lithe foreman that she was willing to defy custom and her father, to be turned away by her family in order to marry him. Self-educated and so well spoken that he was looked upon by many as a representative of the Cork City’s laboring class, Augustine O’Driscoll achieved a stature no workingman had ever held before. He voiced the anger of his peers against the conditions under which they worked, and insisted that even if relatively few in number, they suffered as much as anyone from Ireland’s colonial status.

  Although he consented to marry in church, Augustine O’Driscoll had already earned the nickname of “Pagan” from his alehouse denunciations of Christianity, and his political radicalism. Eventually, alehouses and politics would prove to be his undoing, but all that was as yet unknown to the two lovers who took up residence in a crowded, noisy lane. Catherine sometimes wondered if she had done the right thing, but seeing her husband come through the door assured her that marrying him was the only thing that her heart could have let her do.

  In the end, after years of estrangement, Catherine’s father had relented. Old and sick, he had sent for his daughter, and she went to him in his last illness. Seeing her for the first time in all those years, he had stood back, both hands clutching the knob of his thorn stick, and said, “Sure, Catherine, you’ve become an old woman.”

  Small wonder. First came the babies, six in eight years, Margaret the eldest. They were good years at the mill, and Pagan O’Driscoll had rented a cottage in a newly constructed row of workers’ residences on the outskirts of Cork City. More and more, however, Pagan was caught up in the political agitation that was sweeping across Ireland. A local organizer in Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association, and a fervent advocate for untying the knot of union with Great Britain, he was less enthusiastic in his devotion to O’Connell himself, “The Liberator,” the man who had pushed through Catholic emancipation. At a rally outside Blarney Castle, Pagan proclaimed, “You can repeal a union, but you can’t a rape, and the truth be told, that’s what has been done to Ireland and to her people. And even though England can be forced to recognize that it can continue its depredation only at the cost of continually multiplying the size of its garrison in this country, even though it accepts the inevitability of Ireland’s intention to regain its honor in the eyes of the world, an equally important question shall remain for us: What to do with the landlords? These are the servants of injustice, who held the robe of our ravager, and who to this day collect the spoils of criminal accomplice. What justice shall be meted to them?” His words were widely quoted in the loyalist newspapers, and that embarrassed the Association. Pagan was reprimanded by its leadership in Cork City. In private he said, “O’Connell is a landlord himself, and their fate will be his.”

  In 1847, with the Famine raging in the countryside, Pagan joined the Irish Confederation, the militant embodiment of the Young Irelanders’ desire to deal with the catastrophe of hunger by forcing an immediate restoration of Irish self-government. Margaret would remember him in the green uniform he wore to the Confederation meetings, a heroic sight in her eyes, but all the while her mother busied herself with the children, never seeming to notice the uniform or rhetoric of her husband, yet praying in her heart that the condition of the country could rectify itself before any harm could come to her husband.

  In March of 1848, when John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, two of the most fervid of the Young Irelander firebrands, were arrested for treason along with William Smith O’Brien, the organization’s leader, there were speeches and torchlight parades. Later, Margaret remembered being at an outdoor meeting when her father spoke. She had no recollection of what he said, only an image of her mother with her head bowed, her hand raised to her forehead, as if praying or in pain. Whatever he said, he was subsequently dismissed from his job. That summer, habeas corpus was suspended, and the country proclaimed. Her father and a handful of others in Cork were arrested. In Tipperary, O’Brien, acquitted of the charges on which Mitchel had been convicted, led the remnants of the Irish Confederation in a “rising” that left two dead. Some of O’Brien’s followers escaped to France or to America. O’Brien, Meagher, and several others were tried for treason, this time convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. The sentence was commuted to transportation.

  The trials of O’Brien and the others were a sensation. They were men of wealth and substance, landowners with university degrees, and yet their words and deeds were redolent of the age-old excesses of the “wild Irish.” Where the grim, inexorable depopulation of the island through three years of starvation, disease, eviction, and emigration had failed to rivet the attention of the British reading public, the courtroom performance of the Young Irelanders did.

  Pagan O’Driscoll didn’t share in their fate. He languished in jail in Cork, but was never brought to trial. Margaret accompanied her mother to the jail each afternoon. It was a looming, featureless building not unlike the mill where her father had worked. Margaret and her mother stood behind one set of bars, Pagan behind another, and a jailer paced up and down the space between them. Her parents argued. Once, her father pointed at her and said to Catherine, “You’ll upset the child if you talk like that.” Catherine became subdued. “If you gave a ha’penny for your children, you’d have not allowed yourself the words that put you behind those bars,” she said.

  Her father’s friends helped pay the rent. After three months in custody, he was finally released. They moved to the cellar of a drapery store owned by a former member of the Confederation, and although the Famine receded and the country adjusted to the calm that followed in its wake, Pagan remained a committed revolutionary. He ate and drank politics and, as time passed, drank it more than ate it, an admired figure in the pubs of Cork, not allowed to pay for his own drinks, yet without any offer of work. While Margaret cared for the other children, Catherine went to work cleaning the homes of young clerks, Protestant newlyweds, mostly, who in the interests of domestic economy were willing to spend the early period of their careers without live-in help.

  In 1853, when Margaret was twelve, Catherine became pregnant for the seventh time. By this time, Pagan shook so badly in the mornings that Margaret shaved him. She sat across from him, drew the razor across cheeks, chin, and throat. He held the chair with both hands, his eyes closed, grimacing when she nicked him. Sometimes she did it deliberately, out of anger at his drinking, at his stumbling home in the middle of the night, waking the children, making her mother cry. They lived on bread and tea. Finally, Catherine wrote to her father and explained their plight. He sent back an envelope containing no letter, only some pound notes. Pagan was furious when he found out.

  That morning, Margaret finished shaving him and put the blade into the bowl of soapy water. A thin spume of blood trailed off. There was more blood on Pagan’s chin. He had his hands shoved into his pockets so that they wouldn’t shake, and he was shouting, demanding to know where the money had come from to fill the house with food.

  “Not from you, that’s for sure,” Catherine said.

  He grabbed her by the collar of her dress, and a button at her throat flew off and ran in a wide circle around the floor. He twisted the dress in his hand and lifted her to her toes. “You bloody whore,” he said, “don’t you ever talk to me like that.”

  Margaret retrieved the razor from the bowl and held it tightly, open, in a fold of her dress. She moved toward her father, her hand trembling.

  “Let go,” Margaret said.

  He took his hands off Catherine, turned, and went out the door. He didn’t come back that night, nor in the days that followed, and Margaret was glad for it. They heard reports that he was drinking heavily, sleeping in alleyways, but he was never mentioned except when they said their prayers and her mother put his name in the litany of those she asked God’s mercy for.

  When he came back, he stood in the stairwell that led down
from the street to their door. The shadows hid his unwashed, unshaven face. Holding the door open a crack, Margaret thought he was just another beggar.

  “It’s me,” he said, “your father.”

  Margaret put her shoulder against the door and braced it with her knee. Her mother came from behind her. She gently pushed Margaret out of the way and stepped outside.

  Neither Catherine nor Pagan ever made mention of what was said, but when they came back inside, he sat on their bed and wept. He got a job as a porter in a bakery. It required him to work nights. He slept most of the day, and to the children became little more than a curled, sheeted figure behind the curtain that served as the wall of their parents’ bedroom.

  When the second O’Driscoll daughter was old enough to look after the younger children, Margaret joined her mother cleaning houses. In January of 1858, Catherine went to Macroom for the first time since her father had died, and she took Margaret with her. Catherine grew excited at the prospect of the trip, chattering away about her girlhood, the dances at the crossroads, the pilgrimages to the holy well, the boys who risked her father’s wrath by flirting with her. They stayed with Catherine’s brother, Jeremiah Murphy, a big, bearded, taciturn tenant farmer who lived alone in the whitewashed cabin where he and Catherine had been born. Catherine and Margaret did their best to bring some sort of order to the place, and to get rid of the barnyard odors that pervaded it. Catherine had brought sheets from Cork City to cover the straw mattresses.

  Approaching fifty, and in the process of bargaining for a wife, Jeremiah seemed pleased. He invited his neighbors to come see his sister, and after Mass on Sunday they came, some to see the prodigal daughter returned, to mark the changes in her since she was a girl among them, and others to set their own daughters on display, eager for a match that would join their fortunes to Jeremiah’s. In the old days, before the Famine, it was only a handful of prosperous tenants with the biggest holdings who would postpone marriage so long, but now such procrastination was increasingly the fashion among all levels, save the Irish-speaking and the poorest of the poor, which were usually the same thing. On the way back from Mass, Catherine pointed out to Margaret a field where a cluster of cabins had once stood. “The people there were all musicians and singers. Laborers by day, at night they filled the air with their melodies. But it’s a different country now. The life is gone out of the land. Half the people I knew as a girl are gone, God knows where.”

  The men entered Jeremiah’s cabin first, the nails in their big leather shoes scraping loudly on the floor. They held their hats in their large, red hands. Their wives followed. To Margaret, the women resembled nothing so much as the dwellings they inhabited—squat, thick-walled, the shawls over their heads as bulky and rough as thatch. Last came the daughters, girls with none of their mothers’ girth, but wrapped beneath the same kind of shawls, and as shy as calves. Moving around the room in a store-bought dress from Cork City that was bordered at the cuffs and neck with lace and drawn in at the waist, Catherine seemed from a different world. It was hard for Margaret to believe that her mother had lived her youth as one of these timid girls, or that if she had stayed she would have turned into one of these solid, stocky peasant wives. Catherine glided about the room with lovely grace, serving tea. It was also difficult for Margaret to think of her mother as a clerk’s skivvy.

  The husbands tried not to look at Catherine but couldn’t help themselves. Even with her graying hair and the lines in her face and around her mouth, Catherine Murphy was still near to the girl they remembered from their youth, same body, same smile, same way about her. The wives, their eyes hard and fixed, looked at their husbands, but they, too, thought mostly of Catherine, the easy life of city women, the luxuries they had, the clothes they wore, and the airs they assumed even though they had been born and reared under thatched roofs. Only the daughters made no attempt to hide the awe in which they held Catherine, an apparition from another order of existence, like the visitors from Dublin or London whom they caught glimpses of in Macroom, the wives of government officials or military officers on their way to some other part of the empire.

  Margaret and Catherine stayed for a week with Jeremiah. At first, Margaret took delight in the novelty of what she saw. She enjoyed walking the lanes, the look of the countryside in high summer, and the talk of the people, the accents so thick that if you didn’t listen carefully, you might think they were talking Irish instead of English. But by the middle of the week, she was already growing tired of the place, cow droppings everywhere, flies swarming around them, the remorseless routine of her uncle’s life, the same chores done the same way every day. It took less than a day to see the sights there were to see, a ruined castle, the remains of an abbey, a new church, the tree from which, it was said, Cromwell himself had hanged Bishop Boetius Mac Egan—martyr’s scaffold or not, it was a sorry-looking tree.

  Jeremiah employed two spalpeens. Young men with no English, dressed in ragged clothes, their mouths already half empty of teeth, they never came near the cabin. There were scores of men like them in the area, but they lurked in the background like half-domesticated dogs, living tentatively on the edges of the community. Jeremiah worked beside them, and spoke to them in Irish, but his tone was usually harsh, and Margaret felt sorry for them.

  When he had been drinking, Pagan O’Driscoll had been vitriolic on the contrasting fates of the spalpeens and of the tenant farmers, who had not only survived the Famine but increased their holdings.

  “Calluses on the arse of landlordism,” he said. “When the Hunger was at its height, they closed their doors to their own people, Irish like they were, serfs to the same masters, and then, when it was done, they feasted on the carcasses of the dead and the departed, licking their master’s hand when he threw them the crumbs of lands that had been seized from the starving. Fat and prosperous now, they’re like crows back from a battlefield.”

  It was hard for Margaret to think of her uncle and his neighbors as prosperous. Their cabins were spare and stark, and whatever surplus they had they hoarded, scared the landlord’s agent might raise the rents to levels they couldn’t pay, and perpetually afraid that the potato blight might strike again, destroying whatever margin they had managed to amass. And although the Famine was never mentioned, although there was more talk of Cromwell’s presence two hundred years before than of the events of the previous decade, the memory of what had happened hung over the countryside like the morning mist that shrouded the stubby remnants of cabins in fields and on hillsides, clusters of shattered walls where cows now grazed.

  On her last night at her uncle’s, Margaret attended a dance in Macroom. It was held in a hall brightly illumined by gaslight and filled with many of the same girls she had met the Sunday she’d arrived. They all stood to one side of the room. On the other side were boys who looked as if they had just stepped out of the bogs, red-faced and heavyset, with hands like their fathers’. They reeked of whiskey. The music was the kind heard coming out of the lowest shebeens in Cork City, the fiddle tunes that emanated from cellars and back rooms choked with tobacco smoke. The next morning Margaret awoke happy with the thought of going home.

  It wasn’t until her uncle married that she and her mother returned on another visit. They came down at Eastertide. Jeremiah’s wife was in her twenties. She was shy, sitting by the hearth to have tea with them but saying little. Jeremiah, however, was more talkative than he had ever been. At one point, he suggested that Margaret accompany his wife out to gather some eggs, and she did, glad for the chance to get away from the stinging smoke of the turf fire.

  That night, when they went to bed, Catherine told Margaret that her uncle had made a proposition. “He wants to arrange a marriage for you.”

  Margaret had been on the edge of sleep, her back to her mother. She opened her eyes.

  “He said that he looks on you as he would a daughter and is willing to settle a dowry on you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I�
�d talk to you.”

  “That you’d talk to me?” Margaret sat up. “What kind of an answer is that?”

  “A good one. Ireland is hard on its children, hardest of all on its daughters.”

  “Especially on them that spend their lives scrubbing out troughs.”

  “The man he has in mind owns a grain store in Macroom. His name is Murphy, too, but no relation. Not the worst sort. I knew his father.”

  “Not the worst sort? Well, now, there’s a recommendation. How could I resist such a match?”

  “I thought that you should at least know of your uncle’s offer.”

  “Now I know.”

  “There aren’t a lot of choices, Margaret.”

  “You refused to settle for such a life. What do you expect of me?”

  “I don’t offer my life as a model. You can go back to Cork City; no one will stop you. Spend the rest of your days sweeping out other people’s houses. But, to be honest, if I knew that lay ahead, I might think twice about being the wife of a grain seller in Macroom.”

  Margaret threw her head onto the pillow. She put her hands beneath it and shut her eyes. “I’ll go to America.” She had often had the thought, a fleeting, indistinct desire. This was the first time she had spoken it.