by Kim Kelly
But I ask her instead, to keep her playing: ‘Why am I a weed?’
And she tells me: ‘You have blue eyes like forget-me-nots, Brigid Boszko, blue eyes like chicory. You’re at least half weed. Irish – common and wandering.’
I don’t know what she means, but she looks away, back out the window, and she starts staring again. The kettle clicks off as it finishes boiling, but she keeps staring. And now I can’t help it: my tears bubble up into my eyes and crack out of my throat.
That makes Grandma stare at me: ‘Why are you crying, Brigid?’
She looks like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. I don’t know if I’m in trouble or not, if I’ve done the wrong thing, but I suppose I have, so I tell a fib to try to stop the mess I’m making.
I shrug. ‘Oh, you know, just when you say my whole name like that – Brigid Bozsko. The other kids at school tease me about it – they call me Bozo.’ I don’t even care that they do, no-one says it in a mean way, but it sounds like a dumb thing to be crying about, and in the middle of the holidays when I’m not seeing anyone from school much except Sharon over the road, who never says anything interesting. At least my name is not Voula Boosalis – she gets called Hula Hoops, and it makes her really upset, but that doesn’t make them stop teasing her in the playground. Thinking about Voula stops my tears, though. Nearly.
Grandma is not fooled; she says: ‘That’s not why you’re crying – tell me the truth. What are you upset about?’
So now it rushes out: ‘I’m sad that you’re so sad, Grandma. I’m frightened when you stare out the window.’
Grandma frowns sharper at that, and her voice is sharp at me, too: ‘What are you frightened of?’
‘I don’t know.’ I keep crying – it won’t stop now. I’m sure I’m in trouble but I can’t lie to my grandmother, either. I tell her: ‘I’m frightened that you’re too sad.’
‘Too sad?’ Grandma says and I think she doesn’t believe me even now I have told her the truth. She blinks at me. Our blue, tired eyes blink at each other. Our eyes are the same: everyone says so. I think she’s going to tell me to shoo, to stop addling her again. But now she grabs me to her pink skirt. ‘Oh my baby girl,’ she says as she holds my head against her stomach. ‘My sweet Bridgey girl. I’m sorry I frightened you.’ She pulls me with her onto her kitchen chair by the window. ‘Come here. Don’t cry. Grief – it’s such a terrible, sinful thing. Let me tell you a story, then – let me tell you one I’ve never told you before. Let me tell you a story about some weeds. Two hundred years of grief, and weeds.’
A TROUBLESOME CROP
The wind rushed cold and lonely over the hills that rolled out from Slieve Gullion, the high rebel country between Mullaghbawn and Drumintee, in the south of County Armagh. It was the year 1690, all of Ulster had been long stolen by the English, its people forced into servitude, and Seamus O’Halligan, as he stood amid the heather atop that slieve, was debating in himself what he should do.
The O’Halligans had called these hills home since King Fergus had lost them to the Chieftains of Airgíalla, more than a thousand years ago, but whatever thief it was that staked his stained and ragged flag into this earth, Seamus would never surrender. He was only a lowly farmer, a keeper of pigs, but this was his land, and he would defend it – this slim scrap of it that was left to him. It was land his own father had given up his life for: six summers ago, when Seamus had been not much more than a boy, there had been an accusation made that the O’Halligan pigs had got into the neighbouring cornfields down in the valley – fields owned by English planters – and his father was condemned to hang for it by a judge and jury made up, of course, only of English planters. No chance to defend himself; no means to prove that it had been planters’ pigs that had done the damage to the corn. That was justice under the English Crown.
These English thieves were Protestants, and they considered the Irish to be little more than savages, as they considered all Catholics to be, and they made many laws against them – as they made laws against Catholics in every land they sought to conquer. And so it was that a great war exploded now across not only Ireland, but all of Europe.
Seamus O’Halligan did not care for all this sectarian squabbling; he cared even less for the game of power at play, with the Protestants wanting the Dutchman, William of Orange, to be King of the British Isles instead of King James, who was William’s father-in-law as well as his nephew, and cousin of the King of France. It was impossible to reason out the purpose of it all, much less follow who was related to whom, or who was presently on the throne. Seamus was not much more inspired by his own religion, either. He was Catholic, no doubt about it, but he was a child of these hills before he was a child of any God: the souls of all his grandfathers harked back to a time before Saint Patrick had brought any Cross to this country at all. For Seamus, these very hills were his religion: the mountainside he stood upon, the whole of Slieve Gullion, was a spine atop a dragon’s tale, and the lake that sat between the ancient cairns on its peak, was home to a witch whose wisdom he sought out now.
The Cailleach Bhéarach, she was called in his language. She was daughter of Oisin, the warrior poet; she was queen of this mountain and every fae spirit that lived upon it. Her name was Miluchrach, and she would answer his questions.
Should he leave his land to fight the Williamites for King James? Should he take up arms with James’ army – the Jacobites? Would he see Ireland freed from tyranny if he did? Would he see this land returned to the O’Halligans, by legal right, once more?
The water of the lake was still. The chill wind that had just now been wild through the trees and through his hair was suddenly quiet as well. Clouds behind him parted and the sun was warm upon his shoulders. The white flowers of early summer spread out from the lake like a scattering of snow, bushes of field roses and dewberries sprawling over the ground. A great heron then flew through the sky above him, broad silver wings reflected in the surface of the water. The bird cried out across the hills. Seamus looked up, to watch where it went, and it kept on, south-east, until it disappeared from his sight. South-east: the direction of Dublin, the heart of Erin, the direction that William of Orange was going. Miluchrach of the lake had spoken: it was time for Seamus O’Halligan to get going, too.
‘No!’ said his wife, Nuala, when he returned to his house and his family. ‘Don’t go – it’s madness. King William has already won.’
Seamus looked around at his house: it was not much more than a hovel of hastily gathered stone and thatch and rotting daub. Once, the O’Halligans, and all their mhuintir – their people – had lived in fine cottages, dotted along the hillsides and all through the valleys this side of the mountain as so many dewberry blooms. His grandfather’s stables had been a finer building than the one Seamus was forced to keep his own family in now. He knew his wife was right; the evidence was all around him. The English had won this argument a long time ago, whatever priest they sent to pass judgement over Ulster’s remains. Year after year, more and more of his own fellows – Irishmen – were renouncing their faith and their so-called savagery, converting to Protestantism, to get along. But Seamus did not give that course one moment’s consideration. He would not – he could not – admit defeat.
‘Please,’ Nuala begged him. ‘Be grateful for what we have. Look into the eyes of your son and tell him you won’t leave him.’
Seamus O’Halligan looked into the eyes of his little boy, not two years old, and it gave him only more reason to go. This boy was all of why he had to fight – why he would die, if that was to be his fate.
And so he made his goodbyes. He loved his Nuala as only true lovers can, and with his body he made his farewell to her at the edge of the forest, in the warmth of the afternoon; she threaded a field rose into the breast of his coat and she told him: ‘You will come back.’
She went up to the mountaintop alone then; she begged the fae ones and their witch: let him come back or it is me who will die. She cut her long golden hair o
ff with a knife and scattered it across the waters of the lake. For she loved her husband more than land, or air, or bread, or pride.
He took their only horse and began his journey south towards Dublin, a distance of sixty miles from Slieve Gullion, and on the way, as he passed through the village of Drumintee, he was told that the forces of William of Orange were now at Drogheda, at the River Boyne; that the Jacobites lay in wait on the far bank, too. A battle would be waged there, and soon.
Drogheda was only half the distance to Dublin – only thirty miles – and Seamus urged his horse on through night and day to get there, out through the rolling drumlins and lakelands of his own county and down along coast that looked across the Irish Sea, towards the land of his enemy. Not that he could see much of them when he arrived at the river. A mist had rolled in from that sea, and sat heavily in the glen that enfolded the bank to the north. He could hear them, though: a vast troop of many languages – English, of course, and there were Dutch and Danish, French Huguenots and Scots Gaels, too. But Seamus was not afraid: wasn’t the mist clothing him as he rode right by this army of Orangemen?
He crossed the river at the town and if anyone noticed him, he looked like any other traveller. There was no uniform to mark him out as a soldier. There was no uniform for any Irish Jacobite. They were poor men, all just as he, in desperate need of some victory, however slight. When Seamus found his fellows to the south of Drogheda, he knew them by this poverty: they carried scythes, not swords; slingshots, not guns. They were fifteen thousand strong and more, but they were an army of sticks and stones. As he stood among the swelling numbers of men, he knew his wife was right again: this was madness.
As a horseman, Seamus was furnished with a matchlock musket, and his company would lead the charge up to the Orangemen across the shallow ford. If he was terrified by now, the drums overtook the pounding of his heart and charge he did. The enemy he saw that day might have been Englishmen; they might have been Dutch, or Scots. He’d never know. He saw their faces through the mist of gun smoke, and they all looked like mad men: they all looked like him. He found his wisdom far too late, for as he fumbled at his musket, the faster, surer shot of a Danish flintlock pistol sent its bullet straight through his chest.
He fell from his horse and the battle went on around him. As he died, there in the shallows of the Boyne, he smelled the sea on the breeze coming in again from the south-east and thought he saw a woman walk towards him through the rushing and wheeling of hooves – beautiful, she was, tall, her golden hair unwound about her. He wished it was Nuala, but he knew it was Miluchrach, the witch. She knelt down to him and took the rose from his coat, the rose his wife had set there, white petals now stained red with his blood, and she put it to his lips as he took his final breath.
King James took himself all the way back to France in hasty retreat, and King William went on to Dublin as the bodies of a thousand Irishmen and more lay dead and unremembered in the softly falling rain. Outnumbered and ill-equipped as they were, they’d never stood a chance.
Their souls might well have gone direct to the saints in reward for all their courage, but even if they did, it meant nothing to Nuala. Every time her little boy asked her where his father had gone, every time she felt the new baby kick inside her womb, the knives of grief came for her.
Widowed, penniless and powerless, in the year that followed, she was forced from their little home in the hills, and into the township of Armagh to seek alms. What she did there to feed her two sons across their growing years is no-one’s business but Miluchrach’s; no matter what she did, though, those years saw Nuala’s boys stripped of every last right they might have had in their own country – this land of all their grandfathers. Catholics across all Erin now were prevented by law from receiving any education, prevented from the purchase of any land or from holding any public office. They had no right to own a horse worth more than five pounds, and if you were fortunate enough to own some scrap of dirt somewhere, you had to split it between all your sons until there was none left, down and down the line until it disappeared. If they spoke their language in the street, they would be spat upon and beaten.
Nuala O’Halligan never married again. She never smiled again, either. Instead, her tears laid down a curse, a wail of mourning that would haunt the O’Halligans for the next two hundred years.
And so it was that grief passed down and down the O’Halligan line, through all its sons, all wild and angry men of Armagh. Yes, if legend says County Kerry was the birthplace of Erin’s song, it might perhaps be said that Armagh was the birthplace of her violence. But while it’s true that violence never comes to anything except more violence, like a river it always has its source, seeping up through the rocks of hardship and despair.
From the great grain famine of 1740 that killed two million, to the bloody rebellion of 1798 that saw men burnt alive, their women raped and slaughtered, hatred was pounded into the souls of all O’Halligan men, generation by generation. Bile spewed from every pulpit in the land as Jesus wept and wept for each and all of His children.
By the middle of the 1800s the country was a disaster from head to toe, from arse to elbow, from Donegal to Cork, but the Devil had more coming: he had another famine to inflict. This time it would blight every potato in every field over six long years, and this time, when the English did not lift a finger to help those who lay so helpless and starving in their realm, anyone could have been forgiven for thinking that the Irish might at this point have been exhausted well past hatred. But that was not the case. A scorching hatred like no other filled every empty belly.
And so it was into these circumstances that another young Seamus O’Halligan was born. His father, Malachi, hungry and angry both, had taken violence as his profession, and with some enthusiasm. A strongman for the Republicans, he enjoyed nothing more than becoming roaring drunk and ripping into greedy landlords whenever they dared to turf unfortunates out into the streets. Malachi O’Halligan was mightily made, a monstrous giant of a man, with a mentality to match. There was no gentleness about this man: he relished his size and he used it to crush and to smash. There was no doubt he killed a few men in his day – he certainly stole from them.
He terrified his young son, Seamus, for his thrashings and his unreadable temper. In fact, the whole of Armagh terrified young Seamus O’Halligan – it seemed no week could pass without a bashing of some poor tenant farmer, or a hail of rocks hurled across the marketplace, a riot always threatening to ignite. Like his father, he was built to pull oxcarts, but unlike his father he was quiet, thoughtful. Brooding. Despite the horrors that raged on around him, though, he was not plagued too much by nightmares; instead he dreamt of pigs and fields of grain. He never knew where those dreams came from: vivid, clear; he could smell the corn reaching up towards the sun. Perhaps one of his grandmothers or aunties had told him, when he was very small, that the O’Halligan pigs had once laid claim to all the hills between Mullaghbawn and Drumintee beneath the sheltering arms of the slieve. Something was calling to the lad. Perhaps it was that great-great-great-great grandfather Seamus from so very long ago, his restless soul searching out from the ancient, enchanted mountaintop, his wounded heart in need of a home – somewhere. Somewhere far away from this broken land.
Whatever it was, the call was soon enough irresistible. One morning, much like any other, he was walking out from the centre of the township of Armagh on errand for his father – on this occasion to deliver a small package of cash to one of the deacons of the church for the never-ending construction of Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral that lay to the west – when he heard a woman sobbing as he went by down the road. She was just out of sight beyond the darkened doorway of a cottage, a humble place of stone and rotting daub. He might have known her, or he might not have, he didn’t care, and yet he would never be able to say what compelled him to do as he did next, except for the wretched sound of those tears.
He looked ahead down the road, to the spires of Saint Patrick�
�s, the Catholic; behind him lay the medieval stone of the former Saint Patrick’s, that of course now belonged to the Protestant Church of Ireland. Two cathedrals with the same name, and the same God, tearing the town, tearing the country apart, and at the realisation of this absurdity, he could stand the sound of that woman’s sobbing no more. He threw that package of cash into the doorway of her cottage, and he walked on. Without a word to his own mother, and certainly without a word to his father, he kept walking – all the way to Dublin, a distance of almost ninety miles.
Along the way, he changed his name to Jim, the English shortening of James, of which Seamus was the Irish equivalent anyway. It was the year 1880, and Jim O’Halligan – thoughtful, brooding, wondering, wandering boy – was only seventeen.
At the Port of Dublin, he looked across the Irish Sea. He could not see at all where he was going, except away from all the strife and sorrow here.
When he heard the name Australia, he knew it only as a place of punishment, for his own great-grandfather had been sent there for running guns during the Irish Rebellion – a badge his father Malachi had worn with pride beside his own green ribbon – so Jim O’Halligan did not especially wish to go there himself. Go there he would, though. Within a fortnight of pestering every captain and every bosun he could find along all of Dublin’s quays, young Jim by his seriousness and his size won passage as a general do-all on a schooner bound for Liverpool, carrying a cargo of whiskey and lace. On board this ship – and it was called the Rising Star – he discovered by pure chance in overhearing a conversation among the ratings, that land in New South Wales could be got for as little as £1/5s. per acre. He also discovered the ship was sailing on for Sydney once out of Liverpool.
‘Where exactly is Sydney in the world?’ young Jim asked them, and he ignored their laughter at his not knowing, only waiting to hear the answer, in his gravely determined way.
