Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  Buck believed he wouldn’t survive another internment, and my mother and I agreed he probably wouldn’t. So they’d made up their minds to stay in Germany come what may. My father assumed he was too old to be summoned back to the army.

  The hotel elevator was a creaky monster. Their room was on the top floor. My mother was cleaning jewelry, and Buck lay on the bed looking at a copy of the London Times. The Times was pro-German, and Buck didn’t like it, but read it when he found a copy, for lack of anything better. His favorite German newspapers, the Vossische and the Frankfurter Zeitung, had had their brains eaten out from the inside by Nazi bugs.

  Their room was very small and, I would say, dingy, with a stale odor of dust and paint.

  I informed them of my job offer from Vancouver. I hadn’t formally resigned from IG Farben, but I had an appointment the following day to see my chief, Dr. Best.

  “As it happens, Karin Weinbrenner will be crossing over as well,” I said, trying for a casual tone. “We’re sailing on the same ship, in fact.”

  Although I’d kept things hidden from them, for years I’d been trying to persuade myself my parents knew—they must know!—that I wasn’t actually hiking in the Taunus on all those weekends away; that I was seeing Karin in Berlin.

  I wanted to believe that people who knew us best had no difficulty imagining us together.

  At the same time, in another corner of my brain, I knew my parents would be set against it. My mother would have been. She’d have predicted someone was going to get hurt.

  “Karin Weinbrenner?” Buck sounded shocked. “Sailing for New York? But I saw her father only yesterday. He said nothing about it!”

  “Good for her!” Eilín said. “Time she fled this horrid country. Her mother wanted her to leave years ago. I don’t know how any of them stand it. If only the baron would see sense and go.”

  “You must look out for her, then,” Buck said.

  My mother sat straight-backed, hands folded in her lap.

  “For her father’s sake,” my father continued, “her mother’s memory, you watch out for that girl. We owe so much to the family.”

  He shook his head. He still seemed stunned.

  “Resigning from the IG—I only hope you know what you’re doing, Billy.”

  “I can’t be caught in Germany, Dad, if there’s a war.”

  “Of course he can’t,” Eilín said sharply.

  “There won’t be,” my father insisted. “The generals won’t allow it. If that fellow tries to start a war, they’ll make short work of him.”

  Hitler was always that fellow. Buck would never say his name.

  “Oh, Buck, of course he must go.” My mother looked at me. “And when do you sail?”

  “Two weeks tomorrow, from Rotterdam.”

  I had decided that I’d let them know about her pregnancy once we were safely across the water. Once we were married. I’d send a wire.

  “Have you looked into exchange rates?” Buck asked. “Buying dollars, dreadfully expensive. Will they let you withdraw from your pension? How much can you take out of the country? What does Weinbrenner say, have you spoken to the baron? He’d have some good advice.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do. Get his opinion on things, the man’s a financial genius.”

  Sitting on the edge of their hotel bed, my parents looked old and tired. Helpless. I’d never seen them quite that way before.

  My father suddenly reached out and clasped my hand with both of his.

  Coming in late at night from escapades across the river, I always used to find Buck waiting up for me, in pajamas, slippers, and dressing gown. My father had difficulty sleeping unless he knew I was safely home. Without saying a word he used to wrap his arms around me and hold me close for a few moments. Then we could both go upstairs to our beds and sleep.

  In that dispiriting hotel room, my father held my hand between his hands. Then Eilín reached out as well, and we were joined, and none of us could say a word.

  My going away meant the end of us as a family, and we knew it.

  MICK

  Diary. Constance (Ormsby) Lange. Unpublished holograph. Lange Family Archive, 1882–1982, ref 556J. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  June 20 1918

  Today we were 4 women and 2 boys haymaking in the field known as drom breek, making the cockeens from hay cut last week. Open air and light. We had sandwiches and cold tea by the river and dozed in the high timothy while the boys hunted for frogs. Billy’s 3rd summer haymaking and he can lift as much as anyone. His classmate Mick McClintock grandson of old Willy M’C. and has been haymaking since he could walk. The other haymakers were my daughter in law Eileen and her two sisters. Those 3 young women are a blessing to the house and I don’t know if I could continue at Wychwood without them. I have dug myself into this country where I was born but haven’t funds to stop the house falling down. Death’s shadow often in my thinking. However—not dead yet. I can throw a cockeen as well as nearly anyone. I could dance all night if anyone would ask me to.

  We build up the stacks seven–eight feet tall, weight the sugans with stones and throw them across, to hold the stack against the wind. Eileen heads them by raking loose hay off the top and we pack it on the sides.

  June 23 1918

  Sunday no haymaking. Weather stays fine, the hay was all turned yesterday in the Rath field, we can start there tomorrow making the cocks. Pat Lillis pulls the stacks to the haggard in his sled and declares it is the sweetest crop he has pulled off these meadows in years.

  This afternoon my grandson’s grandfather, the McDermott Himself, came to tea, and says it is now clear that the British armies are in full retreat in Flanders, the Germans will be in Paris any day, the French must sue for peace, the Germans will give them honorable terms, it is only bloodthirsty England that wants the war to go on. What about America? I said. Misguided! said he—America should never have come into the war at all, and then to have come in on the wrong side, he says it’s the Jew bankers who have loaned out America’s fortune to the British empire. And the King of England is ⅛ a Jew himself. Once England is finally smashed by Germany then Ireland will be free. So speaks Jos. McDermott, Esq.

  June 24 1918

  I hope and pray that Buck will settle his family in Ireland once the war is over and he is freed.

  June 25 St John’s Day

  At Calry national school my grandson is surrounded by sacred hearts, plaster statues of dolled-up virgins, RC dogma. At home we don’t say an apostate word not wishing to make his social position more difficult than it is. The McDermott sisters are unbelievers which is the one thing they share with their father though like him they must keep quiet about it. In this country no one is more hated than a non-believing Catholic. The papes will respect the wildest most bigoted Methodist preacher over one of their own who has dared wander from the flock. My grandson made his first Confession to the old bigot Father Griffin, took his First Communion from the hands of the same. Billy and Eileen and the 2 girls attend Mass every week at St Patrick’s, and on First Fridays and the other holy days of obligation they are expected to show up to Mass at the Cathedral. I’m at liberty to do as I like, no one cares if a protestant goes to church. Eileen is a free thinker but she keeps it down for Billy’s sake.

  Billy has been learning from Mick M’clintock the old Irish names for the Wychwood fields. Mick—shoeless urchin, cigarette dangling in his mouth—but has produced a beautiful map of the estate showing the path which the people here call the Mass walk and names of almost every corner, hill and field and what M says are the ruins of an old church, teampull a chlocaire.

  July 1 1918

  The last of the Triangle field is cut, turned, ready to be cocked.

  My grandson and Mick M’clintock lie on in the sun studying their map of a forgotten path from Wychwood to a ruined church and I recall Jack and myself in a chandlery on the Diekstraße at Hamburg poring over charts—the South Atlantic, St
raits of Magellan, Drake’s Passage. The Mass path no longer visible (or I don’t see it) but Mick swears it is there and Billy says the two of them have walked it, only there are occasionally buildings & cabins in the way, and a corner of our haggard. On the map Mick M has drawn the path crosses an orchard that I was always told was established by my great-great-great grandfather. Who owns this country?—this is our subject. The feet of mass pilgrims five hundred or a thousand years ago make what is considered locally to be a powerful claim.

  July 16th 1918

  We address our letters to Buck CAPTAIN HEINRICH LANGE Alexandra Palace Camp, London. Eileen says Buck don’t like to be addressed as Captain unless he is aboard a vessel and has command but I think it must be good for him to be reminded of that life and perhaps eases the dreariness of his surroundings.

  August 4th 1918

  Jos. McDermott, Esq. comes to tea & admits the Germans are retreating and the war must end in a few days or weeks no side victorious all exhausted from the blood that has been spilt. There must be an election and sinn fein will fight every seat and it will be the birth of a new Ireland. He says the English must give in and let us have a government of our own, they won’t have the stomach for the fight they must face if they don’t. While he speaks his daughters watch him intently, faces hard and pale.

  I heard from Mrs McCaffrey the butcher’s wife the old man is sick in love with his housemaid another barefoot island girl just like his late wife, they say it’s a miracle she’s not produced a child.

  Poring over charts, seeing ice castles, dreaming the Pacific, Jack and I once believed we were the artists of our fates. But we were only the medium, only the paint.

  Aug 4th 1918

  Four years since the decl. of War and Buck taken away.

  After we settled at Wychwood my aunts Kate and Frances used to come out for the summers. They’d stay for weeks, helping with the hay. My grandmother Con taught me to ride, calling out instructions while I trotted round and round on my rugged little pony, Punch. At first I rode without a saddle; it was the best way to learn, she said. “Straight back, Billy!” Then she showed me how to harness and saddle Punch and adjust the stirrups myself.

  “Keep light in the saddle! Rise! Rise! Toes up!”

  I learned to feed and handle the pony in such a way that he never was irritated or shy. “Horses love the calm,” my grandmother said. “Gentle, always. Hands, voice. They frighten easily.”

  Pat, one of her old tenants, set up a couple of jumps. Punch balked, and I nearly went over his head.

  “It’s a piece of fear you’re jumping over,” Con said. “Now gather him up, let him know there’s no stopping, and see what it feels like.”

  It was like floating. Next day the jumps were set a little higher, and I wasn’t scared anymore. There was no hunting, on account of the war, but my grandmother and I sometimes went out for the day, rode along the roads, and ate our lunch sitting in grassy verges with our backs against rough stone walls warmed by the sun.

  “Buck never has seen this country,” she said. “Your father has Ireland in his blood, but he’s never seen it. He’ll come out after the war’s over. He’s a lovely seat on a horse, your father, you’ll be terribly proud.”

  At the National School, the teacher, Father Coughlin, wrote on the blackboard an buachaill coigríche, the foreign boy, and that was me. I had one friend at the school, Mick McClintock. He was a couple of years older. Frances said he was a gurrier and told my mother I deserved a friend who at least wore shoes, but my grandmother liked Mick. He smoked cigarettes whenever he could get them and took me on fishing expeditions—poaching, actually—which no one, not even my grandmother, knew about. He was impatient with people who couldn’t put things together as fast as he could, or read situations as well.

  One morning, clip-clopping ponies through Sligo town, heading for Rosses Point, we were stopped by a squad of policemen. Their armored car was blocking the road. A policeman had been shot dead at Ballina the day before, and they were in a wild mood.

  In his saddlebags Mick had several bottles of his grandfather’s poteen he was to deliver to customers on the Point. One of the policemen stepped forward and called out, “Where is your pa at this morning, we don’t want to waste time looking for him.”

  Mick’s father was supposed to be a big man in the Volunteers, though years later, in New York, Mick said he was merely a drunkard who sang rebel songs, and it was his grandfather, the poteen man, who’d taken the IRB oath and was a commander in the Volunteers.

  The peeler was glaring at us. His holster was flapped open, and he held a blue revolver in his big white fist. I could smell liquor on him. The police had been joking with a pair of local girls as we came along. The policemen were laughing, but not the girls; they looked frightened.

  The peeler raised his revolver and held it to the ear of Mick’s pony. “Tell us where your old one’s dug into or down goes the pony.”

  I couldn’t bear to see him shoot the pony. I shut my eyes.

  “I can’t, because I don’t know,” I heard Mick say in a reasonable voice. “And when you shoot the pony he’ll fall down and smash the bottles.”

  “What bottles are those?”

  “Poteen, I suppose.”

  Silence. I could almost hear the policeman thinking.

  “Give it over,” he said, gruffly.

  Mick reached into a saddlebag, extracted a bottle, and handed it over. The peeler uncorked it, sniffed, and took a taste.

  “Give us the rest.”

  Mick obliged. The policeman holstered his revolver and soon had his arms full of whiskey bottles.

  “There’ll be a fine?” asked Mick.

  “Aw, away with you.”

  I don’t know if Mick got in trouble with his grandfather for handing over the poteen, but it was better than losing a pony or giving information to policemen. Mick knew how to handle himself. I never saw him flustered. Poaching was a risky business. Salmon were always owned by someone else. Keepers shot to kill. And a keeper shooting a poacher was common enough that it was used to cover up killings done for other reasons—politics or disputes over ownership of land.

  The best poachers were men who knew the salmon runs and could “listen to the river,” men intimately acquainted with the country. Mick said keepers were offered reward money by police to shoot and kill poachers who were Volunteers. The law might let the keeper go scot-free, but everyone would know who he was, and sooner or later he’d pay for his deeds.

  I remember slipping out of the house at night without being caught, following Mick through glistening darkness, soft rain, slick mud, the scent of tide. I was eight or nine. Poachers didn’t bother with elaborate tackle, it was too expensive, and graceful casts were dangerous, the zing and quiver of line would only call attention. We worked the banks of the Ballisodare River below the falls with carved and notched spears and nets.

  “Poaching’s a life-and-death business,” Mick said. “Life for us ones, death for fish, that’s the word. And keepers are rogues.”

  It wasn’t sport he was after but the beautiful red meat of the salmon, which could be sold for a good bit of money.

  Working the estuary that first night we had no luck. “No good. It’s a boat we need, a currach,” Mick finally admitted. “There was one of my grandfather’s wee boats hidden along the shore, but she’s rotted now, nothing lasts forever. We must try the upper stretch. Are you for it, Billy?”

  “I am.”

  And I was, though also scared the whole time we were out in the dark: of keepers, rogues, of getting shot, scared even of the salmon, which Mick said were long as my arm and muscled by age and wisdom, with ferocious hooked jaws and teeth.

  And the next week we did work the brisk narrows of the Ballisodare, a tiny river, no more than five miles long, from Collooney to the sea. Mick stood out in the stream, clutching his lister, the fish spear, with its point whittled sharp, and I squatted on the bank, holding the net at the ready. Never had I expe
rienced anything like it. Excepting Mick, no one in the world knew where I was. I wondered what my father would say if he knew. Surely he’d approve; he wouldn’t be on the side of keepers, the rogues. My mother, aunts, and grandmother believed I was in bed, cozy, asleep. They took me for a little boy, but I was bold enough to be Mick’s companion. I hadn’t scampered when I saw those drunk policemen and their armored car. And now I was risking my life for a salmon.

  I admired Mick McClintock, his grace, his knowledge. I was grateful that he accepted me as his friend.

  It was cold. We had to keep quiet and still. Any noise that we made might rile and spook the fish. Mick was listening to the river streaming by his legs. He must have been nearly paralyzed with cold, but he was prepared to suffer—the poacher expected to pay for his catch.

  And when first light was grainy in the sky, our fish did appear. Mick thrust the salmon through and lifted it out of the river, a big silver-green creature, twisting and flopping, spraying us both. “Quick now! Net the fellow before he’s off!”

  I splashed in. Our fish was so active and strong he was difficult to snag in the net, but I managed it. And our fish was one of hundreds—the little river was alive with their energy.

  We waded ashore. “There it is.” Mick said, addressing the salmon. “You must die but for the right reasons.” He quickly killed and cleaned the fish, and we rode off with it, and the next day he sold it to the vicar in the Presbyterian church opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral in Sligo town.

  My grandmother Con was born at Wychwood. I never knew her father, my great-grandfather Hugh Ormsby, Baronet, who was a great-grandson of the second Earl of Tireragh, which meant Karin and I were distant cousins.

  Sir Hugh fell off his horse and broke his neck before I was born. Country people didn’t remember him fondly in Sligo—not a good landlord. During the two years my mother and I lived at Wychwood we heard lore of landlords assassinated, houses burned, blood feuds going back a couple of centuries or more. Con relished stories of ancient hatreds and reprisals, the mountain songs, the rebel songs, even if they were directed against her people. They allowed her to feel connected to the country. Northwest Ireland is not the most exciting place in the world, but the people have developed a habit of fantastic embroidery and lies to make it seem so, at least to themselves, and they fed my grandmother as much bloody folklore as she wanted.