by Eamon Kelly
Éamon Kelly
The Storyteller
MERCIER PRESS
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© Éamon Kelly 1995, 1998; Estate of Éamon Kelly 2004
ISBN: 978 1 85635 439 4
Epub ISBN: 978 1 85635 859 0
Mobi ISBN: 978 1 85635 876 7
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A TURN OF THE WHEEL
I was just six months old when I was brought to the house in Carrigeen where I spent my life until I was twenty-three. I often heard about the journey and often too have I tried to imagine what it was like that morning as we drove in Danny Maurice O’Connor’s sidecar from Shinnagh Cross to Carrigeen. I was born in March 1914 so it was a September day. I always see my father and mother on one wing of the jaunting car and me sitting on my mother’s lap, Danny Maurice on the other wing and conversing with my father in a loud voice over the noise of the horse’s hooves and the grinding of the iron-shod wheels on the road. All our belongings were on that car. My mother’s personal possessions were stored in the well, as the deep receptacle at the back of the sidecar was called. There was a bundle on the box seat in front, and under the seat the tools of my father’s trade. He was a carpenter. Some more things, probably bedclothes, on the seat beside the driver, and on the flat surface over the well a box my dad had made with tableware and maybe a kettle and a few pots.
If I took any notice of the countryside as we drove along I would have seen the behind-the-times farmers still making hay which had become a little discoloured because of bad weather. At this time the stalks would be beginning to fade in the potato gardens and men would be busy drawing out turf from the inner bog and stacking it by the roadside to be carted home later. I like to think of it as a sunny day; a pet day coming to brighten up the countryside after a lot of rain.
Then I would have seen the mountains that ring, or half-ring, that great saucer of land from Castleisland to the county bounds. Their names are the first five beads on my rosary – the MacGillicuddy Reeks, Mangerton, Stoompa, Crohane, and to the east and looking down on our sidecar, the Paps. The old people called this twin mountain An Dá Chích Dannan, the two breasts of the goddess Dana. Maybe I wasn’t looking, my mouth on another breast that sustained me. A Rathmore man told me once that when people climbed the Paps each man took a stone and placed it on one of the two cairns at the top of twin peaks. In time these two cairns grew to be the nipples on the breasts of Dana. Further upland towards Boharbue you can see the mountain range in its entirety and you can make out what looks like the torso of Dana stretched out in the sun. One breast, they say, is something higher than the other, as if she were lying a little on her side. Up there Fionn MacCumhaill stood and, bending down, he washed his face in the waters of Doocorrig Lake.
In the shade of the Paps were born the poets Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille. Each day as the sun shone they saw those perfect shapes against the sky, and maybe the old gods who lived up there inspired them. At the foot of the Paps is ‘the city’, Cathair Chroibh Dhearg, a ruined fort. When it was in its glory it was walled and circular like Dún Aengus or Staigue fort. I see Crobh Dearg as a high priest of the pagans and his hand was red from slaughtering animals – and for all we know maybe humans – as a sacrifice on the high altar when Our Lord was a boy or even before Homer nodded.
Since Christian times ‘the city’ has been associated with Gobnait, the Ballyvourney saint. The first of May was the Pattern Day, a day of pilgrimage. From early morning the way was black with people going up the rising, twisting road to the ruined circle. The lame, the blind and the halt sat or lay by the roadside. They carried placards on their breasts or exposed a mortified limb, crying aloud their ailments and calling on our charity. Often I did the rounds at ‘the city’, walking inside and outside the circle, praying and pausing at a station marked by a rock fallen from the once high wall. The prayers, as far as I remember, were the Creed, the Our Father, three Hail Marys and a Glory be to the Father. At one station I waited my turn to take the pointed stone and draw the sign of the cross, three, five or seven times on the rock. From the rubbing of one stone on the other over the centuries the cross is worn deep into the rock. In my young days the bush beside the holy well was festooned with giobals, pieces torn from the pilgrims’ clothing. At the base of the shrub, buttons, old combs, hairpins and safety pins were placed by pilgrims making the old pagan gesture of leaving their troubles behind. People prayed to be cured of their afflictions and once I saw a pair of crutches by the holy well.
To complete the round, the last thing a pilgrim did was to drink from the well and give a penny to the poor woman who filled the mug for him. The well was said to have curative properties and bottles of water from it were brought home to treat humans and animals. Traders’ stalls, often in tents, were set up around the circle where sweet cakes, buns, apples and lemonade were sold. As evening fell, young boys and girls drifted away from their elders and danced to the music of the fiddle in Duggans’ field.
The Paps looked down on our sidecar as we journeyed west. These twin mountains would colour my youth. When they donned their cloudy nightcap the weather was about to change. When they looked distant the coming week would be fine and when they were clapped up to you it would rain tomorrow. When a man was making something clear in conversation and that something wasn’t readily grasped he would protest that the point that he was making was as plain as the Paps. A priest, new to the parish, had a jumble sale and a young lady bought a crocheted cardigan. It was very open crocheting, a string of holes tied together. The priest asked the girl’s mother how her daughter liked the cardigan, and the mother said, ‘It is like a screen, Father. You could see the Paps through it!’
‘Ah,’ the priest answered, ‘can’t she wear a blouse underneath?’
Crossing the railway bridge this side of the Bower, we came to a crossroads where a ghost was said to appear. The ghost was known as the spirit of Béalnadeega. She waylaid and attacked men late at night. She was able to pull a rider from his horse and blind him by squirting her breastmilk into his eyes. Some held she was the evil sister of the goddess Dana or a female demon of that far-off age. The parish priest was helpless in his efforts to get rid of her. A very holy man, a friar, read over the spot where she used to appear and the spirit was never seen again. He banished her from Ireland, people said, and her penance was to drain the Dead Sea with a silver spoon for all eternity.
After climbing the steep hill above Barraduv Bridge we came to the village itself and my father asked the driver in for a drink. My mother thought we should keep on going but the men said it wouldn’t take a minute. The horse stood outside the pub, well accustomed to such an exercise. The bar was dark, with a low ceiling and only a small window to allow in the light. We were well known in that house. My grandfather, on his way from town, was a regular customer there. The pony that pulled his tub trap stopped at John Dan’s of her own accord.
When Kate Connie, the publican’s wife, had filled the two pints for the men she took my mother into the kitchen. It was only then that Kate spotted me, wrapped in my mother’s black shoulder shawl. I was held up to the light
. The back door was opened to let in the sun and I was admired. ‘What age is he? Who’s he like? He’s a Cash, I’d say!’ She put a silver piece into my little fist and poked my middle playfully, saying, ‘Kutsie, kutsie, kutsie!’ She boiled the kettle to make a cup of tea. My mother would rather that than any alcoholic beverage. ‘Drink!’ she used to say. ‘If you were spilling it at my feet I wouldn’t touch it.’
When the men had finished – and I’d venture to say that they had two pints a man, reminding each other that a bird never flew on one wing – we set out, leaving our goodbyes with Kate Connie. We boarded the sidecar and began the last leg of our journey. We passed by the church that later in life I would attend every Sunday, down on one knee beside my father at the men’s side and listening to the word of God. Once every five years I would hear the missionaries thunder in that small church.
We were passing now through countryside that would become familiar to me as the years went on. Not only would I come to know the name of each townland but in time I would learn the names of fields or some prominent feature of the landscape and the story behind each name. When we drew up outside our new home we were in the middle of the half-circle of mountains to the south. Mangerton, Ceapach and Stoompa I would see every day and watch their changing faces. The house was almost new and had become vacant because the tenant had died of consumption. In the three rooms there was a circular black mark, the size of a saucer, on the boards, where the disinfecting candle had burned itself into the floor. The Murphys, our new neighbours, who knew we were coming, had a fire down and had brought a jug of milk and some vegetables to go with our first meal. The few sticks of furniture were old but in time my father made a new bed, a better table, a few chairs and a dresser. The bed I remember best because I slept in it with my parents. It had a high board all round, the inside was filled with straw and on top of this was an enormous feather tick. My mother, when dressing the bed, would flounce this up and down and when the sheet was spread she would place me on the bed and I would sink gradually into the feather tick, laughing up at her as she tickled me.
My father was busy every day. He used the new kitchen table as a bench, and before he turned his hand to building a workshop at the gable of the house he made a cradle for me. My mother had had the use of Mrs Cronin’s old cradle when we were living at Shinnagh Cross. The cradle my father made was a much swankier affair, with a hood and two rockers. On a fine day he’d lift the cradle out to the corner of the house along with a chair for my mother. She sat under the shining sun doing her knitting, rocking the cradle with her foot and singing to me as she kept her eye on our new cow in case she strayed out on to the road. A cow uneasy in her new surroundings would try to get back to where she came from. But when she had her calf she settled down. Then my mother had two youngsters to look after. The calf didn’t drink all the cow’s milk. There was plenty for the house and my mother skimmed the pan where it was set and made butter by shaking the cream in the big teapot.
The girls from Murphys’ next door came to mind me if my mother had to do some shopping, doing the messages as it was called. When I was older they often told me what I looked like as an infant. They said I had a fine head of flaxen curls.
In time my mother got hens and a cock. When I could sit up in the cradle I loved watching this proud bird as he strutted through the yard with measured pace, his red comb like a crown on his head. I clapped my pudgy hands as he flapped his wings and crowed. There were two out offices going with the house. One of these was now turned into a fowl house, the other was later to become a piggery. My father had built a cowshed with space for a stable when we got the pony.
We were now well established, with a workshop at the gable end of the house and customers were coming. As well as being a carpenter my father was a wheelwright. When I was well able to stand up my mother would put me in a tea-chest in the workshop. My father as he worked could keep an eye on me and she was free to do whatever she wanted. The hens made nests in the workshop and a hen when she laid an egg proclaimed to all creation her great achievement. As she clucked her way to the door a ring of shavings would become entangled in her leg. She would drag it with her to the yard, trying to shake it off as she went. I chuckled at this and my father, seeing me laugh, laughed to himself and went on running the plane on the straight edge of the board.
Neighbours who came with an order sat for a while and watched my father working. ‘A trade is as good as an estate,’ they’d sometimes say. ‘And a man who knows his trade well can hold his head high in any community!’ The skill of making a wheel was the admiration of many. The materials for it were bought in Lord Kenmare’s sawmills, all the wood grown locally: elm for the stock or hub, elm too for the felloes or rim and oak for the spokes. The stock was turned on the mill lathe, the felloes were sawn and the spokes split with the grain for strength, like a hurley stick. There was a special wheel-stool made by the carpenter for wheelmaking. It held the stock firm between four stool pins while it was being mortised to receive the twelve spokes. Each mortise was bored with an auger and finished with a chisel.
A sharp tool is the craftsman’s friend and my father prided himself on being able to put up a good edge. Tools had to be ground down to cut away the proud steel behind the cutting edge, and for this purpose there was a grindstone. It was a wheel of sandstone which my mother turned. She twisted the handle with her right hand and poured the water on the wheel with her left, while my father held the chisel firmly on the sandstone. She complained that it was tiresome doing two things at the same time so my father, always inventive, made a wooden trough underneath to hold water. The wheel, when spun, went through the water and it was better than the old way, for an even amount of water was always on the wheel. When the chisel was ground, the sharpening was completed on an oilstone. Fast back and forward movements and then the front of the chisel laid flat on the stone to remove the burr. My father would clean the edge between his thumb and first finger and look at it closely in the light. If he was satisfied, he took up the wooden mallet and sent the chisel singing through the wood.
The stock mortised, my father turned his hand to the spokes. Each spoke was given a face. This was a straight flat surface made with the plane while the spoke was held firmly in the vice. Then with a drawing knife he shaped the spoke, an oval in cross-section, and finished it with the spoke shave. The chips and shavings from the wood, in this case oak and elm, gave rise to a compound of smells. My small nose twitched and I thought the speckled hen coming from her nest twitched her beak a little too. The stock was fixed firmly in the wheel stool and each of the twelve spokes was driven home with a heavy hammer.
There was a mark on the stock at each side where it had been held in the lathe. A hole was bored in the front mark and a long arm called a trammel was screwed into it. This arm could be spun around and used to mark the ends of the spokes, equidistant from the stock. Dowels were formed at the ends to go into the felloes. My father placed the appropriate template on a roughly sawn felloe and marked it off, sawed it to the length and with a hatchet cut off the surplus wood on the convex side and with a tool called an adze shaped the concave surface. Holes were bored in the felloes to receive the spoke dowels and each felloe had a smaller dowel to connect them together. When the wheel was rimmed my father rolled it around my tea chest and said, ‘Wheel’. I was too young to get my tongue around the word. All I could say was ‘Dada’. I said that and it pleased him.
My mother brought me in her arms and put me sitting on the grass by the river the day of the wheel shoeing. The diameter of the iron band was a little less than that of the wheel. This iron hoop would expand when heated and go down easily over the rim of the wheel, then when it was quickly cooled it contracted, tightening the wheel together. To measure the new band for the blacksmith, who made it, the carpenter had an instrument like a large disc which he ran around the rim. It was called a traveller.
To heat or ‘redden’ the iron band a great fire was put down. While this was lighti
ng the band was placed on stones to lift it about six inches from the ground. When the fire was red, the hot coals were heaped around the band in a circle of fire. More turf was added and in time you could see the red ring inside the fire. Many neighbours came to see the operation. A fire is always an attraction. The wheel was flat on the ground, an indentation made to receive the jutting stock. When the band was red-hot, men with hay forks helped my father lift it from the fire. As the white-red band hit the air you could see thousands of little white stars winking all round the circumference. The band was held directly over the wheel and gradually lowered into position. As the hot iron touched the rim, white-blue smoke shot up, the hay forks were thrown away and with hammers the band was put in place. No delays now as the iron would burn too much into the wood. Buckets of water were dashed on the rim and the hot iron bubbled and sizzled. White steam came up in a burst to mingle with the white-blue smoke of the wood. As the band cooled it tightened its grip on the wheel. You could hear the crackle of the felloes as they came together and of the spokes as they sank a little deeper into the stock. The fire was put out and my father bowled the newly shod wheel up the road to the workshop. The water spilling on the oak acid of the spokes stained them black.
The wheel wasn’t finished yet. The centre of the stock had to be chiselled out to take the metal box which encased the axle. The box was a cleverly thought-out affair, narrower on the outside so that the pressure of the axle tightened it in the stock. There were two ridges left proud on the outer surface, which ensured that it could not twist in the stock. It was wrapped in jute and driven home with a sledge. Now a chase was chiselled out in the front of the stock where the axle protruded to take the lynchpin. A band of iron was put inside and outside on the stock and when the wheel was painted with red lead these bands and the edge of the big band were touched in black paint. More black in the chase and the wheel was complete. When my father made a cart the finished article was painted the same colour as the wheels, and all the ironwork, boltheads and so on in black, with a pair of guards in a shade of Reckett’s Blue. If you made it yourself you would stay up all night looking at it!
