The balance between the tutorial sexes was provided by Mother's choices, Miss Taylor and Mrs. Curry, who came from Dublin and London. Miss Taylor wept easily at the great tales she herself told, and Mrs. Curry walked like a turkey. Both schooled me excellently. Where Buckley regaled me with the indulgences of ancient Rome and Greece, and showed me engravings of naked statues, the women tutors held me to the memorizing of whole texts, be they history, geography, English literature, or French.
Although I liked neither woman, I excelled at their lessons. (Also, I much enjoyed the rough teasing they had to endure from Buckley. Judging from the ladies' faces, he whispered amazing questions and raw commentaries to them.) Each lady set out to make of me a man who would be suited to the company of women. In common with Mother (who probably instructed her to do so), Miss Taylor taught me what she called “appropriate demureness.” This had to do with standing in a special fashion, my upper body leaning slightly forward to cast my lower body into shadow and thereby eliminate what she called mysteriously “the wrong impression.”
At some point in this recurrent lesson she would emphasize once again the importance of “never having anything exaggerated in the male appearance.” And she counseled me against ever having my trousers made from any fabric of light gray.
Mrs. Curry's husband had died by misadventure in India. As a consequence and out of respect for her dead spouse, she would not eat any meat other than pork, ham, or bacon. (I believe that a wild pig attacked Mr. Curry and that she was filled with vague revenge.) She taught me how to kiss a lady's hand and began by kissing mine; she had rather dry lips and she disconcertingly licked them a little before swooping down on my young paw. Once fixed there, the kiss became almost a suction— which then she invited me to emulate. She specified the length of time that the kiss should linger: “Think of romantic interest, not cannibalism”; and “The teeth must never touch the lady's flesh.”
Also, she said, I should create “a compartment” in my mind which contained the knowledge of this kissing technique and “it should never, ever, not on any account, be used for anything other than the kissing of hands.” Buckley said, “That's multiple ways not true.”
Mrs. Curry always became quite excited during this instruction, and Buckley assured me—mystifying to me then—that she had “let her mind wander.”
All in all, they taught me well, if eccentrically. I have been imprinted with some of their habits. Where Buckley said an expectant “Well, now” when he walked into a room, Mr. Halloran rubbed his hands; I do both. I have Miss Taylor's swiftly raised eyebrow, Mrs. Curry's nervous belch. And although they differed widely in their teaching methods, they all exercised one delightful practice for which I am most grateful of all—they conducted tuitions in the open air. When the weather permitted, which, in truth, happened on more days than not, “Teaching becomes walking,” to use Miss Taylor's rendition.
Such an education tells a great deal about the young Charles O'Brien's family. Modern Ireland has been called “classless,” and it's true that, in terms of social hierarchy, today's divisions are defined by meritocracy. However, before the creation of the two states of Ireland in the treaty of 1921, a marked social division already existed between the native Irish and their Anglo-Irish landlords.
Mr. O'Brien's earlier definition of the Anglo-Irish has an accurate—if unnuanced—ring to it: “that peculiar breed of people of English ancestry who settled in Ireland on land that was taken by force from the native Irish.” But he neglects to say (although he implies it) that he was educated in the Anglo-Irish tradition of tutors and governesses—in other words, in the tradition of the European aristocracy.
The subtlety of his not saying so—or even being conscious of it— derives from his Catholic father's example. While enjoying the life of an English or Anglo-Irish landlord, Bernard O'Brien also wished to keep on the best possible terms with his native Irish forebears and neighbors.
And he knew how to do so; that was part of the vigilance. He had married a Protestant girl, and thereby appeased the ruling classes while not becoming one of them. And, by mixing easily and amiably with his Catholic neighbors at all levels—he seems to have employed only Catholics—he obstructed any resentment of his Anglo-Irish style of life.
The house in which Charles O'Brien was born and raised may easily be viewed today—a strong mansion on a hill. O'Briens no longer live there; an American family now owns the estate. The woods and its botanical curiosities still exist, as does the walled garden; and the fields that Charles O'Brien and his father so loved show a long history of excellent farm maintenance.
My family's home, Ardobreen, is painted a strong pink; it still stands, on a crest overlooking the road that travels between Tipperary and Cashel. The pigeons roo-coo-coo on slender white columns that support a portico over the front door; deep bow windows curve on either side of the entrance. Great lawns roll away from our terrace, down to a dense, downhill wood, over whose treetops we had views to the Galtee Mountains. Through this wood run paths that were cut by our great predecessor, Captain Ferguson, an eccentric officer who had inherited part of this land and who liked to walk naked about the fields at night-time (and sometimes by day).
I say “great” predecessor because Captain Ferguson made the wood his especial project. He purchased semi-mature, and sometimes mature, trees from all sorts of quarters, including abroad, but mainly from the estates of his friends on the southwest coast of Ireland. Around Glengarriff and Bantry, many subtropical species flourish in the warmth of the Gulf Stream's North Atlantic Drift. As a result of the good captain's researches and plantings, our wood still boasts many exotic and unusual growths. For example, at each of its four corners stands a great palm, whose fronds, glimpsed through a boy's window, might as well be waving in the South Seas.
My instructors deemed the wood and the grounds a source of education, and I spent many hours walking the glades and the fields, being taught my lessons and reciting them aloud. Each of the four tutors interrupted the curriculum of the moment to point out this plant, investigate that tree, marvel at the other shrub.
As a consequence, I formed an early and deep attachment to our “O'Brien Territory,” as I might call it. I came to believe that I understood the smell of the earth, that I grasped the deep satisfaction a man might feel when his plowman turned a deep furrow, or reaped the plumpness of a harvest—and the tragedy of people who are denied the continued humble delight in their own land. That is why I found the great battering-ram of that eviction I witnessed so deeply upsetting. Much more than the whipping of their bodies and faces, I felt a pain in my soul for those people losing their land.
After all, even though I was not yet ten years old when Mr. Treece was wielding his whip, my own life was filling up daily with riches from the experiences of our own farm. I had seen my father breaking open an ear of wheat, feeling and sniffing it to determine which hour—not which morning, afternoon, or day, but which hour—would prove most perfect for harvesting.
The expression on his face as he walked his own fields conveyed as deep a sense of fulfillment as a man could have in life. He bent down to scrutinize it if he saw an unusual blade of grass; I now do the same. He surveyed the pulsing of a frog if he saw one; I always do likewise. He delighted when the mushrooms began to appear, and he would take a hard stalk of long cloverweed, thread it through the mushroom stems, and hand the collection to me like a perpendicular shish kebab. I have brought many such gifts to houses that I have been visiting, and in some cases I have deployed this excellent fungus vulgaris toward my cures.
Sometimes I even had the mystical pleasure of encountering the netherworld. We had on our farm, at the top of the farthest hill, a fort— a “fairy fort,” to give it the full local name. It consisted of a circular ram-part, bushy with trees and briars. Nobody went in there; the cattle, it was said, disliked grazing it.
But Artie Ryan Bull went into the fort and he died. He was called “Ryan Bull” to distinguish him from myria
d Ryans in our area; we had Ryan Brick (he lived in a brick house), Ryan Handsome, Ryan Pug, Ryan Ears—and Artie earned the subriquet “Bull” because he derived part of his income from owning a bull that serviced his and his neighbors' cows. Also, he had a short, thick stature; nothing separated his neck from his jaw.
Artie hunted rabbits over everyone's land; he had a black-and-white mongrel terrier by the name of Ollie. (“Named after Oliver Cromwell,” said Artie, “another vicious little bastard.”) With Ollie and a ferret whom he called Catherine (people suspected that he named the creature after his mother-in-law), Artie went into our fairy fort one day—and next morning my father's foreman, Billy Stokes, found him lying dead on the edge of the rampart.
“Sir,” Billy said to us all in our hallway, “he was only purple. Not mauve, ma'am—purple. He musta seen something terrible to kill him of a fright like that.”
As Mother said that evening, the fact that Artie drank a bottle of whiskey every two nights, and weighed as heavily as his own bull, might also have made some difference. Nevertheless, the legend of the fairy fort in Irish life had another cubit or two added to its stature—and an extra room opened up in my young imagination.
A “blind tasting” of Charles O'Brien's nationality, a guess at his racial background from his writings could produce only one answer: Irish. It's manifested in his desire to express himself colorfully. In his willingness to see life as a drama, he likes to place himself at the center of his own stage. These flamboyances, and the fluid lyricism of how he addresses his world, do not readily hallmark other nationalities. Like all the Irish, he has a story to tell and he knows it.
This national tendency toward vivid self-expression is much derived from Irish history. From the late 1600s, when the subjugation of the people began to intensify, new dark ages shrouded native Irish expression. The Irish “cause” had been routed, resurrected, exploited by monarchs and others with axes to grind against England—and then resurrected in many halfhearted rebellions, and routed again. As the original Irish landowners lost more and more of their territory to the English, a new class emerged: the dispossessed.
Those leading families who were thrown off their own land, expelled from their own houses, ripped from their ancestral moorings—they either left the country voluntarily or were deported as slaves to the Caribbean and the Americas. Or they stayed in Ireland, where they traveled the roads, hunkering down to some kind of appalling and meager existence. Many chieftains ended up living in mud hovels. Some folk memories claim that they were the progenitors of today's travelers, or “tinkers.”
Thus, Charles O'Brien was relatively unusual for his time. The “outsider” status so shrewdly pursued by his father and forefathers kept him out of the mainstream, where danger flowed. His education at the hands of his four maverick tutors turned out a boy who had been exposed to many influences.
He had learned to read—not merely in the sense of being literate and knowing his ABC's, but with discrimination. And he had learned to write, not just headlines with Victorian sentiments in a boyish hand— “Competition Is the Life of Trade”—but also the language of an idea and how to structure an anecdote. He had knowledge of the classics and the Romance languages. And he knew something of art in varied forms.
Therefore, whatever his misfortunes on the streets at the hands of assailants, or the view taken by the woman who was his heart's desire, this was no unlettered oaf. This was a man who, when sent out in the world, had a refinement and sensibility that would have graced any society drawing room.
One further characteristic marks him with Irish distinction: his response to land. From childhood it held something mystical for him. To be sure, not every Irishman responds to an acre of earth with a poetic longing. Most who own land have been too busy wresting their livings from it. But their passion for their earth often transcends all other feeling. Charles O'Brien understood that and, following his father's example, saw the land, the clay, the dirt, the mud as a matter of the spirit.
Daily, and in intimate terms, my father taught me how Ireland is formed—how, for example, the people in the North save money more effectively than the people in the South, and are, in his opinion, more trustworthy. He told me my first tales, many of which came from the world around us, gathered from the many people to whom he spoke; and he liked to speak to everybody. And he had a great number of stories, some acquired down the years and some assumed by him to have been in his head since long before he was born. Many concerned land and the ownership of land, which was the question burning through the entire country all throughout his boyhood, too.
Thus, as other boys grew up with tales of pirates and trolls and ogres and wizards, I was raised on landlords and tenants and oppression and dispossession. Here is a story of a man who went to serve writs of eviction on some farmers over near Kilshane, about six miles from our home; I wrote it down from Father as he spoke it, several years ago.
“They call such men ‘process servers,’ and they make their money in a despicable way—they serve writs; other men make the bullets and they fire them. There was a man called Nolan—and, yes, indeed, some of them were natural Irishmen who chose to serve the landlord's writ on their fellow-countrymen. I wouldn't give a sour apple to a man like that and you wouldn't give a sour apple to anybody.
“This man, Nolan, left Limerick by the morning train and had someone meet him with a horse along the railway line somewhere near Bansha. He was carrying notices of eviction from two landlords, a man called Gibson, a bad pill that man, and a landlord called Birkin—two English-men, as you can tell from their names. All in all, the foolish Nolan was carrying in his leather bag nine white Court Orders.
“He rode his horse into Kilshane, up along the high road into the woods, and from what I heard of the story—a man living there told it to me—Nolan served the first writ and set out for the next house on his list.
“These small places—you'd think they had tom-toms or some kind of jungle communication, because as he rode on, he looked over his shoulder, and following behind him, on this narrow little road, came a bunch of about twenty men. And they looked grim. And then he looked ahead of him and saw twenty more, grimmer fellows.
“There was no escape. They caught Nolan's horse by the bridle, held the animal, and took down the rider. By the way, I heard that they took away the horse and painted it a different color until the search for it was over, and then they sold it for a good price at Mallow fair.
“These men began to kick the foolish Mr. Nolan, and hit him and punch him and pull his hair. He gave no fight back at them—too many against him, I suppose. They took his leather satchel, read out loud the writs and the civil bills. And then they tore them into flitters, and the scraps of paper, they blew away across the hedges like a little blizzard.
“Now the next thing was—several of the men in this affray began to blow hunting horns. Half a mile away, when this sound was heard, the chapel bell started to ring. These were signals, everybody knew them, and folk hurried from the north, the south, the east and west of Kilshane— which isn't a big place at all—to where the hunting horns were blaring.
“By now this bailiff was well beaten, but he still had his wits about him—which was what they wanted. There's a river flows down at the bottom of the hill, a little river, a tributary of the Suir, and they took Nolan down to this river. The men stripped his clothes off him and hauled him into the stream. Two of them went in with him and ducked him well and then took him out again and stood him on the bank.
“They pointed to him and they jeered him and they mocked him and then the men stood aside of him, and the women came through the crowd. One woman held up his right hand, one held up his left, and two more dragged his legs apart and he was held there, upright and naked, like a man being crucified without a cross. Then the prettiest few women in the crowd broke off branches of furze bushes—furze has more spikes than a rose, ask any man who has ever fallen off his horse into a furze bush. Prickly all over.
&
nbsp; “These young women began to tease Nolan, naked and spread-eagled as he was, with the furze bushes. Up and down his body and in and out, anywhere they could get a few needles of furze to poke and sting—he must have gone mad.
“Then they brought forward a bucket of tar. It wasn't roasting hot, for that would have killed him. But it was warm enough to spread, and so they covered his body with this tar, and then they stuck white goose feathers all over him and they tied him to a tree. The constables from Limerick came out to rescue him, in response to a telegram they had received. They asked everybody, they quizzed all over the place, and of course nobody knew anything or had seen anything and there was nothing for it but to search the countryside.
“With no help and no direction, they found Nolan the bailiff as naked as the day he was born, feathers sticking everywhere out of him, tied to a tree out in the middle of the fields and shivering. It took two days of him being rubbed all over with butter to get all the tar off—a nurse in Limerick did the job. They say she did a great job too, every nook and cranny of the man. What a job to be given.”
And my father winced.
Such violence had long been taking place in Ireland, not only in our province of Munster but also in our county of Tipperary, where the land is so rich. The bailiff Nolan had been one of the fortunate ones. In my grandfather's time, the Whiteboys, a notoriously violent secret society, believed that the landlords should be driven out by much more savage force. They roamed the fields at night, wearing white smocks that made them sinister in the darkness—and to me therefore somewhat thrilling.
When I asked my father about them, to my surprise he spoke vehement condemnation. Yet I knew that he agreed with their aims; he too loathed the absentees—those owners who never appeared on their land but controlled the lives of all who lived as their tenants. It was the White-boys' methods that my father so gravely disliked, because they attacked the landlords' cattle and horses. They “hocked” them—they cut the tendons in the animals' legs, rendering them crippled and ready for death.
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