Look. I possess large hands (said Henry Catherwood). So did my mother—“Large hands can make a large fortune,” she said. As they did on this farm and always can. Provided a man has no fear of hard work. Not of hard work am I in fear. Nor of anything else that I have yet encountered.
My mother's father bequeathed her this place. We're some three statute miles southwest of Newtownstewart, a mile west of the road to Drumquin. Not a large farm at all to begin with. In my great-grandfather's time they had a few cows and some cattle for slaughter and some pigs; they ate a beef and two pigs every year and chickens and such. 'Twas the same when I was a boy.
Now, my mother had a wee fright of dogs, so I had no dog. I had a cat, Walter, who came into the fields with me. That cat knew that my true home, the home of my spirit, lay in those fields. Every clement day from the age I was six I roamed these fields.
At the same time my mother had a servant, Annie Heaphy; now, she was a Roman Catholic. When we hired her we couldn't get a good Protestant girl—they were all gone to the cities; they weren't born to be servants, and the Roman Catholics were. I paid dearly for the lack of good Protestant help. With my mother out of earshot Annie Heaphy often taunted me.
“Hi-boy, I tell you there's a day coming when youse folk will be offa this land. This wasn't your land, you were given it by the dirty oul' King of England. And it was never his to give. So cling to it while you can, wee Henry. Cling to it while you can.”
Now, I was too young to understand what Annie Heaphy meant. So I did what she said. I clung to the land. Meaning, I went out into the fields and I looked at every hill and hollow in our fields and I acquainted myself with every one. I say “acquainted”—I mean intimately, like. If I found a ridge in the ground made by an old plow or a finger of God, I traced it with my boots. If water gathered after heavy rain and made a small lake, I drank from it. In the summertime, I followed the reapers as they ran the rabbits out of the barley. I relished it all, the way you'd enjoy eating meat. I saw shelves and furrows of all shapes and sizes and every one of them was like a face, every one had something to recall it by—eyebrows or jaws or cheekbones or shoulders.
Above all, I lay on the ground to try and put my arms around it and find out its mysteries. That summer was a particularly fortunate one in terms of warm weather. It was so hot we had swarms of bees flying by nearly every day—they were all looking for a house with cool, deep eaves. Every field on the farm, every place I could lie down, I pressed my face to the earth, me a Protestant boy who is not permitted to believe in such foolish things as magic or...or... poetry. That was for the Roman Catholics, and damn little's the money they made out of it. (He cackled.) And you see, and here's the merry hell of it—I thought I was obeying Annie Heaphy's orders to “cling to the land.” (Henry Catherwood's cackle deepened into a chesty wheeze of laughter.)
I found a lark's nest in the grass. And, good boy that I was, I never troubled her eggs; I walked far around them. It was that kind of a summer anyway—we had apple windfalls, a baby rabbit that got lost and was made into a pet, a house down the road that had a new infant.
We're hardy people, Protestants. We mostly know what we're doing, because we don't waste time or thought on unnecessary matters. There's nothing much to be gained from trucking with, say, music—outside of a good strong hymn, maybe. The Roman Catholics, they stay up half the night listening to some old tramp of a fellow with a fiddle, and then they're not fit for work the next day. Not that they do any work.
So, one day, I went back to the house and I got out of the barn a loy— that's a big kind of a shovel or spade for digging. And I went back to my little notch in the ground and I used the loy to pare back the grass and open up the clay beneath. Bit by bit I did it—it was hard work, a loy's a heavy implement—but I soon opened up a wide enough swatch and I was like a man in a laboratory. I looked at that ground, I sniffed it, I rolled on it, and I had to wash my face in the pond before I went back up to the house, because I was after putting my face down into the clay over and over again. (Mr. Henry Catherwood was now very excited.)
Look at me! (Henry Catherwood flung open his arms like a man about to embrace a long-lost friend.) Do I look like a man—I'm what, nearly seventy-seven and not yet shrunken—do I look like a man who'd say a thing like that, that the world has a skin?
My friend, with your curly hair and your big smile—I'm telling you that the world has a—a—(Henry Catherwood struggled to find the word)—a complexion. That's it—a complexion. And that complexion is the brown of clay, the lovely tan and gold and dark and brown and amber and nearly black. I mean our own skin, it's nothing like the earth, oh, no! Not at all! Your man in Africa or the swarthy Moroccan or the people in India—they're the boys, if it were to be determined by likeness alone, they're the meek who must inherit the earth.
But because I looked at and touched the skin of the world—I became a farmer. And I expanded this farm to a farm of four hundred acres. In these parts that's a lot of skin.
Now you know, young O'Brien, this island has a lot of land agitation going on here. People are looking for what they're calling “Land Reform”—you know that, don't you? Well, I tell everyone—the land doesn't need any reforming, the land is fine. It's the people that needs the reforming. And I can tell you— I'll reform them, so I will, if they try and take any of my land away from me. King William gave my family this land, because the people who were on it were too dirty and too lazy to work it well. And it's our land now and there's an end of it.
In those two cameos, of Mr. Lenihan and Mr. Catherwood, Charles O'Brien encapsulated Irish life in the last reaches of the nineteenth century. Although he managed to extract unusual candor from each man, it wouldn't be difficult to find such attitudes in today's Ireland, even if said more reticently. More importantly, Mr. O'Brien reached down into belief. And thus he tapped into the core of the Irish land culture.
It lies at the root of almost every serious conflict the island has ever known; history is geography. Mr. O'Brien, in setting out the size of the country, implied—accurately—that the scarcity of land connects directly to the hunger for it.
The sheer visibility of everybody on such a small island, the capacity to see a neighbor's prosperity across a hedge, a fence, or a stone wall, and the envy of land and its potential—all of this exacerbated the desire.
Under the old systems of kingships, most of the people had an opportunity at least to wring a living from the earth. Ancient Ireland was a network of small farms. When the planters came in, and farms were confiscated and merged into huge estates, the land hunger only went underground. It never disappeared.
In Mr. O'Brien's childhood—indeed, in the precise decade before he was born—it broke the surface again, and he lived, therefore, in a time when it became patriotic to want land. Nobody had any illusions; this earth formed the key to all economies.
As may be judged from the separateness between Mr. Lenihan and Mr. Catherwood, the question of Irish land reform posed seemingly insurmountable problems. I must now relate my distressing part in the life of the man to whom people turned for his understanding of all the argument's facets; my account will take some time.
Early in my healer's apprenticeship, Mr. Egan began to encourage me toward the necessity of vacation. He believed that healers endure considerable demands on their spirit and that they must rest. I observed that he did not spare himself any time off and I said so, but he nonetheless insisted that I free myself of his constant attention (in his words) and find means of relaxing.
“A nice long distance away,” he used to say pleasantly. “Mind you go home first and talk to your mother about clothes for traveling in. Rest easy about hurrying back.”
As I have always enjoyed traveling and meeting people, I took him at his word. This practice I have continued since I became my own master, and so, in the summer of 1889, not long out of my apprenticeship, I betook myself off to London, where two of my old tutors, Buckley and Mr. Halloran, had long before
gone to live. It was June, a few days short of my birthday, and I felt hopeful that both gentlemen might be able to share the day with me.
London in general proved delightful; and I navigated the city easily. I found Buckley, though with some difficulty. When I called at his address, as he had furnished it to our family, an elderly lady closed the door in my face; I supposed her fearful of a strange young man with, to her, a foreign accent. Nearby, a tavern-keeper directed me to Buckley's new residence.
The house spoke of grandeur, with great windows set in walls painted an excellent cream color. A bell jangled to my touch, but no servant appeared, and no sound issued from within. I pulled the bell again.
“Shhhhh!” came an indignant whispered bellow from behind a garden wall. “Do you want to wake the whole house?”
It was past three on a bright afternoon. Then a garden door opened, and I knew my man and he knew me. We exchanged a most vigorous handshake.
“Come in here, come in,” he whispered and led me to the garden. He wore a straw boater with a green hatband, an elaborate shirt, and a waist-coat of yellow, which he tapped.
“I look like a goldfinch, don't I?” He stopped and raised an eyebrow.
“Carduelis,” I said.
“Great out,” said Buckley.
“Elegans,” I said. “For once you might like the second word.”
“I do. I do.” He wheezed. “And what do you think of the britches?”
“Elegantissimus.” He wore trousers of broad green and yellow stripes, surmounted by a white cummerbund.
“Show the flag,” said he, still whispering. “The boss loves it,” and he indicated a window upstairs.
Buckley led me to a garden table on which tea service had been set out. He gestured.
“D'you want a cup?” he said. “I always make it for the boss.”
We sat. “I miss you. I'm healing now,” I told him. “I travel the country.”
“D'you know, didn't I hear that? A woman from Kilmacthomas, a Marge Callanan, said she met you. I've sore eyes myself.”
“Use your spittle,” I said. “But you look wonderful.”
We gazed at each other and smiled for the sheer joy of being together.
“Tell me, any news of Mrs. Curry? I often think of her. But she had a bit of the rose-bush about her—enticing to look at and spiky to the touch.”
“How do you come to be here, Buckley?”
“Well, Charles, 'tis a long story but for telling somewhere else. Tell me, did that Miss Taylor ever catch any man? Your mother used to despair of her—the bit of a mustache, I s'pose.” Then Buckley looked past my shoulder and rose to his feet with more respect than I knew he possessed. “Hah, the boss.”
I turned—and I have remembered the moment ever since. Striding toward us came a man I had dreamed about, whom my parents had dreamed about, and he walked in Euclid's dreams too, a man whose name had been spoken in our household many times a day for a decade, a man whose name, stature, and spirit I'd heard being called down in every corner of Ireland that I had so far visited. It behoved me to stand, it behoved me almost to kneel—but I could scarcely move for being awestruck.
Yet I somehow rose as Buckley scampered across the lawns to meet the man he called “the boss.” That Buckley should ever exhibit a sliver of deference speaks in itself volumes for the gentleman approaching. They had a swift and urgent exchange; I was looked at, and the gentleman seemed to be receiving reassurance from Buckley—who then beckoned me.
“Sir, this is Charles O'Brien, from Tipperary. Charles, you know who this is.”
“Well, your name is a good one,” said Charles Stewart Parnell—Father's hero, Mother's hero, Ireland's hero. “I'm well disposed to the name Charles.”
“Sir, it's an excellent name for you to have.” I confess that I did not know what I was speaking.
“I'm pleased that you approve,” he said, and sat down.
He seemed altogether more stern than I had thought. Yes, I had heard my father talk of his fiery speeches, his fearless challenges in the Parliament; and yes, I knew that he had defied the might of the Crown, who'd imprisoned him for his political beliefs and then had to release him, so greatly did the people love him. This man, though, seemed quite consumed with his own authority.
He gestured to me, and I sat down.
“For all your appearance, you do not look like the son of a tenant farmer. Which O'Briens are you?”
“Sir, my father is Bernard O'Brien.”
“Married to a Goldsmith?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hmm, near Cashel, yes? Your father has what? A hundred and fifty acres? And no tenants?”
“No tenants.”
“And a Catholic?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Parnell rapped the table.
“You see! That's what we're driving for, that's what we want! The O'Briens—they survived all plantations or they refused to be planted? Which was it?”
Buckley intervened. “Sir, if you met Mr. Bernard O'Brien—nothing would drive that man off his farm.”
Did Mr. Parnell's demeanor soften because of my father's—to him politically ideal—status? Perhaps—but how can I judge? At that moment, another ameliorating factor materialized, in the form of a lady who drifted toward us across the grass as though on air. I stood again.
“We have a guest?” she said. “Good!”
“My dear,” said Mr. Parnell, “this is Charles O'Brien.”
“How do you do, madam?”
Mother had impressed upon me to bow slightly when introduced to a married woman, and as I took her hand I observed with pleasure the lady's many rings.
We all conversed easily, Buckley, the Parnells, and I. Mr. Parnell talked of Avondale, his family's home in County Wicklow. I had not been to Rathdrum, I said—the nearby town—though I had heard that it was very pretty.
“No, not at all,” he said, “Rathdrum cannot be recommended, but my family estate is several hundred acres and we have perfect tenant relationships. If the other landlords would but listen to me, we should get a good way toward resolving many of our difficulties.”
His lady said little in all our discourse. She laughed once or twice—I think that she found Buckley amusing—and as she sat a good distance from me, I was able to have a clear view of her. The word “gracious” sprang to mind, though I found her not as gracious perhaps as Mother, by whom I set all standards.
I asked permission to sketch the couple; after some whispered exchanges, it was agreed. I made a rough sketch of them side by side—I knew that I should improve it later.
The sun shone and the tea flowed. We talked of many things, but principally we listened to Mr. Parnell, and I could have listened to him all evening and all night and all next day. Still, I wondered that he had gained such great fame for his filibustering ability in Parliament; he seemed to me a halting speaker, and of a reticent inclination. Yet it must be reported that nobody had such capacity to stay so closely on the point of the argument. Land, land, land was his topic—and soon the shadows changed the light in the garden and the temperature of the air.
When darkness began to gather, it seemed polite to take my leave. To my pleasure, Mr. Parnell accompanied me to the gate. That is how I shall remember him: slight, the beard deeper in texture than I had thought, the eyes wide apart, the face a little round perhaps—and the voice hypnotizing.
We shook hands.
“The best meetings are often in private, Charles O'Brien.”
“Sir, this has been the greatest privilege of my life.”
“You seem a discreet young man.”
“Sir, I like to cultivate distinctiveness.”
He seemed about to ask something of me, but he changed his mind and stepped back from the gate; the night's shadows took Charles Stewart Parnell, and I never saw him again.
In the history of Ireland, few people ever achieved the heroic and poignant stature of Charles Stewart Parnell. Under the political system of the
Victorian British Isles, Ireland held elections for the English Parliament. The candidates often came from the more educated—that is to say, the upper—classes. Their voters sent them to the Parliament at Westminster with strong and clear mandates to press for land reform.
For the House of Lords, operations were constructed in a mirror of what had always taken place in England. An Irish peerage was created, of Irish landlords, taken exclusively from the Anglo-Irish. (One of Oscar Wilde's more famous lines was “You should study the peerage, Gerald. . . . It is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.”)
Thus, among the Irish politicians and peers who sat and spoke at the Parliament in London, an interesting and typically Irish anomaly arose. Some of the voices calling loudest for land reform came from landowners of the Anglo-Irish ruling class.
Parnell was a perfect example. He was elected to the British Parliament in 1875, one of many Anglo-Irish landowners who wanted to change the relationship between Ireland and England, between tenant and landlord.
Close behind that ideal came thoughts of Irish self-rule. The Act of Union, passed in 1800, had cemented the political relationship between Ireland and England so brutally that it rankled more and more.
Over and over, the country's orators pointed to the success of the Americans in 1776 and the French in 1789. One populace threw out the English, and the other threw out the upper classes; in Ireland the targets were, heavenly possibility, as one. With land agitation achieving results, the talk of “Home Rule,” as self-government was called, buzzed louder.
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