Three Wishes for Jamie

by Charles O'Neal

  Old Dan was disturbed. “Cousin Tavish would never let a thing like that happen,” he said reprovingly.

  “I only warned Jamie to be careful,” Dennis retorted sulkily. “Anyway, the system of marrying for money and not for love in Ireland is out of date.”

  Tavish’s great arching eyebrows rose upward in shocked surprise. “And where now have you been hearing such radical and unpatriotic talk?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t hear it … I read it in a book,” said Dennis smugly.

  “Dennis …” the Speaker waggled his finger sententiously, “books are the invention of sinful men. They should be kept from the hands of simpletons like yourself. Now be silent or you’ll be getting the full weight of my tongue.”

  Dennis subsided, but Tavish refused to be mollified. His professional pride was hurt. “And who knows the pedigree of every girl from Bantry Bay to Derry Quay better than I do?” he demanded. “Just let anyone try to put something across on Owen Roe Tavish! Sure I’ll raise such a wind as will blow the tails off the horses.”

  Kate had been busy at the hearth inside the cottage. Now she called them to the evening meal. “The praties are ready now … come along to the supper.”

  Seated about the bare, rectangular wooden table with a great bowl of steaming potatoes in the center, Tavish’s good humor returned. As guest of honor, he received a boiled duck egg, and he praised Kate’s cooking until her plain red face grew redder with embarrassment and pleasure.

  “Would you look at that mountain of laughing potatoes,” he crowed. “Sure now, you have to be born in the west of Ireland to know how to boil potatoes like that. See how the skin is cracked just a smile or a wink to whet your appetite for what’s inside.”

  He reached for the strip of salt bacon that was hanging suspended from the beam above the table. Rubbing the greasy meat against his peeled potatoes to flavor them, Tavish passed it along to the others.

  When the meal was finished, Tavish declared it sumptuous and said he would stay the night. He chattered on while Kate cleared away the dishes. Old Dan fell asleep, with ashes from his pipe spilling down his vest and threatening to set him on fire. Dennis joked awhile with the Speaker, yawned, and climbed the ladder to the small loft where he and his older brother slept.

  “God keep you,” he mumbled.

  Jamie had sat silent through the meal, his mood wavering between elation and despair. He was excited at the thought of going to the fair at Kilkahoon; of strutting among the colleens and perhaps saying to Tavish: “I’ll take that one. Speak to her father.” But a feeling of depression outweighed his other emotion. Common sense warned him that there was more to marrying in Ireland than the choosing of a girl. The pretty ones were usually spoken for or had no fortune … and a girl with no fortune was worse than no girl at all.

  “You’ll have no luck with me tomorrow, Cousin Tavish,” he warned. “I’ve a bad name in Kilkahoon. Every time I’ve gone to the fair, there’s been fighting and skull cracking—and I’ve been in the thick of it.”

  “Sure fighting and a little fun is nothing to hold against a young man with muscles,” Tavish reassured him. “’Tis all one at fair time.”

  “But how do I know the girl of my choice will have me?” Jamie persisted.

  “Sure now wouldn’t she be daft to say ‘no’? You’re a darling … that’s what you are … a darling, and lucky’s the word for any girl that catches your eye, Jamie. Now go to bed.… Tomorrow we must look our best.”

  Kate put Tavish in the west room to sleep with Old Dan. The two old men went arm in arm to bed, more to prop each other up than from any excess of affection. Tavish, who was quite full of liquor by this time, hummed a little song.

  “Good night to you, Katie McRuin,” he said kindly to the hard-working girl. “Pray for us all.”

  “Soft sleep to you, Cousin Tavish,” she answered simply.

  There had been little in the thin living provided by the farm for Kate McRuin except work and prayer. She was an exceedingly devout girl, with blessings for every household task. As she made the bed in the west room for her father and Tavish her lips whispered: “I make this bed in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; in the name of the night we were conceived; in the name of the day we were baptized; in the name of each night and each day, each angel that is in Heaven.”

  So, too, whenever she milked the cow she prayed in rhythm to the hissing streams of milk:

  The blessing of Mary and the blessing of God

  The blessing of the sun and the moon on her road

  Of the man in the east and the man in the west

  And my blessing with thee, and be thou blest.

  At the finish of the milking she never forgot to send a small squirt over her left shoulder for the Gentle People, who were always there to demand a share of every milking.

  When the men were asleep she tidied the main room, put away the dishes, and polished the pots. Then she greased Jamie and Tavish’s boots and rubbed them until they shone. Finally she banked the peat fire with the prayer: “I save the seed of the fire tonight, even so may Christ save me. On the top of the house let Mary, in the middle, let Brigid be. Let eight of the mightiest angels round the throne of the Trinity, protect this house and its people till the dawn of the day shall be.”

  Her last act was to throw out the dishwater, with her warning admonition to the Gentle People to: “Mind the water.” Then she retired to her small bedroom; said a prayer for herself and for Jamie’s mission on the morrow, and went to sleep.

  Next morning early Jamie and Owen Roe Tavish set out for the fair at Kilkahoon. Tavish stood outside the gate with his arm across Jamie’s shoulders and recited: “Once upon a time when cows were kine and pigs were swine and the eagles of the air built their nests in the beards of giants, a broth of a boy called Jamie McRuin, with his good friend Tavish to guide him and speak for him, set out on the rocky road for Kilkahoon to push his fortune.”

  They passed out of sight of the cottage, with Kate whispering prayers and crossing herself, as if Kilkahoon was a thousand miles away and the journey fraught with peril.

  Dennis sneered: “There goes our Jamie being led to the altar like a lamb to the butcher.”

  “For shame,” cried Kate. “’Tis for you and the passage money to America that he’s doing it.”

  Old Dan clutched his blackthorn stick and measured a swing at his son’s head. Dennis promptly ducked out of range.

  “Would you be listening to Kate, now. ’Tis for me, she says! But divil a word of her making sheep’s eyes at Waddie O’Dowd every market day, and passing notes at chapel!”

  “Dennis!” Kate’s pink face flamed a deep scarlet.

  “Waddie O’Dowd!” exclaimed Old Dan, momentarily distracted. “Passing notes … and in the chapel?”

  “Like homing doves … back and forth between the pews,” said Dennis.

  Old Dan scratched his head, puzzled. “Sure I didn’t know Waddie O’Dowd could read?”

  “That what’s written between the lines he reads well enough,” said Dennis derisively.

  “Kate … daughter … explain yourself,” the old man roared, transferring his displeasure from Dennis to his daughter.

  But Kate had fled weeping inside the cottage, her sobs swallowed up by the deeper sobbing of the ocean.

  II

  On the road Jamie and Tavish mingled with groups and families thronging on foot or in carts to the fair at Kilkahoon. There were well-to-do farmers who rode horseback, and caravans of tinkers, with their shabby wagons and strings of colts, dogs, and children. The tinkers were the pariahs of the countryside, cursed by Saint Patrick; for when the good saint had found the lump of gold with which he eventually purchased his freedom from slavery, he had taken it first to a tinker. The tinker had called it worthless, saying: “Give it me. It is solder and without value.” Since that day the tinkers had lived homeless, roaming the lanes like gypsies, without roofs or walls they could call their own. They lived
by trading horses, poaching, and occasionally mending a pot or pan.

  Roughs along the road shouted vulgar insults at them as they passed, and received equally profane replies. There was a special curse for outsiders that the tinkers taught their children. “You build houses … aye, like the crows, you put stick and stick together. May we see a scatter of the sticks and the kites achase through the woods. You live man and wife, you say—like goats—two and two together … for fear ye should reach to the hedgetops and the wild taste get in your blood.”

  When a stretch of the lane grew rocky, Tavish and Jamie removed their shoes and strung them about their necks to prevent scuffing against the stones. “We must look our best,” Tavish declared, “and a man’s best begins with his feet.”

  Farther along Jamie stubbed his toe painfully on a sharp rock, but Tavish reminded him philosophically that a damaged toe would mend. “Had you been wearing your brogues, lad, sure now they would have been ruined indeed.”

  The streets of Kilkahoon were a tumult of gaiety and business activity. There were English horses and Irish hobbies displayed in the streets alongside great Belgian and French draft animals. Booths for linens and fine Irish woolens and lace were hung with their wares close beside pens of fat, black Angus cattle, bleating goats, and prize, uncomplaining sheep. Jugglers and ballad singers performed in the streets and three-card men pretended to be drunk, to trap the unwary.

  “Stay close at my side, Jamie lad,” Tavish warned; “and keep your two fists in your trouser pockets so the roughs will know we’re not looking for trouble. There’ll be no time for bloody noses and broken heads this day. We’ve more important things to do.”

  The fair presented a wonderful, laughing, lively scene and Jamie’s eyes drank it in. Bonnie girls singly and in groups darted laughing through the crowd, their skirts and shawls swishing.

  “Look at them … just look at them,” Tavish purred. “Ah … that I were two and twenty this day.”

  He guided Jamie along the crowded street, calling attention to various girls whose charms were outstanding. When Jamie displayed more than a casual interest, however, Tavish quickly found some fault to discredit the candidate who had caught the young man’s eye.

  Jamie thought Standish Moynihan’s daughter an exceedingly pretty girl. He pointed her out to Tavish as she stood tapping her foot in time to the bagpiper’s tune.

  “There’s the glimmering of a fading beauty there,” the Speaker conceded, “but you must look deeper than the surface in choosing a wife, lad. Moyna Moynihan has that fearsome a reputation. Why man, she stood with a club over her father and three brothers until they signed the liquor pledge. And since that day not one drop of liquor has been allowed in the house. And do you know where her aging father, with scarce the strength to get out of his chair, has to go to smoke his pipe? Out to the shed, no less, in the foulest kind of weather. That’s the acid test of a wife, my boy: how she treats her father.”

  With various and comparable calumnies that came easily to his tongue, Tavish led Jamie past the tempting girls that caught his eye. He brought him at last to the combination livery stable, feed and harness shop of the Tinker Shanahans. The Shanahans had formerly been tinkers, but had given up the road and had grown rich in the feed and harness business. Their chief interest remained in horse trading, however, an occupation at which they had few peers.

  The family was large, consisting of Old Timothy, who lived in semiretirement and on friendly terms with no one or thing, except his pipe and ever-present bottle. There were eleven sons who conducted the business, and one daughter, Tirsa, the youngest. The brothers were divided roughly into three categories by public opinion. Jimmie Pat Jackie, Hees, Patch, Tydd and Tone, were the five dark, dour, grim-faced brothers who were never known to smile. They were known perversely as the “laughing” Shanahans. Five other brothers—Fash, Lafe, Ryall, Dan, and Synne—were equally dark in coloring, but for business purposes put on a great show of joviality while they took a customer’s teeth in a horse trade. Of these two groups the second, or the “black” Shanahans were the more distrusted. The most feared of all, however, was Randal, the youngest, who was known with supreme euphemism as “softhearted.” It was said of him that Randal had a human heart served for breakfast, like a kipper, when business was good and he could afford it.

  Jamie had known of the Tinker Shanahans for years, as who hadn’t, but never experienced any dealings with them. The family was famous and fearful but it was whispered that the most frightening of the lot was Tirsa, the daughter. There was a local joke which warned anyone trading horses with the Shanahans to be on guard lest Tirsa be substituted for one of the animals.

  “Why have we come down here, Cousin Tavish?” Jamie asked.

  “Sociability … nothing more,” Tavish assured him.

  The Speaker buzzed among the brothers and their customers, laughing, joking, occasionally whispering to Randal, the “softhearted,” who kept regarding Jamie much in the manner he would study a horse being offered for sale.

  Jamie thought it odd, the unusual interest that the brothers were taking in him. Far back in his mind a suspicion was born and began to grow. Old Timothy limped out, with an ash stick in one hand and a bottle in the other, to beckon them into the house. Jamie followed at a respectful distance, while Timothy, Tavish, Randal, and Fash, one of the “black Shanahans,” led the way.

  The Tinker Shanahans, married and not, lived with their families in one large, two-story tatterdemalion house at the rear of the shop. In the dim, gloom-filled parlor, where the smell of the near-by livery stable penetrated challengingly, the men sat down. The bottle was passed from hand to hand without benefit of glasses and Jamie found himself more and more the subject of conversation.

  “Och, he’s a sober lad, industrious, but with spirit, and a good hand with a horse,” said Tavish. “I wish my poor tongue could describe to you the charm of the small estate which will be his when he decides to take a wife. The acreage is small but the soil is that fertile, you’ve but to drop the seed potato into the ground and step back to avoid being bowled over by the maturing plant.”

  The Shanahans were more interested in the livestock on Jamie’s farm. They wanted to know the number of pigs and chickens; the number and breed of horses; and how much milk the cow gave.

  Tavish answered these probing questions with a jovial expansiveness that made Jamie think the Speaker was describing some other farm than that of the McRuins’. Finally the Shanahans appeared satisfied. They rose and retired to the rear of the house. When they were gone Tavish clapped Jamie on the shoulder.

  “Fortune has indeed smiled upon us this day, Jamie, my boy,” he gloated. “The pulchritudinous cream of Connacht girls has consented to be courted by you.”

  The suspicion that had been growing inside Jamie now became a certainty. “You’re not by chance referring to Tirsa, daughter of the Tinker Shanahans?”

  “Chance?” crowed the Speaker. “I couldn’t have thought of a better word myself—for ’twas chance alone that brought us to the House of Shanahan this day.”

  Jamie had his doubts about the latter part of Tavish’s statement. They had come straight to the Shanahans with directness of homing pigeons. His mind grasped at the small fragments of descriptive gossip he had heard about Tirsa, seeking to form a mental picture of the girl. A moment later the daughter of the house entered, demurely clinging to her father and Randal.

  It would have been more fitting if the two men had been clinging to her, Jamie thought, and some of the furtive rumors about Tirsa’s appearance came back to him. It had been said that her mother was frightened by the Irish giant when she was carrying the child. At any rate, she appeared taller than any of her brothers, and they were all men of considerable stature.

  There had been other whispers, too—no Irishman in his right mind would speak out against a girl with eleven fierce brothers—about her terrible temper and tremendous strength. But now she exuded coy femininity like a lady Goliath.r />
  After flashing one avid look at Jamie she dropped her eyes and steadfastly refused to raise them again, despite the hail of flattery poured over her by Owen Roe Tavish, who seemed determined to outdo himself as a king of compliments.

  “I have acted as Speaker for many a lad in love, but this is the first time such unmatched beauty has left me speechless,” he declared. “Speak up, Jamie boy, isn’t that the truth of it?”

  Jamie opened his mouth to say something but could only gulp in air. From Tirsa came a sharp, explosive laugh, more related to the whinny of a horse than any human sound. Without a word of leave-taking, Jamie rose and hurried from the house.

  “’Tis shyness,” Tavish explained, “the shyness of young love. Ah … ’tis a beautiful thing is nature, the way one heart speaks to another when a boy and girl meet and are at once in love.”

  With that observation which came easily to a man in his profession, the Speaker shook hands all around. Arrangements were made for another meeting at the McRuin farm to seal the bargain—in this way the Tinker Shanahans would have an opportunity to check on Jamie’s inheritance. Then Tavish took his leave.

  Jamie was waiting disconsolately outside. “Cousin Tavish,” the boy said soberly, “I’ve been taught to respect my elders like I’ve been taught my catechism. I would no more think of defying my father than I would of defying the priest. But Tavish, that girl is bewitched.”

  “That’s it … that’s it,” exclaimed Tavish enthusiastically. “What a gift for words you have, Jamie. Bewitching … that’s the word for her. I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “I didn’t say—‘bewitching,’ I said—‘bewitched,’” Jamie protested. “She’s monstrous.”

  “Shush, lad. That’s no way to speak of a girl with a family all brothers.” Tavish put his arm about Jamie’s shoulders and led him away from where the remainder of the Shanahans had never paused in their haggling over horses. “Come now, with our business attended to, we’ll do the fair.”