by Kathy McKeon
“Why is her plant in my pot?” Madam countered. “Bring it out here.”
“Madam,” I jumped in, “that plant’s been here a year!”
I lost the avocado tug-of-war, and without John and me babying it every day, the little tree died of neglect in its new location. Nonetheless, I was still eager for John and Caroline—born and raised city kids—to see what rural life was really like and share what I knew about planting and harvesting when we all visited my homeland.
On the way out the door for our Ireland trip, John had tossed poor old May a small bone: “Don’t worry, May, I’ll go see for myself if Monaghan is better and let you know.”
Monaghan and Sligo were both north of the route we took across the country then down the western coast, passing through an Ireland I was seeing myself for the first time, before we finally pulled up to the secluded estate where we would be spending the summer. Irish step dancers in traditional costume were waiting to greet us alongside servants standing at attention in black-and-white uniforms outside a white Georgian mansion. Horses and ponies grazed in the front pasture. Inside, a parquet entry hall unfurled for what seemed like a city block. There were fifteen bedrooms in all, with Madam’s in the front, facing the Irish Sea.
Point to Waterford, I thought.
Madam had a busy calendar with jaunts here and there, including a state dinner at Dublin Castle, where she wowed the fashion world yet again, her dark hair and eyes offering dramatic contrast to her vivid green evening gown. She stayed overnight at the presidential palace and went to the Irish Sweeps Derby the next day to watch the Thoroughbreds race. I stayed behind at Woodstown House with the children and the McDonnells, enjoying our lazy days picnicking in the fields or climbing down the rocky cliffs to play on the beach.
“Tell us again about the fairies and leprechauns,” Caroline would beg me as the three of us ate our sandwiches on a blanket we’d spread over the soft grass. Inniskeen was a day’s journey to the north, but watching John and Caroline enjoying exactly what I had loved to do at their age, in this same land, carried me on a sweet, nostalgic breeze back to my own childhood.
“If you sit on a hill at night and are very quiet, sometimes you can hear the crackling of sticks and see their little fires,” I told the children. “I spotted them once or twice from a distance doing a jig and smoking their pipes. Sometimes they just sit round a circle playing cards or other games. But if you get too close, they vanish.”
Tell us more, they would demand. Can we catch one? They had big plans to hunt for pots of gold on this trip and were desperate for any clue.
“You have to look for a lone blackthorn bush in the middle of a field,” I instructed them. “That’s where the fairy forts are. All the farmers know it’s bad luck to cut the bush down. Sometimes when they’re plowing their fields around it, they find little clay pipes, two or three inches long, with heads the size of a marble. You can cut a single branch from the lone bush for a shillelagh or walking stick, but that’s all. The fairies live under the bush or beneath stones nearby.”
I had spotted a lone blackthorn in a field from the bus window on the way to Woodstown, and pointed it out to John and Caroline. They spotted a few on their own over the course of our summer as we hiked the hills and fields of the Woodstown estate. Off they would run to search for cold fairy campfires or tiny decks of Old Maid. Leprechauns were trickier, I had informed them. They loved playing pranks and stealing potatoes or small tools from farmers’ sheds, probably to dig holes for burying their black pots of gold coins.
“I’m going to catch one,” John vowed.
“Nobody ever has,” I replied.
He spent the day concocting various plans to outsmart the leprechauns. He vowed to sneak up on them with a net, or ambush them with an empty shoe box or such. No way would he be returning to America empty-handed!
I told the children less fanciful tales, too, sharing my favorite memories from a childhood that couldn’t be more different from their own. I recounted how Easter Sunday had always been such a glorious holiday, because my brothers and sisters and I got to take the jar of pennies and half-pennies Aunt Bridge saved for us and go to the shops on the road to buy candy. We always gave up candy for Lent and looked forward to this binge when our sugar fast was over. We’d pour the coins out on the counter and buy as many little chocolate eggs and pink marshmallow ducks as we could. We’d gather a dozen eggs from Mam’s hens and bring a saucepan from home, along with tea, matches, and a bit of milk. We’d make ourselves a little stove from sticks and stones, fill our pan with river water, and boil the eggs for lunch. We used the cleaner water from the spring for our milk-tea. Our friends would come along with their own Easter candy. One boy who was better off than the rest of us—Bryan was his name—always had good chocolate, and he would trade us some Cadbury for boiled eggs.
We were gone all day, and life seemed absolutely perfect.
Tell us about the animals, Kat!
Both John and Caroline were devoted animal lovers—besides trusty Shannon (a gift from Ireland, from President Kennedy’s last trip) there was a menagerie of birds, guinea pigs, and snakes back at 1040, plus the horses and ponies at the country home in New Jersey. They were politely interested but not nearly as impressed by their private tours of castles and kissing the Blarney Stone as they were with the invitations by local farms to visit the sheep pen or a sty full of squealing piglets. They begged me to tell them stories about all the animals when I was growing up on a farm. Their favorite was the one my older siblings and I came to remember as the famous Billy Goat Incident. (If only we’d had the technology then that we do today to instantly record life’s silliest moments, we no doubt would have become global Internet sensations.)
The goat was a mean and smelly one, even by goat standards, and we came across him standing in the road one day on the way to school with our third cousins, the Kirks. The goat bleated and charged us, and the game was on, all of us teasing him to see how riled up he would get, until a passerby came along and put a stop to it. He took the goat and tied him with a rope to an electric pole out in the field. We went on our merry way, but my brother Mick couldn’t stop thinking about the poor goat tethered and alone out there, so that night, he snuck back to the field and cut the rope. The goat was loose again.
And waiting in the road for us the next morning.
This time, he chased us all the way to school, much to our delight. But as we ran inside the schoolhouse, the goat kept running, too, right into our classroom, where he proceeded to wreak havoc, upending desks and scattering books. The children were all laughing and hollering and shrieking, while Mr. Mullen, in a red-faced rage, chased the goat around the room. He finally ripped the chalkboard off the wall to fling at the wretched beast. The goat caught it with his horns, and Mr. Mullen took advantage of the momentary disarmament to shove him back outside. That wasn’t really the end of him, though: Male goats have a bad-enough musky stink to them to begin with, but when a buck is in rut, he’ll spray himself liberally with his own urine as a sort of goat aftershave to attract the females. This one had spared no expense in that department, and the room reeked with the awful stench for what seemed like weeks afterward. We never saw him again, though.
Once the goat had departed, Mr. Mullen went straight for his hated strap—a small whip with not just one thick strip of leather, but two. “Smiths and Kirks, line up and put out your hands,” he ordered. The red welts he raised burned for days. Corporal punishment wasn’t expressly allowed in public schools, mind you, but none of us ever told our parents about Mr. Mullen’s cruelty because we would’ve just gotten punished a second time at home for incurring the teacher’s wrath at school. Better to suck it up and, in fine Irish tradition, seek revenge. It didn’t take us long at all to hatch a simple but deeply gratifying plot.
Mr. Mullen, we knew, rode his bicycle each day along the same narrow, hilly lanes to and from the schoolhouse. All we had to do was wait for a decent cold snap, and when the weather co
nspired with us, we scoped out the ideal spot in the road to ambush our enemy. Settling on a nice curve with a steep slope that veered off into a thicket of thornbushes, we proceeded to douse the road with the buckets of water we’d brought for the occasion. The water quickly froze into a sheet of black ice, and we scurried behind a snowy hedge to watch and wait. Sure enough, along came Mr. Mullen like the Wicked Witch of the West on his big black bike, feet strapped to the pedals, his school satchel resting in the straw basket affixed to the bike’s handlebars. We could barely contain our excited giggles as he hit the ice and went down with a thud, slipping and sliding, feet still strapped to the pedals, straight into the prickle bushes. As an added bonus, his satchel went flying, too, scattering our classwork into the slush and snow. We hightailed it out of there without a backward glance. As further proof that God was on our side in the undeclared war against Mr. Mullen, Mick also managed at some point to steal the teacher’s strap, and it wasn’t replaced.
While we were on holiday in Ireland, I would take John and Caroline on long walks through the green countryside, and they would delight in the sheep ranging free in the hills around us. I explained how the different-colored x’s painted on their backs helped identify which farmer they belonged to.
Caroline was a true nature girl, with a deep compassion for all living things, animals in particular. She had gotten up with her mother at dawn to ride to the hounds before, but I’m certain Madam and her fellow equestriennes had held back on those days, because Caroline would never have been able to stomach the thought of a fox being killed. I didn’t even realize what was happening myself until Madam came in one afternoon from the stables aglow with excitement. “We did good today,” she told me. “We got a fox.” I had heard the hounds making a bloodcurdling racket up in the hills earlier, and now I understood why.
John shared his sister’s love of animals but had failed to measure up to Caroline’s gold standard of compassion more than once, and felt her wrath. One of John’s favorite toys was that big semi-truck he used to roll noisily down the hallway at the crack of dawn in hopes of rousing Maud Shaw, me, or the cook to come keep him company. It opened and closed like a garage in the back, and John often shut his guinea pig inside to give it joy rides, the joy being likely more John’s than the guinea pig’s. One day he took a break from playing to wander into the kitchen for a midafternoon snack. He parked his truck by the back elevator and forgot all about it. The next morning, when he went to get his guinea pig out of its cage and discovered it empty, he raced to me in tears. We went and found the truck. The guinea pig was alive, but wobbly. Caroline pounced on her forgetful brother.
“How could you do such a horrible thing, John? That’s so cruel!” she cried. “You almost killed him!”
“I didn’t mean to!” John wailed.
The guinea pig was revived with food and water, and he lived to ride again.
Caroline wasn’t the only one who had issues with John’s care of pets, though mine had nothing to do with neglect.
John kept a two-foot snake in a terrarium in his room. I hate snakes and wouldn’t touch the thing no matter how many times he promised me it was perfectly nice and wouldn’t bite. He liked to wear the snake draped around his neck. The super knew about the pet reptile and had warned John to always close his toilet lid and keep the snake away from open spaces inside the apartment. Madam had no problems with a reptile in residence, but caring for it was entirely John’s responsibility, same as Caroline with her pretty little parakeets.
“Kat, can we please go to the pet store to get a mouse for my snake?” John asked me one day. Visiting the neighborhood pet shop was always a fun outing, so off we went. John used his allowance to pay for a sweet little white mouse and carried him home in a sandwich bag. That should have been a clue of what was to come, but I missed it. I had some vague notion that we were buying a friend to keep the snake company.
Back at the apartment, we went to John’s room to put the mouse in its new home, or so I thought.
“You want to see this?” John asked me.
“What?” I asked innocently.
“Watch this.”
He set the mouse inside the terrarium. Around and around it ran with the snake coiled in its corner until quick as lightning it struck, swallowing the terrified mouse one, two, three. I flew out of the room before the small bulge made its way down the length of the snake. I thought it was the cruelest thing I’d ever seen. I still had to occasionally accompany John to the pet store to buy a mouse, but we had an unspoken understanding not to discuss its fate.
There was a wooden cover over the top of the snake’s terrarium, but either John was careless or the snake was stronger than we thought, because it still somehow managed to get out one time. We searched everywhere—behind curtains, in potted plants, under the cook’s bed—and tried to keep quiet about what we were looking for. No sense inciting panic, and John was certain he could find the snake and skirt getting in trouble for losing it. I don’t know which was more terrifying for me—finding it, or not finding it. John was notorious for misplacing things—he went through at least three school blazers a year—and repeated scolding from his mother never did do much to break the pattern. The snake was nowhere to be found.
A few days later, the super called to ask if John’s snake was missing. A woman on the tenth floor had just found one in the worst possible way when she sat on her toilet. One of the Secret Service men went to retrieve the snake and deliver a handwritten note of apology from Madam.
What I would’ve given to read that one.
We got in lots of sightseeing when we weren’t just enjoying the life of leisure on our borrowed estate. Ireland afforded the kids and Madam a kind of privacy they never enjoyed back home. There were no paparazzi hounding them, just occasional news photographers keeping a respectful distance when we went to church or on special VIP tours, like the one where we got to watch artisans blow glass at the Waterford factory. Madam was presented with a big crystal bowl etched with an image of PT-109, the patrol-torpedo boat her husband had heroically commanded as a navy lieutenant during World War II.
The best time of all, though, was the least fancy, and the most genuinely Irish experience the Americans could possibly have had: the night we all went to a local pub to hear some music and have a bite. We sat at a big table in the middle, with extra chairs and tables pushed alongside to make room for all of us. The surprised regulars raised their glasses or offered a friendly nod as we squeezed by, but no one treated Madam any differently than she would have been if she were one of the local fishermen’s wives. There was a terrific band playing that night, and the mood was lively and festive. Soon people were singing along, and the kids were out on the floor dancing. When the musicians struck up a traditional Celtic folk song called “Black Velvet Band,” I glanced over and saw Madam smiling as she swayed along to the chorus:
Her eyes they shone like diamonds
I thought her the queen of the land
And her hair, it hung over her shoulder
Tied up with a black velvet band.
The melody stuck with her, because she later asked me about it.
“Do you think you could get me a copy of it, Kath?” she wondered. I promised to find her a cassette before we left. I could look for it in Inniskeen when I went home.
We’d been in Ireland for three weeks before I was able to peel off for a promised weekend to go see my family. Overhearing me make my plans with Madam, John immediately piped up.
“Can I go with Kat?” he asked. “I want to see her farm!”
“That would be fine with me,” Madam said, “but it’s up to Kathy.” I felt my stomach clench with dread. John looked at me expectantly. I knew he was excited, and I hated myself for not feeling the same way.
I couldn’t let him see where I came from.
“Oh, John, I wish that were possible, I’d love to bring you, but I can’t. There’s no room for you. Maybe another time. I have to go up there first to ch
eck it out,” I improvised. Madam undoubtedly knew I was from humble roots, yet she surely wasn’t grasping the reality of that—no indoor plumbing or electricity, a cold concrete floor, the president’s son going to the bathroom in a dark shed with newspaper instead of toilet paper.
And where was I supposed to put the Secret Service—in with the cows?
But my emotions were more complicated than pride alone.
That Ireland, my Ireland, belonged to me. It was a piece of me I wasn’t willing to give away, a self that belonged only to me and would never be “Jackie’s girl.”
The Secret Service gave me a ride to the train station, and I spent three hours getting to Dublin, where Mam and Packy were waiting in a borrowed car to drive the rest of the way to Inniskeen. Just getting home ate up much of my first day off. That left me one full day to be with my family, then the last one to get back to Waterford. Madam had promised me a second weekend before we headed back to the States so I would have a little more time.
Inniskeen was of course unchanged, though there was nervous talk of unrest across the nearby border. Though part of the Republic of Ireland, County Monaghan fell into the same province, Ulster, under British rule in the north. The Catholics across the border were protesting discrimination at the hands of the Protestants, and the Irish Republican Army was rumored to be mustering to fight British imperialism.
In my old village, I was greeted like a conquering hero; even the boys who never asked me to dance on Friday nights were suddenly courtly. Mrs. Quinn, who ran the folk museum in a former church, invited me to tea.
“Oh, Kathy, do you think you could get me a little something of Mrs. Kennedy’s, maybe a scarf or an old pocketbook she’s not using?” she implored. The museum featured exhibits about blacksmithing and the art of making poitin, which was Irish moonshine. And, of course, there was plenty about Patrick Kavanagh, the modern poet who was born in Inniskeen and was our claim to literary fame. I assumed the intention was to display Madam’s pilfered pocketbooks in that section, not the whiskey wing, but Mrs. Quinn was going to have to find another middleman.
