The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  “Come this way,” Father Burke said, leading him out of a back door of the presbytery, through a yard which connected with a side door of the church. The priest opened the door and went into a corridor, Mangan following. The corridor led into the vestry, a room with two large oak wardrobes, some processional banners furled and stacked in a corner, a row of cupboards on top of which were a censer, a platen, and three statues in states of disrepair. On the cupboard drawers were handwritten file cards, variously marked: altar linens, surplices, tapers, Catholic Truth Society. There was also a desk and a chair, and on the shelf behind the desk were rows of notebooks and files. On the desk was Mangan’s family Bible, surrounded by several old, legal-size ledgers, their pages marked with paper slips. One was open, with a pad on top of it. The pad was filled with notations in a small, clerkly hand. The priest turned to Mangan, his boyish features lit by a smile. “As you’ll see, I did my homework last night. Sit down there and I’ll show you.”

  There was only one chair. “No, you,” Mangan said, deferentially.

  “Sit,” said Father Burke, and it was an order. He took up the pad and turned back the page.

  “We did pretty well,” he said. “We’ve followed the fish upstream almost to the source. Now, look here.” He leaned over the ledger, his finger tracing its way along lines in faded violet ink. “The earliest record of your family in our Drishane parish registers would be this one—the year is 1862—the marriage of Patrick James Mangan to Kathleen Driscoll. I can trace down from this to the present time. But who was Patrick James Mangan? Well, my record shows he was baptized in Holy Cross Church, Dublin, and he was the child of a James Mangan of Dublin and Ellen O’Keefe, the widow Boylan of Skibbereen. Now, that man, James Mangan of Dublin, that might be your man, the poet. But you’d have to check the baptismal records in Holy Cross Parish in Dublin. That way you might find out where that James Mangan was baptized. And that could tell you if he’s Mangan the poet.”

  “I’ll do that,” Mangan said. “I’m planning to go on to Dublin when I finish here.” He took out his notebook and wrote down the dates and names from the register, while the priest got up and produced two further registers, which he opened at marked pages.

  “Now, coming down the years from that beginning in 1862, the records are all here,” the priest said. “Whether you’re related to Mangan the poet or not, you are certainly related to the Mangans who live here in Drishane. I’ve compared the dates in the family Bible you left with me with our records here and they tally out.

  “As you can see here, the Patrick James Mangan who was married in 1862 had three sons, one born in 1872, one in 1874, and the youngest in 1875. The ten-year gap between marriage and children seems to have been because he was off serving in India. The youngest of those sons, James Patrick Mangan, would be your grandfather. There’s no record here of his marriage, of course, because he emigrated to Montreal, as your family Bible shows. And he lived until 1952, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Mangan said. “I was ten when he died. I remember his funeral.”

  “And the Mangans who stayed on here in Drishane were the descendants of Patrick James Mangan’s oldest son, Conor James. Now, there are only two male Mangans left here, Dinny and Conor. And neither of them has married as yet.”

  “So what relation would I be to Conor and Kathleen?”

  “Kathleen?” the priest said.

  “His sister, Conor’s sister.”

  “Ah, yes.” The priest bent over his ledger. “Let’s see, I’m very weak on these consanguinity things. I’ll have to work it out, it will take a minute. Anyway, it’s not that close.”

  “That’s all right,” Mangan said. “Don’t bother. I’m afraid I’ve put you to a lot of trouble already.”

  “No, no, I found it interesting,” the priest said. “Especially the possibility that the James Mangan of Dublin mentioned here could be the poet himself. The dates are more or less the same. But, as I said before, you’d have to go to Holy Cross Parish in Dublin to continue the trail.” He rose and stacked the ledgers in a pile, removing the markers. “By the way,” he said, “maybe you’d like to see where most of these relations of yours are buried. They’re not in the churchyard here, it’s too new. The old graveyard for this parish was at Dunmanus Coos. A beautiful spot. Two of the Fenian leaders, killed in ’98, are buried there, by the way. O’Bofey and Sean Rahilly. Which reminds me, I’m going down that way now on a sick call. I could drop you off there and pick you up on the way back.”

  “Dunmanus Coos?” Mangan said. “Isn’t that down by the sea on the other side of the mountain?”

  “It is, surely.”

  “Well then, I’m driving in that direction myself. I’m going to stay with Conor Mangan and his sister.”

  “Are you, so?” The priest put his head on one side, as though digesting this information. “You were staying at a house belonging to Dinny Mangan, were you not?”

  “Yes. But I have to move. I have my bag in the car. I thought if you were driving past the graveyard I could follow you.”

  “Grand,” the priest said. He took out a key chain and, as they left the vestry, locked the door. In the yard a drizzle had started. Father Burke went back into the presbytery for his overcoat, and a few minutes later Mangan was following the priest’s little car up a road outside the village, a road which intersected with a narrower road that climbed steeply up the mountainside. The rain, in the astonishing way of the country, stopped as quickly as it started and now the sky was blue as on a summer’s day, the sun’s heat warming the wet road in front of his car, sending up a small fog of heat mist from the road’s gravel surface.

  On his left, surrounded by low walls of heaped stones long overgrown with grass and broken down by trespassing cattle, was an abandoned farmhouse, its thatched roof collapsed, its cow byre lichened with weeds. And as he followed the priest’s car up to the summit ridge of mountain and came to the fall of the road down the other side, he saw, below, desolate on a headland facing the sea, an older ruin, a Norman tower.

  The little car ahead of him picked up speed on the descent, puttering along gaily until they reached the coastal road, which wound below the presence of mountain between a brilliant flowering of wild red fuchsia hedges. They passed a farm where a dog ran out barking, making foolhardy feints at the car wheels. An old man and then an old woman emerged from the farmhouse kitchen door, waving to the priest’s car, peering in bewildered curiosity at Mangan’s car, which followed. The old man wore a dark serge suit and the old woman a gray blouse, a gray apron, and a knitted black wool shawl. They were the clothes these people’s parents might have worn a hundred years ago. As he passed, Mangan waved. The old man waved back.

  The priest’s car turned down toward the sea. As Mangan followed, he saw on a bluff just overlooking the rocky headland and the spume of wave an enclosed field of crosses and plinths, the graves overgrown and untended, the graveyard’s iron gate padlocked with a rusting iron chain. The priest’s car stopped outside the gate and the priest got out, his angular black-suited figure outlined like a scarecrow against the sky and the blustery wind which whipped his clothes against his body. When Mangan parked, the priest pointed to the gate. “There’s a step over there,” he said, indicating a stone ledge that jutted out of the wall to the right of the gate. “A footstep. You can climb over. The graves of your family are down there on the right, near the sea. Just look in that general area.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for all your help.”

  “Not at all.” The priest’s face grinned at him, eyes narrowed against the wind. “And if you find out for sure that you’re Mangan’s descendant, send me a postcard, will you?”

  “I will.”

  “Good man, then,” the priest said, holding out his hand. “And good luck to you.”

  “Good luck,” Mangan echoed, and the priest got back into his car, waving as he drove on down the road. Within a minute he was quite alone, the other car gone as if it had never been. He looke
d back up at the mountain and with a start of recognition saw a small yellow speck, high up. Kathleen’s caravan. Below, on lower slopes of the mountainside, were small cottages, little farms boxed in by fields surrounded by low stone walls, narrow roads intersecting, linking the dwellings with each other. But the road up to Kathleen’s caravan on the mountaintop passed no other houses. The yellow speck was all alone on the summit. Mangan turned and mounted the stepping-stones on the cemetery wall, coming down on the other side, inside consecrated ground. He moved through shin-high wet grass, past gray stone plinths and lichened Celtic crosses. There was a path and he made for it, but it was long unused, its stony track infested with stinging nettles and rank yellow dandelion. He turned to the right as the priest had indicated. Above him, a shifting sky of darkening clouds came around the headland, throwing a great shadow on the graves. He stepped off the path, approaching the far corner of the graveyard, scanning names on the plinths and headstones. Almost at once, a greening stone loomed before him and he saw his name writ large.

  MANGAN

  PATRICK JAMES MANGAN

  Departed this life

  1 January 1899

  There in the cloud-darkened field Mangan took out his notebook and compared the dates he had written down from the family Bible and the parish register. This was the grave of his great-grandfather. He saw again the dull young face in Conor Mangan’s photograph album, the boy who had taken the Queen’s shilling, served in India, and sired a Canadian Pacific Railway comptroller, at home in the drawing rooms of Montreal and New York. My great-grandfather lies here.

  Light rain fell like spittle on the names of the dead. He moved on to a nearby grave and read the headstone.

  FERGUS MANGAN

  Erected by his loving family

  1919–1972

  He consulted his notebook. Fergus Mangan was the father of Conor and Kathleen. The rain, growing heavier, began to spatter his page, blurring the names and dates he had copied from the priest’s ledger. He shut the notebook and put it in his pocket, moving on, searching the gravestones. But now he was down at the edge of the cemetery, the oldest part, it seemed, where most of the graves were unmarked, or recorded only by simple grassy mounds of earth. Beyond this point the graveyard sloped steeply toward the sea, so that the great sweep of Dunmanus Bay, the rocky cliffs, and the ruined Norman tower far out on the headland were visible from where he stood.

  He looked at the tower and thought of the broken-roofed cottage he had seen earlier, relic of emigration or famine. Abandoned, castle and cottage were co-equal in neglect, testament to the way in which this country, more than any other he had known, seemed to master time and history, rejecting men’s efforts to make their presence last. Ashes to ashes. He saw Beatrice walk away from him that day, her camel’s-hair coat draped like a cape about her shoulders as she hurried out to meet her new lover. The rain chilled him, wept on his face. He turned back from the sea to the graves and, retracing his route along the weed-choked paths, reached the cemetery gates and climbed the stepping-stones in the wall. As he reached the top of the wall and prepared to descend, a small truck came down the road, passing his parked car. There were four workmen standing up in the truck, wild-looking fellows with red, windblown complexions, dressed in old suit jackets and trousers in the Irish manner. They looked at him and he noticed that one of them at once turned away as though to hide his face. He nodded to the passing men and two of them acknowledged his greeting. Mangan stared at the one who had turned away, or the back of his serge jacket once part of a Sunday-best suit, now wetted by rains, worn with age. A stoutish fellow, he seemed, with ears which stuck out. Why is he avoiding me? Mangan wondered, and as the truck rattled on down the road, diminishing in perspective, the stance of the workman’s back suddenly reminded him of Dinny Mangan, his visitor of last evening. It was an illusion, surely, for these men with their shovels and scythes were the County Council workmen he had seen on the roads the other day weeding ditches and trimming hedges.

  The little truck rounded a bend and disappeared from sight. Within seconds, all was still again. Mangan looked up to the mountain, his eyes drawn to the yellow speck on its summit. He turned his car around and drove along the shore road until he came to one of the small intersecting roads that led toward the mountaintop. He went up this road, driving hesitantly as though he had entered a maze, his eyes searching among the jigsaw of stone walls and winding roads for the route toward that yellow speck.

  He made a wrong turn. The car climbed past two small farms and ended up in the yard of a third farm, halfway up the mountainside. He backed out, pursued by barking dogs, and retraced his way to a crossroads, turning up again, always searching for the yellow speck. After another false turn he at last found himself on a lonely little road, the sort the priest, yesterday, had called a boreen. There were no farms ahead, and as he climbed ever upward, the yellow speck became the outline of the caravan, perched on the side of the road at the very ridge of summit. As he shifted down into second gear for the last climb to the top, his heart began to beat in an irregular, excited manner. Conor Mangan’s little truck was not parked on the road ahead. A wisp of smoke rose from the trailer’s chimney. On the clothesline, a peach-colored slip and a cotton dress danced demented in the high wind. He parked the car on the ridge of the road, opposite the opening to the field where the trailer was. He felt his hands tremble as he switched off the ignition. When he got out, he could see the small road falling away on either side of him, back toward the sea whence he had come, and on the other side toward Drishane. He went in at the entrance to the field, expecting the dog to run out at him from underneath the caravan. But no dog came. All was silent and still, with gray clouds drifting into the mountain face, swirling mistily about him as he crossed the field. The clouds moved on, clearing, and he saw that the caravan door was shut. He climbed the steps and knocked. Perhaps she had gone down to the village with her brother? He knocked again, his tension beginning to abate as he considered the chance that he might have to wait up here, alone, until someone returned. No one answered. He came down the steps and went around to the back. Here the field tilted up toward the mountain rock face, so that when he stood on tiptoe he could peer into the caravan’s kitchen window. He heard a radio playing inside, very faint, a fiddle and pipe, an Irish air. “Kathleen?” he called loudly.

  But no one answered. He peered in and saw the untidy kitchen counter littered with food cartons and dirty dishes. He moved along the bank to a curtained window, and through its parted folds saw the caravan’s sleeping space with two bunk beds. They were empty. He walked around the caravan, coming back to the front entrance. At that point he noticed a bicycle leaning against the low stone wall of the field in which the caravan stood. It was a large, old-fashioned man’s bicycle, with a bell, a pump, a lamp, and a chain guard. The second thing Mangan noticed about this bicycle was that its owner must be a very tall man, for the distance from seat to pedal was very great. So the bicycle probably did not belong to Conor Mangan.

  As he stood looking at the bicycle he heard a small growl in its vicinity and suddenly a dog which had been concealed behind the wall leaped up on top of the stones and stood, its head thrust forward, showing its teeth. It was not the dog he had seen yesterday, although all the dogs in this district seemed of the same type, piebald mongrel sheepdogs, much given to barking and menace at sight of a stranger. This dog was larger than the one which had hidden under the caravan, and watching, he realized that it would not attack him if he did not advance any farther. It saw itself as the guardian of the bicycle. “All right, boy,” he said conciliatingly, and backed away.

  The dog ceased its barking, but continued to watch him narrowly until he had retreated to the door of the caravan. It then sat down on the wall, ears pricked, studying him as though he were some errant sheep. He turned and walked out on the small road and there on the ridge summit looked down at the splendid panorama of sea, the wide sweep of bay, the headlands, like the forelegs of some enormou
s Sphinx, stretching out into the sea, pointing toward America. Below, on the other side of the road, he could see the rooftop of Gorteen, the Mangans’ strange house, and faraway in a valley the spire of Drishane church, the village rooftops clustered around it like spilled playing cards. As he stood, lulled by the beauty of the views on either side of the mountain summit, undecided whether to wait or not, he heard the dog behind him bark once. He looked back and saw the dog standing on the low stone wall, tail wagging, looking across the field to the rocky promontory behind the trailer. From the shelter of this rock came a tall old man in a shabby black serge suit, a stained old uniform cap of some sort on his head. His trouser legs were tucked tight by bicycle clips and he carried a large old leather satchel strung by a strap over his right shoulder. He was collarless and unshaven, gray-grizzled, with a high, purplish complexion. As he approached, Mangan heard his heavy boots squelch on the boggy grass of the field. He touched his forefinger to his cap in salute. “Nice day, sir.”