Irish Mist

by Andrew M. Greeley

  We turned a corner, emerged from the mists, and there, radiantly blue, was the McGrail bungalow.

  I hugged Fiona. “We’ve both made fools of ourselves, girl,” I said. She snuggled close to me.

  How much, I wondered, does this huge and intelligent beast understand? If she could speak to me, would she have said, “You blundered, amadon; I knew exactly where the house was.”

  “We’ll be looking for them, sir,” the copper said. “And we’ll keep a watch around the house all night. Our relief will be along later.”

  “You could use a bite of dinner?”

  “Oh, yes, we could, sir. Ms. McGrail brought us tea and scones earlier.”

  Naturally.

  Fiona and I went into the house and were reprimanded for running around in the fog and getting ourselves all wet.

  “It was all her fault,” I pleaded.

  1 Irish Gold

  —24—

  THIS TIME didn’t me ma and I talk in Irish while we were preparing the meal and me da outside folding the tables and chairs after them poor dear tourists had left. I know You’re an Irish speaker, so I don’t have to translate for You, like I’d have to for me poor dear Dermot. You also know what a terrible indirect language Irish is. Yet wasn’t me ma more direct this time than when we talked about it in English? And didn’t she start the conversation herself?

  “Don’t they say that there’s passionate hunger inside of every woman, no matter how prim and proper she might pretend to be?”

  “Haven’t I heard that said, too?”

  “Them that knows more about it than I do tell me that until a woman is able to satisfy that hunger, the marriage won’t be everything that it should be?”

  “Don’t you know that yourself?”

  Wasn’t that an awful thing to say, and meself in a mood to be difficult?

  “Well,” she says with a toss of her head, “I’m certainly not one of them prim and proper women, am I?”

  “I never said you were.”

  “ ’Tis wrong they say, for a woman to think that it’s up to her husband.”

  Hint, hint.

  “Why would it ever be up to him, poor dear man?”

  “ ’Tis true.”

  Silence.

  “Don’t the prim and proper women spend their whole marriage waiting for their husband to be a magician?”

  “And some of themselves pretending all along that everything is fine?”

  Wasn’t that candid of me now? Am I really a prim and proper woman?

  “Well, isn’t there a bit of the prim and proper woman in all of us? Aren ‘t we afraid of what will happen if we abandon ourselves completely? Sure there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “Och, there is not.”

  She did say “abandon.” She really did. That’s the key word, isn ‘t it now? To give yourself is one thing; to abandon yourself is something else again. I guess there is a lot of the prim and proper woman in me.

  “But aren’t we only half a woman until we overcome that fear?”

  Wow, as me poor Dermot would say.

  Meself half a woman? And pretending all the time that I’m a full woman. And getting away with it because I’m such a focking faker.

  It has to stop. Help me, please.

  —25—

  IT WAS the kind of typical Irish dinner Ma used to make—roast beef (well done), carrots, beans, mashed potatoes with pot liquor on them, and a big dish of chocolate ice cream.

  No wine. Ma didn’t believe in it, and the elder McGrails were not yet into the French and American affectation of wine with dinner. However, we all had a small sip of Connemara, the local whiskey, which would burn the throat out of anyone who wasn’t Irish.

  We praised their new house. They blushed and smiled.

  “I don’t miss the old place one minute,” Annie assured us.

  “It’s difficult altogether,” her husband agreed, “to grasp the change, if you take me meaning. It’s almost like we’re living in a television program—a warm, dry, comfortable house. Annie and me wanted this life for our children. We never expected it for ourselves.”

  “Aren’t we afraid every morning when we wake up that it will all have been taken away from us overnight?”

  “Shush, now, Ma,” Nuala insisted. “No one’s going to take it away from us.”

  Her parents were skeptical, just as so many Americans had been skeptical after the Second World War, expecting as they did that the Great Depression would come back. It never did, not yet anyway.

  There was not even a slight smell of turf in the house, though a stack of it stood near the fireplace. The electric heating apparently was enough. It was strange to be in a house in rural Ireland that was not permeated by your authentic west of Ireland smell—turf blended with cattle manure.

  Nuala, now wearing a simple gray dress, had brought dinner plates out to the drivers, two of them this time, waiting on the road, and a large bone to the famished Fiona.

  “Will those poor men be out there all night?” Annie wondered.

  “Ah, no,” her daughter reassured her. “There’ll be another team.”

  No further questions were asked. They knew as well as we did that the men were Gardai.

  After dinner we adjourned to the garden, where a bottle of Baileys was produced along with water tumblers to drink it—no cordial glasses in this part of the world. No ice either.

  Fiona, who had been having a great time with her bone, rushed over to join us, delighted that we had the good sense to come outdoors where she was. A full moon shone over our heads, though it was still dusk in Ireland even late in the evening. The moon was not shining over the Claddagh or, from our perspective, over Galway Bay. However it was shining on the small lake behind the McGrails’ house. Nuala and her mother had thrown sweaters over their shoulders. I reflected again on how similar they were in face and figure, if not in contentiousness.

  ‘Them eejits again?” Nuala had asked me when I had come out of the shower earlier.

  She didn’t miss much, did she?

  “And one of them with a broken arm.”

  “They were coming after you?”

  “One had a knife and the other a cosh. They’re amateur thugs. They saw Fiona and my shillelagh and decided against a fight.”

  She removed the towel from my hands and completely the drying process, much to my delight.

  “Sure you’re a gorgeous man, Dermot Michael,” she had said admiringly.

  Under those circumstances I had almost told her how frantically the wolfhound and I had rushed back to protect her and her parents. Then I had realized that my panic was foolish. They would have been quite capable of taking care of themselves. Nuala with a garbage can (dust bin here) cover in her hand was as dangerous as I was with an Irish war club.

  So I had kept my mouth shut.

  “The Gardai will stay around?” she had asked.

  “They will.”

  “What do they want, Dermot?”

  “It’s hard to tell. They’re not very good at being thugs, and they’re taking terrible chances.”

  “Someone is paying them a lot of money.”

  Out in the garden after supper, she hummed “Galway Bay” again and we all joined in softly, so as not to wake the Baby Jesus I presumed. I kept my mouth shut also about the feet that from where we were we could not see Galway Bay. Instead I sipped from my tumbler of Baileys.

  Fiona curled up at my feet and went to sleep.

  “It’s easy to see whose dog she is,” Annie McGrail said with a laugh.

  This, I realized, would soon become the conventional wisdom.

  We sat in companionable silence for many moments. In Ireland love is often communicated by total silence.

  “You’re going down beyond below to Limerick,” said Gerry McGrail. It sounded like a simple observation, but it was in this part of the world a question intended to begin a conversation.

  I never have figured out why the Irish combine three prep
ositions as adverbs when they’re talking direction.

  “Aren’t we now?” I said, an Irish response that caused by wife to giggle.

  “And you’ll be staying at that castle over across beyond the Shannon?”

  “We will,” Nuala replied, cutting off my embarrassing effort to sound like a native.

  Silence. Someone sighed.

  I waited.

  “It’s an interesting place altogether, isn’t it now?”

  “A bit of history there,” I said, either now in the groove or at least not embarrassing my wife.

  “Aye, there is that. … Mind you, it’s a fine hotel, they say.”

  More silence.

  “Back in Catholic hands, I hear.”

  “ ’Tis not right for us to judge what happened so long ago,” Annie warned. “Still it’s nice when the wheel turns, isn’t it now?”

  We all sighed.

  “They were a brave young couple, weren’t they?” Gerry continued. “Himself with your Victoria Cross and herself fighting off both the Irregulars and the Tans.”

  “All so long ago,” Nuala said, very softly.

  Her father sighed. “No story in Ireland ever loses anything through repetition, but don’t they say that she was hiding some of the lads when the Tans came back.”

  “Came back?”

  “They’d been there before.”

  Silence.

  “The Kerry men had come before and tried to burn the Big House down, and an English officer living there. The Tans drove them off. Then the Tans came back again later.”

  It could not have been much later, because the Tans (who killed 238 people during their time in Ireland) had run amok for only a year.

  More silence. If Gerry smoked he would have been puffing on his pipe. I filled Nuala’s tumbler with more Baileys.

  “Some strange things happened that night. Me own da who fought in the Free State Army because he didn’t much like your Cork men who were running the Irregulars told me once that there were a lot of tales told about that night.”

  “Were there?”

  “Aye, there were. The woman was killed somehow and the house burned down. Most of the Kerry men escaped and served with the Irregulars. Me da said that most of them were shot by the Free Staters when they captured them. He wasn’t there when it happened, but he says that the orders came down from higher up. They were killing a lot of folks in those days.”

  “Is the castle haunted?” I asked.

  Annie replied in the very words her daughter had used on our ride out, “Och, isn’t every castle in Ireland haunted.”

  ‘The owners don’t advertise that, do they now?” Gerry said. “ ’Tis all about their golf course.”

  “Where I’m going to beat your man,” Nuala insisted. I ignored her.

  “Anything about the officer who commanded the Tans?”

  Yet more silence.

  “Me da never said anything about him. Funny thing, there’s never been any talk about him.”

  It was in England that Henry Hugh Tudor was a bad name, not in Ireland. Odd.

  “Those things happened so long ago,” Nuala said, speaking even more softly this time. “Seventy years and more.”

  “In Ireland, child, that’s only yesterday.”

  Yet more silence.

  “Did your father ever encounter any trouble for serving in the Free State Army?” I asked.

  “Don’t we in the Gaeltacht look on such things a little differently?”

  “We remember as long as anyone else, maybe longer,” Annie added. “But aren’t we easy on forgiveness?”

  “Your children, too?” I asked.

  Everyone laughed.

  I poured myself a little bit more Baileys.

  Gerry brought to an end our conversation about Casde Garry.

  “Didn’t they all say that she was a very brave woman? Maybe she wanted to die to be with her husband again? Me da told me once that they said Mass for her in the Catholic church, just as they did for himself when he was killed.”

  Gerry rose from his chair and took a book off an end table. He opened to a page in which there was a bookmark and with considerable flourish sat back in his chair.

  “May I read you a bit about Carraroe, Dermot Michael?”

  “Sure,” Annie McGrail said with a Nuala-like snort, “is there much chance of him saying no and yourself already to begin?”

  “When your man was young and was writing that play about the islands, he toured the west of Ireland and wrote down what life was like in them days.”

  “Synge,” Nuala Anne said, fearing that the allusion was too obscure for me.

  “Didn’t I know a young woman once who told an audience that she’d lost the only playboy of the Western world?”

  “And didn’t she get a dozen roses for the first time in her life?”

  And didn’t tears of happiness flood her eyes at the memory.

  “And didn’t she forget to say thank you?”

  “And wasn’t she scared altogether?”1

  Gerry waited patiently till we had finished our pas de deux and then began his story.

  “He called it Between the Bays of Carraroe. It was the world in which our grandparents courted.

  “ ‘In rural Ireland very few parishes only are increasing in population, and those that are doing so are usually in districts of the greatest poverty. One of the most curious instances of this tendency is to be found in the parish of Carraroe, which is said to be, on the whole, the poorest parish in the country, although many worse cases of individual destitution can be found elsewhere. The most characteristic part of this district lies on a long promontory between Cashla Bay and Greatman’s Bay. On both coastlines one sees a good many small quays, with, perhaps, two hookers moored to them, and on the roads one passes an occasional flat space covered with small green fields of oats—with whole families on their knees weeding among them—or patches of potatoes; but for the rest one sees little but an endless series of low stony hills, with veins of grass. Here and there, however, one comes in sight of a fresh-water lake, with an island or two, covered with seagulls, and many cottages round the shore; some of them standing almost on the brink of the water, others a little higher up, fitted in among the rocks, and one or two standing out on the top of a ridge against the blue of the sky or of the Twelve Bens of Connaught.

  “ ‘At the edge of one of these lakes, near a school of lace or knitting—one of those that have been established by the Congested Districts Board—we met a man driving a mare and foal that had scrambled out of their enclosure, although the mare had her two offlegs chained together. As soon as he had got them back into one of the fields and built up the wall with loose stones, he came over to a stone beside us and began to talk about horses and the dying out of the ponies of Connemara. “You will hardly get any real Connemara ponies now at all,” he said, “and the kind of horses they send down to us to improve the breed are no use, for the horses we breed from them will not thrive or get their health on the little patches where we have to put them. This last while most of the people in this parish are giving up horses altogether. Those that have them sell their foals when they are about six months old for four pounds, or five maybe; but the better part of the people are working with an ass only, that can carry a few things on a straddle over her back.”

  “ ‘ “If you’ve no horses,” I said, “how do you get to Galway if you want to go to a fair or to market?”

  “ ‘ “We go by the sea,” he said, “in one of the hookers you’ve likely seen at the little quays while walking down by the road. You can sail to Galway if the wind is fair in four hours or less maybe; and the people here are all used to the sea, for no one can live in this place but by cutting turf in the mountains and sailing out to sell it in Clare or Aran, for you see yourselves there’s no good in the land, that has little in it but bare rocks and stones. Two years ago there came a wet summer, and the people were worse okay then than they are now maybe, with their bad potatoes and
all; for they couldn’t cut or dry a load of turf to sell across the bay, and there was many a woman hadn’t a dry sod itself to put under her pot, and she shivering with cold and hunger.”

  “ ‘ “You’re getting an old man,” I said, “and do you remember if the place was as bad as it is now when you were a young man growing up?”

  “ ‘ “It wasn’t as bad, or a half as bad,” he said, “for there were fewer people in it and more land to each, and the land itself was better at the time, for now it is drying up or something, and not giving its fruits and increase as it did.”

  “ ‘I asked him if they bought manures.

  “ ‘ “We get a hundredweight for eight shillings now and again, but I think there’s little good in it, for it’s only a poor kind they send out to the like of us. Then there was another thing they had in the old times,” he continued, “and that was the making of poteen [illicit whiskey], for it was a great trade at that time, and you’d see the Gardai down on their knees blowing the fire with their own breath to make a drink for themselves, and then going off with the butt of an old barrel, and that was one seizure, and an old bag with a handful of malt, and that was another seizure, and would satisfy the law; but now they must have the worm and the still and a prisoner, and there is little of it made in the country. At that time a man would get ten shillings for a gallon, and it was a good trade for poor people.”

  “ ‘As we were talking a woman passed driving two young pigs, and we began to speak of them.

  “ ‘ “We buy the young pigs and rear them up,” he said, “but this year they are scarce and dear. And indeed what good are they in bad years, for how can we go feeding a pig when we haven’t enough, maybe, for ourselves? In good years, when you have potatoes and plenty, you can rear up two or three pigs and make a good bit on them; but other times, maybe, a poor man will give a pound for a young pig that won’t thrive after, and then his pound will be gone, and he’ll have no money for his rent.”

  “ ‘The old man himself was cheerful and seemingly fairly well-to-do; but in the end he seemed to be getting dejected as he spoke of one difficulty after another, so I asked him, to change the subject, if there was much dancing in the country. “No,” he said, “this while back you’ll never see a piper coming this way at all, though in the old times it’s many a piper would be moving around through those houses for a whole quarter together, playing his pipes and drinking poteen and the people dancing round him; but now there is no dancing or singing in this place at all, and most of the young people is growing up and going to America.”