The Grey Horse

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  Again Standún stepped between them. “How do you know how far along she is, if you’re not the father?”

  Baldly Ruairí answered, “I know something about breeding, both horse and human. An old monk could see she’s carrying.”

  He looked to Eibhlín again. “I told you, when I found you hiding in the ditch, waiting for your lover, that a foal needs no father, but a baby…”

  “Hiding in the ditch!” Standún had a long neck, and now all the tendons stood out from it. “Waiting for whom?”

  He shouted this question at Ruairí, who was listening to the sound of footsteps on the stairs. “You’ll have to get that from the girl, Seán. It’s not my place to tell you.”

  Eibhlín was backed against the wall, looking very sick. She made a sudden spring for the doorway, only to slam into Máire, who was coming into the room. The dark woman’s much longer arms held her pinned. “Did she accuse you, Ruairí? Did she really? I wondered if that was her little game.”

  Eibhlín struggled and cried, childlike, but Máire would not release her. “Then, as she is such a weasel, I will tell you who she was meeting at night.”

  “Don’t talk!” cried Eibhlín. “Or … I’ll tell them where you went at night, almost every night …”

  Standún’s face went sick, white, and angry.

  “Where I went? I went riding, is where I went. Twice or three times, Eibhlín.” She turned to face Seán Standún. “With this man here, who knows what respect is due to a woman.

  “Eibhlín’s beau was Seosamh Ó Reachtaire, who ran away after knocking Donncha MacSiadhail senseless, leaving bills behind him and Diarmuid Ó Cadhain claiming to have bought from him a horse that doesn’t exist.”

  She let her sister go, but as her father followed after, livid faced and cursing, Máire blocked the door. “Let her be. You won’t do that innocent babe a harm, Father. Not this time.”

  “Damn bastard!”

  “Another damn bastard,” she corrected him. “But this one won’t have the misfortune to be raised here, with you and that word in your mouth.” She glanced at Ruairí. “That is, if my man is willing to take it into the grand house I have waiting, and to raise it among our own.”

  Ruairí could hardly speak. “Whatever the queen of heaven says.” And in sudden enlightenment he added, “We will raise the baby in Áine’s name. And Anraí’s.”

  Máire’s grin matched his, and the joy of their understanding sent him skipping from foot to foot.

  “Oh, that’s a fine idea, Ruairí. Very clever.”

  Epilogue

  A visit to the land of his Ancestors

  Nineteen forty-three was a year in which the coastal people of Connemara and the islanders to the south pulled many things out of the water: wreckage of British ships, German submarines, and airplanes of all nationalities. According to old custom, the fishermen did their best by the survivors they encountered, and did very well, too, by the goods that washed ashore.

  Occasionally, a German submarine would surface near one of the Galway hookers or even the canvas curraghs of the minor fishermen and ask if there were fresh fish for sale. In the rest of Ireland, such an event would have made people nervous, but Connemara fishermen had lived on the edge of disaster for hundreds of years. Besides, the pay was in good Irish punts.

  It was not a matter of international diplomacy but one of land taxes that brought Aengas Theodore Ó Baoill (called Teddy, by his friends) from Galway down the Coast Road. He was not quite a tax collector, but he heralded the approach of the man who had the black authority of the tax collector. He hated his job and was good at it.

  A family consisting of three brothers and their elderly mother and father had made some money with a horse business and a good amount of land, until the death of a business partner. After this they had dispersed their stock and sold most of the property. Since then, income seemed to have dwindled terribly, and in the past two years there had been no tax report at all from the MacEibhirs.

  On the drizzling drive past Salthill and into the landscape of boulders, Ó Baoill felt his own sort of Ireland—the Ireland that was nervous, that read all the war news—falling away from him into the inscrutable stolidity of Connemara. That man with the cart there, hauling turf in the rain—what if Ó Baoill were to ask him about events in the Asian theater? He would assume it to be located in Dublin, or even Galway, like the Abbey Theatre, and would explain that he hadn’t the money for such things as theaters.

  Ó Baoill had had five years of night study on the subjects of Irish archeology, anthropology, and of course, Irish history, as well as one very small and careful course on Catholic theology—whatever had been needed to advance with the government. These studies had left him with a very sour taste in his mouth regarding ancient Ireland, and the opinion that, if it took all the bright men in modern Ireland half their working lives to maintain a few peasants in their state of artifactual, anachronistic ignorance, then that state of ignorance was too dearly bought.

  Yet it was his job to go into this parish and find out things without disturbing the status quo or leaving the people feeling their own government as one more outside oppressor.

  Ó Baoill could do that, thanks partly to the Cois Fhairrge dialect bequeathed to him by his grandfather, who had moved from the area to work in Cork. This dialect he could don like a pair of overalls and take off again in converse with educated men of school Gaelic. He had also inherited the round face and small features of his grandfather, whom he had disliked. Ó Baoill could slide into a neighborhood of the west without raising an insular, anaphylactic response from the natives, and he could find things out. It invariably cost Inland Revenue more money to send him out than his researches produced.

  At the base of Knockduff he found no stable at all, but only the Ursuline school, which had settled into two old barns and a house. There was a lot of building going on, and no hope in any of it for an Irish tax collector. One of the sisters pointed him south around the mountain, where the MacEibhir house itself was located, but after two hours of slow driving and hard peering out the rainy windshield, he had not located it. He drove on to town.

  Mr. Ó Baoill did not like Carraroe, which seemed to him half slum and half museum. He did not like the bars he sat in that evening, nor the Smithy’s and Guinness that swelled his bladder and promised him a bad mouth in the morning. But he stared at the dirty wall with as bovine an eye as he could command and he brought the conversation insistently around to horses.

  His daughter, he said, had a pony out of a mare raised at a farm out here. Good jumper, lots of ribbons. No, it wasn’t one of Ó Cadhain’s lot. Another name. Odd name. MacEibhir—Granite’s son—were there any others like her still on the hills, he wanted to know.

  The men in the Brown Pot stared at each other like so many owls. MacEibhir’s stock. They nodded wisely. Good stock. Old stock. Too bad it was failing, now with the pony registry coming so strong and ponies starting to be worth something again. Ó Cadhain had some of the old ones. There were a few still breeding in Ros an Mhil. Professor Blondell had had a MacEibhir pony stallion kept at his place for years, though it had rattled alone in the old stables and had little enough work, except for breeding mares at a few shillings a service. Did Teddy know that the stable under Knockduff was now a girl’s school? They had two ponies, it was remembered, but no one could recall whether they were of the true MacEibhir breeding. Likely they wouldn’t sell, anyway.

  Was it drink that did the business in, asked Ó Baoill, feeling himself on familiar territory. The muffled laughter that spread up and down the bar warned him he had made a mistake. He cursed into his beer and went passive, giving the conversation time to recover its rhythm.

  The recovery took twenty minutes and went by way of brags about how much a man could drink and not show it. How queerly he could show it if it came to that, and how visitors crumpled before decent poitín, and at last someone explained to Ó Baoill how much whiskey had been wasted, trying to touch the heads
of old Ruairí MacEibhir and his sons, inside the walls of this very hostelry.

  Ó Baoill sighed in relief as the name came up again, and to reward himself for his patience, he ordered a supper of ham and an egg. Now that conversation had gone in a circle and returned to the MacEibhirs, he would have to inject the subject no more. It would float on its own.

  There had been five in the family, counting the mother, who was rightfully a Stanton. Teddy Ó Baoill listened and nodded as he was told all the information he already knew: that the boys were called Anraí, young Ruairí, and Tadhg; that they had come with a good ten years between the first and second, and five between the second and third, which was strange out of one woman; and that they had never seemed to lack for anything, though horses were a chancy occupation. Of course they’d had old Donncha to help them: a sad fellow with no family of his own.

  Ruairí’s children, on the other hand, had stayed close, all horse-mad together. There was a framed picture behind the bar which the bartender pulled off the wall for inspection, leaving a rectangle of dean wallpaper behind it. It was a photograph of three dark shapes on stocky white horses, which were alt up on their hind legs in a line. It was a very poor photo, in which the horses showed far more clearly than the boys, and it took Ó Baoill’s next-stool neighbor to point out to him that none of the ponies had bridle or tack of any kind.

  Did they compete in horse sports, then? They did not, much. One man in a heavy geansaí remembered wrestling with Tadhg MacEibhir as a growing boy, and being thrown by him. They “helped out” in the parish in their casual way. So did everyone.

  Did they have children of their own? Not a one of them. None married. Now, there were no horses on the mountain. No MacEibhirs, either.

  It was now eleven o’clock, and Ó Baoill was tired and too full in the stomach. He dared ask it; where did they all go, these people? Wasn’t there one of them left, to help him find the right pony?

  Great silence. Silence of chickens with the hawk overhead. Silence of stones. Ó Baoill heard the wind against the hostelry door and the rain against the window.

  The fisherman spoke for the entire bar. “Louis Ó Cadhain is a good hand with a pony. But as for Ruairí and his people … we don’t know a thing.”

  And that was it. Neither more evenings, more beer, nor more bars could change that answer. The men of Carraroe ‘didn’t know a thing, and Ó Baoill cursed their unconquerable ignorance.

  Four days passed and Ó Baoill had a bad head, caused by exposure more to tobacco smoke than to beer, and he entertained the possibility that the missing family had been kidnapped by the Germans. Or perhaps they were in the pay of the Germans and had fled to escape exposure. Perhaps all the parish was in the pay of the Germans. Or perhaps it was the British navy that had spirited them away, though that seemed less likely on the face of it. Most likely, though, they were all still here and delinquent in their tax, and the men at the bars simply didn’t want to tell Teddy Ó Baoill. What a shame.

  He could not find a photograph of the MacEibhir family any better than the one on the barroom wall, except for one candid shot of Máire, the mother, taken in her middle years. She was large boned and just a touch heavy, and she seemed to be considering slapping the camera out of the photographer’s hand.

  But Ó Baoill had come prepared with the information that the child of Máire Stanton’s sister had been raised by the MacEibhir family. Áine Ó Reachtaire had subsequently emigrated to America; she was still alive in Chicago. He would very much like to have called her on the telephone, saving some days, but what with the difficulty of using the transatlantic cable during wartime he merely returned to Galway and wrote to the woman, not mentioning taxes but only that the government was concerned about the family’s disappearance. Could she supply information or, failing that, pictures of the parties involved?

  In due time, Mrs. Persky née Ó Reachtaire sent to Mr. Ó Baoill a snapshot of a drawing she had done as a young woman, as well as advice to the government not to worry about her family, but rather to spend their monies on the children’s schools.

  Ó Baoill thought of the stable filled with little girls and nuns, and laughed at how pleased Mrs. Persky must be at that.

  He did not gain much from the sketch. It was not a drawing of talent, for all the people in it, mother, father, and children, looked much the same age, and the eyes were most unrealistically done.

  Another week passed while Ó Baoill sat and thought, before he made a phone call from his office to that very same Professor Blondell who had once kept a pony stallion in his stable. Ó Baoill explained that there was some concern over the disappearance of an entire family from the county in that mysterious manner. He did not mention anything about taxes. He drove down the long, bad road to see the professor that same day.

  Blondell’s big house had suffered little change in sixty years, but the stone stables had been sold and transmuted into two neat family dwellings, with children on the stoops. As Ó Baoill’s car eased past them, the children rose up and ran inside: not out of fear of Teddy Ó Baoill, but because it had started to rain.

  Blondell was a lean-faced, hawk-nosed gentleman of some seventy years, whose field seemed to be Irish history. By the plaques on the library wall, Ó Baoill also picked up that the professor s affiliation was with Trinity College. Ó Baoill found himself inhibited by a respect learned through years of night classes, and he was a touch sullen because of it.

  But Blondell had a most engaging smile and was not at all haughty. He kept the battered flat saddle of his childhood on a stand by his desk, and he explained how he slipped his day’s mail through the stirrups: near side incoming and offside outgoing. He invited Ó Baoill to tea.

  He was very willing to talk about Ruairí MacEibhir, whom he had known since his own childhood. He had watched Ruairí’s boys grow and had been a sort of unofficial godfather to them.

  Ó Baoill knew why Blondell had to be “unofficial” as a godfather. His vowels, as well as his name, shouted Church of Ireland. He returned the old professor’s smile, knowing this.

  The family were always good sorts, said Blondell. Not clever. Not precisely clever. Good sorts. Ruairí had taught him how to ride. He had taught him Gaelic.

  Ó Baoill did not ask the man to speak Gaelic.

  They had always talked about traveling, told Ó Baoill, as he fed him a good-sized tea with cold ham and hot sausage, and they both looked out at the rain from the east-facing window. They had talked about travel in the vague, enthusiastic way people will who have never traveled. When the kids were grown, they had said they would all go somewhere. Blondell looked out the window, while Ó Baoill looked at Blondell.

  “I don’t even know,” said the professor carefully “in which direction they went: north, south…”

  “Hardly to the Riviera.” Blondell shot a glance back at Ó Baoill. “No. Hardly the Riviera.” He was of Ó Baoill’s sort: the sort that read the war news daily.

  Blondell guessed his friends to be still in Ireland. He was sure they were out for pleasure.

  True, they were a bit old for starting. Certainly Máire was eighty, but in strong health. Ruairí’s age he couldn’t state precisely; he’d always been grey. The boys never seemed to grow up.

  It didn’t surprise Blondell they had left without saying good-bye to anyone. He would have liked them to take leave of him, but he wasn’t surprised that they didn’t. It did surprise him that anyone had reported them as missing. It would surprise Blondell inutterably to find their disappearance had anything to do with the war.

  On the phone, Ó Baoill hadn’t precisely said that he thought the disappearance was related to the European war. Nor did he now take the opportunity to correct Professor Blondell’s misconception. He sighed and scratched his nose.

  “They left things undone,” was what he said.

  “Nothing important.” Blondell’s was the peculiar stare of a man trying to be understood in many ways at once. With his raptorial nose, it was daunting.
Ó Baoill thought briefly that if this man wanted to, he could make a student feel as flat as a cowpat.

  “Though they are here among us in the twentieth century, my friends were not of us. If we expect such as they to follow our rules, we will only be disappointed.”

  That again, thought Ó Baoill. What had he expected out of an historian? Let a poor, English-speaking man of Drogheda run away from his taxes and see who makes apologies for him.

  For a moment Ó Baoill sat in anger, and then that melted before the knowledge that this man here, who so valued the Gaelic primitivism, did so because he was not a Gael. In that knowledge, Ó Baoill was able to smile and shake Blondell’s hand at parting.

  “Ruairí MacEibhir was like a second father to me,” added Blondell, with the same careful, almost secretive intensity he had shown whenever speaking of the horse trainer.

  Ó Baoill considered the size of the house around him, and the quality of Blondell’s tweeds and vowels, and he chuckled to himself. A second father.

  Carrying a map drawn for him by Blondell, Ó Baoill finally found the house against the side of Knockduff: the house that the family had deserted. It was imposing in its size. But it was certainly not what one would call a manor house; it was the work of a man with more energy than education. It was of rough stone, and had a vague resemblance to a Norman castle, or perhaps to the fort at Dun Aengus. It swelled outward from the stone of the mountain itself which was its north wall. Only the roof seemed professionally done.

  Perhaps it would go to Áine Ó Reachtaire or to some distant Stanton relation. Or perhaps all of it would come to the government for charges. If that happened, for once his recoveries would be larger than his salary.