As I pondered, both dilemma and letter were removed from my hands by the Master of Orphans, Brother Madrigal.
“You’ve no time for that now, boy,” he said. “Organise the Honour Guard and get them out to the site. You may open your letter this evening, in my presence, after the visit.” He gazed at my letter with its handsome handwriting and thrust it up the sleeve of his cassock.
I sighed, and went to find the orphans of the Honour Guard.
I found most of the young orphans hiding under Brother Thomond in the darkness of the hay barn. “Excuse me, sir,” I said, lifting his skirts and ushering out the protesting infants.
“He is asleep,” said a young orphan, and indeed, as I looked closer, I saw Brother Thomond was at a slight tilt. Supported from behind by a pillar, he was maintained erect only by the stiffness of his ancient joints. Straw protruded at all angles from his wild white hair.
“He said he wished to speak to you, Jude,” said another orphan. I hesitated. We were already late. I decided not to wake him, for Brother Thomond, once he had stopped, took a great deal of time to warm up and get rightly going again.
“Where is Agamemnon?” I asked.
The smallest orphan removed one thumb from his mouth and jerked it upward, to the loft.
“Agamemnon!” I called softly.
Old Agamemnon, my dearest companion and the orphanage pet, emerged slowly from the shadows of the loft and stepped, with a tread remarkably dainty for a dog of such enormous size, down the wooden ladder to the ground. He shook his great ruff of yellow hair and yawned at me loudly.
“Walkies,” I said, and he stepped to my side. We exited the hay barn into the golden light of a perfect Tipperary summer’s day.
I lined up the Honour Guard and counted them by the front door, in the shadow of the south tower of the orphanage. Its yellow brick façade glowed in the morning sun. We set out.
From the gates of the orphanage to the site of the speeches was several strong miles. We passed through town and out the other side. The smaller orphans began to wail, afraid they would see black people, or be savaged by beasts. Agamemnon stuck closely to my rear. We walked until we ran out of road. Then we followed a track, till we ran out of track.
We hopped over a fence, crossed a field, waded a dyke, cut through a ditch, traversed scrubland, forded a river and entered Nobber Nolan’s bog. Spang plumb in the middle of Nobber Nolan’s Bog, and therefore spang plumb in the middle of Tipperary, and thus Ireland, was the nation’s most famous boghole, famed in song and story: the most desolate place in Ireland, and the last place God created.
I had never seen the famous boghole, for Nobber Nolan had, until his recent death and his bequest of the bog to the state, guarded it fiercely from locals and tourists alike. Many’s the American was winged with birdshot over the years, attempting to make pilgrimage here. I looked about me for the hole, but it was hid from my view by an enormous car park, a concrete Interpretive Centre of imposing dimensions, and a tall, broad, wooden stage, or platform, containing politicians. Beyond car park and Interpretive Centre, an eight-lane motorway of almost excessive straightness stretched clean to the horizon, in the direction of Dublin.
Facing the stage stood fifty thousand farmers.
We made our way through the farmers to the stage. They parted politely, many raising their hats, and seemed in high good humour. “Tis better than the Radiohead concert at Punchestown,” said a sophisticated farmer from Cloughjordan.
Once onstage, I counted the smaller orphans. We had lost only the one, which was good going over such a quantity of rough ground. I reported our arrival to Teddy “Noddy” Nolan, the Fianna Fáil TD for Tipperary Central, and a direct descendant of Neddy “Nobber” Nolan. Teddy waved us to our places, high at the back of the sloping stage. The Guard of Honour lined up in front of an enormous green cloth backdrop and stood to attention, flanked by groups of seated dignitaries. I myself sat where I could unobtrusively supervise, at the end of a row. When the last of the stragglers had arrived in the crowd below us, Teddy cleared his throat. The crowd silenced as though shot. He began his speech.
“It was in this place…” he said, with a generous gesture which incorporated much of Tipperary, “…that Eamon de Valera…”
Everybody removed their hats.
“…hid heroically from the entire British army…”
Everybody scowled and put their hats back on.
“…during the War of Independence. It was in this very boghole that Eamon de Valera…”
Everybody removed their hats again.
“…had his vision: a vision of Irish maidens dancing barefoot at the crossroads, and of Irish manhood dying heroically while refusing to the last breath to buy English shoes…”
At the word “English” the crowd put their hats back on, though some took them off again when it turned out only to be shoes. Others then glared at them. They put their hats back on again.
“We in Tipperary have fought long and hard to get the government to make Brussels pay for this fine Interpretive Centre and its fine car park, and in Brünhilde de Valera we found the ideal minister to fight our corner. It is with great pride that I invite the great granddaughter of Eamon de Valera’s cousin, the Minister for Beef, Culture and the Islands, Brünhilde de Valera, officially to reopen…Dev’s Hole!”
The crowd roared and waved their hats in the air, though long experience ensured they kept a firm grip on the peaks, for as all the hats were of the same design and entirely indistinguishable, it was common practice at a Fianna Fáil hat-flinging rally for the less scrupulous farmers to loft an old hat, yet pick up a new.
Brünhilde de Valera took the microphone, tapped it, and cleared her throat.
“Spit on me, Brünhilde!” cried an excitable farmer down the front. The crowd surged forward, toppling and trampling the feeble-legged, in expectation of fiery rhetoric. She began.
“Although it is European money which has paid for this fine Interpretive Centre; although it is European money which has paid for this fine new eight-lane motorway from Dublin and this car park that has tarmacadamed Toomevara in its entirety; although it is European money which has paid for everything built west of Grafton Street in my lifetime; and although we are grateful to Europe for its largesse…”
She paused to draw a great breath. The crowd were growing restless, not having a bull’s notion where she was going with all this, and distressed by the use of a foreign word.
“It is not for this I brought my hat,” said the dignitary next to me, and spat on the foot of the dignitary beside him.
“Nonetheless,” said Brünhilde de Valera, “grateful as we are to the Europeans…we should never forget…that…they…”
The crowd’s right hands began to drift, with a wonderful easy slowness, up towards the brims of their hats in anticipation of a climax.
“…are a shower of foreign bastards who would murder us in our beds given half a chance!”
A great cheer went up from the massive crowd and the air was filled with hats till they hid the face of the sun and we cheered in an eerie half-light.
The minister paused till everybody had recovered their hats and returned them to their heads.
“Those foreign bastards in Brussels think they can buy us with their money! They are wrong! Wrong! Wrong! You cannot buy an Irishman’s heart, an Irishman’s soul, an Irishman’s loyalty! Remember ’98!”
There was a hesitation in the crowd, as the younger farmers tried to recall if we had won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998.
“1798!” Brünhilde clarified.
A great cheer went up as we recalled the gallant failed rebellion of 1798. “Was It For This That Wolfe Tone Died?” came a wisp of song from the back of the crowd.
“Remember 1803!”
We applauded Emmet’s great failed rebellion of 1803. A quavering chorus came from the oldest farmers at the rear of the great crowd. “Bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Ireland…”
“Rem
ember 1916!”
Grown men wept as they recalled the great failed rebellion of 1916, and so many contradictory songs were started that none got rightly going.
There was a pause. All held their breath.
“Remember 1988!”
Pride so great it felt like anguish filled our hearts as we recalled the year Ireland finally stood proud among the community of nations, with our heroic victory over England in the first match in group two of the group stage of the European football championship finals. A brief chant went up from the young farmers in the mosh pit: “Who put the ball in the English net?” Older farmers, farther back, added bass to the reply: “Houghton! Houghton!”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
“My great grandfather’s cousin did not walk out of the Daíl, start a civil war and kill Michael Collins so that foreign monkey-men could swing from our trees and rape our women!”
Excited farmers began to leap up and down roaring at the front, the younger and more nimble mounting each other’s shoulders, then throwing themselves forward to surf toward the stage on a sea of hands, holding their hats on as they went.
“Never forget,” roared Brünhilde de Valera, “that a vision of Ireland came out of Dev’s Hole!”
“Dev’s Hole! Dev’s Hole!” roared the crowd.
By my side, Agamemnon began to howl and tried to dig a hole in the stage with his long claws.
Neglecting to empty my bladder after breakfast had been an error the awful significance of which I only now began to grasp. A good Fianna Fáil ministerial speech to a loyal audience in the heart of a Tipperary bog could go on for up to five hours. I pondered my situation. My only choice seemed to be as to precisely how I would disgrace myself in front of thousands. To rise and walk off the stage during a speech by a semi-descendant of de Valera would be tantamount to treason and would earn me a series of beatings on my way to the portable toilets. The alternative was to relieve myself into my breeches where I sat.
My waistband creaked under the terrible pressure.
With the gravest reluctance, I willed the loosening of my urethral sphincter.
Nothing happened. My subsequent efforts, over the next few minutes, to void my bladder, resulted only in the vigorous exercising of my superficial abdominal muscles. At length, I realised that there was a default setting in my subconscious which was firmly barred against public voidance, and to which my conscious mind had no access.
The pressure grew intolerable and I grew desperate. Yet, within the line of sight of fifty thousand farmers, I could not unleash the torrent.
Then, inspiration. The velvet curtain! All I needed was an instant’s distraction and I could step behind the billowing green backdrop beside me, and vanish. Once hidden from sight, I could, no doubt, find an exit off the back of the stage, relieve myself in its shadow, and return unobserved to my place.
At that second a magnificent gust of nationalist rhetoric lifted every hat again aloft and in the moment of eclipse I stood, took one step sideways, and vanished behind the curtain.
I shuffled along, my face to the emerald curtain, my rear to the back wall of the stage, until the wall ceased. I turned, and I beheld, to my astonished delight, the solution to all my problems.
Hidden from stage and crowd by the vast curtain was a magnificent circular long-drop toilet of the type employed in the orphanage. But where we sat around a splintered circle of rough wooden plank, our buttocks overhanging a fetid pit, here a great golden rail encircled a pit of surpassing beauty. Its mossy walls ran down to a limpid pool into which a lone frog gently plashed.
Installed, no doubt, for the private convenience of the minister, should she be caught short during the long hours of her speech, it was the most beautiful sight I had yet seen in this world. It seemed nearly a shame to urinate into so perfect a pastoral picture, and it was almost with reluctance that I unbuttoned my breeches and allowed my manhood its release.
I aimed my member so as to inconvenience the frog as little as possible. At last my consciousness made connection with my unconscious; the setting was reset. Mind and body were as one; will became action; I was unified. In that transcendent moment, I could smell the sweet pollen of the heather and the mingled colognes of a thousand bachelor farmers.
I could hear the murmur and sigh of the crowd like an ocean at my back, and Brünhilde de Valera’s mighty voice bounding from rhetorical peak to rhetorical peak, ever higher. And as this moment of perfection began its slow decay into the past, and as the delicious frozen moment of anticipation deliquesced into attainment and the pent-up waters leaped forth and fell in their glorious swoon, Brünhilde de Valera’s voice rang out as from Olympus:
“I hereby…officially…reopen…Dev’s Hole!”
A suspicion dreadful beyond words began to dawn on me. I attempted to arrest the flow, but I may as well have attempted to block by effort of will the course of the mighty Amazon River.
Thus the great curtain parted, to reveal me urinating into Dev’s Hole, into the very source of the sacred spring of Irish nationalism: the headwater, the holy well, the font of our nation.
I feel, looking back, that it would not have gone so badly against me, had I not turned at Brünhilde de Valera’s shriek and hosed her with urine.
They pursued me across rough ground for some considerable time.
Agamemnon held them at the gap in the wall, as I crossed the grounds and gained the house. He had not had such vigorous exercise since running away from Fossetts’ Circus and hiding in our hay barn a decade before, as a pup. Undaunted, he slumped in the gap, panting at them.
Slamming the orphanage door behind me, I came upon old Brother Thomond in the long corridor, beating a small orphan in a desultory manner.
“Ah, Jude,” said Brother Thomond, on seeing me. The brown leather of his face creaked as he smiled.
“A little lower, sir, if you please,” piped the small orphan, and Brother Thomond obliged. The weakness of Brother Thomond’s brittle limbs made his beatings popular with the lads, as a rest and a relief from those of the more supple and youthful Brothers.
“Yes, Jude…” he began again, “I had something I wanted to…yes…to…yes…” He nodded his head, and was distracted by straw falling past his eyes, from his tangled hair.
I moved from foot to foot, uncomfortably aware of the shouts of the approaching mob. Agamemnon, by his roars, was now retreating heroically ahead of them as they crossed the grounds toward the front door.
“Tis the orphanage!” I heard one cry.
“Tis full of orphans!” cried another.
“From Orphania!” cried a third.
“As we guessed!” called a fourth. “He is a foreigner!”
I had a bad feeling about this. The voices were closer. Agamemnon held the door, but no dog, however brave, can hold off a mob forever.
“Yes!” said Brother Thomond, and fixed me with a glare. “Very good.” He fell asleep briefly, one arm aloft above the small orphan.
The mob continued to discuss me on the far side of the door. “You’re thinking of Romania, and of the Romanian orphans. You’re confusing the two,” said a level head, to my relief. I made to tiptoe past Brother Thomond and the small orphan.
“Romanian, by God!”
“He is Romanian?”
“That man said so.”
“I did not…”
“A gypsy bastard!”
“Kill the gypsy bastard!”
The voice of reason was lost in the hubbub and a rock came in through the stained-glass window above the front door. It put a hole in Jesus and it hit Brother Thomond in the back of the neck.
Brother Thomond awoke.
“Dismissed,” he said to the small orphan sternly.
“Oh but sir you hadn’t finished!”
“No backchat from you, young fellow, or I shan’t beat you for a week.”
The small orphan scampered away into the darkness of the long corridor. Brother Thomond sighed deeply and rubbed hi
s neck.
“Jude, today is your eighteenth birthday, is it not?”
I nodded.
Brother Thomond sighed again. “I have carried a secret this long time, regarding your birth. I feel it is only right to tell you now…” He fell briefly asleep.
The cries of the mob grew as they assembled, eager to enter and destroy me. The yelps and whimpers of brave Agamemnon were growing fainter. I had but little time. I poked Brother Thomond in the clavicle with a finger. He started awake. “What? WHAT? WHAT?”
Though to rush Brother Thomond was usually counterproductive, circumstances dictated that I try. I shouted, the better to penetrate the fog of years. “You were about to tell me the secret of my birth, sir.”
“Ah yes. The secret…” He hesitated. “The secret of your birth. The secret I have held these many years…which was told to me by…by one of the…by Brother Feeny…who was one of the Cloughjordan Feenys…His mother was a Thornton…”
“If you could speed it up, sir,” I suggested, as the mob forced open the window-catch above us. Brother Thomond obliged.
“The Secret of Your Birth…”
With a last choking yelp, Agamemnon fell silent. There was a tremendous hammering on the old oak door. “I’ll just get that,” said Brother Thomond. “I think there was a knock.”
As he reached it, the door burst open with extraordinary violence, sweeping old Brother Thomond aside with a crackling of many bones and throwing him backwards against the wall where he impaled the back of his head on a coat hook. Though he continued to speak, the rattle of his last breath rendered the secret unintelligible. The mob poured in.
I ran on, into the dark of the long corridor.
I found the Master of Orphans, Brother Madrigal, in his office in the south tower, beating an orphan in a desultory manner.
“Ah, Jude,” he said. “Went the day well?”
Wishing not to burden him with the lengthy truth, and with time in short supply, I said, “Yes.”
He nodded approvingly.
“May I have my letter, sir?” I said.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 15
