The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  Donal eased out of his tightly stylish pantaloons and pushed his red setter off the night-robe spread out on the quilt. Ten minutes later when Bran had decided that he had indulged his master’s inconsiderate treatment long enough safely to resume his place on the bed, he heard his name from the pillows. Bran paused guiltily in the crouch of a spring. His master never spoke to him after the candle was this long quenched. ‘Bran, you’re not fooling me and neither is she, for all her arrogance. She’s just a pathetic migrant cutting a nostalgic sod to carry over the ocean.’ He turned on his left side and Bran crouched again for the spring. But it was the master who sprang. The covers were thrown back violently. ‘Don’t follow me,’ he said as he put on his dressing gown, and tiptoed to the door.

  The silver surface had been scraped from the landscape by the sharp edge of dawn. It took a few moments before Donal realised that horse and rider were back. Sterrin had returned for her sod. The gap from which it had been cut made a void in the surrounding grey-green but the sod was nowhere in sight. Bran had followed Donal after all, and as Sterrin’s slane gripped deep in the earth, the dog bounded out of the shadow.

  ‘Down, dog!’ Sterrin said calmly. Its great red plume went waving in delighted apology. She stooped and patted its head. ‘You are a beauty,’ she said. Before she could straighten up the animal was on its hind legs and his tongue had stroked her from chin to brow. A hand reached for the dog’s collar and Donal, his heart pounding violently, said, ‘Forgive him. Miss O’Carroll. Tonight he is but human.’

  She faltered in the act of mounting. Where on earth had he appeared from? Why wasn’t he inside sleeping? Her foot resumed the stirrup and he came to her side.

  ‘He shall be punished. Shall I shoot him for his profaning?’

  She placed her knee over the crutch of the side-saddle and arranged her skirt and cloak as though he were not there. ‘Yup, Thuckeen,’ she crooned. As the horse moved Sterrin looked down into eyes filled wide with an admiration that the moon could not hide. ‘Do as you please with your own animals. But if you must continue to make dumb brutes suffer, don’t maim the dog—as you maimed our cattle. Shoot it clean—if you can.’

  He stood watching her as she clattered down the road. ‘Devil a fear, my lovely lady, that you won’t forget to shoot clean; clean through the bull’s eye.’

  Sterrin streaked home once again, defeated for the second time. The sod lay there ready to be taken, when he appeared. Sterrin wondered if Donal spent every night in that field. She took the bay hedge recklessly and Thuckeen’s breathing laboured loud as she cleared the jump.

  ‘You’ve pushed her hard, Miss Sterrin,’ said Big John, taking the horse from her.

  ‘See that Thuckeen gets a good rub down.’ She was curt with him. ‘I’m going to bed. I’m very tired.’

  At the door Pakie caught up with her. ‘Miss Sterrin, beggin’ your pardon, but where will I put this for the time being?’ He was holding a big grassy sod of earth. She looked at it in amazement. It was the one she had cut. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘Sure, didn’t you bring it back with you. Miss Sterrin? When I took the empty bag from the mare’s saddle I thought that you had your journey for nothing. Then when I unslipped the saddle girths this fell to the ground.’

  And she had never noticed it in her fury. No wonder Thuckeen had been straining, with that banging against her flank! Tiredness vanished.

  ‘You’ll put it no place “for the time being”. It is going this minute into the ground where it belongs; for all time. Will you lend a hand, Big John?’

  ‘That I will, Miss Sterrin, with a heart and a half.’

  The three of them walked over to the field of the Big Wind. When the last of the four corners had received a piece of the earth that had been stripped from it seventeen years ago, Big John rose stiffly to his feet, removed his hat and said solemnly, ‘God send that I may never go out from this place with my soul in my body.’

  Pakie uncovered and replied, ‘Amen to that.’

  Sterrin started to say ‘Amen’, but a sleepy yawn stifled the sound.

  * ‘Blossom’, a term of endearment.

  39

  The Commissioners held their melancholy auctions. Lord Templetown’s mansion was knocked down to a Liverpool coffin-ship owner. Lord Templetown, beggared by the famine that had enriched his successor, went to live in Dublin.

  No one knew who bought Major Darby’s estate; no one cared. The famine had not spared him, but unlike Lord Templetown, he had not been softened by it. He saw the tenants he had been compelled to feed as the cause of his downfall. A tenant was simply a rent-paying machine; to have his rent raised or to be evicted. Darby had but to see a new garment on a tenant’s child to have an excuse to raise the rent. If it could not be met the tenant and his family were evicted.

  Sterrin, riding with Big John who was schooling Sir Dominic on a stocky cob, was amazed to see the change in the Darby estate. Even during the brief months that she had been in the convent there had been wholesale clearance of whole colonies of houses.

  ‘He might as well have left them in their homes,’ she said, thinking aloud.

  ‘Aye, Miss Sterrin.’ Big John drew abreast, thinking she had addressed him. ‘He knows what it is now to be turned from his own home. Thank God that you or yours will never know that fate.’

  Maurice O’Carroll had staved off foreclosure with the prices from bits and pieces of land that were not included in the mortgage. But the staff in its relief gave credit for its reprieve to Miss Sterrin. It was her inspiration to take back the castle’s plundered soil that had appeased the Fates!

  A well-dressed man came through Major Darby’s back gates and moved across to where an occasional gable or broken piece of wall marked the site of some twenty homesteads. They watched him as he moved among the ruins, then he came towards them. He uncovered to Sterrin but addressed Big John.

  ‘Could you direct me to the whereabouts of Mrs. Landy?’ His tone was grim.

  Another upstart owner. Big John thought. A gentleman would not approach a servant and engage him in talk in the presence of his employer.

  ‘Someone of that name went from here to the workhouse eight years ago,’ Big John replied guardedly.

  ‘But,’ cried Sir Dominic, ‘don’t you know, Big John, that she has left the poorhouse? She is the woman who is living in the cave.’ He pointed up towards the distant slopes where the broken wall of The O’Meara’s castle sheltered the entrance to his descendant’s cave dwelling.

  Sterrin shot a fierce warning glance at her brother.

  ‘I’m afraid we do not know anything of the person you seek. That cave has been occupied by a hermit for as long as anyone remembers. Isn’t that right. Big John?’

  The stranger saluted her but went purposefully in the direction of the cave.

  ‘Sterrin, why did you tell that man a fib? You brought food to Mrs. Landy at that cave only yesterday.’

  ‘Dominic, could you bid the devil to leave you alone? That new owner seems to be going about enforcing his privileges. He’ll smoke Mrs. Landy out of the cave like a badger; maybe get The O’Meara arrested for sheltering her.’

  Mrs. Landy’s widowed daughter had taken her mother from the poorhouse and had paid the penalty. Darby had evicted her for sheltering an evicted tenant, even though the tenant was her own mother.

  They followed at a distance. They saw the hermit come from the cave holding a fowling piece menacingly.

  ‘My God!’ cried Sterrin. ‘He’ll hang for this. He’s never gone that far before.’

  Then she saw Mrs. Landy come to the door of the cave; giving herself up to avoid bloodshed.

  Sterrin spurred Thuckeen. Over her shoulder she ordered Big John to take Sir Dominic home. ‘He mustn’t see this kind of thing.’

  The O’Meara had sheltered many an outlaw in his cave; peacefully. But this was the first time that he had sheltered a woman. ‘I possess the shooting rights over this ground,’ she heard him say. The
stranger could interpret that any way he liked.

  ‘He is quite right,’ Sterrin called out as she reined to. ‘This is our land and he has the right to shoot. That woman is under his protection—and mine.’

  The stranger uncovered again; more ceremoniously. ‘Miss Sterrin, I have no objection to The O’Meara’s shooting rights—as long as I am not the target.’ He turned to the terrified woman. ‘Do you not know me, Mother?’

  Mrs. Landy knew her son, Dominic Landy, the Omadhawn of the Wren Boys’ procession! Dominic Landy, whom Sterrin had seen marched off amongst the military when he had raided his own grain cart in the famine!

  She rode homewards, bemused, as though she had been part of a dream that had come true. Big John, who had not gone too far out of reach to miss the scene, was wiping his eyes. He, too, remembered the day he had seen Mrs. Landy following her son as the military marched him towards his exile; for fifteen years. And now! After but eight years!

  The horses went off at a gallop, then slowed, then galloped again as the thoughts of the riders set the tempo. One moment they recalled a procession that had wound down the Sir’s Road; a hunger-maddened man, an anguished woman straining to keep up, straining to hold the sight of him within her vision. It had always remained as Sterrin’s acutest impression of the famine. The weeping woman following the soldiers with their prisoner, his madness exhausted, held for her a suggestion of the procession to Calvary. And now—she spurred the horse—that woman was weeping again, in the arms of the man who owned the estate from which she had been hunted.

  ‘It is a miracle, Miss Sterrin,’ Big John said.

  And miracles could happen again—to others. In the days that followed the thought kept pushing its way through all her other thoughts. She burned to hear details of this rags to riches romance. Her daily rides began to take her past the Darby estate. Would she ever come to think of it as the Landy estate? But Dominic Landy was not the type of new owner, all leather and whipcord and unaccustomed idleness, to ride a fine horse across his new acres just for display. He was always in the midst of his workmen, lending a hand or supervising.

  Once she saw him outside the church after Sunday Mass helping his mother into a phaeton. ‘Mamma, don’t you think that we ought to call on the Landys?’

  Her mamma was aghast. One did not call upon the new shopkeeper owners, the gombeen men! The ladies of the old order, shabby, even horseless, were more strongly entrenched in their feudal dignity than when these same shopkeepers came bareheaded to their carriage doors to take their orders. Not that Lady O’Carroll was shabby. Because the castle had escaped the Encumbrancy hammer, she felt encouraged to invest in some of the Sombre Elegance advertised in the catalogues. She had ordered Lubey to send away for some pairs of black silk boots with white satin tops. Today, Sterrin thought, her mother looked dashing. She was wearing a daring innovation in mourning wear, white Widow’s Cuffs beautifully embroidered in black.

  Sterrin pointed out that Dominic Landy had never been a shopkeeper. ‘He has been worse,’ her mother said. ‘He has been a convict.’

  Sterrin was quelled. Her conscience pricked her as they drove home in the chill of Margaret’s angry silence. It had been a bit much to suggest that Lady O’Carroll should call in her carriage upon the Wren Boys’ Fool, who had pranced before her in his ridiculous sack disguise for the patronage of her festive food; and upon his mother whom she had fed in the stirabout line!

  But Sterrin was determined to know how Dominic Landy had acquired the freedom to acquire the wealth. The next time her mother had a migraine that kept her to her room Sterrin purloined the phaeton and drove up to the ex-convict’s splendid hall door. She prayed that Mrs. Landy, whom she had furtively fed in a cave a few weeks back, would not receive her at three o’clock in the afternoon in a low décolletée evening gown, all bejewelled, like the potato factors’ wives did in some of the old mansions.

  Mrs. Landy tiptoed to the door the way she had tiptoed through life for the past incredible weeks. Her starved neck and shoulders were decently covered in a black stuff gown. She clasped Sterrin’s hand in both her own. Pathetically she apologised for her presumption in receiving her benefactor in this mansion; like an equal.

  At last Sterrin got the story of their new fortune. Dominic had impressed the prison governor as being an honest, industrious man. The governor was one who had retained his humanity. He was capable of realising that the hungry Irish, deported for theft during the famine, were not criminals. It was a case of steal or starve. Dominic had proved to be so conscientious in carrying out his prison duties that he had been entrusted with book-keeping. When two years of his sentence had been served he was let out on parole as a shepherd. Soon he was herding his own sheep; buying his own land, and on that land, alone and unchallenged, he had found gold. By accident, at the London bank where he was depositing the money for the cargo of wool he had brought to England, on his way home he had seen the lists of Irish estates for sale under the Encumbered Estates conditions. English shopkeepers were being offered loans to purchase them. And out from that list stared the name of the man who had called him to his food with the cry ‘Suck!... Suck!... Suck!’ that brings pigs to their swill. More than his banishment, more than his cruel sentence, had the degradation of that summons rankled with Dominic during the lonely years of exile. Sterrin had witnessed the last act of that famine drama. But she had not got what she came for.

  ‘By the way,’ she said with great nonchalance as Dominic later assisted her into the phaeton. ‘A former servant of ours was sent to penal servitude in Australia—oh, not by us—he was working in England at the time. Do you think he is likely to have his sentence remitted as yours was?’

  When he had questioned her about the nature of Young Thomas’s offence, Dominic shook his head slowly and with positive certainty. ‘The prison authorities regard the like of that as the greatest criminality; worse than thieving, aye, or worse sometimes, than murder. Employers out there won’t take on “parole men” that have a record for agitation and disturbance amongst workers. The governor, in my time, wouldn’t stand for any leniency to that type of prisoner. He put on my report when he let me out on parole that I was a useful citizen who had been mistreated. He would never consider one who rouses the workers against their employers as a “useful citizen”. No, Miss Sterrin, he’ll serve his sentence—and maybe longer. By the time he is released he won’t feel like making any more trouble.’

  And that, she said to her face in the mirror that evening, is that! She scrutinised her features. You are going to stop cheapening yourself. You have your life to live. You went on living after your father was murdered. Servants have no right to stir up revolt against their employers. They have no right to—no right to stir up revolt in—she rubbed the glass to wipe a sudden mist but it still blurred her reflection; she wiped her eyes and her reflection swam back;—in the hearts of—of their employer’s daughters.

  She swirled on a sudden from the face in the mirror; shocked at what she had allowed it to hear. She crossed determinedly to the wash stand, sponged her face with buttermilk, damped down her hair from the rainwater ewer until it looked smooth and dark. Then she returned to the mirror, ‘Now,’ she said to the face that looked out at her, ‘that revolt has been successfully put down.’ She tapped her heart. ‘There shall be no more folly there. Do you hear?’ She bent her face into the mirror and drew down her cheek. ‘That wart must be seen to, also!’

  *

  Thomas peeped through the curtains and shuddered. ‘Surely,’ he said to the manager, ‘you could have omitted that fairground clowning down here?’ Beyond the curtain a German-American actor was delivering the inevitable Big Wind recitation in what was meant to be an Irish brogue.

  It was the usual showman’s trick to attract the Irish; a chair out in front between the acts, and while the scenes were being shifted, no matter how compelling the play, an actor quoting the crude lines ‘...the night of the Big Wind when rich men became poor and poor men bec
ame rich...’ and for an encore some familiar lines that travestied the famine. The shoddy device never failed to strike an answering chord. It didn’t fail tonight. Out through the sophisticated New Orleans audience that had flocked to see and hear the new young actor, rose the familiar reaction. Wherever Irishmen met Irishmen it was ‘were you over there for the “gorta mór”’ (the Great Hunger)? and then: ‘Do you remember the night of the Big Wind?’ The tragedies of Shakespeare were fine stirring things to witness; and all the high dramas of the actors’ spoken word; but they were not as important as the famine to the men and women who had been both actors and spectators in its grim tragedy, and the dramas of the Big Wind.

  They leaned across seats and swapped experiences and after the performance they came backstage and, as usual, the drama of their reminiscences topped the drama of the play. An elegantly dressed man and woman begged to introduce a young gentleman to the manager and to the actor who had spoken the trite entr’acte. The brogue fell softly from their lips as they told of how, two days after the Big Wind, when their emigrant ship was leaving Liverpool, a child of two was sighted crying on the rocks. It had been blown on to the rocks from heaven knows where during the Big Wind and had survived its two-day ordeal. A young emigrant couple looked after it on the voyage. ‘We are still looking after him,’ they laughed. ‘It was a Big Wind indeed that gave us a son, for we never had any children of our own.’

  The manager escorted them to their carriage. He accepted their invitation to a dinner party. ‘I accepted for you, too,’ he said to Thomas. Thomas told him curtly that he had other arrangements.

  He had planned to go to his room to write to Kitty and Mark Hennessey, to ask their help in trying to find the woman who had brought him to Kilsheelin Castle in the weeks before the Big Wind. He had always been told that she had gone to America.

  ‘Alter your arrangements,’ the manager said.