I stay in the village of Mountnugent, about eighty miles northeast of Dublin. Mountnugent is tiny, not much more than a bridge and a pub and a lake called Lough Sheelin and a few hundred good souls, mostly farmers. The farmland around here is some of the best and richest in Ireland—which has caused people, over the centuries, to do fairly horrible things to one another in order to get it.
I have picked it because of some marriage and baptismal records that show a Thomas McEnroe marrying a Mary Coyle in 1834 and having a series of children. Thomas was my great-great-grandfather. But I am unprepared for the first sight I see as I drive into town. It’s a little pub called the Bridge Inn, and etched on the smoked glass of the side door is “McEnroe’s.”
For some reason I am drawn to a place a few miles away called Ross Castle, a severe sixteenth-century stone phallus encircled by a wall with slots for firing crossbows at one’s enemies. The inside has been renovated for guests. I have a room here. I say “here,” because I’m sitting in the tower right now, writing this on a laptop. The children of innkeepers Sam and Benita are milling around me, asking questions about the machine. The oldest of the kids, Mark, nine, is reading this over my shoulder.
At bedtime, however, they’re back at their farm, and I’m in the castle, in the room at the top of the tower, alone in the green night.
The castle belonged for a time to the notorious “Black Baron” Nugent “whose power could wither and whose word was fate,” according to the local histories, and who made the castle “a licensed haunt for perpetrating crimes.” The local histories do not come right out and say it, but they manage to imply that the B. B. availed himself of all the perquisites of rank, including having his vassals delivered up to him for sexual depredations. He also seems to have been fond of dispatching them. There was a “Lug an Crochaire” (Hangman’s Hollow) near the castle and down the lane is a quarry that, when men began working it, turned out to be full of bones and skulls.
Near the quarry are, supposedly, the graves of Orwin and Sebana. Sebana was a Nugent. Orwin was an O’Reilly. The O’Reillys had a castle across the lough. This gets complicated because of local politics, but the Nugents were Anglo-Normans, the kind of people who got land granted to them by the Crown. The O’Reillys were Celts, more indigenous, with quite a lot of land “beyond the pale,” which means outside the enclosed areas that the English types cared about, which is how “beyond the pale” came to mean what it now means—so far out that nobody respectable would care about it.
The O’Reillys would have managed to cut a deal with the Crown. As one of the townspeople tells me: “The local leaders would have wipes and wipes of land, and they’d say to the Crown, ‘Look, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll fight for you in your wars. But I want to be the boss of my own kingdom.’”
In this way, bosses inside the pale and outside it could coexist, uneasily, for centuries.
The law, for hundreds of years, forbade intermarriage between your Celts and your Anglo-Normans. You can see where this is headed. Orwin, the native-grown Celt, and Sebana, the daughter of the occupying power, fall in love. Legend has it that Orwin tries to get his beloved out of Ross Castle and elope by boat. They drown. It’s much better as a ballad. Anyway, the ghosts of one or both of them are thought to haunt the castle, but I am the only guest and not so much as a single rattling chain or mournful sigh do I hear.
There is also—I’m not kidding—“a fairy pass” between the “hillock and the ringfort.” I have to go about twenty miles north to a research center in Cavan to find out there are fairies twenty yards from my front door. Fairy activities are not heavily advertised anymore, especially in the “new Ireland,” which is way too techy, too IT-savvy, to have any truck with fairies. Here is a dissonance that is almost Japanese, almost Zen, in its delicacy: Outside the walls that ring the castle are black and white cows. Inside the walls, next to this sixteenth-century hard-on of stone, sitting in the driveway, just as I write this, are two black-and-white faux-cow boxes from a Gateway computer that Sam and Benita have just unpacked. If you threw those boxes over the wall, you might hit a fairy as it moved along the pass. The “trooping fairies” use this particular right-of-way to go to and fro in their “macra shee,” their cavalcade, and the whole idea is that if you build your house in their path, the fairies will get mad and beset you with all kinds of misery. At night I go out and stand near the pass. There are shooting stars in the sky and flickerings of borealic light on the distant horizon but nothing you could call a fairy.
The fairies are still there, but the Irish refuse to see them. Safety Man, computer guided and demouthed to silence blarney, is the New Elf, their preferred type of mythological being now.
All of the above shows why it’s almost cheating to contemplate and write about your past in Ireland. There’s so much goddamned atmosphere per square inch, the ground is heaving with it. All of the above—bone quarry, fairy pass, doomed lovers, hangman’s hollow—is crammed into an area of maybe twenty acres. And I haven’t even mentioned Miles O’Reilly, “The Slasher,” who spent the last night of his life in the castle (apparently when the Nugents and O’Reillys were getting along better) before going down to the bridge at Finnea and doing a lot of slashing, holding off the enemy (Scots, I believe) until he himself died amid the heaped up bodies of his foes. He has his own ballad, too.
Nor have I mentioned Mag Slecht, the “Plain of Adoration,” a site in the county where the pagan, pre-Patrick Irish worshiped a foul god, a towering stone idol named Cromm Cruaich. The ancient Cavanians engaged in a form of human sacrifice that makes the Aztecs look like a Bernie Siegel support group.
Here is a bit from a historically accurate poem, author unknown:
He was their god,
The withered Cromm with many mists…
To him without glory
They would kill their piteous, wretched offspring
With much wailing and peril
To pour the blood around Cromm Cruaich.
Milk and corn
They would ask of him speedily
In return for one-third of their healthy issue.
Great was the horror and scare of him.
You think you have issues with your parents.
Some of these are not exactly the feel-good stories of the summer, but if you can’t get interested in your own past in a place like this, you’re just plain not trying.
Where is my past? After a few days here, it sinks in that the McEnroes were probably not players. We were vassals, victims, crossbow fodder. You five guys run across the face of that drum-lin and draw their fire. McEnroe, Plunkett, Briody, Moylan, O’Leary. Off with you, then. Good luck, lads, and Godspeed.
The McEnroes were laborers. They didn’t own land. They didn’t command troops. No one wrote ballads about their heroic, doomed loves. They probably got hanged and raped by the Black Baron; but most of the time they lacked even the epic qualities of victimhood. Most of the time they probably wobbled, like a unicyclist on a wire, between starvation and subsistence.
“They may have had other qualities, good qualities, the kinds of qualities that just don’t show up in the histories,” I say out loud in the car. I am jouncing down a narrow lane in a rented Nissan, a boxy little thing the size of a large bathtub. To an onlooker I would seem to be alone, but there’s a lesser session of the Court of Pie Powder meeting in the front seat. The lanes are often spooky even by daylight. Swirling, brambly vegetation grows right up to the edges and forms walls on both sides, and the roadbed sits low, so that you seem to be running down a chute into fairyland.
“Yes, they may have had skill sets that were not valued,” I tell the Court, and its officers chime in helpfully…
“You never hear about Miles the Nice.”
“John Who Ran Good Meetings.”
“Owen the Guy You Could Lean On.”
“Hugh Who Planted Peas the Same Way We All Did but Somehow His Were Just to Die For.”
This is what you have to face, s
ometimes. Not everybody can be storied. Not everybody turns up in the trilogy, stabbing a troll with a sword.
Some of us stay home and hoe the bean rows while the big shots battle Sauron.
Sturm und Drang are, after all, the by-products of leisure time. I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings out loud to Joey in the weeks preceding the trip—this is months before the release of the movie—and I’ve been getting a little pissed off at the hobbits. It’s the first time I’ve read it in years, and it must have eluded me, in past readings, that Frodo and Merry and Pippin are wealthy idlers. They’re all about fifty, and it is clear that none of them has ever had a job. The fact that they live underground and have hairy feet and don’t wear shoes should not disguise the fact that they are essentially British nobility. They put in one long hard year of heroics and they’re set for life. The McEnroes of the Shire would have had some grinding agricultural job unremarked by Tolkien—notwithstanding his tender enshrinement of the master-servant relationship. Rise up, Sam Gamgee! You have nothing to lose but your trowel!
It’s a Friday evening in April. The air is cool and the sun is shedding golden light all over the farms. I pull into the driveway of Father Francis X. O’Reilly, the parish priest in Mountnugent.
He comes to the door of his bungalow. He is dressed in a shirt and slacks and looks to be about fifty, with a spade-shaped face and a thatch of gray hair and eyes that gleam with intelligence.
“I want to apologize for just barging in like this but…”
“Looking for your roots, eh?” he demands in an unfriendly voice.
“Um, yes.”
“Well go away and look for them somewhere else!” he barks and starts to slam the door.
I step away from the sill and turn toward the Nissan. He catches the door and flippers his hand at me. His face is tightening up with a self-pleased grin.
“No, come in.” This has been an act.
“Sit down in there,” he says, pointing vaguely to several possible rooms as he goes off to finish a phone call. There is nowhere to sit. The house appears to have been recently burglarized, perhaps several times, with each new ransack occurring before the last one could be set right.
Everything sits in heaps. Books and books and papers and papers and packets of Silk Cut cigarettes and Cadbury chocolate bars and… heaps. Heaps that appear to have been heaped on other heaps. Things waiting to be organized into heaps, stuck, as it were, in the pre-heaping stage.
And Father Frank is a gem. He is funny and sad, words that describe eight-tenths of the men in Ireland, but Father Frank has that look of a man who can savor the bittersweet ichor of the nation, let it loll on his tongue.
He digs through the old records written in spidery hand, and we do indeed find the birth notation of my great-grandfather Patrick, in 1841. I tell him more of what I know (courtesy of assiduous genealogical researchers Kevin Curtis and Eileen Germano). Pat was the son of Thomas McEnroe and Mary Coyle, married in 1834. The whole family—Thomas, Mary, and five kids—seems to have emigrated in 1855 and wound up in New Britain, Connecticut, a midsize industrial city with a growing Irish enclave.
“I’m no help to you,” Father Frank says wearily.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Look,” I say, “what I need from you is something different from what you’re used to being asked for. I already know all this stuff, marriage certificates and baptismal records. I need you to close your eyes, and, based on what you know about this area, tell me who you think they were and what they were doing.”
He smiles.
“There’s a chance my family evicted yours, you know.”
Father Frank is one of those O’Reillys, the slashers and drowners. He spent most of his adult life “away,” which in rural Ireland could mean in Istanbul or half-a-county over. The McEnroes down at the pub explained to me that they were not from Mountnugent at all. They were from Virginia. The way they said it you’d have thought they emigrated from Roanoke, but they meant the town of Virginia, Ireland, which is about five miles from where we were standing.
Father Frank’s “away” included a stint in Oldcastle, which is about five miles from Mountnugent in a different direction. When he came to Mountnugent, in the churchyard after his first Sunday Mass, a woman saucily referred to him as a “blow-in” (a newcomer).
“Shut your mouth,” her husband growled. “The landlord’s back.”
I’m interested in landlords, I tell him.
The 1821 census shows a laborer named Henry McEnroe living in the Tonagh townland. A townland is the smallest geographical unit in Ireland. There’s no American equivalent. It’s as if a neighborhood were drawn with exactitude on official maps.
Tonagh is a name meaning “quagmire,” and around Mountnugent it has a special significance. Mention it, and you’ll often see a quick flicker of resentment in a person’s eyes, because of something that happened in 1847. The average Irish person is not necessarily a scrupulous keeper of his or her own personal genealogy. The past is a world of dirt floors and pigs in the house and chaos and hunger, not an orderly grid of lineage. But the Irish have a keen memory for outrage, and the evictions at Tonagh are discussed as if they happened last week.
The Tonagh landlord turned seven hundred, maybe eight hundred people out of their houses, all in one day. This was accomplished in a pointlessly brutal way, as we shall see—a manner calculated to visit hardship, sickness, and death upon the poor farmers. Even in this country, pockmarked as it is by centuries of small hurt and titanic woe, the Tonagh story has a way of making people suck in their breath.
“I’m wondering if the McEnroes might have been among the families who were evicted at Tonagh,” I tell Father Frank.
He looks at me, then looks away. It’s about 6:00 P.M., and the low, angling sun is streaking and smearing the land outside his rectory windows. His voice is gentle.
“It’s not necessarily true that they were evicted,” he says. “The presumption is that they left because of the famine.”
He has seen something that I cannot, at this moment, let myself see. That I am greedy for just a little nibble of this tragedy. For my book? For myself ? For my sense of the McEnroes as a people who wander under evil stars? Who knows? I’m reconciled to the idea that we did not famously hold any bridges or drown while escaping the family castle. But I’m hungry to find us in the wretched hordes of Tonagh, so illtreated and direly beset that there is even a local ballad about our misery.
There was a family in one of his previous parishes, says Father Frank, who had roots in Mountnugent, and they knew that Frank’s family constituted the end of the line of O’Reilly landlords. This family was prosperous, he says, but they were unclear about their own history. One of them asked Father Frank to make inquiries.
Frank mentioned the name of this family to his own father who told him, “They took soup.”
During the famine, the Church of Ireland adopted the questionable strategy of offering food to the starving in return for their promise to convert. Soup-takers were expected to be at Protestant services the first Sunday after they accepted the food and to stay there ever after. Wherever possible, they were threatened with eviction if they reneged. Irish stubbornness ensured that this program had very limited success. In a tiny town such as Mountnugent, only two or three families took soup, but one was the family now inquiring of its roots. (Needless to say, they had found their way back to Catholicism.)
“Well, what am I going to do? Taking soup is a mark of shame. This is certainly news they don’t want to hear,” says Frank.
He let a little time slip by, but the man began to press him. They made a date to discuss what Frank had learned and just as the dreaded hour arrived, didn’t Frank get word that his own father had fallen and broken his hip, so the appointment was broken, too, and the whole dodgy business was temporarily dodged!
More time slid away, and Frank dared to hope that the man had dropped the matter. The man invi
ted Frank to a dinner at his lovely new house on a lake. Frank arrived expecting a dinner party, you know, with various people from the parish attending.
No such thing. Frank arrived to find a full house of dinner guests, every last one of them—except Frank—from this man’s family. He had invited to this dinner with Frank any person with two of the clan’s chromosomes. The jig was up.
Much food. Much wine. Frank was asked to stand and deliver the tidings. He had carefully ingested sufficient quantities of the grape so that the Major Social Abhorrence Centers of his brain were in a kind of rolling blackout.
He stood. The clank of cutlery, the clink of crystal, the murmurs and mutters all stopped. He gazed around. “You took soup,” he said finally.
“You know what?” Frank continues the story, “They pulled through it just fine. It turned out, I think, that they had kind of suspected something of the sort.”
He lets the tale float over the heaps in the room. He lets its message sink in.
The past is not a good place to go digging for the story that you want. It’s a lane you walk down, unarmored, aware that almost anything—wolf, hero, fairy, knave—could leap out of the brush at you.
Father Frank has an evening Mass to give in some other parish. I climb back in the Nissan, roll down the window.
“Take care, Father,” I tell him.
“I hate it when people say ‘take care.’ It drives me mad. And it’s Frank, by the way.” He launches into an explanation of why he hates this pleasantry, and I don’t quite follow it. Because it’s an admonition I guess, but one that’s hard to observe. In what sense is he supposed to take care? Is he supposed to watch for pianos that have accidentally been tipped out of overflying airplanes or go a bit more slowly on slippery steps? What made me think he was such a reckless person that he needed encouragement to take care? That’s the gist of his problem, it seems.
I find myself drawn into the discussion.
“I had surgery to reattach my quadriceps tendon last year,” I began, “and I was gimping around in a leg brace. I noticed that people would take leave of me by saying ‘get well.’ It seemed a little brisk, a little bossy, you know? Instead of wishing me a gentle recovery, they were kind of telling me to heal myself, right away. ‘Get well.’ They don’t have time for this injury thing. I blame it on computers.”
My Father's Footprints Page 14
