The Depositions

by Thomas Lynch

  Who’s to know?

  As for the brother, as for me, after making the rounds at the union hall in which all had assembled for corned beef and cabbage, we made for the road home before rush hour hit, singing the verses of “The Hills of Moveen,” counting our blessings as we had come to see them: that here we were, the sons of an undertaker who was the son of a parcel-post inspector who was the son of a janitor and prison guard who was the son of an ass and cart farmer from a small cottage on the edge of West Clare to which our own sons and daughters do often repair, for the sense that it gives them of who they are and where they’ve come from and where they might be going still.

  Along the way were the cute fools puking out their excesses of spuds and green beer or leaning out of their car doors pissing their revelries into ditches, or being taken into custody by the police. We drove past them all, out beyond the old cityscape of slums and ruins and urban renewal, out past the western suburbs, with their strip malls and parking lots, bearing the day’s contentment like viaticum, singing the old songs, that “Wild Mountain Thyme” what with its purple heather, Pat tapping the time with his thumbs on the dashboard, out toward Milford where the sun was declining, where the traffic was sure to be thinning, and the last light of the day would be reddening and the false spring oozing from the earth might hold a whiff of turf smoke, a scent of the sea, and our Marys would have a plate of chicken and peas, a sup of tea, our place by the fire ready and warm for us to nod off in the wingback chairs, the brother and me, dreaming of the ancients and our beloveds and those yet to be—Nora and Tommy and Mrs. Callaghan and all the generations that shared our names; the priests and the old lads in the stories, our dear parents, gone with years, and our wives and daughters and sons, God bless them, and the ones coming after us we’ll never see, bound to the bunch of them by love and death.

  THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT

  It is mid-June, nearly solstice, and I am adding a room onto the house in West Clare. A small room only—12 by 12—enough for a bed and a bureau and a chair. P. J. Roche has put up the block walls and Des O’Shea is roofing it, after which the work inside might proceed apace—flagstones and plaster and decor. There’ll be a window to the east looking out on the haggard and a glass door to the south looking down the land, over the Shannon to Kerry rising, hilly on the other side.

  It is an old house and changing it is never easy.

  Near as I can figure it’s the fifth addition and will make the house nearly seven hundred square feet, adding this wee room to what is here now: an entrance hall, the kitchen, a bathroom and bedroom—my cottage in Moveen West—my inheritance.

  I’m returning in a month’s time with my wife and her sister and her sister’s friend, Kitty, for a fortnight’s stay; and while the company of women is a thing to be wished for, sleeping on the sofa whilst they occupy the house’s one existing bedroom—my ancestral bedroom—is not a thing I am prepared to do.

  Back in the century when this house was first built, we’d have all bedded down together maybe, for the sake of the collective body heat, along with the dog and the pig and the milch cow if we could manage it. But this is the twenty-first century and privacy is in its ascendancy.

  So P. J. and I hatched this plan last year of adding a room at the east side of the house. He understands the business of stone and mortar, plaster and space, time and materials, people, place. He has reconfigured this interior before, nine years ago after Nora Lynch died.

  We have settled on particulars. Gerry Lynch will help with the slates and Matty Ryan will wire things. Damien Carmody from across the road will paint. And Breda, P. J.’s wife, is the construction manager. She sorts the bills and keeps them at it. “There’s no fear, Tom,” she assures me. “It’ll all be there when you’re home in August.” There are boards and blocks and bundles of slates in the shed from Williams’s in Kilkee. We’ve been to Kilrush to order curtains and bedding from O’Halloran’s and buckets of paint from Brew’s. The place is a permanent work in progress.

  MY GRANDFATHER’S GRANDFATHER, Patrick Lynch, was given this house as a wedding gift when he married Honora Curry in 1853. They were both twenty-six years old and were not among the more than a million who starved or the more than a million who left Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century in what today would be called a Holocaust or Diaspora but in their times was called the Famine.

  On the westernmost peninsula of this poor county, in the bleakest decade of the worst of Irish centuries, Pat and Honora pledged their troth and set up house here against all odds. Starvation, eviction, and emigration—the three-headed scourge of English racism by which English landlords sought to consolidate smaller holdings into larger ones—had cut Ireland’s population by a quarter between 1841 and 1851. Tiny parcels of land and a subsistence diet of potatoes allowed eight Lynch households to survive in Moveen, according to the Tithe books of 1825. Of these eight, three were headed by Patricks, two by Daniels, and there was one each by Michael and Anthony and John. One of these men was my great-great-great-grandfather. One of the Patricks or maybe a Dan—there’s no way of knowing now for certain. Their holdings ranged from three acres to nearly thirty. Of the eleven hundred acres that make up Moveen West, they were tenants on about a tenth. They owned nothing and were “tenants at will”—which is to say, at the will of a gentrified landlord class who likely never got closer to Moveen than the seafront lodges of Kilkee three miles away, always a favorite of Limerick Protestants. Their labor—tillage and pasturage—was owned by the landlord. The Westropps owned most of these parts then—James and John and later Ralph. The peasants were allowed their potatoes and their cabins. Until, of course, the potato failed. Of the 164 persons made homeless by the bailiffs of John Westropp, Esq., in May of 1849, in Moveen, thirty were Lynches. All of Daniel Lynch’s family and all of his son John’s family were evicted. The widow Margaret Lynch was put out of her cabin and John Lynch the son of Martin was put off of his nine acres. Another John Lynch could not afford the seven pounds, ten shillings rent on his small plot. The roofs were torn from their houses, the walls knocked down, their few possessions put out in the road. The potato crop had been blighted for four out of the last five years. Some of the families were paid a pittance to assist with the demolition of their homes, which made their evictions, according to the landlord’s agents, “voluntary.” Along with the Lynches evicted that day were Gormans and McMahons, Mullanys and Downses—the poor cousins and sisters and brothers of those marginally better situated economically or geographically who were allowed to stay but were not allowed to take them in. It was, for the class of landlords who owned the land, a culling of the herd of laboring stock, to make the ones who were left more fit, more efficient laborers. For those evicted, it was akin to a death sentence. For those who stayed, it was an often-toxic mix of survivors’ pride, survivors’ guilt, survivors’ shame. Like all atrocities, it damns those who did and those who didn’t. Like every evil, its roots and reach are deep.

  In proportion to its population, County Clare had the highest number of evictions in all of Ireland for the years 1849 through 1854. The dispossessed were sent into the overcrowded workhouse in Kilrush, or shipped out for Australia or America or died in a ditch of cholera or exposure. As John Killen writes in the introduction to The Famine Decade, “That a fertile country, the sister nation to the richest and most powerful country in the world, bound to that country by an Act of Union some forty-five years old, should suffer distress, starvation and death seems incomprehensible today. That foodstuffs were exported from Ireland to feed British colonies in India and the sub-continent, while great numbers of people in Ireland starved, beggars belief.”

  But the words George Bernard Shaw puts into the mouths of his characters in Man and Superman get at the truth of it:

  MALONE: My father died of starvation in Ireland in the Black ’47. Maybe you heard of it?

  VIOLET: The famine?

  MALONE (with smoldering passion): No, the starvation. When a country is
full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine.

  The words of Captain Arthur Kennedy, the Poor Law inspector for the Kilrush Union who meticulously documented the particulars of the horror in West Clare, are compelling still:

  The wretchedness, ignorance, and helplessness of the poor on the western coast of this Union prevent them seeking a shelter elsewhere; and to use their own phrase, they “don’t know where to face”; they linger about the localities for weeks or months, burrowing behind the ditches, under a few broken rafters of their former dwelling, refusing to enter the workhouse till the parents are broken down and the children half starved, when they come into the workhouse to swell the mortality, one by one. Those who obtain a temporary shelter in adjoining cabins are not more fortunate. Fever and dysentery shortly make their appearance when those affected are put out by the roadside, as carelessly and ruthlessly as if they were animals; when frequently, after days and nights of exposure, they are sent in by relieving officers when in a hopeless state. These inhuman acts are induced by the popular terror of fever. I have frequently reported cases of this sort. The misery attendant upon these wholesale and simultaneous evictions is frequently aggravated by hunting these ignorant, helpless creatures off the property, from which they may perhaps have never wandered five miles. It is not an unusual occurrence to see 40 or 50 houses leveled in one day, and orders given that no remaining tenant or occupier should give them even a night’s shelter.

  The evicted crowd into the back lanes and wretched hovels of the towns and villages, scattering disease and dismay in all directions. The character of some of these hovels defies description. I, not long since, found a widow whose three children were in fever, occupying the piggery of their former cabin, which lay beside them in ruins; however incredible it may appear, this place where they had lived for weeks, measured 5 feet by 4 feet, and of corresponding height. There are considerable numbers in this Union at present houseless, or still worse, living in places unfit for human habitation where disease will be constantly generated.

  The mid-nineteenth-century voice of Captain Kennedy, like mid-twentieth-century voices of military men proximate to atrocity, seems caught between the manifest evil he witnesses and the duty to follow orders he has been given.

  I would not presume to meddle with the rights of property, nor yet to argue the expediency or necessity of these “monster” clearances, both one and the other no doubt frequently exist; this, however, renders the efficient and systematic administration of the Poor Law no less difficult and embarrassing. I think it incumbent on me to state these facts for the Commissioners’ information, that they may be aware of some of the difficulties I have to deal with. —Reports and Returns Relating to Evictions in the Kilrush Union: Captain Kennedy to the Commissioners, July 5, 1848

  IT WAS A starvation, a failure of politics more than crops that cleared the land of the poor, killed off thousands in the westernmost parishes, and dispersed the young to wander the world in search of settlements that could support them.

  Moveen, of course, was never the same.

  By August of 1855, when Griffith’s Valuation was done, only three households of Lynches remained in Moveen—Daniel Lynch, the widowed Mary Lynch, and the lately married Patrick Lynch. It was Mary who gave Patrick and Honora their start, putting in a word for her son with the landlord and making what remained of the deserted cabin habitable.

  My guess is Honora came from an adjacent townland, nearer the Shannon—Kilfearagh maybe, or Lisheen where her famous granduncle Eugene O’Curry, the Irish language scholar, came from; or north of here, toward Doonbeg, where the Currys were plentiful in those days. Maybe her people and Pat’s people were both from the ancient parish of Moyarta and it is likely they met at church in Carrigaholt or in one of the hedge schools.

  Pat came out of the house above, on the hill where the land backs up to the sea, where James and Maureen Carmody live now with their daughter Rachel and their son, Niall. James would be descended from Pat’s brother, Tom; and, of course, from Mary, the widowed mother. We’d all be cousins many times removed.

  The newlyweds leased twenty-six acres from Ralph Westropp, the English landlord. The house had, according to the records, “stone walls, a thatched roof, one room, one window and one door to the front.” In the famous illustration of “Moveen after the Evictions,” which appeared in the Illustrated London News on December 22, 1849, there are sixteen cottages of this kind, most of them roofless, their gables angled into the treeless hillocks of Moveen, their fires quenched, their people scattered to Liverpool and the Antipodes and the Americas. In 1855, the Griffith Valuation assigned the place a tax rate of ten shillings. The more windows and doors a house had, the more the tax. No doubt to accommodate their ten children, Pat added a bedroom to the south.

  On October 3, 1889, Honora died. She was buried in the great vault at Moyarta, overlooking the Shannon and the estuarial village of Carrigaholt. Hers was a slow death from stomach cancer, giving time for her husband and his brother Tom to build the tomb, there near the road, with its cobblestone floor, tall gabled end, and huge flagstone cover that was inscribed with her particulars by Mick Troy, the stonecutter from Killballyowen, famous for his serifs and flourishes. The brother Tom lost an eye to the tomb’s construction when a chunk of stone flew off of Pat’s sad hammering. The work must have taken most of a month—to bring the round gray rocks up from the Shannon beach by the cartload for the floor, ledge rocks from the cliff’s edge to line the deep interior and build the gable he would plaster over, and finally the massive ledger stone that would serve as tomb roof and permanent record. Grave work, in anticipation of his grief—the larger muscles’ indenture to the heart—it was all he could do for the dying woman.

  For months after his mother’s death, my great-grandfather, looking out the west window of this house at the mouth of the River Shannon and the sea beyond, must have considered the prospects for his future. As ever in rural Ireland there were no guarantees. The labor and poverty were crushing. Parnell and land reform were distant realities. Their lease on the land would support just one family. A sister Ellen had gone off to Australia. A brother Michael married in a hurry when he impregnated a neighbor girl and moved far away from the local gossip, first to Galway and then to a place in America named Jackson, Michigan. Another brother, Pat, passed the exam to become a teacher but the Kilkee School already had a teacher, so he was given an offer in The North. His mother, Honora, had forbidden his going there, fearful for his soul among Protestants, so Pat sailed off to Australia to find his sister Ellen in Sydney. He was said to be a wonderful singer. “But for Lynch, we’d all do,” is what was said about him after he’d regaled his fellow passengers on the long journey. He was, it turned out, good at seafaring too, keeping logs and reading the stars and charts. The captain of the ship offered him work as a first mate and it is rumored that after a fortnight’s visit with his sister in Sydney, he returned to the ship and spent the rest of his days at sea. No one in Moveen ever heard from him again. He famously never sent money home. Dan and John, two other brothers, had died young, which left Tom and Sinon and their sister Mary who was sickly and their widowed father still at home.

  Tom Lynch booked passage for America. He was twenty-four. I’m guessing he sailed from Cappa Pier in Kilrush and went through Canada, working his way from Quebec to Montreal to Detroit and then by train out to Jackson. He settled in a boardinghouse near his brother Michael and the wife, Kate, there in Jackson—a place their father, Pat, had been to briefly years before—where a huge state prison and the fledgling auto shops promised work. Maybe it was in memory of his dead mother, or maybe because there was a space on the forms, or maybe just because it was the American style, he identified himself in his new life in the new world as Thomas Curry Lynch. Or else it was to distinguish himself from the better-known and long-established Thomas B. Lynch, proprietor, with Cornelius Mahoney, of Jackson Steam Granite Works, “Manufacturers of Foreign and Domestic Monuments,” situate
d on Greenwood Avenue, opposite the cemetery. Maybe to better his job prospects or his romantic ones, he shaved four years off his age in the same way. Among his new liberties was to identify himself as he saw fit. The stone in Jackson in St. John’s Cemetery maintains his version of it. Thomas C. Lynch, it reads, 1870–1930. Back at the Parish House in Carrigaholt, his baptism is recorded in 1866.

  Before he was buried in Jackson, in consort with Ellen Ryan, the Canadian daughter of Irish parents, to whom he was married in 1897, Thomas Curry Lynch fathered a daughter, Gertrude, who became a teacher, and two sons: Thomas Patrick who would become the priest I’d be named for, and Edward Joseph who would become my grandfather.

  According to the Jackson City Directory, Thomas Curry Lynch worked as a “fireman,” a “helper,” a “laborer,” a “painter,” a “foundry man,” and as a “janitor” at I. M. Dach Underwear Company. In September 1922, he was hired as a guard for the Michigan State Prison in Jackson. The picture on his employee pass shows a bald man with a long, square face in a three-piece double-breasted suit and white shirt, collar pin and tie. He is looking straight into the camera’s eye, neither smiling nor frowning; his closed mouth is a narrow level line between a good nose and a square chin—a sound man, as they say in Clare, able and airy and dressed to the nines. He bought a small frame house at 600 Cooper Street, a block south of St. John’s Church, outlived his wife by nine years, and died in September of 1930. He never lived to see his son receive his Holy Orders in 1934 or die of influenza in 1936. He is buried there in Jackson among the Morrisseys and Higginses and others from the western parishes of Clare, between Ellen and his youngest son. He rests in death, as in life, as Irish men have often done, between the comforts and vexations of priest and the missus, far from the homes they left as youths.