Common Ground (15 page)

Among those who took flight were a small clan of Kirks, for whom the religious warfare must have been particularly unsettling. For the Kirks had once been Protestants: Scottish Presbyterians from the lowland county of Dumfriesshire, who had emigrated to Northern Ireland around 1630. Sometime during the intervening century and a half, at least one Kirk had converted to Catholicism, apparently to marry a Catholic girl. By 1794, these Catholic Kirks had settled in a narrow corridor between Inniskeen in County Monaghan and Maghereah (also known as Kirk’s Cross) in County Louth.

One of these was a Maghereah butcher named James Kirk, known to friend and foe alike as “Butchy.” A beefy man with a blood-red face, Butchy wasn’t popular with his fellow Catholics, who suspected him of illicit ties to the Protestant yeomanry. His enemies accused him of being an informer, furnishing the despised English with intelligence on the Defenders.

One day in 1796, Butchy fell into an argument with a worker named Pat Culleton, who flung a lead weight at his head, killing him outright. Kirk was to be buried in his family plot at Inniskeen, but when the funeral procession reached the river Fane, a party of Catholics seized the coffin and dumped it in the river. Recovered and buried at Inniskeen, it was dug up in the middle of the night.

The Kirk affair produced a series of celebrated trials. Pat Culleton was found guilty of manslaughter, twenty-nine others of disrupting Kirk’s funeral. But the defendants were widely regarded as patriots, while generations of Kirks were labeled collaborators. For years, any Kirk walking a village path had to suffer the gibes of children shouting “Butchy! Butchy!”

About 1800, a farm laborer named Owen Kirk decamped from Inniskeen in search of more amiable surroundings. Tramping the hills east of Ardee in County Louth, he came on a humpbacked ridge of peculiar charm. On one side the land fell away through fields of barley and oats to the river Dee; on the other, a copse of Scottish fir inclined toward the river Glyde. Along the ridge’s spine ran a dusty road straddled by the tiny village of Roodstown: two dozen thatched huts, a smithy, tailor’s shop, and cooper’s works. Towering over everything were the ruins of a sixteenth-century castle, its roof sheared off by wind and storm, but its square towers and mullioned windows still keeping a sentry’s watch over the sleeping valleys.

The castle had been built by the Taaffes, Welsh warlords who had ruled Roodstown through the Middle Ages. By the eighteenth century it had fallen into the hands of Thomas Dawson, a loyalist rewarded by the Crown with the title of Lord Cremorne. From his seat in County Monaghan, he ruled his Louth estates through agents and overseers.

When Owen Kirk reached Roodstown in 1801, he rented a quarter acre of Dawson’s land adjacent to the old Taaffe castle. His plot held a one-room thatched hut, a rutted “half road,” and a small garden, barely large enough for a few rows of potatoes and parsnips, for which he paid an annual rent of five shillings. Before long he married Cath Creaton, and together they had five children. To support his family, Owen worked part-time as a laborer for other farmers, earning six pence a day.

Life was hard for Owen and Cath, but not without its pleasures. In summer, Roodstown was a green and fragrant place, overlooking two of Ireland’s loveliest valleys. The Glyde and Dee teemed with salmon and eel. Grouse and woodcock fluttered in the copse. The Kirks attended the races at Haggardstown and the famed steeplechase at Mullacurry. Ardee and Dunleer held regular fairs at which jugglers, acrobats, and minstrels performed. On such occasions, Louthians downed prodigious quantities of Castlebellingham ale, renowned as Ireland’s best malt liquor.

The opening years of the nineteenth century were relatively prosperous ones in Ireland, but then a severe recession revived the country’s semipermanent agrarian insurgency. Waged for decades by Whiteboys, Rightboys, Oakboys, and Hearts of Steel, now it was carried on by a new breed of rebels calling themselves Ribbonmen. Spawned by the sectarian warfare of the 1790s, the Ribbon Society came to focus on the economic grievances of small farmers and landless laborers. As famine and depression deepened during 1815–16, the Ribbonmen looked toward armed rebellion and started collecting weapons.

In April 1816, three Louth Ribbonmen appeared at Wildgoose Lodge, five
miles northeast of Roodstown, demanding guns from its owner, a prosperous farmer named Edward Lynch. A donnybrook broke out and Lynch informed the authorities. When the three Ribbonmen were executed at Ardee, the Ribbon Society swore revenge. On October 30, some seventy-five Ribbonmen surrounded Wildgoose Lodge with smoldering turf torches and set it ablaze, killing Lynch and seven others. The night’s events sowed terror among the Louth gentry, who responded with unusual vindictiveness. Eighteen persons were executed for the crime, their bodies publicly displayed at crossroads throughout the county for up to two years.

If Wildgoose Lodge and its aftermath set gentry and tenants at each other’s throats, it also brought terrible pressures to bear on Catholics in surrounding villages like Roodstown. The Ribbon Society demanded unqualified allegiance to its insurgency, while landlords and magistrates threatened bloody reprisals against those who offered succor to the rebels. If the Kirks threw in their lot with the Ribbonmen, they were “degenerate felons” marked for execution; if they turned their backs on their own kind, they were “villainous traitors” risking Edward Lynch’s fate. For a family long sensitive to the epithet “Butchy,” it must have been an excruciating dilemma.

Unrest built in Louth as crop prices continued to fall. Then, during the 1840s, the potato crop—prime source of food for most Irish peasants—failed for five consecutive years. Turning potato fields throughout Ireland black with rot, the blight proved a national disaster of unspeakable proportions. Especially acute in the desolate West, the famine took a terrible toll even in fertile Louth. By October 1846, bands of starving men roamed the Louth countryside, forcing themselves on local relief schemes.

Many landlords took advantage of the Great Famine by evicting tenants who had fallen into arrears on their rent. Since eviction was the worst calamity that could befall an Irish farmer, the landlords’ new strategy prompted a resurgence of Ribbonism. The society would issue one warning to those who pursued “this reckless policy,” then if the landlord persisted, a Ribbon tribunal would sentence him to death.

In December 1851, James Eastwood, an English landlord with an estate in Castletown, decided to evict two of his tenants on the Sunday after Christmas. When Ribbon remonstrances proved fruitless, an officer of the society named Barney Quin came to the county seat of Dundalk to recruit assassins among Ribbonmen of the area. After meetings at Rafferty’s Public House, Burns’s Tavern, and Lawless’s Public House, Quin selected Thomas Belton, twenty-four, Patrick McCooey, thirty-four, and an itinerant laborer, the forty-nine-year-old James Kirk.

A cousin of Roodstown’s Owen Kirk, James had been born in Inniskeen just six years after Butchy Kirk’s death. Bearing the very name of the informer, he must have grown up with special maledictions heaped upon him; according to legend, he had sworn to redeem the family honor. Casting his lot with the Ribbon Society, he did not shrink from the ultimate act of rebellion. On Christmas Eve, as light snow fell over Castletown, Kirk and his two accomplices
intercepted Eastwood as he strolled his estates, clubbing him with heavy stones and leaving him for dead at the edge of a quarry. But the landlord survived. Five days after the attack, Kirk and McCooey were arrested on the information of a paid informer—publican Michael Lawless—who testified that he had overheard Quin and three men plotting the assassination in his tavern on the night of December 22. Largely on Lawless’s testimony, Kirk and McCooey were sentenced to death.

On July 31, 1852, the most celebrated execution in county history took place in the square before the Dundalk courthouse. A double row of constabulary ringed the square, backed by a squadron of lancers. At ten minutes to twelve, the condemned men, arms pinioned with leather straps and white caps on their heads, were led to the scaffold. McCooey exhibited “much weakness,” chanting over and over, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for me.” In contrast, James Kirk displayed his “usual firmness.” At high noon, the hangmen wound strips of black crepe over the prisoners’ eyes. Around their necks went ropes of silk, woven for the occasion by prisoners in the Cork jail. At a signal from the prison’s governor, the two men were “launched into eternity.” For an hour their bodies hung from the gallows, “an object lesson to those who watched.”

But the Kirks drew a different lesson from the one the British magistrates had intended. In the family’s collective memory, the exploits of James Kirk the Ribbonman soon exorcised the shame of James Kirk the Traitor—though they still might hear the chorus of “Butchy” in marketplace and tavern, somehow they succeeded in erasing all recollection of the informer. As generations went by, these themes of loyalty and betrayal were to run like bold threads through the family’s history, weaving a tapestry in which heroes and villains, patriots and turncoats, were pitted relentlessly against each other, with the Kirks—and their descendants, the McGoffs—invariably enlisted in freedom’s legion.

Before the Great Famine was over in 1851, death, eviction, and emigration to America had eroded the population of rural Ireland. In 1841, Roodstown had 208 residents; a decade later, only 172 remained. The Kirks hung on. Although Owen and Cath were dead by now, the cottage next to the old Taaffe castle was occupied by their oldest son, Bryan, his wife, Bridget, and their five children.

The Kirks were less dependent on the land than most of their neighbors, for Bryan was a tailor, an itinerant craftsman who made clothes for the villagers and outlying farmers. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, ready-made clothes were largely unknown in rural Ireland. At fairs and markets, one might find a few secondhand suits, known as “Lord-ha’-mercys” because they came off the backs of dead men, but most farmers still supplied hand-woven cloth to the village tailor, who made up a suit to measure. Sometimes Bryan Kirk worked at home; more often he traveled to his customer’s home, carrying needles, thread, and scissors in a leather pouch.

The Kirks continued to live in spartan simplicity. The old thatched cottage Owen had built in 1802 was now divided down the middle by a flimsy partition.
To the left was a kitchen with a stone hearth; to the right, a bedroom where the Kirks spent the night on straw pallets spread out on the clay floor. On either side was a small window which did little to relieve the dark, damp, and cold which pervaded the cottage in all seasons.

Other than Kirk the tailor, Hardy the blacksmith, and Rorke the cooper, Roodstown offered its twenty-five families little in the way of commerce or diversion. For those they went three miles east to Ardee or two miles west to Stabannon. By the 1850s, Ardee was a town of 2,500, with a tanyard, an oat mill, and eighteen alehouses. But it was to Stabannon that the villagers went on Sundays to hear Father Corrigan chant the Latin Mass in the whitewashed chapel; there they went to quaff ale at Geraghty’s, or dance to the fiddling of old Jamie Farrell. And it was there that the Kirks’ second son, Patrick, attended John Mackin’s “hedge school,” so known because it had long been illegal for any Catholic youth to get an education and priests and schoolmasters gave instruction hidden behind a hedge. By 1851, Mackin’s school was legal enough, but it retained a clandestine air, conducted as it was in a former stable on a side lane behind a high thorn hedge.

As Patrick grew to manhood, he could see nothing to hold him in Roodstown. He had no wish to follow his father into the tailoring trade, even less to scratch out a living farming Lord Cremorne’s land.

Nothing had happened since the Great Famine to improve the lot of the Irish peasant. Affronted by mounting Catholic belligerence, many landlords deserted Ireland for much of the year, taking their pleasure in England. The Third Lord Cremorne, a lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, shuttled between his London town house and his Monaghan manor, with little thought for his Louth estates.

Many Louthians had their eyes on events across the Atlantic, where the Union armies were crushing the Confederacy. In February 1865, the Dundalk
Democrat
—a principal voice of Louth’s Catholics—detected “a curious affinity between the state of things in Virginia and the state of things in Ireland. In Virginia, planters have too much power—an unjust and cruel power over their laborers. In Ireland the landlords have too much power—a power of life and death to their tenants. It is a usurped power, precisely like that which buys and sells the Negroes.”

When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the same editor could scarcely contain his delight. A prolonged civil war “would have prostrated Kingdoms and Empires in its march,” he wrote, “but based on Democratic liberty the American Republic has wrestled with it and conquered. The fact proves that a government of the people is more powerful than that of aristocrats and kings.”

Evidently Pat Kirk was equally impressed by the American example, for just three weeks after Appomattox he crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool, where—with 758 others—he boarded the S.S.
Bosphorus
. After six weeks in steerage he arrived in Boston on June 5, 1865.

Pat’s first stop was an unlikely one for an Irishman fresh off the boat: suburban Somerville, then almost exclusively Yankee. Friends from County
Louth had found him a job in a Somerville brick works. They may also have introduced him to Mary Quinn, a recent emigrant from the Louth town of Drogheda, for on July 19, Pat and Mary were married at St. John’s Church. A few months later they moved to South Boston’s Lower End, then teeming with newly arrived Irish, and began building a family: a son, Bernard, born in May 1866; a daughter, Mary, in July 1869.

The Kirks sank shallow roots, moving every year or so from one grim tenement to another: 220 Second Street, 92 Athens Street, 110 Bolton Street. These flats were scarcely larger than the thatched hut Pat had left behind and, in most respects, were even less pleasant and healthful. Landlords had divided warehouses and town houses into ten or twelve apartments, stacking the newcomers in attics, basements, and closets. Most houses had only one sink and a single privy serving up to a hundred people. Lacking direct access to the street, tenants dumped their garbage into the courtyards, where it lay for months in stinking heaps.