Tipperary (19 page)

(Here Martin Lenihan described a large fat circle in the air with his finger.)

Nought. The duck's egg. Zero. That's what I'd have.

So spoke Mr. Martin Lenihan from Oola in County Limerick. I have known many men like Mr. Lenihan, and in his words he told me the essence of this country's ancient story.

But the people, the incomers, such as my mother's family, the Goldsmiths, and the Treeces, to whom land had been given as royal reward— what of them? Many had farmed their lands for, by now, several hundred years. Shall we believe in our hearts that Mr. Lenihan possesses the greater rights? Yet the Protestants have lived here for long enough to feel Irish, to belong to the fabric of the country's earth. For how long, for how many generations or centuries, may the Hand of History reach down to control?

After unearthing the ancient roots of Mr. Martin Lenihan, I set off to examine the newer tradition of Irish land—the recent, yet rigid foundations of Mr. Henry Catherwood. He is a giant man of Ulster whose family has not had the same long-lived residence on the island of Ireland as Mr. Lenihan's; the Catherwoods took occupation of their fields in 1692. Mr. Catherwood stood at least six feet six in his stockings; he had feet like canal boats, and at least eighteen buttons secured the fly of his trousers. We sat to talk in the parlor of his stone farmhouse, with its slate roof, its lace curtains, and large portrait of Queen Victoria.

Look. I possess large hands (said Henry Catherwood). So did my mother—“Large hands can make a large fortune,” she said. As they did on this farm and always can. Provided a man has no fear of hard work. Not of hard work am I in fear. Nor of anything else that I have yet encountered.

My mother's father bequeathed her this place. We're some three statute miles southwest of Newtownstewart, a mile west of the road to Drumquin. Not a large farm at all to begin with. In my great-grandfather's time they had a few cows and some cattle for slaughter and some pigs; they ate a beef and two pigs every year and chickens and such. 'Twas the same when I was a boy.

Now, my mother had a wee fright of dogs, so I had no dog. I had a cat, Walter, who came into the fields with me. That cat knew that my true home, the home of my spirit, lay in those fields. Every clement day from the age I was six I roamed these fields.

At the same time my mother had a servant, Annie Heaphy; now, she was a Roman Catholic. When we hired her we couldn't get a good Protestant girl—they were all gone to the cities; they weren't born to be servants, and the Roman Catholics were. I paid dearly for the lack of good Protestant help. With my mother out of earshot Annie Heaphy often taunted me.

“Hi-boy, I tell you there's a day coming when youse folk will be offa this land. This wasn't your land, you were given it by the dirty oul' King of England. And it was never his to give. So cling to it while you can, wee Henry. Cling to it while you can.”

Now, I was too young to understand what Annie Heaphy meant. So I did what she said. I clung to the land. Meaning, I went out into the fields and I looked at every hill and hollow in our fields and I acquainted myself with every one. I say “acquainted”—I mean intimately, like. If I found a ridge in the ground made by an old plow or a finger of God, I traced it with my boots. If water gathered after heavy rain and made a small lake, I drank from it. In the summertime, I followed the reapers as they ran the rabbits out of the barley. I relished it all, the way you'd enjoy eating meat. I saw shelves and furrows of all shapes and sizes and every one of them was like a face, every one had something to recall it by—eyebrows or jaws or cheekbones or shoulders.

Above all, I lay on the ground to try and put my arms around it and find out its mysteries. That summer was a particularly fortunate one in terms of warm weather. It was so hot we had swarms of bees flying by nearly every day—they were all looking for a house with cool, deep eaves. Every field on the farm, every place I could lie down, I pressed my face to the earth, me a Protestant boy who is not permitted to believe in such foolish things as magic or...or... poetry. That was for the Roman Catholics, and damn little's the money they made out of it. (He cackled.) And you see, and here's the merry hell of it—I thought I was obeying Annie Heaphy's orders to “cling to the land.” (Henry Catherwood's cackle deepened into a chesty wheeze of laughter.)

I found a lark's nest in the grass. And, good boy that I was, I never troubled her eggs; I walked far around them. It was that kind of a summer anyway—we had apple windfalls, a baby rabbit that got lost and was made into a pet, a house down the road that had a new infant.

We're hardy people, Protestants. We mostly know what we're doing, because we don't waste time or thought on unnecessary matters. There's nothing much to be gained from trucking with, say, music—outside of a good strong hymn, maybe. The Roman Catholics, they stay up half the night listening to some old tramp of a fellow with a fiddle, and then they're not fit for work the next day. Not that they do any work.

So, one day, I went back to the house and I got out of the barn a loy— that's a big kind of a shovel or spade for digging. And I went back to my little notch in the ground and I used the loy to pare back the grass and open up the clay beneath. Bit by bit I did it—it was hard work, a loy's a heavy implement—but I soon opened up a wide enough swatch and I was like a man in a laboratory. I looked at that ground, I sniffed it, I rolled on it, and I had to wash my face in the pond before I went back up to the house, because I was after putting my face down into the clay over and over again. (Mr. Henry Catherwood was now very excited.)

Look at me! (Henry Catherwood flung open his arms like a man about to embrace a long-lost friend.) Do I look like a man—I'm what, nearly seventy-seven and not yet shrunken—do I look like a man who'd say a thing like that, that the world has a skin?

My friend, with your curly hair and your big smile—I'm telling you that the world has a—a—(Henry Catherwood struggled to find the word)—a complexion. That's it—a complexion. And that complexion is the brown of clay, the lovely tan and gold and dark and brown and amber and nearly black. I mean our own skin, it's nothing like the earth, oh, no! Not at all! Your man in Africa or the swarthy Moroccan or the people in India—they're the boys, if it were to be determined by likeness alone, they're the meek who must inherit the earth.

But because I looked at and touched the skin of the world—I became a farmer. And I expanded this farm to a farm of four hundred acres. In these parts that's a lot of skin.

Now you know, young O'Brien, this island has a lot of land agitation going on here. People are looking for what they're calling “Land Reform”—you know that, don't you? Well, I tell everyone—the land doesn't need any reforming, the land is fine. It's the people that needs the reforming. And I can tell you— I'll reform them, so I will, if they try and take any of my land away from me. King William gave my family this land, because the people who were on it were too dirty and too lazy to work it well. And it's our land now and there's an end of it.

In those two cameos, of Mr. Lenihan and Mr. Catherwood, Charles O'Brien encapsulated Irish life in the last reaches of the nineteenth century. Although he managed to extract unusual candor from each man, it wouldn't be difficult to find such attitudes in today's Ireland, even if said more reticently. More importantly, Mr. O'Brien reached down into belief. And thus he tapped into the core of the Irish land culture.

It lies at the root of almost every serious conflict the island has ever known; history is geography. Mr. O'Brien, in setting out the size of the country, implied—accurately—that the scarcity of land connects directly to the hunger for it.

The sheer visibility of everybody on such a small island, the capacity to see a neighbor's prosperity across a hedge, a fence, or a stone wall, and the envy of land and its potential—all of this exacerbated the desire.

Under the old systems of kingships, most of the people had an opportunity at least to wring a living from the earth. Ancient Ireland was a network of small farms. When the planters came in, and farms were confiscated and merged into huge estates, the land hunger only went underground. It never disappeared.

In Mr. O'Brien's childhood—indeed, in the precise decade before he was born—it broke the surface again, and he lived, therefore, in a time when it became patriotic to want land. Nobody had any illusions; this earth formed the key to all economies.

As may be judged from the separateness between Mr. Lenihan and Mr. Catherwood, the question of Irish land reform posed seemingly insurmountable problems. I must now relate my distressing part in the life of the man to whom people turned for his understanding of all the argument's facets; my account will take some time.

Early in my healer's apprenticeship, Mr. Egan began to encourage me toward the necessity of vacation. He believed that healers endure considerable demands on their spirit and that they must rest. I observed that he did not spare himself any time off and I said so, but he nonetheless insisted that I free myself of his constant attention (in his words) and find means of relaxing.

“A nice long distance away,” he used to say pleasantly. “Mind you go home first and talk to your mother about clothes for traveling in. Rest easy about hurrying back.”

As I have always enjoyed traveling and meeting people, I took him at his word. This practice I have continued since I became my own master, and so, in the summer of 1889, not long out of my apprenticeship, I betook myself off to London, where two of my old tutors, Buckley and Mr. Halloran, had long before gone to live. It was June, a few days short of my birthday, and I felt hopeful that both gentlemen might be able to share the day with me.

London in general proved delightful; and I navigated the city easily. I found Buckley, though with some difficulty. When I called at his address, as he had furnished it to our family, an elderly lady closed the door in my face; I supposed her fearful of a strange young man with, to her, a foreign accent. Nearby, a tavern-keeper directed me to Buckley's new residence.