Tipperary (22 page)

The impact of the “uncrowned king's” fall reverberated in Ireland for almost a century; only recently have the last wearers of the ivy leaf died out. And nowhere in the Parnell canon of history or biography does the name of Charles O'Brien appear.

In my zeal to examine the arrival of April Burke in my life, I have insufficiently reported in my History, I feel, many of the experiences I saw with Mr. Egan. We rode together through the country, as close as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, as Robin Hood and Little John. I can see us now, as we came down the hill into a place that expected us. He had a small roan mare, Teresa, and I had Della, the bigger horse for the bigger man. We carried packs behind our saddles, with all our boxes of powders, our bottles of potions, our salves and ointments, and our clothes. He had a flat black hat, I wore a wider brim—he told me that I looked like a musketeer; I told him that he looked like a preacher.

We traveled well together. Since he made a great deal of money, and my father had provided me with an income, our food and accommodations proved more than satisfactory. We never quarreled, never disagreed; now and again he fell quiet in himself, reflective, contemplating a recent patient, thinking out an improvement to a cure; and he complimented me many times for not intruding upon such moments. Usually we talked easily or had pleasant mutual silences.

Remarkable were the impressions that we captured of life in Ireland, in city, town, village, and parish. We met huntsmen and hawkers, ladies and louts; we met plowmen and poachers, girls and grocers. Mr. Egan always addressed me as “Mr. O'Brien”; we were, he said, “professional gentlemen, and we must behave as such” and, after every discussion of a patient, he had the habit of saying, “But, Mr. O'Brien, all people are equal until we discover that they're not.”

I do not need to search my memory for the more unusual events that we saw together; they seem to have occurred at the numerous fairs where we most successfully plied ourselves. We saw cattle fairs and horse fairs, where men made many bargains or none at all, but always there was the joy of livestock. And, with a notable absence of joy, we saw hiring fairs.

My first hiring fair was witnessed on the bridge at Golden, right by the old Norman castle, a few miles from my own home. I had heard of such events many times and had often wondered why my father never frequented them, even when he found himself a number of men short at a harvest or in the lambing times. Soon, I understood.

I had been with Mr. Egan a little over two years and, after some days of mixing his herb mixtures at his home, we had come up from his house near Bansha to visit a woman in Mantle Hill who had damaged a leg in a fall in her yard and had been unable to recover its use. Our way, we found, was blocked when we came to the river and, indeed, the entire winding street of the village thronged with people.

On one side of the thoroughfare (if I may call it that; this is not a large village) little rude platforms had been arranged; onto these stepped a variety of men. Many had red faces, all had loud voices, and they shouted their names and their places of origin: “John-Joe Kelly from Limerick itself” or “James Prendergast all the way from Clare.” Having secured an audience, each of these shouters then made way for a succession of diffident people, who stepped onto the podium and waited until told by their barker to step down again. These were the men and women, boys and girls who offered themselves for hire.

Some attracted no interest. If a man seemed unusually strong, a voice called, “Why aren't you working already?” Or someone would step from the crowd and begin a physical inspection—he would check the poor fellow's hands, feel his legs, open his mouth, look at his teeth.

“They don't want to hire someone who's sickening for something,” said Mr. Egan, beside me.

“This is humiliating,” I said.

“Wait a minute and you'll see worse,” said Mr. Egan.

The candidates stepped on, stepped off again. Once or twice, a boy of fourteen or fifteen attracted attention; I observed two such, and both had abundant hair. The farmers who showed an interest poked and prodded. One man hired one boy; the other lad drifted loose.

Then came the women and the girls. Fewer in number, some quite lovely, they stood there, eyes downcast, evidently poor, as their barker shouted their experience: “Worked for a farmer's wife over near Charleville” or “Was eight years with a lady called MacMahon in Clare until the lady died.”

Once or twice, men fortified with drink stepped up and began an inspection. No man actually put his hands lasciviously on any woman (some constables lingered near), but they leered to the onlookers, and curved shapes in the air with their hands, and turned the poor creatures this way and that.

My heart wept for these hopeful people. When an interested call came from a member of the public, the person on the podium looked eagerly toward that voice. How willingly they displayed themselves, even if the inquirer was merely having sport with them. And how dreadfully sank their smiles, men and women, boys and girls, when asked to step down, and they realized that another day had passed and they had no work to feed themselves or those at home.

I have heard that the fair in Golden differed from most hiring fairs in that the barkers charged an “introduction” fee to anyone hiring from their booth. At other such events, the people for hire merely came into the streets and stood there, hoping for someone to offer them the desperately needed employment. In either case, I wished the hiring fair abolished. But it ranked as nothing beside what was to come that same week; and I still rage and wince at the memory of that occasion.

In Golden, we had received word of a “good fair” to be held next day in the town of Mallow, in the north of the county Cork, some forty miles away. We arrived at about ten o'clock in the morning and our intelligence looked well-founded; this fair indeed promised well. Large crowds had already gathered; stalls of food smoked to the sky; music jingled here and there.

Within moments of setting up our tent, we had patients—in fact, fifteen people lined up, and we began the day busily. I handed Mr. Egan every bowl and bottle he requisitioned; and I took money from every person with whom he consulted. One woman complained that the ointment he brushed on her skin had a sting to it; I dabbed her arms gently with cold water. A gentleman from Fermoy said his bunions had come back; I showed him how to burn them off with a candle taper.

All through this, I had a question in my mind: What was this occasion? Why so many people on a day that had no seasonal or religious or holiday significance? Finally I had a chance to ask, and a couple said to me—indignantly, as though I should have known—“Shanahan!”

For months, a search had been going on for a dreadful villain who had taken the lives of his wife and her mother and father. Today he would hang. He had been a surly and disliked fellow, with bad reports from all who had known him, ever since childhood.

The hanging was scheduled for noon. I asked Mr. Egan, “Do you wish to see this?”

“We have to stay. Afterward is when people will want us—their stomachs will be bad.” Then he asked, “Did you ever see anybody swing?”

“No.”

“No eating beforehand,” he said.

At five minutes before noon a party of soldiers and Royal Irish constables escorted a cart through the crowd to the end of the Main Street. No drum rolled, no horn blew. The high sides of the cart had been covered with burlap to conceal anything inside; the escort—of more than a hundred men—seemed to me especially large, considering that this had been such an unpopular fugitive and thus an unlikely subject for a rescue attempt.

This corner of Mallow was a well-known place of execution; a high wooden structure existed there permanently, ready to take the post and beam of the scaffold. In a matter of moments the gibbet of wood was raised. Over the beam they threw a rope with a noose.

We were close by—because our stall had been set up there for the densest throng. The police and soldiers formed a ring around the gallows and then faced the crowd. Brusquely they pushed us back and back, until a wide circle had been cleared.

When the flap on the cart was raised, it was impossible to see from any quarter, because so many police and soldiers stood around it. Soon, a man in foul clothing, the unfortunate Shanahan, was stood up, carried—he refused to walk—and then propelled up on the high platform, directly beneath the noose.

The people buzzed when they saw him, and some jeered. Shanahan, looking nowhere, and to my eyes appearing more numbed than sullen, was manhandled to a point directly beneath the rope. He was small and fidgety, prematurely bald, about thirty-five years old, with bandy legs and dark eyes.

A plump man with a beak of a nose drew the noose over Shanahan's head and arranged it round his neck, then chucked it tight, making Shanahan wince. By now a priest had climbed the platform, but Shanahan turned his head away, like a man who had already decided where he was going. The priest stepped down.

I heard a noise like a wooden gunshot—and a wild cry. The lever had been pulled and the narrow platform dropped—and there, some yards from my face, in the gap beneath the trapdoor, hung Shanahan, in eternity. The shriek from him had startled me.

He did not die. He hung there, twisting a little, his wrists secured behind him, his feet in his tied ankles moving up and down like those of a dancer at practice, his face turning this way and that as though he was trying to get his head out of the noose. Twice he looked into my eyes; twice I looked away. Of course there would be no escape, and after a few minutes Shanahan began to expire, his face turning blue, his lips foaming.

Some cheers rose up, perhaps from the neighbors and families of the victims. Not many people joined in; all, like me, remained where they stood. For my part, revulsion overcame me. I had no feelings about Shanahan; I had not even known his name when I woke up that morning—but even at my twenty-three years of age, my entire spirit convulsed at the pleased deliberateness of the execution, and the waste of a life.

People in general, I am convinced, know everything, even before they know that they know. At that point, by all the usual practices, that crowd should have turned away. Instead, everybody stayed fixed—they sensed another drama.

The militia in front of the scaffold redoubled their attitude of sternness; the soldiers drew bayonets and the police aimed guns, and we were pushed back farther. A puzzled hum rose from the crowd—and then it grew to a shout, as a figure recognizable to us all was taken from the cart and manhandled up to the scaffold.

Over the previous months, a long trial had been taking place in Cork, of a young land agitation leader, David O'Connor, accused of murder. All opinion called the accusation false; witnesses palpably committed perjury; the judge refused to hear respectable contradictory evidence; and the prisoner had been silenced when he tried to speak on his own behalf. At one stage in the trial, the judge had threatened to take the case back from the jury (all landowners, but some of them showing uncertainty) and himself pronounce verdict and sentence. So prejudiced had the trial appeared that delegates had been sent to London to request the attendance of observers at the appeal.

Now no appeal would take place. The authorities had smuggled young O'Connor, a doctor educated in Spain, past the vigil at Cork Jail and would hang him here at Mallow.

I looked at Mr. Egan. “Will they riot?”

He shook his head. Most people sank to their knees in prayer—and I, to my shame, turned away. I could not allow myself to see young Dr. O'Connor die—and I was unable to eat again for two days.

Those who have told me eyewitness stories of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s talk of the quiet in the countryside, the absence of birds, the unbearably sad muting of the neglected animals. Such tales have been especially poignant when coming from musicians, who are bidden to fill places with enjoyable sounds. That afternoon in Mallow, all the fiddles and all the pipes ceased their playing. I have never heard such silence as I heard in that crowded, stricken place, and I never wish to hear it again.