Tipperary (40 page)

Then, after coping with the depression of humiliation that follows a physical assault, he is again struck down. He endures week after week of fevered infection. But he recovers, fights it off, and acquires a new, sparkling, resourceful, and admiring friend.

Then he hears the news that the woman he so desperately wants to share his life with is now out of his reach. She has—dread thought— married another. It seems never to have crossed his mind that she might. And finally, she appears to use him even more blatantly than before. This time, however, his helping her will cut him out of his own dreams. And then, in a savage payoff, she fires him from the task that he loved with all his heart, and was doing for no remuneration.

Given what we know of his romantic excitability, we could assume that Charles was in a much worse condition than he was when he first fell for April and was rejected by her. And we may assume that he went down somewhat under the blows of the world. After the encounter with Yeats (which took place the day before the shooting), no entries appear in the “History” until the end of May 1909.

He doesn't give the date; we can guess at it from Amelia's journal. In a cursory entry that remarks the weather (“unseasonally cold”) and the growths of the spring (“good after all the rain”) she observes briefly that “Charles and Harney have embarked upon a journey. They have made it mysterious. I mean—they have not told us where they are bound. Charles merely said that he had ‘some people to see.’ But Harney will be a good companion for him.”

Charles's next entry begins discursively. Then we discover the reason for this mysterious journey. He wants to visit people on whom his cures might not have worked. And he wants to find out whether one of them, out of revenge or hostility, shot him.

When, in childhood, I wished to be helpful, as children do, I worked alongside the various people on the farm. Inside, I watched Cally and Mrs. Ryan cooking and baking. Mrs. Ryan's daughter taught me how to pluck a fowl. When older, in the open air, I assisted by fetching the cows from the fields for the morning and evening milking.

In those days, Jimmy Hennessy and Dan Danaher, who tended the dairy cattle, showed me how to wash a cow before milking and then how to milk. And in time, I learned to enjoy the dairyman's position, which kept my head pressed to the cow's flank, as I squirted the milk and listened to the pail ring with each thin white jet.

Sometimes, when I came home from my healing travels and took leisure at Ardobreen, I liked to return to these practices. They calmed me and brought me back into a safe world. Perforce, I made few observations toward my History for the year 1908 and part of 1909; I spent fourteen months in the county Tipperary. For reasons too painful to discuss, I required peace and quiet. Suffice it to say that some assailants wounded me.

But one night, into my life stepped the man who would become my dearest and most faithful friend, Joseph Harney. Now I had found a companion, a clever and interested human, who would travel with me when I healed my patients.

It will be valuable to describe him. He is tall and thin, with a beaky nose and hair that flops. I had the impression that he had read every book that was ever printed, and he could draw extensive and accurate quotations from his copious memory. Nothing tired his mind, which inquired into every separate thing that he encountered. His speech was slow and clear, with little exaggeration of accent, which is generally true of the Kilkenny people.

I never saw in him any expression of uncontrolled anger; he was peaceful and he calmed everybody. In his most unusual characteristic, he could both think and act. Not many can apply a thoughtful survey to the great matters of the world; fewer can deal with physical matter. Joseph could do both; he could fix a bicycle wheel or consider whether Plato would gain a place in Ireland's political systems.

He elicited favorable responses from both sexes; indeed, I never saw a man so liked. Once, I asked him to define his deepest ambition, a daring question to ask any man.

“To become a man of no ill will,” he said without hesitation.

“Where did you learn such a thought?”

Joseph said, “When I was twelve, my father gave me a large book about Abraham Lincoln. It contained many essays written by people who knew him. That was all I needed.”

I can here confirm one aspect of Joseph Harney's quality. When I found that I was becoming generally short-tempered and impatient, I was easily moved to distress. Every time this manifested itself, Joseph—if present—made me “sit down and think.” He said, “It only takes a minute. Take out your watch, look closely at it. Follow the passing of a minute.” His advice proved beneficial, though sometimes I required many minutes.

In mid-1909, Joseph Harney and I set out on a journey. We had five destinations, all determined by me, and in different parts of the country. Sometimes, a cure will kick back upon a healer and his patient, with sad and regrettable outcome. More than once, I had been reproached by family members in a place I had previously visited, because my attempts to heal had not met with success. Hostility had been expressed, and I had thought it best to remove the irritant—namely, myself.

Based upon this experience, I deduced that it would not be good to leave such a hostile connection unappeased. Searching my memory, I found five occasions where the most bitter feelings might be harbored. Without telling my parents, I decided that I must confront each of those families where I knew resided the deepest animosity to me. I invited Joseph to accompany me.

When we began to travel, he gave himself a job to do—he was the one who planned the stages of the journey, where we would stay, how many miles a day we would cover, and, most important of all, our mode of transport: we rode bicycles. Harney taught me to cycle (he insisted that I call him “Harney”—said it made me sound like a gentleman with a manservant), and I mastered it immediately; he was an excellent teacher, and off we went.

After two days, we reached our first place of inquiry. The MacDonaghs lived in south Offaly, in a stone house with a slate roof; they had a small farm, and the father of the family had been a quarry worker. Dust from the stones he quarried had caused him sharp respiratory problems, and I had visited him upon a request from his brother, whom I had treated successfully for a chronically uncertain stomach (sweet warm milk, with honey, every night before retiring).

For the poor respiration I had prescribed balsam; but where I had shown him how to inhale the treatment in warm water, he went further; he drank it, and became so distressed at the taste and the gastric burning that he suffered a heart attack and died. As I had remained in the district, attending to others, I went to the funeral and was urgently accosted by his sons. I defended myself, but as I departed, the elder said to me that he would seek me out and kill me—“if it took ten years.” As the sinister Bruree horseman seemed to resemble this family, I had wondered whether a kinsman of some sort had been employed.

Harney and I decided to approach this house at eventide; he told me that he had a plan—and that it necessitated him entering the house first. He did, and I waited outside with the bicycles. A dog came and wagged its tail; I must admit that I felt apprehensive.

A long time passed. Harney came out, pulling the door closed behind him.

“We'll travel on,” he said.

But I said to this boy of twenty-one, “No. I must see them.”

He looked alarmed. “Don't do that. I didn't get a good result.”

I started to walk to the house.

“Come with me,” I said. “We can't have this.”

I knocked at the door, opened it, and stood there.

The family sat at their evening meal—the widow MacDonagh and her two sons and a daughter; the house had a dismal air, and seemed poorer than before. As I walked in, the elder son rose.

“Do you know what's coming to you?” he shouted.

“Please allow me to speak.”

He would have none of it; he took a sickle from a hook on the wall and came toward me, swinging the implement.

Harney stepped in front of me and held out his arms like a supplicant.

“Here! Listen!” He got their attention, though they glared the coals of Hell at me. “Two things. First of all—do you think this man killed your father deliberately? If you do, you're all eejits. Second thing. If he's harmed—ever, by anyone, anywhere—I'll harm you.” Enraged, he pointed to the son with the sickle. “And you won't know when it'll be. It might be next year—or when you're sixty. But I'll do it—myself. Now sit down and offer us a cup of tea like decent people. What kind of hospitality is this? We came a long way to see you.”

This threw the family into confusion. Mrs. MacDonagh, in her black, rose to the occasion and turned to the dresser for two cups and saucers (the family was drinking from mugs); her daughter moved to make room at the table; Harney fetched a chair for me. We sat down, in total silence.

I waited to see whether someone should speak. Soon, oppressed by this, I cleared my throat—and received a warning glance from Harney; I subsided. The silence continued—then Mrs. MacDonagh spoke.

“Big auction here next week.”

Harney, quick as light, asked, “Oh? Whose is it?”

The younger son answered. “A Gallagher man. His wife died; he's going to America.”

Harney looked at the older son, who still had a seething air.

“You should buy that place.”

Mr. MacDonagh said nothing—but I saw his eyes flicker.

“Does your land adjoin it?” asked Harney.

“Our bottom field hits their big meadow,” said the younger.

“That's the thing to do then,” said Harney.

The older son spoke, quick and sullen. “You need money to go to an auction.”

“There's banks,” said Harney encouragingly.

Mrs. MacDonagh listened to all of this, and I saw that she had a yearning to her—she wanted her sons to prosper.

“We know no banks,” said Mr. MacDonagh again.

“We do,” said Harney. “Isn't that right, Charles?”

I did know banks in Tipperary, and in Limerick; my mother's family had strong banking connections. But I knew no banks in Offaly, and I said so.

“But you can introduce this man, can't you?”

That night, I marveled again at Harney and his skills. At twenty-one, I was awkward and uncertain; he seemed capable of any situation. The MacDonaghs responded to him; by letter we performed introductions to the National and Royal banks. Some months later, we heard that they had bought another farm, not the one at auction—there had not been the time; but they had taken the next step in their lives.

“Always try to turn something bad into something good,” said Harney.

He established of a certainty that no MacDonagh had ever pursued me, they attained a kind of forgiveness of me, and on we rode, on our bicycles, with our side-panniers and front baskets, through driving rain and in lovely sunlight. In each of the other four households where we visited, we found progressively less hostility; indeed, we found warmth and welcoming attitudes. Much of this may be attributed to Harney's friendliness, his refusal to let rancor float upon the air. When I look back upon it now, it feels like a journey of true progress.

I believe that we are witnessing, in the pages of his account of his own life, a man in the throes of changing. Charles O'Brien, remember, began his “History” by wishing to change. He wanted with all his heart to make himself irresistibly appealing to the young woman by whom he had been smitten. From this point in his text, it soon becomes plain that he was beginning to undergo a maturing process.

For years he had ridden around the country like an innocent abroad. In comparison with the works of other observers, including those of more formal historians, his general observations of his society were accurate and valuable. Where he seemed out of true came in his judgment of his own life, on which he seemed to have a poor hold.

He adored his father, yet we learn from his mother that his father reciprocated that love less than fully. Charles saw himself as upstanding and dashing, yet he had to be told to wear clean shirts. He blundered onto the stage of Anglo-Irish politics with the unfortunate incident of Parnell, where he was used like a simpleton by the British press hostile to Parnell. And he chose for the love of his life a woman who rejected him completely.