Tipperary (65 page)

She was obviously afraid that events might prevent him from showing up.

The priest arrived a few minutes later. Now the bridal party was complete—bride and attendant, best man and celebrant, and bridegroom waiting for us at the altar.

But when we got to the little church—no Dermot. I thought he had gone into hiding again until he was sure that the voices he heard were ours—that's what I'd have done—and I went looking for him. Well, I searched and I searched and never found him.

When I went back to the chapel, April was crying. Not out loud, just tears pouring down her face. We waited an hour and more, because that's what she wanted to do. But we could be waiting still—he never appeared.

Eventually, we all returned to the car. I gave the priest his offering—a man has to get paid—and we drove back to the castle. She never stopped crying throughout the whole journey, and when we got back there she disappeared and nobody saw her for weeks.

So, now I could conclude that I was not the son of Dermot Noonan. For which relief, much thanks. I met him once and disliked him intensely— condescending and cocky little prancer—and that was years before I ever heard of Charles O'Brien.

Nor could I be the son of April Burke-Somerville, who could not now, after a severe miscarriage—and at almost forty years of age—ever bear children. But I was still the grandson of April Burke the First, the strumpet from County Limerick.

The human spirit can be damnably perverse. However distraught I was by the first DNA revelation, and further hammered by the second one, I was now disappointed. If I had been April's son, that would have given me, late in life, some of the sense of magic that I had always missed. I could have told myself that I came from that grand intrigue, and that both my grandmother, the actress, and my mother, the chatelaine, had been the objects of great, all-consuming passions.

Mind you, I would also have had to observe that both my grandmother and my great-grandmother had taken their own lives by jumping off bridges. So there I was. April did not marry Dermot Noonan. And I still had no explanation for the bizarre DNA results. I searched Charles's history, and I searched it again—and found nothing there. The mystery continued.

I worked like a demon, hauling in every loose end that I could find. Then I indulged in some unraveling of the text to make some more loose ends. And I chased them to their origins. After that, I began to check out the other hazy figures in this steam room.

Noonan did marry. Three years later, while still in his fifties, he found a different young widow with a large farm of land. A leopard doesn't change his spots. The wedding took place very conventionally, in a church. Why couldn't he have continued the flamboyance?

Whatever the complications, part of me wished that April could have married on the Rock of Cashel—one of the “Seven Wonders of Tipperary,” according to Bernard O'Brien. It's unique.

From the grassy heights inside the enclave, the views to the north and west define the county. The view is of wide open fields, a ruined abbey, a sense of deep fertility, the high, blue sky, and those cloud formations that fascinated Charles O'Brien.

Inside, the buildings continue to engross me, even after forty years of guiding school tours around the place. The vaulted heights, the gray-white of the limestone, the ancient mason work, the smoothness of the cut stone, the hush—nowadays, I sometimes go there just to feel the place, to be part of it.

And I replay what it must have been like that morning—for this disappointed woman, rich beyond her dreams, her body in aching turmoil, still hunting for the happiness she had slightly touched when she lived as a girl with her father. She stood in the shadows of King Cormac's Chapel, an exquisite little twelfth-century Romanesque building whose construction had all kinds of mathematical orientation built into it.

And she waited and she waited for the man who'd lost interest in her once he knew she could not bear him an heir so that he and his family would then completely own the Tipperary estate. He had failed to get it in court, and now he was trying to get it by other means. I suppose she was fortunate that he didn't marry her and then kill her.

Through all of this, Charles kept writing his “History.” But never a word of April's misfortunes does he record—no mention of the miscarriage or the aborted wedding. So much for the objective historian— selective again. But I remind myself in fairness that he did issue a warning at the beginning: “Be careful about me.”

Many of his entries now merely illuminate details of the later work on the castle: a fight among the Paglaloni brothers; Mr. Higgins the stone-mason marrying for the first time, at sixty-five, to a girl of twenty-three; the sudden appearance of a new Flying Column leader in the cellars; and some details of local visitors.

There's a general sense, by the middle of 1921, that he's not going to write a lot more. That sense would have come across even if one didn't have the physical advantage of seeing how few pages are left.

But when he does attend to the events that made it into the history books, he shows the same awareness of detail that he did when he was merely nine years old back at the Treece eviction—which now returns to him, with a shock.

Shall I write this History for the rest of my life? But shall longer days, if I am granted them, ever prove as engrossing as those which I have already chronicled? How I thank my father for the first such thought—that I should write down, as the witness, the events of Mr. Treece's harsh evicting. Father could not have known how being a witness would, in general, hold my life together—or in the particular, how that eviction would return to me as a gift. It was a gift that gave me a lesson that I might never have so sharply learned, and it came about like this.

After Harney's defeat in the Dundrum Ambush, he took some heart in the events up and down the country. The news from within the republican organization reached us days or weeks late, and then we would hear details that the newspapers never reported. I thrilled to the daring that men exhibited in ambushes and other raids; and, in common with everybody in the land, I flinched at the behavior of the troops. No wonder that Sinn Fein swept the elections in May; as one newspaper reported, “disgust cast the most votes,” and it is true that revulsion at the army and the Black and Tans gave new support to the Irish Republican Army.

Discussing the rapid developments became quite a pattern with Harney and me. Each morning as we took a respite from the building work, he would tell me of this IRA operation, or that army reprisal, and I felt that I was living in the very pages of history.

One morning, down in the stable-yards, when we stood in from the rain and marveled at the continuing success of the cellars as a refuge, I asked about a new face leading the men.

“He's a fellow called Lacey,” Harney said, “who is by all accounts fearless. He has been busy in these parts since early last year.”

I had seen the chap but never spoken to him—and I marked how all the men respected him.

“What became of your erstwhile leader?” I asked, preferring not to use his name.

“He's not coming back,” said Harney. “They say there are big talks on the way and he's in there.”

I feared that Harney had been deliberately placed in a position of danger as a disrespect to me—so I asked the question that had been weighing heavily on my mind ever since the dreadful fracas with the general.

“Why was Dundrum chosen? It was unsuitable, was it not?”

Harney said, “He was supposed to lead it—and since he came back from Spain, he made it his business to know every stick and stone of the land around Dundrum.”

At this, a cold feeling climbed my neck, and I remembered an early ghostliness that this individual had caused in me.

“Does he have a connection to the place?”

Harney looked at me, surprised that I might not have known something of common knowledge.

“Of course he does. His family was evicted by a landlord, right at the edge of the woods, near the sawmill. He was only a babe in arms. George Treece: a bad egg, by all accounts—your father must have known him. The evicted family emigrated to Canada. And, by coincidence, so did the Treeces.”

Now my heart began to rend itself. All my days I had pitied that family; I thought of them frequently, and they had a most tender place in my feelings. Not long ago, Mr. Yeats wrote a poem entitled “Easter 1916” in which he mentioned one of the leaders as having “done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart.” In this he spoke for me too with that evicted family whom George Treece wronged.

How I remembered a mother lashed with a whip, and two boys come to her aid, and a man with one leg, and a house torn down; and how I thought that even a mind and spirit as yet unformed, such as that infant in his mother's arms, could not have lived through such a catastrophe and not have been somewhere, somehow, aware of the injustice—and would then have been reminded of it by family lore all his life. At the moment when I understood that I had seen the infant evicted grown into a man, I believe that I became a more understanding human being.

In the weeks immediately preceding this information, we had been living in a most precarious state. April, deeply unwell, had lately taken to her bed. As part of her poor state, she must have been distressed and terrified at the news reaching us every day from the other Great Houses. They were being destroyed at the rate of several a week. Lord and Lady Listowel were burned out, and the place that Lady Mollie Carew so loved, Castle Bernard, was burned to the ground. Lord Bandon was kidnapped (and later released), and while the place was blazing, Lady Bandon, Mollie's—and April's—dear friend Doty, stood in the flaming doorway and sang “God Save the King” while the arsonists looked on.

I waited every day for a gang to arrive, and unable to endure the anxiety any longer, I approached the new leader, Lacey, and asked him whether I must worry. To my relief he looked at me as though I were crazed (we were down in the cellars), and then turned to gesture at all the men behind us, eating, smoking, reading, playing cards.

“D'you think these boys'd let that happen?”

Then came the better news—the government instructed the army, which included the Black and Tans, that no more houses in Ireland's towns and villages were to be set aflame in reprisals for ambushes or other Flying Column activity. We had had significant destruction in our village the night of the Tankardstown Ambush; many young men were taken from home at gunpoint and shot, and the teacher's house was burned to the ground. Now, therefore, the counter-reprisals against the mansions would also cease.

I have lived such a profound life—I feel as though I have lived many lives. How happy were my days with my parents; and how beautiful and long the days of my childhood, with Buckley and his innuendo, and Mr. Halloran and his dwarfs, and Miss Taylor and her tears, and Mrs. Curry with her turkey's walk. And my lovely Euclid—I found many ways to honor him in my thoughts, and I was a fortunate man to have known such a soul. Of Mother—what can I say that will make a sum equal to her parts? She is now an old lady—but the youngest old lady I have ever known, and still so ordered and orderly.

And I have been in every parish and village and town in Ireland; I have healed people and made them well again, I have given them hope and they have rewarded me with smiles. I do not believe that there is a house in which I visited that I cannot be welcome again. My potions remain as efficacious as ever; I have never given up my interest in curing the sick, and I never shall. It is my sincere conviction that all human ailments may be rendered better, that all the frail may be made strong. In these pages I discussed a consumptive patient in Bruree, the village whence Mr. de Valera hails. Now she has three children and a husband who loves her more than ever.

My missteps have been my own, and there were many. But there came a day when they ceased, when I took command of a great project, and at the same time took command of myself. Few men ever are granted the capacity to seize such an opportunity. For the granting of it, I am indebted to the woman whom I have loved for more than twenty years, and whom I have loved whether she cared. On account of her presence in my life, I met the man whom I have come to love as a son—and would that I had a son, to tell him about my friend Joseph Harney. He is one whom I must account in this History as on the scale of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Parnell and Mr. Shaw and all the other remarkable people whom I have known, each one touched with greatness in his own way. This has been a fortunate life.