With hay, skilled men scythed in rows, and we followed, teasing out the heavy grasses. A few days later, when the swathes had dried, we moved in again, this time with pitchforks or with our hands, turning the hay so that the underside could dry.
When all had dried, we piled the hay, which by now was getting dusty, into small cocked heaps. Days later, in the greatest exercise of haymaking, these were assembled to make fewer but larger domes, called “wines” or “trams” or “pikes.” Each one had the shape of a tall beehive or igloo and was tied down by a rope made of hay; that was my expertise.
I sat on the ground, a pile of loose hay at my feet. In front of me stood a child holding a stick. I then wound some strands of hay around that stick and told the child to walk backward, turning the stick round and round. The hay tightened into a rope as I fed it out in a controlled fashion. Many a strong housewife has put new seats on her kitchen chairs made of such ropes, called sugawn or suggan, depending which part of the country bred you.
The sights of the year sometimes contradict the lore. According to legend, hares leap in the spring. I beg to differ. On a hill overlooking the river Nore in county Kilkenny, on a warm September night thirty years ago, I discovered a group of stones forming a natural shelter; I have slept there many times. This is good countryside, abundantly wooded, substantially farmed. When first I stayed there, I slept like an innocent.
In the morning, when I opened my eyes, five hares danced in front of me on the hillside. I never saw anything like it—it seemed like a ritual. They leaped over each other, they ran in circles, they left the group, raced round its perimeter, and jumped back in again. Nothing will persuade me that all this was accidental. It had rhythm and method, intent and routine, system, rite, and rote. Their charming little bodies, with their high back legs and long, brilliant ears, twisted and turned and celebrated—a “magic of hares,” I called them, and I think of them like that.
When you walk into new countryside, a new tract of land every day of your life, you look minutely at the things that you see. Small occurrences become memorable, hung in a frame. Memory then enlarges them; you may never pass that way again or see the same sights. If you do see them again, you can tell the miracles by virtue of the fact that they still possess the same thrall.
For example, I smile with delight when I see my own footprints in the morning dew of a field. It seems to defy logic that grass can hold a footprint, but there it is—your trail behind you, clear enough for a dog or a detective, and the green has grown darker where your foot has landed.
I like cobwebs on branches, the fine silver netting with drops of dew at the corners. In winter trees, the nests of the old year appear, abandoned and clear to the eye, and I laugh to think of all the effort the birds put into concealing them.
In all my wanderings, my mind divides my life into Time’s portions: morning, afternoon, evening, and night—of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Each period of the day has its own flavor, as does each period of the year. If you put me to sleep for a long time and then woke me up in the Irish countryside, I believe I would be able to tell you what time of year and—even blindfolded—what time of day. This is not something I can explain easily, and it is not as simple as the smell of wood smoke identifying the fall of the year. But when it comes to day and season, I know what and when.
And now and again I fancy that I would even know where I am, in which county. Often I recite their names to myself like a litany—they say that rhythmic chanting refreshes the mind. Since 1922 and the drafting of the Irish border, I have had to amend my lists; the old province boundaries are now confused. But I still recite them county by county, and I know the flavor and feeling and personality of each one. Sometimes, when I fear that my brain has begun to slacken, I call their thirty-two names aloud to myself alphabetically as I walk from one parish to the next, one uncertain billet to another. The music I make from them may not sound great to anyone else and may look ungainly on the page, but it has sustained me like a prayer many a time.
If I speak the name of each county, if I savor the word, I find myself transported there, to some aspect of its life or feeling. In Antrim, I know the glens and the deep coastline looking out to Scotland, and a certain bleakness on those northern headlands, and a suspicion that I never found there when I first walked. Calling upon an unknown house in Antrim invites a cold stare—though I have had my surprises.
One night, outside the town of Bushmills, it had begun to snow, and I knocked at a door. They invited me in, a Mr. and Mrs. Wilson; they told me they were staunch Presbyterians who had lived in county Antrim all their lives. When I told them who I was and what I did and that I never took money from anyone without giving top value, they fed me, gave me a bed, and listened to my stories. More valuably, I listened to theirs and saw new points of view, a rare occurrence on this island. An amusing exchange took place between Mr. Wilson and me, an exchange that also had a political edge underneath.
He said to me, “Can you name all the counties of Ireland in alphabetical order?” I said I could—and I did. Antrim, Armagh, Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Derry, Donegal, Down, Dublin, Fermanagh, Galway, Kerry, Kildare, Kilkenny, Leitrim, Leix, Limerick, Longford, Louth, Mayo, Meath, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary, Tyrone, Waterford, Westmeath, Wexford, and Wicklow.
Upon which he said, “And I can name the six counties of Northern Ireland in alphabetical order; Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone.” It was wise of me not to argue that Derry should not be called Londonderry, that the “London” prefix had been added to a name older than Irish history. And I enjoyed Mr. Wilson’s laugh.
I always try and get to Armagh in June for the apple blossom, but sadly I cannot travel as comfortably there as I once did. Too much of it lies along the border, and British soldiers have no time for stories. They have fear in their faces, those young boys, not knowing when they will be shot at from behind some horse cart or hedge.
Farther south, Carlow puzzles me. I have always felt it should offer me more personality, lying as it does in the wealthy plains of the east. I said this once to a Carlow man, and he answered me, “The problem is, people from county Carlow are always either going somewhere or staying at home.” Many times have I puzzled over his remark, but I cannot make out what he meant.
But I do understand how the countryside changes, in quite a particular way, from county to county. I know when I have crossed a county border, not from experience but from change of texture. On a mountain road I can tell when I have crossed from Cork into Kerry; northwest of Tipperary town I know the moment I move into Limerick, near the villages of Monard and Oola.
The county personalities continue to astonish, so clearly are they defined. Mayo sits on Galway, yet they feel as different to me as two sisters with whom I have just danced. Is Clare a shrewder version of side-by-side Limerick? Waterford and Wexford fell to Vikings and then to Normans and to Cromwell, but deep within their green and rich fastnesses, they feel as if they have no closeness other than geography.
I cannot satisfactorily explain this widespread individualism, but when I try to grasp it, or discuss it with people who have been listening to my stories, I often feel that I come close to a greater understanding of the whole island; this forty thousand square miles of Atlantic land has a vivid fame the world over. What caused it? Do we talk so long and so loud that everyone hears us? Or did it come about because we put the first dent in the mighty British Empire?
Perhaps our writers did it. I would like to think that they did, because they came from my tradition—poetic, journeyman storytellers who may have twisted and fractured the forms of language along the way but who have always tried to get the flavor across.
Liken it to a stew, a tapestry—anything that draws a final impression from mixed and visible ingredients. The individual counties when melded give me the whole island. We are illogical—the man from Carlow taught me that. And how violent we are; to kill a British soldier matters not a blink
to men I have met, no thought of how his eyes closed, where his blood flowed, if he tried to breathe at the last minute and found he couldn’t and panicked.
A third ingredient—how entertaining we can be! I have laughed as much in a Dublin hall as in a Kerry pub, laughed at the observations of man’s follies deployed to entertain us so that we can draw comparisons. Our music, too; how it grows. A man in a room will strike up a tune on a whistle. Another man will open his shoulders, ease his fiddle, and join in when the first man’s spirit has become evident in the music.
Then someone will squeeze the same tune, but differently, out of a concertina or melodeon. A piper will join in next, adding his variation, his eyes tight shut as he concentrates on controlling the air he elbows through his chanters from the leather bag under his arm. Shakespeare called them “the woollen pipes,” but we call them the Uileann pipes because uile is her Irish word for “elbow.” Did Shakespeare make a linguistic error? Or was he referring to the fact that the air bag is often made of sheepskin?
And one by one, others join in, all with different interpretations of the same tune, until soon, if they choose to, they begin to cease one by one and withdraw, so that eventually the tune ends with the lone sound of the man who started it. That always brings tears to my eyes.
Maybe in the middle of all that, a couple will take to the floor, an ample man and a skinny woman, or more often the other way round, and they will dance like sprites around the kitchen, and for those few moments that farmhouse becomes an Astoria ballroom.
We are seers too—or so we say. Islands appearing in the ocean off the coast surprise no one; strange birds in farmyards portend death; ghosts stride hillsides. What I mean is—we are infinitely permissive of possibility; we rule out nothing. And while nations who have a more prosaic approach to life may find this difficult to digest, neither do they forget it.
And how we have achieved on behalf of others; we have composed the anthems of other nations, designed presidential mansions, drafted the constitutions of new states in Africa, forged chains of charity and teaching that reach across the globe. Rome or Hollywood—we have treated them equally in our glib way, our profound way, our false way, our lies and our desperate, earnest truths and our wish to eradicate prejudice because we have known so much of it. We have taught how politics can be corrupt beyond imagination; we have exported our children as though we wanted rid of them; we have hugged our land as though the very grass covered the gates of heaven or hell, and we did not know which; we have bred some of the world’s best shamans.
As I write these words, a man whose great-grandparents came from down the street here (tonight I sleep in New Ross, county Wexford) will be president of the United States, a man called Kennedy, and he has the same red hair and the blue-green eyes of the Kennedys that I have stayed with near the shadowed foot of Mount Leinster. We have not yet had an Irish pope, but I have no doubt that if we can bargain, bribe, or buy it, the Vatican will one day bow its head to the raised, blessing fingers of Pope Patrick the First.
All of these things, all of these colors, feelings, moods, aspirations, capabilities—I have found them all in each county of Ireland. Sometimes the depth of the places I visit surprises me afresh. Take Meath, one of my favorite counties—from the ancient profundity of Newgrange, achieved so long ago, to the crucial Protestant victory at the Boyne Water—that is a compression of history which the very air breathes.
And such compression can be found elsewhere. Galway, the City of the Tribes, aches with memories of those who made the long—and, in those days, forced and never to be retraced—journey to the New World. Cashel of the kings rises above the Tipperary landscape like a fairy tale, and I have seen it of mornings when I wondered if the medieval household was just waking up, so realistic did it appear in the light.
And I know that those who have left such places have taken with them out into the world all the feelings and moods and remembrances of times before their times. That is the way I now explain to myself how Ireland, so small, became so famed so widely—a matter of the spirit.
For myself, I may easily say that I know all the counties and all the towns and all the villages and all the parishes and townlands and roads better than any Irishman alive, and I carry them inside me too; that is how I can tell their boundaries without requiring maps. What good it has done me, I have yet to know.
My sadness is that I do not have a fit receptacle for what I have learned. I know that one exists, but the fates and fortunes have not yet removed the obstacles between him and me, have not given me an easy access to the dispensing of such wisdom as I have where I most wish to place it. I have known of him since birth; we met when he was a boy of nine years—but I think I will likely die without the fulfillment he brings.
Ronan delayed not at all. After another, less headlong reading of this latest communication, he moved with purpose. He restored everything in the school to the position and condition he had found them in; he replaced the petty cash in its box—the exact amount. If, when the teachers came back, they felt the shade of somebody in their offices and classrooms, so be it; they would not find any intrusive physical trace; he took some pride in this show of responsibility.
In the village he telephoned Toby again.
“Thanks for the money. Did you know about the letter?”
“What letter?”
“A letter was waiting for me at the bank.”
Toby did not ask, From whom? Or, What did the letter say? Or, I don’t know about any letter. Ronan pressed.
“You were the only person who knew I was going to be in that bank.”
“Ronan, banks have hundreds of employees. Anyone could have seen that paperwork going through. How’s the weather over there?”
Ronan felt the shutters come down. He thanked Toby again and found a local taxi driver who took him back to Dublin, and in a shopping district as far away as possible from Kate, he bought a knapsack, sensible hiking clothes, and all the kit he felt he needed. He also spent considerable time choosing a strong but portable notebook and a selection of pencils, plus the most recent road map of Ireland. With the remainder of his money he opened a bank account and arranged that he could draw cash at any branch in the country.
In a pub-restaurant called the Comet, he changed in the toilets, dumping his ruined and musty clothes—including Dickie’s coat—in a corner of the yard. Then he ate what he deemed the best meal he had ever tasted—brown Windsor soup, bacon, and cabbage, followed by apple pie and custard; he asked for second helpings of everything.
From that moment Ronan O’Mara began to zigzag through Ireland, full of purpose. The message of the letter seemed as clear as an order: Walk as I do, and you’ll find me.
Although at the beginning he knew not where he was going, he believed the Storyteller’s letter—again unsigned—gave him a sketch, if not quite a map. He decided that, as he traveled, he would try to pull together a scheme, a system of pursuit, from all he knew. The facts in his possession seemed uncomfortably disparate and slim; he had nothing concrete to work from, and he hoped, trusted, that a pattern, a purpose, would materialize as his journey went on.
He had already been to the Boyne Valley, and had read the Storyteller’s account of the great battle. It also happened to be the location of the Newgrange story—but that had been told to him a hundred miles south. While on the Boyne he had also visited the Geraghty house, in which, yes, the Storyteller had stayed. Yet the other houses of which he knew were all too scattered to offer him a pattern. Nor did any connection seem possible between the houses the Storyteller visited and the stories he told there. This recent letter, and the stories he had heard so far, told him only where the old man had been, not where he would next travel, and thus Ronan still had no precise location at which he could say, “I’m starting from here.”
He felt he must bring some science to his search, so he applied a principle he had gleaned from studying history—the value of firsthand witness. This, at last, gave him his poi
nt of departure; he asked himself, “What is the location of the most recent story I have personally heard, with my own ears?” It also coincided with a mention in the letter—and he headed for Armagh and the site of the Yellow Ford, which the Storyteller had told of after the funeral.
January was kind to the north of Ireland that year; Armagh had balmy forenoons after light frosts, and he wandered its roads with pleasure. In the city he stood at the rock of Saint Patrick’s grave and made a note to write a description. With more than a little excitement, he listened to the strangeness of the overheard accents, faster and more inflected than in the south. A bed-and-breakfast called King William’s Bower, hung with pictures of Queen Elizabeth the Second, fed him well if silently, not even asking questions.
Next morning, when he sought directions to the river Blackwater, the landlord walked to the door and pointed without a word to the northwest.
Half a mile beyond the city’s outskirts, a car drew up and a woman’s voice asked, “Where you heading?”
“I’m looking for an old battlefield.”
“And you found an old battleaxe. Hop in.”
Her name, she said, was Myrtle O’Farrell: “A Protestant first name and a Catholic second name—I suppose I should have a split personality. What’s the battlefield?”
Ronan told her, and she said, “You need the man I’m going to see, my uncle. He lives in the shadow of Navan Fort, though I always tell him that it’s too low a hill to have a shadow.”
She had a face like a pigeon; her head scarcely rose above the steering wheel, and she drove the car with her eyebrows raised. If another car appeared, she swerved toward the roadside and braked. Soon she pointed to a narrow river in the fields below.
“That’s the Blackwater there. Well named, isn’t it? But I don’t know where they fought the battle.”
Ronan asked her if she could slow down—and Myrtle O’Farrell stopped dead, pitching forward the random contents of the back seat. He got out and climbed the earthen roadside bank. Here, on this northern side—was that where Bagenal had come charging in and fallen into the traps? And over there, on the southern side, Hugh O’Neill had lined up his troops and his new artillery—is that the same line of bushes? Such a low slope—how could it have worked so well? Ronan could almost hear the shots and shouts in his ears.