And her teeth were pearls rare
And a snowdrift ’neath a beechen bough
Her neck and nutbrown hair.
In the window a giant moon with heavy-lidded eyes and outside the night so full of peace. The fire throwing out shadows that wrapped about you like shawls and in behind a cloud of perfumed smoke, Uncle Joe remembering a face from long ago.
‘Come on, now, Mattie, that’s the stuff! You’re the man can sing!’
Ah! cold, and well-nigh callous
This weary heart has grown
For thy helpless fate dear
Ireland And for sorrows of my own;
Yet a tear my eye will moisten
When by the Annerside I stray
For the lily of the mountain foot
That withered far away!
It was the saddest song Raphael had ever heard. The girl who lived beside the Anner river went to America and was never seen again. She died far away among strangers, far from her little brothers or sisters. That night Raphael couldn’t get her face out of his mind and that was why he said a hundred prayers, for her, but also in thanks because he wasn’t faraway among strangers but being looked after by his mammy and daddy and surrounded by people who would never be strangers and who if anything happened to you would always look after you, like Pony Brennan and Uncle Joe and all the people who had been at the reaping race and everyone who said when you were going down the road, ‘That’s Mattie Bell’s lad! That’s young Raphael! There you are, son!’
All he wished was that the girl who lived beside the Anner could have been alive so that he could share some of them with her and tell her all about them and how kind they were but she wasn’t she was dead – she had died among strangers and would never be seen again.
Head Altar Boy
Raphael was eight years old when he was made head altar boy. Father Sean told his mother that he was the best little altar boy yet. ‘You want to hear the way he does the Latin!’ he said. ‘Will you do a little bit of it for us?’ Mattie and Evelyn asked him one day when he came home from practice. ‘I don’t know it all yet,’ said Raphael. ‘Just the tiniest bit,’ pleaded Evelyn, and Raphael reddened. ‘All right then,’ he said and cleared his throat. ‘Ad Deam qui laetificat juventutem meam,’ he said and Evelyn threw her arms around him. ‘My holy boy!’ she cried aloud and Mattie shook his head in wonderment at the beauty of the world and the gifts they had been given by the Almighty.
The Latin Teacher
In the spring the crocus came and the young lambs tumbled in the fields. In the summer you climbed up a haystack and then came flying back down again. And then what did you do? You just turned around and climbed back up again. ‘I’m the best!’ squealed Raphael and pulled the bits of hay out of his hair.
‘Say some Latin for us!’ the boys all said because they couldn’t remember it.
‘Introibo ad altare Dei!’ cried Raphael.
‘Latin is good!’ the boys said. ‘We wish we knew some.’
‘I’ll teach you,’ said Raphael.
And he did. In a week they were all able to say it and off they went down the road chanting and clapping away to beat the band Introibo ad altare Dei.
It was good then. Of course it was. It was good being alive in those days.
Out in the Fields
Or at least it was until the War of Independence when people started getting shot right, left and centre and sometimes even whole towns were torched and left to burn away to nothing. You never knew what was going to happen next. Just like the day Raphael was helping Mattie to fork the hay in the field when the Black and Tan soldiers came up and stood there smiling and saying, ‘Turned out nice, didn’t it?’ They took off their caps and wiped the sweat off their foreheads saying, ‘Bloody weather in this country. Like them what lives in it – untrustworthy, know what I mean?’ Raphael didn’t know much about the Black and Tans. He knew there was a war on all right and that Ireland was trying to win independence for itself. But apart from that he knew nothing and to tell the truth he didn’t really care. At least not up until a couple of minutes later when the Black and Tan put his cap back on and hit his father across the face with a revolver.
What exactly happened after that, Raphael was never able to say for sure. One of the others might have hit him with a rifle butt or something but anyway Mattie fell down and when he was on his knees the Black and Tan said, ‘We know you’re a rebel, Bell. We know all about you and if you don’t tell us what we want to know you’re going to be a sorry man. A very sorry man indeed, I don’t mind telling you.’ Raphael knew it was serious now and started crying but they told him to shut up or they would kill his father. So he shut up as best he could. Not that it mattered all that much anyway because the officer said he was fed up and told him to get up and then put the barrel of the revolver to his chest and blew a hole in it. Some of the blood from it splashed across Raphael’s face. When they were going they said to him, ‘You remember this day, son. That should keep you out of mischief.’
His father wasn’t dead yet and Raphael realized he was trying to say something to him. He fell to his knees and pleaded, ‘Daddy, don’t die!’ Mattie held his hand and said, ‘Promise me one thing, son. You’ll always look after your mother. She adores the ground you walk on, son. Promise me you’ll be good to her no matter what happens.’
‘I promise, Daddy,’ said Raphael and then Mattie’s head tilted to one side and he died.
Raphael stood up on the legs of a newly born spring lamb and felt the fields were screaming.
Stranger
The sad part of it all was that Evelyn never really got over it. It doesn’t really matter when all the preparations are being made for the funeral and so on and all your neighbours are there to comfort you but they can’t stay there for ever. And that’s when it begins to get hard. Although you’re living in a lovely little cottage it’s like you’re inside a sealed metal container that lets in no light. That was what Evelyn felt when she broke down crying and it seemed to be for no reason just as it did the day Raphael came in the door and found her there in the middle of the kitchen weeping uncontrollably. Her hands were shaking and she was mouthing the word ‘Mattie’ even though there was no sound coming out. Raphael went to her and threw his arms around her. Her nails bit into his wrist and he was afraid she would go hysterical. ‘It’s all right, Mammy! It’s all right!’ he cried and hugged her.
Raphael was frightened. He didn’t know what to do. Only for Uncle Joe he wouldn’t have known what to do. The night he came he looked at him and frowning under his big soft hat said, ‘You know, Raphael. You know, don’t you? You’re going to have to be strong. Strong for her.’
Raphael wasn’t one hundred per cent sure what he meant but he had a vague idea. He nodded. ‘Because there will be times – and if you’re not strong – there’ll be nobody else there for her . . . do you know what I’m saying, son?’
Raphael said, ‘Yes.’ Uncle Joe meant that if he didn’t stay strong and keep a close watch on her something terrible might happen.
‘You’ll do that won’t you, Raphael?’ went on Uncle Joe. ‘You’ll do that for her – and the memory of your dead father?’
Raphael felt a surge of pride as he stiffened and replied, ‘Yes, Uncle Joe – I will! I promise!’
‘For eight hundred years the likes of that animal that shot your father to death have been trying to break us. They haven’t managed it yet and they never will. Not while we have young cubs like you coming up – am I right, Raphael?’
‘Yes,’ replied Raphael and tried not to think of his father’s mouth with the blood pouring out of it, and his terror-stricken eyes.
Then Uncle Joe put his arm around him and said, ‘Come on, son. It’s time we went to see the horses. I have the trap waiting outside.’
If there was one thing Raphael loved more than anything else in the world it was going to Uncle Joe’s stables to see the horses. And if there was anything better than that it was helping to b
rush them and comb them and run his hands along their lovely polished flanks. He was the happiest boy in the world as he sat beside his Uncle Joe with his mother in the back of the trap smiling for the first time since the death as Uncle Joe’s pipe sent out a great big cloud of sweet-smelling smoke and he flicked the whip and said, ‘Your father was a hero, son. You didn’t know that. No one knew it. But he was. He died for Ireland. He’s at one now with all the loyal patriots asleep in the ground.’
Tears came into Raphael’s eyes when he heard that. Tears of pride, tears of sorrow, tears of joy.
All that day he spent in the stables with the horses, looking into their guileless glassy eyes and stroking their noble, shining necks. He was so at one with them he didn’t even realize he was talking to himself. He was saying, ‘I’m going to make you proud of me, Mother. I’ll make you the proudest mother in the whole of Ireland!’
Which were the very words he uttered the following day as he left for school except that it was different this time because the smile that had been on his mother’s face all the way to Uncle Joe’s farm in the pony and trap was gone now and the way she was looking at him wasn’t the way he was used to it, wasn’t the way you would expect a mother to look at a son, more like the look you would give someone you had never seen before in your life.
God Save Ireland
When Raphael heard the sound of laughter he was ecstatic and was standing in the kitchen before he realized there was no laughter at all. In the chimney corner armchair reposed a huge shadow. With blank eyes it considered him. By the window sitting at the spinning wheel, yet another. With a shadow-head that turned and whispered, ‘Raphael!’ It wasn’t a bad voice. The voice meant him no harm. He knew that. But it made no difference. It was the voice of Nothing and it made tears come to his eyes. He wanted to ask, ‘Why have shapes cut out of the dark come to steal my home?’ More than anything he wanted to ask that question. But now there was no one to ask. You were afraid to ask your mammy because she might cry and more than anything you did not want that to happen. So you just lay there in the night-time hoping they would go away. But they never did. They just sat there, people cut out of the dark, waiting.
Once, Our Lady came to you and sat there with you as the sweat glistened on your forehead and your heart beat so fast, laying her soft hand on your forehead as she told you that it would soon be all right because good boys who loved their mothers were always rewarded and to put your trust in Jesus Christ Our Lord. When you looked again she was gone, nothing but the night moths tapping at the window and the ghosts of her kind words still hanging in the air.
You would be standing by the river when the cherry blossom in full bloom sent out its intoxicating fragrance, where the children on the bank tossed a ball with frantic cries and cabbage-whites described great figure eights in the weighted air above the sparkling silver waters which slowly but surely started to turn red once again and the limp dead dummy of your father would go floating past again, downstream in the smoky haze of a dreamy summer.
And there were other dreams, too, of the Black and Tan who had so cruelly done him to death, now swinging from a tree in that same field, pleading for mercy like the British coward he was, as Raphael in his rebel green gave the order for his men to ‘Execute!’ as he slapped his wrist with the leather gloves and the Tan’s eyes bulged as his neck snapped and somewhere Mattie smiled a wistful smile, now that he knew old Ireland would be free. All night long those dreams would go on, of a building aflame in Dublin, as it had been during the fateful week of 1916 seven years before, when the first blow was struck against the Saxon tyrant, perfidious Albion, the Commandant-in-Chief Patrick Pearse now calling out to Volunteer Raphael Bell, ‘More ammunition! Over here, Raphael! Immediately! We’re coming under fire from the Foresters!’ But sadly, despite their valiant efforts, it was only a matter of time and when they were finally overrun, Raphael, on behalf of his father, defied them to the last and when the judge snapped impatiently, ‘Do you realize your part in this foul rebellion has seen to it that you will most surely die?’ Raphael clenched his fist and thumped the air, crying ‘God Save Ireland!’ and felt the soul of his dead father enter his body as the bullets of the firing squad ripped it to shreds.
Tripping Over Himself With Brains
Tower of Ivory
House of Gold
Ark of the Covenant
Gate of Heaven
Morning Star
Those were the names. The names of Our Lady the Mother of God. The Cedar of Lebanon whose pearl-white foot crushed the head of the serpent. A crown of golden stars adorned her head. At her feet in his surplice and soutane, Raphael each day intoned the words:
To thee do we cry poor banished
children of Eve
To thee do we send up our sighs
Mourning and weeping in this
valley of tears.
The air was heavy with the scent of candle-smoke and incense. He prayed for his mother, that the sadness might leave her.
That the flickering fire would once more return to dance in her eyes.
That the words which he knew she wanted to speak to him would not wither on her lips and her eyes turn again to glass. He prayed that even one old day would return. The day of the reaping race! Oh! If only it could be!
The Lord works in mysterious ways, the priest whispered to him, proud of him as he watched him pray. ‘Your father would have been a happy man had he lived to see this. His young boy growing to be a man and the country he loved soon no more to be a province but a nation once again!’ There were tears in the priest’s eyes as he spoke the words.
When in the year 1925, at the age of twelve, Raphael was awarded a scholarship to St Martin’s College, he was sad because he knew his mother would be all alone. ‘Now,’ said Uncle Joe, ‘I have to ask you to be stronger than ever before. You pass up this opportunity, my son, and your father would turn in his grave. Never fear. We’ll keep a close eye on her. She’ll be a proud woman when you come up that lane the day you finish, Raphael. That’s what you have to think about – the day you come walking proudly up that lane.’
Uncle Joe stood over him and looked into his eyes. ‘There’s times I look at you and I think to myself you’re the spit of him. And he was one of the bravest men that ever walked this earth. To see you the way you are now, son – it would have made him a happy man!’
Uncle Joe hugged him then and the next time they saw one another after that was the big day, with Pony Brennan waiting in the trap outside the cottage as Evelyn smoothed the hair back from his eyes and said, almost in her old, mammy voice, ‘The day you were born I remember Mattie saying – he said you had the face of a scholar. That was what he said the day you were born, our Raphael.’ She tried to smile but she could smile no more. She cried out, ‘You will write to me, son! Please tell me that you’ll write to me!’
A tear glistened in the corner of Raphael’s eye as he choked, ‘Every day I’ll write to you, every day for five years I’ll write to you!’ and then it was time to go, Pony chucking the reins as the horses’ hooves clip-clopped in the summer afternoon and bloating with pride because he was the one to drive the scholar to school. ‘I always knew it, me bucko!’ he cried. ‘I always said that any boy of Mattie Bell’s would be tripping over himself with brains,’ and what could Raphael do when he said that but grin from ear to ear.
Head Prefect
But how, oh how could it be so frightening when you thought it was going to be the most wonderful place in the world, with its shadows twice the size of those at home, when you woke up in the menacing silence of the giant dormitory with its steel beds in military formation and the dean of discipline moving like a ghost among them, hungry for a misdemeanour, many thousands of miles away now the warm glow of the embers in the kitchen fire, the freckles on the wrinkled hand of Mammy to whom you felt like crying out, ‘Please come to me! I cannot stand it here without you!’ And without the smell of soda bread, the slow tick of the clock that marked eac
h passing peaceful day and the heavy sighs from the chimney corner that let you know she was always there. But now she was not! Now there was nothing but the smell of older flesh, the flap of the wind as you walked alone through the vast oppressive grounds with their harsh, enclosing granite walls and vigilant, looming towers, the strange, impenetrable tongues of the half-boy, half-man students who circled you and triumphantly handed you an ominous warning – ‘Make no mistake – the first five years are the worst!’
Oh, how you cried those first few months, even for you the intricate codes of Greek and Latin, the brutal symbols of trigonometry and calculus uncompromising in their obstinacy as nightly in the big study you struggled to best them, at times their icy logic too much for you who wanted only to be there with her and hear that voice again, comforting in your ear as outside the huge night settled over the fields. And that was why you wrote daily, wrote Dear Mammy I miss you so much the new college is nice there are so many things to do – geometry, Latin and on Wednesdays we have a half day I am looking forward to Christmas when I will see you again. The school team is in for the Munster Cup. I think we will win. I am having a trial on Friday for the junior team so here’s hoping D.V. I hope you are well and I will write soon – your loving son, Raphael.
And indeed he did have a trial for the junior team that Friday, Raphael Bell, and became the talk of the whole school with not only his tough, wiry steadfastness in defence, impressive beyond all expectation, but also, because of his height, his ability in the air, being described as second to none. As the President who trained the team said to him in the dressing rooms after the game, ‘I can tell you are going to do well in St Martin’s. You can tell a lot about a fellow by his performance on the playing field.’