“How any Irishman can leave a field with a horse moaning in such awful pain,” my father said. “He's no kind of Irishman, he's a barbarian.”
I grew up, therefore, in territories of conflict—in a beautiful land of old castles, woods, and rivers, where sinister figures had but recently roamed the land at night, garbed in white, dealing out heinous violence, and where murder was often committed in the name of land. In childhood, my parents shielded us from reports of such occurrences, although we knew that at crossroads, in villages and in towns, people held turbulent gatherings to debate their rights to their own fields, and mainly to discuss the ousting of the landlords.
Once or twice, coming home at night from a neighborly visit, we encountered knots of such people holding such meetings. Much shouting seemed to be taking place, and the air felt disturbed. We ran into no immediate difficulties—when they saw my father, they waved us through with a laugh and a light cheer—but we knew that others had been turned back or not allowed to pass or, often, had been forced from their carriages and obliged to walk home. Next morning the carriage might be found in a disheveled state many miles away, and the horses nowhere to be seen.
Charles O'Brien knew that he came of a kindly and relaxed parenting. Those two people loved each other, loved their two children, and loved their existence in a simple and intelligent way. They gave their sons as good an education as their joint political agreement would permit.
Each tutor they hired opened a different window on the world. Nobody in that household feared eccentricity or shrank from individuality. A high sense of justice prevailed. And their patriotism seems to have stemmed from love of their land and their people, rather than from some acquired ideology or the pressures of history.
This is a man who should not have felt a need to “improve” himself. While under his father's roof, he had confidence and a happy inquiring sensibility, which he took with ease into his adult life. Did his uncertainty, his lack of faith in himself, simply arrive with one bound when he fell in love with the eighteen-year-old April Burke?
It can't have done. If the boy had grown unaltered into the man, he might have had something of the charm, the dignity and composure, that he saw at home in both his parents. Therefore, she might have been less brutal in the rejection that he mentions so early in his text.
Nor would he have issued such a self-negating warning about himself: “Be careful about me.” Admittedly, he includes it in the lee of the general, totally accurate, and justifiable warning about our emotional system of history. The Irish have always turned defeat into moral and emotional triumph. But his text begins to suggest that, somewhere along the line, after his loved and imaginative boyhood, and his lively and enjoyed adolescence, Charles O'Brien changed—into an anxious, self-doubting adult.
His journey from childhood is charted in glimpses. For instance, as the prelude to a major chapter, he tells—almost as an aside, and again out of chronological order—an illuminating story of an encounter with his father over a giant. After that, his tale spreads across Ireland as his life begins to find its first direction.
Father's discourses seemed unceasing but never intrusive; he knew how I loved to hear him talk, even when he was giving me difficult advice about my life and how to conduct matters. But is it not essential to trust a man who has encouraged one's every thrilling discovery? And who then has cushioned one's disappointment when, say, a hero turned out to be human, or a miracle's blinding light turned out to be the deft mirror of chicanery?
For example: When I was nine years old, I read in one of Father's many periodicals of America's great and amazing Cardiff Giant. In the state of New York, some laborers digging a well on a farm discovered the almost-preserved remains of a man ten feet tall. I ran, shouting, through the house on that rainy Sunday morning and found my father.
“You see! You see! The old stories are right—there were giants in days gone by, there were! And if there were ancient giants in America, then there could easily have been giants here, couldn't there?”
Father took the paper from my hands and read it gravely, muttering, “Boys-oh-dear, boys-oh-dear.” Then he and I shared some days of wonderful conversation about giants, and whether giants' graves lay beneath any curiously shaped hill that we knew, and might we even have had giants among our own ancestors? To which my father said, “Well, they told me my father had an uncle who was six feet six, and maybe he was a bit of a giant.”
However, sometime later, Father came to my room at bedtime and said, “I have grave news for you—but it doesn't have to change any of our beliefs.”
He read to me, from another newspaper, that the Giant of Cardiff was a hoax. Some gentleman had “created” the giant out of gypsum in order to fake support for an argument about whether giants had ever existed. My father sat down on the chair by my bed and said, “Well, I suppose you and I will just have to puzzle this out until we know what our hearts have to say about it.”
I now understand that, over the course of the next few days, he let me down lightly—but he also turned the Giant into a teaching. “A thing doesn't have to be true,” he said, “for a person to get joy out of it. What it has to be is not evil or malicious.”
Deriving from that exchange, it did not take me long to understand that Father and I shared a willingness to believe in the impossible, especially if it offered any assistance to someone's life. Ten years later, when I was nineteen years old, Father demonstrated this by going on—for him—an entirely improbable journey and one that altered my life and my soul.
He announced at breakfast one morning that he was “taking Charles and Euclid on a little holiday.” Mother scarcely raised an eyebrow. Cally, Mother said, would help us pack the bags, and we now had a girl to help in the kitchen, a thin girl who ran like the wind everywhere. Her name was Nora Buckley, and I soon asked whether Nora might be a relation to my beloved tutor. Mother shook her head and said, “You can't throw a stone in Cork or Kerry without hitting a Buckley.”
When she first came to the house, Euclid whispered to me, “Easy to remember her name—look at her teeth.” Nora Buckley had prominent front teeth, a little splayed. She said, “Yes” (with a spray) to every word spoken to her, and she blinked a great deal, but she intended to please every person; we soon loved her fondly.
Mother asked, “Where will you stay?”
“We'll cross the Shannon at Killaloe. And then I suppose we'll try and get as far up as we can toward Gort. We could stay with the MacNamaras, and then the boys would like to see Galway city.”
“The City of the Tribes,” said Euclid, who knew all these names and nicknames. “Where Mayor Lynch hung his son.”
“Hanged,” said Mother, “is the correct word. And then?”
“Ah, maybe Connemara or so,” said my father, and I knew that he was being evasive.
Mother began to laugh; Father began to blush.
“That's why it's called ‘lynching,’ I think,” said Euclid. “Because of Mayor Lynch.”
“And I suppose,” said Mother, laughing harder, “there's every chance you'll go somewhat north after that.”
Father, now blushing heavily, laughed too. “A bit, maybe.”
Mother said, “I wasn't aware that we needed a miracle.”
Euclid fastened on this like a cat on a bird.
“Knock! Knock! Are we? Are we going to Knock, to the shrine?”
Father looked ever more sheepish.
“If you are,” said Mother, “and I've been wondering how long you'd hold out, take Nora with you. Her aunt lives there—she'll know everyone.”
As a simple preface, let me explain that Father—and all of us—had been pursuing in his newspapers the apparitional events in Knock, County Mayo, where the Blessed Virgin Mary and other divine figures had flared in bright white light on a church wall.
Traveling a long journey with my father had an epic and intrepid feel. No pony-trap this time—we took what he called “the long car,” a brougham with seats alon
g each side. Our valises and our food sat in the well. An Indian summer had delayed the fall of the leaves, and we left the house in a blaze of gold; Mother waved smiling and laughing from the portico.
Even then, young as I was, I liked to stand back, as it were, and view every situation in which I found myself. That morning, this is what I saw; Polly, our great, gray mare, with her white plume of a tail waving as she lunged forward; and how the harness shone and rattled. My father, his muttonchop whiskers crisper than ever, and his large body teeming with life, called now and then to Polly, “Hup, there, hup, girl.”
Beside him on the brown leather bench, hoping to stay firm and well, sat Euclid, a plaid rug of red, brown, and green about his knees, even though that September sun would have ripened a green tomato in a day. He looked everywhere about him, taking in all the world with those great eyes and yet unable to ingest enough; he scarcely ceased jigging with excitement. Behind Euclid, on the side-seat, sat I, facing outward and pleased beyond measure to be traveling thus with two of the three people I loved most in the world. Across the car, at my back, sat the nervous and swift Nora Buckley; she was under strict directions from Cally and Mrs. Ryan never to take her eyes off Euclid except when he was “at the necessary”—and above all to make sure that he reached bed safely every night.
We had left in the early morning and made wonderful progress through the villages of Cappawhite and Cappamore, where, to judge from the sleepy windows, no person had yet arisen. Not far from Newport, Father halted at a quiet turn in the road and announced that he had drunk “too much tea.” He gave us what he called “voyagers' rules”: he, Euclid, and I would climb into one field to relieve ourselves, Nora to the field on the other side of the road. Afterward we all stood in the roadway and stretched, bending this way and that.
Euclid had declared that as the crow flies our house lay thirty-four miles from Killaloe, and my father said he would try his best to “do as the crow does.” In his younger days, he said, he had “hunted all over this barony” and soon, to the alarm of Nora Buckley but to the delight of Euclid and me, he decided, as he announced, to “go across country.” He steered Polly off the road and we swung down a cart track into someone's farm.
Thus began the first truly exhilarating journey of my life across the Irish countryside—and that is how I began to form my taste for such travels, sitting beside my father in the ponytrap or, as now, behind him on the long car, swaying and rocking to the clop of a horse. That day, we traveled down rutted tracks, splashed across streams bright as tin, up hills almost too steep, and over grassy headland plateaus. Here and there, as we drove past, a farmer or his wife waved from a doorway, or an inquisitive child came out to look, and a dog to bark. My father knew all the sweetest ways, and we never felt imperiled by the roughness of the ground over which he took us.
Birds flapped up from the long grass with a sudden clatter of wings. A deer, rare in those parts, cleared a low fence ahead of us and bounced away haughtily. We saw a fox, who walked astutely along a ridge and inspected us from a distance, its tail held out behind it like a bushy spar. Rabbits sat and twitched their noses, not at all bothered by this curious conveyance with the small, intensely frail, pale-faced boy wrapped in a rug in the front seat, who was counting the rabbits but looking for hares.
I heard him ask Father, “And shall we see eagles?” and Father replied, as I expected he might, “If you want to, Euclid. If you want to.”
One field remains in my mind like an encouraging dream. Father consulted his compass frequently and sometimes, directly after a reading, we found ourselves on or off a roadway. Now we trotted along a graveled avenue, at the end of which Father steered Polly into a wood with a broad pathway running through it. No branches overhung and we never slackened pace. We cleared the trees, climbed a hill, and ran along the top. Father drew Polly to a halt and said, “Now look back.”
Below us, a long slope stretched away down the fields; two ribbons of roads from different directions intersected the patchwork of green; and in the distance shone a third and brighter ribbon—the river Shannon.
“This is a good place to eat,” Father said, and we opened the boxes that Cally and Mrs. Ryan had supplied and packed under Mother's supervision. Eggs had been crushed and mixed with chopped ham and onion; we had chicken with onion; Father chose roast beef and some slices of onion. Nora Buckley, perilously with such teeth, elected to eat a soda-bread sandwich of onion and chopped egg; neither Euclid nor I dared look at each other as she ate. When she finished, she said to Euclid, “Somebody in your house must be famous for onions.”
We drank mugs of milk poured from a tall, shining dairy-can, and we looked at the countryside for a long time. I would have sat there an hour and more had Father asked.
“The battles fought over that land down there,” he said. “Troy didn't give as much trouble.”
He pointed out the Silvermines—he called them “mountains,” although Euclid said that they seemed like hills to him, “because by geographical agreement a mountain needs to be over a thousand feet high.”
Far away, across the fields, a tiny man herded thirty or more tiny cows up a patch of hill field and into another patch of pasture. We could hear his dog's distant excitement; and we sat for a little while longer in the glorious sunshine of the autumn, looking at the green and tawny and gold and brown patchwork quilt of fields.
The Shannon, when we crossed it at Killaloe, thrilled us as much as the Tiber might, or the Mississippi. We liked its width, and its refusal to be hurried. Soon the stone walls of the west appeared and the sun went down, leaving the sky red as a blushing face.
That night in the little town of Gort, as I reflected on our traveling across the country, and as I could hear Father's laughter downstairs, where he took a drink with our hosts, I would have said that it had been one of the most beautiful, serene days of my life. I have had many more since, but that day on which I first crossed the Shannon into the West of Ireland remains for me one of my most memorable.
Next day we bowled into Galway city, all bridges and cobblestones. I chiefly recall watching a basket-maker in the square outside our hotel, and being transfixed by the speed of his hands as he wove the hard strands into firm patterns. The hotel introduced me, I feel, to a taste for such comforts that still directs part of my life. For me, to this day, the most restful moments come when I luxuriate in a great hotel, receiving my meals with deferential service and sleeping between starched linens.
We stayed there for two days, and during our first breakfast, Father counseled Euclid, Nora, and myself to tell nobody of our destination. In the many conversations that we overheard in the hotel, the name of Knock recurred frequently. All remarks had the same tone: “Do you believe it?” and “I suppose it is possible” and “Don't you know what they have up there now? Miracles! They have a miracle nearly every hour.”
All of this threw Euclid and Nora Buckley into states of fantastic longing, with Euclid whispering to me at every turn, “Do you think we'll see an apparition?” Nora worried, “If such holy folks appeared—well, when they're gone, what's to stop the Devil comin'?” (She, of course, pronounced it “Divil.”)
My father, I know, also felt excitement, but his anticipation derived from the opportunity to meet those local people who had actually seen the Virgin Mary on the gable wall of the church in the rain. Yet he did not wish people to think him religious, and that is why he asked us not to divulge our destination. He justified his journey by saying, “You know, people should always make a pilgrimage to a phenomenon.”
After Galway, we spent two days out in Connemara, lingering by the lakes of Corrib, Mask, and Carra. My father had fished the mayfly there, and he told us of those brilliant early summer days when, for one week, men would come “from all over the world.” He continued, “Now if you fellows were here that week, you'd make a fortune catching that mayfly in glass bottles and selling it to the anglers for their bait.”
The light over the lakes seemed to
change every half minute, and we saw rainbow after rainbow.
This paragraph comes from a County Mayo guidebook:
In August 1879, more than a dozen local people in the hamlet of Knock, in the county of Mayo, reported an apparition that is still venerated today. This was never rich land. Oliver Cromwell chose not to bring his marauders over here because one of his generals had reported that the country west of the Shannon contained “not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him.” The apparition, however, brought fame and fortune, as such mystical occurrences do. Hundreds of similar appearances by the Virgin Mary have been recorded, most prominently, Fátima, Garabandal, Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Medjugorje in Croatia.
In all those cases, and in Knock, too, the life of the surrounding countryside changed for the better. Lourdes, originally a village near a cave in the Pyrenees, gained a huge infrastructure. With a basilica and an airport, it attracts pilgrims from all over the world daily, to be dipped naked in the miraculous waters.
At Fátima, visitors rip the skin off their legs as they traverse a huge plaza on their knees, praying as they inch the hundreds of yards from the bus parks to the steps of the basilica.
Knock, when the apparition was reported, suffered the official Church skepticism with which all such reports are typically greeted. But the local people and their clergy prevailed. For them, whether they said so or not, this became a further liberation, an extension of Catholic Emancipation. It took some time for validation to arrive; today, Knock has its own devotional infrastructure, including an international airport. It was crowned by a Papal visit in its centenary year of 1979, and receives close to two million pilgrims annually.