Kitabı oku: «The Whitest Flower», sayfa 9

14

The snow did come – big soft, downy flakes, dancing earthwards, decorating the valley in white. The children were delighted. Mary and Katie ambushed Patrick and some of the other village boys, who then pelted them with hard, hand-packed snow, sending the young warriors home to Ellen in tears. The tears soon passed, but the snow didn’t. It hung on to usher in a white New Year.

Ellen loved the stillness the snow brought. When the first new moon of the New Year came, she went to her place by the lake. She stood and watched the moon’s yellow light splash down on to the Mask. Unmoving, she listened to the rhythm of the land, the usual night sounds stifled by the blanket of snow. She had been thus occupied for some time when a scratching sound disturbed the tranquillity. It seemed to be coming from the far side of a nearby clump of bushes. Ellen crept up to the bush, expecting to see a fox or some other wild animal. Instead she found Roberteen Bawn.

The boy was bent over the snow-covered ground, apparently burying something. Intent on what he was doing, he had not heard her approach. That rascaleen’s up to some mischief again, thought Ellen. Out scratching around in the night, like that. Quietly she plucked a handful of berries from a hollybush, then cast them over the bushes at the crouching boy.

Roberteen Bawn leapt up swearing: ‘The divil! God’s curse on you – whoever’s there!’

He turned this way and that but could see no one. Then he heard her laughter. He knew it instantly: the red-haired woman, making a laugh at him again. All the same, when Ellen stepped out from the bushes, he was flushed with the gladness of seeing her.

‘Well, Roberteen, it’s only me,’ she greeted him as she approached. ‘What was it you were doing?’

‘Ah, nothing – nothing at all,’ he said, and put his hands behind his back.

‘Was it burying something you were – a secret trinket, a message from someone special – burying it under the new moon?’ she teased.

‘No, not that!’ He didn’t want her thinking there was someone else, that he had cast off his affections for her now that she was full with the child.

She walked round behind him. He kept turning with her. He had something in his hands. Something he was hiding from her. Something he hadn’t yet buried in the hole in the earth … Then she knew.

‘It’s the “Mayo moon” you’re doing, isn’t it, Roberteen?’ she asked, her eyes twinkling in its light. ‘Well, well … it is.’

Sheepishly the youth looked down at the ground. Then, slowly, he brought his hands to the front and held them out for Ellen to see. They were full of the earth he had taken from the hole in the ground. Only then did he look up at her.

‘’Tis an old custom,’ he began. ‘My mother told me … for the young men in Mayo and the West … the night of the first new moon in the New Year … to go and lift the clay out of the ground …’ he continued haltingly, embarrassed to be telling this to her.

‘I know, Roberteen,’ she said, helping him out. ‘And then, when you say the special words over the handful of earth, you will see your bride-to-be in a dream tonight.’

‘Yes, that’s it,’ he said shyly. ‘My mother said I should be thinking now of finding a girl for myself and getting married before the year is out.’

‘And you will, Roberteen, you will.’ Ellen reached out and gave his arm a squeeze. ‘She’ll be a fine girl, and a lucky girl too, to get a spirited young fellow like yourself.’

‘Well, I hope she’ll be half the woman you are, Ellen Rua,’ he blurted.

Now it was Ellen who flushed at the passion in his voice.

‘C’mon now, I’ll say the words with you,’ she said breezily, wanting to break off this conversation.

‘Does it matter, Ellen Rua, that we’re standing here in Galway, when it’s under a Mayo moon we’re supposed to be?’ he enquired with that childlike innocence he sometimes had.

‘Not at all, Roberteen,’ she assured him. ‘Sure, isn’t it all the one – Mayo/Galway, Galway/Mayo? The same moon is up over the lot of us. Let’s say the words.’

So, in the bright darkness of the Mayo moon, the lake behind them and the white fields before them, they recited the lovers’ prayer. He – young, bursting with manhood, holding out his handful of earth, in thrall to her. She, shining in the moonlight before him, all that his young heart desired.

New moon, new moon, new moon high Show to me my true love nigh Show her face, her skin so fair Show the colour of her hair

Light my dreams this night so she May in your light appear to me New moon, new moon, let me see If one day we will married be

As they said the last two lines, the young man looked at Ellen, and in his eyes she saw the misty look of lost love. The look she had seen there before – the night she had sung at the céilí. She felt that the boy wanted to kiss her, but that he would not do so, unless she gave him some indication that it was all right. A tenderness for him swept over her, and for a moment she was tempted to let him. But she mustn’t. It would be wrong, and he would interpret it for something else. Instead, she tightened her hold on his arm for a moment and then let go of it.

‘There! Now it’s done, Roberteen, and tonight you will have sweet dreams of your true love,’ she said, trying to dispel the awkwardness. But he didn’t answer. ‘Promise you’ll tell me who she is, Roberteen … won’t you?’ she said then.

At this, he shook himself away from her, and the intensity of his reply startled Ellen: ‘I’ll not be dreaming tonight, or any night, of some young slip of a girl for me to marry. There’s only the one I dream of every night, and the way it is, I’m thinking I never will marry at all.’

He flung the fistful of earth down at her feet, and then he was gone, hurrying, back up towards the village and away from her.

As the new year moved through January, Ellen stuck religiously to her old year resolution of teaching the children English. Each day, excepting Sunday of course, she saw to it that the Lessons, whatever else they covered, contained a large dose of the English language. The children had a good ear for the strange-sounding, narrow language, and so, with a mixture of both pride and regret, Ellen watched them progress.

Michael had decided that they should wait to see what the bishops would do about the landlords before taking action. He had never seemed better in himself, healthy and happy, and things were much as always between them: a mixture of tenderness and caring, her condition not dampening their desire for one another’s bodies.

All of this gave Ellen a growing reassurance that maybe the events of Samhain had been nothing more than an illusion, a product of the changes taking place in her body, the night itself, and her own fertile imagination.

When the weather permitted, Michael, along with Martin Tom Bawn, had taken to going up the mountain in search of new places where lumpers might be cultivated in secret. This they did under cover of dusk, to avoid the ever-watchful eyes of Pakenham’s spies.

In the course of one of these expeditions, the two men came upon a spot overlooking Glenbeg which was inaccessible from the valley below and protected from above by a big overhang of rock.

They stumbled on it by accident after they had startled a hare. The hare, in its flight, seemed to disappear right over the side of the mountain. Turning to Michael, Martin Tom Bawn said, ‘Where the hare goes, grass grows, and where grass grows, praties will grow.’ So they followed the hare’s route to a large outcropping of rock, beyond which they couldn’t see. Edging their way along a precariously narrow ledge, they rounded the overhang to find that the mountainside seemed to cut away back into itself, revealing a patch of ground about thirty feet wide and sixty feet long, filled with marshland grasses and boulders and stones of all shapes and sizes.

The two men looked at each other, excited at their find.

‘This will do the job rightly!’ Martin Tom Bawn exclaimed, bending down to test the soil. ‘The lumper will grow well here, Michael.’

‘You were right about the hare, Martin,’ Michael replied.

‘Faith I was! Them’s clever fellows. They know every inch of the mountain and it’s not too often you see them caught, either. They’re even too glic for the fox himself!’

With that, the two began the task of clearing their find. Day by day, they started with the small stones, then the bigger rocks, stacking them up around the sides of the Hare’s Garden, as they called their secret place. It was backbreaking toil, but if they were to be ready for spring planting, then the work had to be done, and neither man complained. Martin Tom Bawn quoted the old saying:

No bread without sweat,

No soil without toil,

No love without longing.

And together they sweated and toiled to make this soil their own.

‘Will we get the dozen beds out of it, Martin?’ Michael asked when it was almost cleared, except for three or four of the largest boulders.

The older man straightened up, pushing the cap back off his forehead and, in the same movement, wiping the soologues of sweat that had gathered there. He squinted and pondered, and squinted again at the perimeters of the Hare’s Garden before he answered: ‘Faith, Michael, we’ll be doing well if we get the half-score out of it – maybe the one or two extra rows for luck. But I don’t think she’ll take the dozen, though I could be wrong, mind.’

‘Well, whatever,’ said Michael, ‘it will fill the loft for another few months, or, if we can slip by Tourmakeady without Pakenham knowing, we could sell them in Westport or Castlebar.’

‘Aye, the Hare’s Garden should see us out most of another year. We could get a blast of spuds out of it.’

On the first of February, St Brigid’s Day, Michael and Martin Tom Bawn went to the mountain by spring’s first light to tackle the last remaining boulder. They used their slanes as levers. It was slow, heavy, and daunting work.

Firstly, they dug under the boulder, then forced the slanes as far as they would go into the opening, pushing a smaller rock under each slane to provide a fulcrum. Then, together, they bore down on the handles of the slanes to dislodge the boulder from the earth and grass which caught at its base. Bit by bit, by slane and stone, they managed to hike up one side of the boulder until it came to a point of balance. Now, by getting their hands underneath it and their shoulders against, they were able to move the boulder over on its side. Then they began the dig-prop-lever-lift-shoulder sequence all over again, each time gaining a foot or so of ground.

Michael marvelled at the strength of Martin Tom Bawn. Although he must have been the sixty years out, he was tireless, never asking rest or respite from his labours. When it seemed nigh impossible that further movement could be extracted from the boulder, Martin Tom Bawn would look across at him, their faces inches from each other against the cold, wet, surface of the rock. Then he would nod at Michael to give it another go. Michael would see a purple vein stretching from eyebrow to hairline across the man’s forehead. The vein would grow a deeper, darker purple with the older man’s exertions, until it protruded angrily. Then, eyes bulging, he would tense himself for a last, mighty heave, and the purple vein would jump and shudder. When it seemed it must burst, Martin Tom Bawn would roar, ‘Now!’ And the two of them would exert themselves far beyond anything Michael would have thought possible.

By dusk, the boulder had been moved to the far end of the Hare’s Garden. The two men stood in the centre of the reclaimed field, arms akimbo, surveying their handiwork.

‘It’s a grand day’s work we’ve done here, Michael O’Malley, but we’ve one more thing to do being the day that’s in it.’

‘Aye, you’re right,’ Michael replied. ‘The luck sod.’

The two men retrieved their slanes and walked back to the centre of the patch. Facing each other they dug down into the cleared ground and out of it lifted a sod of earth each. These they turned upwards on the surface, side by side. These lumps of earth were the ‘luck sods’, lifted on the first day of Spring each year. An old pagan custom hearkening back to the Celtic festival of Imbolc, the turning of the sod symbolized the true beginning of a new year’s work in the fields. An artful Church had christianized the custom, making this, the day of St Brigid, patroness of Catholic Ireland.

The two men rested on the handles of their slanes. It had been a long, hard haul this Hare’s Garden, but it was worth it. Tomorrow they would begin clearing out the ferns and the low gorse bushes that were dotted here and there, and also the clumps of long-stemmed mountain grass. Finally, they would dig and sieve through the mountain earth, picking out by hand the small stones and the pieces of bog-oak and bog-yew, preserved through the ages in the Hare’s Garden.

By planting time, after St Patrick’s Day, they would have tossed and turned this earth many times, until it was tilled and ready for its first sowing. With God’s blessing on their work, and His hand staying the return of the potato blight, they might be able to pick the first of their new crop in August or September.

Martin Tom Bawn smiled, and drove his slane into the waiting earth. Happy with his labours, he spat into his palm, then rubbed his hands together, before stretching out his right palm to Michael.

‘Put it there, Michael O’Malley!’ he said. ‘There’s no better man I’d ask to go to the top of the mountain with than yourself.’

The two men pumped hands, lifted the slanes over their shoulders, slipped back round the out-hang of rock that protected the Hare’s Garden, and headed homewards under the covering mantle of spring’s first night.

Down below, Ellen and the children sat awaiting Michael’s return for the evening meal. They had just completed fashioning a St Brigid’s Cross from some rushes. As they worked, Ellen told them the story of how St Brigid had tried in vain to explain Christianity to one of the old Celtic warlords as he lay on his deathbed. In desperation, Brigid had gathered a handful of rushes and woven them into the shape of a cross, all the while telling the story of Christ’s crucifixion. Before the old pagan chief had died, he had reached for the cross and with his expiring breath, had said, ‘My Lord and my God!’ thus signifying his conversion to the Christian faith.

Ellen had always loved the story, for the hope it gave. Even in life’s last breath, one could, with true faith, be saved by an all-embracing God.

When they had completed the St Brigid’s Cross, Ellen moved to place it over the doorway, as tradition decreed. But Mary had said, ‘A Mhamaí, this year I think you should put St Brigid’s Cross up there with the praties.’ And she had pointed a finger to where their dwindling stock of potatoes lay, dark and silent, in the makeshift loft.

Ellen nodded. ‘Mary’s right – I think that’s the place for it.’

The child said no more, but Ellen knew that, behind those few words, Mary was thinking it all out: if the St Brigid’s Cross had saved the old pagan chieftain, maybe it would save the potatoes, too. Maybe it would save them.

Though she did not like to single out any of her children above the others, Ellen could not resist the urge to go to Mary and embrace her. God love her, Ellen thought, God love this beautiful child – thinking all the time – worrying about us all. Looking out for us all.

March came in like a lamb and went out like a lion, thus defying the old proverb.

The seventeenth, being the feast of St Patrick, Ireland’s other great national saint, was a day of celebration. Some of the villagers made the pilgrimage to ‘the Reek’, St Patrick’s mountain at Murrisk, where they would fast and do penance. This involved walking barefoot up the 2500-foot-high mist-covered mountain, stopping many times on the ascent to do the ‘stations’. Plenary indulgences gained for the ‘stations’ provided a complete expiation of sin and a wiping away of any penitential deficits which might otherwise require the fires of purgatory to balance the books, before the sinner could enter Heaven.

Ellen was too heavy with child to make the arduous journey. Instead, she would ‘do the Reek’ after the baby was born – probably on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in Summer.

St Patrick’s Day also signalled the start of the sowing season, the villagers considering it unlucky to start earlier. So, it was a time of great prayer, penance, activity and rejoicing.

Michael took down his fiddle for the celebrations on the night. Ellen, too, attended the céilí, but she did not sing – it being considered indelicate for a woman in her condition to be too public. Anyway, she decided, she had been public enough already, at Christmas time.

In April, Ellen had a visitor.

The children were out playing and Michael was on the mountain. Ellen was alone in the cabin when she sensed rather than heard a presence in the room with her. It gave her a jolt when she turned to find Sheela-na-Sheeoga there.

‘God bless all here, and those who will be here,’ Sheela benedicted, putting special emphasis on the latter part of the greeting.

‘God and His Holy Mother bless you, Sheela,’ Ellen returned guardedly.

‘Your time is soon, Ellen Rua. I waited your sending for me, but when I had no word I left it till there was a month yet,’ the old woman admonished her.

Ellen had not seen Sheela since Christmas. She had been standing outside the Finny church when Ellen stormed out of Mass with the children in tow. The old one had smiled at her then, in her gap-mouthed way – not without a little pleasure, Ellen thought, at the commotion which her departure from the church had caused. Since then, Sheela had kept very much to herself in her little bothán. Ellen had almost forgotten about her, and had been planning to get one of the other women in the village to be her midwife. Now, she was surprised at the boldness of Sheela’s turning up like this on her doorstep.

‘Well, I’ve been busy, Sheela, with one thing and another, and I hadn’t been thinking much about it lately,’ Ellen replied brusquely, needing time to put order on her thoughts.

‘Is it how you’ve been listening to the stories about Sheela-na-Sheeoga?’ The old woman seemed to read her thoughts. ‘It’s only jealousy from them what calls themselves midwives, that’s what it is. Why, there isn’t a child in this parish that the hand of Sheela-na-Sheeoga first was set upon that didn’t grow to be straight and strong in a man, or comely and modest in womanhood. Look to your own three: all fine handsome children, taken from you with these hands.’

The old woman pushed her upturned palms out towards Ellen. ‘Look at them!’ she commanded.

Ellen, knowing where all this was leading, looked at the outstretched hands, glad not to look into Sheela’s eyes.

‘Was it not these hands that first foretold this child you carry? Was it not these hands which anointed your womb, Ellen Rua, so that the seed would take in you after six barren years?’ The old woman was working herself up. ‘This child is a special gift from God. Will you now spurn the hands which were the instruments of the hand of God?’ She paused, watching Ellen, waiting for a reply. When none came, she started again: ‘I tell you, red-haired wife of Michael O’Malley, the riddle is not yet unravelled. Famine and disease will stalk this land, and you will rue the day you put Sheela-na-Sheeoga from your door. Rue it you will!’ she repeated, making for the door.

‘Stop it, stop it!’ Ellen shouted at her. ‘You will deliver me of this child, Sheela-na-Sheeoga, but I want no part of any of your spells or incantations. If this child is harmed or spirited away into a changeling, then I will come for you myself, and you will not see out the full stretch of Summer.’

‘There will be no misfortune befall this child, Ellen Rua, no misfortune at all – at my hands.’

‘There, it is done, then. Be off with you till the month is out!’

The woman did not move.

‘I must see how the child lies,’ she said, apparently unruffled by Ellen’s dismissal.

‘The child lies well,’ Ellen retorted angrily. ‘I will send for you if needs be.’

‘May the Virgin Mary, Mother of all mothers, be with you in her holy month of May.’ Sheela gave her parting blessing as if nothing had passed between them.

‘I will send for you when the time comes,’ Ellen repeated, emphasizing each word.

When Sheela was gone, Ellen had to sit down and drink from the pitcher of well-water. She was in a cold sweat, and the baby seemed heavier than ever before.

How had she let herself get in this position? Sheela-na-Sheeoga, witch-woman, demon of Ellen’s worst nightmare, was going to draw the baby from her body. She, riddle-maker, mixer of potions, was going to be the first person to hold the small, pink bundle, the flesh of her womb. Sheela would be the one to snip the cord of life binding the infant to her, its mother. And she, Ellen Rua, had agreed to let her.

What could she do? The old woman was an experienced midwife, and she had implied that something would go wrong if she were not present at the birth. After six years of waiting, and eight months of carrying this child through all the travails of the past year, Ellen could not now take any risk that things might go wrong.

* * *

David Moore also went a-visiting in April. He travelled to Leinster House, to report the findings of his experiments to his employers, the Royal Dublin Society.

‘Honoured members of the Society, distinguished guests …’ he began, his strong Dundonian accent tempered only slightly by his years in Ireland. Never before had he seen the assemblage so attentive, so apprehensive.

As the curator of their Botanic Gardens continued, the apprehension of the members of the Royal Dublin Society deepened.

‘No storage conditions, no matter how benevolent as to ventilation and dryness, will safeguard the tuber where there is already present some element of the disease,’ he warned. ‘Likewise, partly diseased tubers soon lead to putrefaction …’

The great hall was hushed at his words.

‘Badly diseased tubers produce no new growth.’

Now Moore, with each new revelation, heard a collective intake of breath.

‘The steeping of seed potatoes in lime and water before planting, as has been suggested, has proven to be of no value … Finally, it is with deep dismay and regret that I must inform you of the fact that the murrain has already manifest itself this season.’