Death and Nightingales Read online

  As the years went on Cooley grew headstrong, ripping the copper ring from his nose, smashing his way through gates and gaps to neighbour farms, swimming across the lough to get to cows and heifers summering on the larger islands. They’d had to confine him in the stone house behind the cattle crush in the upper yard. One day he turned savage, went for Jim Ruttledge: ‘Only Mickey Dolphin was close by I’d be a widow now, and when the boss heard tell of this he said he’ll have to go.

  ‘Next day as they were loadin’ him on to a trailer the sky opened. Your mother come into the yard at that minute with her cush and gig. She could see nothing with the blind of rain. The two men had the ramp up when the bull turned in the trailer, whipping it with his head, and sent the pair of boys tumbling across the yard like two twigs. Then out with him roaring mad and he had the cush gored and the gig coped and your mother in the air tossed and ripped pitiful before Mickey caught him a lash in the eye and my man got an axe to his skull. And true as God I heared the blares and trumpets of him down here half a mile away till they got a knife across his throat. Christ in Heaven what a shambles, the whole street runnin’ water and blood and every man and woman in the place hysterical; but she was dead your mother, the boss holdin’ her head off the street: dead dead dead and covered with a horse blanket, all to her white lovely face. And when I took courage to lift the blanket I seen . . . merciful Jesus . . . a wee blind bairn tore from her womb and it no bigger nor a bonham.’

  Brother? Sister? She placed her hands on her womb. There was nothing to feel. The ‘bairn’ conceived with Liam Ward would be less than kitten-sized. She would not tell him till their plan was accomplished, till they were well away from Clonoula, from Fermanagh, from Ireland. Aboard ship and looking back she would tell him, they were beginning both a new life and a new family.

  ‘Miss Lisbeth, Beth, Miss Beth!’

  Mercy Boyle’s face was very close. Outside the window the brightest of white May light on the palest of green beech leaves. And far above a high clear sky.

  ‘That’s Petey Reilly at the back door, Miss.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Canon’s man . . . he’s here with a message for the boss. Did you sleep all night in your clothes?’

  ‘No, no, I’ll explain when I come down, you tell the boss, Mercy.’

  ‘I will . . . Happy birthday, Miss.’

  Mercy placed a small package on the bedspread and left the room, closing the door quietly. Beth untied the green ribbon, folding back tissue paper. Inside she found an ornate brass locket. It clicked open to reveal the chiselled features and hypnotic eyes of Charles Stewart Parnell.

  2

  Am I awake now or asleep, or waking? Most likely waking, yes; light. Beth’s birthday. Was she in the room just now or a while back? Girl-smell, clematis, woman-smell, twenty-five. Birthdays; deathdays. When’s mine? Where? Bed? Aboard ship? Chair? Stable? Field? Church? Quarry? Matters not . . . but how? Slowly? Agony, bowel-slip and terror, oh Jesus mercy, forgive, forgive, forgive a wretched sinner, always Jesus! Suddenly on highway or byway, at horse-fair or home-farm, William Hudson Winters, my name in a column, table of death, deceased. Like a shot; bang! black end, gone, no more. Eternity . . .

  Here lieth all the dead Winters in the cold north ground of the province of Ulster.

  Here lieth all the women of the dead Winters in the cold north ground of the province of Ulster.

  Here lieth all the infants and children of all the dead Winters in the cold north ground of the province of Ulster. It awaits.

  Poor Mama’s silly jingle.

  ‘I’ll tell you a story bout Billy MacClory.

  Will I begin it

  That’s all that’s in it!’

  Is that all? Full stop?

  Or do we journey onto God’s house, morning star, house of gold . . . My grandfather’s. Is it safe in that old safe? Is it? Who’s knocking? Yes? More knocking, again. Yes! Knocking, louder:

  ‘Yes!’ Billy Winters said, jerking awake on to his elbows.

  ‘I’ve a message, Sorr, and your hot water.’

  ‘Hold on Mercy . . . a message . . . who from?’

  ‘Canon McManus’s man called.’

  ‘What! hold on.’

  Billy Winters bedrolled over, swinging his legs onto the square of faded Indian carpet. Thrusting his arms into a dressing-gown he padded across the pine boards to the bedroom door:

  ‘When . . . who did you say?’

  ‘This minute, Sorr, Petey Reilly, the Canon’s man. He said the Canon would call here on his way back from Mass.’

  ‘That would be now.’

  ‘Yes, Sorr.’

  Her confessor, Canon Leo McManus. What does she tell him?

  Mercy turned and went down towards the turn of the staircase. Behind her, outside the hall window and beyond, the house-field sloped north toward the high ring-fort that looked down on the lower lake.

  Dear God the wonder and beauty, of light and water, of field, tree, and sky . . . May, what a month to be alive and I woke up dreaming of death.

  Below he could hear cow-chains and buckets and mild lowing. He called:

  ‘Mercy.’

  ‘Sorr?’

  ‘Where is Miss Beth now?’

  ‘She’ll be about the kitchen or dairy.’

  ‘You do know what day it is?’

  Mercy smiled through crooked teeth.

  ‘Me mother has a cake made special and I have something I give her.’

  ‘You’re a good girl, Mercy; I’ll be down directly.’

  And she was: discreet, hardworking, loyal.

  Mercy had left the white enamel jug of hot water on a table in the upper hall. He carried it to the wash-stand, poured it into a basin and began preparing to shave. In the bow of a south window there was a ship’s telescope alongside a tripod shaving mirror with candle holders. A north window between the wash-stand and wardrobe looked down on the yard with its two arched entrances, slated out-buildings, the garden, orchard and paddocks leading to the haggard. A rivulet of spring water from the fountain hill surfaced in the yard near the byre in a stone-faced pool. Everlasting. Never failed in drought, nor froze in the bitterest winter. Swirling now round two copper cans keeping the milk and cream sweet from churning to churning. Ancient system: glazed crocks, creak of oxen carts in streets of Jerusalem, the squares of Rome. Fountains, cisterns, springs, aquaducts, the armies of Constantine crucifying Europe for Christ, crusaders butchering in Asia, looting for Christendom.

  A Christian man myself, my breed brutal as any Turk, unkind mankind, aye and womankind to bear and suckle such. My dead love Cathy, mother of Elizabeth, father unknown. ‘One of two,’ she taunted once . . . fountain of old sorrows . . . her birthday today.

  As he moved the shaving mirror for better light his blinking eye caught a movement in the yard below, a blue shorthorn cow plodding across the cobbled yard towards a stone cattle-crush followed by Jim Ruttledge. Something glinted near the cow’s hip-bone as she walked into the crush . . . canula is it? Bloat?

  Jim had closed a small iron gate behind the cow and was removing the canula as Billy Winters opened the window and called down:

  ‘A touch of bloat, Jim?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Jim Ruttledge knew where Billy was. He did not look up. Well over seventy and sturdier than most men of fifty he had been working here at Clonoula before Billy Winters was born.

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘She’ll over it.’

  ‘You were lucky to catch her.’

  ‘It was Miss Beth got her; heard the blaring a fair while back.’

  So there was an animal blaring, no dream. How many women, girls, would brave into half-dark fields to ram a canula into a bloated, dying beast. Her birthday the worst day of my life. She’s twenty-five today, another year. Anniversary. When is poor Mama’s deathday? Blackberry time. September’s end. Leaf-fall. How she played and sang long long ago when I was young, as simply as others breathe – hauntingly of love and love’s dre
am lost forever. And to die then with such grace and humour . . . Give away this, that and the other; burn and throw away this, that and the other . . . and when you’ve that all done . . . throw away me.

  Quietly as he shaved, Billy Winters began to hum a Moore melody, pausing when he heard, half-way down the avenue, the faint scatter of hooves on gravel. He looked out the side of the bow-window. Yes, there he was, topper, frock-coat, astride a grey horse, carrying his silver-banded riding-crop: Canon Leo McManus in full canonicals. As Billy pulled on a collarless shirt, deferential grey trousers and a waistcoat he heard himself sing quietly:

  ‘Rule Romania, Romania rules the taigs,

  Poor Rosie’s childer ever, ever, shall be slaves.’

  3

  For Canon Leo McManus the best part of his ministry was travelling on horseback the by-roads, farms, villages and townlands of Upper Fermanagh. On the walls of his dining-room in the parish house at Dromcoo he had land commission maps pencil-marked, and could tell at a glance the name, status and religion of the owner. He kept a separate register for emigrants, corresponding with those who had prospered and trying to persuade them to buy back, where possible, what he called in his circular ‘The Escheated or stolen patrimony of our forebears’. A matter of some disappointment was that Con Cunningham of Los Angeles, and Barney Hughes of London, who could between them have bought the entire county, failed to reply. Many others did and proved helpful. The county was evenly divided between Catholic and Protestant; time and determination, God willing, would alter that.

  Last night he had been reading in Mervyn Knight’s recent publication from Longmans of London entitled: Farms, Families and Dwelling Houses of Fermanagh. He had read very closely about the dwelling and family he now approached.

  CLONOULA Meadow of apples or apple meadow

  ASSOCIATED FAMILIES One: WINTERS

  LOCATION Barony of Clanawley; Enniskillen, six miles, Tully Castle three miles, Dublin eighty miles.

  SITUATION Mountainside seven hundred and forty feet above sea level. Long view of Upper Lough Erne from eastside RV. £487.00

  HISTORY Held under chieftancy of Brian Maguire (disaffected) crown escheated 1610. Original house built by Thomas Winters under tenant of Sir John Hume of Tully Castle. Burned in 1641 rebellion. Rebuilt by Clement Winters 1660. Extended by Captain William Hudson Winters (sea) 1793. Gates, yard, gatelodge and the hamlet at Clonoula, etc.

  PRESENT CONDITION Good. Inhabited. Occupier: William Winters Esq.

  SPECIAL FEATURES Large cottage-type house, central chimneys, gabled bays. All windows have cutstone ‘eyebrows’. Central doorway, pedimented with fanlight, spoiled by glass porch.

  INTERIOR One Adams-type fireplace, ceilings plain and low, pitchpine timber throughout. Otherwise unremarkable.

  EXTERIOR A sunken cobbled yard, walled garden and apple store (thatched) all built with random rubble. There is a lime kiln, scutch mill (in use), cornmill roofless. Original globe-topped piers in good order. Gatelodge occupied in good repair. Clonoula hamlet has four thatched cottages, one serving as a post office-cum-public house. There are two other cottages on the holding.

  ASSOCIATED TENANT FAMILIES Ruttledge, Ward, Blessing, McManus, Boyle, McCafferty.

  ASSOCIATED TOWNLANDS Ardnagashel . . . Height of forts

  Brackagh . . . A spreckled place

  Garvarry . . . Rough land

  Dacklin . . . A black meadow

  GROUNDS Well furnished with long-standing beech and oak. Orchard of twenty acres reputedly the oldest in Ulster. Avenue one thousand yards long steeply inclined towards the county road. This steep area a maze of thirty acres or more consists of hard woods, conifers and rhododendrons.

  The Canon now paused on the avenue at an opening in this wooded area. He could see over and through a glory of rhododendrons the glittering map of Lower Lough Erne and its islands and, immediately below, the townlands of Brackagh, Garvarry and Dacklin, the black awkward landscape of the dispossessed. Hungry views and sour land can make the best people in the world sullen and dangerous. My people. Mister Knight’s book could not say that Clonoula was an oddity amongst Fermanagh dwellings. Clearly its category was Protestant squireen, mock or low gentry. What it could not say was that Billy Winters had been married by Jimmy Donnelly, the present Catholic Bishop of Clogher who was at that time a boy curate in a country parish near Enniskillen, and he knew, like most others, that twenty-five years earlier, Billy Winters had gone drinking night and day for an extended period. Somewhere in the misery of his cups he had confided to a drunken comrade, or aloud to himself, ‘Never cross the lough for a woman. Mine was served when I got her, three months gone.’ And so the rumour spread about Fermanagh and neighbouring counties that one of the shrewdest young men in Ulster, the first man to build a macadamised road from his limestone quarries, a man who could hold his own with bishops and horse-dealers, who could teach tricks to tricksters, had himself been gulled and shamed by a woman, and worse again a Papist woman.

  Thereafter Cathy Winters had lived on with him in the long farmhouse at Clonoula. During the twelve years that followed, it was said on and off: ‘I see Billy’s woman has a black eye’ or ‘that woman’s aged a lot’ and some said ‘could you blame the man?’ Others remarked ‘He’s a brute, the same Billy, a bad article, kicks and fists her about the house; it’s thon Beth child I’d be sorry for, poor wee morsel.’ And when Cathy Winters met with a sudden and terrible end in the yard at Clonoula, Billy stood over her grave with his arm around Beth sobbing in a way that was uncommon enough for those who witnessed it to say ‘he must have loved her.’ His own tribe were more suspicious: ‘Thon wasn’t for her, it was for Papist contracts. The man has no shame.’ How much of this was true, false or malicious nonsense, he had no way of knowing. True or false, it was general knowledge.

  Oddly, over the years when he called, it was Beth the solemn staring girl, now woman, who seemed watchful, distant in the presence of a priest, while Billy’s manner was affable, open, avuncular, hospitable and on the surface civilised, and yes, there he was again, standing at the porch smiling, both arms extended momentarily in welcome. Referring to him last night the Bishop had said, ‘I don’t think Billy Winters believes in anything much apart from money and malt whiskey but he’s straight, which is more than can be said for a lot of our crowd.’

  Billy led the Canon’s mottled grey mare and tied her alongside the porch to a limb of wistaria as the Canon dismounted saying:

  ‘I have a letter for you here from James of Clogher.’

  ‘Is it good or bad, Leo?’

  ‘Haven’t a notion but it must be urgent.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘You’ll stay for a bite of breakfast?’

  ‘I’ll not, thank you, but I’ll sit a minute. What a morning . . . thanks be to God.’

  ‘It’s the magic month,’ Billy said.

  ‘It’s more to do with where you are,’ the Canon said, ‘up here, this place is half-way to heaven!’

  A red setter came out of the rhododendrons and sat on the rectangle of gravel before the house, her tongue out panting, her copper coat shining in the sun:

  ‘Is she new, Leo?’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘It’s too early to tell but she has a good nose and she’s biddable.’

  ‘It’s the only way to have them.’

  The Canon sat down on a bench in the porch placing his riding-crop on his knees. He then took out an envelope from the inner pocket of his frock-coat, handed it to Billy who sat facing him. Billy placed the letter on the windowsill behind.

  It would have been, the Canon felt, more amicable if Billy Winters had opened the note, glanced at it and shrugged it .off with a comment. On the other hand why should he? Opening it might have proved awkward. Could have been about me or God knows what. Bishops associate with very strange informants.

  It seemed to Billy Winters that the parish priest was frowning at the tiled floor as though thinkin
g of something unpleasant. The glazed tilework showed a beaver sitting on a log mid-river and underneath in Roman lettering three words in a semi-circle: Ī SEQUERE FLUMEN – follow the river. Billy waited for him to speak. When the silence continued he said:

  ‘Nothing remarkable, Leo.’

  ‘Yes and no . . . The Dummy McGonnell is back on his travels, we had him yesterday.’

  ‘He’s a harmless cratur,’ Billy said.

  ‘They should have kept him in Monaghan asylum.’ He paused and then said with emphasis: ‘One thing’s certain, he didn’t smash my new glasshouse.’

  ‘By God! . . . when was this?’

  ‘About midnight, Tuesday back.’

  ‘And where where you?’

  ‘Out in the jungle over by Brackagh Cross and Dacklin tryin’ to put manners on the mad drinkers and devil-dancers.’

  ‘Did you manage?’

  ‘Oh I put them from it.’ He raised his hunting-crop. ‘With this.’

  The lion of Dacklin. Well done Leo. The riding-crop for croppies. Small wonder they leave in droves for America, Australia, anywhere . . . lashing hell out of what they can’t have themselves . . . or shouldn’t . . . better say something.

  ‘The dancing’s American,’ Billy said.

  ‘The liquor’s local,’ the Canon said, ‘and puts them astray in the head.’

  Startling images from three nights back reappeared in the Canon’s mind. He had dismounted and crossed a braird of oats, green and thick as spring grass, then walked down a farm-pass through Dacklin towards Brackagh Cross. He could hear hand-clapping, a melodeon, the sound of laughter. There was a bright moon and he surprised a pair coupling in a dry sheugh, bare legs entwined cross-ankled round a man’s thrusting body; blind moaning, both. He had lunged toward them, stumbling, roaring: ‘beasts, brutes, devils’, his bone-headed hunting-crop lashing the man’s buttocks then flailing about his head and body as he backed away defending himself with one hand concealing his member with the other. He had turned then to punish the she-devil, but she had crept through the ditch and run across a field towards Brackagh Cross to warn the others. The melodeon, hand-clapping and laughter faded to a sudden silence under a full, chastened moon.