No Country: A Novel (3 page)

Padraig was the one to go nest-egg hunting, the first to bring
in a frog to put in someone’s school satchel. He was also the first to share his praties or give away his slice of bread to a girl or boy without lunch. His flung stone was death itself to the squirrels until one day when Brigid cried, staring at the limp bodies hanging from his bloodied fist. That’s when he pulled her hair, and made a face, to be friends again. But the lass shook her mane of black and looked away. Padraig, who could bear everything but to be ignored, grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth. I saw he was breathless, while she walked off as if indifferent.

The host of children with whom we had first flocked to Mr. O’Flaherty’s school had begun to drift off. Many took to the fields beside their fathers, carrying their hoes and spades at dawn. Some left for Sligo or Boyle, others farther afield, leaving their carved names on tables. Declan Clooney had run away to become a sailorman. One or two would drop by after some years, blinking at our threshold, as if expecting to find their own wee selves writing on the slate, their eyes clutching at the childhood they had left behind, crestfallen that others now occupied their seats. Charley Keelan had been the first to leave when he turned eleven. Then by ones and twos they left until in the next four years none of our vintage was left, but the three of us.

Brigid mustered the wee ones scrawling the alphabet on their slate tablets which she would wipe clean with a wet rag when they were done, Mr. O’Flaherty glad of her help. They clustered around her, and she was content, away from her mean cottage, especially when her da was home, blustering in his poteen fug. Padraig stayed on, discussing Ireland and newspapers with Mr. O’Flaherty, and willingly mend the sod roof of the schoolhouse and the doors, replacing corbel stones on the mossy sides of the lane. With his sharp knife, he would carve wooden ships for the little ones, calling these
Grania’s Fleet, ignoring Peter O’Connor’s real one, which sailed from his Garavogue shipyard office, where Padraig said he might one day go to work. He had an inexplicable ability of calculating numbers from large columns of figures, swiftly in his head, instant additions, divisions, and multiplications and such. Mr. O’Flaherty said that Padraig was a rare one, born with that ability: He saw numbers and the answers flocked to him as if at his bidding, like a line of sandpipers flying in to settle on the beach.

“An asset he would be in my business,” Mr. O’Connor had declared, but Padraig kept putting off that plodding employ. Besides, his mother with her tidy shop was glad to have him get more book learning and was in no hurry to bid her boy goodbye. My mate too was reluctant to depart his carefree days. Oh,
I
was glad he had not left.

By the time Padraig approached seventeen, I knew he was over his head. I understood it bitterly, and ignored Brigid. I watched him stare at the frail neck and the curve of her cheek, and all the letters on his page might as well have been motes of dust swirling meaninglessly, while the sunbeam lit up Brigid Shaughnessy alone.

I began to stay back and talk to Mr. O’Flaherty, so I would not walk with Padraig trailing Brigid, him answering me in distracted monosyllables. Padraig thought me considerate. Nay, angry and bruised, I was—and proud—in my fashion, noticing more than I let on.

The winter had raged into February, and tapered off in rains and mists in March, and the faint, then glorious, sunshine began to speckle and deck our early April Sligo with scatters of bluebells, rhododendron, and forsythia all the way up the Ben.

Sharp and clear as a break in a perfect crystal, I chanced to see
Padraig kissing Brigid one day under a crab apple that was at the point of budding. A week later one April afternoon, unexpectedly warm, I spied them entering a shepherd’s broken hut, one of those that lie about the county, abandoned and empty. Padraig took a hurried look around before Brigid’s palm closed over his, drawing him in.

Even from the far edge of the meadow above them, I could see how gentle the clasp of his fingers was—and yet how helpless—as he held Brigid’s palm. My heart and all its veins were twisted within me and hurt, for I knew that Brigid was at that moment closer in his arms than any of our heedless and raucous wrestling contests which Padraig always won, pinning me to the dirt.

Yet it was not I alone who had seen this. Father Conlon had seen it too. How is it that two persons can see the same thing, from great far distances, and react so differently? I resolved to keep the sight as between the pages of my heart’s book, secreted forever. But the priest, in great snorting dudgeon, hobbled fast, even with his weak knees and wheezing breath, and arrived by the longer path—not the steep shortcut we take, half-sliding down the hill—at that same broken shepherd’s hut. He found them entwined, a trace of dirt on her knee and Padraig’s surprised face, sweats mingled, their little dim world redolent with caresses and kisses, fondled half-words and moans—and broke that moment apart.

He dragged them out, naked and seemingly newborn, into the April glare. He was going to tell their mothers, he was going to tell the world, he was going to bellow it to the whole congregation, he would point God’s finger at them. He stood there shouting on the glorious hillside, brandishing his staff, and justifying the ways of God.

Padraig and Brigid, hastily covering their nakedness, did walk
hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, and through that valley took their solitary way.

•  •  •

I
SAT FOR
a long time on a rock and looked out at the ocean. After what I had seen, I felt a tiredness of spirit. I wanted to sit on the rock and not have to go back, to my sick mother, to my shabby sod-roofed home, to the daily wants, to the smell of sputtery tallow candles under the blackened ceiling, to the barefoot dirt beneath, to whatever sanctimonious mischief Father Conlon had been able to brew.

I saw folks gathered outside their cottages, seeming to mind their own business, but I knew the ways of our villagers. Everyone was straining their ears to every bit of scandal thrown into the air, for Father Conlon certainly prated about Brigid’s shameful deflowering and how he knew about Padraig Aherne’s mischief. Ah yes, his red face and pimpled neck aglow, the priest was surely having his loud say. Padraig’s ma was among a number of people in front of her shop. She was with Brigid’s mother. I wondered where Brigid might be. Padraig was surely inside, miserable that his day in paradise had rotted so. He would be in a rage, for I knew his temper.

It was then my heart sank. There stood Mr. Shaughnessy, Brigid’s father, unsteady on his feet as a heavy hamstrung bull. He came to the village on his erratic trips home from Connemara, where he worked in the boatyard of an Englishman. He drank most of his money, and people—if you heeded them—would tell you worse. Every few months he would show up on our lane and settle some of the accounts at Mrs. Aherne’s shop, and then go
for a drunken binge. He would wobble down to Mullaghmore or Sligo harbour making a nuisance of himself, then weave back to his cottage, spitting and retching on the way. He had been warned in Mullaghmore for public pissing. He would stay holed in his cottage for several days, making a terror of himself at home. Brigid could not go to school those days. Then he would get up, put on his shoes without even washing off the flakes of retch, and head back to Connemara, to the relief of all, but especially to his family.

Ay, but now he was back, in the worst of times.

Mrs. Shaughnessy was weeping, her head bowed. Padraig’s ma had her arm around her. Father Conlon stood a little farther away from them and kept looking at the jumble of eager neighbours who had gathered as if by chance.

“ ’Tis your proud way, Maire Aherne, that’s the cause of all this,” said Father Conlon unexpectedly. Mrs. Aherne, who had been speaking quietly to Brigid’s ma, bridled at the priest’s hectoring, and walked right up to the priest and stood before him. “Is that what it is, Father?” she retorted. “And when widowed I returned here, heavy with child, my young husband late gone, what help were you?”

Desperately Father Conlon looked about him. Brigid’s da had reached the crowd—for ’twas a crowd now.

“Come here, Shaughnessy!” Father Conlon called out and grasped the man’s shoulder. “Look at this wronged man, Maire. Can ye look him in the face?”

Mr. Shaughnessy tried to rearrange his stubbly face into the semblance of the righteous. He sighed deeply. The poteen breath made Father Conlon blanch, in spite of himself. He took his fat hand off Mr. Shaughnessy’s shoulder as that man stood swaying, his eyes goggled on one face, then another.

“ ’Tis that odd, Maire, ’tis mighty odd that the English agent Arkwright comes by, wringing every sorry coin from our fists, ranting and threatening to tumble our cottages—but when he comes to ye, Maire, why then does he smile and scrape, and nary a broken farthing does he walk away with? ’Tis always Mrs. Aherne this and Mrs. Aherne that, and old Mrs. Hetty Bunthorne in London did say thus and such,” said Father Conlon, mimicking the English accent. “I wonder what that lordling Palmerston has to say of all this,” the priest tittered. “Your son’s pride is a putrid thing in the eyes of our Lord. Ye don’t see it, Maire. That riddles me.”

“Let your daft head be riddled by other matters then. Is not our Brigid as much a child of mine? Will I see her wronged? You hush, and let us—just we two mothers—deal with this. You prattle of taxes and gibbering nonsense.”

“Gibbering?” sputtered the priest.

But Brigid’s da had had enough of this. He felt cheated of all the attention he felt he deserved. He shouldered his burly way before Padraig’s ma, who refused to yield an inch, never mind the poteen breath.

“Ye say, Mrs. Maire Aherne, your son is all free and clear, having made a darned fool of me?”

“I don’t know, Ruairi Shaughnessy, who is making you a fool. You do it well enough all by yourself. Now hush yourself and listen. You know Brigid is dear to me. And many’s the time I have stood by your wife and child—and you gone for months at a time—and she that sick last time when she lost her poor baby boy.”

Mr. Shaughnessy felt he was losing ground and rolled his eyes and looked around at the people who had closed in to hear better. But the folks suddenly parted, for Padraig had come out of the cottage into the very center of the milling crowd.

“Did I not tell you to stay inside while your ma talks with all the elders?” his mother said directly.

“Aye, you did, Ma. But I am grown and I must speak.”

Mother and son regarded each other as if the crowd, the ugly words had all melted away. Padraig looked at Brigid’s ma, who was weeping into her worn shawl.

“Mrs. Shaughnessy.” Padraig held her hand and said softly, so softly that I could barely hear the murmur from the edge of the crowd, “Mrs. Shaughnessy, will you allow me to marry your Brigid? I do love her.”

No one waited for her answer. Everyone chattered, jostling each other, “Aye, aye, ’tis agreed then. A wedding, a wedding!”

“Father Conlon,” said Padraig’s ma, “what say you?” The priest was waiting for just an opportunity like this.

“What are ye speaking of, woman?” he snorted, “ ’Tis not for the likes of you and your milk-fed lad to make up your mind in this grave matter, is it now? ’Tis the girl’s da who’ll decide if he lets him marry into his family.”

The whole crowd turned to Mr. Shaughnessy, who felt grateful to the priest for his newfound importance.

“Aye, Father, ’tis as you justly say. I’ll take my Brigid back to Connemara with me tomorrow where she’ll stay out of the clutches of this harridan and that blasphemer. I’ll need to think on that matter.” He glared at Padraig and his ma. Then he turned and walked back towards the poteen shack which lay beyond the fringe of the village.

“That’s it then,” Father Conlon snorted, turning on his heel and leaving before anyone could say anything more, happy as long as he had the last word over Mrs. Aherne.

But Mr. Shaughnessy had to return to his cottage thwarted, for
the poteen hut had shut down for the evening. I am certain that if it had remained open, he would have stayed up till late celebrating his success and woken in a drunken daze the next day, letting his resolve float away. But he went to bed disgruntled.

He woke early the next morning, and to keep his triumph intact, he roused his wife and daughter. When they resisted his plan, he hit his wife a hard blow across the mouth. Brigid, face turned to stone, gathered her scanty belongings and followed her father so that he would not beat her mother more.

And so our Brigid left for Connemara with her da, before the sun rose and the mist lifted, long before the dew on the spangled grass disappeared.

Before Padraig knew it, Brigid was gone.

•  •  •

P
ADRAIG RAGED AND
was for going after Mr. Shaughnessy, and perhaps getting into a bruising row with him over Brigid, but his ma reasoned with him, as did I. She was still a young lass whose father could scream for the bailiff, and besides, ’twas usual for Mr. Shaughnessy to show up every two months or so, and now with his daughter in tow, did we not expect him to return sooner? Padraig was spoiling for a row, but this once, Padraig listened to us.

But this time, three months rolled by with no news of Shaughnessy, nor any small sum for his wife, which he sometimes sent with Mr. Rafferty, who traveled about on his business on his trusty cart through the neighbouring counties. Instead what he brought this time was disquieting news. He told Brigid’s waiting ma that her husband had left his job and gone off with his daughter. Some said they had headed for Galway, while others thought Shaughnessy
had spoken of Dublin itself. But the last bit of talk about that feckless man was his boast that no one would ever find them in America! Now no one rightly knew where they had gone, the obstreperous man and his pale daughter.

Padraig would heed no one and hectored Mr. Rafferty to accompany him forthwith to Connemara. Seeing no way to dissuade him, Padraig’s ma provided the money for hiring his cart and Mr. Rafferty’s familiarity with roads. Within the month they were back, no wiser. Padraig refused to speak of his futile trip, even to his ma. Shaughnessy and Brigid had disappeared, and no one knew their whereabouts, muttered Mr. Rafferty.