[Google Images]
Patrick Grugan looked around the squalid little workhouse. There was a fiendish grey light from Dingle Bay that signaled the approach of day, darting in and out of the wall cracks and window-less holes. The rain-sodden village of Clynacartan was still asleep. Following the light—there was no window, just a hole in the wall draped with a piece of sackcloth that didn’t quite cover the hole--the embers of a turf fire were still glowing in one corner, and the feet of the children seemed to be reaching for the waning warmth.
The woman next to him had stopped breathing.
Grugan crawled closer to the fire and threw a couple of sods on top. The young man lying closest to the fire opened one eye and then resumed sleeping. The unmistakable smell of peat burning inside warded off the rising damp outside the workhouse; the flimsy hut looked like a gale would blow it any minute into Dingle Bay. A second room had collapsed on itself. Smoke columns started from the new sods and with it the children’s coughing. That is, from those who still could cough. All of these sounds acquired their own logic but Grugan was suddenly aware of something different. Feet were marching outside. Then they stopped. Pikestaffs clinked and a horse whinnied in impatience.
Then the dawn silence was broken by a peremptory voice. It was a landlord’s agent. No mistaking the tone.
“How many take shelter here?”
A soldierly voice replied: “About seven or eight….we tried to round them up last night and escort them to the market place to put them on the cart but they gave us the slip…”
“Right.” The landlord’s agent spoke in monosyllabic disdain. “They should have complied…the cart would have taken them out of this squalor and filth….” His voice only served to underline his disgust.
Then he continued: “Burn it. Both of youse. Make sure no one gets out alive. There are no rents to collect here. The rest of you come with me.” Landlord’s agent, horse and soldiers formed a new marching rhythm, one that quickly distanced itself between them and the workhouse.
Grugan’s mind was racing with fear. He shook the young lad.
“Get up…now!” he half whispered. “And check under the rug…see who is still alive…”
They didn’t have long. Outside in the damp morning air the soldiers would be smearing torches with pitch then using flints to set them alight. Every second counted.
Under the rug there were five children.
Four of them were dead. Dead from starvation.
Their twitching limbs rearranged the sodden straw in new formations, and the stench of human filth mingled with that of the peat within and the pitch-covered torches without.
Grugan looked out of the rag-covered hole that passed for a window and saw both soldiers kneeling, attending to the soon-to-be-lit torches. He reached into his threadbare jacket—he had already pawned his overcoat for food rations—and found his hurling stick. Drawing it out, he motioned to the young lad and child to crouch next to the back entrance, that which looked out at a shrouded and emerging McGillacuddy's Reeks.
“When I give the signal….” But his words faded into silence as a piercing shot penetrated the seagull-laced, morning silence. One of the soldiers stumbled into the front entrance, lit torch in hand, then careened backwards, blood spurting from his chest. Immediately Grugan sprang forward and out, grabbed the torch and thrust it into the comrade’s face. Part fire, part pitch, his face started to sizzle at which point Grugan brought the hurling stick down hard on his skull.
“No one makes a funeral pyre of Patrick Grugan,” he snarled. Then he ran around the back where he was joined by his young companion. Out of the mist appeared a scruffy, red-haired man, all beard and whiskers with slightly blackened face. It was Micheal Sullivan.
“Jesus Mick, I might have known it was you,” Grugan smiled in obvious appreciation.
“Sons of Kerry...... the Flying Column…. I was following the landlord patrol….got here just in time, by the looks of it…”
He picked up the abandoned musket from his victim.
“Here….you take this….down the bracken and over that wee hill and ye should have a good view of that patrol. I’ll take care of the lad…..looks like he hasn’t eaten in days.”
“Good man,” replied the Grugan, “Ye read me mind entirely”. And off he set at a pace to head off the patrol. A steady rain was replacing the early mist as he raced up the wee hill and flattened himself upon the summit. The retreating mist was patchy but rising. Grugan raised the musket to his shoulder and waited.
Looking closer at the massive rock he noticed the familiar signs. A Mass rock.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph…I’m lying on holy ground,” he chuckled to himself.
********************************************
Grugan had never killed another person in his life. Once he had contemplated killing the village priest, just at the onset of the famine*. Looking for a bit of work, he had arrived at the priest’s cottage in the early evening and had stopped in his tracks outside the kitchen window. Inside he could see the father entertaining two of his fellow priests with steaming platters of crubeens, boiled potatoes, roasted vegetables, large onions. A large bumper of Rhenish stood in the center of the table. The feasting was accompanied by laughter and abject merriment. Grugan felt a dull ache in the pit of his stomach which was quickly replaced with burning resentment.
He knocked on the door.
There was no answer.
He knocked louder the second time, when, just then, Father Mooney opened the door.
“Grugan. What do ye want at this hour?” he inquired indifferently.
“Ah well, Father….I was ….I was jist wondering if ye needed anything done around yer place like? I’d work for…….” But he never completed the thought as the door was slammed in his face. Someone had once said [rightly in Grugan’s mind] that “the clergy always had too much power over the unfortunate people in this country…” ** He had witnessed it in first person.
*********************************************
The clanking of pikestaffs brought him sharply back to his own reality. He looked down the barrel of his musket and waited. One shot. Must make it count. No second chances, that’s for certain. Water dripped from his hat all the way down his fine, aquiline nose.
The landlord’s agent rode into view, followed by three, maybe four foot soldiers. He cocked the musket, inhaled deeply three times and pulled the trigger. The musket ball ripped through the agent’s throat and then exited through the back of his head, causing him to first arch back from the sheer force. He then slumped forward and his confused mount started to make despairing circles around the soldiers.
“From over there…” a voice pointed in Grugan’s direction.
“No…it was from over there…”
Just then another shot rang out and took down one of the soldiers, from the completely opposite direction.
“God bless you, Mick” Grugan uttered and began retreating from the Mass rock, down the wee hill, keeping to the edge of the peat bog as he made for the Tralee Road.
Predictably the second shot had confirmed the direction of the agent's killer and the remaining soldiers set off in that direction.
*Ireland, An Gorta Mor [the great hunger], 1846
** Cap'n Jacky Boyle, "Juno & The Paycock"
No comments:
Post a Comment