REHEARSING FOR THE SHOW
Famine not only carried off a million of the living, but it claimed also
the unborn. Anna's second child was born a few months after the siege
was broken, but the child had been starved in its mother's womb and
lived only three months. There was no wake. Wakes are for older people.
There were no candles to burn, no extra sheet to put over the old
dresser, and no clock to stop at the moment of death.
The little wasted thing lay in its undressed pine coffin on the table
and the neighbors came in and had a look. Custom said it should be kept
the allotted time and the tyrant was obeyed. A dozen of those to whom a
wake was a means of change and recreation came late and planted
themselves for the night.
"Ye didn't haave a hard time wi' th' second, did ye, Anna?" asked Mrs.
Mulholland.
"No," Anna said quietly.
"Th' hard times play'd th' divil wi' it before it was born, I'll be
bound," said a second.
A third averred that the child was "the very spit out of its father's
mouth." Ghost stories, stories of the famine, of hard luck, of hunger,
of pain and the thousand and one aspects of social and personal sorrow
had the changes rung on them.
Anna sat in the corner. She had to listen, she had to answer when
directly addressed and the prevailing idea of politeness made her the
center of every story and the object of every moral!
The refreshments were all distributed and diplomatically the mourners
were informed that there was nothing more; nevertheless they stayed on
and on. Nerve-racked and unstrung, Anna staggered to her feet and took
Jamie to the door.
"I'll go mad, dear, if I have to stand it all night!"
They dared not be discourteous. A reputation for heartlessness would
have followed Anna to the grave if she had gone to bed while the dead
child lay there.
Withero had been at old William Farren's wake and was going home when he
saw Anna and Jamie at the door. They explained the situation.
"Take a dandther down toward th' church," he said, "an' then come back."
Willie entered the house in an apparently breathless condition.
"Yer takin' it purty aisy here," he said, "whin 'Jowler' Hainey's
killin' his wife an' wreckin' th' house!"
In about two minutes he was alone. He put a coal in his pipe and smoked
for a minute. Then he went over to the little coffin. He took his pipe
out of his mouth, laid it on the mantel-shelf and returned. The little
hands were folded. He unclasped them, took one of them in his rough
calloused palm.
"Poore wee thing," he said in an undertone, "poore wee thing." He put
the hands as he found them. Still looking at the little baby face he
added:
"Heigho, heigho, it's bad, purty bad, but it's worse where there isn't
even a dead wan!"
When Anna returned she lay down on her bed, dressed as she was, and
Jamie and Withero kept the vigil--with the door barred. Next morning at
the earliest respectable hour Withero carried the little coffin under
his arm and Jamie walked beside him to the graveyard.
During the fifteen years that followed the burial of "the famine child"
they buried three others and saved three--four living and four dead.
I was the ninth child. Anna gave me a Greek name which means "Helper of
men."
Shortly after my arrival in Scott's entry, they moved to Pogue's entry.
The stone cabin was thatch-covered and measured about twelve by sixteen
feet. The space comprised three apartments. One, a bedroom; over the
bedroom and beneath the thatch a little loft that served as a bedroom to
those of climbing age. The rest of it was workshop, dining-room,
sitting-room, parlor and general community news center. The old folks
slept in a bed, the rest of us slept on the floor and beneath the
thatch. Between the bedroom door and the open fireplace was the
chimney-corner. Near the door stood an old pine table and some dressers.
They stood against the wall and were filled with crockery. We never
owned a chair. There were several pine stools, a few creepies (small
stools), and a long bench that ran along the bedroom wall, from the
chimney corner to the bedroom door. The mud floor never had the luxury
of a covering, nor did a picture ever adorn the bare walls. When the
floor needed patching, Jamie went to somebody's garden, brought a
shovelful of earth, mixed it and filled the holes. The stools and
creepies were scrubbed once a week, the table once a day. I could draw
an outline of that old table now and accurately mark every dent and
crack in it. I do not know where it came from, but each of us had a
_hope_ that one day we should possess a pig. We built around the hope a
sty and placed it against the end of the cabin. The pig never turned up,
but the hope lived there throughout a generation!
We owned a goat once. In three months it reduced the smooth kindly
feeling in Pogue's entry to the point of total eclipse. We sold it and
spent a year in winning back old friends. We had a garden. It measured
thirty-six by sixteen inches, and was just outside the front window. At
one end was a small currant bush and in the rest of the space Anna grew
an annual crop of nasturtiums.
Once we were prosperous. That was when two older brothers worked with my
father at shoemaking. I remember them, on winter nights, sitting around
the big candlestick--one of the three always singing folk-songs as he
worked. As they worked near the window, Anna sat in her corner and by
the light of a candle in her little sconce made waxed ends for the men.
I browsed among the lasts, clipping, cutting and scratching old leather
parings and dreaming of the wonderful days beyond when I too could make
a boot and sing "Black-eyed Susan."
Then the news came--news of a revolution.
"They're making boots by machinery now," Anna said one day.
"It's dotin' ye are, Anna," Jamie replied. She read the account.
"How cud a machine make a boot, Anna?" he asked in bewilderment.
"I don't know, dear."
Barney McQuillan was the village authority on such things. When he told
Jamie, he looked aghast and said, "How quare!"
Then makers became menders--shoemakers became cobblers. There was
something of magic and romance in the news that a machine could turn out
as much work as twenty-five men, but when my brothers moved away to
other parts of the world to find work, the romance was rubbed off.
"Maybe we can get a machine?" Jamie said.
"Aye, but shure ye'd have to get a factory to put it in!"
"Is that so?"
"Aye, an' we find it hard enough t' pay fur what we're in now!"
Barney McQuillan was the master-shoe-maker in our town who was best
able to readjust himself to changed conditions. He became a
master-cobbler and doled out what he took in to men like Jamie. He kept
a dozen men at work, making a little off each, just as the owner of the
machine did in the factory. In each case the need of skill vanished and
the power of capital advanced. Jamie dumbly took what was left--cobbling
for Barney. To Anna the whole thing meant merely the death of a few more
hopes. For over twenty years she had fought a good fight, a fight in
which she played a losing part, though she was never wholly defeated.
Her first fight was against slang and slovenly speech. She started early
in their married life to correct Jamie. He tried hard and often, but he
found it difficult to speak one language to his wife and another to his
customers. From the lips of Anna, it sounded all right, but the same
pronunciation by Jamie seemed affected and his customers gaped at him.
Then she directed her efforts anew to the children. One after another
she corrected their grammar and pronunciation, corrected them every day
and every hour of the day that they were in her presence. Here again she
was doomed to failure. The children lived on the street and spoke its
language. It seemed a hopeless task. She never whined over it. She was
too busy cleaning, cooking, sewing and at odd times helping Jamie, but
night after night for nearly a generation she took stock of a life's
effort and each milestone on the way spelt failure. She could see no
light--not a glimmer. Not only had she failed to impress her language
upon others, but she found herself gradually succumbing to her
environment and actually lapsing into vulgar forms herself. There was a
larger and more vital conflict than the one she had lost. It was the
fight against dirt. In such small quarters, with so many children and
such activity in work she fought against great odds. Bathing facilities
were almost impossible: water had to be brought from the town well,
except what fell on the roof, and that was saved for washing clothes.
Whatever bathing there was, was done in the tub in which Jamie steeped
his leather. We children were suspicious that when Jamie bathed Anna had
a hand in it. They had a joke between them that could only be explained
on that basis. She called it "grooming the elephant."
"Jist wait, m' boy," she would say in a spirit of kindly banter, "till
the elephant has to be groomed, and I'll bring ye down a peg or two."
There was a difference of opinion among them as to the training of
children.
"No chile iver thrived on saft words," he said; "a wet welt is
betther."
"Aye, yer wet welt stings th' flesh, Jamie, but it niver gets at a
chile's mind."
"Thrue for you, but who th' ---- kin get at a chile's mind?"
One day I was chased into the house by a bigger boy. I had found a
farthing. He said it was his. The money was handed over and the boy left
with his tongue in his cheek. I was ordered to strip. When ready he laid
me across his knee and applied the "wet welt."
An hour later it was discovered that a week had elapsed between the
losing and finding of the farthing. No sane person would believe that a
farthing could lie for a whole week on the streets of Antrim.
"Well," he said, "ye need a warmin' like that ivery day, an' ye had nown
yestherday, did ye?"
On another occasion I found a ball, one that had never been lost. A boy,
hoping to get me in front of my father, claimed the ball. My mother on
this occasion sat in judgment.
"Where did _you_ get the ball?" she asked the boy. He couldn't remember.
She probed for the truth, but neither of us would give in. When all
efforts failed she cut the ball in half and gave each a piece!
"Nixt time I'll tell yer Dah," the boy said when he got outside, "he
makes you squeal like a pig."
When times were good--when work and wages got a little ahead of hunger,
which was seldom, Anna baked her own bread. Three kinds of bread she
baked. "Soda,"--common flour bread, never in the shape of a loaf, but
bread that lay flat on the griddle; "pirta oaten"--made of flour and
oatmeal; and "fadge"--potato bread. She always sung while baking and she
sang the most melancholy and plaintive airs. As she baked and sang I
stood beside her on a creepie watching the process and awaiting the
end, for at the close of each batch of bread I always had my
"duragh"--an extra piece.
When hunger got ahead of wages the family bread was bought at Sam
Johnson's bakery. The journey to Sam's was full of temptation to me.
Hungry and with a vested interest in the loaf on my arm, I was not over
punctilious in details of the moral law. Anna pointed out the
opportunities of such a journey. It was a chance to try my mettle with
the arch tempter. It was a mental gymnasium in which moral muscle got
strength. There wasn't in all Ireland a mile of highway so well paved
with good intentions. I used to start out, well keyed up morally and
humming over and over the order of the day. When, on the home stretch, I
had made a dent in Sam's architecture, I would lay the loaf down on the
table, good side toward my mother. While I was doing that she had read
the story of the fall on my face. I could feel her penetrating gaze.
"So he got ye, did he?"
"Aye," I would say in a voice too low to be heard by my father.
The order at Sam's was usually a sixpenny loaf, three ha'pence worth of
tea and sugar and half an ounce of tobacco.
There were times when Barney had no work for my father, and on such
occasions I came home empty-handed. Then Jamie would go out to find work
as a day laborer. Periods like these were glossed over by Anna's humor
and wit. As they sat around the table, eating "stir-about" without milk,
or bread without tea, Jamie would grunt and complain.
"Aye, faith," Anna would say, "it's purty bad, but it's worse where
there's none at all!"
When the wolf lingered long at the door I went foraging--foraging as
forages a hungry dog and in the same places. Around the hovels of the
poor where dogs have clean teeth a boy has little chance. One day,
having exhausted the ordinary channels of relief without success, I
betook myself to the old swimming-hole on the mill race. The boys had a
custom of taking a "shiverin' bite" when they went bathing. It was on a
Sunday afternoon in July and quite a crowd sat around the hole. I
neither needed nor wanted a bath--I wanted a bite. No one offered a
share of his crust. A big boy named Healy was telling of his prowess as
a fighter.
"I'll fight ye fur a penny!" said I.
"Where's yer penny?" said Healy.
"I'll get it th' morra."
A man seeing the difficulty and willing to invest in a scrap advanced
the wager. I was utterly outclassed and beaten. Peeling my clothes off I
went into the race for a swim and to wash the blood off. When I came out
Healy had hidden my trousers. I searched for hours in vain. The man who
paid the wager gave me an extra penny and I went home holding my jacket
in front of my legs. The penny saved me from a "warming," but Anna,
feeling that some extra discipline was necessary, made me a pair of
trousers out of an old potato sack.
"That's sackcloth, dear," she said, "an' ye can aither sit in th' ashes
in them or wear them in earning another pair! Hold fast t' yer penny!"
In this penitential outfit I had to sell my papers. Every fiber of my
being tingled with shame and humiliation. I didn't complain of the
penance, but I swore vengeance on Healy. She worked the desire for
vengeance out of my system in her chimney-corner by reading to me often
enough, so that I memorized the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. Miss
McGee, the postmistress, gave me sixpence for the accomplishment and
that went toward a new pair of trousers. Concerning Healy, Anna said:
"Bate 'im with a betther brain, dear!"
Despite my fistic encounters, my dents in the family loaves, my shinny,
my marbles and the various signs of total or at least partial depravity,
Anna clung to the hope that out of this thing might finally come what
she was looking, praying and hoping for.
An item on the credit side of my ledger was that I was born in a caul--a
thin filmy veil that covered me at birth. Of her twelve I was the only
one born in "luck." In a little purse she kept the caul, and on special
occasions she would exhibit it and enumerate the benefits and privileges
that went with it. Persons born in a caul were immune from being hung,
drawn and quartered, burned to death or lost at sea.
It was on the basis of the caul I was rented to old Mary McDonagh. My
duty was to meet her every Monday morning. The meeting insured her luck
for the week. Mary was a huckster. She carried her shop on her arm--a
wicker basket in which she had thread, needles, ribbons and other things
which she sold to the farmers and folks away from the shopping center.
No one is lucky while bare-footed. Having no shoes I clattered down
Sandy Somerville's entry in my father's. At the first clatter, she came
out, basket on arm, and said:
"Morra, bhoy, God's blessin' on ye!"
"Morra, Mary, an' good luck t' ye," was my answer.
I used to express my wonder that I couldn't turn this luck of a
dead-sure variety into a pair of shoes for myself.
Anna said: "Yer luck, dear, isn't in what ye can get, but in what ye can
give!"
When Antrim opened its first flower show I was a boy of all work at old
Mrs. Chaine's. The gardener was pleased with my work and gave me a
hothouse plant to put in competition. I carried it home proudly and
laid it down beside her in the chimney-corner.
"The gerd'ner says it'll bate th' brains out on aany geranium in the
show!" I said.
"Throth it will that, dear," she said, "but sure ye couldn't take a
prize fur it!"
"Why?" I growled.
"Ah, honey, shure everybody would know that ye didn't grow it--forby
they know that th' smoke in here would kill it in a few days."
I sulked and protested.
"That's a nice way t' throw cowld wather on th' chile," Jamie said. "Why
don't ye let 'im go on an' take his chances at the show?"
A pained look overspread her features. It was as if he had struck her
with his fist. Her eyes filled with tears and she said huskily:
"The whole world's a show, Jamie, an' this is the only place the wee
fella has to rehearse in."
I sat down beside her and laid my head in her lap. She stroked it in
silence for a minute or two. I couldn't quite see, however, how I could
miss that show! She saw that after all I was determined to enter the
lists. She offered to put a card on it for me so that they would know
the name of the owner. This is what she wrote on the card:
"This plant is lent for decorative purposes."
That night there was an unusual atmosphere in her corner. She had a
newly tallied cap on her head and her little Sunday shawl over her
shoulders. Her candle was burning and the hearthstones had an extra coat
of whitewash. She drew me up close beside her and told me a story.
"Once, a long, long time ago, God, feelin' tired, went to sleep an' had
a nice wee nap on His throne. His head was in His han's an' a wee white
cloud came down an' covered him up. Purty soon He wakes up an' says He:
"'Where's Michael?'
"'Here I am, Father!' said Michael.
"'Michael, me boy,' says God, 'I want a chariot and a charioteer!'
"'Right ye are!' says he. Up comes the purtiest chariot in the city of
Heaven an' finest charioteer.
"'Me boy,' says God, 'take a million tons ov th' choicest seeds of th'
flowers of Heaven an' take a trip around th' world wi' them. Scatther
them,' says He, 'be th' roadsides an' th' wild places of th' earth where
my poor live.'
"'Aye,' says the charioteer, 'that's jist like ye, Father. It's th'
purtiest job of m' afther-life an' I'll do it finely.'
"'It's jist come t' Me in a dream,' says th' Father, 'that th' rich have
all the flowers down there and th' poor haave nown at all. If a million
tons isn't enough take a billion tons!'"
At this point I got in some questions about God's language and the kind
of flowers.
"Well, dear," she said, "He spakes Irish t' Irish people and the
charioteer was an Irishman."
"Maybe it was a wuman!" I ventured.
"Aye, but there's no difference up there."
"Th' flowers," she said, "were primroses, butthercups an' daisies an'
th' flowers that be handy t' th' poor, an' from that day to this there's
been flowers a-plenty for all of us everywhere!"
"Now you go to-morra an' gether a basketful an' we'll fix them up in th'
shape of th' Pryamid of Egypt an' maybe ye'll get a prize."
I spent the whole of the following day, from dawn to dark, roaming over
the wild places near Antrim gathering the flowers of the poor. My
mother arranged them in a novel bouquet--a bouquet of wild flowers, the
base of it yellow primroses, the apex of pink shepherd's sundials, and
between the base and the apex one of the greatest variety of wild
flowers ever gotten together in that part of the world.
It created a sensation and took first prize. At the close of the
exhibition Mrs. James Chaine distributed the prizes. When my name was
called I went forward slowly, blushing in my rags, and received a
twenty-four piece set of china! It gave me a fit! I took it home, put it
in her lap and danced. We held open house for a week, so that every man,
woman and child in the community could come in and "handle" it.
Withero said we ought to save up and build a house to keep it in!
She thought that a propitious time to explain the inscription she put on
the card.
"Ah, thin," I said, "shure it's thrue what ye always say."
"What's that, dear?"
"It's nice t' be nice."