Read an Excerpt
1921
By Morgan Llywelyn Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2001 Morgan Llywelyn
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1315-7
CHAPTER 1
Gift-wrapped in a glistening membrane, the tips of two tiny hooves were barely visible within the old mare's birth canal. Her foal would be born headfirst like a diver plunging into life.
Before the slow seepage of years leached away her color the mare had been a lustrous gray, with shadowy dapples like black pearls seen through a mist. Now she was a dingy white, but her head was still beautiful. The huge eyes and tiny muzzle typical of Connemara ponies held a hint of Arab antecedents: a reminder of the ancient folkloric connection between Ireland and Egypt.
The cow byre that served as her stable smelled of musty straw. Icy rain spattered on the tin roof with a sound like fat sizzling in a skillet.
The little mare lay with her legs folded under her body. Her eyes were half-closed until her sides gave a violent heave. Flinging up her head, she turned to look anxiously at the man who knelt behind her on the straw.
Henry Mooney had taken off his coat and was working in his shirtsleeves as he tried to get a grip on the unborn foal. In spite of the cold he was sweating. "Be easy now, pet, be easy — you're doing grand," he murmured. His deep voice conveyed more confidence than he felt.
"What's taking so long?" a woman called from the doorway. "You're as slow as a wet wick. We et dinner without you and the afternoon's almost over."
Henry glanced up to see his mother silhouetted against spears of rain. "I'm doing my best, Mam ... for a man who hasn't a blind notion what he's about," he added under his breath.
"Sorry? I can't hear you." Hannah Mooney picked her way toward him across the straw. A rustle of fabric, a smell of damp wool. She was scowling. She habitually scowled at her eldest son.
Nothing in Henry's appearance explained her displeasure. He kept his brown hair well brushed and was always clean-shaven. His was a kindly face, intelligent rather than handsome. A broad penthouse of forehead rose above a shelf of dark brows. Eyes of a clear deep blue were bracketed with laugh lines; a heavy jaw was redeemed by a generous mouth, shaped for smiling.
Henry was not smiling now. "I can hardly see what I'm doing with you blocking the light, Mam. Would you ever fetch me a lantern from the house?"
Ignoring him, she shrugged off her black woolen shawl to reveal a black flannel dress and jacket. No color, no ornamentation; not even a wisp of lace. The high collar reached her jawbone; the weighted hem swept the ground. For fifteen years Hannah Mooney had worn — some might say flaunted — widow's weeds in their most extreme form. In this somber attire she attended Mass twice daily, stays creaking as she paced down the center aisle to the front pew: a small woman with a large talent for dominating space.
Henry had once remarked that his mother sucked up all the air in a room.
Pursing her lips, she gave her shawl a vigorous shaking that showered man and pony. Then she slowly, deliberately, rearranged the shawl around her shoulders. At last she cleared her throat. As he knew he must, her son looked up. "A lantern, Mam?" he prompted.
She sniffed disdainfully. "There's enough light in here — no call to waste lamp oil. Besides, going back and forth in the rain hurts me rheumatics. I would be dry this minute if ye'd come to the house to tell me what's happening."
"I could hardly leave her like this; the poor pony's exhausted. I wish you'd sent for Bernard when I asked you to, Mam. He knows more about horses than I do."
"Why take your brother from work when you was here already?"
"My misfortune," Henry muttered.
"Sorry?"
He raised his voice. "I said it was Flossie's misfortune that you bred her to McGrath's stallion. He's a big horse and she's an old pony. McGrath should have warned you the foal might be too large for her to deliver."
"Mr. McGrath took pity on a poor widow in rags and jags and let me have the service for half-nothing," she replied smugly. "And where was you and your advice anyway? Who'd have thought me firstborn would run off to Dublin and abandon me?" Hannah Mooney pressed one hand dramatically to her bosom.
"You're hardly abandoned, Mam. The girls are still under your roof, and my brothers live within an ass's roar. If you —"
The mare rolled over on her side and scrabbled in the straw with her forelegs. A rivulet of blood pulsed from her vagina.
"Merciful hour!" gasped Hannah. "Do something!"
Henry braced the heel of one hand against the mare's haunch and worked his other hand into the birth canal. "You should have bought a new pony for the cart and let Flossie live out her old age in the orchard. Instead ... unh, easy there ... instead you may have killed her to save a few shillings."
"Don't be telling me how to care for animals. When your father, God-a-mercy-on-him, broke his back, me butter-and-egg money's what stood between this family and the workhouse. I suppose you've forgot that by now, though. Ye always was ungrateful, Henry." Her mind slipped into a comfortable groove, replaying familiar lines. "I give everything and ask for nothing, and nothing's what I get. And that's all I'm going to say about that."
The tremulous lip, the downcast eye: in her youth Hannah Mooney had been pretty, but she had become one of those compressed women of indeterminate age who practice a fearful tyranny on those around them.
She is my mother, so I should love her, Henry reminded himself as he tried to get some leverage on the unborn foal. I should. Love her.
The foal would not come out. When he gripped its slender fetlocks and leaned back, pulling, the mare moaned like a human.
"Please send one of the girls for Bernard, Mam. It's going to take the two of us if it's not too late already."
"I knew ye would fail me."
"Then why did you insist on my doing this?"
She did not answer.
When Bernard arrived, Henry got to his feet. They had not seen each other for over a year.
Hannah Mooney's frown deepened. "Stand straight, Henry, and put your shoulders back. How many times do I have to tell you?"
The glance the brothers exchanged was layered with meaning. On the surface was mutual exasperation with their mother, but far below lay an antipathy neither would ever acknowledge. In their youth their father had pitted them against each other while Hannah made comparisons to the detriment of whichever boy was within hearing. Those scars ran deep.
Both men were of medium height, well proportioned and strongly built. There the resemblance ended. At thirty-four, Henry still had a flat belly and lean hips, though his shoulders were rounded from habitually hunching over a desk. Bernard was two years younger but looked older. He was sagging without a struggle into middle age. His belly hammocked on the waistband of his trousers.
"They don't like me leaving the plant early," he complained. "I'm after losing half a day's wages." He pulled off the thick woolen gansey his wife had knitted and rolled up his shirtsleeves. "We had best wrap her tail and get it out of our way."
"I told Henry you would know what to do," Hannah Mooney said triumphantly. "I wanted ye from the beginning, but he insisted he could manage." The glance she shot at Henry dared him to call her a liar.
CHAPTER 2
That evening Henry sat in the kitchen toying with a cold supper he could not eat. He had put his waistcoat and suit coat back on, a formality he clung to in his mother's house. A man's garments, to show he was not a child.
His sisters, Pauline and Alice, were keeping him company at table. Bernard had taken the newborn foal away and Mrs. Mooney had gone upstairs to bed, so the three had the kitchen to themselves. The room still smelled of bacon and cabbage. On the wall beside the black iron range, a calendar from the Capuchin Foreign Missions proclaimed the month to be March, the year 1917. A paraffin lamp glowed on the dresser; a brass clock ticked on the mantelpiece.
With a few exceptions, the west of Ireland was desperately poor. Thousands of country folk lived in hovels built of rough stones hewed out of the hills with primitive tools. The sagging roofs were turf; the uneven floors were mud. Sometimes the entire cabin was made of mud. The inhabitants struggled to coax a marginal existence from little strips of boggy or stony ground, and if they failed to pay rent for the land, they were evicted.
In spite of the poverty she affected, Hannah Mooney was far from destitute. The late John Mooney had been a successful blacksmith and a shrewd businessman. The poor of Limerick City lived in tumbledown shacks in fetid laneways, but Mooney had left his widow six acres of land on the outskirts of the town. The property included a stone-and-mortar cottage in good repair, a well-appointed farmyard, an orchard, and two fields rented to a neighbor. The workhouse had never been a danger.
"It's a pity about the pony," said Pauline. She was an angular woman in her twenties who wore her brown hair scraped back into an unbecoming knot. Even so, she might have attracted suitors if her mother had not constantly exhorted her to avoid making a show of herself.
"Flossie," Alice interjected. "The pony had a name and it was Flossie. We all learned to ride on her, and now she's been cut open like a butchered hog." The girl's voice teetered on the edge of hysteria.
"Stop going on about it, Alice," snapped Pauline. "You'll work yourself into a state."
"Flossie was dead by the time we finally took the foal from her," Henry said as gently as he could. "She didn't feel anything, I promise."
"You didn't ... I mean, it wasn't you who ..."
"It wasn't me — I couldn't. Bernard did what had to be done."
Rain wept down the windowpane. Pauline grabbed a cloth and began mopping up a puddle of condensation.
"Sit down and stop foostering, Polly," Henry said. "Can you never be still a minute?"
"I have too much to do, and there's no help to be had from that one." She nodded toward Alice. "If she as much as washes a cup she breaks it."
The girl seemed to shrink inside her clothes.
Henry stirred a third spoonful of sugar into his tea. "Be thankful that Bernard's wife keeps a milk goat," he commented, "otherwise the foal would die too. It may anyway, of course."
Pauline wrung out her cloth into the slop bucket and sat down, perching on the edge of her chair as if she were going to jump up again any minute. "Mam says you didn't save the pony when you could have, Henry."
"Nothing new there; no matter what I do it's not good enough. That's why I never come home if I can help it."
Alice hawked phlegm into a damp handkerchief, then folded the fabric over and blew her nose. At fifteen she still wore her lank hair streaming down her back. Her father had died the year she was born. She worshiped his memory but was terrified of her mother, who dismissed her fits of melancholia as "Alice's spells."
In the autumn the girl would enter the convent. Sisters of Mercy.
Religion had been the bulwark of Ireland's poor down the long, hard centuries. The only art in the Mooney house consisted of Holy Pictures. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, bleeding luridly, had pride of place in the front room, together with a large crucifix and several rosaries prominently displayed. Every evening of their childhood the five little Mooneys, three boys and two girls, had knelt there to recite the decades of the rosary, then gone shivering to bed.
John and Hannah Mooney had buried four children who died in infancy. In conversation they were referred to by the generic title "the Ones Above." Little angels, endlessly mourned.
Life revolved around the Church. First Communion and Confirmation, Confession and Mass, Saints' Days and Holy Days of Obligation.
The Black Fast at Lent. One scant meal a day for forty days, with no eggs, milk, or meat. Two tiny "collations" of unbuttered bread and stewed tea without sugar.
Fish on Wednesdays and Fridays. A salt-rimed ling or cod drying hard as wood on a pole by the fireplace. Sufficient to put a person off eating fish forever.
The Last Rites. The Removal of the Remains: a somber communal march to the church behind the coffin. The Funeral: old women keening like banshees. Thirty days later, the Month's Mind. Frequent obligatory visits to the graveyard thereafter. Every anniversary of every death commemorated. Grief continually renewed while the joys of life were stifled.
On Sundays, even the rope-and-plank swings in the schoolyard were tied up to prevent any accidental pleasure.
Like all good Irish Catholic mothers, Hannah Mooney aspired to giving one or more sons to the priesthood. On the day of his birth in 1891, her third son, Noel, was chosen for this privilege. He was given the largest potato and the extra quilt for his bed, and exempted from the sibling rivalry encouraged between his older brothers. In spite of these advantages, Noel could not stay out of trouble. When the family moved to Limerick in 1899, every constable in the area soon knew him as "that wild Mooney lad." Bold words painted on fences and tin cans tied to dogs' tails were a specialty.
No one but his mother expected Noel to become a priest.
Then, on his nineteenth birthday, a local carpenter's daughter informed him that he was about to become a father after all. "Not priestly, but biological," Henry had quipped.
Mrs. Mooney was not amused. "Why've ye done this to me?" she shrieked at her youngest son. In floods of tears she had retired to her room and locked the door. The house rang with her adjurations to God. The morning before the hasty wedding she had emerged to announce that little Alice would join the Sisters of Mercy as soon as she was old enough. "And that's all I'm going to say about that."
The child herself was not consulted.
Alice going into the convent meant Pauline would have to stay at home and take care of their mother until one of them died. Like generations before her, she was to be sacrificed on the pyre of duty. If Pauline had married, the sacrifice would have been demanded of Henry — but he had escaped. His mother unwittingly had driven him away.
During their childhood Hannah Mooney had regaled her brood with the story of their origins. "Me Mam was only a few skips off the bog," she was fond of recalling, "and me Da was a mountainy man what could turn his hand to anything. He worked all the hours God sends. Everything we had he made for us, from the table we et on to the shoes on our feet, and to make a few shillings he mended carts and wagons as well.
"When I was near grown, Da was hired to do a job of work on a great lord's estate on the Shannon. A job with wages every week, it was, so we left Tipperary to live in Clare. One day Da took me with him to the blacksmith to have some carriage wheels bound in iron. That's where I first saw John Mooney. He come from the old stock and there was some Welsh in him, too. But he was only a smith's apprentice when I met him. Sure didn't he look like a young king, though, with the forge light on his face and the great arms of him? 'I'll have that,' says I. And I did. By the time we married he had a forge of his own and the respect of every man in the parish, including me da."
Hannah, who had fully expected her eldest son to follow in his father's footsteps, was dismayed when Henry showed no aptitude for smithing. He could not hammer iron to a shape no matter how he tried. Bernard was good with tools; Henry was interested in people. What Noel, the youngest, was interested in, no one knew.
When Henry left school, he had taken the first job he was offered, as a printer's devil with the Limerick Leader newspaper. He began work in the heavy country brogues, shabby serge trousers, and collarless shirt he had worn as a schoolboy. The brogues cramped his feet and the trousers were too short, but when he suggested new ones his mother said, "Wait till they wear out completely, same as your father did. There's no call for you to put on airs."
The official job of a printer's devil was to carry used lead type back to the hellbox to be melted down again. He also served as a dogsbody for everyone in the office. Henry fetched sandwiches and whiskey, cleaned muddy shoes, took letters to the post office, made excuses to wives when their husbands were working late and collected those same husbands from the pub when they needed collecting. Equipped with a battered bicycle, the ubiquitous form of transport for able-bodied Irishmen, he learned to wobble along with a drunken reporter precariously perched on the crossbar.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 1921 by Morgan Llywelyn. Copyright © 2001 Morgan Llywelyn. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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