God in an Irish Kitchen
by Leo R. Ward
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012
All rights reserved
edited by Leigh Michaels
Cover illustration copyright 2012 by Michael W. Lemberger
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This is a work of fiction. Characters and events portrayed in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or real events is purely coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
STRONG NATURE IN HIM
We discover the Lannons of Galway City, catch the Claddagh looking at us, and meet a man who has been lost for two hundred and fifty years.
We see the Claddagh houses from the inside, watch seven men capture one salmon, and hear old women sitting on the floor of the church say their prayers in Gaelic.
We discover clover and cattle, but mostly hills and rocks and a few people, circle gently around an unknown mountain, cross Connemara without knowing it, and are told that we are welcome home.
Still misled, we do not know that there are only people in Ireland. People receive us into their homes and say there is strong nature in us.
CHILDREN OF GRANA UAILE
A man plays the flute and girls dance jigareels. A little girl says, “Oh, just foine,” in the style of the Yanks. At her house, people dance every night.
An old woman at the shore serves us tea, a girl shows us her house and her brother whom she is putting on for the Chinese mission.
The speckled chicken barely escapes with its life. Two old women cronies praise each other and all the neighbors and God. It is from God and the Blessed Virgin a boy has the gift of fiddling.
A man comes up out of the praties and shows us the crop. He tells us how he has made land and how he quit the drink.
THERE’S UPS AND DOWNS
People eat moss. They come to the Fair, tell us about the times under Dev and show us some “fine, lovely pigs” lying in the Straw.
The people crowd down against the sea for the races, and a woman is delighted when her own mare wins. The shape and size of a village.
A pilot sitting on a clump of turf tells us of the weather, and of cattle shaking with condition. Though he is the best-kept man in Mayo, he falls down dead by a reek of hay.
Cattleman gets a fine lovely wife at a Fair. He talks of the climate, of Yanks, of a lump of cloud, of The Mountain; he leads horses through his kitchen, dances a step for us and bids us goodbye.
NEARER THAN THE DOOR
People get ready to climb St. Patrick’s Mountain. Twenty thousand ascend at dawn and make the Station on their knees.
We read the signs of the times at the church door, are blown off a ridge into a Holy Well, make our way among bogs to the town called Knock where we visit people who saw the Apparitions.
All go to Lough Derg to do penance, and most find the Canon’s hour the hardest. They fast and go in their feet, they drink black tea and break dry bread, and afterwards see the world anew.
Mollie McCann and Christopher Keogh tell us of the Holy Man of Dublin, and invite us to make “the pilgrimage.” Everywhere we find the Sacred Heart reigning in pubs and kitchens. The form of an Irish farewell.
STRONG NATURE IN HIM
We discover the Lannons of Galway City, catch the Claddagh looking at us, and meet a man who has been lost for two hundred and fifty years.
IT WAS Kate Lannon, a lean gull of a woman, whom we were going to see, and her husband Tom, one of the biggest men in the West. But we didn’t know we were going, or that we were nearly at their house.
The day was about at its middle, and so was the year, for it was along toward the end of June. The sun had broken gently through the foggy clouds at nine or ten, and was at its best now. We stood in it, afraid. For what right has the foreigner, an “outlander” among native people going about their business? They may be a little odd and strange to him, but he is certainly so to every one of them.
Where we stood in the sun was below the Salmon Weir bridge in Galway City, and what we saw was broken little strings of people going back and forth across the bridge, up and down along the stream, some of them with baskets of fish, some of them empty-handed and idling along, some little knots of two or three talking. A few rowboats, chained closely to the shores of the stream, lay still, so still as to suggest that their owners had decided never to lift an oar again. And all this time what we saw looking at us from the other side was just what we were looking for, it was the Claddagh, the famous fishing village within Galway City. But we did not know that we saw it. We knew nothing of Ireland or of the Irish in Ireland, we were without history, literature, the story of Irish politics, and we did not know the language. Of course we could not see what was before us, and we should have to have things pushed bodily upon us.
Now the thing we were anxious to do was to see the inside of one of the houses. If we might just get a glimpse of one of those Irish kitchens that are so well spoken of!
Mrs. Lannon did not read our thoughts at all. She let us idle and gawk along under the Arch, to her house and past her house where she stood at her own door talking to a neighbor woman. We made bold all the same, we went up and asked her whether we might see her kitchen.
We might, indeed. There was nothing hesitant in Mrs. Lannon’s look, or in her way with us. And the bare word “might” was not the word she used. She bowed down to the floor, she curtsied with a kind of dip inside the long skirt and with a spread of the apron, and she said, “You’re a thousand welcomes!” We stooped and went in, and the neighbor, who was merely visiting, bowed and went with out a word to her own home. “God be praised!” said Kate Lannon. “You are welcome here.” We meant to and really tried to tell her it was too forward of a stranger to be coming into her house. But she never answered, likely because she is not able to make sense of such a thought.
In a second then we were over the one little stone step outside, the half-step inside, and were on the cement floor of the kitchen. The room had not the usual open hearth, but a kind of meshed or grated stove where the live coals could be seen, and the place, with a fire like that and a small window and the low door, was not too dark. With a swish of the gingham apron, and as if by one stroke, a little chair, washed and scrubbed and well worn, was brushed and placed for us before the fire.
Still, we did not know the woman and were not known by anyone in this town or in this part of Ireland. And yet who cared about that? Not herself, certainly not herself. For one has to learn that it is Irish law, as much perhaps as it ever was Greek law, that a stranger is a guest, and that a guest is a royal person. So the queerness of the fact that those who have ruled the Irish have had to be seen as the foreigner and the enemy.
This was one of the two things that struck us first in Kate Lannon’s house, this effect of the door opening in and not out, ever. “You are welcome, a thousand welcomes.” That is what the manner as well as the word said, and it is a manner that does not belong merely to Kate Lannon. We would come to hear it at many doors. An old man all his life making land in a bog would .say later to us, “You are kindly welcome to our little place.” In truth, the can be almost tiring in their wish never to offend the stranger. The other “great thing,” in their own word, found everywhere, in kitchen and pub, in the villages and the cities, is the enthroned Sacred Heart. At least, next after the openness of the door, this would al ways keep coming home to us.
Kate Lannon is fond of the religion. She is anxious, not quite at her ease, she doesn’t let up or ever for a moment ride on her oars. To her, everything is a miracle; but we shall learn that it is not so to Tom, who will blurt out a laugh or two at her piety and will hurt her. She has a light burning this day before the Sacred Heart, which is a big colored image of the face and shoulders and heart of Our Lord. And a red heart made of some kind of cloth is also attached to that same wall above the kitchen table, and then, as if all this were not enough, the calendar, sent from relatives in Boston, bears the image of the Sacred Heart. It is not too much for Kate. The light must be kept burning this day, and every day, and night.
Near the big image is a framed document saying that each member of the family is consecrated to the Sacred Heart, and Kate, a kind of child, answers us outright and at once when we ask what is the sense of the writing on this paper. The priest, she says, has come and dedicated the house and family to the Sacred Heart. (Wherever else we later ask that question people will answer in such a way as to suggest that we know the answer as well as they do.) We inquire then whether she knows the new English saints, Thomas More and John Fisher. She says she does indeed know them. She knows all about them, she has read “on a book” the life of St. Thomas More; and when we show her a medal of them, blessed by the Pope on the day of their canonization, she asks to be blessed with it.
Her life is full of saints and prayers. Just a day or two ago, she finished a noven-ya to Our Lady of Lourdes. And as she finished it, she looked down on the floor of the church and saw some little thing that turned out to be a relic of Matt Talbot, the Dublin laborer, whom so many regard as a saint; she went then to the priest and asked what should she do with it and was told to keep it for a week, praying every day for the one who lost it; if in that time he did not turn up, she might keep it. She said she did pray hard for the owner. “I did, then, I prayed hard for that person whoever it was. But I was glad when we saw no sight or sign of him, and I got to keep the relic.” She wants the relic and she wishes all good to the owner of it. Won’t we wait a minute while she runs up the stairs now to bring the relic from the loft for us to see? The stairs is a kind of ladder, inside the kitchen.
All this time we are thinking we are alone with her, for the great Tom is at the moment abroad with men in a rowboat, out against Aran Island, or out maybe to the sea itself, to catch fish; for it’s the way the Lannons live. But we aren’t alone at all. Her son Charles is standing up straight against the wall. He is blocked into a kind of double corner made by wall and stove and another wall, and is like a fixture there; a thick lump of a man of twenty, up nearly to six feet, built out square at the shoulders like the eaves of a house, a man who looks as if he would move slowly but with considerable power. We ask him whether he possibly knows Matt Talbot, the natural ally of men who do hard work. The reply of Charles is like one sudden word, with the accent all on the last syllable: “I-have We have to ask what he has said, and the reply comes as suddenly the second time. To keep up talk, we suggest that his mother is a pious woman. Again the answer is abrupt, like the bang of a door: “Th’holiest-woman-in-the-street!” Again we have to ask him to repeat: “Th’holiest-woman-in-the-street!”
2
On this first trip of ours, no Tom Lannon is in sight, big as he is. A year later we come again. We don’t find the house easily, and have to be told that it is over beyond the Archway. There is nature in us, Kate Lannon says, strong nature, to come back to the same place and the same people. We see now that the house, which is officially condemned and will be torn down and replaced within two years, has two little windows downstairs, one on each side of the street-door, and two windows upstairs in what must be a kind of attic. It is toward dark, but herself knows us at a glance. The big son and the big father are not “in within.” They, and two more sons, are somewhere among the groups of men who chat for the hours of the long summer evenings when the sun is set and the night is somehow stood off beyond the sky. She wants to make tea for us, the water is ready and hot. Well, then, are we after corning from the Catholic Truth Congress which was held but a few days ago in Tuam?
“Were you not, then? It was wonderful. There was an excursion Sunday from Galway City. Were you never in Tuam? . . . They have a beet factory there—it’s a beautiful one; it’s three or four years started. A woman there told me they are going to put up three or four more new departments in it. And there was an excursion there from Achill; you know, Achill Island. Do you know what way they came? They crossed over by Clare Island, and fought the waves. They’re wonderful! They belong to the arch diocese of Tuam. Dr. Gilmartin is their Bishop.”
He is an old man, she says, and the Bishop of Galway sang the Mass. Then she tells us about the Volunteers, a group of young men, one of her sons among them, living in tents outside the city, but she says they are not very serious soldiers: “It’s more a holiday with them than any thing else.” And then with no word of warning, Tom Lannon doubles up and comes through the door, brushing it on all sides as he comes. We are not really prepared for so massive a man, or for his coming at all. He takes our hand in his own generous paw of a hand, and he sits down on the corner of a chair as if it were the edge of a fishing boat. For a moment he says little on any topic. She wants him to strengthen her word about the Confraternity which, she says, meets at St. Nicholas’ the fourth Sunday of the month, but he does not concur with her or volunteer any talk.
Then she asks whether we have ever been up Croagh Patrick, St. Patrick’s own holy mountain. We have, but out of season. Well, they climbed it, himself and herself, two years ago. A brother or sister of one of them was home from the States. They left on the excursion bus at two in the morning and had climbed to the top of the Reek at six. Then somehow or other big Tom missed Mass there, and, as if he had not done enough for one day, he hurried to the foot and then several miles to a neighboring town.
Ah, ha! maybe herself then is smart. For this is a subject on which Tom is willing to talk, and the day they went remains a great day in both their lives. He takes more than his part then on the bare fact and some good theory of the Irishman who has lately committed suicide: yes, they have heard of it, everyone has; and he speaks of a man of their own town, again a rich man, who did the same a few years ago. This earlier Galway man had worried himself beyond the limit over income taxes, and the Lannons do not bother to say that the end was bad. He had been too keen and anxious for making and storing money, says Tom Lannon: “Between jumping and hop ping, he had a lump sum of seventeen or eighteen thou sand pounds; some thought he didn’t report it honestly, and I suppose he knew it would come against him.” Another rich man died suddenly, and people thought he might have killed himself! Tom Lannon says, “From fear, I suppose. He seen this coming on him.”
The conclusion is simple and is stated as beyond any doubt. “Too much money,” says Tom, “is not good.” Kate nods as in full agreement.
We say: “It did him no good.”
“It’s not lucky,” says Tom.
He says that fish is the best food. Now we wish we could sometimes say something with the finality with which he says this. And then he goes on to put other things into their places. Pork is all right, it is easily second best, it is really good, but no other meat is fit for food.
Kate Lannon is well informed, she has read the news of this very day. She says—and she doesn’t hesitate in this —that the Negus has made a great speech before the League. She doesn’t mention England or Italy in this connection, but says Mr. de Valera has defended him, which is a fine thing to have done. “And it comes back to us. It comes back to (the honor of) Ireland.” It is a simple but real satisfaction that she takes in the honor and the deed. Then she says there will be great trouble in the North on the Twelfth. “I see where the Bishop asked the people to keep quiet.”
It does not take her an instant to agree that the Irish want to rule themselves, well or ill, and not to be ruled by any other, and then, without any priming from us, she adds in a calm, even voice as if making non-partisan report of fact: “They hate the English.” But the Irish do have to suffer. That is because they are of the blood and bone of the Church. They are a part of the Church, she says, and “I think it is God’s holy will that the Church suffer persecution. God give us courage to persevere!”
Tom does not say that he agrees or disagrees. He sits with the left leg thrown out wide, the thick left hand doubled into the thigh, and the right forearm making a solid prop from chin to knee.
Her own brother, though, was killed in the War, he whose picture is beside the Sacred Heart. A good grown man, twenty-three he was. He was not more than the two weeks in the Navy, his ship was coming from Ostend and struck mines. She prays every day for him.
Not Char-les, but the oldest boy of this house, is quick at the books, “and they had him praised up to where he’d go away to school.” His aunt in the States offered at once to help.
“For the priesthood?” we suppose.
No, she says, for anything. If he continued (accent on the first syllable), the clergy would help. But he wouldn’t. He won thirty pounds. Still, he wouldn’t.
Well, then, we say we have news for her, from Dublin.
“Oh, sure, then. You have,” she says, ready for anything, and with that curious final tone that goes with the Irish “I know,” “You do,” and so on. “God is good for me,” she says, settling herself a bit.
It is about Matt Talbot. We have seen the place where this great man fell dead by the Dominican Church in Dublin. Tom Lannon is not moved, not favorably moved in any case. He says he has “listened to a good deal of talk” about Matt Talbot. Herself it is that is interested, and happy. She says: “The people are praying for his canonization. I pray always for him.”
Isn’t that strange, that she should pray for him? No, she says it is not: “for his speedy canonization,” and she laughs as she adds: “I hope to get some favors through him.”
Always she is making or “doing” noven-yas, but the big man Tom takes little stock in them or in her stories of miracles. She still has the relic of Matt Talbot which she had last year, and she has been trying with the help of it to tame the boy Char-les. “I put that relic on that lad. He was a bit wild, and he’s a little better. I sewed it un beknownst into his clothes.” He ran away once “by a ship” to England. He was six months gone, no one knowing at all where he could be. The priests couldn’t find him when they watched for him at the Congress in Dublin (1932), and then, after all, he came home by the train. “Wasn’t the Congress wonderful! Glory be to God!” The boy came home the day she finished a novena. It was October, up to the last day itself, “and they were having devotions, to finish the month like; and I was at the end of a noven-ya that day, and in he walked; and I put it to that.”
Big hairy Tom is there as she tells this. He says nothing. She tells then of a young woman who “was looking for a house, and she made a noven-ya, and on the last day of it the key was put into her hand.” The man laughs, just a little, and quickly, and shifts to see how we take her story, and the wife is not the least bit pleased with him.
Kate Lannon is almost a tall woman, and she says she has always been spare and thin; she is like a warped board. The color .of her, of her face and hair, and, one might say, the color or tone round about her, is a kind of speckled coffee-brown or iodine, something like the seaweed called kelp when it is gone partly dry; and it seems to us that this is a color that goes with many women, a good share of them, all along the west coast. Her head has not one grey hair, but when a stranger first sees her against the fire, in an old grey skirt, heavy and long, that perhaps is homespun, and in a house that is itself grey in a grey climate where the sky is never quite blue, one easily thinks of her as seventy. Then when one sees her take care of her fire and trot up the stairs and knows of her climbing mountains, one begins to lay money that she is not far into forty. She says she is fifty-six. Honestly, there was no way for us to have made a good guess. With the help of the Lord, she will go up to eighty, and maybe up to a hundred.
Tom is that age, too, in the fifties. He is sandy, and toward grisly, the hair is thinning and turning, and there are cat’s whiskers streaming out of his ears. He is an immense man, with a body like a bear’s, arms that have fought tons of water, and yet he is not lean meat but has a sort of blubber all over him, so that he must make a load for a small boat; he stands as we depart, and he says he is up to six feet two. Why is he not fishing these best days of the year? Well, he can catch enough fish for a firm; and well he might, for he has a new motor-boat which is a great advantage over the old sails: it can ride through a weight of water. But there’s nothing in fish, not a thing at this season; more are thrown back dead in the water than are sold. It is a sin to catch them.
As we go out of the house, he speaks a gentle word that is as calm and unforced as the night. He says, “It is soft this even’.”
The next day, the kelp-brown woman tells us a word or two outright about herself. It is her niece that is with her this day, a girl brought up by this aunt, and her own mother buried in England; the girl is married now, her husband is “a laborer like, at the foundry.” Mrs. Lannon’s own daughter is married and has a family in the Claddagh. The niece, a matronly little person, says the aunt “is scrupulous, in the line of religion: she makes a sin out of everything.” The two laugh together over this hard, direct statement, and one is safe if one guesses that the family and all the neighbors, whose business it may be, too, are agreed on the point. And, by the way, isn’t this a plain un-Irish little girl, and not English either?
The lady of the house, more used than we to the plain girl, goes on cooking her griddle cake, she turns it out now on a table and wishes to fix tea for us: “The water is hot this minute.” And we, foolish, unknowing, green at the courtesies, yet unborn into Ireland, do not take bite or drop with her! Instead, we ask about the Claddagh ring. It would take two guineas to get a good one, and the same for a brooch; the young woman’s ring, with two hands clasping and a harp on it—the Claddagh style—cost one pound ten: it is the properest kind of wedding-ring. The Yanks, lots of them, buy these rings for keepsakes, and also carry home Galway pork and a dried fish which (these women say) smells very rank, and a green vegetable called cranyuk which grows like moss on the rocks of the Aran Islands; this can be cooked and eaten with butter, it is good that way, but the Lannons say it is best uncooked with a little salt on it.
3
The city of Galway was cut to pieces long ago by a vigorous rough man named Cromwell, and in the year between our own two visits it suffered a great loss. For the place, which we shall call the Mollie House, where they had the best tea, the best Irish ham and a bread that was a darker brown than whole-wheat and less coarse than rye, was closed. On our first trip we went along late on a black, wet evening to find anything at all to eat, and we stumbled by chance into Mollie’s place. It was the best in town, but the manner of service was odd. Only a little girl was below, and she sold no tea or cakes in the evening, nothing but smokes. She sent us upstairs. And the way she did this was so simple, her manner so human and elegant, with a voice that has to talk in song! All she said as she called up the stairs was, “Mollie! Fix Father a lovely tea!” The tea was quite good, it was well served in a busy room, and the way and the voice of the little one below gave a special relish to all the good things. After the year the little girl is gone and the Mollie House serves no tea, and in another tea-shop a good practical woman looking for tips tells us, “They had good enough things in the hotel without that, and they closed it up,” her last word getting the accent and a surge, and its last letter doubled.
The town of Galway is for good or for bad two towns. In one, most of the fishermen and hardly anybody but fishermen live. Into the other, the big shiploads of tourists come. The two towns overlap, of course; men from the Claddagh work at the dock, and women from it sell fish in the streets: women that one would tend to take in every case as old women: always in shawls that serve as cover for head and body, and in great thick skirts big enough to house a family, blue skirts and flaming red skirts, their fish-baskets of a flat marsh-weed that looks like wood, them selves often sitting squat on the walk, their backs against the wall, their sandaled feet stuck out in front of them. They peddle a few fish, if they can, for a penny apiece.
From the other town within the town nicely dressed boys and girls stroll across the bridge and through the fishing village on their way to bathe at Saithill. Against the stream itself, a man as lean and unknotted as a tar is pulling on his hip-boots to go salmon-fishing; he says the weather “doesn’t look wholesome.” An old man, past working, stops part way into the main town and says to a young man at a shop door, “I hope you have a middlin’-good business.” Strangers are in and out of the town all summer: “Yanks they would be mostly,” because this is a good place to take or leave ship, or they are wiry-minded traders trying to get into their own nets the shilling or two that is here. And in the thick of strangers and natives, two old women selling fish have some words across the street that runs from the Claddagh into the town.
One old woman has for some reason been laughed at by the crowd of ten or twelve, and she says (the first word we get), “I wouldn’t touch a fly!” Whether this means anything to anybody, no one says anything, and she repeats, “A fly I wouldn’t touch!” Only she is unwilling to leave the matter at that. People do not so much as look at her, and she says, in the tone of a desperate lunge: “Or what more would you expect of the man—under Providence! He earns it, packin’ and carryin’!” Up this same street a man goes mounted on a load of horse-manure, girls go with tennis rackets in their hands, good cars honk their way through. People are in general taller and better looking than those in Dublin, but plenty of people are ragged and a few men and women beg their way.
The town (they say) is beginning to revive, and we think we can feel something present and some promise in it. Big ships come again into it, new houses are being built on every side and a new church at Salthill. And there is a tone of confidence and hope, now at last, after the generations of slowness and torpor and death that followed the destruction of the town in the time of Cromwell, the town with its grey broken walls and piles of stone and fragmentary archways having all this time been like a cumbrous alien stone to mark its own fall.
As we go along the street on a cool July evening, our selves not too aware of history, a man speaks to us. He wants to show us one of the broken walls. And yet he, looking at that wall every day, knows nothing of it. He is puzzled. What on earth, he has this good while asked himself, could these broken walls and fallen towers mean? The poor man has no training in the fact that Cromwell set out to destroy the city, and succeeded; he is feeling his way in his own kitchen and wants to know why things are
so moth-eaten and crumbled there. Has the man just come to? No, not even that; he is just coming to; the man has been cut off from himself for two hundred and fifty years. He is like a man who after centuries of daze should begin to ask, in a rough, blundering way, about his own ear, why it should b on the side of his head; about his own beard, why it should be on his face; and his own bed and roof, why the one should be under him and the other over him. Isn’t it a strange world, altogether? The good dull man with his questions is almost like one asking whether he did not possibly have a pre-existence, and whether the relics of it are not round about him.
He speaks in a slow, un-Irish way. “This wall has history,” he says, “but I don’t know what it is.” He speaks humbly, he carries himself humbly, like an orphan or an ill-treated dog. His words about doors and windows are almost as if he had a mental feeling for these things. “These were doors and windows,” he says, not knowing whether he has made a discovery or not. “They were. And they have been sealed up. It could have been a convent; this door was low, but people could go in and out there (at that other). I don’t know,” he says, not shaking his head unless in some merely mental way within him. Then he conducts us above to the high street of the town, and he knows the record of the judge, James Lynch, who executed his own son: in 1492, says our friend, and he adds that men have not the courage for such justice now: “they are guilty themselves.” Then he takes us—it is only around the corner—to the Black Church of which his slight knowledge appears to be exact: it is black or Protestant; it was built by Catholics before the Reformation; hardly anyone except the tourist clan is ever seen near it, and he con fesses calmly enough, “I was in through it twice myself, with visitors.”
All the same, he has some sense for present things. He says he can always be found (on the assumption we’d be looking for him) at the eleven-o’clock at the Franciscans, and when we ask him about the pin which he wears on his coat, he says, “It’s the Franciscan. I’m a member. I’m after answering the seven decades there, and invocations with each one. There’s something about the Franciscans. I hadn’t known they existed at all, but they caught me.” The members pay eight pence a month, but there’s no use bringing them something if they don’t want it. “Now if you’d send them a leg of mutton, maybe it’s how they couldn’t use it at all.”
He shows us the marble altar in one of the churches.
“It was brought all in separate pieces, and put together here.” Brought from Connemara? No, indeed. “But from Italy, I think it was.” The street that runs straight from this church door used to be called Buttermilk Lane. “I suppose in the old days they sold buttermilk here.” And the wide street crossing this is Merchant Street. He uses a gesture to explain the name: “I suppose because there was such a trade down this way to the sea with Spain.” And a man once came here to write a book about Galway. He did? He did, and he wrote it. “There was a man came here long ago, by the name of Hardiman, and wrote a book, Hardiman’s History of Galway, and in it he states that in the whole of the United Kingdom there was not a city except the city of London to compare with the city of Galway. And there’s Hardimans here yet; whether antecedents of his I don’t know.”
We see the Claddagh houses from the inside, watch seven men capture one salmon, and hear old women sitting on the floor of the church say their prayers in Gaelic.
1
THE next morning the sun comes for a moment or two out of clumps of lazy-looking clouds. Parked in front of the best hotel is a pair of fat Australians, whom it would be difficult to think English, or Irish, or people at all. The woman is not completely intolerable, though she is a well-fed, pulpy shoat. The man is worse: beady, watery eyes looking dully past his red little nose; a purplish face; features and figure that may well have been slight in their time but are shapeless now; not a man with a paunch but a man who is a paunch. This man and woman are not interested in the Irish people, although they themselves were formerly Irish; all they say, and it seems to be the center of their existence, is that they are going around the earth by a different route this year than they took last year.
A giant crosses the square: a kind of cross between pugilist and poet, between soldier and scholar. He is powerful and neat, abrupt and thoughtful. We ask someone who the giant is. The answer in its tone comes to, “Och, sure, don’t everybody know him?” Well, we are told that the big man is Ned of the Hill, a poet who published things ill] no paper would any longer take what he sent. “He’s supposed to be a Communist, too. He’s been around the world, and on every police force in America. He’s everything and anything, and they do say he’s a bit touched.” A young priest, not tall, but a strong man and freer in build and action than the giant, sits on a bench waiting for the bus to Limerick; he is in a brown habit, his unstockinged feet in sandals. An old man wears a big blue badge with a cross on it. We ask him what it stands for, and he says, “It’s the Congress, in Dublin. . . . No, I was never in Dublin. I was always in Galway. I live below at the Pier.”
Two old women sit below on a mast lying by the stream. One of them is up to eighty, yes, and above eighty, and says the sun is best for anyone who is not feeling well. The other is near sixty, and spent some years in Chicago, “till the hard times, and it was my health, too, and I came home.” The two of them take the world with a great ease, and are not chatterish. One says, “It’s lovely weather, thanks be to God.” They do not know the name of the river, running sixty and eighty years past their door. “Well, now, it’s—it’s the Claddagh River; it’s—the Long-Wall River.” They have never climbed Croagh Patrick. “People do say it is hard. They say you need a stick. I seen girls going, and they had sticks to help them.” Men will go out here to catch salmon again today. They will, “according to the tides. It’s according to the tides. It’s wonderful the way they (the salmon) always find their way back to the same place” (maybe they have strong “nature” in them); “they do go out to the sea, and they say the same ones always come back here.”
The three of us look across at the Claddagh. The older woman says it is sad the way it is being torn down. “It is nearly finished. It is, now. Anyone that was away two years, to come back to Galway they’d never know the Claddagh.” She says the houses were no good, they de served to be torn down. But how does she say this? In three or four cryptic little words: “They wanted it, too.” The town, which means the two towns, had been its old self till lately: “It’s only the last seven or eight years that the town of Galway is changed so much.”
2
People go across the Salmon Weir bridge into the Claddagh. This, we remarked, is the name of the fishing village, and they say it means the Shore, and it really is the shore, tight against the sea. It is a name hard for a foreigner to manage; he fails either to put the gh in the right place or to roll it in the Gaelic fashion. The people in the village are in every sense fisher people. They do fishing, they do nothing else at all. Having put their hand to the oar and the sail, they never look back. Forward for them is out to sea. ‘The land is there always pushing down on them, good land and also bad land that is rocky or boggy; in any case, they never put a foot on it or wish to visit it.
I believe that their every house faces the sea, which is sun and meadow and a flowered way to them. They give their strength to the waves, they pull their poor livelihood out of the ocean; every hope or fear they have, and their loves and hates, go up and down with the tides. What have they on the shore itself? Their houses; and these might be rocky caverns not long abandoned by the sea. They have no garden, not a green stick or blade of any thing: no lettuce or leek, no fruit or berry and not even a potato. They haven’t a cow or a pig or a donkey, not so much as a chicken or a goat. It may be they are reckless and improvident, like one-crop men; but wise or foolish, they know and love and do the one thing.
Wouldn’t a tree or two give a novel and better tone to their lives? Wouldn’t it be more economic to milk a goat or plant a row of praties than eternally to trade the hard-got and cheap-sold fish for the flour and tea? These are the questions of an outsider, not knowing and loving and doing the one thing. The people have slight interest in and perhaps small respect for the lovely beach itself, beyond them at Salthill. Their houses are close together in the hospitable Irish way, side by side, corner to corner, end to end, giving a kind of crazy jigsaw effect, and are like the rooms of a big ship drawn up here and moored to the rock that is called County Galway.
The Claddagh women wear shawls, every old woman and many young women. The shawl is handy, it goes on and off easily, and will do for a coat and hat. They wear the thick skirts which we saw uptown, skirts which seem much too big and fall down in many overlapping folds and help to give the effect of streeling, especially if the woman hurries a bit or it is toward dark or rainy. Though life is properly on this, the Claddagh side, the women cross the bridge and barter fish as they can, for they must have the bit of barley flour. And the children cross the bridge to school.
Claddagh people speak clearly and say simply what they mean; every word and every syllable is distinct. “It’s lovely weather,” they say. “It’s a good time.” An old man agrees, but says, “I think there’s thunder in it.” We have not once heard them say “Hello” or “Good day” or “Good morning” or “Bye-bye.” They have their own way and their own words, and a greeting is a prayer. The usual salute, when friend or neighbor comes or goes, seems to be, “God speed you,” and it is with this holy word that they address even the stranger. The word is varied, but it is always a prayer: “God give you luck. God give you long life. God spare you the health. God prosper you, then.” Young boys salute the priest by using the nifty little gesture that is common now all over Ireland, and say quickly, “God bless you, Father.”