Читать книгу Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy - Patrick MacGill - Страница 6

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"Put a green cross beneath the roof on the eve of good Saint Bride

And you'll have luck within the house for long past Lammastide;

Put a green cross above the door—'tis hard to keep it green,

But 'twill bring good luck and happiness for long past Hallow E'en

The green cross holds Saint Brigid's spell, and long the spell endures,

And 'twill bring blessings on the head of you and all that's yours."

—From The Song of Simple People.

Once a year, on Saint Bride's Eve, my father came home from his day's work, carrying a load of green rushes on his shoulders. At the door he would stand for a moment with his feet on the threshold and say these words:

"Saint Bride sends her blessings to all within. Give her welcome."

Inside my mother would answer, "Welcome she is," and at these words my father would loosen the shoulder-knot and throw his burden on the floor. Then he made crosses from the rushes, wonderful crosses they were. It was said that my father was the best at that kind of work in all the countryside. When made, they were placed in various parts of the house and farm. They were hung up in our home, over the lintel of the door, the picture of the Holy Family, the beds, the potato pile and the fireplace. One was placed over the spring well, one in the pig-sty, and one over the roof-tree of the byre. By doing this the blessing of Saint Bride remained in the house for the whole of the following year. I liked to watch my father plaiting the crosses, but I could never make one myself.

When my mother churned milk she lifted the first butter that formed on the top of the cream and placed it against the wall outside the door. It was left there for the fairy folk when they roamed through the country at midnight. They would not harm those who gave them an offering in that manner, but the people who forgot them would have illness among their cattle through all the length of the year.

If my father met a red-haired woman when he was going to the market he would turn home. To meet a red-haired woman on the high-road is very unlucky.

It is a bad market where there are more women than men. "Two women and a goose make a market," is the saying among the Glenmornan folk.

If my mother chanced to overturn the milk which she had drawn from the cow, she would say these words: "Our loss go with it. Them that it goes to need it more than we do." One day I asked her who were the people to whom it went. "The gentle folk," she told me. These were the fairies.

You very seldom hear persons called by their surname in Glenmornan. Every second person you meet there is either a Boyle or an O'Donnell. You want to ask a question about Hugh O'Donnell. "Is it Patrick's Hugh or Mickey's Hugh or Sean's Hugh?" you will be asked. So too in the Glen you never say Mrs. when speaking of a married woman. It is just "Farley's Brigid" or "Patrick's Norah" or "Cormac's Ellen," as the case may be. There was one woman in Glenmornan who had a little boy of about my age, and she seldom spoke to anybody on the road to chapel or market. Everyone seemed to avoid her, and the old people called her "that woman," and they often spoke about her doings. She had never a man of her own, they said. Of course I didn't understand these things, but I knew there was a great difference in being called somebody's Mary or Norah instead of "that woman."

On St. Stephen's Day the Glenmornan boys beat the bushes and killed as many wrens as they could lay their hands on. The wren is a bad bird, for it betrayed St. Stephen to the Jews when they wanted to put him to death. The saint hid in a clump of bushes, but the wrens made such a chatter and clatter that the Jews, when passing, stopped to see what annoyed the birds, and found the saint hiding in the undergrowth. No wonder then that the Glenmornan people have a grudge against the wren!

Kissing is almost unknown in the place where I was born and bred. Judas betrayed the Son of God with a kiss, which proves beyond a doubt that kissing is of the devil's making. It is no harm to kiss the dead in Glenmornan, for no one can do any harm to the dead.

Once I got bitten by a dog. The animal snapped a piece of flesh from my leg and ate it when he got out of the way. When I came into my own house my father and mother were awfully frightened. If three hairs of the dog that bit me were not placed against the sore I would go mad before seven moons had faded. Oiney Dinchy, who owned the dog, would not give me three hairs because I was unfortunate enough to be stealing apples when the dog rushed at me. For all that it mattered to Oiney, I might go as mad as a March hare. The priest, when informed of the trouble, blessed salt which he told my father to place on the wound. My father did so, but the salt pained me so much that I rushed screaming from the house. The next door neighbours ran into their homes and closed their doors when they heard me scream. Two little girls were coming to our house for the loan of a half-bottle of holy water for a sick cow, and when they saw me rush out they fled hurriedly, shrieking that I was already mad from the bite of Oiney Dinchy's dog. When Oiney heard this he got frightened and he gave my father three hairs of the dog with a civil hand. I placed them on my sore, the dog was hung by a rope from the branch of a tree, and the madness was kept away from me. I hear that nowadays in Glenmornan the people never apply the holy salt to the bite of a dog. Thus do old customs change.

The six-hand reel is a favourite Glenmornan dance, but in my time a new parish priest came along who did not approve of dancing. "The six-hand reel is a circle, the centre of which is the devil," said he, and called a house in which a dance was held the "Devil's Station." He told the people to cease dancing, but they would not listen to him. "When we get a new parish priest we don't want a new God," they said. "The old God who allowed dancing is good enough for us." The priest put the seven curses on the people who said these words. I only know three of the seven curses.

May you have one leg and it to be halting.

May you have one eye and it to be squinting

May you have one tooth and it to be aching.

The second curse fell on one man—old Oiney Dinchy, who had a light foot on a good floor. When tying a restive cow in the byre, the animal caught Oiney in the ball of one eye with the point of its horn, and Oiney could only see through the other eye afterwards. The people when they saw this feared the new parish priest, but they never took any heed to the new God, and up to this day there are many good six-hand reelers in Glenmornan. And the priest is dead.

The parish priest who came in his place was a little pot-bellied man with white shiny false teeth, who smoked ninepenny cigars and who always travelled first-class in a railway train. Everybody feared him because he put curses on most of the people in Glenmornan; and usually on the people whom I thought best in the world. Those whom I did not like at all became great friends of the priest. I always left the high-road when I saw him coming. His name was Father Devaney, and he was eternally looking for money from the people, who, although very poor, always paid when the priest commanded them. If they did not they would go to hell as soon as they died. So Father Devaney said.

A stranger in Glenmornan should never talk about crows. The people of the Glen are nicknamed the "Crow Chasers," because once in the bad days, the days of the potato failure, they chased for ten long hours a crow that had stolen a potato, and took back the potato at night in triumph. This has been cast up in their teeth ever since, and it is an ill day for a stranger when he talks about crows to the Glenmornan people.

Courtship is unknown in Glenmornan. When a young man takes it in his head to marry, he goes out in company with a friend and a bottle of whisky and looks for a woman. If one refuses, the young man looks for another and another until the bottle of whisky is consumed. The friend talks to the girl's father and lays great stress upon the merits of the would-be husband, who meanwhile pleads his suit with the girl. Sometimes a young man empties a dozen bottles of whisky before he can persuade a woman to marry him.

In my own house we had flesh meat to dinner four times each year, on St. Patrick's Day, Easter Sunday, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day. If the harvest had been a good one we took bacon with our potatoes at the ingathering of the hay. Ours was a hay harvest; we grew very little corn.

Of all the seasons of the year I liked the harvest-time best. Looking from the door of my father's house I had the whole of Glenmornan under my eyes. Far down the Glen the road wound in and out, now on one side of the river and now on the other, running away to the end of Ireland, and for all that I knew, maybe to the end of the world itself.

The river came from the hills, tumbling over rocks in showers of fine white mist and forming into deep pools beneath, where it rested calmly after its mad race. Here the trout leaped all day, and turned the placid surface into millions of petulant ripples which broke like waves under the hazel bushes that shaded the banks. In the fords further along the heavy milch cows stood belly-deep in the stream, seeking relief from the madness that the heat and the gad-flies put into their blood.

The young cattle grazed on the braes, keeping well in the shadow of the cliffs, while from the hill above the mountain-sheep followed one another in single file, as is their wont, down to the lower and sweeter pastures.

The mowers were winding their scythes in long heavy sweeps through the meadow in the bottomlands, and rows of mown hay lay behind them. Even where I stood, far up, I could hear the sharp swish of their scythes as they cut through the bottom grass.

The young maidens, their legs bare well above their knees, tramped linen at the brookside and laughed merrily at every joke that passed between them.

The neighbours spoke to one another across the march ditches, and their talk was of the weather and the progress of the harvest.

The farmer boy could be seen going to the moor for a load of peat, his creel swinging in a careless way across his shoulders and his hands deep in his trousers' pockets. He was barefooted, and the brown moss was all over the calves of his legs. He was thinking of something as he walked along and he looked well in his torn shirt and old hat. Many a time I wondered what were the thoughts which filled his mind.

Now and again a traveller passed along the road, looking very tired as he dragged his legs after him. His hob-nailed boots made a rasping sound on the grey gravel, and it was hard to tell where he was going.

One day a drover passed along, driving his herd of wild-eyed, panting bullocks before him. He was a little man and he carried a heavy cudgel of a stick in his hands. I went out to the road to see him passing and also to speak to him if he took any notice of a little fellow.

"God's blessing be on every beast under your care," I said, repeating the words which my mother always said to the drovers which she met. "Is it any harm to ask you where you are going?"

"I'm goin' to the fair of 'Derry," said he.

"Is 'Derry fair as big as the fair of Greenanore, good man?"

He laughed at my question, and I could see his teeth black with tobacco juice. "Greenanore!" he exclaimed. "'Derry fair is a million times bigger."

Of course I didn't believe him, for had I not been at the harvest-fair of Greenanore myself, and I thought that there could be nothing greater in all the seven corners of the world. But it was in my world and I knew more of the bigger as the years went on.

In those days the world, to me, meant something intangible, which lay beyond the farthest blue line of mountains which could be seen from Glenmornan Hill. And those mountains were ever so far away! How many snug little houses, white under their coatings of cockle lime, how many wooden bridges spanning hurrying streams, and how many grey roads crossing brown moors lay between Glenmornan Hill and the last blue line of mountain tops that looked over into the world for which I longed with all the wistfulness of youth, I did not know.