Irish Ancestors and Rebellion (p303-p325)

(Setting:  Freeman magically travels back in time to his ancestral Ireland, where he learns firsthand about oppression by the British Empire and the passion of Irish rebels from his teenaged great great grandfather, Padraic).

His body went limp and his world faded to black. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed by a tornadic vortex of light that sucked his weightless body irresistibly into a yawing whirlpool of time. This continuous funnel of smooth light coiling mysteriously into the past dragged him into a disconnected existence of scrambled temporal linearity. Quantum mechanics in disarray created a condition where potential futures intermingled with infinite pasts and unlimited presents, so that any future could become any past, and vice versa.

Freeman was sucked into the past like a speck of dust in a huge cosmic vacuum. The spinning lights became blurred streaks trailing behind his accelerating mass. Suddenly, chronological gravity braked his body. The luminous vortex narrowed, and he feared he was going to be crushed by the steadily diminishing funnel. Amazingly, he passed completely through the compressed end of the vortex like a watermelon seed being spit out of a child's mouth. Amid a final explosion of kaleidoscopic light, he was plopped indelicately on the soggy turf of County West Meath, Ireland. The year he somehow knew was 1846. More importantly, he somehow knew he was Padraic Freeman, his great great grandfather. The transmogrification was complete.

Padraic was 14 years old and desperately hungry, not from a single postponed meal, but from years of deprivation and famine. Tattered remnants of clothes hung on his emaciated frame. His thoroughly disheveled reddish-blond hair befitted a youth that knew more of the forest than of a bath and a comb. His feet were bare and callused. The comfortably suffocating cloak of Catholic dogma encased his soul, so he knew that if nothing good ever happened in this world, which seemed distinctly possible, he would still have eternal happiness in heaven. Alas, this happiness could only be obtained by dying.

The boy gingerly arose from the ground. He’d been mysteriously knocked prostrate by a blinding light that flashed out of nowhere. He shook his jangled head a few times. He concluded that he was unharmed by the strange encounter, other than his ears were ringing and he had a bizarre feeling that he was no longer alone, even inside his own body. This made no sense to him, so he included it with the other things of this world that made no sense. The accumulation of these nonsensical observations was becoming a disturbingly heavy burden.

Padraic shuffled aimlessly down the narrow dirt road that ran from the small village of Ballynacargy to the tenant farms where he lived. Anger consumed him on this grey Sunday afternoon. He slashed with his oaken shillelagh at the whin that grew dense along the road, pretending that the yellow flowering bushes were the animated demons that haunted his soul. With a vicious whack he truncated the imaginary body of the English landlord who kept him and his father in the field cultivating alfalfa fourteen hours every day to feed the cattle the landlord exported to England for people who knew the blessings of a decent meal but not of a clear conscience. In return for the cattle, the British sent undertakers to Ireland. With another whack at the tangled bushes, he crippled an imaginary cow. Padraic was jealous of the beast’s robust diet as he and the rest of Ireland withered from starvation. Another blow of his shillelagh felled the sheriff, who had arrested Father O'Brien last week for celebrating the outlawed Catholic mass on a rock altar in a secluded grotto, with his congregation kneeling contritely in the hillside heather, concealed by a morning mist. For this dubious offense, an executioner hung Father O’Brien, sliced open his carcass, ripped out his heart and bowels, and cut off his head for display on a pike in the village square.

Another unfortunate bush succumbed as Padraic's angry imagination skewered the pompous teacher from England who tried to force-feed him the English language and fealty to the British Crown. A break in the hedge revealed the wooden schoolhouse with the thatched roof where this despised teacher vainly tried to convert unsophisticated Irish Catholic children into proper Protestant British subjects. Padraic didn’t go to school there any more. His mother got him excused from attending, ostensibly because he was needed in the fields, but truly because tears welled in her eyes whenever she heard him practice the detested English tongue.

The Statute of Kilkenny had made it high treason to wear Irish clothes, speak the Irish language in public, or practice Irish customs. In spite of the statute, Padraic attended a Hedge School after dusk each day, where students hid behind the hedges lining rural roads and secretly learned their outlawed culture from a volunteer schoolmaster, who was often a priest. Furtively, they learned their Gaelic language, their Irish history, and their Catholic principles. They also learned Latin, Greek, math, and the sciences. These starving, half-naked waifs who studied in Irish glens were among the most educated youths in Europe, if only because they were fed knowledge instead of stew, mutton, and potatoes.

If caught in these hedge schools, the Penal Laws imposed by the English Parliament specified death for the volunteer schoolmaster and deportation for the school children. The Penal Laws were designed to reduce the Catholics to extreme ignorance, to separate them from their land, and in effect, to eliminate them from the face of the earth. Irish Catholics were forbidden to exercise their religion, enter a trade or profession, live inside a town, own a horse, purchase land, vote, carry arms, or educate their children. The French jurist Montesquieu would later write that the Penal Laws were "conceived by demons, written in blood, and registered in Hell."

Padraic spat in the direction of the schoolhouse. This was a ritual he had learned from his father, who frequently launched globules of phlegm toward the many symbols of English imperialism dotting Ireland. Padraic wiped spittle from his chin and continued his purposeless stroll. A herd of sheep approached, led by an English horseman. The sheep were on the way to Mullingar, where they would be poled down the Royal Canal to Dublin, ferried to Liverpool, and eventually become fodder for English woolen mills and butcher shops. The Englishman noticed Padraic only enough to nudge him with his horse out of the way of the more important wool-clad Irish denizens going to market.

Padraic wisely stepped off the road onto an unused path that led to a bridge over a river that didn’t exist. He chuckled at the folly of this bridge, if only to avoid thinking about the humiliation of scurrying away from the British horseman. The bridge was built as part of an insulting public works project directed by the Saxons to help unemployed Irish. The useless structure was purposely built to traverse nothing and go nowhere, because the British didn’t want these public works competing with British companies who were building bridges that were actually useful. This nonsense was replicated elsewhere, in the form of railroads with no destination, grain with no markets, and piers far removed from water. These pointless public works required thousands of government bureaucrats, inspectors, and clerks to administer them, all British citizens paid handsome salaries from Irish taxes extracted forcibly from peasants who were already destitute. Those who couldn’t pay their taxes were evicted from their homes, which forced them to enroll in the public works programs, which thus expanded the scope of the public works, which increased the need for British bureaucrats and Irish taxes, which caused more Irish to be evicted from their homes, ad infinitum.

After the sheep passed, Padraic returned to the main road. Around a bend he saw Maeve Dougherty walking toward him. Maeve used to be his friend, but now she was no one’s friend. She had abandoned her humanity, leaving behind a hollow shell of an emotionally comatose bipedal mammal. His heart ached as a surrogate for the feelings that she silently suppressed. He longed to talk to her, to run with her, and to tease her, as he had done when they were growing up together. But he knew that if he tried, Maeve would run away from him. Her body looked like a skeleton inside a rag that used to be a dress. He grimaced at the sight of her gaunt face as she drew near. He quivered as he remembered seeing her eat weeds in the woods yesterday. This image was not, however, as disturbing as that of starving Irishmen eating their own dead, which was rumored to be happening down in Offaly County.

Maeve ate weeds because she was orphaned. Her father had been drawn and quartered by the British army after joining the brief rebellion that flared up when rumors swirled that the French were going to invade Ireland and drive out the British. The premature uprising was squashed, and the Gaels who challenged the Crown’s omnipotence were executed. A day later, two soldiers raped Maeve's mother. They left her to die from a vicious beating as punishment for aiding an enemy of the Crown, which was her deceased husband. Maeve was forced to watch the brutal soldiers defile her mother. They pinned Maeve’s arms and gagged her mouth as the woman slowly died. Shouting for help would have been useless, because in 1846 Ireland, the only criminals were the Irish. Orphaned and starving, Maeve got no help from her British overlords, who didn’t count her as a human. She passed by Padraic without recognition, and the sound of her lifeless footsteps faded behind him.

The village cemetery, which was where most of Ballynacargy called home, loomed directly ahead. The dead found peace there, and it was the last piece of Ireland that the living could call their own. Their schools were alien places, their churches outlawed, and their farmland stolen by foreign invaders. The cemetery was also the only place where families could be whole, because everyone in Ballynacargy had a parent or a child interred there. In the past fifty years, more Irishmen had died than were now alive. Ireland had become a massive green graveyard.

Padraic entered the moss-covered cemetery. It was surrounded by a rock wall that was deteriorating like the spirit of the Irish. He trod gingerly around makeshift tombstones that were decrepit and unsightly, since a proper death was a luxury beyond the means of people who couldn’t even afford a proper living. Many of the epitaphs on the grave markers were now illegible, but the villagers didn’t need to read them to know the fate of their fallen kin. Before the King of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury sent their legions to rid the Irish soil of Catholics and Gaels, people in Ballynacargy died from old age and accident. But with the Saxon attempt to confiscate the land and the soul of the Emerald Isle, people died prematurely and brutally in a religious and cultural genocide orchestrated by secular and divine tyrants in London.

Padraic reverently tiptoed past vine-covered tombstones under towering beech trees, mentally noting the apocalyptic stories told by the grave markers. A friend had succumbed to bubonic plague, which tore through the village last year. An uncle had been dragged from Tullamore to Kilbeggan by horses after being caught with a rosary, which his murderers used to hang his nearly lifeless carcass with. But at least in death, he no longer had to face the ignominy of soldiers coming to his home each Saturday morning with bugles blaring and bayonets fixed to exact their undeclared "taxes", confiscating money, clothing, furniture, and food. Father Duggan, for the crime of providing Communion to wounded Irish rebels, had his hands and feet broken with hammers and burned off from his arms and legs, and then finally had his heart torn from his chest and fed to dogs. Daniel O'Hennessey was beheaded for wearing green, after first being beaten and whipped. But, at least he had the honor of a grave, pitiful as it was.

Other deceased Irish weren’t so fortunate. To make way for British landlords to confiscate their property, an entire village of Irish people was driven like stampeded cattle over the cliffs of Moher, cascading like a human waterfall seven hundred feet to perish on the rocks and surf below. Another village was cleared by driving the natives into a brushy grotto that was set afire, incinerating the evictees and leaving nothing but ashes intermingled with dirt as evidence that they ever existed. Other Irish wandered the land, their faces etched with uncomprehending scowls and their eyes growing dim and increasingly hopeless, until they succumbed to starvation, falling into roadside ditches to be devoured by rats and wolves. Those who survived were arrested as vagrants, and then impressed into the British navy. The only safe Irish lived in County Clare, where their land was so barren there wasn’t enough wood to hang them, enough water to drown them, or enough earth to bury them.

Many mothers gave their paltry food to their children and starved to death. Death was probably better for them anyway, since not even motherhood was sufficient protection from the sanguine bands of soldiers who were systematically exterminating the Irish. Mothers of known rebels were hung by their hair, often with their children swinging grotesquely beside them. Small stones commemorated a whole generation of children who had died from typhus, cholera, encephalitis, starvation, or abandonment. Death was probably better for them too, because British soldiers had made a sport of tossing Irish babies into the air and catching them with their bayonets, ostensibly to prevent them from growing into adult insurrectionists.

Famine was a common denominator for many of the corpses buried in Ballynacargy’s cemetery. But the potato blight alone wasn’t responsible for so many starvation deaths. There were plenty of other crops flourishing in Irish fields. Unfortunately, these crops were owned by English landlords, and were destined for the cows, sheep, and dinner tables of Britishers across the Irish Sea. Native tenant farmers cultivated potatoes in the small, nearly barren fields they rented from landlords. When the potato crop failed, the British felt no mercy for their conquered tenants. To Saxon Protestants, death by starvation was a fitting reward for the misguided Celtic worshippers of the Pope. As Irish carcasses dropped from hunger, the British feasted on Irish beef.

Padraic spent much time in the cemetery. It was the only place in this world that he could talk with his brother and sister, who carried on their end of the conversation from the other side of death. Maggie, two years younger than Padraic and the apple of her doting brother’s eye, died from the plague last spring. James, who was two years older and who always protected Padraic from bullies, avenged the death of Maeve's mother. He stole one of the landlord's muskets, hunted down the two soldiers who had murdered her, and shot them both. But, the redcoated bully was more than his match. The British militia caught him before he could make it to Derrynane to escape on a clipper to the continent, where he planned to join other expatriates in France. His mutilated remains were dumped outside the door of Padraic's thatched hut, with a note promising a similar fate for any other Catholic that dared to challenge the Crown or the Archbishop. Padraic secretly buried the body in this cemetery. He didn't want his mother to see her son like that.

No official inquiry was made into his death, which would’ve been ruled accidental anyway, because it wasn’t a crime to murder an Irishman. According to the British religion, it was no more of a sin to kill an Irishman than to kill a rabid dog, so it was open hunting season. Parliament authorized British agents to behead any Irishman without trial for the simple crime of not wearing the Kingdom’s red colors. Ireland’s own Parliament ordinarily would have repealed such an insidious law. Unfortunately, Britain instituted Poyning's Law, which forbade the Irish Parliament from enacting any legislation without permission of the British Parliament.

Today, as Padraic stood between the graves of his fallen siblings, he told Maggie and James that he was worried about mom. A note she had received from the landlord caused her to cry for hours. Her wracking sobs haunted his sleepless thoughts last night. His father, with hollow eyes and graven pallor, was unable to ease her inconsolable grief. This morning, the sheriff visited their home and argued bitterly with his parents, apparently in regard to the note. Padraic couldn’t discern their veiled discussion, but he sensed that a crisis was imminent, especially when his mother invoked the spirits of Irish saints Brigid and Ciaran. It was then that he decided to leave his tension-filled hut for town. He stopped at the cemetery to commiserate with Maggie and James on his return trip home.

Padraic could feel Maggie's tender fingers gently wiping tears from his cheek, though he knew it was his own hand making the motion. And he could feel James' consoling hand on his trembling shoulder, though he knew it was just a spiritual recollection of brotherly contact repeated hundreds of times in days gone by. Strangely, standing alone among the dead of Ballynacargy, Padraic felt intense companionship. He basked in the warm love pouring out from his brother and sister from an eternal fount he couldn’t comprehend. He thanked them with softly spoken words that settled on their graves like a comforting blanket. He told Maggie everything would be all right, that mom would find the strength to overcome her grief. And he thanked James once again for the ultimate sacrifice he had made to fight the Redcoated Bully.

Padraic hopped the stone wall entombing the cemetery and resumed his stroll on the dirt road. His step was livelier now, despite the light mist settling over the island like the humid breath of the sea god Neptune. The road was unnaturally deserted for a Sunday afternoon, especially since the Catholic friary was just ahead. In days of old, this road would have been crowded with churchgoers, rested from their labors and warmed by their congregation. But today, the stone-walled friary, with it’s thatched roof, wooden steeple, boxed pews, and carillon that used to ring across the surrounding countryside, was abandoned. Father Brian's fiery sermons excoriating the evils of demon whiskey wouldn’t echo loudly inside the stony church. Young Kathleen O'Flaherty's delicate flute playing plaintive carols and hymns wouldn’t be heard. The intoxicating Latin canon rolling off melodic Gaelic tongues was silenced.

Catholicism was officially banned in Ireland, even though 90 percent of the Irish were baptized into that faith. By order of King Henry, Irish churches and monasteries were pillaged, their shrines desecrated, their sacred relics disinterred and destroyed, and their clergy evicted from convents and seminaries. A price was fixed on the heads of Irish Catholic priests equal to the price fixed on a wolf’s head. The law required Catholics to give weekly tithes to the new Protestant clergy, even if they didn’t attend services. This resulted in enormous salaries for Anglican pastors whose only congregation were their own families.

Ireland was overrun by external conquerors bearing the standards of two religions. Protestantism, of divine origin, was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury in England. Imperialistic Monarchism, of secular origin, was led by the King and Queen, the British Parliament, and the Saxon people worshipping at the altar of the Empire upon which the sun never set. The adherents of these two mythologies joined forces to convert the heathen Irish to Protestantism and to absorb their land into the Empire.

The Irish didn’t know which was the viler of the two religions that oppressed them. When ordered to worship at the Church of England, did that mean they should prostrate themselves to the God of Protestantism or the King of the Empire? In truth, it didn’t really matter. The secular and divine mythologies were intertwined, because mysticism begets political power, and political power breeds mysticism. The Irish didn’t understand why these mythologies were invading, but they did clearly understand that the result would be the utter destruction of their race.

Padraic pondered this awful state of affairs during countless strolls past the abandoned friary on Sunday afternoons. He was at that peculiar stage in life, between childhood and adulthood, where he was too old to blindly accept the traditions of his forebears and too young to know the futility of questioning them. He was a simple adolescent who made simple observations. One observation was that his fellow Irishmen were dying all around him. Another observation was that adults do things collectively they wouldn’t do as individuals. It wasn’t separate individuals coming here to steal Ireland and exterminate the Irish. It was convoys of British soldiers, congresses of British politicians, and congregations of Protestant evangelists. A final observation was that the essence binding these gangs together and emboldening their murderous actions was mysticism. The people who killed his brother James did so at the behest of their Archbishop and their King. From Padraic’s innocent perspective, this faithful worship was not only an unnecessary human construction and an illusory fabrication of obeisance, it was inherently deadly.

These musings confused Padraic and disturbed his soul. It was one thing to disdain the vile British horde, and to spit upon their graven image of God. But, if it was the servility of the English people to their mythologies that created this woeful situation for the Irish, what woes did the servility of the Irish to their own mythologies cause for themselves? This led him to the blasphemous notion that the Irish mythology of Catholicism and the dogma of their ancient Brehon Laws were just as much to blame for the horrible bloodshed as was the British mythology of Protestantism and the dogma of the Empire. The only tangible outcome of this endless contest over whose secular and divine gods were supreme was that millions of people were now interred in earthen graves. These victims were being slowly devoured in body by fungus and worms, just as when alive they had been devoured in spirit by myths and allegiances. For him, the question was gradually shifting from which god Man should worship, to whether Man should worship at all. The zealousness and false piety of his fellow humans had overwhelmed their consciences, leaving them unable to choose between right and wrong. He couldn’t even call these murderous adherents of faith hypocrites, since their behavior was consistent with the dogma that consumed them.

This distressing adolescent turbulence shook the foundations of the heritage and traditions still tugging mightily at Padraic’s heart. His parents remained devout, unquestioning Catholics. If they learned of the blasphemous notions fermenting in his mind, their hearts would seize up with paroxysms of shock. He loved his father and mother desperately. They had given him life, and their unconditional love nurtured him through these terrible times. He also loved the traditions of Ireland, and Catholic rituals still beguiled him with their comfort and eternal stability. But, his soul harbored a suspicion that evil came in many disguises, including subservient worship of his parents’ mythology. This was an enormous metaphysical conflict for one so young.

While the rest of Ireland feared that their gods had abandoned them, Padraic wrestled with the even more unsettling proposition that Ireland should abandon its gods. It wasn’t the division between their religions driving Protestants and Catholics to kill each other, it was the mere existence of these religions. If the world could abandon the secular and divine gods that were at the root of all organized conflicts, then perhaps peace on Earth was a possible dream. If such a thing had happened just two years earlier, then James and Maggie would be walking gaily alongside him now, instead of lying under Ireland's loamy turf, serving as the main course for microbes in Earth’s food chain.

Padraic was now ascending the massive hill overlooking Ballynacargy. His heart beat faster, partly from the effort of climbing, but more so from his memory of the gathering that occurred on this hill just two weeks ago. During this Monster Meeting, one of a series sweeping the island, Padraic saw a fleeting glimpse of his dream. It stirred his soul like nothing else. A hero named Daniel O’Connell was nurturing a ground swell of revolution in Ireland.

Four hundred thousand Irishmen came to this hill a fortnight ago from Roscommon, Longford, Offaly, Leitrim, Kildare, and Carlow to hear the renowned orator O'Connell speak. The only bigger gathering in Europe’s history happened on Ireland's sacred Tara Hill outside of Dublin. One million Gaels came from throughout the island to hear O'Connell declare that freedom from England’s Church and Empire was a possible dream. The exhilaration was indescribable as O'Connell stood on the highest point of Tara, the ancestral seat of Irish sovereignty, roaring that independence was the rightful quest of the Celtic nation, boldly defying the red-coated British militia that was powerless to act against such enormous Irish solidarity.

Just as America had its immortal written Declaration of Independence from British rule, now Ireland had Daniel O'Connell standing on blessed Tara with a spoken declaration against British oppression. O'Connell on Tara Hill, with a million Irish gathered around! Ireland’s greatest bards and poets couldn’t have conjured a more compelling scene. Padraic's heart leapt at this vision, because the same O'Connell had stood on this hill he was climbing now in Ballynacargy, delivering the very same immortal words to four hundred thousand Irish.

Padraic was among the teeming throngs that day in Ballynacargy, sitting on his father’s powerful shoulders, straining to glimpse his hero sounding the rallying cry for dissolving the treacherous subservience to Great Britain. O'Connell’s ringing oratory renewed their hope that had been nearly extinguished by three centuries of imperial subjugation. Emaciated from starvation, ravaged with disease, chilled from nakedness, and terrorized by the agents of the King and the Archbishop, the Irish nonetheless surged up the hill with irrepressible fervor, hearing words that their hearts barely dared to imagine possible, from the man that was the Voice of Ireland.

Padraic would never forget how O'Connell, who as a boy in Cahirciveen gleefully watched American men o' war battle British warships off the Kerry headlands, spoke as though the souls of his kindred spirits in America had somehow merged with his. As boldly as John Paul Jones sailed into Belfast Bay in broad daylight to sink stunned British merchantmen, he declared with Jeffersonian eloquence:

"The time has come to break our manacles on the heads of our enemies, and to wrap around the necks of our oppressors the balls and chains that have entangled our legs. The atrocious British attempts to extinguish liberty make me young and vigorous again. Their occupation of our soil has made us weep tears of blood over fallen compatriots, over stolen property, over outlawed faith, over proscripted language, and over banned dress and culture.

"What are we to do? Tamely surrender our land, our spirit, and our very lives? No! The centuries have recorded the Saxon and Protestant brutality, but our indomitable spirit has not been conquered. We must look to the West for the inspiration to ignite our fanaticism! The revolution shaking down the thunder across the sea is our answer. The Americans have removed the bushel shrouding freedom’s light, and have shown the world that it is not only proper for man to rise up against his oppressors, but also that it is possible! The tempest that tore through America and ripped through France is now to be heard on our own shores. Through the darkening clouds engulfing our proud island we can hear the boom of distant thunder and discern the flashes of the coming lightning.

"Let our enemies stand against us if they dare. Where is the coward who would not die for such a land as Ireland? Where is the slave so lowly that, suddenly discovering he can burst his chains, would choose to keep them manacled about his ankles and wrists? I am not that slave!

"We might soon have the choice to live as slaves or to die as free men. If that choice comes, I declare that it will be my dead body they will trample, if that be the fate of Ireland. Daniel O'Connell will not live as a slave!!!"

Four hundred thousand Irishmen responded with a raucous cheer that rolled across the Irish Sea. Emotional energy plowed like a giant riptide through a crowd that would have been prouder to wear chains than be decorated with the Star of England. Ireland clearly had a leader, a purpose, and a vision now. If O'Connell had said the word on that glorious day, four hundred thousand tattered Irishmen would have somehow summoned the strength to ride night and day to Dun Loaghaire, swim the Irish Sea, charge across the English landscape, and storm London like rabid pit bulls to avenge three brutal centuries of attempted genocide.

But it wasn’t yet time. O'Connell had more Monster Meetings to hold throughout Ireland to coordinate a unified insurrection. He urged the fervent throngs to preserve their energy and wait for the opportune moment to rise up. To keep the embers of revolution smoldering in their hearts, he read a poem written by Fanny Parnell to close the meeting:

Now, are you men, or are you cattle, ye tillers of the soil?

Would you be free, or evermore the rich man's cattle toil?

The shadow on the dial hangs that points the fatal hour--

Now hold your own, or branded slaves, forever cringe and cower.

The serpent's curse upon you lies--ye writhe within the dust,

Ye fill your mouths with beggars' swill, ye grovel for a crust;

Your lords have set their blood-stained heels upon your shameful heads,

Yet they are kind--they leave you still their ditches for your beds!

Oh, by the God who made us all--the seignior and the serf--

Rise up and swear this day to hold your own green Irish turf;

Rise up and plant your feet as men where now you crawl as slaves,

And make your harvest fields your camps, or make of them your graves.

Three hundred years your crops have sprung, by murdered corpses fed;

Your butchered sires, your famished sires, your ghastly compost spread;

Their bones have fertilized your fields, their blood has fallen like rain;

They died that ye might eat and live--God! have they died in vain?

The hour has struck. Fate holds the dice, we stand with bated breath;

Now who shall have your harvests fair--'tis Life that plays with Death;

Now who shall have our Motherland? 'tis Right that plays with Might;

The peasant's arms were weak, indeed, in such unequal fight!

On that sunny day, Padraic's spirit soared like eagles riding a canyon thermal. The world suddenly held out potential for his adolescent yearnings. Life now had meaning, beyond being just a desolate way station on a journey to the grave. Childishly, Padraic imagined he and O'Connell walking shoulder to shoulder, leading legions of Irish militia, planting the Irish Republican banner proudly in the green turf wherever they boldly marched. As his imagination hyperacted, he daydreamed that he and O'Connell were kindred spirits, cut from the same mold and destined for the same glory as liberators of Ireland.

As Padraic descended the hill overlooking Ballynacargy, he chuckled with embarrassment at his delusions of grandeur two weeks ago. How could he ever have imagined himself standing tall like the giant O'Connell, who would surely laugh till he cried if he heard that some starving waif pretensed to join him in the pantheon of libertarian heroes. Padraic’s childish dreams evaporated as he slowly came to grips with reality.

The dreams of the whole Irish nation evaporated when O'Connell was arrested three days ago, by orders of the King. While organizing the climactic Monster meeting on the plains of Clontarf, where Brian Boru had cast a wave of Viking invaders into the ocean a millennium ago, O'Connell was seized by Redcoats and charged with insurrection. Ireland collapsed into greater despair than ever before as British soldiers punished the impudent Celts. Deportations increased dramatically and unexplained deaths jammed over-crowded cemeteries.

Padraic hurried down the narrow path leading to his tiny mud-walled home, since anyone caught outdoors after sunset was subject to deportation. He trudged up to the door, but didn’t enter. He listened intently to see if the emotional rancor that had driven him away earlier had subsided. Unfortunately, he heard passionate argument, punctuated by his mother's wailing and his father's uncharacteristic cursing. Forlornly, he sat on a rock to wait until peace descended upon his troubled home.

While his bare feet toyed with weeds sprouting from the mossy turf, he heard much of the conversation unfolding inside the house. He began to understand what had been tormenting his parents for two days. The wave of deportations sweeping the country, in retribution for O’Connell’s abortive insurrection, had descended upon Ballynacargy. Some unfortunate villager was slated to be forcibly exiled overseas. Mother wasn’t resigned to letting it happen. Father tried to console her by rationalizing both the benefit and the inevitability of it.

Padraic gathered, from the depth of his mother's emotions, that the deportee was very dear to her. He heard her decry the brutality of the long journey on the deadly coffin ships, and the terror of a frightened immigrant landing on foreign soil with no acquaintance within four thousand miles and with nothing but a pervasive hatred for the perpetrators of this awful thing.

Padraic himself began to mourn when the conversation revealed that the unfortunate soul destined for deportation was an adolescent. His mother described the woeful trauma that a youngster would experience in heartless separation from family, village, and country. She told of the gruesome voyage, where one thousand deportees were jammed into the bowels of a ship fit for only a hundred cattle. Water was sparse, and food even more so. There was no privacy and no sanitation provisions. Daylight was rarely seen. Vomiting from seasickness added to the germ-laden effluence washing through the hold with bilge from the sea. Disease abounded, and death was frequent. So many corpses were summarily tossed overboard that coffin ship pilots could track their progress toward America, Argentina, and Australia simply by following the trail of Irish skeletons that haunted the world's oceanbeds.

Padraic’s stomach churned with revulsion. For a fleeting moment, he wished he could trade places with the unfortunate deportee, but he knew he wasn’t brave enough. He also knew that his mother’s grief would be magnified tenfold if the last of her children not yet murdered by the British was to be taken from her, even as a voluntary self-sacrifice. He opted for the security of his rock perch as the sun slowly sank below the western horizon.

Moments later, two visitors strode down the narrow path to his house. They passed him without noticing his existence, but he noticed them in a way that he had never noticed anyone before or since. Seeing the sheriff and the landlord allied together, rapping forcefully on the door of his home, sent a charge of electricity down his spine that made every hair on his body stand on end. Their black coats, their lips pursed with grim resolve, and their strident knocking convinced Padraic that serious business was afoot. Morbidly, he imagined the two dour men as Grim Reapers incarnated.

When his mother opened the door, she unleashed an unholy scream that pierced the core of his being with a subliminal warning he didn’t understand. She turned and ran from the doorway, her screaming unabated. Padraic was now completely disoriented and afraid. His heart beat faster and his palms began to sweat. His father appeared in the doorway looking haggard and defeated. The beaten man stared intently at the Grim Reapers for a long, silent moment, as if trying to make them disappear with what remained of his will. Sweat covered Padraic's entire body. His breathing was rapid and shallow. Adrenaline pumped through his veins as his body subconsciously recognized the imminent danger that his staggered mind didn’t yet comprehend.

Comprehension came quickly enough. When his father's staring couldn’t make the Grim Reapers vanish, the gaunt patriarch turned his head and looked at him. "Padraic", he said with a weak, cracking voice, "Come here." His father said nothing else, but his beseeching look that passionately begged forgiveness told Padraic all he needed to know. He now understood why his mother grieved so. He now understood why his father looked more vanquished than any man deserved. He now understood who was being deported to America. He was.

He didn’t move. His world stopped momentarily, because he willed it to stop. He wanted to freeze this scene for posterity, because whatever was left of his childhood had now been purloined. This was his last look at the world through youthful eyes. From now on, his view of the world would be glazed with cynicism and hatred, and he would forevermore interpret life with a heart singed by brutish callousness.

His father summoned him again. Padraic rose mechanically from the rock, still in shock. As he walked, he dully heard his father explaining why this unfortunate situation was unavoidable. "....there is not enough food for us all to eat....America has food enough to feed the world....the landlord doesn’t want the starvation of another youth on his conscience....there is opportunity to lead a real life in America, and the landlord will pay your passage....we haven't paid our rent for seven months....it’s better to go it alone overseas than to join Maggie and James beyond the pale....we can’t go with you, because we have no money....we must stay here to repay our debts to the landlord."

The words meant nothing to Padraic. He didn't need an explanation. He needed his mother. He suddenly dashed into the house past his surprised father and the two Grim Reapers. He flung himself onto his mother, who was crumpled in a heap on a wooden chair. She had just enough forewarning to open her arms and envelop him, on this last day of his childhood and her last day of his acquaintance. He buried his face between her neck and shoulders. The salty residue of her tears evoked a torrent of his own tears. They sobbed in unison, with great wracking spasms, trying to cleanse their souls of pain. He cocooned inside her suffocating hug. The soft warmth of her bare skin on his face became etched permanently in his memory. He kissed her cheek tenderly, an affection she returned several times over. Her pungent breath, heavy with the scent of intense crying, wafted across his nostrils, etching another indelible memory. Placing his head on her bosom, he heard her pounding heart thumping out an eternal message comprehensible only by mother and child. He absorbed these sensory souvenirs as secret little treasures to be cherished for the rest of his alienated life. They would be his only proof that he ever lived in a place called Ballynacargy, in a land called Ireland, raised by parents he would never see again.

The landlord, the sheriff, and his father entered the house. The two impatient Grim Reapers explained with little sincerity that maudlin displays of emotion only made it harder to get on with the inevitable, as ordained by the King and the Archbishop. His father, trying to salvage his family’s dignity, instructed his wife to release Padraic. She did this, but the withering look she gave her husband made it clear her estimation of him would never be the same. He pleaded with her for understanding. "Whoever stays in this godforsaken emerald prison will surely die! The boy will live if he goes!" The words had no effect. She interpreted them as betrayal and surrender. No reasoned arguments could ever sway a mother to abandon her child.

Padraic watched this exchange between his parents with morbid fascination. His predicament had become surreal, as if he was an observer in this drama, rather than a participant who should be running or punching wildly at the Grim Reapers or collapsing to the floor. But, he did none of these. His father put a hand uncomfortably on his shoulder as a farewell gesture. Padraic just looked at him with an empty expression. This part of his life was already just a memory. As the Grim Reapers led him away, he heard his mother scream frantically. Then he heard a scuffle as his father physically restrained her from chasing after him. Then he heard no more, because powerful barriers had formed within moments around his heart and soul. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t look back.