Máirtín Ó Cadhain - Graveyard Clay - Cré na Cille

“I’d sooner go begging for my keep,” says Pádraig. “I won’t marry any woman on the face of the earth but Nóra Sheáinín’s daughter from Mangy Field …”

And he married her.

I myself had to put a shirt on her back. She didn’t even have the marriage fee, not to mention a dowry. A dowry from the Filthy-Feet Breed! A dowry in Mangy Field of the puddles, where they milk the ducks … He married her, and she’s there with him ever since like the shadow of death. She’s not able to raise a pig or a calf, a hen or a goose, not even the ducks she’d have been used to in Mangy Field. Her house is dirty. Her children are dirty. She can’t work the land or the strand 15…

There was full and plenty in that house until she came into it. I kept it scrubbed clean. There wasn’t a Saturday night in the year I didn’t have every stool and chair and table out by the stream to wash. I spun and I carded. I had yarn and I had sackcloth. I raised pigs and calves and fowl … for as long as I had the energy to do it. And when I hadn’t, I shamed Nóra Sheáinín’s daughter into not letting everything go by the board completely …

But how will the house be now without me? … The bold Nell will be satisfied at any rate … So well she may. She has a good woman in her house for baking and spinning: Big Brian’s Mag. It’s easy for her to laugh at that little fool of a son of mine who has nobody but that untidy slut. When Nell’s going up by our house now, won’t she often be saying: “Indeed we got thirty pounds for the pigs … It was a good fair if you had cattle raised for it. We got sixteen pounds for the two calves … Even though it’s not the laying season our Mag still manages to collect eggs. She had four score eggs in Brightcity 16on Saturday … Four broods of chicks hatched for us this year. All the hens are laying a second time. I set another clutch yesterday. ‘The little clutch of the ripening oats,’ Jack called it when he saw me putting them under the hen …” She’ll have a right swagger in her bottom now, going by our house. She’ll know I’m gone. Nell! The pussface! She is my sister. But may no corpse come into the graveyard ahead of her! …

4

— … I was fighting for the Irish Republic, and you killed me, you traitor. Fighting for England you were, the time you fought for the Free State … An English gun in your hand, English money in your pocket, and an English spirit in your heart. You sold your soul and the heritage of your ancestors for the sake of a “bargain,” for the sake of a job …

— That’s a lie! A criminal you were, rising up against a legitimate government …

— … By the oak of this coffin, Muraed, I gave Caitríona the pound …

— … I drank two score pints and two …

— I remember it well, Glutton. I twisted my ankle that day …

— … You stuck the knife into me between the lower and upper ribs. Through the edge of my liver it went. Then you gave it a twist. The foul blow was always the mark of the One-Ear Breed …

— … Permission to speak! Let me speak …

— Are you ready for the hour’s reading now, Nóra Sheáinín? We’ll make a start on a new novelette today. We finished Two Men and a Powder-puff the other day, did we not? The title of this one is The Red-Hot Kiss . Listen now, Nóra Sheáinín: “Nuala was an innocent girl until she met Charlie Price in the nightclub …” I know. There’s no peace or seclusion or opportunity for culture here … and as you say, Nóra, paltry trivialities is all they ever talk about … cards, horses, drink, violence … he has us demented with his little mare, day in day out … You are perfectly right, Nóra dear … There’s no opportunity here for one who wants to cultivate the intellect. That is the absolute truth, Nóra. This place is as bad-mannered, as dull-witted, as barbarous as the Wastelands of the Half-Guinea Plot down there. We’re truly in the Dark Ages since the sansculottes who accumulated piles of money “on the dole” began to be buried in the Fifteen-Shilling Plot … This is how I would divide up this graveyard now, Nóra, if I had my own way: university people in the Pound Plot, and then … Isn’t that so, Nóra? It’s a crying shame indeed that some of my own pupils are lying up here beside me … It depresses me how ill-informed they are, when I think of the diligence I wasted on them … And they can be quite disrespectful at times … I don’t know what’s coming over the young generation at all … You’re right, Nóra … Lack of cultural opportunities, I suppose …

“Nuala was an innocent girl until she met Charlie Price in the nightclub.” A nightclub, Nóra? … You were never in a nightclub? Well, a nightclub is not unlike this place … Ah no, Nóra. The places frequented by the sea-going fraternity are not the same as nightclubs. “Dives” is what those places are, Nóra, but cultivated people go to nightclubs … You would like to pay a visit to one of them, Nóra? … It would be no bad thing, to give your education the final touch, a bit of polish, a cachet … I was in a nightclub in London myself that time the teachers got a pay rise, before the two cuts. I saw an African prince there. He was as black as a berry, and drinking champagne … You’d love to go to a nightclub, Nóra? Aren’t you the shameless one … Naughty girl, Nóra … Naughty …

— You brazen hussy! Seáinín Robin’s daughter from Mangy Field! What was that place she said she wanted to visit, Master? … May she not live to enjoy it! Take care that you pay no heed to her, Master dear. If you knew her as well as I do you’d sing dumb to her. I’ve spent the last sixteen years bickering with her daughter and herself. You’re poorly employed, Master, squandering your time on Nóirín Filthy-Feet. She never had a single day’s schooling, Master, and she’d be more familiar with the track of a flea than her ABC …

— Who is this? Who are you …? Caitríona Pháidín! Is it possible you’re here, Caitríona! … Well, no matter how long it takes, this is the last shelter for all of us in the end … You are welcome, Caitríona, you are welcome … I’m afraid, Caitríona, you are … what shall I say … a little too hard on Nóra Filthy … on Nóra Sheáinín. Her mind has much improved since the time you used to be … what was the expression you used, Caitríona? … Yes … bickering with her … It is difficult for us here to keep track of time, but if I understand you rightly, she has been here for three years now, under the beneficial influence of culture … But tell me this, Caitríona … Do you remember the letter I wrote for you to your sister Baba in America? … That was the last letter I ever wrote … I was struck down by my fatal illness the following day … Is that will under discussion still?

— It’s many a letter came from Baba since you were writing for me, Master. But she never confirmed or denied anything about the money. We got her reply to that letter you spoke of, Master. That was the last time she mentioned a will: “I did not make my will yet,” she said. “I hope I will not suffer a sudden or accidental death as you were imagining in your letter. Do not worry. I will make my will in due course, when I consider it necessary.” When that letter came I said to myself, “It must have been a schoolmaster wrote that for her. Our people never had that sort of talk.”

It’s the Small Master — your own successor — who writes for us now, Master, but I’m afraid the priest writes for Nell. That hag can get round him with her chickens and her knitted stockings and her backhanders … She’s the one who’s good at that, Master. I thought I’d last another few years and bury the bitch before me! …