The Rath

By Brian Collins

A man writes to console his heartsick daughter with a wild tale about sadness like that. “It's half of what ails us,” he tells her, “someone else's grief.”

A long way back young Tom Hedderman came as we all do to want a little love. But love needed land in old Moyloo, a bit of dirt for spuds, and there was none but rathground, where the ghosts of the old people never let up. So Tom's wanting turns to rage, he begins to make bold with the landlord's men, then just a few days shy of murdered, he is saved by a marvelous dream. He must marry Peg the lovely neighbor girl and find the heart for life beside the rath.

What follows is a test of spirit there as sure as it is fantastical. The old people keep knocking Tom's cabin down, Peg blows up like a cow, and the children are all faerie cursed—the eldest heartstopping reckless, the girls too beautiful or weird. Then comes the day with clouds like coffins and the spuds all turn black, the Great Hunger, a whole countryside gone fantastical now. When it is over, the few who survive shoulder a sadness that would last a hundred years.

“Come down to us through the blood like crooked teeth,” the man tells his daughter. Not quite cure for what the girl is feeling, but a chance at one, her knowing what she is grieving so she can lay it down. That and her father's story about how love saw all those people through. One trial after another turned goodside out—rathground settled, reckless boy turned wondrous rider, a demon badger tamed by their too beautiful girl.

Thanks to years of study we now have a fair historical account of what happened during the Great Irish Famine, but everyone for whom it is also family history needs another kind of reckoning, something more personal and a way of living in its long shadow. The Rath is both, a famine blues song for today made of folk memory, closer by half to laying it all down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Collins
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370341771

Brian Collins

Brian Collins’ work has appeared in the Broadkill Review, Licking River Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Inquiry. His first book, When in Doubt, Tell the Truth, is published by Columbia University Press. He lives in West Clare, Ireland, and Hanover, New Hampshire.