The Rath

By Brian Collins

What if we suffer things from before we were born?

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.”

It all began with young Tom Hedderman and his wanting a little love. 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. What follows is a fantastical test of spirit. The ghosts keep knocking Tom's cabin down, Peg, his wife, blows up like a cow, and the children are all faerie cursed—the eldest heartstopping reckless, the girls too beautiful and weird. Then comes the day with clouds like coffins and the spuds all turn black, the Great Hunger. 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 she is feeling, but a chance at one—knowing what she is grieving so she can lay it down. That and her father's story about how love sees people through.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Collins
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780998326818

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.

Book preview

These worries, sweetheart,

Just the afternoon swallows

Of a warm September day.

--Verlaine

I

I wanted to write sooner, Peg, but it was one thing after another this week—the cat and the car and then Jack on the way to France. I'd barely time to change my socks.

You sounded so sad the other day.

Why not come home this weekend? We could drink some wine, light a great heaven of candles and talk it all over.

And I will get the ticket.

II

Once more, then I'll let it go.

Don't let the sad keep you from coming.

It’s only a couple hours, then you’re here with Mary and me, and we’ll take good care of you.

Or will I come down for a couple of days? It’s all the same to me, and you ought to have some company.

III

I understand. If you change your mind, the offer stands. But there’s something I need to tell you, so I'll have to write again.

For now take care. And don’t fight the sad. Lie down and let it wash over you. It's the only way.

No way around but through.

IV

Sorry to be so long with this, but I was a few days getting it all down. It’s about what you’re feeling now, Peg. It’s not just your sad over Michael. You’ve the gloom on you too. You must know what it's about or it will eat you.

I got it all from my gran. About the gloom and the monster and the sweetness in the dark of night. Gran who was also called Peg and lived to a hundred and one. This was near the end, when I was going in to her every couple of weeks, a way out in Brooklyn. Not my favorite thing to do, but she was all by herself and you've never seen anything like her. Old as a troll with this great jig of a brogue and a hundred little stories she told over and over.

A dog? she’d say, quiet for a moment and then very serious like. Well. The dog was out in the road. And the soldiers come along. And would you believe they just shot him?

They were all like that, always only halftold things, hard to know what to make of at first. But like I say, she told them over and over, and by and by you'd begin to get the idea.

It was just like that I learned about the gloom.

It’s late one Sunday, we’ve played a hundred hands of rummy and I’m beginning to squirm in my chair. I look across the tippy little snacktable we’re sitting at, sizing her up for leaving. She’s got the cards up to her nose—to make them out. Then this light catches my eye. There is a window just behind her, and it's rooftops and twilight all the way out to the long Verrazano. You wouldn’t think so—shank end of Brooklyn and a bridge to nowhere—but it’s heartbreaking lovely. Something heavenly in that soft, late light.

But it's also a bit hard. Like a wave the lovely comes and lifts you up, then it turns, and there's a great, strong pull toward something else. Out and down you go, and all you can feel is how small you are.

It's a strange thing to say, but it looked like the light of the end of the world.

What roused me then I'm not sure, but Gran's cards were on the table, and she was looking hard at me through those ancient glasses of hers. Are you afraid of the dark? she says.

Part of me was still a way out over those lonely rooftops, but I'd heard her. She reached for the lamp at her shoulder, click, and the knife edge of a light's coming on.

It's the gloom, she went on. The sad in the late light. Your father had it, and wasn’t he a great son-of-a-bitch? And my mother, your great grandmother. Then just as always, done before she'd finished.

It may be she was telling me something, but at the time it seemed more of the usual thing, part of that circle of never more than halftold stories she went round and round to hold on to who she was. No matter, I was done. Just enough left in me then to get myself uptown. Up and off I went, thinking only of home.

The rest is harder to tell—how it all come out, how I put it together—but like I say, round and round she went, a hundred little stories, then there just come a day when I could see it all, like the hangman children play and the difference one letter makes. To tell it to you, Peg—about the gloom and the monster and the sweetness in the dark of night—I'll have to do it different or be at it forever. I'll have to gather it all up, make a story, a proper one with beginning, middle and end. And what's the harm? She’d have done it herself, I think, if she'd been able to stand back a little bit more. Don't we always try to put things together for ourselves that way? It’s just there isn’t always enough time. Maybe this is part of what’s left to the rest of us—the long, slow reckoning with hard things?

Anyway, you like a good story, don’t you? It can be enough for a little while.

I will try to tell it as Gran sounded to me, for there was something in that Irish of hers that was no less the story—light even in the darkest things, like one of their wakes.

One more thing. Some of what I will tell you will seem very, very strange. You’ll find yourself thinking it can’t all be true. Such things you will have to sort out for yourself, but I can offer a little advice.

The strangest ones are all true.

V

I should probably start with poor old Tom, for he was the last of our people to have the gloom and to know what it was. This was my grandmother’s great, great, great grandfather, if that means anything. He and all the rest lived upon a little finger of bog and bottomland between the river and the great sea.

Before the gloom got him, he was the sweetest boy there was. You know the kind, up in the morning and laughing and singing right away. And a great good heart too. Like the day he was walking along the road with a friend. He’d earned a shilling bringing the storekeeper’s horse back to him, and they were going to town to buy themselves some sweets. Anyway, about halfway there they come upon a man down in the ditch, half- starved and two legs shy of whole since a musket ball cut him down in France. And could the boys help him out with a copper or two?

I don’t need to tell you, it was rare a country boy had something in his pocket, but Tom gave that shilling to him just like that. The friend though, he took it very hard. He'd his heart set on those sweets, and as they're walking back home, he asks Tom whether it didn’t seem a little queer a man who couldn’t walk got a way out in the country like that, and from France no less. And Tom—and it just goes to show what kind he really was—he says:

What does it matter how a man gets down in a ditch? Sad is sad.

But like I said, this was all before the gloom got him.

It happened about the time the boy got his whiskers and began to want what a man wants. Back then remember, a man could get a wife only if he had a living, a bit of the great green Earth for a cabin and bed of spuds, and poor old Tom hadn’t a prayer. For three hundred years what land fat-arsed Henry left the Irish had been passed from father to sons, divided again and passed on. By the time Tom was born, the people were living on top of one another. Yes, his old man had more than many, but he’d also seven sons. Just enough to give each of the oldest four a little scrap. And the youngest three? Well, it was just tough luck. It's why so many went off to England and America back then, like brothers five and six.

But Tom was not that kind. It would have killed him to leave his people. The only thing left was to stay home—stay home and stay a boy for the rest of his days—and with nowhere to root itself, that great yearning of his began to turn inside him, to give off a sour that went all the way through and ruined sweet Tom of the morning.

The boy who used get up singing could now hardly get out of bed, and when he did rise, well, you’d best stay out of his way. The least thing could draw a sharp remark, the kind that’d sting all day long. No, it wasn’t personal—he hated everything—but as you might guess this was little consolation to his family and friends. The terrible feeling inside him was so strong you could feel it across the room. Some claimed he brought the dark with him when he come into the house. Dogs and children ran off when they saw him. After a while the neighbors got to know the signs of his coming down the road—the blackbirds flew up in the air, leaves on the locust trees turned just as before a storm, and then for no real reason, you suddenly felt kind of low, dwelling on the saddest things, all the loved ones that had gone on, on the lonesomeness of life, on the children, who were all headed for the grave. Those with a cow learned to get it away from the road to keep the milk from souring. The women would bring the things in from the line—the poor fella was known to drag a short rain behind him. It wasn’t long before bright, young Tom seemed someone they had all just dreamed. When exactly it happened it’s hard to say, but sometime then he got the name poor old Tom—and poor old Tom then until the day he died.

God save us, said his ma, should that boy find someone to blame for his gloom. And it was just a few days later the great dark thing inside him caught fire.

VI

Peg you must bear with me a while. It's only the first part that's so dark. I promise.

Just down the road from where they were—Tom and his people—just over the hill there was a fellow by the name of Quealy, and he’d a devil of a summer. Some of the fields out that way hang over the sea, and one day poor Quealy’s cow grazed herself right out into thin air, down and then drowned. Then his spuds failed. A traveler had cursed the ground where they were. So he’s starts taking a drink every night, just for courage like. But one time he overfortifies himself, falls down and hits his head, and when he comes to, thinks he’s Sir Robert Peel.

Now it goes without saying, it’s a hard thing to make your rent when you’re haranguing Parliament all day long, but it seemed news to Quealy. And sure, in another place I suppose he might have been given time to get back on his feet, but the landlord out their way was always off in France, where a gentleman could idle in proper style, and there was an agent watching over things, the kind that would eat his own mother. No, it was pay up or out with you.

The agent would come along with the papers, and the sheriff and a couple of thugs in case things got ugly. Then all your possessions were put out in the road while the neighbors looked on, those that loved you along with the ones that just loved to watch. The worst—as worst is want—come last. After you’d had the whole shame of it read aloud, the official notice I mean, and all your private things tumbled into the ditch—whatever they hadn’t seized—the men would set up the Devil’s Pestle, great stout pole of oak like a cannon, and from mighty chains they’d swing it to smash what was once your house to flinders. Then quiet, the deepest of quiet, like all of Creation struck dumb by the thing, everyone would begin to drift off—thugs and neighbors and friends—and you’d sit by yourself for a long, long time while your wife and children cried, sit in a sort daze on whatever trash the sheriff left behind. Like a man who can’t wake himself up from someone else’s bad dream.

And that’s just how it all began when Quealy’s turn come—the agent with the papers and the constable and the ugly brothers Dolan, for whom there was no work too mean. A shilling was a shilling after all, and that day they earned it, what with Quealy abusing them the whole time with his parliamentary oratory, and all those stone-faced neighbors standing by on simmer. Yes, though it was rare anyone dared get in the way of such business, the line between order and mayhem is easily crossed, and you’d want to be with the mob, not against it then. Weren’t there three fellas up by Kilnoonan torn to pieces just a few years before.

Let’s get it done, whispered one of the brothers to the other. And then up the road for a taste.

Why no one saw the usual signs of his coming along—the turning of leaves, the uneasy air, the hardening of shadows everywhere—well what do you expect with Quealy’s goddamning to hell the eviction gang and the rest of the assembly up against the razor’s edge of its only thus-far contained ire? Yes, just like that, poor old Tom appeared in all his miasmic melancholy, just inside the great circle of witnesses, and the putting out of Quealy stopped as if by a thunderclap.

For a long moment everyone just stood there in the road, looking at one another as if to say, Aren’t things bad enough? Like a very gray day, you know, and then along come a hearse. And for Tom, it goes without saying, the whole thing was really beyond bearing. Wasn’t it the very same tyranny of land sure that stood between him and a little sweetness in the dark of night? Wasn’t it the same damn thing that plunged him down into the gloom? How else to see it all but as a terrible dumb show of his own great thwartification? They might as well have been putting himself into the road. Then, just as his dear mother had anxiously foreseen, that yearning-gone-sour started turning like a small maelstrom.

What come next just goes to show how tight a spot the agent was in now. There was suddenly something very different in the air, something much worse than the scene’s being just a little darker with Tom of the gloom standing by. The moment had turned toward trouble no longer just imagined but solid and moving, bodies already given to it as much as to any real blow. They were all only waiting for an opening, and you could feel it. Sure poor old Tom’s great gloom had gone out from him, out and around, drew them all to itself, and they all now saw it just as he. Well if Tom moved toward the eviction men at that moment, the mob would have crushed them to dust.

Are you sure you know what you’re doing here? was how he began, slow like a sad bell tolling in the quiet, and with a look in his eye that made the agent and his men only more uneasy, the black of a man who’s ready to go straight down to hell. Even the ghoulish Dolan twins held their breath.

This is a lawful action, the agent returned, waving the papers he got from the sheriff.

Another moment like something ready to split open, then Tom again: Like what happened over at Ballybroken? he asked.

What Tom was alluding to was a man in a place not too far away, a fellow that found himself in much the same straits as poor Quealy and finally turned out. But two days later, when the sun came up on the agent’s pasture, the cows were all on the ground with their hind legs cut. The agent had a pretty good idea who it was that did it, but there was nothing he could do, for the people were very cute back then.

Listen boy, says the agent to Tom, covering his discomfort with bluster. This is not Ballybroken, nor am I that foolish fellow up there who lost all those cows. And if I were you, I’d be careful what I showed knowing about such things. And then he starts off again toward the cart like enough time’s been wasted. Before he goes very far though, Tom pipes up again.

Right you are, says he, quiet still and nodding a little, like he was giving the whole thing every consideration. This is not Ballybroken. And then off he went, just like that. Off and up the road as if it were all the same to him, mercy and murder. And those eviction men—the eviction men and all the rest if truth be told—it was like they'd all been just snatched from a fire.

He had not much liked Tom’s tone, it won’t come as a surprise—the agent, I mean—and later that night he thought it might be wise to get a little air, have a look around, to see that no bad business was afoot. After a little tour of his own place, he went over to the Bighouse, where the overseer—more of a daytime sort—would be slumped in his quarters with the drink, and when he finally got to where he could first see the few lights that were always kept burning, the place was quiet as could be. Down he’d go for just a quick nose around, see who was still up, then back home and to bed. Good as it was to have done that day a little something for the progress of so backward a place, an eviction always left him all in.

Tied up his horse then a little way off to come up the last stretch of road on foot, and when he come finally to where the working buildings lay, all was still quiet as a church. A big moon was up that night. The place was soft with that thin light, the kind that just gives the dark a soft sheen. The feeling was almost deathly, and it comfort him.

But then, just as he turned to go back to his horse and home, there come a great, unholy howling from out in the dark near field. If your man had believed in the banshee, that terrible cry would have killed him. These landlords’ men were cold blooded though—it was the only way in their line—and so right toward it he went as fast as his tired legs could go. What could have made such an unearthly sound—loud and high but hoarse, like hell’s own hinges after a century of poisonous rain—he did not know, but where bad business was afoot, it was usually your plain, old blackguard at work, and the agent hadn’t gotten to where he was by running off.

Nearly up the short slope he was when the terrible keening began again, only now so much nearer it stopped him right in his tracks, and then a great ball of fire came over the crest of the small hill and knocked him hard on his arse. In the moment or two it took him to raise himself up and look after it, the flaming haystack was already a way down the hill, trailing great tongues of fire behind it into the moonless night, and then it was the smell of burning flesh surrounded him, upwind now of the frightful spectacle, and a heartbeat later, behind him, the hinges of hell again, and the ground began to rumble like when the steam engine from Limerick come down for the peat, and if he hadn’t turned back around at that very instant to see what it was, he would have been broken to pieces in the unforgettable storm that swept down upon him now of the Lord’s own cows, each caught up in its own horrible inferno, and he lay there and watched them careen away into the night, their ferocious wailing tearing through the dark from out of the flying fire.

VII

The happy part is coming, Peg, if you will hold on just a bit longer. And I will say a little more about the point of the whole thing. Sure what could any of this to do with you—poor old Tom, the gloom and all the rest? It was a hundred years ago and a thousand miles away.

Once more I tell you, part of what you’re feeling right now is this very same gloom, come down to you through blood like crooked teeth.

Like a man who loses his wife is how Gran unfolded it once, a woman he really loves. A few years later he finds someone else, and it's love again, but it doesn’t make him whole. Not really.

She give me a moment to take it in and went on.

He has children, but he grieves still. And it's no small matter. There are ways he's really lost to them in that grief. So they grieve too. They grieve his grieving.

Like fever, says I, from one to the others.

Smart boy, says she, but how smart? I haven’t finished. Another moment then until I was listening.

Now, what if our man never spoke of his grief? Some things are like that you know. Too hard for words.

Here I waited.

And if he never spoke of it, would his children know he's grieving?

But you said—

"I said they'd grieve his grieving, she broke in, not that they'd know what it was." This I only sort of followed.

And what about their children? His children’s children?

Another long pause then though I don’t think she really expected an answer.

"And how would the grieving end if no one knew what it was? How could you say long enough?"

And that was all I got.

Come on now! she barked. Your deal.

It was only later, when I’d a few more pieces, I could see what this had to do with us.

It’s why I’m telling you about poor old Tom.

It’s with him the knowing ended and there was no one could say long enough. From Tom to us then like crooked teeth, that gloom.

VIII

It was never found out who burned those poor creatures the night Quealy was put off his land. Whoever the madman, he’d been cute enough to cover his tracks. Not to say the agent didn’t have a notion. When he got home that night, and still trembling, what did he find on his doorstep but one of the parish boundary markers, and straight away the tomb cool words of poor old Tom come back to him, Right you are. This is not Ballybroken. But you couldn’t accuse a man on a notion, not even when you were the agent and had the upper hand. If it isn't already plain, those were very unsettled times. Such things had to be handled very carefully. Only a few years back the people had risen up with the French behind them, and the Parliament had to be moved to Westminster, where no Irish could go. Then came O’Connell, the Great Liberator, stirred everyone up again and made the English give in. Away out in the countryside though, things changed very little. The landlords were still driving the people into the ground. That’s when the farmers started taking the law into their own hands, in the middle of the dark night, slashing the cows and other such stuff, and an agent had to think twice before he began pointing his finger. Oh sure, a lot less trouble out their way than in many other places—this the agent had perhaps much too quickly reminded Tom that day at Quealy’s—but that the barony would forever avoid such mischief was unlikely. No, it looked like the fight was on, and that agent would have to work a bit harder to earn his bread.

As it turned out though the whole business was beyond him.

That night over at the Bighouse just wouldn’t let him go—the wrenching cry, the stampeding inferno, the stench that came up to him from down below—all day long, over and over, so he couldn’t think straight. And then at night, when he lay down, it kept right on. He’d thrash himself to sleep and the flaming cows bore down upon him in his dreams. It was just no use. Before he got his reply from the Lord—he had written to him with a full account of the recent trouble—he sent another terse message to inform his worship that though he regretted, etc., it was imperative, etc., his health, etc., and off the miserable fellow sailed to what seemed to him the much more agreeable work of Virginia slaver.

Before a month passed another man took his place, a preacher who was rumored to have lost his last parish over some dark deed with a child. Whether it was true or not, who knows, but he hit the ground running like nothing so promising had come his way in a long, long time. There were three given notice his very first week, and by the end of the second, the Special Tribunal for People’s Security had tacked a death warrant to his door. Why they bothered with such formalities isn’t entirely clear. So few of those agent fellas could take a hint. It was just the rapparee style, I guess. In any case, when after another few days it was clear the death warrant hadn’t made much impression on him, they went to where he was sleeping, blindfolded him, put him on his own horse and rode with him to a place by the sea just west of Kildillon, where the great cliffs run all the way up to Moher. And with his blindfold still on—sure the poor fellow must have been able to hear the swells breaking against the rocks far below and guessed what was coming—with his blindfold still over his eyes, right off they threw him into the dark night and down into the icy water. A few days later, up on the strand he washed, the fish having left just enough of him to set an example. They buried him in a child’s coffin, without pants—for none were needed—and down inside the box they tucked the black blindfold that deprived the poor fellow one more look at the star-filled sky and was still around his head when he came up with the surf.

Hard to believe, but another fellow come along within a fortnight, little fellow with terrible skin, scarred all over from some pox he had when he was young. Quiet and slow he was. You could see him going at his supper in his place by the road, where he always had the door open, and when you’d speak to him, he’d just look at you through his sleepy eyes, and at the very most, give a short low grunt as if to say what could it matter to a creature with a brain no bigger than a toad’s, and that’s what they called him, Toad. Oh but this fellow knew better than to get himself dropped right away into the sea. His first week he just went slowly around, tasting the air with that little bit of a tongue