Where the Atlantic meets the land

by H. Caldwell Lipsett

A PAUPER'S BURIAL

'Oul' Shan the Pote,' as the townsfolk called him, was a descendant in the direct male line of Shan O'Neill, the great rebel of Queen Elizabeth's day. He had a fine pedigree, but little else; for of all the possessions of his forefathers, all that remained to him was an old battered, silver punch-ladle and a silver-mounted dirk with a cairngorm in the hilt of it, which the envious-minded amongst his neighbors declared to be a bit of yellow glass. At such insinuations Shan used to wax mightily indignant, showing that he still retained his pride of birth; but on ordinary occasions that feeling was entirely subordinate in him to two others—his belief in his own genius as a poet, and his overflowing love for 'me daughter Kathleen, what's in Australey, the crathur.'

His actual position in the social scale did not quite coincide with his high ancestry and literary pretensions. He was a stone-cutter by trade, and had been for some years at one time in his life in my grandfather's service as odd man. With the partisanship of the Irish peasant, he thought that the latter circumstance made the family in general, and me in particular, his peculiar property, and used to treat us accordingly. When he was a young man, and the sap was still effervescent in him, he had been in the habit of going an occasional 'tear;' and once my grandmother, seeing the recumbent form of a man very drunk sleeping peacefully in the middle of the road in front of the house, and having a vision of carts jolting over him, called in the police to remove him to the lock-up. In the morning it turned out, much to her dismay, that the man she had thus given into custody was Shan, whom she was called upon to go and bail out again. That was the standing joke of his life. Whenever he saw her in his latter days he used to say, 'Ah, now, misthress dear, don't be ang-ery an' go an' give poor oul' Shan up to the polis, bad scran to thim,' and then he cackled vehemently at his own wit.

The last time I saw him was when I was a schoolboy of fifteen home for the holidays. He was then a little thin old man with deep wrinkles in his face, and long wispy gray hair that used to blow round his face in a dishevelled halo. I can see him now ambling along the street of the little town with his eyes fixed straight in front of him, with the inward gaze of the poet and the dreamer; 'moonin' down the road like a jackass wid a carrot in front of his nose,' his persecutors, the street boys, used to call it.

When he was more than usually elated by the recent appearance of some piece of doggerel of his in the poet's corner of the local rag, he would be heard crooning over to himself with a curious kind of sing-song lilt the words of his great poem, that had made his local reputation,—

'Oh, the banks an' braes o' wild Kilcross,
Where the blue-bells blow
An' the heath an' fern an' soft green moss
In the springtime grow,
Where the lads an' lasses take their play
Of a Sunday morn,
An' the blackbirds sing the livelong day
In the rustlin' corn.'

When I used to point out to him that 'the rustlin' corn' was a pure myth of his imagination, as the cliffs of 'wild Kilcross' were as bleak a place as you would find in 'a month of Sundays,' and that not a blade grew anywhere within a mile of them, he used to reply, 'Ah! whisht now, can't ye? If them wans haven't got the sinse to plant a lock ov oats, is it me as ye'd blame for it? Ahl that the likes av thim has a mind for is shpuds.'

But his favorite haunt where I could always find him at need was in the churchyard under the shadow of the square, ugly tower of the barn-like church, amongst 'the beautiful uncut hair of graves.' At that time he did very little work, and used to spend the greater part of his day there stringing rhymes together, while he renewed the inscriptions upon the old weather-beaten stones, and made them once more legible; for the lapse of time and lichen-growth make those memorials of us in stone hardly more enduring than human life itself. There I used to seek him out with offerings of snuff, to get him to tell me those stories of the ancient grandeur of his race which I loved to hear; for youth has always a tinge of snobbishness, which is at the root of that hero-worship common to all children.

But Shan's mind was fixed on other things. He would parry my inquiries by bringing out a roll of old newspaper cuttings, which he always carried about with him, and use me as an audience for the lack of a better, spreading the precious morsels out on the flat tombstone on which we were sitting, and holding the fluttering paper down with a thumb on each corner as he read them aloud, although he knew every word by heart. Or he would say, as he chipped away at his labor of love with deft strokes of the hammer on the head of his chisel,—

'Tell ye how I knew that oul' ladle really belonged to the great Shan O'Neill, is it? Well, this is the way ov it, d'ye see? Min' the shparks, sonny, or they'll be fly in' in yer eye. While I'm thinkin' ov it, did I iver tell ye the shtory of the road Kathleen an' yours kim to be thegither. It was whin yous was a wee fellah, a weeshan roun' roll of fat in yer perambulator, an' ye kim down to the big meady wan day whin they was puttin' in a shtack of hay; I mind it was the year afore I got the toss off of the cart of hay, an' tuk harrum in me innards, an' I was niver the same man afther; an' ahl the quality from the big house was there havin' a picnic, an' Kathleen she was a bit slip ov a gurl ov thirteen at the time, an' she kim to help carry the tay. Well, yous an' she made great frien's, an' ye rouled in the hay an' covered aich other up till many's the time ye were shtuck be the forkers ahl but. An' whin they tuk yous home in the evenin', Kathleen she started to roar an' to cry afther yous, an' there was no houlin' her; we thried ahl we knew to quiet her, but deil a hate wud she quit, an' her mother was fair moidhered wid her, an' at last she ups an' takes her in unner her shawl, an' walks her ivery fut ov the road up to the big house, an' lan's her in there at ten o'clock ov night, an' she ups an' says, says she, to the misthress, as bowl' as ye plaze, "Mam," says she, "ye've made Kathleen here that conthrairy, yous an' that babby ov yours, that there's no houlin' her. I'm fair broke wid her, so I am. So I've brought her up till ye, an' ye must just kape her, for I can do nothin' wid her." An' the misthress she laughs an' says, says she, "Well, if I must, Biddy, I shuppose I must. Must is a harrud worrud," says she; an' so Kathleen she shtops from that day out in the house an' luks afther yous. I min' well she used to wheel ye in the perambulator, an' many's the time she shpilt ye in the shtreet, but devil a hate did yous care, ye just rouled in the gutter, an' laughed till she picked yous up agin. An' she shtayed as long as yous was there,—she was terrible fond ov yous; it bet ahl iver I see. But when yous was eight year oul', an' she was goin' on near han' twinty, an' a fine han'some soople lass she was too, glory be! They tuk an' sint yous away to school in England, an' she was that lonesome afther yous she was neither to houl' nor to bind, an' she just tuk a notion, an' she ups an' she emigrates to Australey. An' she was there in service for foor year, an' she wint wid wan and wid another, an' no wunner, for she was the purtiest gurl in the foor baronies, an' at last she marries a squatter-fellah out there, an' now I hear tell she has a grand carriage an' servants galore to her back. But she doesn't forgit her oul' daddy, she's not the wan to go for to do that; but she sinds me enough ivery month to kape me at me aise like a lord wid lashins ov tobaccy, an' shnuff, an' tay, an' shugar. But ahl the time she thinks a power ov yous till this minit, more be a dale, I'm thinkin', than ov her oul' man himself, as she calls him. Many's the time she's axed me to go out till her, but I wouldn't lave the oul' place even for her; I'll lay me bones, plaze God, where I spint me youth. May the saints purtect her, and may her children stan' by her as she has stud be her oul' father an' mother.'

At this point in the story the old man always found it necessary to see in which direction the clouds were blowing, and I took diligently to making out the rest of the inscription upon which he was at work. He told his story all in a breath, and always in the same words, as a parrot might, from long habitude. It was the old story of Irish emigration. Sons and daughters, not content with a fare of potatoes and tea and a futureless outlook at home, drift off one by one as they grow up to different parts of America and Australia; there they form new ties, and forget the old folks at home and all they owe them. In this case one of the daughters did not forget her debt; and, as rarely happens in this world, it was the most prosperous and best beloved of all who was thus mindful of her old parents and supported them in their age.

It was seven years before I revisited the sleepy little town, and I had heard nothing of old Shan for a long time. The day after my arrival I went for a drive on a hired car; the Jarvey was the same old character that I remembered from my youth up, but I had outgrown his failing memory; the mare was the same old screw, only a little grayer and scraggier than of old. She was painfully climbing the steep hill just outside the town, when she suddenly stopped in the middle and turned round her head to look at us.

'Ah, luk at that now. She says she's tired, the crathur, an' wud like a rist,' cried her compassionate driver with the familiarity of a privileged class. 'Shure yous is in no hurry. What 'ud ail ye?' and he got down and put a stone behind the wheel to keep the car in position, while we surveyed the view.

Opposite and behind us another hill rose steeply, even more precipitous than the one we were on, which had proved too much for the mare—a green knoll crowned with the gray old church, its summit fenced with the back wall of the churchyard. Along the strip of level ground on the dividing line, from which the twin hills sprang, wound a gray ribbon of dusty road; and as we watched, a singular procession crawled slowly along its length below us. Four old men in the light blue workhouse uniform painfully bore a long oblong black box upon their shoulders; behind them followed two old women, also in light blue. It was a pauper funeral.

'Luk at yon now. Troth, there's a sight ye wudn't see the like ov anywhere outside of the foor baronies, an' mebbe ye might niver see agin,' said the driver, with a complacency in this unique local spectacle evidently bred by the remarks of previous strangers.

As he spoke the procession halted at a stile, from which a footpath sprang straight up the hill to an opening in the shoulder of the churchyard wall: it led to the portion of ground outside 'God's Acre' allotted to those outcasts, who, by venturing to die within the walls of the 'Poorhouse,' forfeited that last right of miserable humanity, a resting-place in consecrated ground.

The old men rested their burden on the stile and grouped themselves round it.

'What are they doing now?' I asked.

And the driver replied, 'They're fittin' the rope till it. Them oul' flitters isn't fit to carry a heavy corp, lit alone the coffin, up yon brae, the crathurs, so they tie a rope till it and dhrag it up.'

The group opened out and resolved itself into its parts as it slowly climbed the hill. First came two old men bent double, each straining at a loop of rope passed over one shoulder and across their chests; behind them jolted the coffin, to which they were harnessed, over the uneven ground; next came the other two men as a relay, ready to relieve their comrades when tired; and behind them the mourners, the two old women.

I now noticed that the path was composed of three parallel lines upon the green sward. On each side was a footway, worn smooth and bare by the feet of the men and the following mourners. In the middle was vaguely outlined a strip less distinct where the grass was beaten down like a pock-marked field of oats after a rainstorm, and was thinned and straggling like the hair upon a head beginning to grow bald. That was the mark where the coffin was dragged.

'Whose funeral is it?' I asked, with a pitying sigh at this outrage upon the dead.

'Oul' Shan O'Neill's,' came the startling answer; 'he was a stone-cutter, and a gran' han' at the pothery; he cud write a pome as fast as another man cud mow a fiel' ov hay. Troth cud he!'

'But I thought his daughter kept him.'

'Holy Post-Office, how did ye come to know that?' exclaimed the driver, in surprise at the unexpected extent of my information; 'that was Kathleen, the wan dacint wan ov the whole bilin'. She kep' him till a year ago. But thin she lost ahl her money in wan ov thim banks in Australey, and the other childher' wudn't give no help, and so the oul' man come on the parish, an' he niver hel' up his head from that day out, and now they're buryin' of him.'

And so the descendant of all the O'Neills was haled at the end of a rope to a pauper's grave.