“I’m after forgettin’ that I came out to pluck bog-bine,” she repeated when the train had disappeared from sight, and taking off her boots, she picked her way across the soft and spongy moor.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRAGEDY
I
OFTEN a youth leaves Donegal and goes out into the world, does well for a time, writes frequently home to his own people, sends them a sum of money in every letter (which shows that he is not a spendthrift), asking them for a little gift in return, a scapular blessed by the priest, or a bottle of water from the holy well (which shows that he has not forgotten the faith in which he was born); but in the end he ceases to write, drops out of the ken of his people and disappears. The father mourns the son for a while, regrets that the usual money-order is not forthcoming, weeps little, for too much sentiment is foreign to the hardened sensibilities of the poor; the mother tells her beads and does not fail to say one extra decade for the boy or to give a hard-earned guinea to the priest for masses for the gasair’s soul. Time rapidly dries their tears of regret, their sorrow disappears and the more pressing problems of their lives take up their whole interests again. In later years they may learn that their boy died of fever in a hospital, or was killed by a broken derrick-jib, or done to death by a railway train. “Them foreign parts were always bad,” they may say. “Black luck be with the big boat, for it’s few it takes back of the many it takes away!”
A year had passed by since James Ryan last heard from Fergus his son. No word came of the youth, and none of the Frosses people, great travellers though the young of Frosses were, had ever come across him in any corner of the world.
“We are missing the blue pieces of paper,” Mary Ryan said to her husband one evening in the late autumn, fully three years after Fergus’s departure. She now spent her days sitting at the fire, and though her health was not the best it had greatly improved within recent years. “They were the papers!” she exclaimed. “They could buy meal in the town of Greenanore and pay the landlord his rent. Maybe the gasair is dead!”
“Maybe he is,” the husband answered. He was a man of few words and fewer ideas. Life to him, as to the animals of the fields, was naturally simple. He married, became the father of many children, all unnecessary to an overcrowded district, and most of them were flicked out by death before they were a year old. Once every eighteen months James Ryan’s wife became suddenly irritable and querulous and asked her husband to leave the house for a while. The cattle were allowed to remain inside, the husband went out and walked about in the vicinity of his home for two or three hours. From time to time he would go up to the door and call out: “Are you all right, Mary?” through the keyhole. “I am all right, Shemus,” she would answer, and the man would resume his walk. When the wife allowed him to come in he always found that his family had increased in number.
One day a child was born to him, and its third breath killed it. It was the seventh, and the year was a bad one. Potatoes lay rotting in the fields, and the peat being wet refused to burn. Somehow James Ryan felt a great relief when the child was buried. Twelve children in all were born to him, and ten of these died before they reached the age of three. “The hunger took them, I suppose,” he said, and never wept over any of his offspring, and even in time forgot the names of most of those who were dead. The third who came to him was the boy Fergus; Norah was the youngest of all.
“Maybe, indeed, he is dead,” he repeated to his wife. “I suppose there is nothing for it but to put out the curragh to the fishing again.”
“And never catch anything,” said his wife, as if blaming him for the ill-luck. “It is always the way.... If Fergus would send a few gold guineas now it would be a great help.”