"Ireland might attain, by orderly evolution, to a co-operative commonwealth in fifty to two hundred years.
"But these are dangerous times for prophecy."
PADDY GALLAGHER: GIANT KILLER.
From the dark niche under the gray boulder where the violets grow, a
Donegal fairy flew to the mountain cabin to bring a birthday wish to
Patrick Gallagher. The fairy designed not that great good would come to
Paddy, but that great good would come to his people through him. At least
when Paddy grew up, he slew the child-eating giant, Poverty, who lived in
Donegal.
Paddy began to fight poverty when he could scarcely toddle. With his father, whose back was laden with a great rush basket, he used to pad in his bare feet down the mountainside to the Dungloe harbor—down where the hills give the ocean a black embrace. Father and son would wade into the ocean that was pink and lavender in the sunset. Above them, the white curlews swooped and curved and opened their pine wood beaks to squawk a prayer for dead fish. But the workers did not stop to watch. Their food also was in question. They must pluck the black seaweed to fertilize their field.
When the early sun bronzed the bog, and streaked the dark pool below with gold, Paddy and his father began to feed the dried wavy strands of kelp between the hungry brown furrow lips. They packed the long groove near the stone fence; they rounded past the big boulder that could not be budged; last of all, they filled the short far row in the strangely shaped little field. At noon, Paddy's mother appeared at the half door of the cabin and called in the general direction of the field—it was difficult to see them, for their frieze suits had been dyed in bog water and she could not at once distinguish them from the brown earth. They were glad to come in to eat their sugarless and creamless oatmeal.
In the evening Paddy ran over the road to his cousin's. Western clouds were blackening and his little cousin was pulling the pig into the cabin as a man puts other sort of treasure out of danger into a safe. Paddy listened a moment. He could hear the castanets of the tweed weaver's loom and the hum of his uncle's deep voice as he sang at his work. He ran to the rear of the cabin and up the stone steps to the little addition. A lantern filled the room he entered with black, harp-like shadows of the loom. While the uncle stopped treadling and held the blue-tailed shuttle in his hand, the breathless little boy told him that the field was finished.
"God grant," said the uncle with a solemnity that put fear into the heart of Paddy, "there may be a harvest for you."
Paddy watched his mother work ceaselessly to aid in the fight that his father and he were making against poverty. During the month her needles would click unending wool into socks, and then on Saturday she would trudge—often in a stiff Atlantic gale—sixteen miles to the market in Strabane. There she sold the socks at a penny a pair.
In spite of combined hopes, the potato plants were floppily yellow that year. Their stems felt like a dead man's fingers. No potatoes to eat. None to exchange for meal. What were they to do?