I wish I had sent for her for my own little boy. It's often he asked me to bring him to the friars at Loughrea. But he never would tell how or where he got the touch. It came like a lump in the back, and he got weaker and smaller till you could put him into a tin can, and he twenty years. Often I asked him about it, but he'd say nothing. I believe that they are afraid to tell or they would be worse treated. I asked him was it at the jumping, for they used to be jumping over a pole, and he said it was not, and that he never took a jump that was too much for him.
But some that saw his back said he had been beat. And when the Doctor came in to see him, he was lying on the bed, and he turned him over and looked at him and said, "If he had all Lady Gregory's estate he couldn't live a week." And sure enough within five days he died. And many of the neighbours said they never heard such a storm of wind as rose about the house that night. I never saw him since, and I went late and early, in the mill and down by the river. But it's maybe a hundred or two hundred miles he was brought away.
Tom Flatley:
There is a priest now, a curate down in Cloughmore, is doing great cures. There is often silence between him and the parish priest, Father Rock, for he wouldn't like him to be doing them. There was a little chap went to bed one night as well as yourself, and in the morning he rose up with one of his ears as deaf as that he wouldn't hear you if he died. And the mother brought him to Father Dolan and he came out as well as ever he was. It was but a fortnight ago that happened, and I didn't hear did the misfortune fall on any of the stock.
But wherever there is a cure something will go, and what would a sheep or a heifer be beside a misfortune on a child?
There was a priest near Ennis, a woman I knew went to for a cure, and he wouldn't do it. "Tha me bocht," he said, "I am poor, but I will not do it." "I will pay you well," said the woman. "I will not do it," said he, "for my heart was killed two years ago with one I did. And it isn't money I'd ask of you if I did it," he said, "but to offer you my blessing and the blessing of God."
Mrs. Casey:
There was a woman down by the sea that had a very severe time when her baby was born, and they did not think she or the baby would live after. So the husband went and brought Father Rivers and he said, "Which would you sooner lose—the wife or the child—for one must go?" And the husband said, "If the wife is taken I might as well close the door." And then Father Rivers said, "She's going up and down like the swinging of a clock, but for all that I'll strive to keep her for you, but maybe you must lose two or more." So he read some prayers over her, and the next day the baby died, and a fine cow out in the field, but the woman recovered and is living still. But Father Rivers died within two years. They never live long when they do these cures, because that they say prayers that they ought not to say.