Back to Old Mhaigh Eo, and: John Early Wonders, Waiting Dawn

Back to Old Mhaigh Eo

On the night of December 11, 1920, an armed and authorized mob combined of Black and Tans and Auxiliaries burned a good bit of Cork City to the ground. This—with its attendant pillaging, looting, and violence inflicted upon a civilian population—drove Micheal O'Maille, long a storyteller in those parts, to consider in the February following a return to the county of his birth.

His narratives were over now, orso he said in February with the lotbehind his room on Patrick Street still heapedwith remnants only of the non-combustiblesfrom Cash's, Grant's, and Connelly & Co.left unmolested, most still reeking fromthe outrages of last December. And, oh,that silly ash tree he and Lynch had plantedlate last spring just in the center of the lot—and it still smoldering like so much hatredcaught within the limits of a bottle corked,its contents putrefied, each blackened buda curse, its blackened trunk a stickof wonder now, its crown refusing even now to die.And that December night: a whirl of firecloud,and an empire like an arthritic dogpast limping, not quite dead, a rotten thingwith rabid jaws six hundred years too old.And when those ravens with their long, dun-colored legsbegan to feed, he knew he'd have to go:the street beneath the raven's squatting stank,and Dillon's Cross became a monumentto blustering and battering and raimeis* shrillenough to drive him mad. That's when he reckonedhe'd write poetry that didn't rhyme;and head he would before the year was out back to his father's promise where he'd hear,maybe, the answer to his mother's prayer.

*Blather, pronounced "rawmaysh."

John Early Wonders, Waiting Dawn

The steamer Cambria was lost on its return from New York off the north coast of Donegal on October 19, 1870. About 180 passengers and crew were drowned.

"What is the difference, then, between a daydreamand a memory" he'd asked her head of full,brown, flowing hair, its length like bending grainupon the broad straight field that was her backas she bent forward on the table's edge.Except, when Early shut his eyes to catchhis breath, full forty years had passed withouthis memory. A miracle? Perhaps.But was it holiness at all? Or elsethe universal curse. John Early blinked,and when he looked again he saw a fieldwhere driven snow in heaps had snapped the stalks,and wheat lay rotten on the broken plainof her now heaving back. And as it heavedit heaved just like the waves, he thought, that groundbetween their jaws the Cambria and pitcheditself against the rocks off Malin Headsome eighty years ago.                    Beyond his dreamsthe only memories he had were dreamsof memories as yet unborn, much likeher pleading that the amber light of dawnreveal to both of them the rock upon which falls damnation's fact, the blessed pricesalvation reckons for a passage home.Then, at an inward beckoning he'd neverafter comprehend he held her hair withinhis hand like beads, and tapped the candle cold.And darkness like a breaker swamped the room,until he felt her shoulders slacken, and her breath,long held (it seemed to him) since long beforethey'd met until this time, unloose itselfin halting strokes to range reserved yet sureand unmolested in that rush of wateras it bore her past the bay.                    The moonlightwashing silently into the room had spreadacross their counterpane like creeping seas,or like low whispering behind a veilwill sometimes float beyond the gossamerand fill the air with presences unseen.And when the whiteness of her hair becamea First Communion, then a wedding, thenthe veil of Ireland's suffering collapsedinto the sea, John Early knew the momentsthat his wife had yet to live would behis memories as...