Tipperary (2 page)

By this time I had been transfixed and could not tear my eyes away—from a scene the likes of which I had never imagined, much less encountered. My father laid his hand on my head and said, “Home?” I did not look at him and he said, in a change-of-mind tone, “No. Maybe you're the one who should be the witness,” and we stayed; indeed, he even edged a little closer and swung the ponytrap around for a better view.

Now I saw another player in the drama, a man of about my father's age or older. He stood some twenty yards back from the proceedings, leaning against a tree, seemingly detained there by one of the policemen. When I had a better view, I saw that this man used a wooden crutch; sometime, somewhere, he had lost a leg. He was shaking his head, as if unable to come to grips with Life at that moment.

As I watched him, he began to shout, and the policeman tried to quiet him. Mr. Treece turned around on his horse, saw the man, spurred the animal over to him, and fetched the shouter a lash down across the head and face with the whip, and then another lash. The man would have reached to grab the whip but his uniformed custodian prevented him, and in any case Mr. Treece, generally excited and red-faced, rode back to the front of the house.

“Set it up,” he shouted at the knot of men. “What's keeping you back? Set it up!”

The men bustled to assemble the apparatus. They hung the chain down between the poles of the tripod where it ended in a hook. Next, they manhandled the great column along the ground to a point where they could hook the chain into a ring on the wooden beam. When they had made the connection and reeled in some lengths of chain, the post swung clear of the ground like a long rectangular pendulum. They dragged and shoved until the tripod stood right against the wall of the house, near one of the small windows.

Sweating with exertion, the working gang hauled the swinging wooden beam—which seemed at least three feet thick—back from the tripod. For a moment they held it there, out at an angle. Then Mr. Treece shouted, “Let her go,” and they released the ram. It swung forward and battered into the window of the house and the wall beside.

My father muttered, “Oh, great Lord!”

Glass crashed and tinkled; the outside of the building fell apart in a blurt of whitewash and brown mortar; I was surprised and alarmed at how much of the house burst under that one swinging stroke. As the men steadied the ram, something flew from the doorway and they reeled back, yelling. Mr. Treece's horse bucked as if stung.

Mr. Treece shouted. “The bitch! What is that?”

A policeman shouted, “Boiling porridge, sir”—someone in the house had hurled the contents of an oatmeal pot through the doorway.

“Draw your guns,” shouted Mr. Treece, and with only a short hesitation, all the military and all the police drew their guns with a rattle and held them ready, aimed at the cottage door. A silence fell. Portions of the wall continued to crumble. I looked at the man beneath the tree; he had begun to weep. His tears and his gasping, dismayed face seemed very different from the sadness of my father when my grandmother had died, or when he watched Mother sing his “beautiful Bellini.”

“Angle her and go again,” Mr. Treece shouted. Beneath a hedge of pointed guns the men rearranged the tripod's angle to edge it farther along the wall. Once more they held back the thick battering ram and released it. This time, its impact went straight through the wall. The hole gaped so wide that we could see the woman inside the house, her face lined with blood from the whip's lashes, which she tried to wipe away with a sleeve.

Mr. Treece shouted, “Get the bitch out of there!”

Nobody moved.

“Then shoot her!”

Under the tree, the one-legged man and his guard began to argue— and suddenly, to my surprise, the uniformed man stood back and the one-legged man crutched himself as awkwardly as a huge frog across the open space of grass toward the house.

The men in the gang saw him and stopped, allowing the battering-ram to swing gently against the house wall, where it made a hefty indentation and then came to rest after a few small bounces. Mr. Treece turned around to see what had grasped his men's attention; he reined back his big horse and waited.

The one-legged man, who had black-gray hair and wore a shabby gray shirt without a collar, stopped for a moment beneath Mr. Treece's horse. He looked up at the rider; Mr. Treece looked away. The man stepped into the doorway and beckoned; then he turned and led his wife and two sons into the sunshine. As they walked behind him, away from the door, the man called out to his family, “Take nothing. Not a thing.”

But they had taken something; my father muttered, “Oh, Lord, there's an infant”—and I looked and saw the swaddled packet in its mother's arms.

Still inside the little garden, where Mr. Treece's horse had trampled some of the pretty flower-beds, and where the team of the battering-ram had ruined everything else, the man paused and held up a hand. Behind him, the bloodied members of his family halted.

He turned to them and said, in a loud voice, “Take a good look at this man on the horse. You already know who he is—he's our landlord, George Treece. He's evicting us. Evicting the wife and three children of a man who put on the King's uniform and fought for England. He's evicting us because he wants the land for grazing, because he thinks sheep and cattle more valuable than people. He's evicting people whose family has lived in these fields for more than fifteen hundred years. Look at his face and never forget him—because if you don't meet him again, you'll meet his seed and breed.”

He didn't shout these words; he spoke them more as an actor intending to reach an audience, or like a man with an orator's gifts. At that moment it seemed to me that the entire world stood still.

Mr. Treece never spoke; his horse flinched a little, and snorted; the men with the battering-ram stood with their hands at their sides; and the men in uniform quietly lowered their guns and began to put them away. More than a few seemed uncomfortable.

Near the house stood a dense wood, into which this maimed ex-soldier led his wife, their babe-in-arms, and their two sons. Like characters in a magic tragedy they disappeared into the darkness of the trees; the last I saw of them was the blood on the legs of one of the boys. My father exhaled, “Boys-oh-dear.”

Mr. Treece wheeled his horse and rode out of the little cottage garden.

“You know what to do,” he shouted and stood his horse off some distance.

The men with the battering-ram and its tripod moved slowly enough.

“They've no stomach for it,” said my father. In all of this, he never addressed his remarks to me directly; rather, he suspended them in the air for me to inspect.

Slowly the work-gang began to move, aided now and then by a uniformed man, usually if he saw something about to go awry, such as a pole of the tripod about to slip or a slab of thatched roof about to fall down on top of them all. Nobody spoke to anybody. I heard grunts, I saw effort, men wiped sweat from their faces, and the dust from the thatch darkened them head to toe. Their labors concentrated on the front wall, with its two windows and its door, and when they had leveled it to the ground, the little house, with its table and few chairs and tall dresser with some plates on it, looked like something built for a theater in the open air.

At that moment, the men looked to Mr. Treece for direction, as though they might scavenge something for themselves.

“Put the furniture on the cart—we'll throw it into the lake. Level everything else,” he roared. “Smash all. If they didn't think enough of it to take it with them, it's worthless. Like they were.”

At home, when we heard china break, our housekeeper, Cally, would call from the kitchen her famous apology to Mother (and my father, with a grin, would silently mouth the words): “Wet hands, ma'am.” Now, though, the crashing of this crockery sounded different—multiple, deliberate, and awful. For some reason that I could not divine, this affected my father most of all; he wiped a hand across his face, murmuring again, “And he wanted me to witness this.”

A fire had been burning on the hearth; the men trampled it out with their boots until only a wisp of smoke rose from the earth, a blue dying breath. Father and I stared at the scene, and we sat in dull silence thereafter for what seemed like an hour.

By the time he turned Barney's head for home, my father had become pale and morose, not at all like him. He was a merry sort of man with apple-red cheeks; he was thirty-two that week and had much enjoyed being teased by Mother about getting old. Now I worried, and tried to speak to him. I moved from my side of the ponytrap and sat on his seat and leaned my head against his heavy sleeve. He thought that I sought comfort from him and reached his arm about my shoulders—but I wanted to make him feel less sad. At the last possible moment, we looked back.

All the walls had come down; they had toppled the chimney. Hauling the cart, the great horses were being led back and forth, back and forth, across the debris, trampling the remains of that modest homestead into the ground. The men had now taken up shovels and were turning the earth in all directions, and by noon the next day, I reckoned, we would scarce have known that people had ever dwelt there. The history of that home had come to an end—and we did not even know the family's name.

But then Father gripped my arm.

“Look! The edge of the wood.”

In the county Tipperary we have marvelous forests, deep and absorbing, with hazelnuts and crab-apples, ash and sycamore, cool, spreading oaks and wide, rewarding beeches. Under these branches, in the shadowy treeline beside this destroyed household, local people had begun to materialize, like ghosts out of the darkness. They never quite stepped into the sunlight but I somehow knew that they had been there all along, watching. Men and women, both young and ancient, boys and girls, both small and growing, all dressed in the uniform shabbiness of the people who lived in the cottages, all gaunt with the same undernourishment—they stood shoulder to shoulder among the green ferns and the red bracken, a long, thin, single line of witnesses, gazing calmly but intently at the eviction.

A hundred or more, white-faced and grave, and unmoved of expression, they never made their presence felt; they spoke not at all. So shadowy did they appear that they might have come from Hades or any other place where Shades dwell.

We watched them for no more than two or three minutes—and then they stepped softly back into the trees, where, as though dissolving, they vanished into the shadows. I almost felt that I had been dreaming.

So moved were Father and I at the sight of these specters that we started with surprise when Mr. Treece shouted. He beckoned to my father—who abruptly turned his head away and flicked Barney homeward with the long carriage whip.

“Don't you talk to me, George Treece,” he muttered and never said another word until we reached home.

Mother came to the door when we stepped down from the trap. Pen in one hand, spectacles in the other, she had been doing what she called her “work,” the farm ledgers.

“Where were you? You were a long time.” She looked at my father, saw his moroseness. “Oh.” She stopped. “What happened—?”

“George Treece,” said Father, sighing and grim.

Mother knew how Father loathed evictions; he had never put anybody off his own land. And she evidently knew Mr. Treece's reputation in such matters.

“Again?” she said, disturbed.

“Again,” said my father.

“Who this time?”

“You know them by sight,” he said to her. “That man who lost his leg—I can never remember his name.” He sighed.

“But didn't they have a baby last month?”—and she frowned at me. “Go wash and change, Charles.”

And then at dinner, a somber, quiet, and somewhat puzzled dinner, when even Euclid, who was only four, had the sense not to say a word, Father said to me, “Please write down what you saw. It will last longer if you do it. These things will need to be known one day.”

None of that Treece family can be found in Tipperary today. Their property dissolved early in the twentieth century, when, under new legislation, the British government set a price for any landlord who wished to sell. In many cases, their native Irish neighbors—their former tenants— became the new purchasers, and saw it as no more than the recovery of their ancestral rights. By then, anyway, many of the landlords had been trying in vain to collect their Irish rents. A Treece hadn't lived in the county for years—the name gave off too foul an odor for safety.

The man with the whip died as he lived. A report in
The Limerick Reporter & Tipperary Vindicator
in April 1880 tells that “Mr. George Treece, late of Ballintemple, Tipperary, died at his home in Ontario, Canada, following a fall from his horse, in a violent incident now being investigated by the authorities. He had migrated to Canada in 1872”—that is, three years after the eviction witnessed by the young Charles O'Brien; no further details were given.

Within days after that eviction, Ireland's ballad tradition, a powerful underground, cleared its throat and began to mock:

To hell with the Treeces, that rack-renting crowd;
Their finest apparel's the brown winding-shroud;
From your cats they'd steal fur, from your sheep steal the fleece;
The world's better off when it buries a Treece.