Meeting the Other Crowd Read online

  “Now,” says he, “weren’t you lucky you took my advice.”

  They went on again, and when they came near her own house he stopped.

  “Show me what else herself gave you,” says he.

  She took out the bag o’ gold and showed it to him.

  “Listen to me, now,” says he, “and do what I’ll tell you. If that gold isn’t used up in three days,” says he, “you’ll have nothing in that bag, only leaves. If you’ll take my advice you’ll get rid of it as fast ever as you can.”

  They came to the house, anyway, and when the father and mother saw her back home safe, they couldn’t hardly believe it. They thought they’d never see her again. Oh, they thanked him, and asked him in for the tea, but no.

  The only thing he said was, “Remember what I told you.” And off with him. Gone!

  “What was it?” they said. “What did he tell you?”

  So, she told ’em the whole story, from start to finish. And they were amazed, o’ course. They didn’t know was she making it all up.

  But when they saw the bag o’ gold, and took it up in their hands, ’twas then they knew there was no lie in it.

  “We better get rid of it, like he told you,” says the father.

  And the following day they started buying, cattle and a horse, things for the house and clothes for themselves, a lot of it in the town of Ennistymon. And by the third day all was spent except one or two o’ the gold coins—sovereigns, you’d call ’em, I s’pose.

  But the following morning, when the old father put his hand in his pocket where they were, to get ’em, there was nothing there, dry leaves.

  And ’twas the very same with all the people that got that money for the cattle and all the rest of it. When they went looking for it there was nothing there, only leaves.

  Wasn’t she the lucky girl to do what the lad told her!

  They lived away, then, and ’twas richer they were getting by the day. They used to be at this fair and that fair buying and selling cattle, and the girl’d always go with the father. She got nearly as good as himself at it in the finish-up.

  But this fair day they were in Kilrush. A big fair. And while he was settling up with a couple o’ buyers she walked down the street, just looking at the shops—maybe she had something she wanted to buy for her mother or herself. Whatever ’twas, she was only gone a small bit when she saw one o’ the crowd from the fort that night.

  She stopped, o’ course, thinking she must be mistaken. But after a small while she saw two more of ’em. And then she saw the gentleman who carried her to the fort and he walking up the footpath towards her. She saluted him, o’ course, delighted to see him. But he was looking strange at her.

  “D’you see me?” says he.

  “Hah? O’ course I see you. How could I talk to you if I didn’t see you?”

  “But . . . tell me, now,” says he, “d’you see me with . . . your right eye?”

  “How d’you mean?” says she.

  “Just tell me,” says he. “Do you?”

  She closed her left eye.

  “That’s strange,” says she, “I can’t see you now.”

  “And you won’t, either,” says he.

  He stuck his finger into her left eye. Blinded her. She never again saw anything with it, for all her money.

  And ’twas that way always with the Good People. You might get something from ’em, but maybe you’d be better off without it.

  How careful we should be in making wishes, lest we get what we wish for! In this tale we see how the natural world may be a mere cloak over a world we have little understanding of and whose denizens may summon us at short notice for their own mysterious ends.

  The unfortunate girl who is the human essential to the fairies’ business in this case knows enough not to eat their food in the great mansion to avoid being held there. Unfortunately for her, there is a dark and vicious side to their nature that her innocence does not allow for. The loss of her eye in the end is a high price to pay for the gold she receives, but as the teller of the tale says, and as was widely accepted in Ireland, a person might be better off to have nothing at all to do with the Good People. Too often the liaison ended in tragedy for the human.

  PART TWO

  “There Since the Start o’ the World”

  FAIRY PLACES AND SIGNS OF THEIR PRESENCE

  “I know that the whitethorn is always associated with the sióga. 9

  That’s why ’tis called the fairy tree. But ’tis the lone whitethorn

  in the middle of a field that’s the dangerous one.

  There was a reason why that was left there, you see.

  No one but a fool would interfere with that.”

  CROOM, OCTOBER 12, 2001

  The Bush That Bled

  YOU DON’T REMEMBER the bad times, I’d say. You’re too young. But I do. I do, and well. After the war, and the ’50s, there was nothing in this country except hunger. If you had a job that time you were a lucky man, for sure.

  I was working for the county council them years, and my brother was, too, God rest him. And glad to have it. But I remember to this very day a thing that happened one time during them years, above Tubber, not so far from Lough Bunny.

  The council was making a new piece o’ road, to shorten the way across from this road here to another road going down there, nearly half a mile over. ’Twould save people going three miles all around when ’twas finished.

  The engineer came; ’twas surveyed and all marked out. We started work on a Monday morning, a big gang of us. Pick and shovel and sledgehammer, that’s what we had—none o’ the big machinery they have today. Sure, the lads doing that kind of a job now don’t be working at all, only stand and look at the machines doing it for ’em. But more luck to ’em. We had to slave for the few bob we got. I wouldn’t wish that on any man.

  We were working on, anyway, and ’twas slow going, too, ’cause there was a lot o’ rock there.

  But this morning—I’ll remember it all my life—myself and my brother arrived, and we were a small bit late. We had nearly ten miles to cycle and the weather was bad. But there was no one working when we got there—everyone standing around idle.

  “Lord God,” says I to my brother, “surely ’tisn’t break time. We couldn’t be that late, could we?”

  “No,” says he, “ ’tisn’t that.”

  There wasn’t a stir from any o’ the crowd there, only standing up, leaning on their shovels and the foreman talking to ’em. We found out quick enough what ’twas all about. He was laughing at ’em. But, faith, you could see he wasn’t too pleased about something.

  I fell in behind a man and asked him—quiet, you know—what was happening.

  “The job is stopped,” says he. “He wants us to cut the sceach. ’Tis in the way o’ the road.”

  “What?” says I. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “That sceach there,” says he, and he showed it to me. Oh, ’twas there, all right. Plain to be seen. So I said nothing, or my brother, either, when we weren’t in it. Let ’em sort it out between themselves.

  Oh, they argued for a good long while, but no! There’d no one cut it. He was a decent enough man, the same foreman, only doing his job, sure. He tried to persuade ’em first.

  “Look,” he says. “That’s no sceach. Surely to God if that was a sceach the engineer’d know it. He wouldn’t have the road brought in on it, would he?”

  “What do lads inside an office in town know about things the like o’ this?” says one of ’em.

  He didn’t like that. He got ratty.

  “Don’t mind that old talk. Or tell it to the man himself if you want to. He’ll be here tomorrow to see how things are going.”

  But still, they wouldn’t cut the bush. And ’twas there, right in their way! Standing by itself. The man that marked out that ground, he mustn’t have much sense, whatever else. But you’d often see that, fierce smart men, and still they can do awful stupid things.

&nb
sp; The foreman, he says, “Look, men, no more talk about it. It has to be cut, that’s all,” and he picked out two of ’em.

  “Get the crosscut,” says he, “and do it.”

  Faith, they wouldn’t stir.

  “We all know one another, lads,” says he. “Don’t make me use no threats.”

  He was a decent man. I’ll say that much for him. I knew him well. And what else could he do? He’d be in trouble himself if the job wasn’t done.

  But no move.

  He had to say it, I s’pose, in the end: “All right, so. If you won’t cut it, you’ll be without jobs this evening.”

  I’m not blaming the man. Maybe if he didn’t do that, maybe he’d be without a job if the engineer came and the work not done. But, anyway, when ’twas put like that—and I s’pose with jobs so scarce, and they were married men, the two of ’em—what could they do?

  They took up the crosscut and started at that whitethorn.

  But . . . Lord God . . . I saw it with my own two eyes, and every man there saw it! . . . they had only two draws o’ that saw pulled across that sceach when it started to bleed! I tell you, I never saw men jump back as fast as them two. And threw the saw away from ’em. ’Twas a wonder they didn’t cut someone with it. ’Twas blood that came out of it—nothing else, only blood!

  And who’d cut it, after that? All that was worrying them men that marked it was, would they live or wouldn’t they?

  ’Twas left there and ’tis still there. And I hope it’ll be there when I’m dead and gone.

  Would you take it out o’ there, after what happened that day? You’d be the brave man to do it.

  This story might be dismissed as the ramblings of an old man whose memory had begun to fail him in his ninetieth year, were it not for the fact that in 1999 a far more important highway, costing millions of pounds, met a similar obstacle at Latoon, at the opposite end of County Clare (see Introduction). In this latest case, something at least seems to have been learned: the sceach in question was not harmed. Instead, the road was varied slightly around it, a civilized solution to what might otherwise have been an ultimately very costly ignoring of powers that cannot be ignored—unless very unwished-for consequences are to be invoked.

  “Now, there was one man round our part o’the country that did cut a lone bush. An’he was cutting a tree, maybe within two years after, an’ the tree spun on the butt an’ killed ’im.”

  MEATH, MAY 6, 2000

  A Fairy Bush Moved

  A BUSH LIKE THAT surfaced in the entrance to Ferenka in Limerick, and several machines and machine men approached it. Couldn’t care less! They’d shift it.10 And each machine, as they went in to shift it, stalled, for no known reason. So it remained there for some time, and there was a new machine man who came to the job. He wouldn’t be aware o’ the happenings at all, you see, the new man. The rest o’ the lads were. So they asked the new machine man if he’d move the bush.

  He examined it, anyway, and he sized it up, that it wasn’t his kettle o’ fish.

  He said, “Yeah, I’ll move the bush. But on one condition.”

  They said, “What’s that?”

  “That you’ll gimme an alternative place to plant it.”

  So they said, “Yeah. We’ll search ’round, and we’ll find a place for you.”

  So he went down and he dug out the alternative place, and he drove up and got his big scoop of a machine in under the bush, brought it down and replanted it. No problem after that. He replanted the bush. He didn’t destroy it.

  But o’ course, Ferenka didn’t prosper much ever after. There was always controversy about the place.

  As the speaker says, “there was always controversy.”The fact was that Ferenka, one of those flagship companies that employed a huge number of workers in Limerick in the 1970s, was a symbol of the “new Ireland.” This story of the problem about its building persists even to this day. But was it the disturbing of the sceach that brought about the demise of the plant in 1979, or was it the woeful industrial relations that prevailed there?

  The interesting fact in the Ferenka saga is that city as well as country people believed in the sceach version of events—some even going so far as to claim that the industrial mayhem at the plant was a direct result of disturbing the Good People.

  “I heard about this man who cut a fairy tree, a whitethorn tree, an’ when he went to bed in the night, the bed was full o’ the needles o’ the whitethorn. He couldn’t sleep. An’ often in the nights when he’d turn in the bed, that part o’ the bed’d be all thorns for years after. He cut a fairy tree, a lone tree. He’d always have to sleep in one side of the bed ever after.”

  MILTOWN, JUNE 27, 1999

  Man Cuts Briars in a Fairy Fort

  OH, ’TISN’T RIGHT TO DO IT, to interfere with a fort. Oh, I wouldn’t do it. A lot o’ people’d laugh at you today to say that, but ’tis no cause of a laugh.

  We have a fort above there now, behind the house, and I’d never take the timber in that fort. Any of it that fell, I’d throw it in the fort and let it rot away there.

  But I remember cutting the briars in it. D’you know why? Because I used to have sheep at that time, and they’d get tangled in the briars. So I’d cut ’em. But I’d leave ’em there, shove ’em to one side. I’d never take ’em out of it.

  My wife—God rest her—she wouldn’t even like to see me doing that much. She’d rather I’d leave it alone entirely, put no hand to it. And I didn’t interfere with the bushes, either. Only cut the briars.

  But, anyway, I got a lump there on the back o’ my hand. Jeez, it rose up a good bit, and I couldn’t know in the name o’ God what was it.

  And she said to me, “Did you interfere with the fort?”

  “I cut the briars.”

  “Oh,” she said, “you had no right to do it.”

  Well, ’twas there on the back o’ my hand for a couple o’ years, not giving me any pain or anything. And you know the two men I used to be gambling with—Lord have mercy on the two of ’em now—one of ’em used to always be joking, “Leave out your hand here and I’ll flatten out that thing for you.”

  ’Twas half the size of an egg, you know.

  But this night, anyway, wasn’t I collecting up the cards to deal ’em, and he was as good as his word. What did he do, only hit my hand a welt—hurt it. I made nothing of it then. How could I, in the middle of a game? But the following day ’twas sore, and in a couple o’ days after didn’t it fester.

  ’Twas paining me, so I had to go to the doctor with it. There was only one thing to do, he said, and that was to let out the badness. And that’s what he did. Lanced it. But d’you know what came out of it? A thorn about an inch long!

  I don’t know was it in the fort I got it or not, but when I told my wife about it there was no doubt at all in her mind.

  “Now, will you leave it alone?” she said.

  I won’t say that I did or I didn’t, but ’tis still above there, anyway.

  The man in question here I know very well. At over eighty he still plays the cards he describes here and today shows no trace of the lump that disfigured his hand. I recall seeing it, though only two years ago did he tell me this story.

  Note how reticent he is in putting any blame on the fort or on the Good People. But his wife is far more certain of where the truth lies. To the very end he will give no definite answers, but the facts speak for themselves: steel used in a fort; a mysterious ailment; an impossibly painless thorn; the fort left since unmolested. The message is clear enough.

  “Personally, I never cut even as much as a thorn in that fort. ’Tis belongs to . . . the unknown. I’ll put it that way. The Good People. ’Tis there for generations, for longer than we’re aware of, or know of. We don’t know what the origin of it is, nor we don’t know what them people are about. Just leave ’em alone.”

  DRUMLINE, SEPTEMBER 19, 2001

  Respecting the Ancient Forts

  LONG AGO, the Tuatha dé Danann11 and
the Fir Bolg12 and all those tribes used to have fights, and after one o’ those battles the crowd that lost—I don’t know was it the Fir Bolg or the Tuatha dé Danann—retreated into the spirit world, and they are the fairies today. As we know, the spirit world lives forever. That is why they were before Christ and they wouldn’t have entered the eternal mansions when the spirits moved over. ’Tis because their spirits stayed around their own property. They still hadn’t been converted to Christianity. And that is why the fairy raths, or forts, or whatever people want to call ’em, people feel that they’re protected. Their property is still protected.

  I’ll tell you this story, now. One night we were visiting this local man—he had got a bad bout of sickness. There was three of us. And the three of us had fairy forts on our land. O’ course, naturally, the discussion turned to forts.

  “Well,” I said, “I never interfered with it at all, never touched it. It was there thousands o’ years before I came, and hopefully ’twill be there thousands o’ years when I’m gone. I wouldn’t interfere with their property at all, at all.”

  And the other man that was there, he said, “Well, I cut the bushes out of it all right, but I left the rings there.”

  And the third man came in and said, “I brought in the bulldozer and made the fairies homeless.” He was laughing at the idea. Thought ’twas a big joke.

  I said, “Watch it there, now, Pat. They’ll make you homeless.”

  In one week a shed fell on him and killed him. In one week! That was a Sunday night we spoke. The following Sunday the shed fell on him.

  And the other lad was dead one morning when his wife woke. He was dead alongside her.

  I’m the only survivor of the group.

  Whether the speaker here realizes it or not, the battle he refers to is the great mythological “First Battle of Moytura,” in which the Tuatha dé Danann defeated the Fir Bolg aeons ago. His logic as to why the losers did not enter into “the eternal mansions” and why they became the sióga may be a little shaky, but there is no doubting the sincerity of his belief that their spirits still protect their property, i.e., the fairy raths and forts.