The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes

Author:Caoilinn Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

28.

The only holidays we’d gone on as a family were Christmases at relatives’ homes or bank holidays exploring the surrounding parishes’ callows and eskers and boglands. We revelled in the region’s quantity of kills: Kilbride, Kilbryan, Kilcolagh, Kilcolman, Kilcooley, Kilcorkey, Kilgefin, Kilglass, Kilkeevin, Killinvoy, Killukin, Killummod, Kilmascumsy, Kilmeane, Kilmore, Kilnamanagh, Kilronan, Kilteevan, Kiltoom, Kiltrustan, Kiltullagh. There was the rare time the three of us would go fishing in the Suck—a tributary of the Shannon. It seemed the Chief was trying to find me a healthy pastime. Maybe he thought the river’s unstoppable movement would inspire calmness, in the way you had to be resigned to it. He would sit patient as the moon in his collapsible chair, rising only to pull Cormac’s fish hook out of my cheek or to rub night crawlers out of Cormac’s hair or to knock our heads together, which was always a kind of relief. It gave us licence to leave one another alone for five minutes.

One Easter, we climbed the 850 feet (Cormac counted) of Slieve Bawn to the tune of the Chief’s sermon on the Composition of Connaught, Oliver Cromwell, the penal laws, the land acts and all that developmental malarkey. ‘Point out to me MacDermott county, Cormac.’ Shane tagged along with us on that one, so Cormac had carefully calculated the hero-worshipping a clip on the ear would earn him. ‘Did they have penal laws in MacDermott county too, Dad, or were the MacDermotts allowed to grow their penises however long they’d go? Ow!’ But a bit of elevation from the water meadows’ slop was all the Chief needed to feel the buoyancy of our self-governance, seven hundred years in the making. That day was the closest he ever came to the surface of himself. Nóra was with us for that one—climbed the whole thing keenly in her Mary Hick dress and wellies. Us boys were goggle-eyed at her exultant perspiration. We didn’t know our mother could climb a hill. We’d rarely seen her beyond the periphery of the farm, never mind the county.

She did come with us to Strokestown regular, where all the shops would be closed for lunch, so we’d visit the Famine Museum again and be made to think about the farmer feeding his entire family for a year on a quarter hectare of potatoes. ‘He’d have to,’ the Chief pulled Cormac up on his scepticism, ‘because half the tenant farms in the 1840s were between two and six hectares in size. Minuscule … No, Cormac. Potatoes were the highest calories per acre could be harvested … No. The acreage was too small for diversity. Stock farming wasn’t viable. The monoculture was a trap, leaving us exposed to the brown leaf spot, late blight fungus, mosaic, southern wilt, common scab, halo blight, the black dot … Not pirates, Cormac. I think we’ve had our fill of your cuteness. The pictures aren’t altered and the Holocaust isn’t a hoax … The murdered millions are the evidence … My own grandfather … “Oh” is right.

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