Hostages by Oisín Fagan

Author:Oisín Fagan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: New Island Books
Published: 2016-08-18T23:00:00+00:00

Costellos

The first Irish Costello of the line, Alphonse Costello, left Calais, France in 1574 and arrived in Wexford after two days of severe seasickness. Alphonse was a twenty-one-year-old ship hand who never saw his family again, because after four months on Irish soil working as a bookkeeper, he married Mary Gallagher, an epileptic milkmaid who couldn’t speak English, and the couple established themselves in Moynalvey, Meath, two years later on four chartered acres where they raised cattle and chickens for the markets. Several generations were sprung up from Alphonse and Mary, starting with nine live-born children. Alphonse lived a nice, long life, only dying at fifty-six, while raving in his childhood language, Picard, a strange tongue his wife couldn’t understand. She thought the Devil had taken hold of her beloved husband and as he expired, a cough of blood shot up from his throat like a vermilion fountain that she took to be the expulsion of the demon and she blessed herself, believing her husband had found peace and then buried him, unaided, behind their potato patch. Three of her sons would bury her four months later behind the same small furrows, though they miscalculated the measurements, so she ended up lying six hands away from her husband and facing west with her hands uncrossed. Alphonse and Mary, though the first of the line, were the last of the Costellos to enjoy the luxury of falling in love for over two centuries. Their love, though functional, was reciprocal, and developed at a leisurely pace in the decades following their marriage; a strange notion, as romantic love was unheard-of in that part of the country for peasants who toiled all the hours of sunlight the day gave them. But enough of this, a brief word must be said on the physiognomy and humours of the offspring of this union between Mary Gallagher and Alphonse Costello. They did not flourish, but they survived. The men nearly invariably all died in their thirties, but the Costello women usually held out till their fifties. It soon became apparent that the line was prone to heart attacks, bowel cancer, stomach cancer and depression nervosa. The line would often wake up in the five hours of sleep afforded them, shaking and spitting bile, acid reflux tanging the roofs of their mouths, but no one ever mentioned these phenomena as they were seen as personal defects rather than familial ones. They were disproportionately unaffected by alcohol and rarely overindulged in spirits, probably because of the delicate disposition of their stomachs. Remarkably, there is no trace of incest in any of their nuclear families during their whole genealogy, with the exception of many cousins too numerous to mention who intermarried with the necessary dispensation sent from Rome. Their genes led them to verge on the plump side, but circumstances wouldn’t allow this to be discovered for another three centuries. In most cases, intelligence and industriousness ran in their blood and they were devout, unquestioning Catholics. They passed the

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