The Year of the French Read Free

English. A letter to a landlord. You know the kind of letter we need, and there is none of us can write it.”
    “You cannot be serious,” MacCarthy said. “ ‘Remoreseless Tyrant beware. Long has your heel been ground into our neck.’ ”
    “We are serious, right enough,” Hennessey said.
    MacCarthy spoke in English. “‘A terrible vengeance will fall upon you. Tyrant beware.’ ”
    “By God, that must be beautiful English. You rattle that out like an agent. What did that mean, Owen?”
    MacCarthy did not answer him. He spoke to the watchful bull, Duggan, heavy dark head balanced easily on thick-muscled neck.
    “What is it to be, a warning to the agent of the Big Lord?” He shook his head. “He would use it as a wad to start his fire.”
    Matthew Quigley, greasy-apronned, leaned forward to refill their glasses, Hennessey’s, O’Carroll’s, MacCarthy’s, his own. Duggan had no glass.
    “It is no warning this time,” Hennessey said. “And it will not go to the Big Lord’s agent. It will go to Captain Cooper here in Kilcummin, to tell him what we have done after we have done it. We are going to hough the cattle that he has turned into the new pasture.”
    Slashed tendons and bloody bellowing in the night.
    “Write your own letter,” MacCarthy said.
    “An easy thing for you to say, Owen,” O’Carroll said. “You have no land to worry about. A schoolmaster has only his books, and who would take those from him?”
    “You would,” MacCarthy said. “You would take the fine words that are in them. Do you not think the magistrates would wonder who sent Cooper a letter in handcrafted English?” He saw himself standing before the magistrates, and his letter being passed from hand to hand. “Much better you scratched out the letter yourselves, ignorant men confessing an ignorant crime. Draw a coffin on it, is what the Whiteboys used do in the old days. Cooper has enough Irish in him to understand a coffin.”
    “It is no crime,” Quigley said, “when slaves ask for simple decency.”
    “Is it not? The magistrates would quarrel with you there, and so would Hussey in the Killala chapel.” Whiskey lapped at the edges of his spirit. He drank again.
    “A priest has no understanding of these matters,” O’Carroll said.
    “I know,” MacCarthy said. “He has no land. If you mean to protest slavery, you might put in a word for your own. There are no worse slaves in this barony than those poor lads you bring in from the hiring fair and keep half starved on potatoes an honest man would not throw to sows.”
    “Now that is a hard saying, Owen,” Hennessey said. “Poor Phelim does the best he can for those lads. He has the life squeezed out of him by the Big Lord’s agent, and so do I. And well you know it.”
    MacCarthy drained the whiskey. “But you have no need to look abroad for slaves, have you, Donal? They are bred for you at home.”
    Puzzled. “My sons, do you mean?”
    “Do you call them so? There is no great resemblance.” In a corner of his imagination, the mother of Hennessey’s young sons stood wide-legged by cabin door.
    “This is a letter that you will write,” Duggan said. The others looked towards him. MacCarthy watched their eyes. They followed where he led, hard farmer, bully, faction fighter. Three years ago, on a fairday, he led the men of Tyrawley against those of Erris, stout stick in hand, neither pleasure nor anger shaping the creased, stolid face. Leaning against the gable end of the Belmullet tavern, MacCarthy had watched, disdainful and awed. “You will use your fine English for this letter, and it will be a long one. You will say that this will happen whenever a farm is taken for pasture by any landlord or any middleman. And there will be no other warnings. We want that known.”
    “You want that known,” MacCarthy said. He held out his glass and Quigley refilled it. A poet’s privilege. “Four men in a tavern want that known.”
    “There are more than four,