Tipperary Read Free

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