Piltown, Ireland 19.6.1998: Choctaws and Quakers, Dozing Priests and Inaccessible Records

Yesterday in Waterford, and before that a stop in Kilmacow parish. It was shortly after 1 when we stopped there, and the priest, whom I awoke from a nap, seemed dazed and suspicious. He didn’t offer to let me see the church registry, but insisted on consulting, himself, a computer printout of the registry.

In it, he found Margaret Ryan, sister of my Catherine! She was baptized 3 Aug. 1838, and listed as a daughter of Bridget Tobin. The father’s name was too faint for the indexers to read.

A wonderful record to find, since it proves that Valentine and Bridget Tobin Ryan are, indeed, my ancestors. We had (or her tombstone has) Margaret’s birthdate awry—2 Aug. 1835—but this Kilmacow Margaret is clearly mine.

Then on to Waterford. What to say? A lived-in city, lived in and lived on for generation upon generation . . . . In a shopping mall downtown are the foundations of a Viking church—discovered far beneath the ground as this block of the city was excavated. It has an apse, perhaps the first in Ireland, as well as burial crypts. There it is on the basement floor, encased in glass, to be gawked at, with a panorama of garishly painted Vikings around the walls.

The Irish live with their artifacts—have no choice except to do so. They live lightly with them, passing them with nary a glance, or telling an amusing story about some primeval escapade that occurred at that place. It’s not that they’re unconscious of their history. It’s just that it’s there, all around them, like the tattered antimacassars of a shabby old country house. The Germans would put up neat signs with erudite guides to these shrines, and in doing so, distance the places from their contemporary selves. Not the Irish. They leave them be.

And in doing so, allow them to decay—the downside of the Irish character, the feckless manifestation of Irish lightness of being. Waterford’s a shabby, grimy, third-world city, and not a shabby genteel one. It’s full of loutish teens puffing on fags, their faces pasty in the gray light of an Irish day. Like Ireland as a whole, it’s pocked by inveterate poverty, with longterm poverty’s attendant ills—ignorance, narrowness, scheming and resentment.

We did the tourist bit—a tour of the heritage center, where a display of Viking artifacts (also discovered when part of the city was excavated) is on show, along with a stunning display of the city’s charters. There were Aoife and Strongbow in all their bright-colored lifesize glory, to be seen in a panorama.

When one looks at the characters, all one can think is how intertwined—how incestuously intertwined—is Ireland’s history with England’s. This Viking and Hibernian city, decreed into existence by English monarchial fiat, and then divided and subdivided as booty given to English lords who pleased English regents . . . .

One is ineluctably aware of that history when one sees the old manor places. In the morning, John and Maura took us to pick strawberries on the old manor estate of the Earl of Bessborough, Mr. Ponsonby, now Kildalton Agricultural College. The house itself is Georgian, of local limestone, with serene classical proportions and a beautiful grand stairway pirouetting up out of the entrance hall.

As one sees it, one tries to imagine the life lived in such a place, in such a nation. John and Maura say the earl lived here only sporadically, perhaps three nights a year. But the house was kept staffed with a large year-round staff of servants, so that it would be impeccably groomed at any time the earl happened to drop in.

When he did so, the local gentry gathered for balls and soirees in the elegant gardens, part of which are still there to be seen—the yew walk, the deer park, the little man-made lake, rhododendron tumbling to Irish excess and chaos all around the tiny artificial areas laid out by human intervention.

And what did these gentry talk about, I wonder, as they waltzed and sauntered so self-consciously aware of setting a glittering social standard in a barbarous and incomprehensible place? Themselves, no doubt, and London, sweet London, the center of their universe, and so the world’s. Did they ever debate the merits of Swift’s modest proposal? Did they wonder what my ancestors talked about in their smoky little cabins where chickens clucked beside pipe-smoking grannies beside the fire?

William Trevor gives us a glimpse of these social worlds and social interactions, and, to an extent, Brian Friel. Yet I still want to know more, to be inside that social world, to a degree.

All these thoughts reinforced as we drove up to the estate of Lord Waterford last night, as John and Maura stories of him. We drove through an interesting little mill village, Portlaw, which I believe Quakers laid out, though John and Maura don’t know of that.

They tell stories of Lord Waterford (who still owns huge tracts of good land) as if they were still the 19th-century tenants on the lord’s manor—half-affectionate, horrified stories about this very alien man with very alien cultural norms on whose good pleasure their existence depends.

It seems that in his youth he was a wild, reckless man, who would drive like a demon down the road, heedless of children or dogs in his way. That he tried to shoot himself after a favorite hunter was killed in a hunting accident. That the family were cursed by an old woman whom a former Lord Waterford evicted, who foretold that, for generations, the male heirs of the family would die violently, and not in their beds. And so it has come to pass . . . .

The Quakers: John and Maura speak kindly of them. They apparently helped tremendously during the Famine, though many of their ancestors came as liege soldiers in Cromwell’s army, and got land for their service.

John and Maura also tell me that the Choctaw Indians sent money for relief during the Famine! This is commemorated in Waterford, where a plaque about it hangs in the Carnegie library, and a few years ago, a delegation of Choctaws came to Waterford for some celebration, and were warmly received.

Portlaw Quakers who operated cotton mills using cotton from the American South; Choctaws whose homeland is Mississippi sending money to relieve hungry Irish people: do any of these strands interweave with the story of my Ryans, who sailed off to New Orleans and Mississippi cotton lands in 1852? To know history at all, one must have a story. One must sense a story where others see bare fact. One must tease narrative out of the stony ground of document and artifact.

Piltown, 26.7.01: The Callan Condom and Thalictrum

A drive yesterday to Callan to see the burial place of Am Liobh (Humphrey) O’Sullivan, as well as the house of Edmund Rice. Land around Callan seemed not so lush as in southern Co. Kilkenny—more of an open, barren feel to it. This especially true when it’s contrasted with the area around the slate quarry on the Kilkenny-Tipperary border.

John drove us to the latter on the way. Gorgeous countryside, those sweeping vistas of fields rising up hillsides on all sides.

The quarry is in a valley area, just on the border. As one drives to and from it, one goes along narrow lanes choked with fern, bracken, meadowsweet, yarrow, horsetail (a noxious weed, John says), brambles, and thousands of other plants.

Driving away from the quarries, we passed a ramshackle farmplace John and Maura described as belonging to some couple who live hand to mouth, cultivating bits of vegetables and living on the dole. We also passed a very neat place on a stream that they said belonged to a Dutchman, who sometimes comes to stay in it. A very appealing area—I could see having a retirement or vacation place in it.

(The Irish seem to have a strong interest in “others”—the Dutch who vacation here, the French van we saw in Kilkenny, bicycles affixed to it, the Spanish students clustered in the city. There’s that self-conscious sense of being part of Europe, aided and abetted by shared Catholicism. There’s the need to be unlike England, with its insularity and xenophobia. Hence John and Maura’s interest in the fact that this place was bought by a Dutchman. And everybody does seem to know everybody else’s business here.

In fact, John and Maura knew and told stories about almost every place we passed. E.g., a little roadside pub whose name in Irish spoke of its musical offerings: John and Maura told us the family living there had been extraordinarily musical. In a back room were a piano with a violin and mandolin on it. As the family members worked, they’d pass by and stop to play whatever instrument took their fancy. None ever married, and all have gone off except for one man, who now lives alone there, a rather forlorn existence.)

On to the high crosses at Ahenny, which were beautiful, but…. I seem to drink in the landscape, the fresh breezes, those sunlit fields, the wagtail atop one of the crosses. With any touring, the first time one sees an extraordinary monument, it’s fascinating. But the next and next time….

From Ahenny to Callan, an unprepossessing, gray-seeming town. Perhaps it didn’t help that the skies had darkened by the time we got there, making it gray and the air very close. It’s also always a shock to go from the fresh pristine beauty of the Irish countryside to the grimy tawdriness of one of its towns, litter everywhere. English villages aren’t so. Perhaps the Irish are too individualistic or anarchic to have the gift of living together.

In Callan, a pub meal. Steve had beef stew, which was quite good, a slight undertaste of allspice, with sliced carrots in it. Around it, julienned carrots and rutabagas. Why more carrots? Why nothing green? We might have had lasagna with potatoes, another menu offering.

I had chicken sandwich and lemon squash, ordered it toasted and as a chicken salad sandwich, but the waitress told me it wouldn’t be nice (i.e., the toast-salad combination). That seemed to make perfect sense to John and Maura, but the logic of it escapes me. It arrived salad on the side, with one meretricious little pink glop of a very fussed-with cole slaw added.

At Callan, we decided we didn’t have time for Edmund Rice. We did walk on to see the Norman church, with its interesting carving of a late-medieval woman over one door. Steve remarked that her headdress looked not unlike the hairstyle of the little Piltown Madonna, and he’s right. The two are separated by less than a century, apparently.

We also saw the Augustinian church, a dreary affair, all green paint, mildewed and flaked, inside.

We then decided to drive on to Kilkenny, where we wanted to book-shop. Visited several bookshops. None had MacLysaght’s surnames book, or the diary of Am Liobh O’Sullivan. But I did buy at Rothe House a brief history of Templeorum parish—a not very good one—and a history of Rosbercon parish.

Back to the grave of Am Liobh O’Sullivan, in Callan cemetery, a pretty place outside town. But, again, I was more impressed by the beautiful countryside than the monuments. Callan—at least, the Callan countryside—has a more yellow color to it than the lush green of the south Tipperary-Kilkenny border. Home to pork steak and onions, with potatoes, cauliflower, and broccoli—with Maura’s brother Gerald, who lives outside London in Kent and is quite the world traveler.

John’s garden is absolutely a work of art. I can’t describe it, it’s so simply beautiful, a vestige of the monastery garden, with its herbs, fruit, and bee-drawing flowers. Vegetables intermingle with ornamental shrubs, not in a confused or riotous way, but with perfect decency. The apples are espaliered (some of them, at least) over a woodrail fence. There’s a gingko tree John grew from seed—about ten years old—which is a shrub rather than a tree, beautiful beside a dark purple buddleia. The buddleias grow tall as trees here, where the winter climate doesn’t bite them back.

Fuchsia grows as a hedge, six feet tall, as I have seen it in west Cork. There’s a glorious flower called Thalictrum, a lavender mist above maidenhair-fern foliage.

Buddleias big as trees also along the coastal road south of Waterford today, and again along the road north of Mullinavat. And fuchsia six and eight feet high.

The Callan condom: in the restroom of the pub in Callan, a sleek black condom on the floor. Never having seen one, I wasn’t sure what it was, though I had my suspicions. I poked it with my toes. It left a slimy trail. Why a used condom on the bathroom floor? Come to think of it, did I see condom machines on my previous visits? I don’t believe so. Now they’re in every restroom. Oh Ireland, how you have fallen from the grace bestowed by our gracious bishops and cardinals on the righteous.