Boycott

Colin Murphy

• Publisher: Brandon
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781847175359
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

Boycott - a word whose meaning is known the world over. But it once belonged to a man.

Two brothers, Owen and Thomas Joyce, barely survive the horror of the great famine that devastated Ireland in the 1840s. But it left a lasting effect on both of them. Three decades later they are thrown together during the Land War, when evictions and landlord cruelty reach an intolerable level. But Thomas places his trust in the gun, while Owen backs the passive resistance advocated by the Land League. Captain Charles Boycott, an English land agent in Mayo, becomes the first to suffer this new form of revolt, when he and his family are ostracised. It is a David versus Goliath situation, with Boycott supported by the military, the police, the press, the British Government. How can peasants stand against an empire? And how will the two brothers reconcile their differences and confront their troubled past?

A novel of brotherly love and brotherly conflict.

PART ONE

WATERSHED

The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

–Sir Charles Trevelyan, civil servant responsible for the administration of relief during the Great Famine (1845-49)

CHAPTER 1

By the side of the cottage’s western wall is a long, newly-made grave; and near the hole that serves as a doorway is the last resting-place of two or three children; in fact, this hut is surrounded by a rampart of human bones, which have accumulated to such a height that the threshold, which was originally on a level with the ground, is now two feet beneath it. In this horrible den, in the midst of a mass of human putrefaction, six individuals, males and females, labouring under most malignant fever, were huddled together, as closely as were the dead in the graves around.

–The Illustrated London News, 13 February 1847

An inquest was held by Dr Sweetman on three bodies. The first was that of two young children whose mother had already died of starvation. Their father’s death became known only when the two children toddled into the village of Schull. They were crying of hunger and complaining that their father would not speak to them for four days; they told how he was ‘as cold as a flagstone’. The other bodies on which an inquest was held were of a mother and child who had died of starvation. The remains had been gnawed by rats.

–Official report from County Cork, 1847

AUGUST 1848

He had encountered the smell many times during his sixteen years. It was one with which his kind had a casual familiarity, living off the land as they did. Their closeness to the earth’s coarse and cold-blooded ways had hardened them to some degree to dismiss such unpleasantries with a wrinkle of the nose and a fleeting frown before moving on. But the boy had never grown used to it, not like the others.

The smell was usually chanced upon in the woods or among the knee-high reeds that grew in wetlands, or in this case in the blossoming heather that dressed and scented the mountainside. If ever one took the trouble to investigate, which wasn’t often, the reward for one’s efforts was to tumble upon some small animal, usually a rabbit or a hare savaged without quarter by a fox or an eagle, its twitching remains then discarded to the mercies of the elements and the maggots. Occasionally the animal was larger, a mountain goat perhaps, although it was years since he’d seen one of those.

A subtle awareness came to him that the smell was somehow different to those he’d encountered before and, although he railed against the notion, he knew his curiosity would inevitably draw him towards its source. He tentatively rounded the small bump that rose from the slope of the mountain and stopped. A barely heard mewl escaped his lips; otherwise he was silent. He just stared.

The youth, by the standards of his peers and elders almost a man, now felt like a small child lost to its mother far from the hearth. The things before him could do him no harm and yet his fear was palpable because somewhere in his jumbling thoughts he could imagine himself coming to a similar end.

He had seen the dead before, of course; by now every Irish man, woman and child surely had witnessed the empty stare of the lifeless, for in some parts of County Mayo they seemed to outnumber the living. Each day or night brought the sound of a keening hag from a hillside or a village, keening that had echoed throughout his own home, and more than once. But death more often now did not involve the normal ritual of wake and funeral. Many had seen the fallen forms of their countrymen and women in the ditches or simply draped across the boreens, left to rot, their sunken eyes pretending to watch one’s approach. Yet his previous experience of the dead had done little to steel him for this sight.

She was perhaps eighteen, not so many years his elder, although it was difficult to tell precisely, but the long black hair that in life would have almost reached her waist suggested a younger woman. God alone knew how long she’d lain here in the heather and the bog water. Her eyes were gone, pecked out by birds, and the obscene hollows in her face held his own gaze transfixed. The condition of her remains was, no doubt, due in part to the elements, but her demise was clearly the result of abject starvation. This had rendered her flesh so thin that it seemed draped on her bones the way a cloth assumes the shape of an object over which it is spread. Her very skeletal structure was defined – cheeks, jaw, ribs, shins. The fine muslin of skin was the colour of a mountain boulder and in places broken, or patchy, revealing dark red matter below. She was clothed in blackened rags that had once purported to be a dress of coarse, dyed wool, but was never more than a peasant’s covering for decency’s sake. Even that decency had now been shed as the gaping holes in the garment exposed her bare, decaying thighs.

But by far the most afflicting aspect of the scene was the child, no more than a withered bag of black wrinkled sacking, its shape barely defining it as human, its tiny form prostrate across its mother’s sagging belly, so recently alive with the promise of new life. The black leathery lips of the baby lay an inch from the shrivelled pouch of its mother’s breast, seeking nourishment that had never come. He couldn’t help but wonder which of them had perished first. He hoped, he prayed to God above that it was the child. The image of the mother dead and the screaming child suckling on her cold and lifeless breast was impossible to bear.

Owen Joyce knew his mind was clinging to reason by a thread and he felt his knees weaken. His thoughts flashed to Sally, his younger sister. He’d often sat by his mother’s side as she had held his sister to her breast and watched with fascination as thread-like jets of mother’s milk had shot out and splashed Sally’s face as she blindly sought to suckle. Sally would gurgle and he would look on in wonder, once squeezing his own nipple to soreness as he tried to create a flow of milk, much to the hilarity of the others.

His mother. Dead now. Like this young mother before him. He finally closed his eyes, swaying on his feet, trying to order his thoughts. Sally. She was why he was here, he remembered, and in the blackness behind his eyelids he saw her, now eleven years old, lying skeletal and incoherent on the straw by the hearth.

He had to find food for her – so he had sworn to his father not an hour ago. His brother, Thomas, had scoffed and been silenced by his father’s glare. But he had set out nonetheless, kissing his sister on her sunken cheek and pushing through the door into the autumn sunlight. And his undertaking had led him here, to a tableau of death at its most execrable. But he needed to hasten to the lough. Sally was alive, this woman and her child were dead. In a year the bog would have consumed them, dust to dust. He turned away and looked at the slope of the hill sweeping down to Tawnyard Lough and Derrintin Lough beyond it. That was his destination. Yet his feet would not obey him. He looked over his shoulder at the girl and child. The truth of it was that he could not leave them here, exposed and naked to the rages of nature without even a holy word to mark their passing. He uttered a miserable sob.

Owen looked around. A few yards beyond the bodies lay a gash in the landscape, a bog hole. It measured maybe four feet long, less than an arm’s length across, and sank no deeper than a man’s thigh. He could see his own gaunt reflection in the mirror-still pool of water at the bottom.

He returned to the bodies and knelt. There was little strength in his limbs, but he suspected the remains had been reduced to near-weightlessness. Wrestling with nausea, he began to lift them both as one. One of the girl’s arms, like a bone wrapped in paper, fell limply on the heather. Her head lolled backwards as he rose and the movement brought what sounded like a sigh from her open mouth, the lifeless breath so rancid it was beyond comprehension. He yelped and stumbled forward, conscious of the movement of her bones beneath the coarse clothing, his revulsion causing him almost to throw the girl’s body into the hole. With an effort of will he pulled stems of heather from the bog and piled the bushy growth over the bodies until they were out of sight. It was a travesty of a burial, he knew, but the best he could fashion. He tried to recall the words he’d heard the priest utter when he’d served as an altar boy, and began to mouth the incantation through the splutters of his sobs.

‘Requiem æternam dona eis Domine. Et lux…et lux…,’ he whispered, but his brain refused to offer up more words and he quickly skipped to the end. ‘Requiescat in pace. Amen.’ He blessed himself. The dead had been cared for as best he could manage; now it was the turn of the living.

Not far below he could distinguish the narrow boreen that skirted Tawnyard Hill. As he neared it he glanced over his shoulder and took in the collection of crudely assembled homes that pimpled the mountain’s face. Among the highest was his own, where his father now wept as he watched the light fade from his only surviving daughter’s eyes. Smoke rose from the hole punched in the rough thatch of heather twigs. None of the other dwellings showed any sign of life. The homes of unworked stone or rough-hewn lumps of turf were mostly empty shells now, the former inhabitants the victims of starvation or violent eviction.

He reached the lowland of the valley and looked out across the fields where the cottage, the place of his birth, had once nestled by the Owenduff River, before they’d been forced to depart to the near-barren higher ground. The original cottage had two rooms, a luxury unheard of, and a window! How bleak a place the world had become since those distant days, he thought, as he felt a shift of wind and stab of pain within his hollow gut.

He began to steer a path around Tawnyard Lough. A mile in length from west to east and once teeming with fish – he had a clear memory as a small boy of spotting an immense brown trout not a few feet from the shore, so close he could almost reach in and scoop it out with his bare hand. His father had taught him how to fish and he had taken to it effortlessly. He’d brought home fat, ambrosial trout occasionally, welcome company for the incessant lumper potato, or sometimes an eel or a coarse, oily fish, unpleasant yet eagerly devoured by all. Thomas, at eighteen his elder brother by two years, would on occasion look with some resentment at the food Owen brought to the table. Within a week Thomas would hunt down a rabbit and exchange it for the family’s adulation, a glint of triumph in his eyes, his status as the first-born restored. Thomas was good at poaching rabbits and hares, even now when they’d almost disappeared. When they’d played together as children, he could always approach Owen from behind and leap on him, forcing him to the ground where they would laugh and roll in the dust. His brother had always been good at sneaking up on him.

Once, though, for his trouble, Thomas had earned a musket ball through his leg, luckily in the fleshy part below his arse – in one side and straight out the other, fired by the gamekeepe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s note
• Contents
• Part One: Watershed
• Part Two: Odyssey
• Part Three: BOYCOTT
• Historical Epilogue
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright