Far from the Land
An Irish MemoirBy Thomas J. RiceiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Thomas J. Rice
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4401-8307-2Contents
Acknowledgments.................................................ixIntroduction....................................................xiPart One: Foundation Stones.....................................1Chapter 1 The Man of the House..................................3Chapter 2 Maggie's Mission......................................12Chapter 3 Ties That Blind.......................................28Chapter 4 The Rambling House....................................39Chapter 5 A Visit from Bridget Cash.............................48Chapter 6 Canceling Christmas...................................53Chapter 7 Home before Dark......................................63Chapter 8 Return of the Prodigal Father.........................70Chapter 9 Hard Truths...........................................81Chapter 10 Three Dog Night......................................92Chapter 11 The Threshing Runner.................................107Chapter 12 God Made the World, Sir..............................113Part Two: Restless Winds........................................127Chapter 13 Dropping Out.........................................129Chapter 14 Settling the Irish Question..........................134Chapter 15 Real Football........................................145Chapter 16 The Heather Blazing..................................152Chapter 17 The Horse Whisperer's Apprentice.....................157Chapter 18 Unforgiven...........................................172Chapter 19 The Art of the Deal..................................182Chapter 20 Hard Travellin'......................................195Chapter 21 Mating Rituals.......................................206Chapter 22 Marquee Leadership...................................220Chapter 23 History Matters......................................224Chapter 24 Spending a Life......................................232Chapter 25 The Auction..........................................243Part Three: Uprooted............................................251Chapter 26 Urban Passage........................................253Chapter 27 Boardinghouse Reach..................................260Chapter 28 Hard Landing.........................................267Chapter 29 Trapeze Act..........................................278Chapter 30 Manchester Man.......................................292Chapter 31 Rolling Away the Stone...............................305Chapter 32 Family Fortunes......................................312Chapter 33 Last Dance in Rosslare...............................318Chapter 34 Leaving Mena.........................................328Chapter 35 Atlantic Foam Trails.................................334Chapter 36 Knocking on the Golden Door..........................346Epilogue........................................................357
Chapter One
The Man of the House
I went out to the hazel wood Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped a berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout.
W. B. Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus"
The stall was cursed and we all knew why. The story was a legend in our community. One Sunday morning in 1896, my thirty-two-year-old grandfather and namesake, Thomas Rice, had entered the stall to saddle a young stallion he'd been breaking. The stallion had trapped him against the manger and stomped him to death. The young father left a devastated widow and nine children to fend for one another, including my father, Arthur, a babe-in-arms.
The stall where my grandfather met his death was inside a corrugated tin shed at the south end of our farmyard. It stood empty for decades. No one dared tempt fate. Knowing its history, Mother never used the shed for our livestock and even banned us from playing in the yard just beyond the stall.
Our neighbor, Davy Dillon, knew the tragic story well-everyone did-but thought it was time to put practical needs before superstition. He'd asked Mother to use the stall to house an untrained colt he'd been schooling.
Reluctantly, Mother granted him permission. The colt went in the stall, and another Thomas Rice went in after it. Unlike my grandfather, I was not alone.
The colt was a big, barrel-chested Arabian-an unbroken, two-year-old gelding-coiled with energy, hungry to run. But my sisters had convinced me that we could sneak into the stall, climb along a dividing wall to get on his back, and that I'd have the honor of being first. As the youngest child and only boy, I was never first in anything. This was my big chance.
The next thing I knew, they'd hoisted me onto the colt's bare back, thrown open his stable door, and turned him loose without reins or halter, whacking him on the rump as he bolted for the distant meadow at a gallop. I clung in terror to his flying black mane.
It was a beautiful spring morning in April 1946. The hillside was ablaze with yellow furze bushes and dew still clung to the morning pasture. I had just turned four-an extremely shy child, afraid of everything. My sisters-all older, rough and tumble farm kids-scorned my fears and competed with each other to see who could inject Sonny (my nickname) with some backbone. My horseback ride was just the latest in a long series of failed experiments.
The colt swung toward the freedom of the lower fields, leaning into his gallop as he sensed that beyond the wet grass lay freedom. I felt the wind rush in my face, felt the silky-smooth glide of this powerful colt beneath me, and suddenly realized I could hang on. By the time the colt had stopped to graze in the meadow, I'd lost all fear of horses. I was a rider. The curse of half a century had been lifted.
That meadow, known as "The Far Bog," was part of a beloved place called Ballinvalley, a barren sliver of land we called home in southeastern Leinster Province, where I was born and raised. Only sixty miles south of Dublin, our remote forty acres was perched in the western foothills of the Blackstairs Mountain range. We lived in such isolation that our only connection to World War II came with the rationing of kerosene, our only source of lantern fuel. We had no plumbing, no running water, no electricity, no heat-and no sense of deprivation. This was rural Ireland in the late 1940s.
Despite our large family, I grew up feeling like an only child. My mother had lost two children before I came along, so my youngest sister, Christina, was almost six years older than me; the age and gender gap was too much to breach.
My father, Artie Rice, came and went for a time, then abandoned the family for a good three months before I was born. He left behind a bankrupt farm, a pile of gambling debts, and at least six broken hearts. My heart was not one of them. Unlike my sisters, who loved and needed their charming Daddy, I never felt abandoned when Artie left us. On the contrary, I gained in stature the moment Mother knew he was gone for good. She always wanted a man at home, and she made me man of the house almost as soon as I could walk.
Until I grew too big, Mother would carry me on the back of her bike when she went shopping for groceries in Borris, our closest market town, four rugged miles from the farm. Riding home on the Lackin Road-the only paved road for miles-which bisected the valley, I delighted at the mystery of spotting our house, hidden in the distant hills. Looking up to our right, I could see the River Barrow running parallel to the road, then a patchwork quilt of small fields surrounded by stone fences sweeping up to Seacon, a famous hill shadowing our farm. Perched on its summit was a concrete cross rising twenty-five feet above the granite pillar that held it-the result of a burst of Catholic fervor in the early fifties, which aimed to consecrate every elevated landscape at hand. Just below the cross, in the middle of a rocky ridge, stood a large stand of majestic sycamores that I thought of as my personal fort.
Our two-story house faced the valley, its red tile roof, green front door, and whitewashed masonry hidden among the sycamores. We could see the entire valley and well beyond, but those who looked up from the valley saw only the stand of sycamores.
There my mother, Maggie O'Toole to locals, a heroine of the Irish Civil War, raised the seven of us. She fended off poverty-"the gray ewe," she called it-standing tall and pretty and proud, asking no help, stamping out any signs of self-pity in her children. Mother taught us to cope with adversity by embracing it, insisting it was a privilege ordained by God only for those with character enough to handle it. Tragedy could be overcome by denial. The rest of life's challenges were simply stepping stones to keep us nimble.
So when Mother realized I was missing from the house and yard that day when I was four, she didn't panic or complain; she briskly set about arranging my rescue. It took Davy Dillon-our neighbor who had a magical way with horses-to coax his frisky colt to surrender his featherweight passenger. I felt Davy's strong, kindly arms lift me off the big Arabian and saw his quiet smile as he searched for words, and found none.
In time, I would become Davy's devoted apprentice, and he would shape the very way I saw the world and myself. But Davy was not the hero in Ballinvalley that day. As the story of the wild ride of little Sonny Rice went around the local kitchens and pubs, it was reported that young Rice had climbed on the horse himself, vaulted steep fences, controlled the colt without a rein, and cantered home smiling, unharmed.
All our neighbors knew the Rice family had a star-crossed relationship with horses. It wasn't only my grandfather Rice who'd met a premature death as a horse trainer; my maternal grandfather, Thomas O'Toole, was thrown from a carriage when a young horse he was training bolted. He died of head injuries a few days later. It was 1916, year of the Easter Rising in Dublin. My grandfather O'Toole was fifty-four and left a widow and four children. He'd been a pillar of the community, a good husband and father, and a hardworking, proud farmer. My mother was the oldest, a sturdy eight-year-old when she lost her da.
Knowing this history, the community now eagerly embellished the story of my unlikely survival. It was a kind of gift to my family, an unspoken consolation prize for the tragic deaths and fatherless families.
As a social experiment, the Arabian therapy worked wonders. My shyness fell away. I was eager to take risks like the older boys and men I'd always secretly admired. Everyone treated me differently, like some sort of child prodigy. Mother began treating me differently, too: confiding her worries to me and seeking advice on adult things. I was suddenly the man of the house, and I loved it.
Mother didn't seem to notice that I was just a child. Nor did she seem to notice how her blatant favoritism hurt my sisters, who had their own ways of getting even.
As we stood in the kitchen, Mother would say, "Sonny, should I lease the fields under the house to the Byrne's this year? I was thinking if we could get a pound an acre from them, I could buy another cow and we could have our own milk this winter instead of havin' to buy it from the Lawlors."
I'd ponder the problem just as I'd seen adults do when serious topics came up, then pretend I'd weighed all sides of the question before answering. "That sounds good to me, Mammy, but what would we feed the cow? We don't have any hay or straw of our own, like the Lawlors do."
She'd frown, stop whatever chore she was doing, and engage me directly with her earnest hazel gaze. "You're right. We can't afford a cow this winter. You have more sense in that little head of yours than all the grown-ups I know. Lord, it's good to have a man around the house." At moments like that, I'd almost burst with pride as we beamed across the kitchen at each other. Typically, she'd be quietly wiping away the tears streaming down her cheeks, which I never understood.
A major obstacle to my claiming this mantle of manhood was my obsessive fear of the dark. Horses are earthly creatures with their bulging muscles, pungent smells, and lusty mating calls. But the dark was a different species of fear: unearthly, invisible, and untouchable.
For those who've grown up with electricity and modern lighting, it's hard to imagine rural darkness. And in the shadow of the Blackstairs Mountains, we had the premium, carbon brand, especially as winter deepened. Daylight never dawned; it was pumped out from behind the mountain in a soupy, foggy mist, which, with grudging hints of light at brief intervals, began to fade by mid-afternoon.
Night dropped suddenly, like a black shroud dropped from a cliff. Up on our ridge, this pure blackness often came with a drenching rain and driving wind, picking up steam from the valley floor by the time it reached our farmhouse. It rattled the ancient windowpanes in my second-story bedroom and rendered me an easy victim to the night prowlers, the sisterhood.
Emboldened by the results of their Arabian therapy, they now sought to cure me of my greatest fear. On those endless, ink-black nights, this became a kind of a challenge to see who could develop the most diabolical plot. These were built around two staples of childhood nightmares, Satan and the banshee. The devil, known to all Catholic children as evil incarnate, was always hungry for young sinners to feed the flames of hell for real or imagined transgressions.
The banshee was more complicated. She was a strange Celtic goddess, a ghostly harbinger of ill tidings, usually a death in the family. To me, the banshee was a real woman, unspeakably weird. People knew her, swore they'd seen her. She was a young woman who'd been wronged in some horrid fashion. Her spirit roamed the earth, a gliding face at the window, keening and combing her golden hair. God help you if you heard her wailing.
In gray wintertime, night fell by 3:30 in the afternoon, and from then until bedtime, I was a pushover. Making Sonny hear the banshee made for great sport at nightfall, like hide-and-seek. To the sisterhood, this was the best time of day. Their favorite gambit was to alert me to any night sound as the wail of the banshee: a vixen calling her young, a goat caught in the briars, or just the wind in the sycamores. "Listen. Did you hear that? I think it's the banshee!"
Once alerted, every whisper of the wind struck terror into my fevered imagination. As the youngest, I had to go to bed first, alone up the darkened stairs, a juicy target. Mother rarely seemed to notice these assaults; she was too exhausted from the endless avalanche of farm chores and money worries. She provided food, shelter, clothing, hygiene-with steadfast resolve, against the odds. Beyond that, the well ran dry. Our emotional hygiene we had to sort out for ourselves.
And sort it out we did, Lord of the Flies style. One of my sisters' more fiendish gambits was the night they put a kid goat in my bedroom, complete with horns and chains. They knew my worst nightmare: to find Satan himself lurking in my creaky, moonlit bedroom window. They scored a bull's-eye, and I went into convulsions from the shock. As with the Arabian colt incident, the punishments inflicted by Mother did nothing to derail my sisters' fine-tuned engine of mischief.
Eventually, the tide began to turn my way.
By my seventh birthday, I'd grown wise to the ways of the sisterhood. But we had a pact not to be tattletales, so I never turned them in. Still terrified of the dark, I finally hit on the perfect solution-dogs. When darkness fell, I always had at least three dogs in my entourage, the meaner the better. I had a knack for finding pups and strays, nursing them to health, and rewarding them for merciless attacks on any real or imagined threat. Some of the adopted pack were wiry bird dogs, others fierce terriers. But most were mixed-breed sheep dogs; big alpha males that loved to dominate and pursue anything I set them on. I became a one-man arsenal of aggressive, edgy dogs, and relished my newfound power.
The greatest of all these dogs was a huge Border collie I named "Captain." I loved all my dogs-and they returned it with total loyalty-but Captain was in a class by himself with the broadest license to defend and protect. Even if I were only roughhousing with my cousins, the Ryans, Captain would be up in their face, fangs bared, at the slightest hint of distress from his master. I noticed, with secret satisfaction, that there was much less tripping, punching, and arm-twisting, the standard stuff of boys being boys.
Captain was a gift from Uncle Peter Ryan. Newly home from the States and in his usual genial mood, he showed up one day with a gorgeous puppy in his coat pocket. Black and white with red markings on the forehead, the puppy was about six weeks old and crying for his mother. The poor little fellow kept that up for three nights. I whined to my mother that I wanted the pup to sleep with me. Finally, she relented and let me take Captain to bed so that we'd both stop whining and she could get her rest.
Captain stayed near my side for the next three years. During all that time, the devil never once waited for me in the window. Even the banshee slowly lost interest. And I knew that if she had slid by, Captain's sinister bark would have drowned out her keening, and I would have laughed at it from behind my bristling canine shield.
Because of his natural snarl and swagger, Captain was a source of constant controversy. He looked like a giant, black wolf, and intimidated just about everything and everyone but me. Other dogs literally shrank in his presence and fled for cover. But he'd do anything I asked-and plenty without being asked. We were inseparable. When school started, I had trouble making Captain understand that he couldn't come into the classroom with me.
At the end of the school day, he'd meet me just outside the schoolyard, thrilled at the reunion, and ready to escort me home. I never knew how he gauged the time, or what he did in the interim. I felt anxious without him, but gloriously confident with his swaggering presence next to me, all my fears masked by his power.
During those years, my main chore was to fetch the cows for milking twice a day. It was a long jog down to where they grazed in the lower meadows, and without a dog, the chore took hours. But with Captain, I was done in half an hour. He bullied the cows into prompt obedience. Relishing my not-so-secret weapon, I encouraged his violent assaults on all dawdlers, so the cows often arrived for milking petrified, their tails and hindquarters bleeding.
These assaults on the cows began to wear on Mother. She gave Captain (and his owner) warnings, muzzles, and probationary periods. Finally, when Captain was four years old, the hammer came down. Mother acknowledged that Captain was beautiful beyond belief, talented, and loyal. She told me she knew the dog felt he was only doing his duty. But she declared we were either going to have Captain shot for high crimes against innocent cows and all living things, or give him away to someone who could control him. I knew she was serious, and I wanted to save Captain's life, even if I couldn't share it anymore. So I gave him up.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Far from the Landby Thomas J. Rice Copyright © 2009 by Thomas J. Rice. Excerpted by permission.
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