Read No Country: A Novel for Free Online

of calling to our Heavenly Father was now a pretext to damn us as papists, our faith trodden upon.
    People here still swear by the sword of our Irish Queen Grania.She had triumphed on ship and land, around Corraun Peninsula and the slopes of Achill Island. When Elizabeth tried to buy her off with a promise of peace and a title, she was disdainfully told off. No English title could match the one our Grania had already. She died a ruler, and in her own bed, buried royal and peaceful, under the painted gaze of saints on the walls of Knockmoy Abbey. I longed for those lost days of the Irish swords. We heard the stories of later times, complete with songs, and curses: how Sir Frederick Hamilton led the British troops in the sack of Sligo Town. In his Protestant fury, with flaming brand, he tried again and again to burn down Sligo Abbey, once the abode of the peaceful singing Fathers. May his skin rot, mottled by pox, and his eye clutched with sore aches, squint, and motes.
    The Abbey walls had figures carved upon them, saints holding tablets, some with gentle palms turned towards the looking folk beneath, benedictions in stone. Though the flames leapt all about, the wall would not crumble or humble, and the holy ones stood, lit by the flames as if shielded within God’s holy palm.
    That fire finally burnt low, the sky full of stars until the embers blurred into dust beneath the stony stare of the saints. No one had been allowed to throw so much as a spoon of water. The hard and bitter English soldiery had stood by as the flames leapt. But our stone saints remained unharmed, Daniels in this later burning. Such were our few victories in those iron times.
    In dark nights here, after the stories and songs, easy ’tis to imagine the sad-faced giant Finn McCoul a-looking seven long years for his bereft and naked son, or Oisin on his gigantic horse cantering a bronze beat in the gloaming. No such heroes rode into our town to save it on that day. But I longed to be with the warriors of the coming day, among my brother Irish.
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    T O HEAR M R. O’F LAHERTY tell it, our O’Connell was made of the same stuff as McCoul, the great Boru, Cuchulain, with the very mien of the heroes of old. Dan O’Connell spoke for us all, and his words were fiery. Ah, what dreams these words held for us! I had many by heart, and standing on the slope towards Mullaghmore on my way back from school, I would pretend to be the great O’Connell himself and yelled the words out—as if all the gorse-tangled valley, the rhododendron bushes, even high Ben Bulben were my audience.
    “Here I am, calling for justice to Ireland. Will you, can you—refuse? You may raise the vulgar cry of ‘Irishman and Papist’ against me, you may send out ministers of God to slander and calumniate me. I demand equal justice for Ireland. I will not take less. Refuse me if you can .”
    When I returned home some days, still high with the brave words, my mother would ask me with a chortle, “Will Mr. O’Connell be wanting his praties now?” But she would want to hear the words too, enthralled as I was, by the sheer rightness of them all.
    I went wild with excitement the day I read the announcement of our Dan O’Connell’s plan, a vast “Monster” meeting on a Sunday, the eighth day of October in 1843. He had called upon all Ireland to come to the fields of Clontarf, next to Dublin, where exactly eight hundred years ago, our great Brian Boru had met the alien Norsemen in armed conflict and battered them, driving them brokenback and spentbreath into the sea. Dan O’Connell’s choice of place was masterly. Whoever thought that he was ever too much of a gentleman to roll his white sleeves and pick up the hoe or cudgel for a bleeding turn nowthought of the symbolism of the site, the time. My moment had come.
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    ’T WAS MORNING, AND me fretful the whole night before, wondering how and what I’d say to my ma. Finally she brought me my glass of