Creagh
July 1846
JOHN HAD PLANTED OUT THE SEED POTATOES IN MARCH, THE DAY AFTER St Patrick’s Day.
‘Mary, will you give up your old vegetable patch?’ he’d pleaded, ‘so I can set more seed potatoes?’
‘No, I need it for the vegetables!’ she had refused stubbornly, for after last year she intended to grow even more cabbages and turnips.
The winter had been the worst since they had married, for they had little to eat except what they foraged or what Mary could purchase with the money she made. She’d killed the last of their hens over three weeks ago as the bird was better in her family’s bellies than in her neighbours’.
They had cleared their two fields of any last trace of the diseased potato crop. They had raked up and burned the stalks and debris, and turned the soil, before John dug fresh new drills for planting. He and Pat had carted heavy loads of iodine-rich seaweed to their fields from the rocky shoreline, and spread it over the beds to fertilize them and feed the plants. They hoped that it would give them a better yield of potatoes.
She and John were like two broody hens with a clutch of eggs as they watched over this year’s new crop. They inspected their plants nervously for any sign of blight or leaf damage, but were relieved as the months passed and the drills grew tall and strong.
‘This will be the best harvest ever,’ boasted Flor, sitting on the wall across from his cottage. He sucked at his clay pipe as he and grey-haired Molly surveyed the potato plants all around them. ‘It will be a fine crop to make up for last year.’
‘They say it promises to be good, but we must not take the crop for granted,’ John warned, unable to shake off the nagging fear that the blight would return.
‘Brother, you are worrying over nothing,’ teased Pat. ‘For it is clear to all eyes that this year’s potatoes are thriving.’
Looking out across the fields at the pale pink-and-white potato blossom which blew and danced like a wave, Mary was reassured that their potato pits and sacks soon would be full again with this year’s harvest. Once their crop was stored for the year ahead, it would not be long before the hard times were behind them.
John and Pat were busy getting in the barley and wheat crop for their landlord.
‘The grain stores will be full,’ John remarked as they sat around the fire, sharing a pot of gruel and griddle cakes. ‘Though most of this year’s crop is bound for Liverpool, Leeds and London.’
‘Why must we feed the factories and workers of Britain,’ pondered Pat angrily, ‘when all we have is gruel to keep us until our own crop comes in?’
‘It has always been the way.’ John shrugged. ‘But it’s the wrong way.’
‘I’m telling you, it’s time that things change.’ Pat’s eyes flashed angrily. ‘We can no longer be like an old dog lying under its master’s table, waiting for scraps. The time is coming for the hound to rise up and bite.’
‘Will you hush up with your talk, Patrick?’ Mary warned, noticing that young Con and Nora were glued to his words. ‘Do you want to bring trouble down on this house and our children?’
‘No!’ He lapsed into silence and ate his gruel.
Con’s eyes shone as he looked admiringly at his uncle and Mary thanked heaven that at least her son was too young to be involved with Pat and his group of Young Irelander friends.
Pat disappeared in a huff as soon as he had finished eating.
‘Why did you chase him out of the place?’ rebuked John later. ‘You know it’s lonely for him, being on his own.’
‘He should have thought about that four years ago when he broke off his engagement to Frances McCarthy and chased after Julia Carmody.’
‘Unfortunately, a man is ruled by his heart not his head.’
‘I’m not sure that I would call it his heart!’ Mary teased. ‘He threw Frances over, with her father’s ten acres of land and a cottage, for that black-haired beguiler he paraded around the town with.’
‘Julia was not the woman for him,’ John admitted. ‘She’d not live on Pat’s scrapeen of land.’
‘Well, Frances is happy now, and her husband has charge of the land since her father took ill last year and died. I hear she is due a second child soon.’
‘It upsets him thinking of what he lost.’
‘Maybe Pat will find another girl.’
She felt a surge of pity for her handsome brother-in-law. With his long dark eyelashes, deep-brown eyes and easy smile, he had a certain way with women, but still lived alone in a small cabin and spent many of his nights drinking porter or talking politics and rebellion in the local síbín with another few wild men like himself.
‘He will be a lucky man if he finds himself a girl as beautiful and kind hearted as the one I found.’
Mary laughed. She had forgotten what a charmer her husband could be!
Dusk had fallen, and together they listened to the unexpected rain which had begun to patter on the thatch roof. John ran outside to look at the drills and returned soaked to the skin but happy.
‘Will you stop your worrying?’ Mary urged him as she pulled off his sodden shirt and made him sit by the glowing turf. ‘The potatoes are grand, just grand.’