Blessed Are the Chancers

Chapter One: The Notice on the Door

My name is Rory Tansey, and in the spring of 1728 I owed Colonel Hugh Coyne two years' rent, a sum so large that I had stopped thinking of it as money and started thinking of it as weather. You do not argue with weather. You put your head down and go on walking through it, and if it kills you, at least nobody says you didn't try.

Every Friday, the Colonel's man came out from the big house with a hammer and a nail and a sheet of paper, and put the paper on my door. His name was Padraig Hanley and he was the longest, saddest article ever assembled out of a man's parts, and he apologised each time.

"It's only what I'm told, Rory."

"You're told a great deal, Padraig."

"I am. Would you not read it this week?"

"I would not. I've a fire to light."

And that was the truth. In two years I burned enough legal instruction to roast a bullock. There is no better kindling in Ireland than a lawyer's paper. It's dry, it's plentiful, and it goes up with a small offended noise, like a curate hearing something he shouldn't.

You will want to know about Cloonbeg, and I will tell you quickly, because there was never much to it and there's less now. Forty houses along a road that the road itself seemed embarrassed about. A chapel with a roof that was of two minds. A bridge over the Cloon river that had been built in the last century by a man who, it was generally agreed, had never seen a river before and did not entirely believe in them. West of us, the bog: black, wet, patient, going on for four miles until it gave up and became Kilbarra's bog instead, which was the same bog but with better publicity.

And ninety-one families. I know the number exactly, and I knew it then, because Father Simon Duffy kept them written in a register in a hand that got worse as the years got harder, and he had a habit, when drink had made him sentimental, of reading the names out loud in the alehouse like a man calling in cattle that weren't going to come.

The oats had failed twice. Two years running, which is a thing the oats have no business doing. The price of meal had doubled and then thought better of it and doubled again. There were children in the parish in the spring of that year with the round bellies and the thin arms and the old faces, and I am not going to make a joke about it, because I saw them, and because everything else in this account is going to be a joke, and you should know from the start what the jokes were sitting on top of.

In the back room of my house was my mother, Sabina Tansey, who was seventy-one and dying.

She had been dying since 1722.

She was very good at it. She had the deathbed down to a craft: the sighing, the eyes going up, the hand out on the blanket like a woman laying down a winning card. What she would not do was finish.

"Not in a wet spring," she told me. "I'll not be carried to the chapel through slop. And I'll not do it this year at all. It would delight the Caseys."

"Nobody's delighted, Mother."

"Bridie Casey would be delighted. She'd have the fire out and my chair moved before I was cold. Rory. Tobacco."

"There's no tobacco."

"There's tobacco in the parish."

"There's tobacco in Dublin too, and I've the same chance of it."

She would then prophesy. That was her other trade. She had foretold the failure of the oats, which she never let anyone forget, and she had also foretold the return of the Spanish, the burning of Athlone, the death of the King of France on two separate occasions, and a plague of frogs. She had a sense of the dramatic and no interest whatsoever in accuracy, which, looking back, is the whole family gift, and I got my share of it.

"There'll be a great strangeness on this house before the summer," she said to me, that April, while I was pulling on my wet coat. "A great strangeness. Out of the ground."

"Out of the ground."

"Out of the ground, and half the country talking about it, and money in the door, and you no better off in your soul."

"If you're right about the money I'll say nothing about the soul."

"Tobacco," she said, and turned her face to the wall like a queen dismissing a footman.

I want it noted, for the sake of the record, that she got that one exactly right, and that she has never once let it go.

The fourth thing you need is Oliver Cawley, and Oliver is harder to hand over than the rest, because Oliver spent his whole life presenting himself and I have never been sure I got past the presentation.

Oliver Cawley was sent to Spain at nineteen to be made a priest. The parish paid for it in eggs and small coins and a subscription taken up at two funerals, because his mother had told everybody he had the makings of a bishop, and in fairness he had the voice for it. He came home four years later, on a boat he was vague about, with a good black coat and no orders, and the story went round in pieces for a month before it settled.

He had forged his own ordination paper. That was the first thing. Not out of malice, he said, but out of impatience: the college was slow, the Latin was slow, the men above him were slow, and he could see no reason to be nine years becoming a thing he already was in his heart. So he wrote it himself, and he wrote it beautifully, and he was very nearly not caught. What caught him was the second thing, which was the wine. There was a cellar. The wine in it belonged to the college. Oliver formed the view that a great deal of it was going to waste in the hands of men who could not tell one bottle from another, and he found a merchant in the town who agreed with him, and for five months Oliver Cawley conducted a private trade in the sacramental supply of a Spanish seminary and did quite well out of it.

He was put on the road with what he stood up in. And here is the part I never understood: he came home not ashamed but improved. He considered the whole business a piece of bad luck, like rain at a fair. He came back to Cloonbeg and let it be known that he was the only educated man in the parish, and the terrible thing is that he was. He had Latin. He had a hand you would cry over. He could tell you what year a coin was struck and lie to you about it in three languages.

He worked, when he worked, for me, cutting turf, for nothing but food and the pleasure of his own company, which he assumed I shared.

We were on the bog four days that week. If you have never cut turf, I'll tell you only that it is the most honest work in the world and that is exactly what's wrong with it. You take the slane, which is a spade with ambitions, and you cut down through the black, and you throw the sods up onto the bank, and you do that eleven thousand times, and then you go home wet to the neck and do it again tomorrow. There is no cleverness in it. Oliver hated that about it more than he hated the wet.

"Do you know what Kilbarra took in last summer?" he said, on the second day, straightening up with his hand in the small of his back like a man three times his age.

"I don't."

"Nor do I, exactly, but Joseph Skehan built a slate roof on a house that had thatch on it at Easter, so we may take it as considerable."

"It's a wet parish. A man might want slate."

"They have a well," said Oliver, holding up a finger. "Saint Brendan's well. Water in a hole, Rory. Water in a hole in a country where you cannot stand still for two minutes without water coming up around your ankles unasked, and they have people walking eleven miles to drink it and leaving a penny for the privilege. They have a hand. Did you know they have a hand?"

"I heard about the hand."

"A hand in a box, with a bit of glass over it, and they'll show it to you for a halfpenny and tell you it took the pain out of a woman in Boyle. And they have eleven beds. Eleven! Skehan's sister has a long room with eleven beds in it and she charges pilgrims twopence a night to lie in a row and cough at each other, and they go home and tell their neighbours they slept in the pilgrim house at Kilbarra as if they'd been at court."

"And what have we?"

"We have a bad bridge," said Oliver Cawley bitterly, "and a woman who takes warts off with a snail, and she isn't even good at it."

That was the second day. On the third day it rained sideways and we said nothing at all except about the rain. On the fourth day, the ninth of April, a Thursday, we were down four sods deep in a face of black turf at the far end of my cutting, past the old drain, in ground my father never worked because he said it was greasy.

I put the slane in.

It did not go through peat. Peat gives one way: it parts, sullenly, and lets you know it is doing you a favour. This gave another way entirely. It was soft and it had a spring in it and there was a little resistance in the middle of the softness, and the whole of my arm knew before the whole of my head did.

It was, and I have never found a better way to say it, like putting a knife into a cheese.

I stood there with my two hands on the shaft.

"What," said Oliver.

"There's something."

"A bog deal. A root."

"It's not a root."

He came over, complaining, and knelt down in the wet with his good black coat, which tells you he was interested, and he pulled away a handful of the moss, and then another, and then he went very still, which in Oliver Cawley was as rare as snow in July.

"Rory," he said.

"What."

"There's a hand." He sat back on his heels and looked up at me with the rain running off the end of his nose and an expression on him I had never seen before and would come to dread. "There's a hand in it, Rory, and it's up in the air, and I think it's waving."