Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories/The Careys
XX.—THE CAREYS
THEIR home is in the flat midland of Ireland, in one of those districts in which, to use our favourite euphemism, there is "trouble." I need not describe the trouble. Politicians have done that, done it till nobody wants it done again half of them eloquently insisting upon its extreme troublesomeness, the other half with equal eloquence maintaining that "trouble" is far too strong a word to apply to innocent amusement. The Careys, Peter and Affie, a pair of brothers and both young, are in the thick of the trouble whatever it is. All the authorities give them a bad character. The parish priest spoke to me about them guardedly.
"They're not the boys they ought to be," he said, "though their old mother that lives with them is as decent a woman as you'd meet."
Questioned about their misdeeds, he became very vague. They did not drink. He admitted that.
"Nobody ever saw the sign of it on them; but they're careless in their religious duties; though I wouldn't go as far as to say they were disrespectful to the clergy. It was the same with their father before them, but that was before my time."
The police sergeant was more explicit. It was he, and not I, who introduced the subject of the Careys. I was only vaguely curious. To him, as to most other people in the neighbourhood, Peter and Affie are a sort of obsession. All subjects of conversation lead to them in the end.
"They're daring," he said, "mighty daring. There's little they wouldn't be fit to do in the way of bad work. If there's trouble of any sort going"
"Cattle driving?" I suggested. "Boycotting?"
The neighbourhood has a reputation for both, and I thought that the Careys' daring might find expression in one or the other.
"And worse," said the sergeant significantly. "Whatever it might be in the way of lawlessness, them Careys will be at the head and tail of it. It was the same with their father before them and the old Land League. I wasn't in it them times, but I'm told he was a terrible man, and the trouble wouldn't have been the half what it was only for him."
The belief in heredity is extraordinarily strong amongst us. The parish priest also holds the view that the Careys' teeth are on edge on account of the sour grapes which their fater ate.
"It was in old Carey's yard," the sergeant went on—"that's the grandfather of Peter and Arfie and the father of the man that was in it in the bad times—it was in his yard that the police found the arms buried when the Fenians was out. It was him that was the chief man amongst the Fenians in these parts."
I began to feel sorry for Peter and Affie. With an ancestry like theirs and a fixed determination on the part of everybody to give them a bad name, it is almost inevitable that they should plunge into violent courses.
"Drink?" I suggested. Like charity, drink covers a multitude of sins and is a recognised and admitted excuse for almost any kind of wrong-doing.
"They wouldn't touch a drop," said the sergeant emphatically, "neither the one of them nor yet the other. It would be better for them if they did. Where the drink's going there'll not be much besides. There's worse things than the drink."
This view was new to me. It may be sound. I imagine that it is sound when there is question of privy conspiracy, rebellion, battle, murder, and sudden death. The original Carey, the Fenian, would hardly have kept the arms buried as long as he did if he had been given to whisky. Men babble in their cups. However, the Careys are no business of mine, neither the bygone generations of them nor the present Peter and Affie. I was going to see the widow Conway, quite a different sort of person.
She lives alone in a tiny cabin which stands at the end of a long muddy bohireen. She had a husband once and a fine family of sons and daughters, two sons and three daughters. They are all gone from her now. The husband, the eldest son and two of the daughters have taken the longest journey of all, the children by the way of consumption, the husband mysteriously, "after a vomiting and a terrible pain that the doctor could do nothing for." So she told me. The remaining son and daughter took the other journey, hardly less inevitable, "across the big sea." They are in America. The mother lives alone, a broken woman, half crippled with rheumatism, on the patch of stony land which her husband, and after him the son who died, used to till.
I found her seated on a low stool,—"creepy" stools we call these seats—beside a smouldering turf fire in a room which was very ill-lit. The fire was smoking, or had been smoking, which made it still harder to see at first. It was only after some minutes that I discerned a calf standing in a corner barricaded in with an old packing case. It seemed a placid, friendly calf, well satisfied with the warmth of its lodging. Mrs. Conway brought forward a chair for me and wiped it with her apron. Then, by way of welcome, she made up the fire, piling on fresh sods of brown turf. I had noticed a fine stack of turf in the yard as I approached the door. I remarked on it, saying that she was fortunate in having so large a supply of fuel.
"I have good neighbours," she said. "If it wasn't for them I wouldn't have a sod at all. How would I be going to the bog to save it?"
Saving turf is laborious work, work for strong men, not for a rheumatic old woman, and carting turf home is a long job when the bog is five miles away.
"It's wonderful," she said, "the way they do it for me every year, fetching it home and all, and never a penny they'll take for doing it, not even if I had it to give them; but sure they know well that I haven't."
It appeared that this was not by any means all that the neighbours did for her.
"When it's the time for saving my little lock of hay," she said, "them boys will be down here at six o'clock in the morning, taking a turn at it before ever they begin their own work. And in the evening when another would be wanting to amuse himself they'll be down here again until such time as they have it saved. It's badly I'd do without them."
"They're good neighbours," I said, "whoever they are."
"You may say that, and it isn't even as if they were some of our own."
"Our own?" I was doubtful of the phrase.
"I am a Protestant," she said, "and all that ever belonged to me were Protestants, and they're belonging to the other side."
Well, the gulf is wide enough. God knows; religious, political, social, even racial sometimes, in the far back part of it; it is not so wide, it appears, but charity can bridge it across—the wonderful love of the poor for the poor which is the best sort of charity there is in the world. I felt that I wanted to know something more of these neighbours, the boys who worked early and worked late to save the widow's hay for her and bring home the widow's turf.
"Who are they?" I asked.
"It's the Careys," she said. "Who else would it be? They're the only neighbours I have, for this is a backward place and lonely."
"Is it Peter Carey?" I asked, "and his brother Affie?"
"It is. Sorra the better boys than them you'd find anywhere and it's often I do be thanking God that I have them. There's many a one wouldn't do the half what they do; and, what's more, they don't begrudge it. Was I telling you about Peter—that's the eldest of them—the time my cow died on me the day after the Christmas? It's her calf I have within in the house with me this minute, keeping the creature warm the way I'll be able to rear her with the help of God. I was not telling you, for I didn't see you since. Well, Peter Carey—"
I suppose Peter Carey and his brother Affie will be put in prison some day on account of their share in "the trouble that does be in it." Their names will be bandied about by politicians who will want to have them prosecuted or will want to worry some one for prosecuting them. It will be cattle driving, or boycotting, or what the police sergeant calls "worse" that they will be accused of; and they will not have the blessing of their church when the time comes because they have never attended properly to their religious duties. Nevertheless I disagree with the philosophy which regards their sin as less venial than drinking, and I think that somewhere there will be another judgment pronounced on Peter and Affie. The widow's turf, and the hay, and the dying cow will be remembered there; perhaps even the daring will be counted for a kind of righteousness, the righteousness of blind men trying to go straight through a world whose ways are tortuous.