The Old Man on the Mountain:                 The Seeds of My Historic Novel 45 Years Ago

On a summer evening in 1981, Nan McGovern, my Irish mother-in-law, took me up a mountain near her home in northwest County Cavan to meet an old man who lived alone beside an open hearth in a cottage without electricity. That was the way it was with some of the older generation in those days. When electricity arrived in the valley in the 1950s, some of the hardier folks who had lived without it all their lives refused to have the electric installed. "Sure what would I want with the likes of that?" they'd reply when offered the prospect that electricity would power such modern amenities as lighting at the flip of a switch or even a refrigerator. And so Charlie Maguire, well into his eighties by then, lived out his days and evenings as he always had, by the light and warmth of the hearth, with the aid of an odd oil lamp when the sun set at the end of the day.

            Charlie was known in the region as a seanachie (pronounced "shanakee"), a local storyteller who has "a head full of knowledge about life in the old days," as Nan put it. Stooped over with age, he met us at the door of his stone cottage, greeting us with a delighted smile. "You're very welcome," he said in a wispy voice, strands of white hair lifting in a breeze. As we settled in beside the turf fire, Charlie began to talk of days gone by. He captivated us with tales passed down from generation to generation in the oral tradition of the region. He shared accounts of a former village nearby that pre-dated the devastating potato famine of the 1840s and noted that an old gruel pot once used to feed the starving masses in those days was still to be found in the vicinity.

            Then Charlie related tales of a local folk hero in the region who attacked landlords and the English authorities for oppressing the native Irish early in the 18th century. Dick Souple (the local pronunciation of "supple") Corrigan was a highwayman whose gang robbed from the rich and sometimes shared their plunder with the poor. Souple Corrigan is remembered in legend in the region to this day. 

            In Tobar in the Gloaming, my historical novel, I have envisioned my protagonist as the great-grandson, on his mother's side, of Souple Corrigan. In 1846, Michael Sheridan is a feisty young man raised on tales of English oppression. As he witnesses his neighbors evicted from their cottages during the Famine, he strikes an officer and goes on the run, becoming an outlaw, just like his ancestor a century earlier.

More next time on the book, its background, and its progress.            

            

 

 

The Burning of the Green

"Christmas," an Irishman once said, "is for family. St. Stephen's Day  [December 26th] is for friends." In fact, much of Europe still celebrates The Twelve Days of Christmas from December 25th to January 5th, the eve of the Epiphany, which marks the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem. The festivities, many derived from folk traditions and ancient yuletide customs, entail Christmas Masses, creche displays, parades, caroling, Christmas markets, and saints' days. Revelers indulge in  seasonal foods and gaze in awe at the holiday lights adorning houses and public spaces everywhere. Here in America, though, we seem to have forsaken most of those hoary rituals of The Twelve Days of Christmas.

        As the shadows lengthened on Christmas day when I was a child in The Bronx, by late afternoon the celebration was always tinged, for  me, with a bittersweet realization that with the encroaching darkness, this day that we had so long anticipated was drawing to an abrupt conclusion. From the slow foreshadowing weeks of Advent that prepared us to welcome the birth of the Christ child, to the hopeful expectation of Santa's bounty, the Christmas season itself was drawing now with cold finality to an end. By the next day, Christmas would be over. 

        Like many Christian families, we'd leave the Nativity set up until the feast of the Epiphany on January 6th. But by then, any feasting would have been over for nearly two weeks, and Christmas was just a memory. No matter how frequently we had watered the tree—always a real one in those days—the branches would be brittle, their needles dropping like rain at the slightest touch. So we stripped it of its tinsel and decorations and discarded the tree to the curb in the days after Christmas. 

        In one final farewell to the season, the older kids in the neighborhood would drag into the gutter some of the cast off trees from the pile beside the garbage cans on the sidewalk. As darkness settled on Tiebout Avenue, the heap would be set alight in the empty space by the fire hydrant outside our building. The trees would catch with the flick of a match, their dry branches flaring and snapping as the wind fed the fire and the pile blazed beneath the lampposts. As the fire roared, the scent of burning balsam mixed with smoke in the crisp sharp winter air. 

        

        Some of the more daring kids darted about the flaming trees and we could see the fire reflected in their eyes. Others tied steel wool pads to ropes, lit them in the fire, and swung them over their heads in a swirling spectacle of street theatrics. Of course, the fire would eventually burn through to the ropes and launch steel wool missiles into a low orbit that added to the fearless performance and scattered many in the crowd of kids who had gathered to watch the amazing display. As the fire died down, the older kids would feed more discarded trees onto the pile, which flared anew. On some nights the F.D.N.Y. would arrive, sirens blaring, to hose down the flaming trees. Most nights, though, they were busy dousing pyres on other streets, and our burning of the green blazed on. After what seemed hours, the flames would peak. Soon the whoosh of the fire subsided and the crackling sap sizzled and popped until it faded to a whisper and eventually went out.

 

        Of course, for kids in The Bronx—as no doubt for kids all over the City—the burning of the green was sheer frolicsome fun. Yet in looking back now more than six decades later, I realize that, unwittingly, the flaming trees were our urban version of the bonfires that blaze to this day in rituals throughout Europe, which originated to ward off evil spirits amidst the darkness of winter. The fire symbolically represented the demise of the old year and the birth of the new, mere days away. But it was for us just one of the many street rituals that marked the changing of the seasons in our neighborhood of New York City in the 1950s and '60s: stickball in spring and summer; street games galore on mild days; spinning tops, chestnut fights, and street hockey in fall; and snowball fights, sledding, and the burning of the green in winter. The cycle had come round once again, and the blazing trees reminded us that Christmas was less than a year away.