A Secret in the Grave

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Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

A Secret in the Grave

April 16, 2008

By Cormac MacConnell

A MAGUIRE man who was a boy when I was a boy got a heart attack last week and died in seconds with at least one secret untold for certain. I did not hear about it until the following day. I sent a Mass card and a note of sympathy this afternoon to the widow and family.

I’ve not seen the man for maybe 30 years, but one early summer evening by the Erne we shared a secret and also discovered that there is indeed manna from heaven. Or thereabouts anyway.

We were not close friends as boys. But there is an aimless thing that happens to lads in the long summer evenings, and that was how we came to be together in Tully that scorching late June evening fishing for perch with hazel rods and brown lines and feathered corks for floats, the whispering lough filling nearly all our world, calm as a millpond.

And there was another reason we were there. It was haymaking time, every meadow in the parish downed, and you needed to make yourself scarce before some farmer spotted you and cajoled you into his field.

Then there would be hours of hard work with rake and patchfork, blisters on the inside of both thumbs for sure, and sixpence at most at the end of the day.

It was too hot and heavy for the fish to be biting. Perch will go stone mad for the worms we were using after rain showers, but it had not rained for days.

I had one bar of Cadburys chocolate with me and we shared that. Then we skimmed flat stones as well as any 10 or 11-year-old loughside-bred lads could skim them.

Maybe we’d get 10 or 11 skips before the stones sank, and that was considered good. And then we got thirsty the way you can after eating chocolate.

We could have gone to Paddy’s spring well a hundred yards away, but Maguire suggested that we thieve a drink of Protestant milk from one of Nixon’s Protestant cows before they were brought in to be milked.

I went along with that. We stowed the two rods in the ditch until the next time and set off up the lane to the field where the Protestant cows were.

About halfway there we heard a man laughing gently on the other side of a thick hedge of thorn bushes, briars and twining honeysuckle. We stopped silently like the small animals we were and “jouked” down under the hedge so we could see who it was.

There was a small triangular meadow inside, less than an acre.

All its hay had been saved into three ricks, still more green than gold, neat and tidy.

The laughing man we knew well. He was lying on his back with his head against one of the ricks of hay.

There was an oilskin bag beside him with the setting sun glinting on a tin can inside. Lying across his chest was a young woman wearing a red blouse and a black skirt.

She was kissing him and getting the kiss back with interest. I think maybe it was the first passionate kiss either of us had ever seen.

And we were struck dumb by what we were seeing, not by the kiss at all, but at the fact that the young man was Catholic and the girl was a Protestant!

It’s nothing nowadays, but that was a huge thing then. It was a mortal sin. It was condemned by both sides of our strange religious divide.

Either would have been in very serious trouble if the foul deed had been seen by anyone other than two small boys! There would be blood spilt over the likes of that.

We were so shocked that we did not wait to see any other developments. We crawled quickly out from under the hedge and ran away as silently and as fast as we could.

And when we got around the bend I saw Maguire was in an awful state altogether. He was pale and there were tears in his eyes.

It took me a minute or two to recall that the young fellow in the field was his uncle. Inside the next minute he had me caught by the front of the shirt, his wet eyes blazing, all friendship gone, and he was swearing blind that he’d kill me if I told anybody at all what I had seen.

His arms were shaking. I think he was shaking all over.

I swore to him that my lips were sealed. I would not even tell my mother. I would not tell what I had seen even in Confession (I didn’t either!)

I knew, even at that age, we were in a heavy place. If the story got out his uncle would probably have to leave home and go to England, at least for a couple of years.

He saw I meant it and eventually settled down. In the style of boys we put it away altogether and went into Nixon’s field to steal a drink of Protestant milk.

We picked an old quiet Ayrshire cow that was in a concealed corner of the field. I lay down at right angles to her with my head under the big swollen udder. She kept grazing away.

Maguire, a skilled hand-milker like everyone then, began milking the two rear teats into my opened mouth below. The old cow continued to graze.

The milk streaming down on to my face and into my mouth was more hot than warm, full of cream, a wonderful drink. When I looked up past the side of the udder and the Ayrshire’s great rounded belly, the milk indeed seemed like manna from heaven.

Then, less accurately, I gave Maguire his drink, and we went home the long way by mutual consent rather than maybe meet the lovers again. We were silent, and clouds of little moths rose up from the soft green aftergrass under our feet all the way.

I never told that story until now that Maguire is gone. And I have not told ye all of it now either because, inevitably, there was an aftermath.

But that was not the fault of two small boys drinking manna from heaven and closing themselves in around a summertime secret long ago and far away.

God be good to them all.

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