A Child-Idyl of Donegal

MARY ANNE DUFFY, aged six, trudged along a Donegal hillside, quite alone except for the cow she drove, — a curiously marked beast suggesting a black cow wearing a white blanket.

This was the proud morning for Mary Anne, since it marked her promotion from the toddling class to the herding. She held her straight little back still straighter as she realized how much older and more responsible she was than Kitty or even Pat James.

The cow half wheeled and shook her horns playfully at the new ‘ herd,’ whose pretty pride suffered quick collapse.

‘Och, the cow do be thinking I am too wee!’ she whimpered, but bravely brandished her stick. The animal recognized the official baton and shambled on.

Mary Anne was sound and ruddy, though delicately formed. She had the quality of intrinsic cleanliness, as if the soil would not adhere even to her bare legs and feet. She wore a gray homespun dress of many patches and more rents. Her mother had pinned a red kerchief about her head.

The cow left the path and fell to grazing on the short, scanty, native herbage. Mary Anne seated herself as near the creature’s head as she deemed prudent; she did not want the cow commenting again on her smallness. She grasped the stick with two hands and observed fixedly every movement of her charge.

Soon she heard a mighty whooping alternated with snatches of music on a ‘tromp’ or jews-harp. It meant that Shane O’Donnell, a neighbor lad of eight years, was herding his father’s four cows, not far away. Mary Anne dreaded Shane as a noisy, disconcerting being always overflowing with tumult. Not wishing him to spy her, she crept into a sheltered nook among the rocks. The sun was deliciously warm with one of those brief unexpected relentings which temper the rigors of Donegal. The white-blanketed cow soon wandered where she listed.

Shane O’Donnell discovered the beast when she had cleared a square yard of his father’s oats, — something of a depredation in a field the size of a drawing-room. He recognized the cow and was driving her before him, expecting to have it out with one of the elder Duffys, when he came upon Mary Anne, still asleep, her head pillowed on a clump of daisies.

Shane had no weakness for little girls; he had always regarded Mary Anne as of even less consequence than Pat James; but now her exquisite helplessness made some appeal to his embryo masculinity, which he did not in the least understand, but which caused him to withdraw, taking her cow to herd with his own until she should awake.

Mary Anne came to herself in a grievous panic, and was on a rock staring about for her charge before she had finished rubbing her eyes. Poor little Irish Bo-peep! She soon discovered the cow in the possession of that monster, Shane O’Donnell. With one halting step after another, she forced herself to approach him. Her astonishment at his friendly grin was immeasurable.

‘That was a fine sleep you had, Mary Anne.’

‘Did — did— me cow do harm?’ faltered the guilty one.

‘She eat up most of me father’s corn.’

‘Will he — be annoyed?’

‘He will that, just. He will break his legs running to t’rash you.’

‘Maybe — it was some villain of another cow eat up the corn.’

‘I seen your baste eating away.’

Again the domineering manhood of Shane O’Donnell succumbed, — this time to the pitiful puckers that formed about the little red mouth of Mary Anne.

‘If I take the blame off you and say it was our dun cow, will you be giving me the next sweeties you get?’

‘I will that, Shane. I will be giving you the next barley rock me father brings me, and come Fair Day I will give you me penny until you get some apples.’

‘And I will be doing you the good turn, Mary Anne, to give you back one of the apples.’

‘O Shane! I never was thinking you to be that char’ table, I was not indeed! ’

‘ Do not be revealing it on me,’ he put in hastily. ‘Do not be revealing me to be so grand and charitable.’

‘I will not, Shane.’

‘And do you not be revealing how I herded your old nuisance of a cow while you was sleeping.’

‘I will not be revealing it,’ promised Mary Anne in the repetitive form of answer which Donegal people carry over from their native Gaelic.

A distant church bell pealed three strokes, then three and three again, — a thrice blessed sound in that weird land where humanity feels itself the tenant-at-will of fierce elements and powers unseen. The children bowed their heads and Shane dragged off his cap, showing his black poll very close cut except for a long fringe over his forehead. As they stood without sound or movement waiting for the last vibration to spend itself, they made a childish replica of Millet’s Angelus. They were set in the characteristic Donegal landscape. Here the green mantle of Ireland has great patches of brown bogland, and is full of rents through which huge granite ledges thrust up gray knees. It is an untamable region whose sombre storm-beaten magnificence withers the heart of the stranger, but the youngsters lifted to it careless, accustomed eyes at the ceasing of the bell. Their faces, however, were still grave with an instant’s prophecy of the dark seriousness of their elders. Their first shy smiles at each other with which they resumed their converse were like the glinting of the sun across brown bog pools.

‘Time for noon milkin’, Mary Anne. Get your cratur shingelin’ on far ahead like we was not herding together.’

Thus Shane commanded and Mary Anne obeyed.

The cottages of the hillside group, toward which the boy and girl drove their cattle, were too few for a collective village name. The boreen leading up from the highway below came first to the slate-roofed abode of the O’Donnells. Shane was the youngest there. Mary Anne was the oldest of the children belonging to the low thatched Duffy cot farther up the hill. Within easy hail of the Duffys was a ruinous cabin, shaggy with grass, where dwelt old Cormac O’Brien, the piper. Nearest of all to the top of the brae stood the square stone hut of Peggy Coogan who lived there her lone.

When Mary Anne drove her cow back to the feeding ground, Shane was already there with his four. She noticed that above his ragged herding coat shone his white celluloid school collar.

‘Do I look brave to you, Mary Anne?’ he demanded.

‘You do just.’

‘Are you more content with me for the collar?’

‘I am.’

‘It restrains me neck like I was to be hunged.’

‘ It does,’ she agreed sympathetically.

‘It cost all of five pence.’

‘Did it now!’

‘Don’t you be revealing I put on me collar to look brave for you.’

‘I will not.’

‘You being so old-fashioned and sensible,’ he laughed, ‘sit you here on this rock and eye all of the cows while I am constructin’ you a bit house and you can be calling me if the cattle go streelin’ into the crops.’

Shane wrought with diligence in a miniature glen just below Mary Anne’s rock. He built the walls of stone and mud.

‘Look how I bringed the full-of-mearms of sticks from me house when me father was not noticing,’ he exulted; ‘and I bringed a spade.’

He laid the sticks across the top and then with the spade cut ‘scraws’ of grassy sod, rolling each one like a strip of carpet , and placed them across the sticks for the roof. He measured the size by his eye as he worked, comparing with Mary Anne. When finished, it was a rather close reproduction of the old piper’s storm-soaked, grass-crowned habitation.

Mary Anne left her rock to dance in ecstasy about the tiny dwelling.

‘Oh, the wee house! Oh, the pretty wee house!’

‘Put yourself inside.’

It was a close fit, but she could sit upright, and could have her feet within by curling them under her.

‘Now stay you down there and mind the house while I am up here herding, for you are me wee wife.’

‘I am,’ she assented joyously.

Her delight was purely imaginative. Shane was still young enough for the same appeal of make-believe, but he was also old enough for the delicious emotional disturbance of his first sweet-hearting.

Mary Anne’s next impulse was the feminine one to dress the part. She took off her kerchief and, with thorns from a convenient whin-bush, she pinned it on for a matronly apron.

Then she ran about gathering pebbles to pretend they were potatoes. Shane bethought himself of the cows and returned to the rock, from which he could look down on Mary Anne’s activities, as she had looked on his during the building of the house.

‘It is himself will be coming home to supper and the tatties not in the kettle,’ she chirruped.

‘It is herself is the grand wee wife trigging up the hearth and boiling me spuds to me liking just,’ he chirruped back. ‘But you will not be revealing our blathers, Mary Anne?’

‘I will not.’

The weather is seldom of one mind for two hours together in Donegal. Dark blue rain-clouds were gathering rapidly, and there were premonitory mutterings of the storm.

‘The t’unders!’ cried Shane. ‘I hear the t’unders! Run for your wee house, Mary Anne! There you will be safe and dry.’

The first drops fell on Mary Anne’s feet as she was crawling in.

‘Be’s you grand and content, Mary Anne? ’

‘I am that.’

‘ Is there any of the rain coming in on you, woman?’

‘There is not.’

‘Are you no glad I made you the elegant bit house?’

‘ I am.’

‘ Was you ever thinking to get a man who would be giving you such a fine place to sit down?’

‘I was not. Shane, you’s terrible good!’

The clouds emptied themselves. The cattle stopped feeding and turned their backs to the storm in patient endurance. The wind drove the rain so slantingly that Shane found partial shelter in the lee of a rock-heap which formed one side of the little glen. He noted with satisfaction that Mary Anne’s door opened away from the tempest.

‘I mind nothing so me wee wife be’s grand and content,’ he shouted.

Just then he heard a soft crunching followed by a smothered wail. He knew instantly from former experiences with sod shelters what had happened, and jumped to the rescue. Fortunately, when the house collapsed, Mary Anne had instinctively thrown up her arms to shield her head, so there was an air-chamber left for her face in the general ruin which buried her out of sight except for one little white hand protruding from the wreck like a signal of distress.

Shane dug frantically with his hands until he thought of the spade. He had her out in less than two minutes, but in a most woebegone condition, mudencrusted, bruised and terrified, with a bleeding scratch on one cheek. The furious rain sent the mud from her hair coursing down her face in thick black streams. She sobbed with childish abandon of fright and misery.

‘You be’s dead, Mary Anne,’ mourned the contrite Shane.

‘I am,’ she agreed.

‘Let me look. Are you much hurted ? ’

He gently detached her apron and, dipping it in the nearest pool, he assisted the rain in washing away the clinging mud.

When the dirt was sufficiently out of her eyes, she stopped crying to survey the ruin.

‘The bit house fell itself on me,’ she lamented.

‘Mary Anne, take you the cow stick and give me a good t’rashing for the trouble I brought on you this day.’

‘I will not. There is no blame on you and I am no hurted, and I am liking you the same as before.’

‘Some day I will be building you another wee house that will no fall on you.’

‘Will you be himself?’

‘I will.’

‘And me to be herself?’

‘You shall, and no other girl whatever.’

‘Shane, you’s awful char’table!’

‘I am. Stand you still, Mary Anne, I will be tying back your handkerchief or maybe you will be getting a dose of cold.’

Shane was fastening the sopping square beneath Mary Anne’s chin, when a freckled face partly bounded by a gray cap and prominent ears came in sight over the rock from which Shane had watched the cows.

‘Hullo, Mary Anne!’

Mary Anne did not answer, for the reason that while her name was used it was applied directly to Shane.

‘What you doing on this height, Billy Deever? ’

‘Looking for me calf, Mary Anne. Will you be asking me to your wedding?’

‘Big Hump and Crooked Legs!’

‘What be’s you getting with the girl? Her father must be equal for a cow and three couples of sheep.’

‘You, black! The devil take you and your calf out of this!’

chanted Billy Deever over and over until the hillside rang with it.

Shane’s fists clenched, but Billy Deever was ten. The occasion called for diplomacy.

‘ You old tief! What must I give you not to be kilt with me companions codding me? —and no cause but your old lying chat! ’

‘If you gived me your tromp —’

‘I will not be sparing me tromp to the likes of you.’

‘Then kape it yourself, Mary Anne Duffy.’

Shane approached Billy anxiously. ‘I will be giving you lashins of barley rock and the full of your two hands of apples come next Fair Day.’

With this Shane tried to slap Billy’s hand as men do to seal a cattle trade, but Billy thrust his hands behind him.

‘I will be having naught but the tromp that is in your pocket forninst me face,’ insisted the future American alderman.

‘Take it over, then, and may it put all your teef into smithereens and choke you dead, bad scran to you, Billy Deever ! ’

Shane flung the tromp on the grass.

With a victorious whoop Billy pounced upon it and was off after his calf, which he now spied vanishing over the top of the hill. Mary Anne meanwhile had crouched patiently in the poor shelter of a rock.

‘O Shane,’ she mourned, ‘I bringed you the bad luck to lose your tromp and you that char’table—’

‘ I think nothing of that, Mary Anne, so you be’s not hurted. I see your mother coming yonder. Take up your cow and lep along, but do not be revealing on me.'

4I will reveal nothing,’ again promised Mary Anne as she prodded the reluctant cow into action.