THE LAST BOY OF THE VILLAGE

E laid the boy down in his coffin, the last boy in the village, and that was saying something as he was six years from forty. In his ship in the earth his soul would sail to eternity. So we hoped. So we prayed.

Women, the ones who bear us to these landed shores, do not greet this departure without grief. Such grief. From the small door of the sanctuary we follow them into the church cemetery where it takes over their bodies. They clasp their empty wombs, bending over the grave, wailing.

HAMLET the government calls us. Our village is hardly that, tucked at the foot of a rocky outcrop that dare not be called hill or mountain. Our herds graze between them and the forest. Yes, the mystery of our woodland is considered a quaintness in the land of Londoners, a smiling curiosity for the red-hatted dowagers searching for material for their publisher, escorted by our Dublin princes, thrilling for the chance of a ghostly shiver. They come to our farms and ask our leave to visit some shallow pocket of the forest’s edge. Not so very long upon a time, in the days of our grandfathers, these fields were cut out of the forest, and every acre belonged to the kingdom of the fairies. Their mischief is their vengeance on us. They are so like our feuding clans that an educated man may contend the Irish invented them in their own image, a contention that cannot be easily refuted.

The banshee, from the same forest, is of a different kind, so it seems, one who finds a clan and waits upon them, not to secure health, but to signal doom.

The arrival of these wailing apparitions of female figures might, to the educated mind, be explained as the grief of Irish mothers as they watch their child lifted in a coffin, never again to sit for supper.

But the cry of the banshee, that shrill tocsin which cuts through hill and plain, is too otherworldly for the voice of a woman created by God. The sorrows of the descendants of Eve are held firmly within, flow from the heart, are frail, and yet endure.

But the grief of the banshee is unknown.

I met one in the late summer, her pale beauty crossing the fresh mown farm fields. So clouded were we with the pallor of death that her appearance did not surprise me. As if to meet an emissary of a foreign kingdom, I crossed to greet her and stopped midway. I regarded her and she with her eyes transfixed looked beyond my shoulder.

The face was beautiful, but with the beauty of a false rose, a thing that bends but does not break. Her visage was half-smile and grimace alike, as a child first discovering emotions, or the face of a drunk in the midst of his stupor.

“Good day to you,” I said, cold and bland.

She replied with a quivering moan which electrified the air. The hair on my arm erect, I approached her, drawn by a curiosity that invites death to the hearth. What I intended I hardly knew. Might her grief be consoled?

“Who do you cry for, miss? Is it us you care for?”

ANY’S the time that Sean Tobin’s return from the woodland has heralded the laughter of the shepherd boys, anticipating another of the drunk’s wild tales of marriage to his fairy princess. Tobin raves lyrically about his otherworldly nuptials to the king of Elf-land’s daughter, and of his comical casting out by the bride’s imperious father.

But to the nursemaids of Ireland, the mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, priests— we consider the forest with serious regard. For us there are the missing ones. The lonely strayer, the curious child, the dutiful shepherd— those who never returned to the dinner table. We, more than the drunks, have the right to wonder what our neighbors do in their hidden village, if their gaze is envious, if there is true enmity between us, or if our loved ones, having found a happier existence, are too content to write home.

I went to university, one of the most austere in Ulster. There these sorts of tales are religiously drummed out of us, enforced by the reasoners from Glasgow across the waves. Stern in their dark coats they arrived long ago, these people of King James, rapping with their rulers the knuckles of Irish boys.

The war recruiters never wanted me, but all the boys went with them, my new little book of Poems tucked safely in their pockets. Many a hero’s song had I written in the vein of Thomas Davies, filled with ridiculous encouragement, courage that a soldier might have afforded in the days before the machine gun. But we know the lottery of the bullet.

We hoped and prayed against it.

As O’Riordan’s sheep lorry sputtered amiably away, the lads in their uniforms grinning and waving to all they left behind, I wondered which of my ballads was best medicine for the wound, which lyric best for loss. What elegy could I fathom out of myself for these my dear students? I knew I must begin it the moment they were carried away, for it was likely some would be killed. But that they should all return so?

WOMAN afield the sheep, seeming to tend them, stands a little way above the village and cries out. A rending blast, carrying her wail, reaches us. We brace against it, but it cuts us to the bone, tracing the skeletal frame, charging dread.

Too soon returns O’Riordan’s lorry, plied not with sheep. Too soon return the boys, lowering down into the moss sea in their diamond-shape coracles.

Often I sit along the road, brooding like a Byron, considering the last boy of the village, my own, whose return I most dread.

Often I meet the banshee, reaching out to touch her, awaiting her reply. What sympathy can she hold for me, a stranger to her, what words for the mother of my child who doubles over with the pain of her loss?

The grief of the banshee is unknown, but sure and definite as the Universal Resurrection she stands above, crying out, and we all again stand with dread and trembling should the last trumpet sound.