I'm working on a memoir. This is how it begins. (The picture shows where it all began: Monaghan, Ireland.)
1.My parents were thoroughly Irish types,
thoroughly American that they also were: she, the lace-curtain pasionaria;
he, the desperate chancer. Delaware-born, they were both of immediate or
intermediate Irish stock: the Rogerses, originally McRorys, on her grandfather’s
side; the Boylans on his father’s. His branch of the Boylans were formerly of
Co. Monaghan in south Ulster, near the Co. Armagh border. I’ve been through
there a few times. It’s a boring place of small farms, oak trees, furtive
bachelors, a manor house or two and largeish pigs locally known as hogs. In
fact, our sept of the kingly clan is said to date back to the Milesian kings of
Ireland (a bit of fancy recently given credence by DNA tests that prove that
all Irishmen are descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages), but, royal or not,
they were really just a bunch of bogland piss artists, subsistence farmers mostly,
freelance vagabonds who wandered all over Ireland when they felt like it,
especially when they needed to evade authority, usually that exercised by H.M.
or H.M.'s minions. But the wanderers eventually returned to fertile south
Ulster and reunited with the stay-at-home farming crowd and settled into an
unvarying routine, raising the hogs and a few kids, growing a spit of maize,
making sure the spuds came up right, emptying pewter mugs down the old throat
and stamping a booted foot to the fiddle music down at Doran’s Bar, come
Saturday night. It was a bearable life, all in all, for a few centuries, as
long as you paid the bailiff on time. Things were . . . OK, no more. Sure, life
was nasty, poor, British, and short, but you had a fighting chance if you kept
your head down and your hands above the table and went to Mass behind the
hedgerows—very quietly. (Then came Daniel O’Connell and poor Parnell and
you could make all the noise you wanted, and in church, no less.) The Boylans,
God bless ‘em, even stuck out the Famine, hogs being a great hedge against
starvation: “Sure,” as the chronicler O’Hagan says, “the creatures will eat
anything and grow big enough to fill the empty patch where your potatoes once
were. Then you clobber them over the skull and eat well for a week.”
