Famine Ghost

From his parents’ cottage, Johnjoe Kevane saw them come with the dawn, the fog drifting up from Dingle Bay a mile away and clinging to Conor Pass above. Six mounted dragoons, wearing their scarlet short-tailed jackets in service to the Crown, rode up to the Kevane cottage in Ballyristeen, two miles north of Dingle, which jutted out into the Atlantic like a large bumpy finger. Each soldier carried across his shoulders a bayonet-fitted musket called a “dragon” because it “breathed fire” when shot. Captain Patrick Packenham with his five soldiers was to preside over the destruction of another farmer’s cottage. Trailing the soldiers like stray puppies this day was Bailiff Sheedy, the landlord’s gombeen man or rent collector, who preyed upon the poor. The bailiff conscripted two townspeople, “Irish destructives,” the villagers called them. Armed with crowbars and sledgehammers, they wouldn’t look the Kevanes in the eye. They would do the dirty work, and looked the part, dressed in patched farmer’s clothes, a contrast to the spit and polish of the English dragoons whom they knew despised them for their poverty. The bailiff strode to the door of the thatched whitewashed cottage and pounded on it with his fist. “Now, John, Mary, ‘tis time. I warned ye.” Two days before, the bailiff told John Kevane: “What the devil do we care about you or your black potatoes. It was not us that made them black. You will get two days to pay the rent, and if you don’t, you know the consequences.” This morning the consequences were arriving.