Free Tipperary by Frank Delaney

“Easy to remember her name—look at her teeth.” Nora Buckley had prominent front teeth, a little splayed. She said, “Yes” (with a spray) to every word spoken to her, and she blinked a great deal, but she intended to please every person; we soon loved her fondly.
    Mother asked, “Where will you stay?”
    “We'll cross the Shannon at Killaloe. And then I suppose we'll try and get as far up as we can toward Gort. We could stay with the MacNamaras, and then the boys would like to see Galway city.”
    “The City of the Tribes,” said Euclid, who knew all these names and nicknames. “Where Mayor Lynch hung his son.”
    “Hanged,” said Mother, “is the correct word. And then?”
    “Ah, maybe Connemara or so,” said my father, and I knew that he was being evasive.
    Mother began to laugh; Father began to blush.
    “That's why it's called ‘lynching,’ I think,” said Euclid. “Because of Mayor Lynch.”
    “And I suppose,” said Mother, laughing harder, “there's every chance you'll go somewhat north after that.”
    Father, now blushing heavily, laughed too. “A bit, maybe.”
    Mother said, “I wasn't aware that we needed a miracle.”
    Euclid fastened on this like a cat on a bird.
    “Knock! Knock! Are we? Are we going to Knock, to the shrine?”
    Father looked ever more sheepish.
    “If you are,” said Mother, “and I've been wondering how long you'd hold out, take Nora with you. Her aunt lives there—she'll know everyone.”
    As a simple preface, let me explain that Father—and all of us—had been pursuing in his newspapers the apparitional events in Knock, County Mayo, where the Blessed Virgin Mary and other divine figures had flared in bright white light on a church wall.
    Traveling a long journey with my father had an epic and intrepid feel. No pony-trap this time—we took what he called “the long car,” a brougham with seats along each side. Our valises and our food sat in the well. An Indian summer had delayed the fall of the leaves, and we left the house in a blaze of gold; Mother waved smiling and laughing from the portico.
    Even then, young as I was, I liked to stand back, as it were, and view every situation in which I found myself. That morning, this is what I saw; Polly, our great, gray mare, with her white plume of a tail waving as she lunged forward; and how the harness shone and rattled. My father, his muttonchop whiskers crisper than ever, and his large body teeming with life, called now and then to Polly, “Hup, there, hup, girl.”
    Beside him on the brown leather bench, hoping to stay firm and well, sat Euclid, a plaid rug of red, brown, and green about his knees, even though that September sun would have ripened a green tomato in a day. He looked everywhere about him, taking in all the world with those great eyes and yet unable to ingest enough; he scarcely ceased jigging with excitement. Behind Euclid, on the side-seat, sat I, facing outward and pleased beyond measure to be traveling thus with two of the three people I loved most in the world. Across the car, at my back, sat the nervous and swift Nora Buckley; she was under strict directions from Cally and Mrs. Ryan never to take her eyes off Euclid except when he was “at the necessary”—and above all to make sure that he reached bed safely every night.
    We had left in the early morning and made wonderful progress through the villages of Cappawhite and Cappamore, where, to judge from the sleepy windows, no person had yet arisen. Not far from Newport, Father halted at a quiet turn in the road and announced that he had drunk “too much tea.” He gave us what he called “voyagers' rules”: he, Euclid, and I would climb into one field to relieve ourselves, Nora to the field on the other side of the road. Afterward we all stood in the roadway and stretched, bending this way and that.
    Euclid had declared that as the crow flies our house lay thirty-four miles from Killaloe, and my father said he would try his best to “do