Free The Wild Irish - Robin Maxwell Page B

around them—were like prisons to a girl who knew the freedom of the sea. Whenever she could get her hands on me, my mother plied me with instructions on proper womanhood. I’d run a house or many houses of my own when I was grown and married, she insisted, and needed to learn the making of butter and buttermilk and candles.
    How to spin and how to weave and how to doctor. I was interested in none of it, and I’d drive her mad with my inattention, or worse, my sloppy attempts at the given tasks. Invariably I would burn the oatcake—a near impossibility for anyone with half a brain. My mind would wander out the window to the near neighbors in their thatched cottages of wood and stone, to fields where the cattle grazed, but mostly to the gulls flyin’ past, remembering how on my father’s ship we would race with the birds through the waves . . . and I would overchurn the butter and ruin it.
    The only joy I had in land-bound winters was my education. I learned my Irish letters quickly from my mother who, bless her soul, defied tradition and kept me home, rather than fosterin me out at the age of seven like most children. She taught me numbers too. And I could read by the time I was six. But ’twas at the Abbey of Murrisk that I received my wider education—the Latin—which my father had insisted I should get. The monks there tutored me, and though they were kind and finally grew to love me, they thought it mad to teach a little girl the likes of the Roman language. What good would it do me? they often asked my father. To tell the truth, Owen never offered much in the way of an answer, for it was his abbey, built by his ancestors, and the monks were there by his leave, under his protection. So they did as they were told and taught me Latin and tried their hardest to instill their religion in me. Their frustration on this last account was boundless, for my father was not a religious man in the Catholic sense, and my mother was an unapologetic pagan.
    I thought a lot about Jesus Christ. Thought he was a great man who died a terrible death for our sins, but I kept in the deepest regions of my heart a love of the old goddesses of nature, and the warrior goddesses who were, to me, more heroic and exciting than Jesus was any day.
    The summers were a sight better, for we moved—the lot of us—out-doors to my father’s booleys. These were makeshift structures, long and narrow, and thatched with rushes, built new each year and set in the midst of our upland pastures amongst our herds. Aye, we lived with our animals, somethin’ the English could never fathom. But it was a marvelous thing, livin’ so close to the land with the very beasts that were so great a source of our wealth. ’Twas very green and the weather soft, and the booley house smelled of fresh rushes. The women would spin and weave. And sometimes we ’d hunt with our hounds, or hawk with our falcons.
    There were more serious days, when the Brehon judges would come round on their circuit of Connaught to hear the civil suits, and cases of crimes committed in my father’s territories. ’Twas our ancient Gaelic law that they practiced—the very one that the English and the Christian Church so abhorred and wished to destroy. They could never understand the leniency with which we punished our thieves and murderers.
    The English like to flog a man to ribbons, cut off his hands, his head, rip out his very bowels for such offenses. And the Spanish Inquisition with its insane tortures and burnin’ people alive—quite unfathomable. Under native Irish law we demanded a payment of compensation that was equal to the crime, and paid to the family by the criminal—punishment enough. Or he lost his civil rights, became what we called an outlaw.
    That was much more sensible, we thought, than common vengeance.
    And the Church’s views on marriage were nothin’ short of ridiculous.
    It had to be celebrated in public, and the marriage was permanent, for mercy’s sake. We