Irishman C.J. Kickham's 19th Century novel Knocknagow is exceedingly charming and often very funny. That's why this dead-serious, grisly passage, which I read last night, came as a shock. I happen pretty much by accident to be reading Knocknagow immediately after finishing Thomas Flanagan's great historical novel, The Year of the French, about the bleak and bloody 1798 uprising of the Irish, with some aid from the French, against their English overlords. Knocknagow is set some decades later, but a couple of veterans of '98 populate the book, and the '98 Uprising has become part of the consciousness of many of the younger characters as well. Here we learn the reason that Mrs. Donovan (mother to Mat the Thrasher, local hero for his good looks, good nature, and hurling prowess) tends to have a sad face, which the narrator calls "the shadow of a curse." The soldiers referred to are English Red Coats, although some of them may well have been native Irish. The yoeman are local troops loyal to the crown.
Poor Mrs. Donovan
got that sad face of hers one bright summer day in the year '98 when
her father's house was surrounded by soldiers and yeomen, and her
only brother, a bright-eyed boy of seventeen, was torn from the arms
of his mother, and shot dead outside the door. And then a gallant
officer twisted his hand in the boy's golden hair, and invited them
all to observe how, with one blow of his trusty sword, he would sever
the rebel head from the rebel carcase. But one blow, nor two, nor
three, nor ten, did not do; and the gallant officer hacked away at
the poor boy's neck in a fury, and was in so great a passion that
when the trunk fell down at last, leaving the head in his hand, he
flung it on the ground, and kicked it like a football; and when it
rolled against the feet of the horrified young girl, who stood as if
she were turned to stone near the door, she fell down senseless
without cry or moan, and they all thought she too was dead. She
awoke, however, the second next day following, just in time to kiss
the poor bruised and disfigured lips before the coffin-lid was nailed
down upon them.
