Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
The Head
My auntie's man, Tom Murphy, has a talent
For identifying skulls.
There's not a head he wouldn't recognize, any time
They'd open up a tomb in Caitlin's graveyard, over there
In Ventry parish. He knows them by their teeth.
And when he comes across a badly-knitted bone, he reads
The jagged line like script. He'll have the name, the surname,
And a story about how it happened
As long as your arm.
But he tells me there's a skull he's never managed yet
To lay his hands on—the real king of them all, the skull
Of Tom the Head. This was one of the Kavanaghs from Killdurrihy,
A great big hulk of a body, with a mind to match.
He made a bargain with this character one day,
A widow's son from Rathanane: two horseloads of kelp
For letting him take a belt at this head.
The character deliberates about his choice of weapon, till
At length he lifts this pannier-pin, and give the Head
An awful crack on the ear. The stick broke in two bits
While Tommy . . . Tommy never turned a hair, but rubbed his earlobe
Absentmindedly, and set off homewards
With his two loads of manure.
His wife was from back East, from Annaleck.
So he walks into the kitchen one day, and this joiner
And the wife are hob-nobbing by the fire.
There's a great big coffin made of one-inch—no, an inch
And a quarter—deal boards. 'I'd like to see the man,'
The joiner says, 'who could break one of these boards
With one kick of his boot.'
'It would be an awful runt,'
Says Tom, 'who couldn't do it with his head,' and with that
He puts a cracker of a head-butt
Clean through the coffin.
So it's no wonder, when at last they put him under—
In Ventry parish, in St. Caitlin's graveyard—
That the skull achieved a kind of notoriety.
They called it the Head of Tom the Head
And it became a byword in the district.
But for all his incredible bulk he was a shadow
When you put him up against the Big Child of the Glen.
Glen Fahan was his dwelling-place, and in the year of 1784
Or thereabouts, he was at his peak. That was the Year of the Bad Spring,
About ten years, come to think of it, before the Massacre
In Dingle. Straw ropes and mattresses were in short supply
That year; the cattle—and the people—had them ate.
It had been prophesied that such a one would come,
And so the legend was born. The makings of the wristband of his shirt
Would take a yard of linen, and the brushwood
That he'd gather on the mountain would provide a good-sized shed.
Hauling boats, or launching them, the Child would be one side,
Seven strong men on the other.
And he broke this boyo's arm one day, with one twist of his wrist.
One day Tommy Connor was abroad on his white stallion.
He walks into the Child's place—he was some relation of the mother—
Lifts a wooden mug of curds and whey, and knocks it straight back.
He hands the Child the empty mug.
What does the Child do?
He oxters Tommy up and heads out the door with him.
The mammy jumps up. 'What in God's name, Child, are you at?'
'I'm gonna toss him off the cliff,' the Child says,
And it took the ma to call him the names of the day
Before he let him go. He was nine at that time; thirteen
When he died. It took six strong men
To lift the coffin, and he's known to this day
As the biggest child that ever roamed these parts.
But what has this to do with anything, you might say, all this bullshit?
Just this: these people swim into my ken with marvellous
Regularity. Just yesterday, before first light, an enormous giant of a youngster—
It could only be the Child—was signalling across the bay to us,
And the children and myself were trying to guide him over to our side,
Flashing a light—a car flashlight, maybe—on/off, on/
Off, on/off . . . three long bursts and three
Short bursts, three long bursts and three
Short bursts, three long ones again, for all the world like S.O.S.—
Hoping he would get the message, trying to see if he would talk to us,
Or, finally, if we could talk to him.
--Irish; trans. Ciaran Carson
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Irish, trans. Ciaran Carson, Pharaoh's Daughter, Wake Forest University Press, 1990.