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“What about the story that my father stole my mother from a gypsy camp and brought her here and married her. And she was a real she-cat.”
Mother Ross smiled. “That’s a part of Corrymore folklore that people here will be telling long after your father is dead and gone.”
“I never thought it was true,” Caitlin said.
“Of course it isn’t true.” Mother Ross looked earnestly at Caitlin. “There’s a lot of people hereabouts who don’t think as highly of Finn MacLir as we do. Let me tell you the truth. Tom and Roisin’s parents were gypsy folk. Tinkers. But they gave up the life. They wanted their two children to go to school, to make something of themselves. They lived in their caravan, parked in a field off the Mill Road, for two or three years. Few in the village wanted them there. Few liked or trusted them. They were always called the Tinkers, never the Corrigans. Always outsiders. To make ends meet, Tom’s father, Big George Corrigan, became a drover, walking animals bought at the monthly fairs in Lisnaglass and Clondarragh to the farm of whoever bought them. Then Ned Thompson, as dacent a cratur as ever walked God’s earth, he gave Big George work on his farm, and when a house on Thompson’s land became vacant the Corrigans moved into it. Tom and Roisin were teenagers by then. One spring day the mother upped and took off and left them. Never came back. She was the she-cat of Corrymore folklore, not your mother. A vicious, hateful woman. And may God forgive me for speaking ill of the dead.”
“She was my grandmother, Mother Ross,” Caitlin pointed out.
“Grandmother or not, Caitlin, she was a real vixen, I can tell you.” Mother Ross spoke ill of the dead with commendable candour. “And wild as a vixen. Some say she ran off with a man. Some say she went back to the tinkers’ life. She missed her caravan and didn’t want to live in a house like Christian folk.”
“And my mother—Roisin—was left to look after her father and Tom.”
“When your grandfather, Big George Corrigan, died from a heart attack, the priest then, Father Coughlin, I think it was, refused to bury him in the graveyard at Our Lady Star of the Sea, so he was laid to rest in the old graveyard behind the ruins of Killyshannagh Chapel. Your mother is buried there too, Caitlin. Tom Corrigan shook the dust of this country off his boots and went to America. That’s when your father married Roisin.”
“Did my father marry her for love or because he felt sorry for her?” Caitlin asked.
Libros Libertad 