Spiritual Conversion Amongst The Tír Go Maith

-A Missionary’s Memoir-

Mr. Coffey passed some several months on what he called “that black, bedevilled, sweltered isle,” the tiny, tropic mass that floats still visible, just, off the coast of Kerry. He analysed its rocks and its heavy vegetation and moved, unharmed, amongst its pasty-skinned and sad-eyed people. The tropic forestry out there is so wild that its inhabitants live permanently under shadow and barely see what little sun there is. But this thick jungle canopy, Coffey had deduced, was soaked up from the sun-embellished Gulf Stream that comes this way, at twists and turns, from Amerika.

The natives called it Tír Go Maith, in their own unruly language, or meant this word to signify themselves, or both. The term, Coffey opined, sounding, “rightly, as if they despised the wretched place.” Their patois was a garble of vowels and mismatched consonants, which the few indwellers with writing skills seemed to confuse all too easily, apparently ignorant of the civilised world’s consensus on V. Mr. Coffey, now Professor in a chair at Lifford University, picked apart the dialect over almost a year, condensing and defining its strange, off-putting attributes, until he could speak it almost as badly as the folk themselves. This great philological inquiry comprises much of Another Tongue: A Grounding in the Speak of South-Western Heathens, the professor’s first success. This was followed by a topographical primer of the area, an inventory of recognisable religious rituals (totalling nil) and a series of monographs. Of these, A Foundation in Island Humour amused me most.

All these books were available to me in the See House in Strabane, where I readied myself for my journey under the tutelage of Bishop Boyle, the Archbishop of Half Tyrone. I was just a young man, then, and spent my roguish energies on learning the lingo, such as it was, of that benighted place that sat in quiet protest so near to civilisation.

“Bishop,” I once spoke, “I hear their women walk bare-chested, without a sense of shame, and the men, not to be outdone, wear not a thing at all.”

“Now, son,” the Primate asked me, “where does it say this in your study book?” His theological rigour was astounding.

It said this nowhere in the literature. I had been mislaid by rumour and talk amongst the lads, so resolved to study all the harder. I worked solidly beneath the library’s reading lamp, kept at work by the severe ticking of my father’s pocket watch, its workings unusually large and awkward so that the blind Belgian watchmaker could set them in place. It was all I had left of him, my father; left, in fact, of my life before my admittance to the orphanage, as so much of the country was then.

“Bernard,” the Bishop told me, “Remember, when you reach the island, that you represent our nation, our beliefs and our ways. Conversion of the heathen is a tricky task, for, were he as reasonable as us, he would already think as we do. Your arguments must be strong as hammer blows to knock some sense into his head. Here, take these.” And the Archbishop of Half Tyrone weighed me down with tomes of theological discourse, of skilled religious reasoning, and most eloquent analogy.

These I read in quick measure and understood them to my fullest. Professor Coffey, now holding tenure across several departments in Thurles, was only an academic and, as such, held no greater ambition than to sneer. But I, invigorated by learning and encouraged by his Grace, sought to bring civilisation to that island of Tír Go Maith, the island that could be reached only by rowboat.

*

Civilisation was stuffed conveniently into my haversack: the lighter of the Bishop’s books, a parcel of fine home cuisine to last a few days, my pocket watch, a high-precision compass, and a change of shirt. On hitting the sandy island target, I slipped this over my shoulders and abandoned the rowboat to the beach. The great weight of the pack and the physical strain of rowing meant that I crossed the sand in faltering steps, falling sometimes onto all fours and dragging myself across the cold, white surface.

However, the coast was but a narrow areola around the hard, green centre of foliage and overgrowth. It was only moments before I was lost amongst it all, though the sense of loss seemed to last for hours. Huge fronds sagged down from the canopy and palms the size of collection plates pushed into me at elbow height. The sun, as it was, percolated weakly through the thick, wide leaves and the slight, green light that resulted was scarcely enough by which to stumble blindly. Numerous half-sunken roots uprooted me and creeping vines snagged my toecaps or brushed my head. When I return, some day, I thought, I will erect signs in the Bishop’s English, that no man may lose his way as I have mine.

The machete is hardly civilised, but it was a necessity. It never rested in the haversack, but always in my hand or by my side. Its narrow edge met many a branch and severed groping limbs, protecting me here and freeing me there. One swipe loosed me from the tropic bough that snagged my lading luggage and pulled me back with a snap. I tumbled forward with such force that a bush before me was parted in two. But I kept on, heaving myself through the grim shade, forward to my destiny.

It must surely have been days, although I could not tell dusk from dawn under that umbra… days that I had traipsed, swinging one arm and then the other against the undergrowth, searching for lack of civilisation. In my initial fervour, I acquired great strength, taking my baggage forward with ease, but now, days later, for it must have been days, I started to tire. I found a flat-topped rock and parked myself and hoisted up my haversack, where a parcel of the finest home cuisine lay wrapped for me. Or so it had done, at some point, but all the sack bore now was the clean cut of a machete blow. The items from my home were scattered now, somewhere across the jungle floor, back along my way.

It was then that I let out my first defeated cry.

But, the heathens, I thought, must feed themselves, if only on gruel or unholy fleshes, so I ploughed ahead with my task, truly hungry for success. It must have been night by then, for it could hardly have been day any longer, and I hoped to find them while they themselves were exhausted.

Dirt crumbled beneath my feet and limp limbs bended to my will, but I found no clumped heathens, bare-chested or otherwise. Some hours after my discovery, a square of waxed paper passed before me. It had once protected a slab of Cashel Blue, but it had been neatly unsheathed by jungle fauna. The package still wore the strong scent of the Bishop’s own blue, so I pressed it deep inside my nostrils, as one might a hankie to a nosebleed, and felt myself revived just enough to sleep.

An unshoed foot passed over me, when I awoke, and connected to it the ashen leg of an ashen man, as filthy as Adam & Eve after the expulsion and as shameless as they were before. He did not look down at me, nor did the procession of similar men that followed.

“Thank G-d!” I cried, leaping to my feet and taking down a heathen in good fun.

The front one stopped. “Thank G-d?” he repeated with a stumble. His lips turned up, then, in smirking recognition. “Thank G-d,” he laughed. “Yes, thank G-d… Coffey?”

“No, thank you,” I replied, “But I’m dying for something to eat.”

The heathen seemed to grasp the language, as if he had learned as much from the Professor as the Professor had from him. I imagined the grotesque, paganistic chair he must occupy in his village. Then, in my first halting attempt at speaking it out loud, I tried the heathen tongue. “Yes, thank G-d.” This word I was uncertain of. Coffey, with a book due soon from the Carrick-On-Shannon press, seemed to think these people didn’t understand it, but this man’s first reaction was word enough for me. “Thank G-d, I say. For it is G-d has crossed our paths like this, that you might come and save me.”

“No. This is where we hunt,” he said in deadpan. “We would have been here anyway.” He smiled. “Your G-d has brought only you here. And it seems he has done a rotten job. But come…”

This pale, diminished man directed me on into the forest and his colleagues followed close behind. They were each one naked, as had been rumoured, but not a one of them were brutes. Each was short and thin, though broad across the shoulders, and on each one an overgrowth of ginger hair and riotous red beard. Maybe this results, I thought, from a carotene-heavy diet.

Shortly, they had led me to a clearing and for the first time in, goodness, it must have been weeks, I saw the wan, old sun that watches over us. There were no huts, no fanciful heathen totems, only women, bare-chested, kneeling on the earth, sitting on felled logs or returning, themselves, from hunting. In my relief, I promised myself one hundred Penitent Fathers as penance for the gruel or unholy flesh I felt compelled to eat.

“You must take something,” the tribesman told me, guiding me to a prostrate log. And he revealed a bloated, little fruit in his outstretched palm.

“Was the party not out hunting?” I asked him.

“O, yes, we were. These ones hang especially low. They are very easily trapped.”

“You caught no animals? No flesh to cook?”

“But the animals are so fast,” he answered, a tad confused. “And they’re so sweet… not sweet-tasting, as in your language… but good, nice… go maith.”

He bid me stand, to show me all the clearing. “We hunt the fruit that lowers its guard. And we forage for the seeds and pods, that we may grow them ourselves, if we can. But, strangely,” he said, “very little grows here at the centre of the isle.”

He showed me a row of dirt in mounds, each as sad and lifeless as the last. A woman, on her knees, had paddled clear a little hole and was placing, now, a pod inside. The pod glinted, weakly, as the sun fell on it and I realised, as it slipped out of her hands, that it was my father’s pocket watch.

“Good G-d. Stop!” I cried, diving to the ground and scooping the precious item from the earth. “This was my father’s watch.”

I pulled myself up, dusting first the watch, then cleaning off myself. “Can you not see that? It fell from my haversack… see.” I showed them both the frayed opening. “I lost it and all my items from civilisation. That’s where I am from.”

“It’s a large sack,” the woman said.

“And heavy too,” added the man.

“Well, it’s a most amazing place, a place of wondrous and ingenious things. Take this watch.” I held it in the sun, that all could view its majesty. “This was crafted by the finest artisan in all of Belgium. Could you not tell by its intricacies, by its ornate features, by its sheer beauty, that this was the result of some great intelligence? That it had been slaved over in its design? That it was not just some husk dropped from a tree or dispersed from a plant?”

The tribesman took the watch in hand, surveying it in ponderous detail. “Someone made this?” he asked. “But why?”

“To tell the time of day.”

“Ah. You see, we just look up, if we are here. And, if we are in the jungle, it makes no odds. But this? It seems such effort, when time is all about. And with the forest all about, why would we think that this, which we found there, was not part of it?”

“You do not make things?”

“What’s to make?” replied the Heathen. “Everything we’ve ever thought to need is in the forest. Sometimes things are just there and one needn’t worry about the cause.

I looked gravely at the tender fruit I’d been given. It was the size of a pocket watch and yellow in colour and, when I took a bite, it tasted of the finest things, like strawberry and mango and of Cashel Blue.

“Yes,” I said. “G-d has been good to you.”

“G-d has never visited the forest,” the tribesman told me. “Your Mr. Coffey mentioned him, but I did not recognise any such description. Was he the maker of your… watch, was it?”

“No, no. That was just a Belgian. G-d is all around us.”

“Like time? Or like the forest?”

“Like both, I guess.”

“And yet you test him so and value him much less than your things of civilisation. Is that really the way your kind treat a person?”

I shook my head at him. “But G-d is not a person.”

“Well, maybe that explains it,” he said. “Now, let us go and find these things you prize so much.”

We wandered through the jungle; he knew it much better than I did and found my tracks when I thought I’d left none. A certain rock seemed familiar and some shapely overhang of leaves I’d surely seen before and that specific severed branch had been cut to size by me, but, yet, we found no change of shirt, no hermeneutic books, no food nor waxen paper even. The compass too was lost.

In time, we came out near the water; the little rowing boat settled on the sand.

“You will not go now?” asked the sallow tribesman.

“No,” I said. “My job is still undone. For it was my duty to bring G-d to this island.”

The native looked confused. “Then, yes, your job is still undone.”

“He is here already,” I explained. “It’s just you do not see. Still, you rely on him, on his forest, on his time alone… how to put this?” I stared across the sand, at the rowboat that had carried me so soundly, and noticed, for the first, the prints I’d left when stumbling towards the trees.

“You see,” I started. “Imagine there’s a man who walks along a beach for many miles and, at the very end, he meets with Jesus…”

“Who?”

“Let’s say G-d.”

“If it helps.”

“So,” I said. “He meets with G-d and G-d tells the man that he was with him all the time. The man looks back to see, like these that I’ve left in the sand, prints, sometimes one pair, sometimes two. ‘But did you desert me sometimes?’ the man then asked of G-d. And G-d replied: ‘No, sometimes, I walked there by your side. And, sometimes, where you see only a pair of prints, this is when I carried you.’ This is how you should see G-d, as one whose work cannot always be seen.”

“I see,” said the tribesman, shaking his wild red hair at me. “But don’t you understand that one of those sets there is but a pair of handprints? You must have fallen over from that heavy haversack of sack of yours. That was when you were carrying the burden of civilisation. You must remember that you were alone, until you met us.” He stretched out his hand to me, with my father’s watch upon it. “But here, pay me no heed, I’m sure you will want to take this with you.”

But, reader, I can hardly tell you why, I did not want to.

Bernard O’Hagan,
Tír Go Maith,
1894.