My Father, the Fortress

How personal memory informs story

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My fourth novel, When Starlings Fly as One, was completed, edited, and in production before I realized what personal experience had bubbled up to inform the story, and why I needed to tell it. The experience is not unique by any means, and so I wonder if it might stir the ashes among readers as well.

My father’s ashes were scattered in 1997 along a winding, tree-lined creek in Ireland’s County Clare. I’ll never know the exact location, having been about 7,200 miles away at the time, living in Seattle. His second wife and my niece made the long, sad journey and carried out those final wishes. After that, life carried on, and nothing was ever the same. 

Like many children of the Depression Era, my father, the eldest son, had to grow up faster than he should have. Abandoned by his own father who couldn’t support his wife and four children, he had to step up to an adult role and look after his siblings while my grandmother did everything she could to succeed where her husband had failed. She ran a boarding house, raised chickens, grew a garden, cooked and cleaned, and held a job as clerk at the county courthouse. 

My father drew on his mother’s strength and formed his work ethic according to her relentless standard. If he’d been a sensitive boy, as a young man he toughened, building his walls of solid material, meant to withstand the fiercest assault, the worst deprivation, the deepest insult. In time, when faced with troubling situations, he made sure that if someone had to suffer, it would always be the other guy. He was a fortress.

One day he was impressed by a wealthy man who worked as an accountant, managing other people’s money. He determined then and there his future career. All he had to do was figure out how to get it. In the navy, he learned if he performed well on a particular test, he’d be sent to college instead of to sea. He made sure he’d be among the top three scores. He went to the University of Pennsylvania and Wharton.

In similar style, when he saw a beautiful woman walking to work along a sunny street in Miami, Florida, he decided she would be his wife. He found someone who could introduce him and then he pursued her. She became my mother. 

Why wouldn’t he then, build his fortress with the firm belief that he could control things and make life unfold as he planned it? But life is life, after all.

Perhaps the first fracture came when his wife delivered three girls instead of the three boys he’d intended. But princesses have their value, too, and he would never abandon his children as his father had done.

For we three daughters, it wasn’t easy living within those fortress walls. We lived comfortably, but demands for performance were sometimes unreasonable. Expectations were high, matched only by harsh criticism and humiliation. Winning his approval was supreme, but it was the smack across the side of the head that I remember most, and being invisible became the best course of action. But we also knew that inside the fortress we had a place. We would always eat. We were protected. And even if we ventured far beyond the fortress walls, if things went wrong we could return and the gates would open. 

No one could have foretold what effects the new era—of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll—would have against that fortress, finding cracks in its outer walls, and seeping into the safest chambers to change thinking, shift desires, alter the paths of lives. There was rebellion inside and out. The great fortress walls began to crumble, the towers to shift. The gate didn’t lock anymore. Some unexpected things came in. Other things that had once been good went out. 

All of these experiences colored in some way my telling the story of Ireland’s longest siege at Rathbarry Castle. No one expected the siege. Good things are lost, there are unexpected arrivals, there are many kinds of rebellion, along with moments of brilliance and foolishness. Transformation.

My father became like the tall, standing tower that remains amid a castle ruin: still majestic and proud, but with nothing left to guard or protect except himself. He softened, not quite returning to the sensitive boy, but taking his enjoyments quietly, his disappointments with a shrug, no longer firing from the battlements. At night he would go to an Irish pub and sing Danny Boy, a song of a parent wishing for return of a son from war; a song that, in the words of journalist Maddy Shaw Roberts, “deeply cries for home.”

I didn’t expect that after more than two decades since my father’s death, grief still rises. And what better way should it come than in story? I, like the protagonist, return to the fortress even though I know it can never be what it once was. I can’t fix it. But I can take the stone and rubble that remains, dust off a few bits to see what they can tell me, sweep out the darkest corners, and craft something of my own. I think my sisters and I have each, in our own way, made our father proud. 

Tracking the Prince: Liss Ard, Lough Abisdealy

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Part 11 in a series featuring sites I visited in Ireland while researching my second novel, The Prince of Glencurragh. See previous posts listed at the end.Just west of Castletownshend and less than four miles from Skibbereen, there once was a ring fort high on a hill. All but gone now, the place still bears the name, Liss Ard, meaning “high fort.” Turning off the main road, instead of discovering a ruin you’ll come to an attractive high-end resort near the tranquil waters of Lough Abisdealy.

Here, along its lush banks, I found the very tree I needed for an exciting scene in The Prince of Glencurragh. It is here that protagonist Faolán Burke sets his trap for the bad guy who stalks him, Geoffrey Eames. Eames ends up tied to the tree, his feet at the water’s edge, and is left to his own devices to get himself free. Appropriate, perhaps, because by at least one source Lough Abisdealy means “lake of the monster.”

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On a map, the shape of Abisdealy looks to me like a giant sperm whale with its tail flipped up. While the lake is a favorite spot for some who fish for pike or carp, it has also produced sightings of another kind of monster, the conger or horse eel—giant eels in the likeness of the Loch Ness monster, as described in another location:

When the normally gushing waters linking lakes and rivers became reduced to a pathetic drizzle a large horse-eel was discovered lodged beneath a bridge by Ballynahinch Castle. The beast was described as thirty feet long and “as thick as a horse.” A carpenter was assigned to produce a spear capable of slaying the great creature but before the plan could be carried through rains arrived to wash the fortunate beast free. ~ Dale Drinnon, Frontiers of Zoology

And in 1914 at Lough Abisdealy, author Edith Somerville reported sighting “a long black creature propelling itself rapidly across the lake. Its flat head, on a long neck, was held high, two great loops of its length buckled in and out of the water as it progressed.” 

I saw no snakes, eels or monsters when I visited the lake, but what I did see was a visual feast of trees, their forms twisted, curved and swayed as if they were dancing.

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If you have an extra €7,500,000 handy you can pick up the estate for your very own. The real estate sales listing describes the “truly remarkable” 163-acre residential estate as a pleasure complex with Victorian mansion (6 bedrooms), Mews House (9 bedrooms) and Lake Lodge (10 bedrooms), plus tennis court, private 40-acre lake, and the Irish Sky Garden designed by artist James Turrell where you might “contemplate the ever-changing sky design.”

While it is not from the 17th century when my novel is set, the location does have some history to it:

“The Mansion house was built by the O'Donovan Chieftain of the O'Donovan Clan circa 1850 and a summer house, a moderately large house, was added to the estate circa 1870. This Summer House now referred to as the Lake Lodge.”

From the lake, the characters in The Prince... are just a few more miles from their destination, Rathmore Castle at Baltimore, and an important meeting with the Earl of Barrymore.

Thanks to Eddie and Teresa MacEoin, Dick Raynor, Exploring West Cork by Jack Roberts, Dale Drinnon and the Frontiers of Zoology, Liss Ard Estate.

Part 1 – Kanturk Castle

Part 2 – Rock of Cashel 

Part 3 – Barryscourt 

Part 4 – Ormonde Castle

Part 5 – Lismore Castle

Part 6 – Bandon, Kilcolmen

Part 7 – Timoleague Friary

Part 8 – Castle Freke, Rathbarry, Red Strand

Part 9 – Coppinger’s Court

Part 10 - Drombeg and Knockdrum

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An heiress, a castle, a fortune: what could go wrong?

The Prince of Glencurragh is available in ebook, soft cover and hard cover from online booksellers.

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