1
Markers of identity are not always straightforward, of course. Take the story of a man called Dick Woulfe. He was known locally as the Chemist and ran a pharmacy in Abbeyfeale. When the wind of rebellion whipped up early in 1916, he put his face to it. A few days before the Easter Rising, a German U-boat quietly surfaced and deposited three men at windswept Banna Strand, in County Kerry. Their leader, Roger Casement, was a mustachioed former British diplomat from Dublin who was running guns and wooing the Germans on behalf of Irish independence. Weakened by malaria, he was soon captured and executed. In Abbeyfeale, the Chemist got word that one of Casement’s comrades had somehow evaded the authorities and was holed up in Ballymacelligott, just east of Tralee. Woulfe dispatched one of his apprentices to borrow a local priest’s Model T, which was then cranked into action to rescue the fugitive. The man eventually made it safely back to Berlin.
Born in Cratloe, not far from the Glen, Dick Woulfe had studied pharmacy in Dublin, which is where he met Catherine Colbert. Katty, as she was called, was the fourth of thirteen Colbert children and had been raised on a farm just outside of Athea. After the deaths of her parents, she moved to the capital, working as a dressmaker and mothering her six younger siblings. She and the Chemist married in 1913 but soon returned to County Limerick, apparently at the urging of his father. The other Colberts stayed behind, including child number ten, Cornelius “Con,” who attended a Christian Brothers school, joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and eventually hired on at St. Enda’s school, founded by the poet and revolutionary Patrick Pearse. Con served as a drill instructor and, in 1916, took up arms with Pearse.
On April 30, after a week of bitter fighting, the twenty-seven-year-old — now calling himself Concobar O’Colbaird — finally waved the white flag. He and fourteen others were soon condemned to the firing squad. Late on May 7, just hours before his death, he scrawled a note to his sister from his candlelit cell in Kilmainham jail:
My dear Katty,
Goodbye and God bless you,
Forgive me the little I owe you — I would I could ere I died, but ’twas not to be.
Pray for me when I am gone and I hope we’ll all meet in Heaven — Give my love to Dick and the children and remember me.
Ever your fond brother,
Conn.
The Woulfes’ children by then included Johanna and Hanora. The next year Cornelius Colbert Woulfe was born, followed by two more sons: Richard and Michael. All five grew up to take orders, as either priests or nuns.
The Chemist, meanwhile, remained in Abbeyfeale, taking on apprentices and raising his deeply religious family above the shop. At first the Irish public had demonstrated no appetite for yet another failed rebellion. The Desmonds and the Geraldines, the United Irishmen, Young Ireland, and the Fenians had all been quite enough, thank you, and the fact that a world war raged in Europe only made the sentiment stronger. But after the bloodletting in Kilmainham’s back yard, opinions began to change. In 1919, a guerrilla war erupted in Kerry and soon spread to other parts of the country. The Irish Republican Brotherhood morphed into the Irish Republican Army, and the Chemist joined the West Limerick Brigade as medical officer. His pharmacy once again hosted the type of men who spent a lot of time looking over their shoulders.
One of the Chemist’s employees, Jimmy Collins, later recalled how one such man, calling himself Peadar Clancy and claiming to be from the IRA’s General Headquarters in Dublin, had raised suspicions within the West Limerick Brigade. He was “a stranger to us” — that’s how one of his comrades put it. And so he was brought to the pharmacy in Abbeyfeale. “I was working in the shop at the time,” Collins said. “Mrs. Woulfe called me and told me that she knew the Clancy family of Dublin and that this man was not one of them.” Collins explained that “as a result of Mrs. Woulfe’s suspicions,” the man was arrested, tried, and executed as a British spy.
In Victory and Woe, his memoir of the West Limerick Brigade, Mossie Harnett doesn’t mention the Woulfes or their role in exposing Peadar Clancy. He notes only that “our intelligence received information that led” to his arrest. Harnett then relates how Clancy was found with hidden money and papers that, once decoded, exposed his guilt. His execution took place in the spring of 1920: “Fully realising now his terrible predicament, and visibly trembling, he clutched his Rosary beads in his hands. Near the place of execution, a priest heard his confession; then he shook hands with his executioners and admitted his crime.” The man was eventually identified as Denis J. Crowley—a Cork native, father of two, and British army deserter.
The IRA waged its brutal war against the police in fits and starts. Armed units might attack a barrack here and ambush a patrol there, only to melt back into the countryside. The Chemist appeared not to have been one of the gunmen. Instead, he worked intelligence, gathered munitions, and helped to treat the wounded, all while maintaining a respectable business. For all we know, he may have been asleep on the night of September 18, 1920, when a group of forty to fifty of those gunmen, including Jimmy Collins and Mossie Harnett, surprised a handful of policemen on patrol just outside of Abbeyfeale. Hiding in a ditch, inside a church wall, and behind some fences, the IRA opened fire on a crossroads. One of the attackers accidentally snapped a branch, giving away his position. When John Mahony, a twenty-six-year-old constable from County Cork, peered through a hedge to investigate, he was shot dead. Two other policemen were wounded.
The next morning a large number of men in uniform arrived, members of both the Royal Irish Constabulary and the RIC Special Reserve, or so-called Black and Tans — temporary constables recruited from England and notoriously violent. “The Tans remained for a couple of hours while they fired some thousands of rounds of ammunition all round and bombed several houses,” Collins recalled. According to a newspaper report, “The local Temperance Hall was subsequently burned, [and] Mr. Woulfe’s pharmacy was considerably damaged.”
The British blamed the Chemist for the fire, claiming that he had been fashioning bombs in his shop when one of them popped off by mistake. However, one of his daughters remembered that night rather differently. In her ninety-ninth year, Sister Íde (Hanora) recalled how the Black and Tans had barged in and attempted to arrest her father. She was just four at the time. “They were going to shoot him,” she said, “and I understand my mother screamed. She was upstairs. They’d locked my mother and one of the babies in […] They were trying to burn the house and my mother in it.” Dick Woulfe was able to rescue his daughter and then escape out the back.
“Now, at the back of our house,” Sister Íde said, “our garden opened into the river, and it seems he got out to the river and walked the river that night.” Her father eventually made it to a nearby convent. “And the nuns took him in and hid him behind the altar.” The soldiers came looking but the reverend mother denied them access. “I think she must have told them they couldn’t go into the chapel, and they respected that.”
Little Hanora, her mother, and her siblings all went to stay at the nearby home of the Chemist’s sister, Kate White, while he remained on the run. He sometimes visited, though, calling himself Uncle Jack. He had shaved his mustache, which altered his appearance just enough that even his own daughter didn’t recognize him.
“They told me he was Uncle Jack because there were girls in the school whose people were on the other side,” the elderly nun recalled, “and they would ask you, ‘Who was at your house last night?’” In other words, in order to protect her father, Hanora’s family had found it necessary to lie to her. When the fighting stopped, her mother told her the truth, but it only caused her to cry. “I went under the table and said, ‘No, no, no, it was Uncle Jack.’ And I was crazy about Uncle Jack because, naturally, when he would come to the house he was everything to me. But he was definitely Uncle Jack. And it took them quite awhile to get it into my mind that this was my father.”
The Anglo-Irish War ended in 1921 with an 1,800-word treaty that agreed to partition off part of Ulster, granted Ireland its own parliament, and required that the new parliament’s members swear an oath to the Crown. By the middle of 1922, the IRA had split and a civil war begun. The Chemist opposed the Treaty, and according to his daughter their neighbors boycotted the pharmacy as a result. He went on the lam again. Meanwhile, the mothers, wives, and sisters of anti-Treaty fighters, including Katty Woulfe, congregated each night in the Square at Abbeyfeale to say the Rosary. One night a group of pro-Treaty locals attacked them with rotten eggs.
2
Here’s another story, one that rhymes but at a slant. It’s about a man named Maurice Woulfe who was known locally as the Solicitor. He was born in 1884, the same year as the Chemist but a bit farther afield, in Yorkshire, England. He was Dollie’s younger brother and a grandson of Dicky Ned. His father, yet another Maurice, had been raised at the Glen before joining the British civil service as a gauger. For forty years the elder Maurice’s job was to test the alcoholic content of whiskey, which in those days was barreled by distilleries and sold to independent bottlers in concentrated form. The Gauger Woulfe checked that an uisce beatha had not been too watered down and, in the process, is said to have become too fond of the drink.
Maurice the younger attended school in Aberdeen and worked briefly in London before reading law in Dublin. In 1915 he hung a shingle out in Abbeyfeale, just a few blocks from the Chemist’s pharmacy. There he plied his trade until March 1916, when he volunteered for the 10th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, an infantry regiment in the British army. What might have motivated him to enter a recruiting station and sign on the dotted line isn’t clear, although Irish boys had long fought in British uniform. In 1914, a full 10 percent of the army hailed from Ireland, and many of these boys marched off to war to the sound of crowds singing “Rule Britannia.” These new soldiers recoiled at gruesome tales of German atrocities and hoped, perhaps naively, that cooperation with the war effort might result in Home Rule. The Solicitor, meanwhile, was tied to Britain through birth and education. His mother was a Presbyterian from Glasgow. Who could blame him if he sympathized with the Union Jack more readily than did his cousin the Chemist?
Whatever his reasoning, Maurice joined his unit at the Royal Barracks, a stately stone building in the center of Dublin that in 1798 had served as the site of Theobald Wolfe Tone’s trial and pre-execution suicide. Among the ghosts of revolutions come and gone — this is where the Solicitor was on April 24, 1916, preparing to ship out to France, when that poet Patrick Pearse, his young drill instructor Con Colbert, and the others commenced their attack. British authorities immediately called on the 10th to cross the River Liffey and engage rebel forces at Dublin Castle and the South Dublin Union, the country’s largest poorhouse, where Colbert himself helped direct the action.
As you might imagine, Katty Woulfe’s brother was flush with patriotic vigor, so much so he had written a poem for the occasion, which begins:
Hail! Ye the dawning, hail!
The dawn of blood and steel.
One expects that the Solicitor felt less sanguine about the occasion, although his thoughts about, or indeed any of his actions during, that fateful day have been lost to history. He may have been angry, similar to one Irish soldier on the Western Front who wrote to his mother, “I am glad the rebels are getting squashed. The Irish regiments out here would like nothing better than to have a go at them with a bayonet.”
Or maybe he felt more akin to Willie Dunne, the protagonist of Sebastian Barry’s wonderful novel A Long Long Way (2005), who, like the Solicitor, found himself wearing a British uniform in Dublin on Easter Monday. The battle shocked Willie’s fragile idealism, as did the violent death of a young rebel right beside him. Blood flowed, and so too did the questions. How had Irishmen come to fight Irishmen? Who was the real enemy?
And no matter how hard he tried, Willie couldn’t rid himself of that encounter’s awful stain: “He tried again in the morning but in the main he carried the young man’s blood to Belgium on his uniform.”
3
The Solicitor had only begun to see the dawn of blood and steel. Like Willie he sailed to Europe — but only after officer’s training and a transfer to the Royal Munster Fusiliers — and like Willie he was gassed on the Western Front. “The gas boiled in like a familiar ogre,” Barry writes in his novel. “With the same stately gracelessness it rolled to the edge of the parapet and then like the heads of a many-headed creature it toppled gently forward and sank down to join the waiting men.”
Unlike Willie, however, the Solicitor got to come home, honorably discharged with a Silver War Badge. He resumed his practice in Abbeyfeale while making his bed back at the Glen — which is where the IRA man Mossie Harnett found him in 1919. The boys of the West Limerick Brigade were going house to house collecting weapons, much as the Moonlighters had done during the Land War. It was a tried-and-true tactic, allowing them to disarm the countryside while sorting friend from foe based on who dared resist. After taking a Colt revolver and shotgun from the home of a British officer without any fuss, the party arrived at the Glen. “There we got some shotguns and cartridges after being strongly obstructed in our search,” Harnett recalled with a certain sense of understatement. “Ned Ryan took strong objection to this behavior, and pointing his gun around, threatened to blow the brains out of anyone not staying quiet. In the confusion created we missed a fine revolver owned by Maurice.”
It was his black Webley service revolver.
A year or so later, on September 18, those same IRA men ambushed the police patrol outside of town, killing Constable Mahony. Then the Black and Tans arrived, burning the pharmacy and sending the Chemist into the wind. The violence didn’t end there, though.
Just two days later, at about six or seven o’clock in the evening, a rural postman named Patrick Harnett ambled out of town on the way to his uncle’s house in Kilconlea. At some point he ran into Jerry Healy, a blacksmith’s apprentice headed in the same direction. They were on the Castleisland road when witnesses spied a Black and Tan named Thomas Huckerby leave the barracks. Huckerby followed them out of town, after which witnesses heard two shots. The young men were both found dead in a field.
So egregious were the killings that on September 22 the authorities took the unusual step of opening an inquiry, during which the Solicitor represented the Harnett and Healy families. On the stand, a police sergeant testified that Huckerby had confessed to killing the boys, claiming that he had followed them and, when they ran, shot them. Huckerby even led the sergeant to the bodies. “They were about a yard apart and the younger of the two had a soft hat clutched in his left hand as though he had taken it off to enable him to run faster,” according to an account of the trial. “They had climbed through the hedge before they had been shot. There was no sign of a struggle.”
In reply to a question from the Solicitor, the sergeant admitted that the young men had been unarmed. “The shooting struck him,” the policeman said, “as being drastic under the circumstances.”
Huckerby was an eighteen-year-old West Indian who only recently had been transferred to Abbeyfeale after being accused of killing a sixty-year-old man in nearby Shanagolden. In fact, Jimmy Collins, the Chemist’s apprentice, later claimed that the IRA ambush that killed Constable Mahony actually had been an attempt to assassinate Huckerby. “He was a thorough blackguard from his first day in the town,” Collins remembered, and “a crack-shot with a revolver.”
At the inquiry, a few additional witnesses testified before the court adjourned. Appearances had been maintained, and in the end Huckerby was not disciplined.
Then, on the morning of October 7, just after arriving at his office in Abbeyfeale, the police arrested the Solicitor. They charged him with the unlawful possession of a weapon — that same black Webley service revolver that Mossie Harnett later regretted not having confiscated for the IRA. The authorities transferred Woulfe to Limerick city, and according to one account Huckerby even helped accompany him there. Maurice Woulfe was released a couple weeks later and fined ten shillings.
4
These two stories, of the Chemist Woulfe and his cousin the Solicitor, have interested me for years, probably because they represent two contrasting ideas of Ireland, of patriotism, and of what it means to be a Woulfe. Of course, without their own words to inspect, we should be careful not to parse their differences too finely. Still, I think it would be fair to say that the Chemist subscribed to a more romantic view than his cousin. His nationalism was the nationalism of the Desmonds and the Fenians, of blood gloriously spilt — “Hail! Ye the dawning, hail!” as Con Colbert wrote — while the Solicitor likely learned very different lessons in the trenches.
Then there is religion. Remember Dicky Ned’s prophecy, “that there would be Woulfes in Limerick and Kerry while the Shannon rolled into the Atlantic, and that more than an average number of them would devote their lives to the service of God”? In the Woulfe family, that God had always been a Catholic God, the Pope’s God, and yet the Solicitor’s own mother was a Presbyterian. When it came time to bury her in the ancient graveyard at Templeathea, old Bessie Cockburn was not allowed in. So Maurice, perhaps with the help of his son Seán de Bhulbh, built her a stone mausoleum just on the outside of the cemetery walls. A fluent Irish speaker, the Solicitor attached a sign above the door that reads, “Muintir de Bhulbh,” or Woulfe Family.
On the outside dreaming in, you might say.
The first time I visited Athea, some men in a pub enthusiastically told me this story after hearing I was a Wolfe. One, full of drink, whispered that the family had not always been well loved in the area. They did not wear their success lightly enough, he suggested, and had earned some people’s resentment as a result. I’m not sure what he was talking about, but his tone carried with it a hint of malice, as if old grievances were bubbling to the surface.
There is much of that in Ireland — ancient fissures just barely hidden. Imagine how much worse it was in the time of the Chemist and Solicitor, two local wars barely a memory. So even after more than a decade of relative peace, it’s not surprising that the violence continued. A newspaper report from the summer of 1934 notes that the Solicitor’s home, just outside of Abbeyfeale, “was attacked at night. Mr. Woulfe’s bedroom was fired into and the window shattered by gunshot pellets. Several rifle bullets were also fired through the roof of the house.” The article didn’t say whether anyone was hurt or what might have provoked the attack. For that you have to consult the archived police reports, twenty-nine pages in all.
Unsurprisingly, the “outrage,” as the police called it, was related to an ongoing lawsuit. It involved a foreclosed-upon pub, a massive debt to the bank, and a group of sureties: several local men who were on the hook should the debtor not agree to terms. As a representative for the local deep pockets, the Solicitor found himself in the gunsights of the debtor’s brother and his gang. By intimidating Woulfe, they hoped that the sureties would not sign off on a deal that forfeited the debtor’s house and land.
This, the police understood, served as the immediate provocation for the middle-of-the-night attack. But their reports acknowledge that it also carried with it a “political tinge.” After all, Woulfe was president of the local Fine Gael, a political party formed out of the remnants of the pro-Treaty forces, while the debtor was Fianna Fáil, the party whose core members had fought the Treaty. In fact, the local Fianna Fáil club — whose vice president just happened to be the Chemist — had posted a letter to the bank’s directors warning them not to take any “drastic action” against the debtor.
The civil war’s violence threatened to boil over once again. When the police executed search warrants they discovered a hiding spot for weapons in a ceiling crawl space as well as an empty, shotgun-sized strap under a kitchen table. Fears were widespread that the IRA might go to war again, and Fine Gael responded by absorbing within its fold a quasi-Fascist group known as the Blueshirts. Just five days before the attack, the Solicitor had published a letter to the editor complaining that the police had not properly responded to a violent attack on Fine Gael dancegoers in Abbeyfeale just a few months earlier.
The papers didn’t report on the investigation into the nighttime shotgun blast through the Solicitor’s bedroom window. His own granddaughter knew nothing about it, only remembered that her father — Seán de Bhulbh — had mentioned the family finding need of a bodyguard when he was a boy. Were these two Woulfes, the Chemist and the Solicitor, whose offices were just yards apart in tiny Abbeyfeale, friendly with each other? For that matter, did they even consider themselves to be related?
No one seems to know, and of course the answers would only further complicate our idea of Muintir de Bhulbh.
Remember: the stories we tell are forever hiding the ones we don’t.
5
My sisters and I grew up surrounded by the totems of American Irish-ness: Clancy Brothers records, family history, Dad’s silly Irish accent. And, of course, more than a fair amount of alcohol.
“Brendan Maaaaartin,” Dad liked to call out, and when I was a kid a cheap paperback copy of my namesake Brendan Behan’s Confessions of an Irish Rebel sat on one of the blue-painted bookshelves in the basement, serving as the quintessential expression of a certain kind of loud, mischievous, language-obsessed Irishman. Meanwhile, my sisters and I learned — in this instance from the Clancys — to yell at the top of our lungs bits of rhyme like
Up the long ladder and down the short rope
To hell with King Billy and God bless the pope
If that doesn’t do, we’ll tear him in two
And send him to hell with his red, white, and blue!
We had no idea what any of that meant, of course, and were barely old enough to read in the papers about IRA bombs and hunger strikes. I watched my dad fill up the fridge with his PBR and noticed the way his body slumped at night in his favorite chair. I didn’t know yet that Behan, too ill to type, had been forced to dictate his Confessions, or that he’d died at forty-one. All that mattered to me was the Irish-ness of my name, the literary energy of it, how its gravity helped draw me into the safety of my family’s orbit. This is who we are: the Wolfes of Davenport, Iowa. Brendan Maaaaartin. It took me years to notice that I had never met Father Martin or to wonder why.
And what does that even mean, the Wolfes of Davenport, Iowa? Bridget and Sara had never cottoned to their Irish-ness in the way I had. That may have been why, in addition to still-raw feelings stemming from our parents’ divorce, they chose not to accompany Dad on his trip back to Kerry in 1998. To be a Wolfe meant something slightly different to them. For starters, they both had been adopted, although Bridget’s story is the more typically Irish American. I know because, one afternoon in the summer of 2007, a woman emailed me claiming to be her half-sister. She explained that her mother, an Irish Catholic teenager living in Davenport in the 1960s, had become unexpectedly pregnant. Rather than acknowledge the situation, her parents had hidden her away in an out-of-town hospital for months, forcing her to wear a wedding ring and lie about a husband in Vietnam. The man who had arranged this peculiarly Irish Catholic form of exile was none other than Father Martin, who, when the baby was born, handed her over to Mom and Dad.
Unplanned pregnancies can undo some families while creating new ones. “Father Martin set the whole thing up,” Dad told me on a visit shortly before he died. He considered us to be good Catholics — we were good Catholics — and it helped that I was Irish. Or at least of Irish ancestry.”
He paused for effect.
“It was my only redeeming quality.”
“Bridget Colleen!” he liked to call when my sister walked into a room, always keeping her close within the orbit.
I showed him pictures on Facebook of Bridget’s birth mother. The physical resemblance between the two was striking, and it turned out that both were nurses. And yet it’s also true that people comment about how much Bridget and I look alike — How can you not be related? — as if the prerogatives of family don’t exert their own kind of control.
A few weeks later, Dad was back home in Iowa and out listening to Irish music when he texted me that he was “looking right at Bridget Colleen’s birth mother!!”
“Life is way way too weird,” he added.
Though tempted, and probably full of beer, Dad decided not to introduce himself. It’s not always clear which relationships we should acknowledge and celebrate and which we should keep to ourselves. But that’s the thing about DNA: it simplifies otherwise complex lives, reducing us to the moment of our birth, a fake wedding ring, an expectant couple waiting nervously just outside the hospital room.
Bridget has always been a Wolfe in ways that may have defied DNA yet conformed in other ways, in ways that we could instinctively understand. Sara didn’t have even that. She was married that summer of the flood in a Lutheran church, and I remember her telling me how odd it was that she and her husband were the only black people at their own wedding.
6
In the spring of 2019, Bridget and I flew to Ireland. She had never been there, despite having traveled the globe, while I had been researching this essay for years and wanted to explore some of the places I’d written about. The day we landed we met Gemma Hensey and her first cousin Philomena Buckley in West Limerick for lunch. Their great-great grandfather and mine (the immigrant John R. Wolfe) had been brothers, and when we arrived, never before having seen each other, we nevertheless recognized the Wolfe face.
“It’s round, a little fat,” Gemma said, and then gestured at my sister: “Now she’s something different altogether, isn’t she?”
Gemma is a generous and outspoken seventy-something, and she invited us both to lunch the next day at the family homestead at Beale Hill, near Ballybunion, in North Kerry. Bridget was to be in Dublin that day but Gemma sent me directions and in the morning I set off. When I pulled in, a few minutes past twelve, a white-haired old man stood in the driveway with his hands clasped behind his back. I rolled down the window and asked whether he was Séamus Woulfe.
“I am indeed and you’re very welcome,” he said, shaking my hand through the window.
He showed me the name of the house, Dúinín, after the nearby Cliffs of Dooneen, made famous by a folk ballad of the same name. The lyrics were written by Séamus’s wife’s grand-uncle Jack McAuliffe, who had visited this area for a week back in the 1930s, after which he disappeared. This last part is according to Gemma’s father, Tom Woulfe, in an oral history conducted when he was in his late nineties. People thought McAuliffe had gone to America, Woulfe said, but in fact he’d gone to London and died in the Coventry Blitz.
You may travel far far from your own native home
Far away o’er the mountains, far away o’er the foam
But of all the fine places that I’ve ever seen
There is none to compare with the Cliffs of Dooneen
McAuliffe was from Lixnaw, only about fifteen kilometers away, but such were the effects of the cliffs, I suppose! Séamus told a story of some old lady who, upon leaving her house, put her hand to her brow and declared, “Sure I hate to leave dear old Beale.”
“She was only going seven miles to the store!” he laughed.
The landscape has its claws in people out here. You can see the Atlantic from the house, and smell it. The salt has settled into the rocky soil, making farming difficult. Séamus raised dairy cows for a living here, while his great grandfather, Thomas Woulfe, leased a farm, Beale Hill, just a few hundred yards away. This is the same Tom Woulfe who began plowing his land in 1870, promptly fathered nine children, and after armed Moonlighters harassed him, stopped paying rent for three years. He was evicted in 1885.
This same lovely, wind-blistered countryside where I was treated to a lunch of ham, pork short ribs, green cabbage, and baked potatoes is where three hundred friends and neighbors, including twenty musicians, showed up to help Tom and his family put in the crops after the landlord had suddenly allowed them to return.
There’s a word in Irish for this kind of cooperative labor: meitheal. “Everybody needed help back then,” Séamus’s wife, Mina, told me. “There weren’t enough horses and draft animals so we all had to share.”
The music is an especially memorable detail, but this happy ending can obscure how difficult and violent life was out here. Tom’s brother Maurice farmed at Kiltean, near Beale. Two of his sons, you’ll recall, were indicted for murder but never tried. Séamus took me on a tour of the area, pointing out what he called the old, worthless bogs. He’s an aggressive driver, my cousin Séamus, and I’ll admit I was worried some about another death occurring in these parts.
The fields lay flat and open, the clouds hang low. This is where John R. Wolfe grew up. When his father left Athea for North Kerry, this is where they came. And when John R. journeyed to Lost Nation, this is what he left behind. His farm bordered Kiltean in an area called Dromlought.
“There’s still an old house there,” Séamus said, so we sped off in that direction.
An old whitewashed cottage sat adjacent to a more modern abode, its thatched roof caved in. The place had an Ozymandias feel to it, and as I walked around Séamus hummed a bar of “The Cliffs of Dooneen.”
You may travel far far from your own native home …
I remembered Dollie Woulfe’s letter, about how she and her grandparents could summon the dead of previous generations, calling each by name.
Dicky Ned, I thought to myself as rain began to spit down. The Book of Athea.
John R. and his son, the Judge.
Father Pat.
Ray, Gladys, and my great grandfather Maurice.
Also Maurice the Indian fighter and Maurice the Solicitor.
Old Maurice.
And Young Maurice.
The Chemist.
The Commissioner.
The Barrister and the Gauger.
Short Dick and Brown Dick.
Uncle Melvin of Lost Nation. His son Dave and Father David the Jesuit.
Dollie herself and her grandmother Kate.
Sister Íde, Seán de Bhulbh, and old Bessie Cockburn.
Thomas Woulfe of Beale Hill. His grandson Tom.
And of course my dad, Tom Wolfe, of Davenport, Iowa.
We’re always coming back, aren’t we? As we left the caved-in house at Dromlought, another car pulled in and Séamus stopped to chat with the driver. She rented the newer house and he wanted to explain our presence.
“We have a Woulfe from America in the car with us,” he told the woman behind the wheel.
“Ah sure, more Woulfes,” she laughed. “Don’t you know a whole van of them showed up another time.”
Séamus motored back in the direction of Beale, maneuvering quickly down impossibly narrow roads and through a landscape that reminded me a lot of Lost Nation.
“Now. You’ve seen where you came from, Brendan,” he said. “Where, then, are you going?”
In the backseat his wife cackled. “Isn’t that a question for a priest?”
A version of this essay was originally published in Wolfe’s History: A Family Story (2019).
