THE LAMB OF KERRY

"You shall have A Paschal Lamb when you visit Ireland this Easter," promised my hostess. Never having been to Ireland, I wasn't sure if A Paschal Lamb would be an Irish Easter Bunny, a sinister Catholic ritual, or just a nice leg of lamb. I had already figured out that Paschal means Passion (having witnessed a Russian ice skater at the Olympics who in an act of stupefying self-aggrandizement publicly renamed herself Pascha for "passion"). As a fan of Rennaissance paintings, I discovered that The Passion is a reference to Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection. The Paschal Lamb must be an Irish/Easter thing, I reasoned. "And when you arrive in Ireland," my hostess added, "we shall go out and get us a nice one." "OkeyDokey." said I, and started to pack.

The flight into Shannon was breathtaking. Through the clouds I could see the cliffs where David Leanshot RYAN'S DAUGHTER. Then we sailed over a patchwork quilt of undulating green fields and stone fences, and finally touchdown. I fell into the arms of the hostess, my dear friend Nuala, a roan-haired beauty of indeterminate age. Almost immediately she blurted out the sad news that the Paschal lamb she had ordered had not only come up lame, but had collapsed from a wool ball. "It can't be slaughtered if it isn't well," said Nuala. "All the more reason to kill it," I said. "No," said Nuala, "there is some ancient Celtic Law that states that lambs have to be healthy before going under the butcher's knife. "Ah well," says I commiserating "let's try to make the best of it, and enjoy our trip."

So we motored along the countryside, through tiny villages, past 14th century castles and around circular stone forts dating to 3000 BC. One of the treats, other than the ubiquitous pubs (which at one point numbered three to a block in a five block town) were the B&B's (Bed and Breakfasts) on route. The first one we came towas listed in a book called UNDISCOVERED IRELAND. It should have been more properly consigned to a volume ofCOUNTRY RUINS. Half the windows were broken and stuffed with cardboard, and there was not a hint of life when we pulled up: no pot of flowers, no sign post, not a soul around. But when we came back later that evening the front door was ajar, and we peered into the front hall of a Georgian Country Estate, a room of generous proportions and period furniture.

We were greeted by the owner, a seedy yet pretentious Englishman, with an unattractiveponytail. He showed us our upstairs room, which unlike the rather gloomy downstairs, was aglow in primary colors. Dinner, it was announced, was at 8 PM, and we were invited to have a drink in the sitting room. The drink's tray, the Englishman explained, was kept in the front hall because the sitting room was far too warm, a statement that flew in the face of our own observations that it was so cold, you could keep ice cream in it. The rather indifferent meal was served in a splendid dining room, which housed, amongst other things, a collection of antique boxes. I was invited to inspect them and discovered inside one, several slides of the male organ in various stages of tumescence. When I showed them to another guest, he speculated that it might be a worm. "Give it to me," says Nuala, who after a cursory glance, announced, "That's no worm."

The following night we dined at The Mustard Seed at Echo Lodge, a restaurant so adorble that it looked ready to be photographed for ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST. It was in fact preparing for a visit from THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. The Mustard Seed was festooned with cleverbric-a-brac and little explosions of spring flowers. The decor was a feast for the eye, and the meal a feast for the taste buds. After dinner we hastened off to a tiny pub where a circle of musicians sat beside a peat fire playing Celtic music. The barmaid on occasion would saunter into the middle of the group and burst into sadsongsof betrayal and revenge (recurring themes in Ireland, I soon discovered). An elderly bank clerksang OLD MAN RIVER, a full octave lower than the sore, which made the whole room shake. This was followed by a recitation of an ode to death and war (all the more resonant with the Irish peace negotiations of 1998 stalled, as they were at this point.) And finally we listened to a recitation of a poem by Yeats. Overcome with emotion and a tad too much Guiness, I wept: "Oh God, wereally arein Ireland," Nuala'seyes rolled heavenwards.

But with the problems of the Paschal lamb still before us, it was time to head down to the Ring of Kerry and then on to Caherdaniel,Nuala's village in the Southwest tip of Ireland. The ring itself offers spectacular views of the hillsides above and the seacoast below, and as a result is very popular with tour buses. The problem is that the road is about as big as a driveway and two buses cannot pass each other without alot of last minute swerving. In fact driving itself was so alarming that my entire alimentary canal seized up for the first three days, and I couldn't relax enough to have a proper bowel movement.

To begin with, the Irish all drive on the wrong side of the road, which left me sitting in what should have been the driver's seat with hedge rows flashing by to my left. I tried to uncover a pattern amongst the other drivers. The object, I quickly deduced, was to barrel down the middle of the road using the yellow line as centering device rather than as a lane indicator. When an oncoming car approached, each driver would pick up speed and head down the middle of the road. Then, in a sudden move,each car would swerve up on the verge,narrowly missingeach other. This was followed by a brief curse, "Fuckin' Idjut!" And then the conversation would turn happily back tothe favorite pastime of the citizen's of Kerry, denouncing the people of neighboring Cork. I on the other hand would try to focus on relaxing my ever-tightening sphincter.

As soon as we landed in Caherdaniel, we set about locating awretched lamb. Since it was Spring, there were lambs in every field, but you couldn't just go out and snatch one. The lambs would bolt, the ewes would butt, the sheep dogs would bite, and if you could overcome those obstacles, the farmer always had a gun. So phone calls were made. Discussions were held. Plans were formed.

Caherdaniel itself is a village so small that it has only eight buildings in it. Four were joined at the hip on one side of the road and contained a red pub called THE BLIND PIPER, and further down the street and on the other side, there were four others, also joined, which terminated in a yellow pub called FREDDIE'S. In the hill above, floated an architecturally indifferent church, while down the road sat a postal station, so tiny that it held only two customers at a time. A small door off FREDDIE'Scontained "The Store", a shop in whose tiny confines you could find everything from home-made socks to frozen puff pastry. But not alas a Paschal lamb.

So Nuala began to call every shepherd she knew; which was an amazing thing tomeas I don't know even one shepherd. But none of them was willing to give up a suckling lamb, which was what Nuala wanted. "Don't try givin' me a hoggit (a yearling)" she admonished each shepherd. They said they couldn't do it; something about not pulling the "wee one away from its dear Mother's teat." Later on it turned out that the real reason was that they didn't want to sell in April what they could more handsomely profit from in May.

As a last resort, one Brian Manson was called, a shepherd, a drug dealer, a mad man whose name sent shudders throughout the village.When we arrived at his farm, Brian roared out of his cottage like Caliban in THE TEMPEST, talking to us in a voice so loud I could only think it must come from constantly addressing his sheep three fields away. And while talking to us, he barked at the dog, "baahed" at the sheep and made a series of other incoherent sounds. He lived alone in a small one room stone house that for some reason was half-filled with flooring material. Other than a cell phone and a FAX machine, you wouldn't know you weren't in the 14th Century. His dog Bobo, was allowed inside but his lamb, Baba, whose mother had sadly rejected him, was not. "But Baba is not for sale," said Brian, "but I do have a ewe with twins. She might be persuaded to give one up for a bucket of grain. He held up a small pail of oats and the ewe walked up with her twins on either side. She looked at the grain and then looked at her twins, and after some consideration, lowered her head in the bucket. "Sophie's Choice" remarked Nuala. "Judas Priest" thought I. "Jesus Christ!" said Brian grabbing one of the twins. Sealing the bargainNuala shouted, "I'll pay the May price for the April Lamb." And the deal was done.

The three of us then jumped in the car and headed offto Sneem to have the lamb butchered. Brian sat in the back seat with the crazed animal in a plastic bag, trying to comfort it by saying "Der, derya poor ting. Givin' it all up for Easter, are ya?" Nuala told him to shut up about the damn lamb, and warned me not to look it in the eye for fear it would attempt to befriend me. We finally arrived at the Butcher of Sneem, who dragged the terrified creature over piles of sheep's offal into a holding tank with 5 other frightened sheep. Though each knew that no good would come of this day, not one of them emitted a sound. The Silence of the Lambs indeed.

The guest list for the Easter Feast was the next order of business, and in a small town this was a trickier exercise than one might think. For example, Timmy couldn't be invited if his ex-girlfriend or brother, with whom he lived, were there, since he didn't speak to either of them. Nuala's best friend, Arthur had to be invited, but whether to include his boyfriendwas tricky, since the latter was attempting to put an end to his bi-sexual ways. Of course Mrs. Moriarity the ex-postmistress wouldn't be invited as she had complained at the Church Tea that Nuala's Apple Crisp wasn't sweet enough, even though Nuala insisted that she had doubled the quantity of sugar. Denyce "with a Y and no eye" wasn't asked. I was told because many thought with the booze and all,her glass eye might come tumbling out. And "Two Ride Joe," who got his name from having to have "it" twice a day, was unruly this week, having lost his latest "ride" Peggy Mahon,dubbed "The Donkey," because she had been ridden so much. But even with these omissions there were still 24 on the list.

Then Edgar, Nuala's husband,arrived (the Jew of Kerry as she called him, although the locals dubbed him The Badger, because of his beard and shock of grey hair). His first task wasto set up the spit upon which The Pascal Lamb would be roasted. Edgar got absolutely Biblical about the whole thing and kept muttering things, which I took to be passages the Old Testament, but were on closer attention concerns about the wind, the rain and the charcoal. Even so, I saw him stand up on the fence, waving his arms about like Moses in the Bible, and ordering two local lads to "bring forth the stones for the spit."

The sun rose promisingly on Easter morning: the first sunny day we had since I arrived. It had rained and snowed and hailed almost every day since I got there, and the hillsides were frequently dusted with snow. "Unseasonably cold." everyone agreed. "No surprise to me," said I, having read that the Romans had named Ireland, Hibernia meaning winter and had dismissed it as uninhabitable. Mercifully no weather pattern ever lasted more than twenty minutes, so a quick nip into a pub or under a tree solved most inclement problems. Nualahad got so used to it that when a downpour turned into a mere shower, she would cheerily announce, "Ah good, it's stopped raining." But on this Easter Sunday there was no rain, and we got up early, had a bath, got dressed, drank tea, and went off to Mass.

Servicein a Roman Catholic Church can be a daunting experience, particularly for someone raised in the dour PresbyterianRites. On entering the church, you have to dabholy water on your forehead, cross yourself and bow in the aisle, then clasp your hands and kneel on a bench at the pew. Once the service began it was made all the more incomprehensible by one Father Lucent, (a misnomer if ever there was one, as he spoke in an accent so thick that even his own congregation agreed that it took "twenty minutes to tune him in." I actually thought he was speaking in Latin until I heard him announce a bake sale in the church hall.) Unable to follow the service, I took in the surroundings, and discovered that the Holy Trinity at least in this part of Ireland was not in fact, The Father Son andHoly Ghost, as I had been taught. It had morphed intoSt. Patrick, St, Bridget and The Blessed Virgin, though judging from the number of shrines we had seen to the BVM, I was pretty sure She was in first place. When it came time for communion, the crowd this Easter was so large, that the host (a wafer) was served at the front by an acolyte and at the rear by the priest. This led to one young man being offered it twice, which he stoutly refused not wanting to be accused of having two helpings of the Lord. Nuala and I didn't participate, I, because I was a heathen, and she, as she whispered to me, because she was D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D!

We arrived home to find Edgar laying the skewered the lamb in the spit. "Poor little thing," I sighed. "Now stop it. It's The Paschal Lamb," snapped Nuala, as if the animal should have been honored to participate in the festivites. Edgar lit the charcoal and soon the lamb was roasting, blackened where the coals were too close and raw where the feet overshot the fire. When it finally arrived at the table several hours later, you could have it either well done or extremely rare. And 24 of us tore into the beast with our bare hands and celebrated a joyous Easter this year in Ireland. The newspapers were full of reports on the success of the Peace Accord, declaring that "after so many Bloody Mondays, and Bloody Tuesdays, and Bloody Sundays, it was wonderful to finally have a truly Good Friday." So with the Lamb of God ascended to His throne, we all wished each other "Happy Easter" and tucked into The Lamb of Kerry.

© Bruce Gray 1998