No Nose Noonan

No Nose Noonan and Why

A true tale written for Ian James Rentschler by his Grandfather

Tom Durkin

“Tell me the story of No Nose Dugan, Grandpa,” Ian asked while we were having a late supper that Thursday night.

I tried to ignore him and did my damnedest to get the table talk back to the delicious salad my daughter, Kathleen, Ian’s mother, had made as a principal part of that evening’s meal. I did that mainly because I couldn’t remember what the hell I told Ian about our esteemed antecedent as recently as dinner the previous evening.

The salad was based on wonderfully fresh romaine lettuce with curly green leaf and outright sensual red leaf lettuce, upon which was sprinkled fresh, but crisp, bacon chips, black olive slices, oil cured of course, Kenmore blue cheese, crumbled to perfection, moist strips of freshly roasted chicken breast strips, shockingly continental slices of fully cured proscuitto and the thinnest slivers, ever, of ovate hard cooked eggs. Dutifully, the salad was dressed with her own exquisite ranch dressing and garnished with Polish vodka soaked capers.

“Grandpa, I want to hear the story of No Nose Dugan,” Ian piped in again, just as I thought I had diverted his attention by commenting at length and fulsomely about the salad.

The previous evening, Ian sat to my left at the oval table and had been guilty of what can charitably be called needlessly dangerous dinner activity. He leaned back several times on his chair and then allowed that chair to charge forward, using its rear legs as a pivot, to strike the edge of the table, barely avoiding total facial disfigurement to himself. None of the diners had anything to say about the child’s behavior until his mother chided “Ian, please sit straight and eat your dinner or you will get no dessert.” Ian’s grandmother, who had nothing to say at this particular time, has, in the past, described the child as adventurous; his kindergarten teacher, a less critical observer, has gone on record as finding him “charming,” which once again suggests that grandmothers have God given insight and modern day teachers are still totally deficient in their education.

I, admittedly, had consumed several glasses of cheap white wine that evening prior to taking my place at the table. In a gush of Christian charity, I told my grandson that his actions at the table,, in addition to being a source of displeasure for his mother, were, in fact, dangerous and could result in physical damage to ones person—his person being the one.

To illustrate my point, I foolishly told Ian of the fate of our great, great, great, great, great grand uncle Padraic Emmet Noonan who was born and raised in the lovely valley of Western Sligo known as Dooneen.

“It’s No Nose Noonan, Ian, not No Nose Dugan,” I chided, defending the honor of my dear departed ancestor—and his.

Mr. Noonan as a child was a curious individual, not that he himself was a curiosity, but that he was curious about anything and everything he saw or imagined. His mother, Lord rest her soul, freely told her neighbors that she had a wonderful son. They, of course thought she was bragging and therefore took an immediate dislike to Padraic Emmit and often told stories behind the back of Padraic Emmit’s mother, and tended to avoid her at the market, the cattle fair and worst of all at the church. Since she was better educated than most – well, in truth, all—of her neighbors, she never realized that they misunderstood her statement and that they assumed she meant that Padraic Emmet was better than their bairn. This, as you might guess, is not what she meant. She simply tried to tell them that her son had an insatiable curiosity about everything he saw or heard or smelled or touched. He wanted to know why. He was in endless wonder—awe, you might say– of the world about him. To his mother, Patrick Emmet was, in a word, wonderful.

Because of this misunderstanding, Padraic Emmet was forced to grow up almost by himself, without friends or playmates, save for an occasional tinker passing by who was stupid enough to engage him in a euchre game for eight shillings a point. By the time Padraic Emmet was enrolled in the National School his euchre winnings enabled his parents to buy the hundred acres they worked as tenant farmers and two additional farms in Dooneen for a total of two hundred twenty acres. That the Noonans, with their weird kid could buy their farm and two others to boot, really upset the neighbors who thought that Padraic Emmet’s mother was lauding it over them with her wonderful son. They talked among themselves and agreed that the child didn’t really know how to play euchre but was having an outstanding streak of luck. There were no Denmark mortgages in those days so if the Noonans really owned all three farms, it was because Padraic Emmet’s parents were shrewder than most of the Dooneen citizens and were probably Protestants at heart, going to the real church on Sunday only for appearance sake. It had nothing to do with Padraic Emmet, they assured themselves.

When Padraic Emmet was in the second form he was thoroughly bored, because while his fellow students and the teacher were working on simple addition and subtraction , Padraig Emmet was formulating what was later announced to the world as the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. It was during this period of boredom that Patraig Emmet began to rock back and forth on his chair at the Carrabarra school. Padraic Emmet would rock back and forth from eight thirty in the morning until the class was dismissed at three o’clock. Since he rarely talked to his classmates because their parents told them to avoid the Noonan boy, Padraic Emmet often ate his midday meal at his desk table, rocking back and forth, contemplating the wonders of the universe until his teacher and fellow classmates returned. It was during one of these midday meal times while Padraic Emmet was in the second form that he conjured up what is still known as Noonan’s theorem on the fourth law of thermodynamics. It was on that day that he rocked three or four inches too far back on his chair as he savored the insight, and on his return trip forward, collided with his table in such a way and with such force that he severed his nose in the bargain. All Padraic Emmet could see was that there was an enormous amount of blood flowing from his face. At first he didn’t realize that his nose had been cut from his face by the sharp edge of the table and all he did was put his hands across the middle of his face, moving them up and down, left and right until the flow of blood was located. Fortunately this happened toward the end of the midday meal and when his classmates and their teacher returned, several saw the pool of blood on Padraic Emmet’s table and began to yelp. Since none of them had ever seen such a sight, yelping seemed an appropriate response. The teacher had never heard her students yelping before and immediately began to try to shush the children. The shushing didn’t happen right away and while the teacher continued to try to restore order to the classroom, a big black dog – of no certain breeding—pounced into the classroom, leapt to Padraic Emmet’s table, picked up- the nose in his teeth and, as quickly as he came, ran from the schoolroom and digested the tasty morsel, in the shade of an old walnut tree.

The teacher reacted quickly and soon realized that Padraic Emmet had lost his nose somehow and was bleeding to death slowly and painfully. She instructed the other students to take out their slates and write out the two times table from one to twelve, and do it neatly. As the students obeyed her instructions, she took part of an old towel that had been used to wipe the blackboard and pushed it forcefully into Padraic Emmet’s face. There was nothing elegant in what she did, but her quick, instinctive action probably saved Padraic Emmet’s life.

Padraic Emmet’s face healed within months and many of the townspeople said it was because the quick action of the teacher and that the chalk dust from the old towel cauterized the wound and saved Padraic Emmet.

Padraic Emmet’s fellow students were less charitable in their reaction to the incident. One observed innocently that Noonan had no nose. Others saw the simplicity of this assessment and in an effort to be more complex and insightful, started to call Padraic Emmet No Nose Noonan. As those things go, the name No Nose Noonan stuck until the day that Father Riordan buried Padraic Emmet. Very few of his classmates, as they grew to adulthood, ever recalled that the wealthiest landowner, banker and merchant in Dooneen, and their representative in the Irish Parliament had a Christian name. To them he was No Nose Noonan. And it was to No Nose that they paid their rents, their interests and usually ten percent of their crops until the day he died.

At his request, Padraic Emmet’s final remains were laid to rest in the nearby Gallagher cemetery, Glanduff, County Mayo, in the same grave as his illustrious uncle Two Red Feet Gallagher.

 

March 18, 2002

Melbourne Beach, Florida