Julia Cahill’s Curse – George Moore (1852-1933)
George Moore was born in County Mayo, in 1852, of a well-to-do family. At an early age he wished to become a painter, and went to Paris for that purpose. Finding that he had no real gift for painting, he turned to literature. His earliest efforts were plays and imitative verses.
He spent the period between 1872 and 1882 in Paris, and when he returned to London to earn his livelihood, he was a confirmed Naturalist of the school of Zola. Under Zola’s influence he wrote his first successful novel, A Mummer’s Wife. During the eighties and nineties he wrote several novels of contemporary English and Irish life, including his masterpiece, Esther Waters. Most of Moore’s short stories are in the volume The Untilled Field (1903). These are beautifully written studies of Irish life.
Julia Cahill’s Curse is reprinted from The Untilled Field, by permission of the publisher, William Heinemann. Copyright, 1903.
Julia Cahill’s Curse
Julia Cahill’s Curse – “Ah, didn’t her mother send her to America as soon as the baby was born? Once a woman is wake here she has to go. Hadn’t Julia to go in the end, and she the only one that ever said she didn’t mind the priest?”
“Julia who?” said I.
“Julia Cahill.”
The name struck my fancy, and I asked the driver to tell me her story.
“Wasn’t it Father Madden who had her put out of the parish, but she put her curse on it, and it’s on it to this day.”
“Do you believe in curses?”
“Bedad I do, sir. It’s a terrible thing to put a curse on a man, and the curse that Julia put on Father Madden’s parish was a bad one, the divil a worse. The sun was up at the time, and she on the hilltop raising both her hands. And the curse she put on the parish was that every year a roof must fall in and a family go to America. That was the curse, your honor, and every word of it has come true. You’ll see for yourself as soon as we cross the mearing.”
