‘This is the sort of weather now we live for in Ireland,’ she says, in best shopkeeper fashion, No doubt she has said this or something like it a score of times this day. She says it with conviction, with the force of poetry, with a strange, muted passion, almost as if to drive me back with the truth of it, to banish me from her tidy and odorous shop. It smells of caraway and oatmeal, of nutmeg and cloves, strong, clingy smells indeed, and the softer smells of tea chests, of eggs in their trays without washing, straight from the warm places of the hens, such eggs as I have often brought down to her when my favourite hens have offered a surplus and a bounty, in particular, the best of the Rhode Island Reds, Red Dandy herself, a hen so productive now and then that I wonder she can still walk.
‘Oh, yes,’ I say, glad for the neutral haven of a topic like the weather - which is the purpose of such talk. I could not say, Honoria Nicodemus, I hate you for the luck of your bowed back, and your shapely children, and your husband’s kisses, though this is what I think. So instead I will agree with her about the weather, which of course is remarkable. And then I remember hearing, from Sarah maybe it was, that Mrs Nicodemus just recently was given ill news from Doctor Byrne, who has found a lump as big as a turnip in the region of her stomach, which she will have to go to the hospital in Baltinglass to have examined. So now I am looking at her with slightly different eyes. I am thinking of the possible suffering of that news, and how bright and normal she is now with me and the children. Indeed she leans her little self on the old worn counter polished by all the hands and the generations of the hands of Kiltegan - even my childhood prints and those of my sisters must be deeply there - and smiles down her sunny face into the children’s faces, and all fear is banished from them, especially the fearful little boy, and she reaches without even looking for readied-up bags of little sweets she has behind her, most likely for the schoolchildren when they emerge at ten past three.
‘There,’ she says. ‘What pretty smiles. And these are Trevor’s children? The boy is the spit.’
‘I am not,’ he says. ‘I wish I was. When I grow taller than him he is going to send me away.’
‘Oh, never,’ she says, ‘that will never happen. Never, ever,’ she repeats, like an article of belief, almost sadly, almost sadly.
‘I will have to pack my bag then,’ he says, ‘though I have no bag yet.’
‘Good boy,’ she says, ‘good boy. Time enough for bags,’ she says, ‘isn’t that right, Annie? And my two eldest in Chicago now. Think of that. Only yesterday they were little lads like him, going about.’
And she shakes her head. Why does she not like me, I wonder? What is it about me that offends her, or troubles her even? I wish I knew. I am thinking suddenly of my brother Willie as she talks, the horrible sadness that struck my father, that struck me and my sisters when they sent back his uniform from France. They sent it back to us. It still had the marks of the mud on it, though there were also little slivers of something like mica in it. He had been killed, we thought, in a district like our own, where granite lies under the clays of the fields. The mica was scattered in the dried mud like silvers, like stopped snow. She will have waked her boys too, when they went to America, cried and cried for the loss of them in her bed, as if they had died.
There is more that should join us than keep us apart. But that can never be.
‘Do you want anything more?’ she says. Maybe she thinks it is frivolous and wasteful of my time to come all the way down to Kiltegan for bags of sweets. Maybe I do myself. But I cannot risk more than the three halfpence I pay her for the sweets. And why have I carried Billy Kerr’s Peggy‘s-leg all the way also, as if it were a stick of explosives, as if it cannot be given to children? Again, again fear. Suddenly I am a puzzle to myself. I am frowning, I am sure, with perplexity. She is looking at me closely, quietly, as at a woman washed up on a little island of sudden ignorance.
‘I, I ...’ I say, not very helpfully.
‘I am going to go on with the sectioning of the tea, if you want nothing more?’ She smiles now clearly. She is very pretty, even at her age. Fifty, fifty-five. Lucky, lucky, despite her flown sons. I see behind the counter she has been using a wooden ladle to fill pound bags of leaves from a great chest. Heavy tea is bad tea, they say. Because the damp will have got into it. A tea chest is lined with special paper, so the air goes out but no moisture in. Like a good house should be. The Indians, the Chinese, far away, growing tea for us here in Kiltegan. Crossing the impossible oceans. Clippers. My father knew all those things. He understood the origins of things. He used to say, we gave to the English cathedrals their roof beams. He said in the long ago, Merlin the magician stole the stones of Stonehenge from Kerry. And staves in their millions for barrels. Wood and stones to England, but they had given us the potato, in the person of Walter Raleigh. It was a fair exchange. The hatred between the islands had no sound base, he said. More to-ing and fro-ing than anyone knew, marrying, melding. We were the one people, secretly, he said. It was the fact of the secret that was killing the country, he said, in his later days. He was so full of sorrow. He was hurt in himself, wounded, deep, deep, down deep. For forty years he rose up through the ranks, keeping the peace, guarding, watching. Then everything he knew was burned and razed. It burned and razed the odd house of his mind. Never the same, never the same.
‘Annie?’
I am startled now, by my own reverie, being woken from it. The two children are looking up at me, waiting for a sign.
‘Oh, yes,’ I say, ‘no, we were, I was ...’ I don’t know what I am saying. She smiles again and sinks back from the counter and takes up her ladle, and begins again her measuring. ‘Willie, you see,’ I say, ‘- I am sorry, sorry about your boys in Chicago, that’s what I was thinking.’
‘How do you mean?’ she says, with a distinct, bladed tone in her voice.
‘It was coming round in my head - I was thinking of it, how -’
‘Are you mocking me, Annie Dunne?’
Of course I am appalled. Why am I trying to offer sympathy when the question is long settled no doubt in her mind? I must be mad, unhinged. What is wrong with me? Of course this is why she dislikes me. I have no grace, no truth, no womanly understanding. I am not a mother. I am a humpbacked woman that might make a humpbacked child. I am not like her, or any other human person. Moreover, I do not really feel sympathy for her, I feel it for myself. I am a charlatan, and in my emotions maybe almost a cretin. It is a terrible thing, to be there in her shop like a cretin. Will the Lord not save me?
‘I am not mocking you, Ma’am. Please excuse me.‘
I sound like a mere serving woman, a low sort. I herd the children out. The bell rackets merrily behind me. When I glance back through the fresh murk that the sunlight makes of the interior of her shop through the dusty window, I see immediately that she is not moving. The ladle does not glisten, it is made of wood, but something glistens there. Was there a brooch on her breast? Something is starry there, glistening, appearing and disappearing. I am a great fool. With my made-up sailor and my words in the wrong place and time.
‘Thank you, Auntie Anne, for the beautiful sweets,’ says the boy. ‘Thank you, thank you.’
Soon we gain again the sanctuary, as you might say, of the green road. High up the heat runs along the rim of the woods, making the green colours fume up into the sky. The children have eaten their sweets. The new wrens, even tinier they seem than last year‘s, are bobbing about in the hedgerows like fat corks. Blue-tits, yellow-tits, and some brown bird I do not know the name of, try to blend themselves with the shades of the hawthorn and the scrubby ash trees. This is lower Kelsha. By rights we are citizens of Kelshabeg or Little Kelsha, under the bare wide coat of Keadeen. It is from Keadeen we used to gather the sprigs of purple heather in the old days, carrying them up to our rooms in Dublin Castle, sometimes having them sent up by the Wicklow bus, all as touch of home. The smell of the heather brought your Wicklow with you into the stony streets, the yellow and grey of Dublin town. As a child I us
ed to think of it on the bus as if it were an animal itself in a paper bag. And I am sure the bus driver never thought twice about it. Such things do not seem daft to country people.
The bell flowers are just beginning to show their proper blooms at the tops, and the closed flowers in the middle of the stems are nearly right for bursting. I am showing the little boy how to do it, how to hold the bud softly and then suddenly close your fingers, making that satisfying noise. He cannot get the hang of it. He pesters me to keep showing him, but there begins to be only delay in the matter, and no pleasure. I try to coax them on. He gets more and more anxious and bothered. Now I am beginning to sweat under my dress, the heat is taking advantage of me, the road is lengthening against me as it rises into the trees. Once there were many cabins along here, Mary Callan’s is almost the last of the proper one-roomed places. But when you go from a cabin of mud walls, the rain soon washes it away, till no trace is left. A one-roomed cabin abandoned, as the occupant heads off for America or the graveyard, or England, passes away from its corner of the land like a mere stain drying and crumbling. It was these people had the fiddle music and the fun, that played the road bowls in great crowds in the evenings, the younger boys massed on the banks of the road, cheering and shouting, longing to be old enough to play, and be the new hero. All that flock is gone. And in November, around the sixth, when the month of harvesting the spuds was over, there was that great week of visiting, when every group of cabins endured a fit of neighbourly hunger for each other’s company, and Jack would go to Joe a couple of nights, and then Joe to Jack, and tremendous dancing there was, and we as girls though we were better people, hung at the poor half-doors in that democratic manner children have, and feasted our eyes on the jollity. And the odd night we would be gathered in among the fold of those labouring people, and stewardships and Dublin jobs would be forgotten, and me and Dolly and Maud and Willie, too, would swirl about on the rough flagstones of some provisional house, and dance, and feel the colours of the hewn rafters and the spidery thatch, the crust of whitewash on the stony walls, the streaming yellows and reds of the fire against the gable, feel those colours enter into our hearts and souls, and we would be made free as new wrens.
The little boy has stopped on the road behind us. He is weeping. When I go back to him I find he is weeping rather angry tears, if anything. The panic rises in me again. Is this the oranges, the true effect of the oranges? Am I about to find out something? I must be resolute, know my own mind, speak sensibly to them.
‘What is it, childeen?’ I say. ‘What is it?’
He is staring down into the moss and water of the ditch.
‘I’ve sent it down to Australia,’ he says. ‘Because you would not teach me the bell flowers.’
‘What have you sent down to Australia?’ I say.
‘Oh, where is Auntie Anne’s purse now?’ says the little girl.
‘Where is the purse?’
‘You would not talk to me or listen, or stop again on the road. It has been sent away down to Australia.’
‘Down in the water?’ I say, astonished. I pull up the layers of my dress and cardigan and shove my right arm deep into the filthy ditch. A brown-black slime dresses the arm instead. I moil my fingers around among no doubt the tadpoles and the beetles and the leeches, until they close on the soggy leather of my purse. Out I haul it. It is ruined and unhappy-looking, like a frog killed by a heart attack.
‘What do you mean, Australia?’ I say, a surprising and suffocating anger rising in me.
‘Isn’t Australia upside down in the ditch?’ he says, with a mollifying innocence.
But well-nigh savagely I turn from him. Not a word will I speak, I tell myself, from this turn of the road to the pillars of our gates. I will not even look behind. They have both changed. It will never be the same again. The fairies have taken my little ones, these are only monsters, with their indifference to purses and their talk of oranges.
I march on, nursing my outrage. But, after all, he is only a mite. Who thinks that Australia is under the ditch! I expect if Australia really were under the ditch, I would have gone there years ago. And worn a hat with hanging corks against the flies. Beside the well-known wastes and billabongs.
I feel at sea and frightened again, but I cannot be their enemy, I cannot and must not. I am at the gates and all anger has gone. It is like dirty water flung out of a basin. I wish heartily I knew more about the world. I should maybe write to their mother and father. But how would I frame the words?
The little boy is staring up at me. I go back the few steps to him, to his long face. He is smiling, without mirth. He wants me to be smiling too, because my good graces are essential to him. I reach down and put my hand on the back of his head and pull him gently to my apron.
‘Child, child,’ I say.
The little girl is stranded there on the road. The rush of summer weeds and grasses seems to blaze around her spindly legs. There is nothing to her. She is only a notion of humanity, a suggestion. Wicklow is wild with green and brown all about her, the colours fly up. The breeze tries softly to arrange her hair. I stand there holding the boy and looking at her, not knowing what to do.
‘Australia!’ he says, ‘Australia!’
I laugh, no doubt like a sheepdog, like Shep himself, still collapsed in his sunspot on the yard. Oh, let us step through the ditch into Australia, and run with the kangaroos, and see the koalas, and cross the limitless emptiness of the interior. Let us go there, and dance with the convicts and be Australians, and meet again, I am sure, some of those fled denizens of the Kelsha cabins, that had the music and the dances in their keeping, and the great, lost happiness of that week in November when the spuds were safely saved.
Chapter Nine
No sign of Sarah in the house and yard, no sign of a killed chicken ready near the fire, to make our new stew. The fire itself has burned low, but that is my task and therefore my neglect. Carefully I build back the wall of turves, and roof it for good measure. Maybe the killed and plucked hen is under a dish on the dresser, but no. Something has made her, forced her, to abandon her task. Did the tinkers return? Most unlikely. The yard is strange and quiet, though I hear Billy snorting in his byre. The calves are bigger now and gone from the shed and will be frisky in the far garden, as we call it. The hens in general are pecking about between the pack-stones. They do not look like hens who have lost one of their number, and indeed when I count them, they have not. There is always a trace left among the hens when one has been murdered, I often think a resentful glare in those glassy eyes. Perish the day when we must consign the great Red Dandy to the pot. But the legs of hens get yellower, their lives are circumscribed like our own. I cast my gaze across the nearer fields, but no sign there of Sarah either. This is not a good feeling, the Sarahless farm.
It is a curious irritation to do another’s share of work. But the gap in the tally of tasks must be filled, just as if it were a gaping hole in a field fence. The weight of the day, the collection of things and happenings that make a day, will not hold true with something left undone. It is a fact that you feel in your bones, in your water. It cannot be ignored.
Out into the peaceful yard I go, having sent the children before me to search the secret places of the hay barn, where the trap now looms alone, for whatever eggs may be hidden there. Hens take great pride in eggs. They covet them, though, like chicks. They do not always want you to find them. So you would think.
Perhaps their simple hearts tell them to find out-of-the-way corners and shelves and niches, against the preda tions of foxes and mice and rats. So the children must insert their warm arms into dark gaps, and feel about for the still-warm orbs secreted there, and triumphantly extract them. Perhaps we are like very comprehensive murderers to the hens, not only seeking the older ones for stews, but quenching all possibility of life from vulnerable eggs. Yet this thorough-minded enemy strides out in the evenings with the apronful of grain. We must puzzle them greatly.
Having spied an indiv
idual a little heavy with her years, one of the regular replacement birds we buy from time to time in Baltinglass fair, I corner her in the yard, where the walls of the calf shed and the hay barn make an angle. She seems to know well her fate. She skithers and dances, making a rush here and there which I block with counter-steps. We are dancing now in the yard, a funny dance of death.
Now I am within a farthing of her, and hold out my arms and gently but swiftly grasp her under the head.
I would not like to recount the look of pure horror that grips the hen, although in truth hens always bear a horrified expression, as if life in general was a thing of fear. She is living and breathing, she is growing old, the intervals between eggs is sadly widening, even the mighty cock himself must be growing weary of her, defeated by her gathering barrenness.
What would it be if some knowing farmer were to find out the barren women of Kelsha, and corner us in our yards, and wring our necks?
I lift her from the stable earth with caring quickness and shake her firmly, with a properly vicious, circular move- , ment. The neck breaks immediately. She hangs from my efficient hand, her days of living done.
With a sigh, I must admit, I sit myself in the shade of the cow byre on a three-legged stool, and begin to pluck her.
It is then I see the little boy in the cowl of dark within the barn, watching me. His face shows nothing, one way or another. My right hand grips her now on the lower neck, the head hangs down, a droplet of crimson blood gathers on her loose red comb, my left hand by long familiarity flies from feathers and out, giving firm plucks, wrenching the quills from their tight roots. The pink skin, almost white, puckers up into a little mountain, then slowly falls back, smooth again but for the general wrinkles of a hen.
Nice and fat she is, with soft muscles. She is just right for boiling, and will make an excellent stew.
The little boy slowly approaches, leaving the summer darkness of the barn, his eyes fixed on the stripping hen. The white feathers fly about the yard, birdless and free. You could save those feathers and wash them well and use them to re-stuff a bolster, but I am not in thrifty mood. I pluck and pluck.