The little boy hangs a side of his rump on the chopping block, with its thousand stripes of the axe, and never offers a word, his face unchanging, like, it occurs to me, Matt when he is painting. I have watched Matt working the odd time secretly, noting how he does not move his face except to lick his lips, his left foot forward of his right as he stands at his easel in a summer meadow as may be, capturing some instance of beauty he has found in our Wicklow. I have watched him secretly from behind a tree, and loved something about him then, the peace and the power of him, the unsmiling happiness. It was thus that Maud encountered him those long years ago in St Stephen’s Green in the heart of the city, ensnaring the duck pond onto his special watercolour paper as if he were alone in the heart of the mountains. I understand what took a hold of her. Even now when she is dead and he is surely sixty-six years of age, and all their kisses done, age falls away from him when he painting, time falls away, even I might hazard the very cut of his clothes, the present century, all that incidental matter. And Matt is there as the eternal creature, raptly working.
Something of this now stills the features of his grandson, watching my working hands as if he too were painting it, recording it not for himself necessarily, or for anyone, except perhaps the unknown memory of his God.
At dusk Sarah returns, I know not from whither, as the saying goes. The coming night is just pockets of hints in the sycamores. The fields about, the lower woods, are failing in my eyesight. Inside the kitchen the poor departed hen bubbles in the big pot. She has been dismembered and beheaded. Swedes and parsnips, potatoes and carrots, have joined her funeral. Dido herself, the queen of Carthage, burned on a pyre as Aeneas sails away, could not have felt more honoured.
I have given her spuds without black eyes and the smaller, sweeter carrots. The three of us, small boy and girl, myself the general, have bestowed on her the stew of stews.
They have found all of thirteen eggs, a magnificent haul, ranged now on the dresser for Sarah’s return, the children say. They sense the unusual absence and naturally as children they assume some strange sadness in the grown-up, which the harvested eggs will banish.
She comes in through the gloom of the door, it must be well past eight. It is not true dusk, the proper dusk of night, but the artificial dusk this farm endures when the sun goes over beyond our mountain, and all the sloping field and trim of woods is thrown into shadow. It is as good as dusk, though sunlight remains on further farms, looking bright and covetable on the plain, brighter farms than ours, the faraway fields no doubt of the proverb. Well, faraway fields indeed are greener than the fields of Kelshabeg, in the summer evenings.
‘Sarah,’ I say.
What else can I offer? I do not wish to scare her, blame her, offend her. I must be neutral like those foreign diplomats that sometimes visited the Castle, dignitaries that would neither praise not criticize, for fear of war - or so my father would say. One misplaced word might plunge all Europe into chaos, he said, and that was the sorry life of a diplomat. We used to watch them from our windows with great anticipation, hoping for visible disaster. But they did not look sorry to us, with their cheerful faces, and their huge official vehicles. Often in those years countries came and went, as did our own, names and borders changing, but it did not affect the cheerfulness of diplomats, as far as we could judge.
She passes through the kitchen without speaking, sadly not registering the haul of eggs, and on through the door into our bedroom, and closes the thin door quietly.
I have sprinkled water on the flagstones and brushed them, yard by yard, as is my custom. There is a manner to sweep a floor. My mother’s grandmother’s floor was clay, red clay, and that took expert sweeping, but if done well it is as clean as stones. I have tidied away the few stray objects of the day, the Bible that Sarah must have been perusing, a tin box with nothing in it. I have the wooden box of socks for darning by my legs, and am sitting fairly hunched by the lowering fire. The big darning needle passes with a satisfying ravishment through the thick, still heel of one of Sarah’s working socks, that lines her boots. She has not emerged, but is lying, I have no doubt, on our bed, immobile, quiet, staring at the old egg-blue ceiling boards. It would not be the first time for such strangeness, and I must allow it. If not for me, sometimes I think the country home at Baltinglass would beckon for her.
I feel some accomplishment in the fact, though it bears to me the shadows of my father’s last days with me in Lathaleer, before his final outbreak and decline. It seems I must be sometimes daughter and cousin to the mad, or nearly mad. But I blame neither that old policeman nor my cousin Sarah, it is the declensions of age that are at fault, the very faulty arrangements of our Lord for such as we become. If this is blasphemy then the Lord will have to forgive me.
My father in the old kitchen at Lathaleer raved and waved his ceremonial sword, with his shirt rended by himself and his trews bestained by urine, and cursed himself and my own life. I thought he would kill me, and when he reached the height of his raving he begged me to kill him, with the sword, across his poor addled head like a sword of Damocles. I could not do that, but some would say I brought a worse judgement on his wits, by putting him to the county home in Baltinglass, with the help of Matt. And there in darkness of mind and pitiful reduction, he died. He that once kept all of B division in Dublin, with responsibility for the castle herself, as he would say, all quiet and shipshape for viceroy and king. I would not willingly put Sarah to such sorrows, and if I can stand between her and whatever ails her mind, just now and then, I will have paid her better for the niche she has given me, than any thousand eggs from a Rhode Island Red.
The fire is sweet and red, like habitual garnets, or rubies strewn under black stones.
The little boy comes from the blackness of his room, slips in near beside me on Sarah’s chair. I do not even look at him. He is like a mouse, a field creature I must not disturb. How small and trim he is, how neat his bending back. . His legs hang from the seat of the chair.
‘Auntie Anne,’ he says. ‘I am sorry for the purse. I am sorry.’
‘Why did you throw it in the ditch?’ I say, at ease.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the notion came into my head, and I just did it, like boys do.’
‘I know,’ I say, ‘I know. Well, I did a worse thing, I must confess. And don’t you tell your sister, I think she would not understand. You will understand, I am sure.’
‘But what did you do?’ he says, with fierce interest. The crimes of a grown-up!
‘I stood at the margin of the scrubby wood, on the road there below, and I threw a Peggy’s-leg that Billy Kerr gave me for you, I threw it as hard as I could, way, way into the tangle of the brambles and trees.‘
‘Why, Auntie Anne?’ he says, fascinated.
‘I don’t know why. I just did it. Do you understand?’
‘I do,’ he says. ‘I do.’
We sit there silently. The barn owl in the pines above us slowly sounds, feels his way through the darkness to us with his voice. That must be a lonely life. Other more human sounds are only the clumsy wind. The clock ticks on the dresser, the mice run about in the roof. A segment of turf puffs down into destruction. In all the houses of Kelsha will be sleeping forms, I am thinking of that: Mary Callan in what I imagine is her filthy bed, the old rabbit man above near the owl with his sad memories, all the kith and kin strewn along the green road in the stone houses, breathing and dreaming on their feather pillows. It is on the tip of my tongue to ask him about the oranges, him kneeling there between his sister’s legs. But a voice in my head says, do not, do not.
‘I suppose it is a crime to throw away another person’s Peggy’s-leg, Auntie Anne,‘ he says, without accusation.
‘Oh, a crime indeed - a small crime. There are crimes and crimes. One time ...’
‘Oh, yes, Auntie Anne?’ he says brightly, sensing a story.
‘Well, one time, we had a dog. No, I should say, because it was in my father’s time, when he was only a little boy
like you, they had a dog. This dog was also called Shep. Anyway, this Shep killed a sheep, which was a very serious matter. It was my father found the dead ewe on one of the higher fields, just over the road from this farm, and he went back down and told his father, and his father said, “Go back up and put a rope around that dog’s neck, and bring him down, Tom,” - for that was my father’s name - “and I will shoot him.” Well, my poor father, just a mite of five, went back up the fields with a heavy heart, and put a rope around Shep’s neck, ready to obey his father’s wishes. But he had a great liking for that dog, and turned his footsteps up into the woods, and passed on in, just up here behind us, and disappeared.’
‘These very woods? Oh, Auntie Anne. What happened?’
‘Well, some hours passed and my grandfather began to be anxious. He was the steward there on the Humewood estate and he was a blunt, old-fashioned man, and many a time he had beaten my father. He beat him one time with a cooper’s band, a hoop of metal off of a barrel, and my father carried the scars of that beating on his back all his life.’
‘My father never has beaten me,’ says the boy. ‘My father will not even kill a bluebottle, though bluebottles eat poos,’ he says, gravely.
‘These were other days. And my father would tell this story without rancour. When it began to grow dark that day and it was clear that the little boy was missing, my grandfather raised the district, and bands of people, cousins and neighbours alike, lit bright torches and scoured the fields about and called out my father’s name - Tom ! Tom! But there was never an answer. The night was pitch and cold, and my grandfather fell into a fever of disquiet, and he cursed himself for sending the lad on such a task. For even a rough man like the old steward had in him a tenderness that could be awoken by an emergency. He sent the men and women of the district out hither and thither with the torches, urging them on all the while, but alas, to no avail.’
‘He was killed, he was killed!’
‘No, child, he was not killed.’
The fire sputters and quarrels minutely with itself on the hearth. Little visitors of flames run across the failing heaps.
‘Well, well?’ says the boy, eager to hear the fate of that other boy, in the long ago.
‘My father himself had only a dim recollection of that night, but he did remember standing with the dog in a moonlit glade, standing all night with the dog, never moving, hearing, he said, in the distance now and then people calling his name. But he could not move or answer. What kept him standing there he could never say, but stand he did. The dog itself shivered in the cold, but he himself, my father, felt quite warm, quite strange, quite resolute, as if an enchantment had fallen on him, by the force of his affection for that dog.
‘Near daybreak, at last, my father moved his legs. Down from the deep, dark woods he came, and out onto the sloping field. All about him the neighbours gathered, with their torches, saying his name, and calling out to the others below that he was found. But my father paid them no heed. He had it in his head that he would be shot too, now, along with the dog, for his misdeed, for the crime of his disobedience. And he was quite resigned to that.
‘He came down the fields of Humewood towards his father’s lodge. His father emerged from the house below. How big and dark he looked! My father’s heart shrank in his breast. The dog itself was whining on the rope, being dragged along, knowing well, you need not doubt, its own dark crime of killing the ewe.’
‘And were they shot, the both?’
‘When my father reached his father, one of those great hands went up, as if indeed to strike down the little boy, but no, it was to pull my father’s head to him, and grip it with that fierce tenderness, and he lifted his own head and thanked his God for the deliverance of his son.’
Then the boy says an unexpected thing. It is only one stray word, but it comes forth as natural as a bubble in the well, up from the frothy mud. There is no sentiment in the word, he says it as plainly as he says anything. But it surprises me. It makes me wonder about him, if he hasn’t something unusual within, some quaint understanding beyond his years, or despite them. He is what they used to call sean-aimseartha, an old-fashioned child.
‘Love,’ he says.
Now I realize he has said it with a stain of desperation. I am disquieted again. The oranges, the oranges ... The little boy sits by the moulder of the turf. He seems to be thinking, thinking on my words. I can almost hear his mind whirring, turning everything about, examining everything, deciding. His small hands grip the wooden edge. He is as still as a stone, overwhelmed, transfixed. Myself, I have not thought of that story for twenty years or more. Forty years maybe. It is strange how vivid it is in my mind. I can see the torches as I speak of them, see my grandfather in the door of the steward’s lodge. Yet I was not there, I was not born, my father was only five years old.
‘And what happened to the dog, Auntie?’ he says.
‘I do not know,’ I say. ‘My father never said. Or did he say my grandfather let it live, and never mentioned its crime again? There are crimes and crimes, you see, like I said. The story seems to stop at that door, father and son in their moment of ...’
There is another spate of silence.
‘Love,’ says the little boy finally. He looks up at me now. There is a kind of pleading in his face. ‘My father,’ he says, like a brief, fragmented song he sings alone to himself, and is singing now for me, ‘loves me.’
‘Of course he does.’
‘And he loves my sister.’
‘Of course.’
‘And he loves my mother.’
‘He does, of course!’
‘He does,’ says the boy, with great satisfaction.
‘Maybe you should wander into your bed now,’ I say
‘All right,’ he says, but doesn’t move an inch.
So we sit there, listening to the owl. It must be in the mossy woods, but near, at the very margin of the trees.
‘If you showed me the spot,’ he says at last, the words heavy from being first thought, ‘I might climb in after it.’
‘After what?’ I say.
‘The lovely Peggy’s-leg.‘
‘You would never find it.’
‘That is sad, then,’ he says without sadness.
‘It is,’ I say.
The little boy gets up and hugs me. He puts his short arms about me and hugs my bones. I stroke the black hair of his head, thinking of all past times, and present times, the river of time upon which we are merely carried, small boys and girls, loves expressed but rarely, loves confounded in the main.
Warm he is, warm, warm.
Perfect time, perfect time, perfect time, says the clock.
When he is gone, I sit there alone. ‘My father loves me.’ He loves his father, more than life, I am thinking. It is right and meet that a child should love his father so. A litany of love, but something is bothering, bothering me.
It is another story entirely, also a true one. When my father was a sergeant in the police force, he succeeded in arresting a man who had assaulted a little girl on Kingstown Pier. For this he was awarded two shillings by his superintendent. He had other money awards in his day, one of them for helping in the rescue of sailors off a stricken ship in Dublin Bay. That was easy to explain to us, three girls. But the other award was not so straightforward. Maud, being the eldest, was told the full story, and she, being our loyal sister, gave us all the details later in our beds. We were gripped and horrified. Assaulted, the very word - suggesting a sort of leaping. I could see that wolfish man in my mind’s eye, vaulting through the air with bared teeth.
I know the little girl has not been assaulted in that sense by her brother. Her brother is only small. She was instructing him in the game, if anything. But if it is a secret game, as it seemed, how did they come to begin to play it?
I go into my bed, and Sarah is awake and clear. She smiles her smile of a lost child.
‘I was lying here thinking what was the worst thing ever befell me,’ she says. ?
??And I cannot think what it was, unless it was the death of my mother.’
‘God rest her,’ I say, as decent people do.
‘God rest her indeed,’ says Sarah. ‘But what was the worst thing ever befell you, Annie?’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘there has been a number of such things. The death of Willie, my father’s troubles late in life, and then the death of Beatrice, Maud’s daughter.’
‘The death of Beatrice, Maud’s daughter,’ she repeats. ‘And Matt’s daughter.’
‘And Matt’s daughter too, of course. It was terrible for him, I know. But I think it was worst for Trevor. It was worst for Trevor, bring only small himself, and her brother.’
‘It was worst for him,’ she says, with the familiar tune of a topic discussed before, ‘in that he was so small himself, and was blamed.’
‘Yes, Maud blamed him. That was not right. He was only six. She was a baby. It’s true he gave her the Scarlet Fever, but only out of love. A little boy does not understand quarantine. Didn’t he feel just wonderful, and missing his sister. He was told, he was told not to go to her, with the infection still in him. But in he crept and kissed her, all in secret. And then when she died, he confessed what he had done, and Maud, Maud blamed him.’
‘You were up there helping, weren’t you, Annie, and you saw everything?’
‘I saw everything, and felt everything. And I don’t think little Trevor was ever the same idle, happy boy again.’
‘No, but he is a fine man now.’
‘A very fine. What has set you, Sarah, to asking these old questions?’
She sighs, deep and sad. I do not think that this is the daftness in her after all. She is very serious and still. Her old body is thin and warm beside me. I can feel the rough cotton of her nightclothes just against my right knuckles. I frown in the darkness, though there is moon and light as well tonight. That old unease creeps back. I sense also her trouble and pain, but on what head I do not know.