‘Oh, I have been shaken by these recent days,’ she says. ‘I have tried to say otherwise, to you and ‘to myself, but Billy throwing you out on the road, the tinkers and their menacing ... Women alone, I am afraid, Annie.’
‘Don’t be afraid, Sarah.’
‘I am afraid, and I am afraid.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘I am, though. Women alone. It would be better if ... if there was ...’
‘A man here? But there is no man.’
‘No, there is none now. There were men here once. That carved out the fields and made the yard and put everything in place. They made the ship that we only sail. We are like the last sailors aboard, though. I am afraid. And I think I am right to be afraid.’
‘Well, try and sleep now, Sarah. We must be churning in the morning, and scouring. A few dreams, Sarah, and when it is daylight again, your fear will be gone.’
‘Maybe so, Annie.’
She is quiet now. I am quiet. My knees are jumping with painful energy, my back is reeking with soreness, rawness. It is strange. I am like the spring of the clock wound too far, all tight and stopped.
‘Are you sleeping, Annie?’ she says from under the blanket.
‘I am not. I am worrying now.’
‘Don’t be worrying.’
‘I am worrying about the girl. I wanted to ask you about the girl.’
‘The girl,’ she says. Then silence under the blanket. At length I imagine she must be asleep. But the old voice stirs out again.
‘I am afraid,’ she says, ‘she is wounded. There is a wound in her nothing can heal. All you can do is watch over her. She needs watching over.’
‘What do you mean, Sarah?’ Because Sarah is wise in certain matters. She knows old medicines. She knows unguents. There was a time when she was valued for it, as an alternative to any doctor. But those days are gone. I had almost forgotten it was ever so. But her voice carries that old authority, and doubly frightening for that.
‘What do you mean, Sarah?’
But this time the dog of sleep has fetched her. She is gone. I am left alone to think my thoughts, to wonder and wonder about the oranges.
It is a morning again of sun, heavy on the hands of the byre, the barn, the house. The red geraniums are slowly ekeing out their tight blooms. They begin to catch fire along the granite windowsills each side of the door. The whitewashed window-reveals and walls also excite their colour. It is a lovely thing, a favourite thing, although also you would think of the passion of Christ, of holy blood lying around an exhausted forehead on the cross, such are those drops of flowers.
From red geraniums to yellow butter I go.
I have boiled a pot of water on the kitchen fire and carried it into the dairy and now I fetch the big enamel basin and brush. In the little dairy as clean as a prayer, with its limed upper walls and wooden counter, I wield the scrubbing brush, mashing the stiff hair into the hard counter so that every hint of dust and grease is gone.
Down on my bony knees I do likewise for the flags, till the steam rises everywhere, and the room looks like a little chance wave has broken into it, and scoured it out, terrorized it with cleanliness. Since six o‘clock Sarah has been churning, turning and turning the metal handle, listening to the slosh of the cream inside, over and over, till the sweat sits along her arms and on her big, bare face. She does not speak all morning and I am not inclined to wrench words from her. She never believes in that butter, and is convinced that only I have the knack of what she calls happy butter.
At last she gets the signal, a heavying up inside the barrel, a protest almost from the cream, as it gives up the ghost and becomes the different nature of the butter, only the whey washing about like a memory of cream. It is a delicious victory for Sarah. She gazes about with sumptuous pride, her own worst opinion disproved. This has happened a hundred times, and tomorrow she will be back to saying she has no knack for the butter, but no matter.
And that is a great moment, a moment of strange stiffness after long labour, and a releasing moment, and it is how I am sure the butterfly feels when at last it breaks from the discarded caterpillar, drying its wings and easily flying to become that graceful thing. And there is a grace in butter, how can I explain it - it is the colour we all worship, a simple, yellow gold.
And it is my job now to make the ingots of it, Sarah sort of fussing and hissing at the door, like an enormous goose. I roughly knock it into shapes like small turves, never touching with my hands, using the big wooden butter blade, and then the two little paddles as neat as oars, pushing and slapping and coaxing, till I have five good half-pounds, which I wrap in butter paper, and pop in the drip press to keep as cold as summer will let me.
In the old days we would take not only a sprig of heather from the hills back to Dublin Castle, to keep home near, but also a length of butter in a turn of paper. And in the butter was put the thorn from a blackthorn tree, to keep it from going off. You had to be mighty careful, when you got home to those echoing walls and courtyards, to fish out that sharp, devious little thing, before you put anything in your mouth.
And although Sarah is gripped in her silence, we are like two dancers, two doors opening and closing on perfect hinges, two creatures oiled in their actions, concerted, with one purpose, wonderfully adept, and in my case wonderfully happy. When you find me in the dairy, an old rook of a woman in a blue and white apron, the room immaculate, the sun excluded but honouring the gap of the door with rinsing light, you will find only the picture of happiness.
And all the while there is that clean, clear smell, that remembers everything in the making of the butter - the meadow, the mouths of the milch cows, their secret stomachs, the grasses wrenched from their green selves, the milk in the soft warm udders, the odour of inside skin - all perfect and mixing together into one laden smell, a smell that in its nature is the very opposite of mould and rot, that makes the dairy ring like a guitar.
‘Annie, dear,’ says Sarah at last.
‘Yes, dear?’ I say. She stands in the sparkling door, the light showing through her summer dress. She has been wearing that dress, washing and repairing it, for thirty years. Her summer dress, with the faint blue pattern of roses and lines, growing ever fainter. One day it may be a plain white dress.
‘I have been talking to Billy,’ she says.
It is as if I have already heard her speech. Maybe I have rehearsed it in my dreams unbeknownst. Still and all I can’t believe it, I do not wish to believe it, and at heart I don’t believe it.
‘I have been talking to Billy, and we have said ... things, to each other, and it may be that we will reach an understanding.’
‘The worst thing that ever befell me? Is this why you were talking on that topic last night? To see if what you were going to say might ... might, kill me?’
‘Kill you?’
‘I am only a light - I am ... How light is a feather, Sarah? One of those slight little feathers from under the hen’s belly, that she leaves often on her eggs, a sort of tiny flag ...’
But I have lost her - I have lost myself. I am trying to tell her, what? That time has thrown me from my own family, that Matt has thrown me from my former niche, that Kelsha is my last refuge, my last stand, that the half of her warm bed is all my desire, that I will be glad to go to my grave from this small yard, carried out between the pillars with their nesting stones ... That always I have expected to be cast off, discarded, removed ... My hurts and thoughts discounted. That we have, she and I, not a marriage of bodies but a marriage of simple souls, two women willing to do the work of a hard subsistence farm, to dig out the potato ground, to milk the milch cows, to tend the fire, to fetch the water, even when she is dark and dour to take her tasks to myself, and recognizing that there is no honey of man here, no strong, hard limbs of man to crush us underneath him, and give that crazy pleasure that we have only heard tell of, that holy ecstasy that was not accorded to us, recognizing the losses and lacks, that we have a world here, a way, an admir
able life enough ... But, none of these things I utter. None. Because I cannot get the words out, and if I could, she would not hear them as I intend them. It would be like Mrs Nicodemus, with other meanings than I intend.
So the only way to answer now will be by deviousness and counter-play. The only way to answer will be to confound this Billy Kerr in his evil plans by actions more dark and dexterous than his own. Poor, slight, long Sarah. Does she think it is for her he has walked this strange walk?
She is standing there, lost herself, open-mouthed, afflicted. How ridiculous she seems. Sixty-one, reeled in by forty-five. He must have some stomach now, that same Billy Kerr, to think for the sake of a little farm that he can lie in the nights beside this old woman with her long, clean bones like the pillars of the courthouse in Baltinglass. That he can set his mouth on hers and whisper to her in the dark. I am almost laughing. Then the bad words rise up, surprising even me.
‘Sarah Cullen, do you think he wants you, an old woman without a hint of youth, or this farm of thirteen acres?’
‘What, Annie?’
‘What has he been saying to you, Sarah, that makes you think you can do this thing? Are you going to walk down to Kiltegan church and stand in a white dress before poor Father Murphy, and ask that old, benighted priest to wed you to this man? This man who is only a scoundrel in a pair of farm boots, the do-everything, the lackey of my cousins, the Dunnes of Feddin. What will all the people of the district say? Don’t you think they will laugh at you, be disgusted by you, their stomachs turning at the thought of you, Sarah Cullen, marrying such a man?’
‘Why, Annie? Cannot any person marry? Is it a crime? Annie, Annie, is it a crime - I did not know?’
Her words are so simple, small, and low. Whispery. I feel myself the greater criminal by far than Billy Kerr. I should have kept my own opinions to myself, and let this story take its course, as I have always allowed every story that has come to me. She is open and raw to my wounds. That is why I have wounded her. Because I am so well able. These are the actions of a wicked mind. And as suddenly I am assailed by other fears, the plain fact we have these two children in our care. Am I going to be thrown off before their father returns for them? Will there be a need now for letter-writing and telegrams, and letting down of people, and all the rest? And what will befall me then? Who will take me? Will heart and body fail, and the county home open its doors for me, like my poor, discarded father in his day? That evil action answered by this, that by throwing him away I am to be thrown away in turn, unloved, unwanted, and unseen.
Chapter Ten
But maybe there is something that can be done, gently and truly, to unlock this dam of branches and rubbish in the river of Sarah’s simple life. After all, I am her guardian, plain and simple. She took me in not only because I had no pillow upon which to lay my thinning head, but because no doubt she felt the threat in the countryside around her, the threat even of the dark and wind, of the day when she might wake and feel the strength not as much at her beck as heretofore. Oh, she is a mighty girl, strong and unchanging and true, but even an old wall of massive stones will start to lose its power when the old lime washes from between the gaps and the clever rain goes in and makes its secret mischief. Then one morning you go out to find a corner of your barn asunder, and great stones twisted and cracked from their ancient beds, and the work of dead hands undone.
An unexpected calm takes a hold of me. This daft marriage is too odd, too disquieting. The whole of Kelsha, Kiltegan and Feddin would be made uneasy by it. There wouldn’t have been the like in these parishes in all the decades of existence. It is something you might hear about in Dublin - not even Dublin, which in many ways is only another country town, being stuffed with indigent country people, but all those places that are made clear in the odd risky book I might have come across. Maud used to keep them in her knicker drawer, one by one from the library in Donnybrook, and even unknown to her I would filch them out now and then and have a quick peruse. And when the pictures came first to Dublin, there were mighty terrible films to see, of wild divorcees and the like, and extravagant goings-on in far-flung places like California, where all the houses seemed to be made with strict right angles and all their furniture was smooth and shining. That is something you notice when you are reared in Ireland. I often, too, in the afternoons took the tram into O‘Connell Street and went into the Savoy, and sat alone in the great terraces of seats and watched an almost incomprehensible picture, in the company of a hundred other women like me, and on Wednesdays all the cooks and parlour maids would be there, on their day off, dressed to the nines, but not quite ever the nines of the women on the screen. And in those stories strange things happened, and you witnessed strange things, and one of the things you would love most was when Gary Cooper kissed a girl, Gary Cooper that was like a stone himself, but who could melt a woman like lead in the roof of a burning mansion.
I am taking now all this experience of life and there is something in Sarah’s declaration that makes me strongly suspect she could not have the support of anyone in her predicament. At the same time I feel a creeping guilt, and oddly enough the situation arouses in me a profound love for her, a reaffirmation of the respect and care I have for her, this side idolatry, as Ben Jonson says of William Shakespeare, according to my father. It is not only the memory I have of her as a girl, all clean and fresh as wheat with the moist seed still in it, as subtle as a bud, as clear as a sun shower, but the woman she is now, that I lie beside through all the seasons, and know so well, or think I do. And I know what is the matter with her, because it is the matter with me, that awful fear I feel she feels too, that fear heaped up around our hearts by so many things - age and our vulnerable sex and all the rest.
At any rate we are invited down to the Dunnes of Feddin for the tea-time and I will be able without announcement, without suddenly turning up in a state of anguish or any other undesirable state, to talk quietly to Winnie about it, Winnie who is the scholar and so wise, and after all, Billy Kerr takes her wages and is in her keeping, and even a wild dog like him has to obey the keeper of his bones.
At the same time I would be wise not to say anything first to Lizzie, who is the sister almost as strong as a man, and with the manners of a man, and who has used her fists on more than one occasion, once knocking a fencer to the ground at the back of their farm, because he was laying in the posts at too great distances in a spot he thought no one would notice. But of course that is how cattle get out, and she knocked him down in justice, and he accepted that.
Whereas May is too soft and nice, like her name, all white and frothy, silent and hard-working, all smiles and no words at all, though she tries hard to gabble responses to greetings, to remarks on the weather and the like, and really lives in the loving shelter of her sisters.
It is Winnie, both strong and gentle, with all the characteristics of her sisters, and yet with the added virtue of wisdom, that may help me. After all she teaches their lessons to the children of Kiltegan, and not low and high babies, but the bigger ones who will go out to work when she is finished with them, so she is teaching tricky stuff, the very stuff you forget the moment you leave school, but no matter, like compound fractions and long division, long division which I could do at school but could not put myself to now, God forgive me.
The other thing that strongly settles me on this occasion is the boy and the girl. It is not just myself I have to fight for, as in the past, and always battles that I lost, but I must preserve where they are now, until their father comes for them. He has promised to return before the harvest, at the close of summer, when we will begin to be deepest at our labours, but who knows what struggles they may be enduring, what difficulties and what trials in the mazy city of London? Dublin to me holds no fears or mysteries, being virtually a Dublin woman in part myself, but I would not like to go down to the pier at Dunleary and take that big mail packet to England, I would not.
The children’s s grandfather, Jack O‘Hara, travelled the entirety of the
earth in the merchant navy, he has told me - grandfather on their mother’s side - but we have always been stickers to home and loath to roam, always excepting the wild courage of my sister Dolly, who went to Ohio almost as an indentured slave, let us say a house servant on contract, and nearly broke my father’s heart, or in fact did break it. Dolly, who was only five foot high, and pret tier than many a lacquered film star, set off alone from the regretful arms of the Liffey, past the solemn figure of the Dowager Lighthouse, and the portly one of the Poolbeg, way beyond the furtive dog, crouching down ready to spring and savage you, that is the hill of Howth, and down to Cobh and out beyond everything she knew, to strange America. Because, she said, she could not bear the changes that befell us, the loss of my father’s mighty job, the country that we knew, and at last, his very wits.
Dolly, Dolly, Dolly, in Ohio, my father cried.
So I keep the peace with Sarah in shipshape fashion. It is washday, so we spend the hours boiling sheets and blouses, and scrubbing at our and the children’s garments in the zinc tub, and lathering and rinsing. For this we use almost the full measure of the rainwater in the barrel, because you would be killed going down to the well.
On washday the water bucket becomes as useful as a thimble, the deluge of water that is required.
At least in summer there is no rain paradoxically to ruin your efforts, at least not today, though every night this week the rain has fallen, as if in a furious frenzy to wash the earth. But there is good solid drying time in the daytime hours, and we spread our sheets with their gift of starch on the drying-bushes with confidence.
Sarah will gather them in in the late evening before the sun is gone, and tonight she will stand in the kitchen with the irons heating on their spotless grille by the fire, and iron the sheets till the starch in them dries and fixes them into objects like the thinnest metal, which is how we love our sheets. So that when you set a child under them, and tuck them in, they are gripped by those sheets as if in a strange embrace, and barely stir the whole night.