We speak but little all day, but there is nothing unusual in that. When the work is there, especially washday, which will go from six o‘clock till late that night, words become unnecessary. We know the pleasant drills. When the sheets are dry you will see us other days in the yard or kitchen, holding our corners, and stepping to each other and stepping away in that old dance of folding, wordless, exact. Those dances are known now inside the bones.
Nevertheless I feel her pain and confusion, and certainly feel my own. We send the children to roll in the grassy sloping field, and when they are done with that we find other adventures for them, to keep them out of our hair. We stop only for cups of tea, slices of buttered bread and blackberry jam. When we are ruined by thirst, we throw down big mugs of our milch cow’s milk. It is all in the day, it is nothing to us, except this new nag of hurt between us. Illusion or not, I sense my power over the situation, and flatter myself that she does too. I begin to feel so confident and strong, I think I would strike Billy Kerr with a bar if he strode in, and cleave him like a pig, and hang him in the byre from the pig hook, and bleed him, and shave his bristles for him, and make black pudding from his dark blood and all the rest of those ceremonies reserved for the killing of the munificent pig.
Leaving the wide white linen sheets drying on the shocked bushes, we set off, the children and me, for my cousins’ farm. I have at least discharged my share of the work, a heavy day of work it is, the washing. I have not abandoned Sarah just for argument, but stayed true to what is daily required of us. I am almost washed myself, to the inner bone, by the great effort of washing our world clean. And carry that righteous feeling to the lower road, the lower world.
A trim road of pines leads to their gate, an old iron affair with designs on it where the latch is. But the gate is locked and we must cross the mossy style, which delights the boy. Their farmhouse stands beyond, a square house in the centre of a muddy field. It is only the hooves of the cattle does that, because their yard teems with bullocks. They are always meaning to fence or ditch around their house, but the old garden has long since been wiped away by those hooves. Billy Kerr should be more bothered by that than he is, but then what is the measure of Billy Kerr? Once there were roses there, and lilies in the summer, orange ones, and fuchsia in droves, but no more. They are not seemingly those sorts of women that need a garden. I suppose they are strange women enough.
When their father died they stripped out the house of everything that spoke of him. But never said the why of it. Seemingly, they loved him while he lived. True, he kept all courting men away, till sense might say it was too late. He died of an apoplexy all the same, raging at some matter or other. He was buried beside his wife, forty years gone before him. Carpets and curtains went, to the bare wood. Maybe they meant to decorate again, and it has to be said that it was always a better house than Lathaleer, certainly than Kelsha, which is only a cottage. Feddin is a two-storeyed farmhouse with a little neat door. But they never did put new carpets and curtains in, and so their house now is like a great series of wooden drums - everything scrubbed clean, it must be said, they never tire of the scrubbing, but echoing and banging and rattling.
‘Ah, Annie, dear,’ says Winnie as we come into the wooden hall. She stands back then with a flourish and puts her two hands on her hips and gazes down on the children like they were miracles come into her abode. ‘Lovely, lovely creatures,’ she says.
‘Indeed and they are, Winnie,’ I say, laughing.
‘Oh, they are, they are. They are ... beauteous.’
Now, you can see her learning in a word like that. Her and my father had the same vocabulary, as I suppose myself and my father had too. Winnie and I like each other. We know what Hamlet is, we know who Bottom was, and like to laugh about it. True, I never read those books, but lapped such knowledge from my father’s garrulous knees!
‘Come in, come in, the whole crowd of you,’ she says, like we were teems of people, ‘come in.’
And she leads us into their bare parlour, with its old scratched windows and the window seats unflattered by cushions. The room cries out for care and embellishment, yet all the same I love their parlour. The very wood is so scrubbed and white, it is pleasing. And today, much to my astonishment, they have spread a starched cloth on their habitually raw table, an honour that would be difficult to explain to children, but I feel it, in fact I am wondering if they haven’t been into Baltinglass to purchase it. And there are oddments of cups, blue and white and it must be confessed more cracked than not, and plates, and rough tea cakes and a big hot-looking kettle of tea. I can see the little boy is quite taken aback. To add to the deluge of new things, the rook-like shapes of Lizzie and May stand incongruously in each window frame, like vigorous statues. The light beams in from the clamour of sun outside, till their dresses look enormous and bizarre. The little boy almost cowers back. He lifts his small hands to defend himself against these visions, visions that melt down into mere old women when they step forward to try and kiss these rare sorts of visitor. Oh, I see that hunger in their eyes, the very hunger that has been satiated in me by having the boy and girl for these weeks, and if it has been hard work it is the look of sheer desire and wonderment and delight in my cousins that reminds me of my great privilege and access to joy. And suddenly, looking at these wildish women, with their startling hair and rough clothes, the backs of Lizzie’s hands torn into scabs and wounds by maybe barbed wire, by God knows what manly labour, I am already thrown forward in spirit to late summer, when as sure as salt their father will come for them, and I will be a childless crone, a withered woman, all unmothered yet again.
‘Good Lord above,’ says the little boy, in words I never heard from him before. ‘How did you get those wounds?’
‘It’s only slits,’ says Lizzie, ‘it’s only slits I got off of the plough!’
Then she bends as by right to get a kiss from this terrified child. Oh, such terror I never saw. He looks wildly at his sister, who is quite calm and looking about with perfect ease. He looks at me. Is there no force on earth that can protect him? Seemingly not! He draws in a huge breath as her great, ruined face descends, the lips pursing like in a drawing book, it is an ogre maybe trying to devour him, I do not know. But then a little miracle occurs.
‘Oh, you are like Auntie Anne,’ he says, with a sob of true relief. ‘You have her cheeks, and her eyes!’
‘Why, yes,’ she says, ‘I am her cousin!’
And suddenly the booming voice and booming body is changed to him. He holds out his short, thin arms and holds her fiery hair, and kisses her.
Then there is a kind of scattering, and a gathering, of old women, as May advances to take her share of the boy, and Lizzie and Winnie bestir themselves with the tea, delighted, redeemed like old blouses put to use again as polishing rags, marching out with loud clacks of their working shoes on the floors, coming back in with plates of sandwiches, thick-breaded things with mad slices of baked ham in them. Nevertheless they present no obstacle to the boy and girl. They sit at the soapy table and chew enthusiastically at them, smiling and laughing, the boy anyway, delighted with himself and his welcome. It occurs to me that the little girl must feel a touch neglected, such is the power and tide of a boy in such company. After all, they have seen and known enough of girls, being once girls themselves.
‘Doesn’t she have your hair, almost, Lizzie?’ I say.
‘She does, she does, she does,’ says Lizzie. ‘Or what it was before it did go grey on me!’
‘Well, it is still nice hair,’ I say, lying nicely in my teeth.
‘Cack, cack, cack, cack,’ says May, or something like it. Maybe the teeth that seem to have fallen out of her head have made her speech even worse than it was previously. . She is tremendously excited. I can almost see the surges move through her. She keeps throwing back her head and laughing, and then trying to speak, and managing only, ‘Cack, cack, cack, cack,’ at which the little boy in turn tremendously laughs, but all in a highly agreeable wa
y We could be speaking of the stars in the most refined manner, such is the enjoyment of all.
At length I am able to leave the concatenation of the feast and take my chance to follow Winnie out, as she carries the kettle into the kitchen for a second fill.
It is a low, dark room, bare as the rest of the house, but for the cut-stone granite of the fireplace, very different to Sarah’s but with the same arrangement of cranes and hooks. Everything is spotless, there is not a spider’s web to its name. Winnie’s hair actually scrapes along the old ceiling, which is curious.
‘Matt’s over in Lathaleer. Did you see him yet, dear?’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. Matt in Lathaleer.
‘He’ll be over to you shortly, have no fear. He is mad after those two children. He is daft about them. He has boiled sweets bought for them, the ones they like, he says.’
‘He hasn’t been over yet,’ I say.
‘Isn’t he only just down? Last night! Drove in that nice big car of his. Morris Major. And didn’t it break down in Aughrim? Poor man. Got a jarvey all the way from there. Think of the expense of that!’
‘Good for him.’
‘Oh, unstoppable. He loves all that painting. Oh, he’ll , have been up since dawn now, with that easel of his, walking, walking, pausing here and there, like a fisherman.’
‘Like a butterfly collector, my father used to say.’
‘Did he, God rest him?’
I am glad that Matt’s about again. Of course we don’t get on. By rights he should keep away. Of course it won’t be for me he comes visiting to Kelshabeg. It won’t be for me. But this is not the question of the moment, no.
‘Winnie, dear, there is a topic I wish to touch on, if I may?’
‘I am so glad you brought them down, Annie. I don’t know what I was expecting. City children. But they are lovely children.’
‘Can I ask you something, Winnie - your advice on a matter?’
She changes her manner immediately, sets down the kettle, rests a hand on the table, looks at me seriously, gently.
‘What is it, Annie? You look solemn.’
‘It’s - oh, God forgive me for not understanding the world sufficiently not to bother you with this, but. And I should likely say nothing. Let things take their course. Oh, and I don’t want to make her unhappy, to wreck her chance of happiness, if that’s what it is.’
‘Who, who, who, Annie?’ she says, like an owl in the sycamores.
‘Sarah, Sarah Cullen!’
‘What about Sarah? Her eyes, is it her eyes?’
‘It is probably her eyes has her going the way she is going. And her age, and the pony and the tinkers ...’
‘Annie, Annie, hold your horses, what’s the matter?’
I am trembling, sweating now in my summer dress. Winnie comes closer and puts her sisterly hand on my back. I can take no offence from that, though I am as always aware of the hideous hump in my spine. How close she puts her fingers to it. Touch not, touch not!
‘What’s the matter with Sarah, is she ill? Not that dreadful cancer that afflicts so many?’
‘No! Thank God!’
I am astonished she has uttered the word, cancer. But it is the mark of Winnie. Even a shameful illness like that would not confound her.
‘It is all Billy Kerr,’ I say. ‘Billy Kerr coming up to us, and talking to her, and I don’t know what he has said to her, but it is all very strange. She says, she says they have an understanding ...’
‘Billy Kerr?’
She is very quiet for a minute. She is thinking.
‘Well,’ she says at last. ‘Well, that is surprising, Annie, but I suppose people in general are surprising.’
‘But, Winnie, is it not ... is it not awful?’
‘Awful? I don’t know.’
‘The ages, Winnie, are not right.’
‘Oh? How old is Sarah Cullen now? I am sure she is sixty.’
‘She is sixty-one, just a shade older than myself, two years between us.’
‘Well,’ she says, disastrously, ‘Mrs Tomkin in the village was sixty-three when she married.’
‘But Mr Tomkin was older than her, and it was his second marriage, after the first Mrs Tomkin died.’
‘Well, I don’t know, Annie. Billy Kerr is no spring chicken either. If he doesn’t want children, it hardly matters what age his wife would be.’
‘Spring chicken? Is he not forty-five then? I thought so!’
‘Sure, no, no, Billy is in his fifties too. It’s that we feed him so well, he looks like a gasur.’
‘But, Winnie, Winnie, it’s just the farm he wants, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, now, Annie, a woman with a farm is an attractive notion, but Billy Kerr, you know, he is very sincere.’
‘Sincere?’
‘Yes.’
She looks at me. I feel she can see into my worried heart. I feel she can read there after all the source of my fear. She looks at me I think with pity, biting her lip as she does.
‘We are not against marriages, and we are not for marriages, ourselves. We never wished to marry here, you know,’ says Winnie, leaning in to me, as if I have asked her that, but I haven’t. ‘Our father left the three of us the place. , We would not divide it. We are happy to have each other. The first to die will be buried by two sisters, and the sec- , ond to die will be buried by one, and the last will have to bury herself, and that is our story!’
And she offers her enormous, kindly laugh to the bare, scratched boards of the naked kitchen, and turns her back without insult and starts to heave the fresh-boiled water into the kettle.
Oh, I am surprised and disheartened by her generous humanity. I thought I was so safe in my prejudices, and forgot the breadth of Winnie’s sympathies. It is a disaster.
Chapter Eleven
As it is the boy’s fifth birthday in July, it behoves me to carry myself whatever way I can now without the pony and trap to Baltinglass, and see if there is anything there in the haberdashery and general store that would interest a little boy. As it may be imagined, I proceed on my way with some grimness, after what Winnie has told me.
It is Pat Byrne the stone-man that gives me a lift in his Ford Anglia and I suppose he considers me a very glum package indeed in the bright red plastic seat beside him. But I cannot help it. I cannot hardly speak to myself let alone to him. I feel the world is against me and at the same time I feel miserably at odds with everything. I have the awkward sense that if I open my mouth people will know me for the villain I am. At the same time, or in the next breath, tears keep surging up into my eyes, tears of some righteousness, because my mind keeps rising to righteousness. All in all I am like a ragged wind in a tangled hedge.
Well, and I do find a highly suitable toy, a wooden fire engine painted a fierce green.
This I carry back, entering the farm like a Russian spy, and hiding the present in its folds of newspaper under the hulk of the abandoned trap. I feel in my heart that it will make the little boy’s head hot with pleasure when he sees it on the great day.
I am out of sorts now but not entirely so. The fire engine at least, I am thinking, is a victory of a kind.
Next day at evening time I am sitting on my three-legged stool, in the cow shed, milking Daisy and Myrtle. I can feel the hard little saddle of the stool against my hard backside. It is a marriage. Daisy has given up all she has, and now I lean in against Myrtle’s warm bulk, to encourage her. I begin the little hauling on her teats, stretching them, squeezing them, and after a little, the warm milk starts to spurt, striking the zinc bucket with a satisfying ripping noise. This is work that would calm an evil God. Lucifer himself would find a balm in it.
The children come out to me, maybe scattered from the kitchen by Sarah. They stand in the wide doorway of the shed, darkening the interior a little. Myrtle pays them no heed. She thinks nothing of them, maybe, mere calves of human beings. Not that I really know how a cow may think. But she must be thinking something, to judge by the murky but intelligent
eyes, the blue of mackerel. She is relaxed now, surrendered, or she could not give the milk.
They are holding hands, the boy and the girl. They are complete, content, sunburned. Their own eyes are bright as pebbles in the river, and they are giggling like friends. I have watched the little girl carefully but not seen hide nor hair of anything like the thing I witnessed. My worry about them is lessening. I am hopeful that it must have been a little experiment, a moment, one of those undesirable things that happen the once.
I have debated with myself whether I should ask the little girl about it, but I cannot find the words. I do not think she would know how to answer me. It would embarrass her terribly. Much as it offends me to think it, it must be a part of being brother and sister, a mimicking of love, I do not know. Despite what Sarah says, the little girl seems bright and whole to me now. She is full of laughter.
I bend Myrtle’s supple teat towards them and send a long stream of milk across the shed. The smell of milk bursts through the shed like a veritable seltzer, that odour of inside skin that babies too must have when they are born. It breaks up into a thousand droplets, glistening like mother-of-pearl. It cascades down and strikes the gansey of the boy, the dress of the girl. They scream with surprise and delight.
In the twilight of a few days following, I am carrying in a forkful of hay to Billy in his murky byre, when what light there is is erased by someone suddenly standing in the gap. I have been speaking to Sarah those days as if no catastrophe was imminent, because there is no other way we could continue to run the farm, and she falls I think gladly under the same foolish spell.