He gives a little laugh, and takes his gaze off me, as if he thinks I am mad.
‘You know, Annie,’ he says, leaning back on the grass, chewing at his egg—already he has put the matter out of his head—‘you are doing a wonderful job with these children. They are as active as chimpanzees. How do you do it? I wouldn’t last a day. They are lovely, oh yes, but, heavens you would need to be in the first flush of youth for them!’
‘You have to know how to manage them,’ I say, a little dizzy now with relief, ‘like any other creature - how to farm them, in effect. Though, yes, there are nights when Sarah and I fall into bed with the gratitude of women reprieved.’
‘Well, I hope Trevor is good and grateful, and I’m sure he is.’
‘Well, we have heard nothing since he left to go. The little boy writes a scrap of a letter to him every day. Just scribbles and gobbledegook. I am keeping the letters. But I am hoping their father will write soon, or I will have to make up a letter, and pretend it’s from him.’
‘And their mother?’
‘Oh, just the same.’
‘They will be very preoccupied, setting up house.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And they are safe here. They know that. Nowhere safer than Kelsha and Annie. You are doing a tremendous job, tremendous. Yes, I am saying to you, Annie, I am admiring you for it.’
So I am silenced by that, how could I not be? It is praise from on high—I almost said, from the master. I luxuriate in it, I confess. For those moments I feel like the greatest minder of children, the greatest great-aunt that ever lived.
‘Ah, sure,’ I say, ‘it is a pleasure mostly.’
‘They are grand children,’ he says, watching them. ‘Grand.’
What I would like to say to him is, ‘Matt, Sarah too is on the brink of marrying. What will I do, what will I do? Who will take me in, and guard me, and be father and mother to my fears? Won’t you help me, Matt? Won’t you take me back?’
But pride, oh, and sense too, forbids it. Of course it does. I know the story of the world. Aching hearts and silences. So was it ever, so will it ever be. I must be tremendous Annie instead, on the dry grass as near to fire as makes no difference.
Oh, grind up the furze-root as you might, and feed it to us, you could not put the two of us a-ploughing. Grind up the furze, grind up the furze, but I fear it will be to no avail!
When he is going out the gate that evening, I give him a wrap of my butter, as a memorial of the day. He says he will spread it upon his bread in the morning, under the heats of Lathaleer.
And like old friends fond of each other’s company, we make a plan for one of the days to drive in his Ford into the Glen of Imail, and choose some wild spot there with the children, and picnic again.
Strange days of peace, considering.
That evening I play with the children with an odd abandon. It is the game they love, How Many Miles to Babylon? They take turns, dutifully, but with ferocious desire in their eyes.
I put the little girl up on my knees for the umpteenth time. My lap is sore and rubbed by them. My old dress has taken a drubbing. But, what do I care?
‘How many miles to Babylon?
Three score and ten.
Will I be there by candlelight?
Sure, and back a-gain.‘
And when I reach the gain, I let her down suddenly between my legs, holding her hands, her scream echoing in the lime-washed room. The little boy is already jumping and clamouring for his go. Sarah is laughing in the shadows.
Candlelight, candlelight.
Chapter Thirteen
An old woman, one of the O‘Tooles, that lived in the last house except one on Keadeen - the rabbit man is the last—has died, and Sarah has gone up the mountain road to lay her out. She is a woman I never knew, and abided her last days in a tiny thatched cabin with mud walls, all half sunk back into the wild earth from which it was made. How lonely she will have been. Neighbour she had none, except the rabbit man. And he is a man of few greetings mostly. The odd time there is the summer of talk in him. But when you might see him on the road betimes, and when that usual mood is on him he will barely greet you. And when you turn your head again to see him, he will be gone, gone out of sight entirely, plunged up silent and quick into his woods, like a spirit, like a vanishing sprite.
So that old woman cannot be said to have had a neighbour.
I did not even know she was there until her family came in and asked for Sarah. For Sarah is always called on for the laying out, and when she was younger, and a child was sick in a neighbour’s house, oftentimes she was sent for, for to suggest a remedy. Of course there is the good doctor, Doctor Byrne, but he must have money for his work. Sarah will take no money, nor nothing else in kind. It is a part of her secret, a reclusive gift.
But I notice these years she is never sent for. It is to do with the tarring of the roads, the demise of the traps, the death of things we knew in general. A gift like hers is no longer trusted, being a home-made thing. The shop-bought bread, the shop-bought medicine, it is all part and parcel of the same thing. At least now, when a last woman is to be taken from the mountain, where she must have lived in secret penury, the family have the justice and the ceremony to call on Sarah.
She has gone up the hill with her candle, her basin and her cloths. She will wash that old lady for the last time, and burn the clothes after at the back of the midden. She will lay those cool cloths along arms and withered legs, she will scour out the old body, and plug her gently, and fold those arms of long work and toil. If she was a child of Mary at school as a little girl, she will have a blue habit folded in a drawer and Sarah will put that on her, as a mark of her goodness, or at least, former goodness. If there are scapu lars sewn into her knickers, she will snip them out and give them on to the eldest girl among her surviving relatives. They are all people that have left this district. Her great-uncle was the famous silent man, Wesley Mathews, who spoke but seldom. It is said that when he went to America he was conversing with a neighbour on the last day. The neighbour says to him, ‘Wesley, see that blackbird. It is the blackest blackbird I ever seen.’ Wesley said nothing, but went to America the next day. Fourteen years later he returned, and met the neighbour on the road. ‘It is,’ he said.
But that is a story told about many places, and it may have no truth. Sarah will not be thinking of such a thing while she works.
Then poor Father Casey with his onerous gout will come up past us here in his car, driven by his man German Doherty, humming no doubt one of his dancing tunes. Because German Doherty plays in the ceilidh band, and after the harvest they are called on to visit the houses, when people want dancing and happiness. He cuts a sharp figure there with the priest, German Doherty does. They will sweep up the mountain, German dodging the worst of the ruts in the track, and singing. Then that old woman will get her oils and her solemn prayers. At the close, Sarah will place a candle in her hands, and open the window. And when the wind blows out the candle, that will be called the fleeing of the soul, up to the heavens.
God forbid that Sarah should ever have to lay me out. That would be a short walk for the work, from her side of the bed to mine.
So I am left alone in the house and must shoulder Sarah’s tasks. It is a taste of the life she has led before I came, a list as long as a pig’s intestine. You can make a lot of sausages from the one pig, if you have the stuffing. I remember my father delighting in the slaughter of the pig, the cutting, and then, him in his hobnail boots walking on the carcass, to work the salt into the skin. Such food would bring my father fiercely up the yard, if he knew there was a wodge of cured bacon cooking. And truly it is a magnificent food. The skin all salty and tender because of the walking, the flesh all pungent and wild as brambles because of the boiling.
Often and often Matt carried me over in the Ford to see my father while he languished in the county home in Baltinglass. In truth it was the workhouse of old, and these days they are wanting to call it not even the
county home, but the hospital. They can call it what they want, but it is still a bleak, dark house of granite stones, and in a room of that place, a veritable cell, my father descended, losing wits and sense, and even his clothes, which he gave away near the end to another man, a hero of his youth also incarcerated in that spot. And in I went one day and found my father in his long johns! I did not laugh, though I almost laugh now to think it. I suppose I did not see the humour then, because in truth there was none. It was all too bleak, such a resplendent man, with his uniforms, his bulk, and his habit of command, as he called it, reduced to an ember of that fire, one coal in the grate, one fragment of coal, barely showing in the darkness. ‘Annie,’ he would say to me, ‘Annie, where’s Dolly?’ and I would tell him she was in Ohio, and then half a minute later he would ask again, and I would tell him again Ohio, and he would look at me as if it was information he was getting for the first time. And I do not know how they treated him in that place. You never know what happens after they shut the doors on you, and they have the old inmates to themselves. I forget the man’s name that tended him, but he was a dark bull of a man from Cavan or somewhere the like uncivilized, and I did not like him.
There was no one there when he died. There was not. I do not even know who laid him out, who blessed him, who lit a candle for him and opened the window to let out his soul. He had less in that way than this old dame upon Keadeen.
I hope God will forgive me, I do hope he will. I hope St Peter will let me pass the gates.
I am thinking these thoughts and I have finished banking the fire and giving the flags a sweep and flicking the feathers at the crockery. So I wander out through the half-door to escape the little storms of dust. The little boy is playing there, at a game of childhood in the shadow-hooded yard. The sun now climbs down Keadeen, her lights have lifted and lie on the slates of the calf byre, like golden slates themselves. Such an old, humble place, with such a wealth of gilding! But what is the boy playing with? There is something green under his foot, and he is skating on it, but in a stumbling manner, down the middle gutter of the yard, where the ground is smoother and flatter, to fetch off the rainwater when required.
‘What have you found there, child? Is it a piece of wood?’
He visibly gives a start, his short round shoulders jumping. He turns his head slowly to look at me, the brown eyes as hooded as the day. He looks both fearful and angry, I cannot say it plainer. I have never seen such a look in him before.
‘What have you got there?’ I say, and proceed over to him, feeling suddenly very like my poor father, approaching what seems very like the guilty party.
I reach him. I look down at the object under his foot. He looks down at it, and then back up at me.
It is the green fire engine I have bought and hidden in the barn for his birthday. The wheels hang out at the sides, quite forced and ruined. The half-dry mud of the gully, that probably in all truth carries also the urine from the calves in the shed, has smeared the gift, turning it from that bright fresh toy into an aged thing. It is only good now for laying out itself. I stare down at the boy’s face. Yes, a filthy anger rises in me, something prompted by his own look, his demeanour of misery and defiance.
‘Where is your sister? Would she not have prevented such - such brutality? Such thuggery? Have you gone into the barn and took it out? Are you so brazen, so wild, so cruel?’
‘I was in looking for eggs for you,’ he says. ‘I put my hand in a shadowy place and found it.’
‘And do you know what it is?’
‘It is a green fire engine.’
‘But why do you think it would be there in the barn?’
‘For fires,’ he says. ‘For green fires.’
‘It,’ I say, lifting his foot off the toy, and lifting the toy from the gutter, ‘is your birthday present.’
He basks me in a look of entire joy. But I crush that joy under the heel of my stare.
‘It was your present,’ I say. ‘For it is no more. Now you have no present. Now I have gone to Baltinglass and spent a month’s money on this joke, and now it is destroyed, and you will have no surprise.’
Of course, even as I allow my anger rein, like Billy the pony himself, I know it is not him who will have no surprise, but me who will have no pleasure in fetching the present in to him, on the bright morning of his birthday. He was born in the great heatwave of 1955, and therefore owns a sunny disposition. But my words strike harsh clouds across his eyes, I dim his lights for him. I can see it. I can feel it. But it does not stop me. I know I am murdering him, because I understand the small language of his looks. Never have we stood against each other like this. The smaller voice inside me cries out, mercy, grant him mercy, Annie. But some other loud, vicious, uncontrollable thing calls.
I am as near to striking him, even to kicking, as puts a true fear into me. I march away with the engine instead, and past Billy’s dark prison, and through the gables along the ‘lane’, and up to the dung heap. I place the engine on the ground, and shove my hand sin-deep amid the rotting stuff, and tear away at the layers and lumps, deep as I can go, deeper, far deeper than the child could go, deeper, far deeper than will have it ever found again. I pray that the moisture of the dunghill will seep fast into its soft wood, and rot it, render it, reduce it like bones and skulls. Down into the morass I thrust the engine, and cover it back over with the muck. My arms are smeared with odorous browns and greens from the elbows to the fingertips. And my head is racing, tumbling, painfully tumbling.
The little boy has not moved. He can see me well enough from where he stands. Then slowly he turns away, like a little monk, and walks gradually back to the half-door, and in he goes like the shadow of a hen. Red Dandy struts with her sisters in the upper yard. The sunlight kisses the ridge tiles of the calf byre. Everything is normal in the yard, everything in its place, except the misplaced anger of my heart, the topsy-turvy kettle of my heart, spilling out venomously onto the enrichened grasses.
Immediately the anger abates. Immediately I am guilty, with a dark, bladed guilt. I have given way to an ungovernable anger with the child I love. I am as ruined and smeared as the engine. I am destroyed.
She stuck the penknife in the baby’s heart, Weile, weile, wáile,
She stuck the penknife in the baby’s heart, Down by the river Sáile.
‘You are upset, Annie,’ Sarah says that night in the bed, her generous task for that old woman done. Her mind is on other things, on death and washed bones. She has listened to my tale of the fire engine, but with a withering interest. ‘You are upset because of what I have put to you. Now when the boy does something as any boy would, that is in the nature of boys, you will be for going to war with him. I blame myself. I am sorry, Annie. The ball of twine is all twisting up. It was as neat as a newborn foal these two years. Now it is all twisted up.’ Then she falls again to thinking.
I am silent too. I cannot speak to her. The little boy I sent to bed early, and the little girl for good measure. There are weights on my arms and my legs. I am weighed down, I am old. I cannot manage these two children. They are bringing me to distress. It is all an error on the part of their father. How could he think to leave them here, with me and Sarah, and all the years there are between us? What foul little instinct is it in the boy to fetch out the beautiful present and destroy it? To muck it up and make nothing of it?
Oh, I am festering. The starched sheet lies to my chin. Oh, but she is right. She is a wise woman. She is offering truth. But the truth she offers sticks in my throat like boiled spuds. I need a drink of milk to wash it down, but what shall this milk consist of? Some glean of sense, some descending peace. I must lie as still as a cat. I must wait for ease. That I might think, that I might think ... More difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of an needle. But more difficult still, a foolish, moiling old woman.
But the next day I feel I might have the remedy. If Sarah is correct then another effort must be made to avert what threate
ns me. I cannot stand day after day on the edge of the pit that Billy Kerr is digging for me. It would be foolish. Suddenly I.remember that Matt is a friend of Billy Kerr‘s, or so Billy Kerr has claimed. Cannot he speak to him?
All day I wait as patiently as a salmon fisher for a salmon. I do not send for Matt, which would be an awkward action, but somehow I imagine and assume that he will be up the road to us, as has become his wont. I am not so blind as to think he comes for me, it is his grandchildren that he cannot get enough of. He paints about the countryside all the mornings, rising I know with the cockcrow and then sun, then no doubt he feels his footsteps drawn to Kelsha. Time afflicts him as it does the rest of us. Maybe he is thinking of that, the cramped space that we are given to be children in, how bright and brief it is. Now is his chance to drink the waters of their love for him. Oh, well he knows it, and well he ought to know it. Woe betide the person who does not.
And yet he does not come. We pass through the tasks of the day and there is no sign of him. The summer dark comes late against the hills, the yard closes over again, the hens are fed in the flashing shadows, Billy gets his share of hay in his pitchy byre, the children are folded in again to find their sleep. Has he gone about the countryside like the gleaners of old, making his quick sketches like a poor man collecting the fallen ears of corn, gathering the beauties of Kelsha, Feddin and Kiltegan, and then returned all tired and content to his bed in Lathaleer, and never a thought for me? I expect so.
If the little boy was gravely offended, the mercy of his age soon lightens him. A boy of nearly five cannot hold a grudge. I have a vision of him skating on the engine, he no doubt for a little while of me shoving the engine into the midden of muck. My vision abides, but his fades quickly. By mid-morning, after his egg in a cup, his soldiers of bread, he is as good as before, gentle and sweet, smiling and true. So we imagine we do them no harm by our crude actions. But I wonder. I wonder. For I remember now the slights of childhood, now that I am growing old and older, and sometimes they are bitter and large in my mouth. I remember how the girls of the Loreto Convent in North Great George’s Street jeered my back, how I was never a girl among girls, but only a wounded creature among the complete. How straight were all their limbs, how neat their blouses hung on their spines. In the dark of my room in the Castle those straight backs would float above my bed, in their summer blouses. Even the ugliest face in the school could claim a pretty back. Backs were all my study, old women in the street, the young, the poor, the wealthy in their furs. ‘