The whole of the world is still. The beech trees along the border of the wall are quiet tonight. The woods themselves must be halted above on the ridge. And there is no thrashing about of branches to disturb the children, who, after all, are city children, and need time to adjust, and not just to the butter. Salted, unsalted, that is the difference, salted and unsalted life. They cannot be immediately at home, it is not possible, no matter how deeply I revere them.
I thank God for the windless night.
The children are in their bedroom sleeping as deep as river stones. I am thinking of the little boy in his nest of sheets and blankets. The sheets are like white card they are so starched.
I was so eager to make their bedclothes agreeable and nice, I am afraid I was a bit loose-handed with the starch bottle. No matter. The old brown water bottle softens them a little. I know he will have his small feet set on it, in a kind of friendly fashion.
He has an odd attitude to mere objects, he imparts characteristics to them. The water bottle hence is his friend. The old blue coverlet, with the scenes of country life stitched onto it, is his friend. He has greeted everything in the house with a kind of satiated longing. I wonder what his dreams might be.
Perhaps he sees the long road to Kelsha unwinding in his sleep, the sparkling hedges, the unknown farms. A little boy’s thoughts, what may they be?
The kettle is back off the flames on its grubby crane - the grease of cooking defeats even us - because I could not be tempted to tea now so late, as it might have me stiff in the bed with sleeplessness, which would be an awful occasion. I will be depending now on sleep for my recuperation, the friendly sister of sleep.
A day of hardship is a long day, good times shorten the day, and yet a life in itself is but the breadth of a farthing. I am thinking these thoughts, country thoughts I suppose, old sayings of my father.
My father liked just as much as myself the empty spectacle of the fireplace, or did until the great restlessness took a hold of him. After that nothing suited him.
Everything seems far away as I sit there in the gloom of the lowering turf. Everything seems to stand off in the distance, like those deer that slip from the woods at dusk to crop the soft grasses. I am thinking about nothing, slipping from one idle thing to the next as one does beside a fire. For instance it strikes me for no reason at all that the deer are in their Sunday coats, every day of the year.
Jack Furlong the rabbit man goes in after the rabbits but I know he would not hunt the deer. There are thousands of rabbits up on the knolls where the trees end. He is a tender man but it is his work to kill them.
Billy Kerr would harass the deer if there was any profit to himself in doing so, as he is a man without qualities. There is probably a Billy Kerr, or someone like him, in all human affairs. Otherwise all would be well, continually.
But no life is proof against the general tears of things. And as I sit there alone between the sleeping children and the sleeping Sarah, the coverlet over her face in our bedroom behind me, I am not thinking of Billy Kerr in any especial way. My mind is drifting, there is a measure of ease. The children sleep without a sound, the ashes of the turf collapse with a familiar noise the size of mice. I can hear over my head in the wooden loft the tiny dance steps of the real mice as they cross and re-cross in a strange regularity, always going to the limits of the loft and heading back across the boards intently, as if drawing a great star on the dusty boards.
After a while I am disturbed by a little mewling sound, which at first I imagine is coming in from the henhouse. It is built up against the south gable of the house or nearly, and we are therefore neighbours to the hens.
But I fancy it is not the hens. Hens make a sound of outrage when the foxes come down from the trees. This is not a sound of henny outrage, but something softer and darker. I start up from my chair when I realise it is coming from the children’s room.
To their door I dart, lifting the metal latch as gently as old practice can manage, and peer into the glistening dark. What little light follows me in the door now finds the turns and angles of things, the dull brass on the beds and the like. I wonder is it the boy awake and confused by the strange surroundings? But no, it is not he, but the soft swan of the girl in her white nightdress. Her covers are down in the chill bath of stray lights, her little legs are up at the knees, her head of dark hair twists and turns, and out of her red mouth issues the curious sound of something akin to distress.
Of course I creep over to her. I know it is wrong to wake a sleepwalker, but she is not walking. All the same she looks like she is awake in another setting, dreaming she is somewhere with her eyes open. The eyes are not looking at me or anywhere, they are focused on invisible things.
Perhaps I ought to wake Sarah because Sarah for all her silence often knows the solutions to matters that to me seem tangled and dark. The limbs of the little girl are rather beautiful in the murky light, she reminds me of something, maybe my own girlhood, maybe my own early softness and slightness, before my tussle with polio. I do not know.
The little girl cries out. I risk putting a hand on her forehead and immediately her eyes change as I stoop there over her. She lets out a pure thin scream, I never heard the like.
‘What is it, what is it?’ I say.
‘The tiger is in the room,’ she says.
‘There are no tigers in Wicklow,’ I say, but, God help me, I gaze about nevertheless in the fear of seeing one. ‘Bless us, child, there is nothing. Now,’ I say, sitting on the edge of the little bed and stroking her head. Her hair is soft as first grasses. ‘Now, there is nothing to fear. Here you are in Kelsha. You are safe and sound tucked up in your bed. I am here and Sarah.’
The little girl starts to cry. It is a slight, distant, private crying, melancholy and affecting. I am ashamed of myself suddenly for thinking littler of her earlier than her brother. My heart goes out to her, as whose could not?
‘Oh, Auntie Anne,’ she says.
‘Oh, dear,’ I say.
I gather her in my arms. She is only gentle bones. To think a person is a soul wrapped in this cage of bones. What an arrangement, how can we possibly be protected?
‘I am very afraid of the tiger,’ she says. ‘I am glad he is not here.’
‘That’s the truth,’ I say.
She looks at me. She pushes me away a little, as if to see me better. Her own eyes are more accustomed to the dark of that room. There is a world of words in her look, I can almost see her brain struggling. But it is too much for her. Perhaps she does not have words for what she wants to say. Instead she says something else, something simple, that all the children of the world have said in their time, to their mothers and the like. But I had never had it said to me.
‘I love you, Auntie Anne,’ she says.
The wolf of pride smiles in my breast.
‘Oh, I’m sure,’ I say, as pleased as I have ever been, and tuck her back down into the bed. And I laugh.
And she laughs.
‘You go off to sleep now,’ I say. ‘I’ll sit here till you do. God knows.’
And, just as I had mentioned to the boy, the barn owl, that roosts not in the barns, but in the tallest pine at the margin of the woods, calls out one haunting, memory-afflicted note.
Chapter Two
Daylight opens the farm wide, the fearful shadows flee from the damp trees, the pony wakes in his standing, the calves clamber up in the calf byre. I stand in the yard at the rain barrel, holding the enamel jug, stilled by the unexpected veil of sunlight thrown over everything. There is almost heat in it, that May sunlight. Even the cobbles lose their toes of shadows, and the water at the top of the barrel lies in a loose mirror.
I can feel the heat getting into the very fibres of my blouse, a slight heat addressing a woman of slight heat. My bones are grateful where they lie in their weary slings. I lift my face to the light and am amazed again at what great pleasures there are to be had on this earth.
I have lain beside a sleeping Sarah all n
ight, sleeping myself the odd time, trying not to turn or moan and wake her, and was despondent in my thoughts, despite the coming of the children. I became fearful again for their safety, for our ability to guard them, and almost cursed their father for leaving them. Such were the thoughts of the night, banished by this stripling sun.
I plunge the jug down through the film of browned leaves that have come from the gutter despite that Billy Kerr was supposed to clean it, and the rainwater floods in. With the proper gesture the jug can now be lifted without any debris in it, a small triumph of the morning. Out comes Sarah from the kitchen, closing the half-door behind her, with the big basin of grain. She grabs a fistful of it and calls out to the hens, though they are fast still in their coop. Perhaps she does it to excite them.
‘Chuck-chuck, chuck-chuck, chuck-chuck.’
‘Sarah, dear, you haven’t washed.’
‘I’ll wash in a minute, Annie.’
‘You have your blouse on now over your wrists and you haven’t washed them.’
‘No more than yourself.’
‘But I have the sleeves rolled to the elbows in readiness.’
‘The hens are hungry.’
She pulls the wooden hasp on the henhouse and hauls open the old door. It is another thing that needs fixing, for it touches the ground and the rain is eating it from underneath. Billy Kerr again. But then Billy Kerr is not our man, but the man of the Dunnes of Feddin, my three cousins below. We would have our own man but that we can’t afford a whole man all the time. I would not pay a regular wage anyway to Billy Kerr, because his work is dubious.
The cock rushes from the coop in all his confused annoyance and begins to march up and down the yard, nearly running he is. The poor fellow looks like a girl in a rusty tutu all the same, a ballerina. And now his ladies follow him out slowly, bruised-looking from the darkness of the coop, less sure, less eager. They love Sarah, you would think by the way they see her now and crowd against her, and she shakes her wrist of grain at them, the wrist she has not washed, and when it hits the stones like hailstones and leaps about, the hens fasten their beaks into it, a-worrying the whole time, you would think by their glassy eyes, that they will not get enough to fill their bellies.
‘Get back, get back, get back!’ cries Sarah, which is her cry to them these days, because her eyes are failing and she fears to tread on them.
‘Why do you do that?’ I said to her, just a few weeks previous.
‘Because I cannot see them,’ she said.
‘You must go up to Dublin to see the eye doctor,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t see him, either,’ she said, laughing.
‘We must make arrangements,’ I said. ‘It is only sensible.’
‘I must manage for the minute,’ she said. ‘A doctor is a pricey item.’
And since then she does seem to be managing well enough. She is devising strategies, other ways of seeing perhaps. I do not always understand her. At night she pulls the blanket over her face and sleeps under it. In the watches of the night when I have foolishly drunk tea late, and lie awake, I hear her muttering and squawking under the blanket. Now and then she thrashes around, as if she were a marching soldier.
She seems to see well enough when she is asleep, whatever about her waking difficulties.
She marches slowly at the hungry hens, throwing the dampened grain. When she throws it against the sunlight, its colour lightens. Her big hand flashes with grain. Her legs are like the slender pillars of the courthouse in Baltinglass, advancing.
‘When you are finished there,’ I say, ‘come in and wash your wrists like a good woman.’
In I go to the kitchen, closing the half-door behind me, in case the hens might follow me in, and through the kitchen to our bedroom. Into our basin in the bedroom I pour the residue of the rain.
Such water you could not drink. But to plunge in my two hands and lift it, and bang it against my cheeks - my underskin sparkles, it feels like. I see things for an instant - things of summer, rooks racketing out of the trees, heavy heated leaves flashing. Then the room again, the simple wooden room, our only carpeting the chill of May that lies across the floor and seems to seep up through my stout shoes.
Those sleepy heads within, I must wake them. Into their bedroom I go softly to steal a look at their sleeping.
The little girl is peaceful now. She lies on the bed as if gliding across some unseen surface, as if skating, one leg leading the other, the toes pointing.
The boy has neither turned nor stirred you would think, but is ramrod in the starched sheets. Everything is undisturbed, his small head lies in the pillow like an egg in soft earth. I will hardly need to make his bed tonight, except that you must turn down the sheets to retrieve the clay water bottle. I am half laughing at the sight.
‘Come on up,’ I whisper, stirring at their forms with my fingers, not tickling but waking them. ‘It is time to rise. The hens are fed. Come on up,’ I say, ‘it is nearly half past six already.’
The little girl opens her eyes suddenly and looks at me. Perhaps she was already awake, and kept her eyes closed to tease me.
‘Half six,’ she says, ‘Auntie Anne, no human being ever rose at half six.’
‘Well, you are forgetting your country manners,’ I say. ‘If our work is not done by ten, the day is wasted.’
‘Do we have a lot of work then?’
‘Only to watch me and Sarah, and mind Shep doesn’t eat your toast.’
‘I’ll get up at half six for toast,’ she says.
‘So will I,’ says the boy, with his brown farthings for eyes watching me.
‘Did you have good dreams?’ I ask him.
‘I did,’ he says. ‘Perfect dreams.’
‘And what did you dream in the night?’
‘I dreamed our daddy carried us on his back, the both of us, and we were laughing like monkeys.’
‘Where did you ever see monkeys laughing?’
‘In the zoo,’ he says, severely, poised at the end of the bed, shivering a little.
They sit in to the makeshift table by the fire, and I hold out their bread on a long iron fork, and soon the turf flames begin to paint the slice with a soft brown.
‘Now,’ says the girl, ‘do you hear that?’
‘What?’ says the boy.
‘I told you the cricket would still be there in the stones.’
And they cock their ears dutifully to the cricket and sure enough the cricket sings for them.
‘You’d think he’d like to be out in the fields singing, not singing in here with us,’ says the boy.
‘You would think,’ I say. ‘But there is no telling with crickets.’
‘Do I like the sound at all? I don’t know,’ says the boy. ‘Is a cricket like a snake or what is it like?’
‘It’s just a little thing with folded wings.’
‘Like an angel,’ says the boy.
‘Well, aye, I suppose, like an angel in the wall.’
Then the rattling of the latch and Billy Kerr puts his head in the door. It is very early for him and anyway we have sent down no message to him to come up.
‘Ah, there you are, Annie,’ he says. ‘Where’s Sarah at this hour?’
There you are, Annie, where’s Sarah? I don’t know what it is, but I look at him with accustomed suspicion. He is forty-five and his appearance is his own business. But I don’t like the head of him, the scraggy red hair and the black stubble on his chin. I don’t like his small stature and the set of clothes on him that might give pause to a tinker before he put them on. Of course they are work clothes and I shouldn’t be so harsh. But it is the air of the man, the confidence grounded on so little evidence for confidence. Even though he has swept off his cap it is the same as if he hasn’t bothered. Anyway he waves his cap at me like he was airing it, like he was drying it of sweat in the warm kitchen after the long walk uphill along the green road from Feddin.
‘If you don’t see her in the yard, I don’t know where she is. Don’
t you go creeping about. It is early morning and she hasn’t even washed herself.’
‘I don’t see her,’ he says, looking back out into the yard. ‘No, I don’t.’ For a full half minute he stands there, showing us the heathery hair on the back of his head.
Silence has fallen on the children the way it does when they don’t know a person, and they are staring quietly at him like two blades of shovels. At last he swivels his head again and seems to see the children for the first time.
‘Whose are these girls?’ he says.
‘They’re not both girls. It’s my nephew’s children.’
‘Ah, yes. The boy is not hardy yet! Is he four?’
The little boy looks up curiously.
‘He is nearly five,’ I say, like a lawyer to the defence.
‘Down for a few days?’ he says airily.
I am not inclined to give him information, harmless though the information is. And anyway everyone will know hereabouts soon enough. But information is a gift of sorts, and I feel ever niggardly towards him. So I say nothing with an easy air, not to give offence and yet not to give satisfaction.
‘Ah, anyway,’ he says. ‘Pleased to meet ye.’
Then he hovers there. There is no end to his ability to hover. I have seen him hovering over a shovel when he ought to have been sluicing out a ditch, with yards of a flooded field behind him.
It suddenly strikes me that his eye is on the black kettle that rattles with heat over the turf. I concentrate my efforts on not glancing in the same direction, or I can be accused of rudeness later, down in the village where no doubt he laughs about my temperament.
Everyone knows my grandfather was once the steward there, and a tall, lofty-minded person he was, that the likes of Billy Kerr would not have dared address directly, and if he had, would have been given no answer. But those days are gone and blasted for ever, like the old oak forests of Ireland felled by greedy merchants long ago.
There are some who remember such things in their own way. They like to see me hanging on the mercy of Sarah, if that is what I am doing. They like to see a woman with nothing between herself and the county home but the kindness of a cousin, a woman whose relatives were kings of Kelsha one time. Poor Annie Dunne, they must say, if they are kind. They will find other things to say, if they are not. Well, if we were something then, I am nothing now, as if to balance such magnificence with a handful of ashes. Our glory alas was before any of those mad gunmen, De Valera and his crew, thought to throw everything over with a dark frenzy of blood and murder. Before all the wars, all the upheavals, the uprisings and the civil disturbances, thirty long years ago, the very things that destroyed my own father’s mind. For my father was a simple policeman in seditious times, and it did for him conclusively.