Is the dark troubled by our dreams? The whole district, the whole half of the world closed from the sun, dreaming. Men and women, sisters, brothers, in their allotted beds. The accidental nature of it all. My dreams are clear, like life really, whole and pure. I see my father there, the policeman, and my mother in her youth, when she loved to be with us, and counted herself the most blessed of women to have three girls and a little boy. We were her dry kingdom and her fallow field, where she let nothing grow, only the dallying sun was allowed there, to dance for us, to sing its dry song for us. So in my dreams I see her often, long, not beautiful, but calm and smiling. From this world of tears she was torn by a thinning disease, when my father was in his fiftieth year. It was a long, hard job for him to mind us. But in my dreams she is not dead, but precisely living, even-handed and serenely just.
The summer offers a general peace, perhaps the very peace that passeth all understanding. God may have been thinking of the Irish winter when he wrote that in the good book. My spirit is altered by the deepening length of the days, the pleasant trick that summer plays, of suggesting eternity, when the light lies in the yard, and Shep is perpetually stricken by that light, the heavy weight of heat on those special days. Hopefully heaven itself will consist of this, the broadening cheer of light when I walk out into the morning yard. The stones already hot, softened by dawn. The rain deep in the earth seeps further down, and a lovely linen-like dryness afflicts the land. Grass becomes bright and separate, like a wild cloth. A crust appears on the dunghill. The piss of the calves dries in the gullies like spit on a heating griddle. Sleekness creeps over things, handles and insects. You can almost hear the work of the sun in those long, patient things, the buds of the crab-apple tree, the little hinges of the sycamores. How fresh and alive the leaves even, shouting with green, delighting in life. Stone and earth and wood, the make-up of our little hillside palace, where such as we abide.
How different our story would be if we were Greeks or Spaniards, and could count on that sunlight. But it is only a trick, for many a day of summer is sister to any winter day. And yet we embrace the trick, we live by it.
I have not fetched the lambs from their lairs in the sheets, let them lie a little longer, they are still city children yet. Soon they will adjust to us, and rise with the cockcrow easily and full of go. The zinc bucket creaks in the hooks of my fingers, and I pass along the dew-drenched path to the well, sucking in the smells of clover and the queer fresh smell of the bread-and-butter bushes, a smell so slight you could miss it, a hair’s breadth of a smell. The may sits heavily in the bushes this year. The slopes of Kelshabeg are all brightened by it, it is a free glory. My polka-dotted dress brushes the fringes of the taller grass, giving me a little line of wetness there, but I do not care. Though I am old I feel a skittering in my bones, a gratitude, an interest in this adventure, and I am speculating on the state of the well. Will she have been there before me, the wild witch across the road, and disturbed the mud, and washed some old working bucket there?
But all is clean and stately, the big sliced boulder of water lying in its crown of long grasses, the kneeling-stone dry and welcoming. So I dip my bucket there with secret expertise, not a grain of mud rises from the black bottom. The bucket drinks the water. Some boatmen, little black darting creatures, creep in on the deluge. Let them come, I do not care. They will keep the water stirred and good while it sits under its damp muslin cloth by the door.
For some reason I think of Mary Callan in her lone bed, no type of human body to lie at her side, in a filthy nest no doubt of fetid sheets. Perhaps on mere straw she lies, in the manner of the old days, when cottagers and the like could not stretch to such matters as linen. In the straw they all lay down, adults and children and many of them, and in the low part of the room the beasts lay down, the milking cow and a calf if they were lucky, and if more fortunate than most, the prized personage of the pig. It was the slope in the floor that kept the emissions of the animals well down from the sacred precinct of the hearth, where the human animals gathered and took their farthings of ease at nightfall. It is my suspicion that Mary Callan holds to these emergencies and customs yet. Should this awake a shadow of sympathy in me, such a dark, solitary life so near to our own? I suppose it should and does, but I damn her dirty bucket anyhow.
Now when the gloss of daylight has brushed every stone, and the sun itself moved beyond the gable of the milking shed, and I have chastised Sarah for her neglecting to put Daisy and Myrtle back up to the grass, and given them an unaccustomed night under the spidery rafters, and I have roused the two children and brought porridge to their niche in the fireplace, where they lurk now with spoons like the mites they are, Billy Kerr comes in to us. I am not so surprised to see him, since he may have things to do to right the old trap, or some such plan, nor am I so vexed. The services of the previous day have given me a lingering endurance of him, with his round face speckled with unshaven hairs. His chin and cheeks are like wood infested with a damp bloom. There seems to be a big bone across his shoulders so he looks perpetually like a man with a wooden yoke for two buckets, except there are no buckets, only some mysterious invisible weight that stoops him slightly. As a woman with a hump myself, I would not care to see the children you would get off of such a man, no more than I would have cared to risk children out of myself, though the great need was there, certainly. It might well be crooked children he would give a woman.
No matter for that, Sarah greets him kindly and sets him at the scrubbed table and fetches tea to him again. Maybe he senses the relaxation in me, because he is not annoying or dark with me this day, but glances over at me and smiles in a brotherly fashion. Maybe he thinks the ring is in my nose now, the danger is less in me.
‘That’s a great mass of sunlight now,’ he says, ‘stretching the height of Keadeen mountain and I don’t think we will see rain again for a week. So between the recent rain and the sun, anyone with potatoes sown will be happy. The Dunnes of Feddin have half an acre sown. They were sitting up with their boiled eggs this morning as happy as pigs in muck.’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’ says Sarah. ‘They’re hard to work. Did you put in those spuds for them, Billy Kerr?’
‘I did. The four worked side by side. We were fitting in spuds and singing. Good work.’
‘Well,’ says Sarah, edging the cup with its rings of blue and white closer to his hand because he has not drunk yet, ‘it is a good thing to have the spuds to put in, and the ground, and the people to do the putting. Me and Annie will sow our own store soon, I am sure.’
‘We most certainly will,’ I say. ‘Most certainly.’
The children sit in the niche of the fire, staring at the talking adults. Their dim spoons travel from bowl to mouth, bowl to mouth.
‘They are certainly grand children,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘They must get right feeding in the big city. How’s that boy today, hah?’
The boy stares out at him, the man who the day before has played with him on the green road. And yet nothing issues forth from him, no easy talk or smile.
‘You see,’ says Billy Kerr, ‘a night of sleep passes, and they forget you.’
‘He’s only a little fellow,’ I say, by way of explanation and perhaps a hint of apology. Because the boy can be oddly silent even with me. You need to tickle him out, like a spider having his web tickled with a stick. The girl is like a secret all to herself, like seven magpies. Five for silver, six for gold. Seven is a secret never to be told.
He’s only a little fellow. A little fellow has a memory worthy of remark. He seems to forget and yet another time he can call forth a matter in all its bright details. He chooses to remember in his own good time, cannot remember unless something in him wants to. Not wanting to remember for the boy is the same as forgetting. Perhaps that is what forgetting is, and I would do well to practise that art. The ease and dance of a boy’s mind, the rightness of it. But I must think also how easy it would be to destroy his dance, his ease. So I must think well of his f
ather, with that red beard, who as a boy himself had the temper of a wolf - silence, silence, and then the growl and the snap, a ravening temper he could bring to bear on his younger brother. His older brother was different, employing much more elaborate methods of torture. They were a threesome of endless and unnecessary war. And I stood among them not as a mother, which should have been Maud’s job, though Maud either doted on or ignored them, and finally, abandoned them and all daily matters, and put herself to bed one autumn morning and never arose again in any purposeful way. There was a horror and a terror in that for the boys, and in chief for the father of this little scrap, who worshipped the ground his mother trod on. The trouble was, she did not issue forth, to trod!
I do believe the little boy never met his grandmother Maud, or perhaps he crossed her time of dying with earliest babyhood. Certainly Matt worships in turn his little grandson, says he will put him to being a painter like himself, and glories in the prospect. Matt may profess a great disappointment in his eldest son, who he calls a Bohemian, meaning a mere layabout, even though he went himself to be a sculptor in the art college in Dublin. But of this boy’s father he never says but good, and of this boy likewise.
The boy again in turn worships Matt, because Matt, when they lived near him in Donnybrook, was always careful to bring boiled sweets on his bicycle every Sunday, and that is the kind of thing that registers with a child.
Soon now Matt will be down with his paints and easel as the summer matures, and I am hoping he will make the journey from Lathaleer, my cousin’s farm where he stays, often, for the boy’s sake. For my own part it would give me no grief if I never set eyes on him again, for his cruel actions. One of which is, he will not stay here in Kelsha with us, and indeed we have no space for him, but if he wished we would make up the hag’s bed for him, where he could sleep the sleep of the just, with the comfort of the sleeping fire. And it would be nothing for us to include his shirts and drawers in the wash, items I knew well in the old fled days when I washed for all those men, him and his three sons. When they were my care.
But the boy is a complete boy, no roaring or beating has pulled the crystal jewel from his crown of contentment. So I must also say a word in favour of his mother, who I know, because it is writ plain in her face, has a dislike for me. Although it suited her to leave the children with us, while they fix their tent in London, I feel she has no great opinion of our abilities. She wrote me a letter of preparation and thanks that reeked of doubt. Luckily she is a rather indifferent mother - the children’s clothes were all entirely sent down to me without ironing, and holes in the heels of socks, and tears in trousers left to the mercies of the wind like neglected houses—or I might never have got my mitts on the boy and girl. As Billy Kerr luxuriates in the peace of our kitchen, I am buffeted, tormented even, again by this feeling I have for them. It is like the treacle in the pudding when it is first thrown down on the dough, and the spoon so slow and held back as the mixture is stirred, dragging on the muscles at the top of the working arm. And then the treacle begins to let itself be folded in, and surrenders, and imparts to the pudding that wild taste of sugar, foaming and cavorting in the mouth. Not that treacle pudding features much down here in Kelsha—that was an item of my mother’s in the old kitchen in Dublin Castle in our heyday, so the memory of the weak arm is my arm as a little girl helping her mother, in the eternal security of early years.
Chapter Five
‘So I am thinking,’ says Billy Kerr, ‘that pony now, I am sure you will be eager to sell him now, and in that regard I’ve been asking about Kiltegan and Feddin, and I think I have a man will take him from you, despite the new savagery in him. Because I think he must be a man’s pony now, someone that can handle him and put manners back on him. Although I would advocate the gentle touch now with an animal, there must be that hidden strength there in the arm if needed. By God, if a pony wished, he might break everything in his world, with those hooves. He might start to kick and kick till all was sundered and in a thousand pieces. Think of that!’
He has said this in the direction of the children, wide-eyed in their niche. The boy looks to me for confirmation, he licks once at his lower lip. I shake my head in a wordless denial. But I suppose it is true. Nevertheless, I have again that unpleasant but informative creeping in the back of my head, that stirring there like woodlice in a seeming solid log, that doesn’t concur with what Billy Kerr is saying, doesn’t like it and doesn’t know exactly why. But the why is coming close behind.
‘And I’d say, you’d be lucky now to get a ten-bob note for that animal, but I think I could get that for you, indeed and I do.’
Ten bob? One nice paper note for such a handsome horse, that Sarah Cullen paid as I remember six pounds, seventeen shillings, and sixpence for, the sixpence returned to her as luck money by the tinker that sold her the horse, and tried to put the spit he spat into his hand into her hand for good measure, and Sarah had to shake on it, as custom demanded, though she is as fastidious as a cat.
‘You did us a good turn yesterday, Billy Kerr,’ I say. ‘And I want to say this with all politeness. But to my mind when a transaction that concerns ready money is to be discussed, you might wait for the other person to open the discussion. Now that’s just my way of thinking, dating from the days of my father, when money was a subject that got greater airing. I don’t mean to offend you.’
‘Heavens above, Annie Dunne, I am not offended. I am only trying to put my way in to help. There’d be nothing for me in a deal like that, except the shilling of the price for my trouble. That’s it then. I will bring a man up to look at the animal, and bring the animal down to the man if needs be, and drove it ten miles out the Baltinglass road if necessary. I will bring him to Carlow for you, if the need arises. I am solicitous on your behalf. I only intend to assist you both.’
But he is abashed also, this assisting man. He has flushed up around his sideburns, poor scraggy streals of hair though they be. I have an interesting effect on this man. I am thinking sincere politeness without sincerity might be a better weapon against him, if weapon be required again. But I must bear in mind his epic efforts of the great mishap on the road, I must, I must. It is becoming too easy to discommode this man.
I am looking now at Sarah, standing, looming at the top of the room between the dull shine of her delf and the dull fire of the turf. It is hard to read her face in the gloom, the white hair pulled back from it, her mouth with its little twist in the lips as always. But I can hear, almost feel, her brain thinking. Oh, oh, she loves that pony Billy, because she has great pride in him, and in the shining light brown wood of the trap, and in the glory of the high lamps. She loves that pony in the half-lights of an autumn evening, when she can clatter along the main road of Kiltegan, the big metal rims of the wheels calling out the music of her triumph in the world, the triumph of her thirty acres and the strange but palpable dominion of the trap. Never married, too crooked in the face, she will say, to marry, but I say too crooked in the head, what with her mass of dreams and her suffering silence, her awkwardness and her oddity - never married, but got this little hill farm of Kelsha in the happy run of things, the dowry of her own mother in the old days. When Billy Kerr speaks of selling a pony, there are many other matters attached in a long necklace of importance and scripture, the very scripture that keeps Sarah happy on her hill and her mind in general a passable human mind, and not a mind to languish in the county home, as my own father’s mind once did, because the meanings and musics of his own world were torn away from him and he could not find a singing to answer that pain and change.
Sarah stands in the glooms like some old queen of old, some old monarch of France before the changes maybe. The tide of her own unimportant history laps at her sturdy brogues. Go back, go back, she cries to the hens in the yard at eventide, even as she advances to feed them, go back, go back, like King Canute to the very waves.
‘I think I would find it hard to part with Billy,’ she says, in the little voice of a cow
ed child. And in that instance of childish sounds, the little girl breaks from the niche and flies across the flagstones of the floor and almost hurts Sarah by the bang into her knees. Sarah’s long sturdy legs are covered in the fresh linens of her yard-dress, she barely notices the affectionate girl, or seems to. Yet a long arm with a long-fingered hand drifts down and touches the head of the little girl, her brown hair in a cow pat of curls, that I must brush before the day is any older. Sarah’s face floats there like a window with a stretch of wood nailed over it to keep the weather out, its brightness blighted, interfered with. It is a greater thing even than I thought, the question of Billy. She has the severe bereaved look of a person at a graveside, the rinse-through in the skin a mourner gets, like the influenza, staring to the middle distance as if into the realms of death itself.
‘I think I would,’ she says. ‘Is that all the worth he has now? Ten bob? He’s only four year old.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘He must be seven now, at least.’
‘Is he seven?’ she says. ‘Even so, a cob like that has years in him. And how could I sell him? I would have to look at him in another man’s field as I pass by, and not have the feeding of him, and the talking.’