‘How is it shadows they are like, Sarah?’
‘To remember, just to remember, what it was like, littleness —I barely, scarcely—but you, you have the knack, you have the wrist for children, like for the butter, I could never make happy butter. I can make it, but not happy butter. I understand nothing of it, or of children. They have something ahead of them, and this I no longer understand. The little girl is strange to me, she is strange.’
‘Well now, she is a little strange.’
‘She is quiet and strange. She looks at me. The little boy talks to me, but she just looks, as if she thinks I am a very odd bird indeed. She has asked me nothing since she came. She does my bidding, one, two, three. But she asks me nothing.’
‘They are city children.’
‘But you were a city child. You were a city child, Annie, in your heyday. And I envied you that, except, I was happy enough being Winey Cullen’s daughter.’
‘I wasn’t a city child like them. My father carried the country with him. Even in the castle he led a country life. He patrolled the streets of Dublin as a countryman, as a Kiltegan man. His happiness arose from being from somewhere else. Those children are really from Dublin, born in Dublin and knowing only Dublin, till they are sent down here just to put a twist in their heads!’
‘And God bless them,’ says Sarah. ‘God bless us all, God knows.’
She takes her leave of her folding and steps the few paces of the boards to the bedside and kneels down with her long bones and prays into her large hands, her big horse’s face buried in the callused fingers. She has thin layers of yellow skin on the working sides of her hands, that no pumice stone will erase. You cannot run out Sarah’s hands with a pumice, though she attempts it daily. And she rubs in lavender water, and she sprinkles it all over her body now and then, to freshen herself, she says. You cannot leave good linen in a damp box, she says. You cannot keep a book far from the fire, or it rots, she says. Lavender water, Sarah’s idea of youthfulness. She grows it up under the woods like a secret, and when it flowers she gathers them and dries them, and when they are well dry she steeps the flowers in warm water to gather out their smells, and she puts the scented water into an earthenware bottle that her mother kept for the same purpose. Maybe her grandmother also smelled of lavender, I do not know. Her prayers done, she creaks into bed beside me.
‘Oh, but, it is good to lie down,’ says Sarah, ‘it is good.’
‘It is good,’ I say.
Sarah breathes out, her lavender is in her breath.
‘In the moment of rest there is safety,’ she says. ‘There is riches.’
‘I think so,’ I say.
‘No matter what, no matter what fears afflict us, we have our own dry bed to lie in, and we talk to each other like Christians.’
‘And that’s right,’ I say.
‘And those wild tinkers are gone away now another while, and God bless the poor people under Keadeen.’
‘God bless them.’
‘Joseph Casey and his brother Jem, and Katherine Keady that lives alone just under the dip of the hill. God protect them.’
‘Amen,’ I say. ‘Amen.’
There is nothing then for a long, long time, except the slip of wind in the maples outside.
‘And Annie,’ she says suddenly, but in that ease of starch and cotton, ‘was there really a sailor that wanted you?’
‘What’s that, Sarah? What put that into your head?’
‘I hardly know. I was thinking of the folding of the clothes, what ease it gives, and the folding and unfolding of the sea where the Liffey meets it, at the Great South Wall where once your brother-in-law Matt took me walking, one time I was in Dublin for to have my eyes seen to. I don’t know why I was thinking of that at all, but those long gold waves and the severe dark river, folding and folding one into the other, and then I was thinking of all those docklands that Matt loves to paint on his lunch-times, or so he said, and I have seen some of those pictured, well, and then I was thinking of sailors in their salty ships, you know, and then I was thinking of you, and what Maud told me once, long long before she took to her bed, in the days when she was always full of funny stories - she was sad but the stories were always humorous, you know?’
‘And what did she say about me?’ ‘She was saying that you at one time was asked to be going off with a sailor, a sailor that came ashore at the boat-yard in Ringsend to mend his keel, and he met you, I do not know where, and asked you to walk out with him, and then he went away, and you were waiting, waiting and waiting for him to come back and have that walk with you, that it was to Buenos Aires you thought he had gone, which is a long way enough.’
I lie there awhile beside her. I don’t know what the truth is. One day on the big yellow stones of the docks I was walking and a sailor leaned out from his dirty cargo ship and asked me for a kiss. I did not even answer him, but passed on without a glance. Or maybe this memory was at first made up, at this distance I no longer know rightly. When I got back to our quarters in the castle I told Maud something of the kind, and embellished the story, I am sure, in the telling. Because I did not want her to be thinking it was always Dolly and her got the interest, and there might be a man in the end who might overlook my damnable hump and take the risk of loving me. Then that shadowy man became my sailor, and Maud often told her friends of my sailor, maybe even to bolster herself as well as me against this crookedy back. Till I came to believe in him myself, and lived many a year by him, and waited for him, and am maybe waiting for him still, even though he was a queer little dark man on a Portuguese tramp steamer amusing himself by saying hello to a humpety girl on an idle Dublin Sunday—unless that is all invented too. A foolish, dark old woman, me!
‘Aye, there was a sailor once,’ I said, ‘that I might have taken if I’d had a mind to.’
‘You had a better score than me, so,’ she says. ‘World, one, Sarah Cullen, nil.’
‘You oughtn’t to mind such a thing.’
‘That’s what people say to the heartbroken and I heard it often enough. A priest said it to me once, when I wept in his confession box. Suddenly weeping, and him just a young fella out of the seminary, in Hacketstown it was. Father O’Keefe, that hanged himself in forty-seven. “You oughtn’t to mind such a thing,” he said to me, and hanged himself the following year.‘
‘I’m sorry, Sarah.’
‘Arrah, what can you do?’
I think of my crab-apple tree, alone in the summer dark. I wonder what is its purpose. An apple tree has only a hint of roots but it has stood well enough. I think it gains comfort from the manure heap near by, the heat of it, a strange insurance against frosts. I think that evil weather has passed now, the peace of the summer has returned. Now and then the rare note of the hens sounds, that ripple of clucking they do in their sleep, as if they are dreaming of foxes. I think of all the animals of the night creeping across the darkened fields.
‘I am thinking now,’ says Sarah, ‘of Joe McNulty, that went out one morning with a scythe and scythed a whole acre of wheat, to set a marker, he said, for the next generation. And boys brought buttermilk to him all the live-long day, against the monster of thirst grew in his throat. His huge back swiping and swiping at the standing wheat. At the setting of the sun he threw down that scythe, and flung his whetstone far off into the bog just by him there, and let out a crazy roar. The boys sat up on the ditch and cheered. He was something of a man, and that was the man I wanted for my bed. But he might as well have been the president of America, for all I could get close to him.’
‘I always thought there were hundreds of boys trying to get you. You were a lovely long slip of a girl, all wheaten-haired and brown and strong.’
‘Hundreds,’ she says, and laughing a little.
The mice are afoot too in the ceiling. Sometimes tiny drips of water come down from between the ceiling boards. Can it be they are trying to piss on our heads? I think of the silence of the kitchen with its patient and never-regretting clock,
the plates in the dresser with the destroyed light altering the blue and white in their glaze. It must be half ten at night, it is only the early summer, not yet the peculiar long days of light when we draw the curtains to encourage sleep, and the daylight lies in the yard like drying straw. Perhaps I will not sleep tonight, but Sarah sleeps, the old embroidered blanket over her face, its hart and hounds forever caught hunting across the low, unstable hills of her breast. What keeps me awake is a dread, an anxiety, an unease I have no name for. My own breaths are short and sharp, my body cannot obey the commands of sleep. And yet by length of trying, by hook or by crook in the woods of the night, seemingly I do sleep.
Chapter Seven
In the folds of the dark she awakes, Sarah, drawing me up like a dark bucket from the deep well of sleep, hand over hand. I can already feel her agitation when I have not even broken the soft surface of normal wakefulness. In the dropping shadows I can see her. She seems to loom up as far as the wooden boards of the ceiling, although she is merely sitting up in the bed, the old bones of her bottom crushing down into the tight straw of the mattress, the tight ticking, so I am almost rolling over against her. My angle of vision from the pillow enlarges her, expands her, her wild white hair like foam or fire, her nostrils begging air, her long hands beating gently on the coverlet. Maybe she was dreaming darkly under the coverlet, till it became a little hot hell of nightmares, which she is by custom afflicted by. The dark of the room is stirred by her fears, the browns and blacks seem to boil around us, the sticks of furniture themselves caught in the petty maelstrom of her panic, twisted out of their places, crooked side table, the pitcher for water in its hole, rickety chairs to take a throw of clothes but never the weight again of a person, except it was a child, swinging its legs to make the creaks come alive in the damaged wood. The leaves of the sycamores make a green waterfall of the wind, all unseen, beyond the cold glass of the window. The mice no doubt scamper in the rafters gleefully. The two old dames below awake!
Billy Kerr is almost a memory when next he returns. That is the way of the summer. Even to an old woman, time gains again some of the rope and length of early days. We are mired even happily in the sweet weeks of June, when vigour is everywhere, the green of everything violent and hungry, the young brambles anxious and ambitious to cover every neglected dip and awkward hillock of our fields. Perhaps that is the great note of the summer, an awful anxiety that takes itself into everything like a strange rot in the windowsills, eating out the hearts of things till you could put your finger through the last coat of sorrow.
Never mind that the end of such doings is clear even as they begin, even as the grasses tear up from the warming ground, and the brambles throw strong cables across surprising distances, and the first pale green signs of the blackberries burn in the thorny ropes. For a countrywoman, if such I am, knows the end of such ambitions, the berries at last boiling with the wasteful pounds of sugar in the big cooking pot, the white sugar creating lighter veins of reddish streaks, as bitter berry marries to the sweetness of the beet. The grasses devoured by the milch cows, and all those grasses out of reach lying exhausted and sere in the revenges of autumn. All swept away, vanishing by a fierce magic off the old woven carpets of the earth.
The marriage coverlet is woven and embroidered for the happy pair, the house is built in a few summer weeks by the meitheal of neighbours, the last twist and stitch is put to the thatch, and in they go, the fortunate couple, with strength and purpose—and at length the house is desolate and empty with only rain for a roof, the stranger comes and opens the rotted hope chest, and puts their fingers to the folded coverlet, which falls from their hand in mouldy fragments. And that’s all we can say about it, the shortness, the swiftness, and the strange unimportance of life.
But when June is queen, eternally in the grasses, in the wood pigeons, in the dank rooks, in the potato gardens, in the cabbage patches, wild dreams are given birth to with all the mighty energy of the full-blowing year.
All things and creatures feel it. I am not immune. A strange and inconvenient affection takes a hold of me. I go down beyond the midden to my crab-apple tree and talk to it. Now and then I touch it, like patting a child on the head. I watch its progress carefully, like the mother of the same child. I pinch out whatever the late frosts have done to it, and scrape off the mildew, and every week or so I lime-wash the bottom of the trunk against such insects as like to climb up towards the shoots. I dig and tussle up the soil around its rim, I feed it the tea leaves from our many infusions. When I read the leaves in the cups for Sarah, bringing into her head the dreams of soft futures, I am thinking quietly myself of the crab-apple tree, the nourishment it will get from the makings of such prophecies.
I am at the tree that day when Billy Kerr arrives. He is covered head to foot in a strange painting of what looks like snowflakes, but it is the blurred splashes and drops of the whitewash that he must have been applying to the house of my cousins. Even the backs of his hands are speckled, his cheeks, his nose. It stops in a line on his forehead where he must have had a paper bag over his remnant hair. Any cuts and scrapes now he has on his hands where the lime has touched will be deep pits in his skin by morning, right down to the bone, if he doesn’t wash well. Because the lime eats in the hours after painting with it, in the small hours when you lie in bed dreaming, reminding you of the fact that the bodies of hanged men used to be cast into the lime pits in the prisons, to render them down, to get rid of them, to bring utter destruction. So my father would have described it—‘utter destruction’. For the guilty must not expect mercy from other living men, only God could mend their hurts, or the devil increase them. That was all the mind of my father: retribution, punishment, being lost to the world and never found again. It used to frighten me as a little girl, his certainty and his power, devour me with fright like lime itself, in my cosy iron bed in Dublin Castle.
‘You were liming today anyhow,’ I say, friendly enough, pleased with the heat in my blue and white apron, the scent of rough starch from it rising up to me.
‘I was so late with it. The Dunnes were looking darkly at me. So I set to. Tomorrow or the next day when it dries, if there is no rain, their house will be beaming out like a beacon. They want you to come down for tea-time tomorrow, to bring the city children with you, but not Sarah.’
‘Sarah never goes down there.’
‘No, but, it’s not a feud, is it?’
‘No, not a feud. A custom. How they live side by side, these companies of single women.’
‘And they are cousins, aren’t they?’
‘I am cousin to the Dunnes and Sarah is cousin to me.’
‘I know, I know. What’ll I say? Will I say you’ll come down?’
‘I will be happy to come down. The children will love the adventure.’
‘Where are they this moment? I have a Peggy’s-leg for them.‘
‘I don’t know. Somewhere about. I’ll bring it to them for you.’
He hands me the stick in its crinkling wrapper and I slip it into my apron pocket like a knife.
‘Well, you tend that old apple tree well,’ he says.
‘I do.’
‘It is as well to mind an apple tree.’
‘It would perish otherwise.’
‘Very likely. And you keep the whole place so well, you and Sarah.’
‘We have the measure of it.’
‘No need for a fella like me about here,’ he says, laughing hugely suddenly.
‘Men are not as essential as they think they are,’ I say, falling suddenly to humour myself, and smiling at him. Not for the first time I try to think what it might be like to be accounted normal—to be easy and fluent with my fellow human beings. In a dream of community and harmony! Nevertheless I feel unaccountably spied on, as if I were emptying out the chamber pots under the bushes, and he was close by, looking and commenting. It is an eerie feeling, certainly.
‘And is Sarah about the yard there?’ he says.
‘Sarah is
about the yard,’ I say. ‘She is trying to decide which of the old hens she will kill and boil. I am afraid it brings a touch of the Solomons to her. She cannot bring herself easily to impose sentence of death on her old acquaintance.’
‘I’ll go up to her and help her wring a neck! I have no such qualms.’
‘No, I expect not,’ I say, as he passes by in his limy boots.
I go in to find the children, now that I have true treasure for them. I pass from the wild glass of the sunlight into the familiar blindness of the kitchen. No sign of Sarah at any household tasks, only the clock continues its measured work, taking away the days, or adding new days, I cannot say. My shoes clack on the blue flags. Over at the fire I place a brace of turves and then hear little giggles from the children’s bedroom. Armed with the Peggy‘s-leg, I go in fearlessly, expecting only to find childish things afoot.
The little girl lies on her bed. She is entirely naked to the world. The usual speckles of sunlight that run like shoals of small fish from the window, after being sorted and darned by the leaves outside, illuminate the strange scene. I am nonplussed, bewildered, lost, dismayed. She lies with her face towards the window and does not see me. The boy is huddled between her legs, his face down near where her body joins at the centre, near that special place that should be foreign to all eyes.
‘Do lick it,’ she says, in her sweet calm voice, innocent as a rose, truly as innocent.
‘It smells of oranges,’ he says. ‘Like when Mummy peels oranges. And rain it smells of.’
‘Give it little licks then,’ she says.
Six years old talking to four years old, nearly five! Her brother! His sister! Is this a childhood game? I search in my own murky memories for such as this? Did Dolly, Maud and me disport ourselves so? I do not think so. Now my habitual fear engulfs me, it is like a group of men charging me, knocking me down, stamping on me in the mud. My hands seem to wave about at the ends of their stalks. My eyes are suddenly freezing as if winter were driven against them. The bare little room, this niche of Wicklow, this nowhere place, swims about. There is nothing of gaiety in it. My heart is being leant on. I can feel its rafters start to crack and break.