Annie Dunne (18 page)

At any rate we are invited down to the Dunnes of Feddin for the tea-time and I will be able without announcement, without suddenly turning up in a state of anguish or any other undesirable state, to talk quietly to Winnie about it, Winnie who is the scholar and so wise, and after all, Billy Kerr takes her wages and is in her keeping, and even a wild dog like him has to obey the keeper of his bones.

At the same time I would be wise not to say anything first to Lizzie, who is the sister almost as strong as a man, and with the manners of a man, and who has used her fists on more than one occasion, once knocking a fencer to the ground at the back of their farm, because he was laying in the posts at too great distances in a spot he thought no one would notice. But of course that is how cattle get out, and she knocked him down in justice, and he accepted that.

Whereas May is too soft and nice, like her name, all white and frothy, silent and hard-working, all smiles and no words at all, though she tries hard to gabble responses to greetings, to remarks on the weather and the like, and really lives in the loving shelter of her sisters.

It is Winnie, both strong and gentle, with all the characteristics of her sisters, and yet with the added virtue of wisdom, that may help me. After all she teaches their lessons to the children of Kiltegan, and not low and high babies, but the bigger ones who will go out to work when she is finished with them, so she is teaching tricky stuff, the very stuff you forget the moment you leave school, but no matter, like compound fractions and long division, long division which I could do at school but could not put myself to now, God forgive me.

The other thing that strongly settles me on this occasion is the boy and the girl. It is not just myself I have to fight for, as in the past, and always battles that I lost, but I must preserve where they are now, until their father comes for them. He has promised to return before the harvest, at the close of summer, when we will begin to be deepest at our labours, but who knows what struggles they may be enduring, what difficulties and what trials in the mazy city of London? Dublin to me holds no fears or mysteries, being virtually a Dublin woman in part myself, but I would not like to go down to the pier at Dunleary and take that big mail packet to England, I would not.

The children’s s grandfather, Jack O‘Hara, travelled the entirety of the earth in the merchant navy, he has told me - grandfather on their mother’s side - but we have always been stickers to home and loath to roam, always excepting the wild courage of my sister Dolly, who went to Ohio almost as an indentured slave, let us say a house servant on contract, and nearly broke my father’s heart, or in fact did break it. Dolly, who was only five foot high, and pret tier than many a lacquered film star, set off alone from the regretful arms of the Liffey, past the solemn figure of the Dowager Lighthouse, and the portly one of the Poolbeg, way beyond the furtive dog, crouching down ready to spring and savage you, that is the hill of Howth, and down to Cobh and out beyond everything she knew, to strange America. Because, she said, she could not bear the changes that befell us, the loss of my father’s mighty job, the country that we knew, and at last, his very wits.

Dolly, Dolly, Dolly, in Ohio, my father cried.

So I keep the peace with Sarah in shipshape fashion. It is washday, so we spend the hours boiling sheets and blouses, and scrubbing at our and the children’s garments in the zinc tub, and lathering and rinsing. For this we use almost the full measure of the rainwater in the barrel, because you would be killed going down to the well.

On washday the water bucket becomes as useful as a thimble, the deluge of water that is required.

At least in summer there is no rain paradoxically to ruin your efforts, at least not today, though every night this week the rain has fallen, as if in a furious frenzy to wash the earth. But there is good solid drying time in the daytime hours, and we spread our sheets with their gift of starch on the drying-bushes with confidence.

Sarah will gather them in in the late evening before the sun is gone, and tonight she will stand in the kitchen with the irons heating on their spotless grille by the fire, and iron the sheets till the starch in them dries and fixes them into objects like the thinnest metal, which is how we love our sheets. So that when you set a child under them, and tuck them in, they are gripped by those sheets as if in a strange embrace, and barely stir the whole night.

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 way 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.