Annie Dunne (23 page)

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.

‘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 threatens 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. ‘