No Country: A Novel (11 page)

“Do you want to come out and play?” I asked, poking my head under the bed. She shook her head and shrank back farther in her nook, holding the round of cheese. I did not know what to do or say. I knew how to deal with children a little older, but children change so in a year or two that it was like trying to speak another language altogether. Maeve stared back, somber, and shook her head.

With the same strong and laughing voice, Mrs. Aherne said, “Maeve dear, I am hungry, and so are these two gentlemen who
have come to visit us. Can you give them a plate of biscuits and make them your pretend tea?”

I saw then what effort it took for Padraig’s ma to speak in her normal tone. A thin sweat covered her face, and her arm that was whole clutched the counterpane, while the other lay by her side, purple and rigid. Maeve came up from under the bed. The child seemed reassured and went about her task of hospitality. While she was thus busy and growing happy in a way children can, Mrs. Aherne spoke low to Mr. O’Flaherty.

“I knew them all, moving about the shop, Mr. O’Flaherty,” she spoke in a whisper. “I knew Mrs. O’Toole by the sound of her short leg as she lifted away the seed potatoes. I knew John Shanley when he was dragging off the fabrics, for he wheezes and stops and moves again, and many others. Oh, Mr. O’Flaherty, the saddest blow was when Mrs. Purdy came in late at night and took trays of needles and my lace where I hid them under the counter, and my bundle of shillings I buried in the floor—which she must have known all along. We have been neighbours ever so long. But Mrs. Purdy and her hut being tumbled, her husband set a-weeping. I could not bear anymore.”

Her voice cracked. “Look at me now. I am done for.” She stopped to regain her breath. “I can feel the poison gathered in my neck and armpits—they are swollen so. My chest is full of pain and I know I am sinking. Look after my Padraig’s child. She is in your hands. I’ve been praying you would come.”

“As long as I have breath, Maire,” Mr. O’Flaherty said. “And when my time comes, I know that Brendan will take care of his mate Padraig’s child. Does she need worry about that, Brendan? Tell her now, on your faith, once and for all,” he said. She looked at me, eyes a-glitter with the fever.

“I promise, I do,” I said, as simply.

I reached out for her hale arm, to hold her palm for assurance. It was that hot and dry I never thought the human hand could be. As my thumb lay across her wrist, I could feel the frantic thrum of her heart.

The child Maeve came by, sprightly, with some biscuits and her tiny china service of teapot and toy cups and saucers. Mr. O’Flaherty and I nibbled on biscuits, and Maeve poured us imaginary tea with great ceremony. We drank and praised its aroma. The child was pleased and offered us more.

“Miss Maeve,” said Mr. O’Flaherty, “will you be so kind as to help Brendan at the school?”

Maeve looked puzzled. “But I live here,” she replied.

“Aye, that’s a fine point.” Mr. O’Flaherty was stumped, but he recovered. “Do ye think ye could visit with us and teach him how to make that fine tea?”

“But that’s pretend tea,” Maeve pointed out conclusively.

At great cost, Mrs. Aherne came to our rescue. She spoke again to the child in her normal voice and said, “Well, Maeve, if you want to go with the big children to school and learn to read the picture books all by yourself, Mr. Brendan’s the man to ask. He has many books with pictures.” Then, as if in doubt, she added, “But may be you are not a big girl yet for school.”

“I am a big girl!” Maeve bridled at any suggestion otherwise.

“All right then,” said Mrs. Aherne, “why don’t you try it for a couple of days. If you don’t like it, you can come back and Brendan will bring you. Won’t you, Brendan?”

“Aye, that I will,” I agreed.

“I’ll get my things then,” decided Maeve. “But if I want to come back, I can?”

“Aye, that’s right,” Mrs. Aherne and I said together.

As the child went to get her toys and put her tea service together to improve our life at school, Padraig’s ma told us urgently, “Inside my pillow, I have a number of silver coins I’ve laid by over the years. Take it. Use it to raise Maeve.” Then she turned her intent eyes on me. “Upon your life, Brendan, take care of her as Padraig would have. Someday Padraig will come back. I know. Tell him then, this was the best I could have done for us all.”

These were bitter tears, seemingly wrung out of her blood, the first I ever saw her shed. “Go now, Brendan, for I will need to talk to Mr. O’Flaherty.”

“Shall I ask Father Conlon to come by?” I said, thinking of the last sacrament and extreme unction.

“Nay, I’ll make my own peace, through Mr. O’Flaherty here,” she said to my astonishment.

The last rites were the doors to Paradise and to Our Father. She was waving these away. Did that mean she did not care to make her last confession and leave her sins behind? But Padraig’s ma has always been that mysterious.

And now I had the care of Maeve, I took her back with me. She skipped up the path, pleased to be going to school and catching up with all the bigger children, for she was very like her da, and could not bear any who was ahead.

Mr. O’Flaherty sat with the dying woman.

As I lie here dying, I think in this dark of my life and its impulses. It is, although few would guess, my mad whims that have ruled me altogether. To hide them under a strong gait, a face that holds its smiles in abeyance until I am alone: These have been my disguises. But here comes Death, this untimely visitor who touches my fingers, then my blue-black wrist, ruffles my life’s blood flow, and pulls me down by my strong and impulsive right hand. He takes me in hand and refuses to let go. I wish he would hurry.

All my life I have raged against the slowness of things, how matters unfold little by little. I used to want my little Padraig to be a man soon after he was born. I wanted to speak to him, woman to man, by passing all the slow seasons of childhood. Perhaps that is why I have spoken to him as a sensible man even as a child, and now he is gone. Impulsive mother, impulsive son. Where is he on earth today, if he is among us at all? As I lie in my feverish bed, I wonder if he will come sit by me and hold my hand, the one Death has left whole, not the one in which the veins are swollen channels
and my nails undercrusted by the angry coral of corruption. Yes, yes, I do want my wandering son, or his wandering shade, to come and sit by me as I go from this place to no country, so that I can tell him how my impulsiveness brought him into this world.

I had been the much-adored Maire Finnegan, my father’s daughter, whose ma had died of sudden fever when I was only three. I could do no wrong, Jock and Georgie’s sister, at whom no one looked with anything but joy. When my da would go off to sea with my brothers, and they were gone for days, and I growing and watching by the sea, my father decided to have me learnt and sent me up to the village with old Mrs. Byrne the widow. Three children on our lane used to go daily to school at young Mr. O’Flaherty’s. One day I went with them out of curiosity, and after the first time itself, when I heard a bit of the tale of sad Isolde and the ill-fated Tristan, I came back and told my da that I could not miss even a day of such stories. I was that swayed and seized by all these tales of King Mark, Queen Grania, the lost men of the glens, the dying Diarmuid, that I was beside myself with the hearing of all the tales. When I read, the voice of young Mr. O’Flaherty seemed to tell the tales in my head. That has not changed at all. Even in these hours of pounding fever and in the sure knowledge of my grief I recall them, drifting unmoored upon my mind.

The storms of 1811 brought great wrack upon the fisherfolk throughout the region, Galway, the Arans, Sligo Bay, and even through Donegal and Connemara. Who would care to count the boats gone, and the bodies of fathers and brothers washing ashore after days so battered by the cruel sea that they were identified by the knit and pattern of their sturdy sweaters. It made the world of difference to me, and I was left an orphan, all of fifteen, with nowhere to go but old Mrs. Byrne, who used to be given by my da
fish and coins for my keep, while I scampered to school all those years, and slept on her spare bed.

Now with my da gone and both my brothers, I noticed the eyes of some villagers grow crooked, and the world a-changing. ’Twas over Easter, I remember well, and no one at school for all the churchy week—when I got it into my head to run up to Mr. O’Flaherty’s. I was hot and sweaty when I got there, but he was gone, perchance to church and a day in Sligo Town, and all the decorated shops on Wine Street, or among the folks taking the air by the quayside here at Mullaghmore itself with the brave ships and their pennants of all colours.

I threw off my smock and dress and splashed the cool water from his cistern behind the cottage. I had the water streaming down my face and shut my eyes and poured some more, in the delight of that coolness and the red sun filling my world behind my shut eyes with a glow of pleasure. Then it was that I heard him. I burn to think how long he had seen me, for he seemed rooted like a tree, my bosom wet and bare, and my paps pink and goose-pimpled. Then, impulsively I did another thing. I shut my eyes and poured the water again over my head and face, my bosom hard and shaking, and even with that cool water I felt a throb in me that was not at my heart at all. When I opened my eyes, my hands, these very hands, were quiet by my side, my red hair wet and trailing over my face. I stood, now with my palms shielding my breasts, but he was gone.

I stayed back for the whole afternoon, waiting. I would have just sat by him, I swear by sweet Jesus and St. Patrick and my poor gone da, I would have listened to his tales and looked for nothing more.

In all the years, we never once spoke of this, and he that shy.

Within months, it had become clear that I was a growing burden to Mrs. Byrne, and she, crabby and crotchety, complained I ate so much. Yet all her chores, her garden and potato patch I took care of single-handed, and all that cheerily done. I have never made a fuss of work. But one day, she said that I had eaten more praties than I was due, and I, in such a blind glaring anger, instead of saying the harsh word which rattled in my head and curse her and her ratty pigtail of grey, I stomped down to the harbour and thought to walk off my ire and see my schoolfellows besides. Many of the fisherfolk who came in from the sea would hail me, for I was their dead mate’s daughter, and give me fish and warm words besides. All these, the fish and good cheer, I had been wont to take back to that harridan Byrne, but I was that angry I did not want to return in the afternoon.

A fine ship had hoved into the harbour, with a show of white sails and shiny bows. A great family, I thought, had arrived. But no, it was a lady’s maid that had come to set up her house before the lady arrived—and her fine china and new gowns had come in the ship, which a month or so later, would likely sail away, back to rich England. The lady’s maid was a red-faced large woman, smiling and squinting in the sun, and friendly-like. The boxes were unloaded on the quay and she did much counting, got muddled and counted yet again. She had to go back into the ship and make sure that all had been unloaded, bandboxes, sea-chests, and all. Why she did not have a written tally, I did not know, but she was that flustered and riddled by the count.

She saw me watching and asked my name. “Miss Finnegan,” I said, as I had read in books. I did not say, “I’m the Finnegans’ Maire.”

She said, please Miss Finnegan, could you watch over these
here bandboxes and mirror stands while I check the ship and its nooks once more. She was sure she had forgotten the new inkstand and the writing papers, and the card table, and the decanter, and the opera glasses and on and on—for her ladyship liked to watch the sea from her house, and Ben Bulben—and the new cards and the bedroom slippers and . . . By this time, as the list grew, I laughed in jollity and said, “Why, I will keep both eyes on these, Missus.”

She rushed off and came back with a number of things, and then exclaimed, “M’lady’s snuffbox! I was carrying it so carefully in my hand, I declare.” I noticed a small ornamental thing, a wee column scarcely bigger than a child’s thumb, prettily inlaid with shiny mother-of-pearl and some dainty green stone. I picked it up from under the fringe of her skirt where it had fallen and handed it to her.

“Would this be what you are looking for?”

“Why, bless you, girl, that’s what it is. What a trouble if I could not find it, for our ladyship, that is, Lady Temple’s sister—she who took care of our young Master Henry after his mother died—she is very fond of her snuff and gin and cards. So thank you, Miss Finnegan.”

Then a thought struck her, and she hummed and hawed. Well, I am a straight and direct one, as my da would say. I was sore vexed with Mrs. Byrne, and it would surely be an adventure, so I said, “Will her ladyship be wanting a maid to help you while you are here?”

“Why, yes indeed,” Mrs. Hester Bunthorne said, for that was her name, though her ladyship called her Hetty. “However did you guess? That is exactly what she told me to do and I was worried, for I am from their house in Herefordshire and know nothing at all of this land and its ways.”

“I am your girl then,” I said simply, “You’ll just need to teach me what to do and when.”

I was told by the relieved Mrs. Bunthorne that her ladyship, the dead Lady Temple’s sister, would arrive in a few days from the great house at Boyle where she was staying with her friend, some great lady or other, and she would be the one to say the final aye—but that I could come right away.

So I scampered off to the fisherfolk and told Timmy Doherty to send word to Mrs. Byrne that I was off to the big house, and she should keep all her praties to herself and the tending of the potato patch to boot, and went off with Mrs. Bunthorne directly. Timmy Doherty did that, and was all a-blush that I had chosen him as messenger, and on his own brought all my stuff in my box to the English house.

Her ladyship came a week later and took to bed with her two furry lapdogs, her bottle of gin, and her cold that she’d brought along from the high folks she was staying with. She let me stay on as maid, as absentmindedly as if she had agreed to have another pinch of her snuff or a sip of gin. In a few days she was better, and though a little snivelly—I saw her blow her nose in the sleeve of her dress when she thought nobody was noticing—she ate well enough. Then she wandered about the newly aired home. With all the white dust covers off, the furniture gleamed after the fine hard work by Mrs. Bunthorne and me. But I could see her ladyship was bored. And just as suddenly as she had come, she was going to depart—with Mrs. Bunthorne and Mr. Arkwright, the bailiff, in tow—back again to that great house at Boyle in the heart of Rockingham Estate. I suppose this was the way of high folk.