Woman of the House (5 page)

You are not really in there, Dada, she thought, you’re gone away. She gave Jack’s hand a jerk and they moved towards the door.

A figure rose out of one of the chairs at the foot of the bed. Tall, thin and angular with foxy hair, it was Miss Buckley, her teacher. Nora did not like her: she slapped with a hard black stick and never listened, and Nora was sure that she liked the white worm and let her torment her.

“Nora,” she said, “I’m sorry about your Daddy.”

Nora looked at her and thought, why would you be sorry
about Dada? Dada was kind and fond of everyone, but you’re not like that.

“Dada was very fond of me,” Nora told her.

“I’m sure he was,” Miss Buckley agreed.

“But you’re not fond of me,” Nora told her quietly. Jack moved her quickly toward the door.

“Nora, girlie,” he told her when they reached the sanctuary of the porch, “you could have burned your boats behind you in there.”

“I didn’t mean to say it,” she said; “it just came out.”

“Well, never mind,” Jack said philosophically, “maybe it was time that someone told the old bat the truth.”

“Don’t you like her either?” Nora asked with interest.

“Never had much to do with her,” Jack said, “but it takes a lot of bad temper to give someone a big bold face like hers.”

The men were still in the porch. Con Nolan knelt down and put his arms around Nora.

“Rosie said to tell you that she is sad for you,” he told her. Nora could not imagine her best friend, bouncing happy Rosie, being sad. Davy Shine was no longer crying but looking bleakly into space.

“Jack, I’m awful sleepy,” Nora said suddenly.

“That’s to be expected. Come on in to your Nana,” he told her, opening the kitchen door.

“What about Bran?” she asked.

“Let Bran to me,” Davy Shine said, coming to life, “and you get your Nana to put you to bed.”

That night she dreamt of Dada and Paddy and Bran, and then she was falling, falling into darkness with no one to hold her. She woke up screaming but Nana was there with her arms around her.

“Easy, Nora, easy, you’re all right,” Nana comforted.

She was afraid to go to sleep after that, but in spite of herself she drifted off.

When she awoke in the morning the terror of the previous day jumped into her mind. But, could it be possible that it had never happened? That it was all a bad dream? But she knew that it had and that nothing could take it away.

The day dragged on in a haze of people calling and crying and making fresh pots of tea and it going cold and throwing it away and starting again and changing the candles around Dada. Mom sat unmoving, talking to nobody; Aunty Kate moved around the house, a grey shadow. For the first time Nora thought that Nana looked old and frail. She wondered where was Uncle Mark. Mom always said that Uncle Mark was never where he should be. Betty Nolan, Rosie’s mother, from down the road and Sarah Jones, who lived near Jack, looked after everybody, giving some women strong tea and others weak tea and encouraging some men to take a drink and trying to hold it back from those who did not know when they had had enough. Nora knew that Sarah Jones had laid out Nana Nellie when she died and wondered if she had done that to Dada. It must have been hard on Sarah Jones to do those two things, because she had been Nana Nellie’s best friend and she had often heard her tell Dada that she had brought him into the world. All that day Jack was the one to whom they all turned to for help. How was Jack so calm and brave, Nora wondered.

Then late in the evening the house packed up with people so there was hardly room to stand and Nana Lehane gave out the rosary and Peter and Mom and herself knelt beside the bed. She knew that Peter didn’t feel
comfortable so near the bed and Mom looked as if she did not know where she was, but Nana looked calm and tired. Then all the people poured out of the parlour and there was only Mom, Peter, Nana, Aunty Kate and Jack left in the parlour. Then Mr Browne, who buried people, brought in the coffin. It looked huge.

“I’ll leave you for a few minutes,” he said.

When he left the room you could hear a pin drop as they all looked at Dada, and then Jack made a move. He bent over the bed and put his hand on top of Dada’s.

“Goodbye, lad,” he said, “you were a good one.” He went to the window and stood looking out with his back to the room.

Jack, please don’t cry, Nora begged silently. Please, please, don’t cry. I can’t bear it if you cry.

Everyone else was crying, Aunty Kate in loud sobs, and Mom had suddenly come alive and was thrown on the bed moaning; Nana had her arms around Peter and they were crying together. Nora went over to the window and slipped her hand into Jack’s.

“Jack,” she whispered, “I’m here.”

“That you are, girlie,” he said, and when he looked down at her his eyes were bright with unshed tears, but he dashed them away with the sleeve of his coat and shook his shoulders and said, “Better gather ourselves together,” and then he was her Jack again.

“Best say the goodbyes,” he said, gently turning back into the room.

Nora, like Jack, put her hand on her father’s and was shocked that it was so cold and rigid. She went over to the window and turned her back on the room because she did not want to watch the others, and then Peter stood beside
her sobbing, and gradually they all gathered around the window and Mr Browne and his helper came in and quietly transferred Dada into the coffin.

Nana had their coats piled high on a chair beside the door. Nora was surprised when she handed her a black coat that she had never seen before. She put it on, wondering where it had come from, and was surprised that it fitted perfectly. She followed the others out of the parlour. Outside the door four men stood with the coffin on their shoulders. Jack, Con Nolan and Davy Shine. She stretched her neck around to see the other man. It was Uncle Mark. There was no mistaking the long black hair, the same as Mom’s when she let it down. The hard knot in her tummy eased a little just to see him. They shouldered the coffin slowly through the silent people and eased it gently into the hearse.

Horse and traps were tied up around the yard but there was also a big black car beside the hearse and Nora found herself steered in its direction by Nana. Peter and Jack fitted easily in the front with the driver and Mom and Nana and herself in the back. The seats were brown like chestnuts and had small wrinkles that sighed when you sat on them. It smelled like her new leather school sack, and if Dada had been with them it would have been great fun to bounce up and down on the seat. But there was no bouncing up and down, and she watched out over Jack’s shoulder as the low black hearse went slowly up the boreen. She looked out the back window and saw that Dr Twomey’s car was behind them and knew that Aunty Kate and Uncle Mark would be with him.

In the church it was all prayers and holy water and shaking hands, and she was glad when they came home. She
opened the parlour door and peeped up. There was no trace of the bed or the candles, the table was back in the middle of the room and laid for tea and the fire was lighting in the grate.

“The neighbours are very good,” Nana, who had come in behind her, said gratefully.

“Some of them,” Jack confirmed as he put turf on the fire.

Everything about the funeral the following day was black. Fr Brady was dressed in black and so were Mom and Nana, Aunty Kate and herself. Peter had a black diamond cloth stitched on the sleeve of his jacket. Nora was surprised when Jack did not have one.

“Jack, why don’t you have a black diamond like Peter?” she whispered to him in the church before the mass.

“I’m not family,” he told her.

“But you are!” she insisted.

“Not blood related,” he said, “and there are people here today who would say that I should be down by the back door like I am every other Sunday, and the Lord knows but I’d feel more at home back there.”

“But it would be worse up here without you.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he told her.

The mass droned on, and her headache got worse, and she looked at the shiny brown coffin and tried to imagine Dada inside in it. Bits of the sermon came from the altar – “great husband and father, good worker … helpful neighbour”. She wished that he would just shut up and say “the best man in the world”, because that was the truth. She walked down the aisle with Mom and Peter, all the people standing. She supposed that Mom and Nana and Aunty Kate and even Peter, because he was tall, could
see their sad faces but she could only see their hands and she was glad.

The graveyard was worse than the chapel because it was cold and wet and the rain danced off the shiny coffin making it more shiny. Big blobs of raindrops shone like small glass marbles on the varnished wood. It was horrible when the coffin thudded down into the deep hole, and she could hear the water slushing beneath it, and then the earth thumped down on top of it and she thought: Dada, the real you is not down there. But if he was not, where was he because he was gone? All the talk about heaven was all right, but where was it and was he there?

“Jack,” she said, tugging his hand, “where is Dada really?”

“That’s the big question,” Jack told her.

When they came back home the grown-ups had tea and talked, and cried between the talking and the tea. She wandered out into the calf house and found Bran asleep in the straw. When he heard her he opened one eye and wagged his tail as if to say come and sit here with me. She sat down beside him and put an arm around him.

“Bran,” she asked him, “will we be crying for ever after Dada?”

I
T WAS MONDAY
morning and she was going back to school. Nora had never thought that she would look forward to going to school, but home was so strange that she wanted to be where things might be the same as they had been before the accident. Everybody called it “the accident” or “the terrible accident”, and it was easier to say that than to say “the day Dada died”. But no matter what they called it Nora felt that home was a different place since then.

Mom and Peter and herself were like strangers to each other because they were all changed. Mom was gone silent. Instead of being busy and keeping things moving as she always had, she sat looking into space, with no interest in what went on around her. It frightened Nora to see her like that. Peter was grumpy and sullen and Nora knew that he cried in bed at night. One night when she woke up terrified after dreaming that she was back on the road behind
the trap, she had crept along to his room. Just as she put her hand on the knob of the door she heard him sobbing. Something had stopped her from turning the knob. She tip-toed slowly by her mother’s door and listened, but there was no sound though she was almost sure that her mother was not asleep. She had heard Mom tell Nana the day before Nana went home that she was awake all night. Nora wished that Nana had not gone home, but after a few weeks Nana was not feeling well and had wanted to get back to her own house and to Uncle Mark.

Sometimes Uncle Mark did not come out of the house for long periods because he was working out tunes on his fiddle or painting pictures. Nora knew that people thought he was odd but when she looked at his pictures she felt that he had magic inside in him. She wanted go home with Nana to be with her and Uncle Mark, but Nana had told her gently, “Your mother needs you.”

“But Mom is gone all queer,” Nora complained.

“Give her a chance, child,” Nana told her. “It’s early days yet.”

Later she had heard Nana tell Mom to make some effort for the children, but Mom did not seem to be listening.

It was Jack who had decided that they should go back to school.

Peter objected sullenly. “I’m not going to school,” he said; “I’m going to stay here and run this place like my father did.”

“Peter,” Jack said firmly, “you’ll be finished in the Glen this summer and then will be time enough to make decisions.”

“I should be running Mossgrove, not you,” Peter said mutinously.

“That’s Conway talk,” Jack told him sharply, and Nora knew that he had hit home when Peter’s face went red.

“Listen, Peter,” Jack said kindly, “this is a quiet time of year, and if you milk the cows with me morning and evening we’ll manage until it gets busy, and then you’ll have holidays and we’ll take it from there.”

“All right,” Peter agreed reluctantly, but Nora felt sure that he was secretly relieved to be going back to school.

They arranged that Jack would call Peter when he came down from his cottage early in the morning, and then, when the two of them had the most of the cows milked that Peter would come in to call Nora and she would get the breakfast for the three of them while Jack and Peter finished off the milking. Nora felt strange that they were making all these arrangements as if Mom were dead as well, but when she voiced her thoughts Peter said bitterly, “She might as well be.”

“Don’t be too hard on her,” Jack said. “She’s had a mighty shock but there’s too much fire in her to stay down long; she’ll rise again.” Nora hoped that he was right, but then Jack was usually right, so maybe things would get better.

Before they left for school they tidied up the kitchen.

“Will I take up a cup of tea to Mom before we go?” Nora asked Peter.

“Suit yourself, but hurry on or we’ll be late,” he told her.

Nora quickly buttered a cut of bread and poured what was left in the teapot into a cup and, balancing a plate on top of it, ran upstairs.

Her mother was lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, her black hair in lank strands on the pillow. The bones stuck out in her long face and she had black patches under her eyes. Nora had heard her mother described as “the
best-looking woman in the parish”. It frightened her now that she was so changed. A light seemed to have gone out inside in her and she looked like a corpse. It would be terrible if she died too.

“Mom, here’s a cup of tea for you,” she said quietly. “Peter and I are going to school.”

“Oh,” her mother said blankly.

“We are, Mom. Do you remember we told you last night?” Nora said.

“I forgot,” her mother said vaguely.

“The kitchen is tidy and Jack is out in the yard if you want anything,” Nora told her.

“Oh, is he …?” her mother said as if she had forgotten Jack.

It was almost as if they had changed places. Maybe Nana was right and it would be better for Mom if there were things that she had to do.

As they put on their coats it felt odd that Mom was not there checking that they were well wrapped up and warm before leaving the house. Nora was glad to be back in the old familiar school boots. As she looked down on their leather toe caps, she stamped on the floor to warm her toes and the iron studs gave a metallic clank.

“It’s very cold this morning,” Peter told her. “We were nearly frozen out in the stalls doing the cows. Be sure that you have plenty of clothes on, Norry, because the school will be freezing.”

Nora thought that Peter was a bit more like his old self this morning, and it made her feel better.

As they walked out through the yard Jack put his head out of Paddy’s stable. “Don’t worry about your mother now. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

“How’s Paddy this morning?” Nora asked.

“Almost as good as new,” Jack told her.

Paddy had been cut and bruised in the fall and Jack had been doctoring him with his own remedies. The accident had not been Paddy’s fault, but somehow seeing him brought it all back, so she had not called to see him very often.

They walked along quickly in order to keep warm. The high ditches at each side of the boreen were draped with faded brown ferns and tiered moist moss. It was a short, steep boreen that led up to the road and Jack’s cottage was just beside their farm gate.

“Hello, Toby.” Nora leant over the stone wall that divided their boreen from the cottage yard and a small brown terrier put his front paws on his side of the wall and shook his tail in welcome. They were old friends, but if a stranger called when Jack was out Toby attacked with great ferocity. In the yard behind him hens and ducks wandered around scratching and picking. They could see Jack’s cat sitting on the back window of the cottage washing her face and tidying herself up for the day.

“I love Jack’s cottage,” Nora said.

“Oh, every time we pass Jack’s cottage you say that!” Peter protested.

“I know,” Nora said agreeably, “but it’s grand the way it’s all huddled into the trees so that you can’t see it from the road, and when you look out the front windows you can see down over Nolans’ fields away down to the village.

“Well, I never heard such a palaver about an old house,” Peter said. “Our house, because it’s lower down, is more sheltered.”

“That’s what Dada says,” Nora remarked.

“Norry, you’ll have to get used to saying ‘Dada said’, because Dad isn’t here anymore,” Peter said, biting his lip.

“But Pete,” she protested, “sometimes I forget and I expect him to come out the stable door or to be sitting on his chair by the fire. Part of me knows that he is gone, but another part of me keeps forgetting because he was always here,” she said.

“We better not start talking about Dad because we can’t cry today,” Peter decided.

He bolted the farm gate behind them and they walked back the road away from the cottage, both silently preparing themselves for the day ahead. When they came to Sarah Jones’s gate they saw the small neat woman with grey cropped hair out in the acre feeding the hens. She put down her bucket and, wiping her hands on her apron, she came towards them smiling.

“I’d rather she’d let us pass and not be delaying us,” Peter muttered under his breath.

“Shush,” Nora whispered.

“Good to see you on the road again,” Sarah smiled, putting her hand into her pocket and drawing out two sticks of barley sugar. Peter’s face broke into a smile of appreciation and Nora, standing on tiptoe, kissed her gratefully.

As they walked away from her gate Nora grinned at Peter. “Now are you sorry that she stopped us?”

“She’s not a bad old sort,” he admitted.

“Jack told me that she laid Dada out.”

“Nora, we’re not going to talk about Dad this morning.”

Then they rounded the first bend of the road and saw two figures trudging just ahead of them.

“The Nolans,” Nora said with relief. It would be good to have Rosie beside her facing back into school.

“Yoo-hoo,” Peter shouted after them as they ran to catch up. The two Nolans waited with smiles of welcome on their faces. Rosie was solid and serene with heavy blonde hair down to her waist, while her brother Jeremy was gangling with a short unruly thatch over a cheery, freckled face. Rosie was Nora’s best friend and the only one to whom she had confided about the horror of the white worm. In the play yard her ample presence had often shielded Nora from further threats. If only she was sitting beside Rosie in school, life would be so much easier.

“We missed the two of you,” Rosie said simply, and Nora smiled in gratitude because she wanted to feel that her school world was waiting for her. But even that world was darkened by the threat of the white worm. She did not like Miss Buckley either, but then nobody liked Miss Buckley. She knew that she had said something to Miss Buckley the night of the accident, but she could not remember exactly what it was because those days were all mixed up in her mind like bits of a broken jug that would not fit together.

The two boys forged ahead and Nora cracked her stick of barley sugar in half and gave it to Rosie, who looked at her with concern.

“Your face is as white as whitewash,” she said, but added comfortingly, “You’ll get better. My mother says that when things are bad they can only get better.”

“Hope so,” Nora said a bit forlornly.

“They will,” Rosie told her reassuringly, sucking her stick of barley sugar. That was one of the nice things about Rosie, she could always see the good side of things, and she was full of all kinds of exciting news.

“Wait until I tell you about the big fight Jeremy had with Rory Conway while you were missing,” she began.

Rosie chatted on non-stop and Nora was happy just to listen. The last couple of weeks had been a time of subdued whispering, so now just to listen to Rosie’s happy voice was a welcome change.

When they arrived at the long low school the door of the front porch was closed and there was nobody in sight.

“We must be late,” Nora said in alarm.

“Don’t worry,” Rosie assured her, “the foxy greyhound can’t say anything to you on your first day back.”

Rosie had christened the red-haired Miss Buckley “the foxy greyhound” because, as Rosie explained, she was long, lean and mean and always barking.

Rosie put her shoulder to the heavy old porch door and pushed it in before her, and the familiar smell of sour milk bottles and damp coats came out to meet them. They hung up their coats and Rosie lifted the latch of the door into the schoolroom. Every eye in the room swung towards them. Rosie sailed serenely up to her place at the end of the front seat and Nora slunk on to the edge of the back seat beside the white worm. Miss Buckley after a glance over her shoulder in their direction continued to write on the blackboard.

“So you came back at last,” Kitty Conway greeted her. Nora thought that she looked like a cat waiting to pounce on a mouse.

“Silence,” Miss Buckley demanded without turning around, and there was instant silence. “Take out your sum copies and take down these sums off the board.”

Nora found it very difficult to concentrate and had to rub out the wrong numbers several times while Kitty Conway watched her with a smirk on her face.

“You stupid lump,” Kitty whispered, but because Miss
Buckley was so cross there was no chance of further exchanges, and for that Nora was grateful.

As the morning wore on she felt tired and found it difficult to keep her eyes open. It was a relief to hear the Master’s bell for lunch hour. She moved quickly from the desk and was out the door before Kitty had time to say anything.

Out in the play yard the other children looked at her curiously, almost as if they expected her to have changed in some way. She knew that they had all heard about her father. They gathered around her in a silent cluster. Nora felt threatened by their unspoken expectations. She felt Kitty Conway moving in near her to mock, to some way blame her for her father’s death so that they would all think that she was a freak. Their faces swam before her eyes, waiting and watching. Then Rosie was beside her, large, solid and assured.

“What are ye all gaping at?” she demanded. “How would ye like if your father was dead and ye had no Dada at home?”

Eyes opened in dismay and then sympathy washed over their faces.

“It would be just awful,” one little girl said, biting her lip at the thought of it.

“Well, then, play with Nora and stop acting like mugs ’cause it could be you next week,” Rosie threatened. “So come on and we’ll all play the cat and the mouse.”

They looked at Rosie as if she was wise beyond her years and started to form a long line, and once the game got going they laughed and screamed with excitement. Nora found herself joining in and for a while forgot everything only the fun of being one of them again.

But as they trooped back into the school after lunch she saw Kitty Conway watching her. Later that evening they would have the sewing class, when they were allowed to talk quietly. That would give the white worm a chance to attack. Nora liked sewing, but she dreaded this class, when Kitty Conway would have her cornered in the desk and at her mercy. All of a sudden Nora wished that she was at home. School would be all right if she did not have to sit next to Kitty Conway, but now it all washed back over her and she felt trapped.