Across the River (3 page)

As he guided the horses around by the headland, he viewed with satisfaction the tall meadow grass. Different hues of delicate browns and yellows blended together. As the first cut fell the whiff of purple clover filled the air and the smell that wafted up to his nostrils told him that the field was just right for cutting. The horses had their own rhythm and hardly needed him, they were so used to their job. He relaxed on his seat to the soft drone of the mowing machine.

As Jack circled around the field, the island of hay in the centre grew smaller and the swards stretched out around it. He decided that Davy must have forgotten his promise to
come down after him to rake out the dykes. That was not surprising, because Davy could be depended on to come across something else that he’d decide had to be done. He might bring down the tea later and stay on then for a while before the cows, or Martha herself could come if she decided she needed to get out of the house. It would give him a chance to put in a good word for Peter, not that she’d listen, but it was always worth a try.

But it was Nora who finally came through the gap swinging the gallon of tea. She was probably just back from school. It did his heart good to see her dancing over the swards, her mane of blond curly hair shining in the sun. With her long elegant limbs she always put him in mind of a well-bred colt. Not a trace of Martha there, nor was she a Phelan either; she was her grandmother’s side of the house and they were easy, gentle people. She often calmed the waters between Peter and Martha. Next year would be her last in the secondary, and if she went further afield, which she probably would, there would be no peacemaker in the house.

“Jack,” she called, “do you want to take the horses down to the bottom of the field and we can eat by the river?”

“Grand job, girlie,” he said, reining the two horses in that direction and raising up the blade so that they could move more freely. The horses sensed a rest from work and strained forward on the reins. When they reached the lower headland, he eased himself off the seat.

“Getting old and stiff, Nora,” he told her, bringing the bag of hay off the seat and placing it on the ground. “You sit there now, girlie, and make yourself comfortable.”

“No, Jack,” she told him, taking the bag of hay and placing it on the low stone ditch, “you sit here and I’ll sit on this big flat stone. It’s grand and warm from the sun.”

He put a few swards of hay under the heads of the horses, and they crunched noisily with long green strings dribbling from their jaws. Nora and himself settled themselves comfortably on the low ditch overlooking the river.

“Isn’t it lovely to listen to the water?” Nora said, looking down through the overhanging branches at the river gurgling over the brown stones beneath them. Then, taking the cover off the gallon, she handed him a cup out of the basket.

“Boys, but I need this.” Jack sighed with relief as the tea hit his parched throat.

“I brought a cup for myself as well,” Nora told him, “but I’ll wait and have my tea when you are having Mom’s apple cake because I’m only just after my dinner.”

“Your mother’s a mighty baker,” Jack said appreciatively as he sank his teeth into the nutty brown bread.

“She’s great, isn’t she?” Nora agreed. “Mom does everything perfectly.”

“That’s about the cut of it.” Jack agreed.
No problem there!

“Did herself and Peter have a row today?” Nora asked tentatively.

“What makes you say that?” he asked cautiously. He knew that Nora worried about the rows between her brother and mother, so the less she knew about some of them the better.

“I could feel it when Peter and Davy were in for their tea just now, so I decided to come down and have mine with you.”

“They had a bit of a scrape all right, nothing much. But you were right to come down here for the tea. Nothing beats tea in the meadow on a sunny day.”

“It’s lovely here, isn’t it?” Nora sniffed the air with delight, looking around at the sheltered meadow and
across the river. Then he saw her expression change and he followed her glance. Standing on top of the high bank at the other side of the river, leaning on the fence, was Matt Conway. He was too far away to read his expression, but Jack doubted if it were friendly.

“He frightens me,” Nora whispered.

“So he should,” Jack told her. “Keep far away from him.”

“Why is he standing up there staring down on us?” Nora asked uneasily.

“Trying to make us feel uncomfortable,” Jack told her.

“He believes in the silent treatment. They say that he hasn’t spoken to that poor unfortunate wife of his for years.”

“Why has he fencing around the top of the high bank? Nobody could cross up there anyway.”

“He put that up when a cow fell down over that bank and got drowned. That’s a fierce hole down there, some kind of a whirlpool in it, and whatever goes down never again comes up.”

“When we were small, Mom was always warning Peter and myself to keep away from yalla hole.”

“And she was right.”

“Why do we all call it Yalla Hole?” Nora asked.

“I suppose because the cliff yawning over the water is mostly of yellow mud, so the water in the hole beneath has a yellow reflection.”

Nora shivered and then decided. “Jack, let’s turn our back on Matt Conway and enjoy our apple cake.”

“Sound idea,” Jack agreed, and they came down off the little ditch and sat under the whitethorn in the headland. They ate in companionable silence, both busy with their own thoughts. Jack liked the way Nora could sit in silence; few young ones could do that. Peter and Davy
were always chewing the cud about something.

When they looked across the river again, Matt Conway was gone.

M
ATT
C
ONWAY
SAT
at the top of the table chewing his food noisily, his eyes half closed in concentration. Wisps of foxy hair were plastered across his bald head and folds of chins rose and fell with each chew as grease oozed out of the side of his mouth and trickled down their furrows. Every so often his jawbone made a clicking noise.

Danny watched him out of the corner of his eye. If he were caught looking at him, he could get a belt across the head. Sometimes Matt Conway pretended to have his eyes closed, but he was only laying a trap, and when he had given Danny a good blow he would roar laughing at the joke of having caught him out. But it wasn’t pleasant laughter: it was a derisive bellow with a manic ring to it. Sometimes Danny was convinced that his father was half mad and at other times that he was completely mad.

There was nobody living at home now except himself and his mother. They were all gone, couldn’t stick the old fellow. He was not sure how long more he could stick him either. To be treated like a fool and get a blow if you protested was hard to take when you were nineteen, but he could not leave his mother on her own. The old fellow could kill her. He had nearly succeeded a few times.

She had shrunk over the years. It was as if the less space she took up the better her chance of escaping attention. His father’s attention meant a battering or a nod of his head towards the foot of the stairs. His mother would have no option but to comply with a cowed look on her face. As a child he had sometimes listened to the rocking of the bed upstairs. He remembered the day that his father had discovered the pills his mother had got from Dr Twomey so that she would have no more babies. He threw her
down the stairs, roaring like a lunatic, “You know that it’s against the will of God to take those bloody things.”

His mother lay in a heap on the floor at the foot of the stairs and his father came thundering down and kicked her.

“Well, what’s your explanation? Are you trying to get me into hell with you?”

With blood trickling from her forehead, Biddy Conway had pulled herself up by the banister of the stairs.

“I asked Fr Brady and he said that it was all right,” she told him.

“That fella!” he yelled. “That cur isn’t a proper priest at all, stuck in there in Kate Phelan’s every chance he gets, probably using them himself. You go to Burke in future, he’s a proper priest. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” she agreed resignedly.

Sometimes his brothers had tried to interfere, but the old fellow was as strong as a horse and could beat hell out of any of them. Maybe if Rory and Tom had stayed they could have taken him on together, but Rory had said that if he stayed he would kill him and finish up in jail. Rory had the temper of the old fellow, so maybe he was right to get out.

Danny missed the lads, but it was the girls he missed most, especially Kitty. She was a year younger than him and they had been great pals. She was gone eight years now and had never come back. Mary was gone longer, but then she had been older and he could only just remember her. She had looked so different when she came home for their grandmother’s funeral, and it was then that Kitty had gone with her. He could not understand it at the time. Now he could. It was his father, but their reason for leaving was a different one from that of the boys. The thought of it made him squirm with disgust.

“They are working in our meadows,” Matt Conway growled.

“I know,” said Danny, who knew that the remark was addressed to him because his father had not spoken to his mother for years.

“This could be the year that I might straighten them out,” he threatened. He put his large beefy hands on the edge of the table and pushed his chair back, driving the table forward until it banged against Biddy Conway’s leg. Danny saw her flinch with pain, but her face remained impassive. His father stretched himself and then pulled up his sagging pants, but his overhanging stomach was too great a barrier to overcome.

“You brush out from those pigs,” he barked at Danny and plodded out of the kitchen with his head thrust forward and his hands resting on his backside.

There was silence for a few minutes. Danny watched the window, waiting to see that he had passed before asking his mother, “Are you hurt?” She raised tired eyes and looked across the table at him.

“Not much,” she said resignedly.

“He’ll be like a devil now while the Phelans are in the river meadows,” Danny said. “Every year he goes off the head at this time.”

“If it wasn’t the Phelans it would be something else,” she sighed. “I sometimes think that there is a demon eating him up inside.”

Danny was surprised that she was so forthcoming. Usually she said little. Plucking up his courage, he asked, “Why did you ever marry him?”

At first she looked amazed that he had asked the question. She sat very still for a few seconds and then appeared to come to a sudden decision.

“There wasn’t much choice,” she told him. “I was expecting a baby.”

“But how did you come to be mixed up with the likes of him at all?” he persisted.

“Young and stupid,” she said bitterly. “Hard to imagine it now, but I could not believe my luck that he even noticed me. He was a fine looking fellow then. A grand dancer. I was actually impressed by his dancing! That’s what a fool I was.”

Then it was as if, having taken the lid off, she now wanted to let it all out.

“The night that it first happened I could not stop him because he was much stronger than me, and of course when it happened once there was no stopping him. When I told him I was expecting his child, he told me that I was trying to trap him.”

“So why did he marry you if he didn’t want to?” Danny probed.

“Because my father came to his mother and they patched something up between them. He was afraid of her. She could put a brake on him. Even though she was hard to live with, I missed her when she died, for there was no one to put a stop to him then.”

“She got Kitty and Mary out, didn’t she?” he asked quietly.

“You understand about that too,” she said grimly.

“Why did you never leave?”

“Where was I to go?” she asked resignedly.

“You could have gone to Dublin with the girls.”

“I wanted them to have a fresh start and not be dragging me after them. As well as that, if I went up there he might have come after me. I wanted the girls to be safe.”

For years he had wondered why the girls did not write,
until one day when his father was gone to the creamery. From his bedroom window he had watched his mother go across the fields in the direction of Sarah Jones’. When she came home, he had asked why she went to Sarah’s that early and she warned him not to mention it in front of his father. Then she told him about the letters. Mary wrote to Sarah Jones and Kitty wrote to Kate Phelan. She went over to Sarah’s to read them and then burn them for fear of their father finding out.

Danny wanted to know why she had never told himself about the letters, but she assured him that the less he knew the less could be beaten out of him. He knew that if his father knew they were in contact through Kate Phelan there would be hell to pay, but it was great to know that Kitty had not forgotten them. Kitty was doing her Leaving Cert this year and Mary was teaching now and earning her own money. It was a great comfort to his mother that they were both independent. Their grandmother had financed the girls for years with the money she made out of the “cure”. She had never told anybody about her business, and when she died her brewing secret went with her.

Danny often wondered how she had managed to keep it all under control.

“Grandmother must have been an amazing old lady. To think that she could keep himself in his place and he can belt a big fellow like me around is strange, isn’t it?”

“No one got the better of old Molly,” Biddy told him.

“She made the cure for years and no one knew where she made it.”

They both sat silently remembering old Molly Conway.

Her next question took him by surprise. “Did you never think of leaving, Danny?”

“I did, but the thought of you being here on your own
stopped me.”

“You were always a good child,” she said, and then continued in a questioning voice, “Isn’t it strange, Danny, that we did not have a talk like this before?”

“I was always nervous of asking you questions in case I’d upset you,” he said.

“I hadn’t realised how grown up you are. When I was your age I was married with a child and another on the way and knew that I’d ruined my life. You must be very careful, Danny, and make the right decisions. I’m always writing that to the girls.”

“Where do you write to them?”

“Over in Sarah Jones’. I am very careful; it would be a disaster if he found out where they were.”

“Isn’t it strange that it’s Kate Phelan is your link with Kitty?”

“Could you imagine what would happen if himself found that out? He’d kill me.”

“I can just barely remember her being here the night Nana died, and Kitty went with her that night,” he said.

“Well, she’s the district nurse. She was attending your grandmother when she got blood poisoning in her leg. In some odd way the two of those understood each other.

That drove himself mad. Fr Brady was with Kate Phelan that night, so he has it in for him since.”

“I suppose if Ned Phelan hadn’t died, the problem with the Phelans might have been solved, because he was a very quiet man,” Danny said.

“I don’t know,” she sighed, “but whether it would have been or not, there is no way now Martha Phelan and himself are going to come to any agreement.”

“She is a tough woman,” Danny said with a hint of admiration in his voice. “She is doing a great job over there, isn’t she?”

“She was always an able lady,” his mother said. “I remember her in school and you couldn’t frighten her.”

“I’d say that hasn’t changed, but didn’t she get a notion of selling after Ned dying?” he asked.

“She did, and when she changed her mind about that it drove himself mad. To get his hands on Phelans’ is his life’s ambition.”

“For all the use he’d make of it,” Danny said bitterly.

“He is a wash-out of a farmer. If he might run this place properly instead of watching the Phelans across the river … He wastes more time down there leaning on top of that stake looking across at them. Is he trying to intimidate them?”

“There is no way that he is going to frighten Martha Phelan. He has met his match in her. Of course, Jack Tobin is over there so long now that he takes no notice.”

“It’s all so long ago, wouldn’t you think that it was time to forget about it?”

“Some things are never forgotten around here,” she told him, “especially if it has to do with land or money.”

It had startled him to hear his mother talk of being in school with Martha Phelan. That would make them about the same age and yet his mother seemed years older. He looked across the table at her with pity. Her hair was grey and wispy over a small drawn face, and there was a hopelessness about the very way she was slouched on the chair. He thought of Martha Phelan as she swept up the centre isle of the church every Sunday. It was hard to keep your eyes off her. She was magnificent. But the one who reallyheld his attention every Sunday was Nora. Since they had gone to school together in the glen, she had fascinated him.

“You had better go out to the pigs, Danny,” his mother
broke into his thoughts, “or he’ll be up from the river and roaring like a bull.”

“You’re right,” he agreed, rising from the table. “I’m so glad that we had this talk though; it makes things easier.”

“It does indeed, and maybe we should have had it before now, but I was not sure you’d understand.”

As he walked across the yard to the pigs’ house, he looked around, and the sight depressed him as always. The farm sheds were a decrepit looking collection of rusty galvanised sheeting with some gaping holes.
If I was in charge around here,
he thought,
there would be a total change.
But what a hope he had. The old fellow held a tight rein and made all the decisions without discussion.

Then he thought back over the conversation with his mother. Wouldn’t it be lovely to visit Kitty and Mary? But what about his mother? It would be like abandoning her to leave her here with the old fellow. Imagine his mother going out with a fellow because he was a good dancer!

She mustn’t have had a spark of sense.

When he opened the door of the pigs’ house, rats ran out of the feeding troughs in all directions. God, he hated to see them. The old fellow had a fascination with rats. He set traps and lay the dead bodies out on the dunghill. There was no doubt but that he was a crazy bastard, and Danny hoped that some day Martha Phelan would get the better of him.