Annie Dunne (11 page)

‘Maybe, maybe so,’ she says, with solemn simplicity, with sadness, folding the clothes as if it were a ritual, a priestly thing—when the priest used to be ‘fussing about’, as we thought as children, at the altar, with his back to us, and never a look or a word, and the dread shaft of boredom striking down into our limbs, and us twitching like just-slaughtered calves on the cold benches. Religion was a terrible burden to us as little girls, excepting the excitement after mass, when you could count your cousins alive on the church steps, and dead in the churchyard.

‘I wouldn’t think twice about it, if it happened to me, I wouldn’t now, Sarah.’

‘It didn’t happen to you, Annie.’

‘No, no.’

‘If there was a leak in our roof, I would expect a man to go up on the slates and mend it. I would expect a helpful man to bring his ladder and his roof ladder, or knock one up in the yard with a few lengths of timber, and scale the heights there and do what he had to with his hammer and his lead.’

‘Oh?’ I say.

‘And if there was a leak in a bucket, I would want the tinker Dempsey himself to come with his metal and his fire and plug the gap fiercely.’

‘We had enough of tinkers for one day, surely.’

‘But when there is a leak in an old woman, what is the best thing? To bring up the stun hammer from the slaughterhouse in Hacketstown, and lay it in against her foul, old temple, and give her a good bang with it, and cure her lep for herself.’

I laugh despite myself, under the warming sheets, not at all sure if I might not be giving her offence. But she has humour in her, Sarah. She laughs too.

‘And cure her lep for herself! Ha, ha, ha!’

Then she stands quietly with the bowl of the lamplight.

‘Wasn’t it lovely when we were young girls and we hadn’t these things to worry about. You could wet the bed in the long ago and no one say boo to you, except your mamma might be vexed and muttering at the extra work. But the sheets’d go through the storm of washday and everything washed away, stains and troubles, and not a word said about it again.’

‘How do you mean, Sarah?’

‘I mean, Annie, such things were by the by, and the future was there to set against any to-do and turmoil was going on. Now there is not that. There is too much fear.’

‘Fear, Sarah?’ I say fearfully.

‘Fear, yes. Where has all the days gone? How am I nearly sixty-two next year and the summers gone that were allotted to me, and days and weeks and years all added up to that amount already? Where is all that time? Where is it gone? We were young one day and that tomorrow came and we were no longer young. The Dunnes of Kelsha were young, and you were, and your sisters Maud and Dolly, and of those six girls only the one was wed, and she is dead now.’

‘Poor Maud. We thought she had seen paradise. Such a wedding day. She did not look well even that day, but when I saw those babies, one after the other boys - it is sad to be sad on your sister’s wedding day. And I suppose, with my crooked ...
’
—I am going to say back but I do not say it, I cannot—
‘
how could I expect, different, no ...’

‘I think in all truth you would have made a fine mother, Annie, and those two little children within certainly have a great liking for you. They run about the place. They seem to break everything, Annie, how is that? I try to see them, to peer into them, but they are like shadows.’

‘How is it shadows they are like, Sarah?’

‘To remember, just to remember, what it was like, littleness —I barely, scarcely—but you, you have the knack, you have the wrist for children, like for the butter, I could never make happy butter. I can make it, but not happy butter. I understand nothing of it, or of children. They have something ahead of them, and this I no longer understand. The little girl is strange to me, she is strange.’

‘Well now, she is a little strange.’

‘She is quiet and strange. She looks at me. The little boy talks to me, but she just looks, as if she thinks I am a very odd bird indeed. She has asked me nothing since she came. She does my bidding, one, two, three. But she asks me nothing.’

‘They are city children.’

‘But you were a city child. You were a city child, Annie, in your heyday. And I envied you that, except, I was happy enough being Winey Cullen’s daughter.’

‘I wasn’t a city child like them. My father carried the country with him. Even in the castle he led a country life. He patrolled the streets of Dublin as a countryman, as a Kiltegan man. His happiness arose from being from somewhere else. Those children are really from Dublin, born in Dublin and knowing only Dublin, till they are sent down here just to put a twist in their heads!’

‘And God bless them,’ says Sarah. ‘God bless us all, God knows.’

She takes her leave of her folding and steps the few paces of the boards to the bedside and kneels down with her long bones and prays into her large hands, her big horse’s face buried in the callused fingers. She has thin layers of yellow skin on the working sides of her hands, that no pumice stone will erase. You cannot run out Sarah’s hands with a pumice, though she attempts it daily. And she rubs in lavender water, and she sprinkles it all over her body now and then, to freshen herself, she says. You cannot leave good linen in a damp box, she says. You cannot keep a book far from the fire, or it rots, she says. Lavender water, Sarah’s idea of youthfulness. She grows it up under the woods like a secret, and when it flowers she gathers them and dries them, and when they are well dry she steeps the flowers in warm water to gather out their smells, and she puts the scented water into an earthenware bottle that her mother kept for the same purpose. Maybe her grandmother also smelled of lavender, I do not know. Her prayers done, she creaks into bed beside me.

‘Oh, but, it is good to lie down,’ says Sarah, ‘it is good.’

‘It is good,’ I say.

Sarah breathes out, her lavender is in her breath.

‘In the moment of rest there is safety,’ she says. ‘There is riches.’

‘I think so,’ I say.

‘No matter what, no matter what fears afflict us, we have our own dry bed to lie in, and we talk to each other like Christians.’

‘And that’s right,’ I say.

‘And those wild tinkers are gone away now another while, and God bless the poor people under Keadeen.’

‘God bless them.’

‘Joseph Casey and his brother Jem, and Katherine Keady that lives alone just under the dip of the hill. God protect them.’

‘Amen,’ I say. ‘Amen.’

There is nothing then for a long, long time, except the slip of wind in the maples outside.

‘And Annie,’ she says suddenly, but in that ease of starch and cotton, ‘was there really a sailor that wanted you?’

‘What’s that, Sarah? What put that into your head?’

‘I hardly know. I was thinking of the folding of the clothes, what ease it gives, and the folding and unfolding of the sea where the Liffey meets it, at the Great South Wall where once your brother-in-law Matt took me walking, one time I was in Dublin for to have my eyes seen to. I don’t know why I was thinking of that at all, but those long gold waves and the severe dark river, folding and folding one into the other, and then I was thinking of all those docklands that Matt loves to paint on his lunch-times, or so he said, and I have seen some of those pictured, well, and then I was thinking of sailors in their salty ships, you know, and then I was thinking of you, and what Maud told me once, long long before she took to her bed, in the days when she was always full of funny stories - she was sad but the stories were always humorous, you know?’

‘And what did she say about me?’ ‘She was saying that you at one time was asked to be going off with a sailor, a sailor that came ashore at the boat-yard in Ringsend to mend his keel, and he met you, I do not know where, and asked you to walk out with him, and then he went away, and you were waiting, waiting and waiting for him to come back and have that walk with you, that it was to Buenos Aires you thought he had gone, which is a long way enough.’

I lie there awhile beside her. I don’t know what the truth is. One day on the big yellow stones of the docks I was walking and a sailor leaned out from his dirty cargo ship and asked me for a kiss. I did not even answer him, but passed on without a glance. Or maybe this memory was at first made up, at this distance I no longer know rightly. When I got back to our quarters in the castle I told Maud something of the kind, and embellished the story, I am sure, in the telling. Because I did not want her to be thinking it was always Dolly and her got the interest, and there might be a man in the end who might overlook my damnable hump and take the risk of loving me. Then that shadowy man became my sailor, and Maud often told her friends of my sailor, maybe even to bolster herself as well as me against this crookedy back. Till I came to believe in him myself, and lived many a year by him, and waited for him, and am maybe waiting for him still, even though he was a queer little dark man on a Portuguese tramp steamer amusing himself by saying hello to a humpety girl on an idle Dublin Sunday—unless that is all invented too. A foolish, dark old woman, me!

‘Aye, there was a sailor once,’ I said, ‘that I might have taken if I’d had a mind to.’

‘You had a better score than me, so,’ she says. ‘World, one, Sarah Cullen, nil.’

‘You oughtn’t to mind such a thing.’

‘That’s what people say to the heartbroken and I heard it often enough. A priest said it to me once, when I wept in his confession box. Suddenly weeping, and him just a young fella out of the seminary, in Hacketstown it was. Father O’Keefe, that hanged himself in forty-seven. “You oughtn’t to mind such a thing,” he said to me, and hanged himself the following year.‘

‘I’m sorry, Sarah.’

‘Arrah, what can you do?’

I think of my crab-apple tree, alone in the summer dark. I wonder what is its purpose. An apple tree has only a hint of roots but it has stood well enough. I think it gains comfort from the manure heap near by, the heat of it, a strange insurance against frosts. I think that evil weather has passed now, the peace of the summer has returned. Now and then the rare note of the hens sounds, that ripple of clucking they do in their sleep, as if they are dreaming of foxes. I think of all the animals of the night creeping across the darkened fields.

‘I am thinking now,’ says Sarah, ‘of Joe McNulty, that went out one morning with a scythe and scythed a whole acre of wheat, to set a marker, he said, for the next generation. And boys brought buttermilk to him all the live-long day, against the monster of thirst grew in his throat. His huge back swiping and swiping at the standing wheat. At the setting of the sun he threw down that scythe, and flung his whetstone far off into the bog just by him there, and let out a crazy roar. The boys sat up on the ditch and cheered. He was something of a man, and that was the man I wanted for my bed. But he might as well have been the president of America, for all I could get close to him.’

‘I always thought there were hundreds of boys trying to get you. You were a lovely long slip of a girl, all wheaten-haired and brown and strong.’

‘Hundreds,’ she says, and laughing a little.

The mice are afoot too in the ceiling. Sometimes tiny drips of water come down from between the ceiling boards. Can it be they are trying to piss on our heads? I think of the silence of the kitchen with its patient and never-regretting clock, the plates in the dresser with the destroyed light altering the blue and white in their glaze. It must be half ten at night, it is only the early summer, not yet the peculiar long days of light when we draw the curtains to encourage sleep, and the daylight lies in the yard like drying straw. Perhaps I will not sleep tonight, but Sarah sleeps, the old embroidered blanket over her face, its hart and hounds forever caught hunting across the low, unstable hills of her breast. What keeps me awake is a dread, an anxiety, an unease I have no name for. My own breaths are short and sharp, my body cannot obey the commands of sleep. And yet by length of trying, by hook or by crook in the woods of the night, seemingly I do sleep.

Chapter Seven

In the folds of the dark she awakes, Sarah, drawing me up like a dark bucket from the deep well of sleep, hand over hand. I can already feel her agitation when I have not even broken the soft surface of normal wakefulness. In the dropping shadows I can see her. She seems to loom up as far as the wooden boards of the ceiling, although she is merely sitting up in the bed, the old bones of her bottom crushing down into the tight straw of the mattress, the tight ticking, so I am almost rolling over against her. My angle of vision from the pillow enlarges her, expands her, her wild white hair like foam or fire, her nostrils begging air, her long hands beating gently on the coverlet. Maybe she was dreaming darkly under the coverlet, till it became a little hot hell of nightmares, which she is by custom afflicted by. The dark of the room is stirred by her fears, the browns and blacks seem to boil around us, the sticks of furniture themselves caught in the petty maelstrom of her panic, twisted out of their places, crooked side table, the pitcher for water in its hole, rickety chairs to take a throw of clothes but never the weight again of a person, except it was a child, swinging its legs to make the creaks come alive in the damaged wood. The leaves of the sycamores make a green waterfall of the wind, all unseen, beyond the cold glass of the window. The mice no doubt scamper in the rafters gleefully. The two old dames below awake!