Annie Dunne (15 page)

‘Child, child,’ I say.

The little girl is stranded there on the road. The rush of summer weeds and grasses seems to blaze around her spindly legs. There is nothing to her. She is only a notion of humanity, a suggestion. Wicklow is wild with green and brown all about her, the colours fly up. The breeze tries softly to arrange her hair. I stand there holding the boy and looking at her, not knowing what to do.

‘Australia!’ he says, ‘Australia!’

I laugh, no doubt like a sheepdog, like Shep himself, still collapsed in his sunspot on the yard. Oh, let us step through the ditch into Australia, and run with the kangaroos, and see the koalas, and cross the limitless emptiness of the interior. Let us go there, and dance with the convicts and be Australians, and meet again, I am sure, some of those fled denizens of the Kelsha cabins, that had the music and the dances in their keeping, and the great, lost happiness of that week in November when the spuds were safely saved.

Chapter Nine

No sign of Sarah in the house and yard, no sign of a killed chicken ready near the fire, to make our new stew. The fire itself has burned low, but that is my task and therefore my neglect. Carefully I build back the wall of turves, and roof it for good measure. Maybe the killed and plucked hen is under a dish on the dresser, but no. Something has made her, forced her, to abandon her task. Did the tinkers return? Most unlikely. The yard is strange and quiet, though I hear Billy snorting in his byre. The calves are bigger now and gone from the shed and will be frisky in the far garden, as we call it. The hens in general are pecking about between the pack-stones. They do not look like hens who have lost one of their number, and indeed when I count them, they have not. There is always a trace left among the hens when one has been murdered, I often think a resentful glare in those glassy eyes. Perish the day when we must consign the great Red Dandy to the pot. But the legs of hens get yellower, their lives are circumscribed like our own. I cast my gaze across the nearer fields, but no sign there of Sarah either. This is not a good feeling, the Sarahless farm.

It is a curious irritation to do another’s share of work. But the gap in the tally of tasks must be filled, just as if it were a gaping hole in a field fence. The weight of the day, the collection of things and happenings that make a day, will not hold true with something left undone. It is a fact that you feel in your bones, in your water. It cannot be ignored.

Out into the peaceful yard I go, having sent the children before me to search the secret places of the hay barn, where the trap now looms alone, for whatever eggs may be hidden there. Hens take great pride in eggs. They covet them, though, like chicks. They do not always want you to find them. So you would think.

Perhaps their simple hearts tell them to find out-of-the-way corners and shelves and niches, against the preda tions of foxes and mice and rats. So the children must insert their warm arms into dark gaps, and feel about for the still-warm orbs secreted there, and triumphantly extract them. Perhaps we are like very comprehensive murderers to the hens, not only seeking the older ones for stews, but quenching all possibility of life from vulnerable eggs. Yet this thorough-minded enemy strides out in the evenings with the apronful of grain. We must puzzle them greatly.

Having spied an individual a little heavy with her years, one of the regular replacement birds we buy from time to time in Baltinglass fair, I corner her in the yard, where the walls of the calf shed and the hay barn make an angle. She seems to know well her fate. She skithers and dances, making a rush here and there which I block with counter-steps. We are dancing now in the yard, a funny dance of death.

Now I am within a farthing of her, and hold out my arms and gently but swiftly grasp her under the head.

I would not like to recount the look of pure horror that grips the hen, although in truth hens always bear a horrified expression, as if life in general was a thing of fear. She is living and breathing, she is growing old, the intervals between eggs is sadly widening, even the mighty cock himself must be growing weary of her, defeated by her gathering barrenness.

What would it be if some knowing farmer were to find out the barren women of Kelsha, and corner us in our yards, and wring our necks?

I lift her from the stable earth with caring quickness and shake her firmly, with a properly vicious, circular move- , ment. The neck breaks immediately. She hangs from my efficient hand, her days of living done.

With a sigh, I must admit, I sit myself in the shade of the cow byre on a three-legged stool, and begin to pluck her.

It is then I see the little boy in the cowl of dark within the barn, watching me. His face shows nothing, one way or another. My right hand grips her now on the lower neck, the head hangs down, a droplet of crimson blood gathers on her loose red comb, my left hand by long familiarity flies from feathers and out, giving firm plucks, wrenching the quills from their tight roots. The pink skin, almost white, puckers up into a little mountain, then slowly falls back, smooth again but for the general wrinkles of a hen.

Nice and fat she is, with soft muscles. She is just right for boiling, and will make an excellent stew.

The little boy slowly approaches, leaving the summer darkness of the barn, his eyes fixed on the stripping hen. The white feathers fly about the yard, birdless and free. You could save those feathers and wash them well and use them to re-stuff a bolster, but I am not in thrifty mood. I pluck and pluck.

The little boy hangs a side of his rump on the chopping block, with its thousand stripes of the axe, and never offers a word, his face unchanging, like, it occurs to me, Matt when he is painting. I have watched Matt working the odd time secretly, noting how he does not move his face except to lick his lips, his left foot forward of his right as he stands at his easel in a summer meadow as may be, capturing some instance of beauty he has found in our Wicklow. I have watched him secretly from behind a tree, and loved something about him then, the peace and the power of him, the unsmiling happiness. It was thus that Maud encountered him those long years ago in St Stephen’s Green in the heart of the city, ensnaring the duck pond onto his special watercolour paper as if he were alone in the heart of the mountains. I understand what took a hold of her. Even now when she is dead and he is surely sixty-six years of age, and all their kisses done, age falls away from him when he painting, time falls away, even I might hazard the very cut of his clothes, the present century, all that incidental matter. And Matt is there as the eternal creature, raptly working.

Something of this now stills the features of his grandson, watching my working hands as if he too were painting it, recording it not for himself necessarily, or for anyone, except perhaps the unknown memory of his God.

At dusk Sarah returns, I know not from whither, as the saying goes. The coming night is just pockets of hints in the sycamores. The fields about, the lower woods, are failing in my eyesight. Inside the kitchen the poor departed hen bubbles in the big pot. She has been dismembered and beheaded. Swedes and parsnips, potatoes and carrots, have joined her funeral. Dido herself, the queen of Carthage, burned on a pyre as Aeneas sails away, could not have felt more honoured.

I have given her spuds without black eyes and the smaller, sweeter carrots. The three of us, small boy and girl, myself the general, have bestowed on her the stew of stews.

They have found all of thirteen eggs, a magnificent haul, ranged now on the dresser for Sarah’s return, the children say. They sense the unusual absence and naturally as children they assume some strange sadness in the grown-up, which the harvested eggs will banish.

She comes in through the gloom of the door, it must be well past eight. It is not true dusk, the proper dusk of night, but the artificial dusk this farm endures when the sun goes over beyond our mountain, and all the sloping field and trim of woods is thrown into shadow. It is as good as dusk, though sunlight remains on further farms, looking bright and covetable on the plain, brighter farms than ours, the faraway fields no doubt of the proverb. Well, faraway fields indeed are greener than the fields of Kelshabeg, in the summer evenings.

‘Sarah,’ I say.

What else can I offer? I do not wish to scare her, blame her, offend her. I must be neutral like those foreign diplomats that sometimes visited the Castle, dignitaries that would neither praise not criticize, for fear of war - or so my father would say. One misplaced word might plunge all Europe into chaos, he said, and that was the sorry life of a diplomat. We used to watch them from our windows with great anticipation, hoping for visible disaster. But they did not look sorry to us, with their cheerful faces, and their huge official vehicles. Often in those years countries came and went, as did our own, names and borders changing, but it did not affect the cheerfulness of diplomats, as far as we could judge.

She passes through the kitchen without speaking, sadly not registering the haul of eggs, and on through the door into our bedroom, and closes the thin door quietly.

I have sprinkled water on the flagstones and brushed them, yard by yard, as is my custom. There is a manner to sweep a floor. My mother’s grandmother’s floor was clay, red clay, and that took expert sweeping, but if done well it is as clean as stones. I have tidied away the few stray objects of the day, the Bible that Sarah must have been perusing, a tin box with nothing in it. I have the wooden box of socks for darning by my legs, and am sitting fairly hunched by the lowering fire. The big darning needle passes with a satisfying ravishment through the thick, still heel of one of Sarah’s working socks, that lines her boots. She has not emerged, but is lying, I have no doubt, on our bed, immobile, quiet, staring at the old egg-blue ceiling boards. It would not be the first time for such strangeness, and I must allow it. If not for me, sometimes I think the country home at Baltinglass would beckon for her.

I feel some accomplishment in the fact, though it bears to me the shadows of my father’s last days with me in Lathaleer, before his final outbreak and decline. It seems I must be sometimes daughter and cousin to the mad, or nearly mad. But I blame neither that old policeman nor my cousin Sarah, it is the declensions of age that are at fault, the very faulty arrangements of our Lord for such as we become. If this is blasphemy then the Lord will have to forgive me.

My father in the old kitchen at Lathaleer raved and waved his ceremonial sword, with his shirt rended by himself and his trews bestained by urine, and cursed himself and my own life. I thought he would kill me, and when he reached the height of his raving he begged me to kill him, with the sword, across his poor addled head like a sword of Damocles. I could not do that, but some would say I brought a worse judgement on his wits, by putting him to the county home in Baltinglass, with the help of Matt. And there in darkness of mind and pitiful reduction, he died. He that once kept all of B division in Dublin, with responsibility for the castle herself, as he would say, all quiet and shipshape for viceroy and king. I would not willingly put Sarah to such sorrows, and if I can stand between her and whatever ails her mind, just now and then, I will have paid her better for the niche she has given me, than any thousand eggs from a Rhode Island Red.

The fire is sweet and red, like habitual garnets, or rubies strewn under black stones.

The little boy comes from the blackness of his room, slips in near beside me on Sarah’s chair. I do not even look at him. He is like a mouse, a field creature I must not disturb. How small and trim he is, how neat his bending back. . His legs hang from the seat of the chair.

‘Auntie Anne,’ he says. ‘I am sorry for the purse. I am sorry.’

‘Why did you throw it in the ditch?’ I say, at ease.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the notion came into my head, and I just did it, like boys do.’

‘I know,’ I say, ‘I know. Well, I did a worse thing, I must confess. And don’t you tell your sister, I think she would not understand. You will understand, I am sure.’