Annie Dunne (28 page)

I come down into the yard. The figures have reached the round columns of the gates and flood forward to meet me. It is hard to see the faces in the whirling light, the little storm now engaging strongly with the flames. But I hear the voice of Billy Kerr. There is a woman beside him. And another woman. And three or four men I cannot say I know. And children too, responsible ages of children. And Sarah stands there, tightly holding the hand of the little girl, whose face I notice is as white as the moon‘s, riding now in the arms of the sycamores.

‘Any news, Sarah, any news?’

‘No, Annie, dear - you?’

‘I was all up by Jack Furlong’s and the common woods. No sign, no sign. What are we to do?’

‘We will search for him,’ says a voice. It is Billy Kerr. ‘The whole district is raised and we will find him. We will search everywhere and everything till we have him found and safe.’

For it is Billy Kerr with the leading torch. And that is Mary Callan at his side, heaving with a lack of breath. And there surely is Mrs Nicodemus. And those faces are the faces of men I see as I pass, but do not greet, labourers of the O‘Tooles and the more stately O’Tooles themselves.

‘Mary Callan came down with news of your distress,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘I lit the torches and came straight up.’

So there is a district. It is myself that has no district, no sense of it, but it is there despite me. Then I remember, staring at her, a thing it is only stupidity to forget. Mary Callan cannot speak. I have a hump and she has a crookedness in the throat, two things to keep a woman on her own. She has no voice, no way to tell a thing. She has gone down to her cousin to fetch us help.

All this a torrent of thinking. There is no lightning in this mild summer storm, but nevertheless lights are leaping in my eyes, not just the torches. I realize I am close to fainting. I feel it all down my legs, and in my cheeks.

‘First we will search the further road,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘We’ll go on up, lads!’ he calls, and the
meitheal
of people surges forward. I have dark visions now of ponds and rivers, of the twists of hay with candles on them set upon the water, to find out anything snagged beneath the surface. It is dark and I am weeping. I will never see the boy again. There is no other way to think it. He is gone, he is dead.

I look up the yard, something draws my eye. The bulk of the trap looms in the harrowing lines of new darkness. But another element is there also, a thin white shadow at the murky rim of the trap. Shep is veritably cavorting now. He rushes into the barn as if to declare, see, see I showed you all this before, you didn’t believe me, old human woman of little faith. It is the boy, it is surely the boy. My head is all muddle and miracle in one stew.

‘Billy Kerr, Billy Kerr!’ I cry. ‘Come back, come back!’

I am afraid I am merely seeing things. I need the proof of other eyes. But I am sure, truly. Unless it is an angel in the trap, a vision.

Now Billy Kerr comes back from the pitch-dark of the mountain road, his torch making the small landscape jump about. I can see his balding pate shining under the freckling starlight. Such a night of stars is ahead of us! Mary Callan, wizened and small, trots after him, moving as surely and black as a boatman in the water bucket, renewed, feeling I am sure the same bolts of energy that I do myself, reinvigorating old legs.

‘He’s found,’ I say, ‘he’s found! Oh, child, child.’

And forward up the yard I go, feeling my legs as heavy as oak beams after all the scuttering and scattering about, and I sweep to the back of the trap where the little wooden door hangs open, and I hold my hands aloft to him. Without another word he descends into my arms, loosing himself from his intent like an apple from the glue of its twig, twisting down into my arms from his childish madness. What a small length of bones he is, so warm and nice his back, the little slope of the shoulders, the funny, rough, sudden legs of him. He nestles into my old breast, moulding himself there like plasticine. I hug him and hug him.

‘Oh, child, child,’ I say. ‘You were lost and now you are found. I am glad, I am glad!’

Suddenly there is that wiggling that children do when they want to be released. I do not understand. We are hardly wed again, and yet that is the way of children. He has seen someone else coming up behind me, because I hear Matt’s voice.

‘My God, I heard the boy was lost! I heard from the girls of Lathaleer that my little man was lost!’

‘Papa, Papa,’ he cries, like a very Biblical child indeed, ‘I was hiding but Annie has found me!’

I turn about. I see the little boy going up into Matt’s arms. I feel a thousand things and nothing at all. The human part of me feels such great relief, such love, such gratitude to God to have returned this child safely to us, for all the reasons his safety is essential, to me, to his parents, to Matt, to Sarah, the little girl, maybe even to God himself. The ugly part of me, the creaturely, feels dejected and cheated, robbed, imprisoned, despairing. I cannot explain it, it is like a weapon, a rope of water falling from the hills. All a great muddle of things, and at the midst of this muddle swirls something without a name, something dark, ferocious, starless. Matt stares into my eyes, luxuriating in the poultice, the bower, the harbour of the little boy.

‘Magritte!’ I say, I know not why.

It is all I can say, before our yard in Kelsha begins to turn and turn like a great mill-pool, and then there is a roaring as of the sea at Silver Strand by the bay of Wicklow, and then there is peculiar silence, and then there is blackness.

There is a most peculiar stench, and then a thought of knitting, pearl and plain, pearl and plain, endless and endless, peculiar, unbidden, and then the faces round me, Sarah and Matt, and the more stray moon of Billy Kerr.

‘Poor Annie. Are you all right, dear?’ says Sarah.

‘Oh, oh—I am fine,’ I say. I feel like the peas gone to mush in the pot.

‘You were very clever, Annie,’ says Matt. ‘To find the boy. How did you find him, how did you find him?’

‘I didn’t,‘ I say. ’He found himself.‘

And there is a pause. ‘He found himself!’ I say again, my fogs and miseries entirely lifting, old rooks from the ground, to their nests, nesting, nesting, and they are beginning to laugh. And I am laughing.

‘He found himself!’ says Matt, and there is that strange, rare screeching of laughter that people do when great strains are taken off them, and they can breathe again, as ordinary human beings, beyond emergency.

‘He found himself!’ says Sarah, bending as lithe as a willow, no sign of the yard brush that her back usually is.

‘He found himself!’ I echo. ‘He found himself, he found himself!’

I fold the little girl and boy into their beds, harbour them there like little boats, wedge them in with blankets and pillows. I am nesting them truly.

‘What a wild little boy he is,’ says the girl, ‘to be hiding and causing all that to-do.’

She does not seem to resent me now. She is smiling. There is a grace in her, an understanding maybe. I do not know whether to upbraid her for kicking my shin. She was protecting her brother, it was a good thing she did. Let it go by, let it all go by, with the help of God. My own violence with it, I pray, the stain of my own violence. I pray to God. Let there be no damage beyond repair, no perfect things in smithereens. Please God, I pray.

‘He is, I suppose, a wild little boy enough.’ The solace of banter! ‘But, his feelings were sore hurt. Weren’t they?’

‘They were,’ he says, a mite glumly. The rainbows of excitement have abated. What is left is the mud and murmur after the storm. It is a very strange spot to be, I remember well from my own young days. I feel sorry for him. I take his little sack of bones again in my bony arms, and hold him against me as gently as I can.

‘Do you miss your mother?’ I say, on an inspiration.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I miss you, Auntie Anne.’

‘But, child, I am here.’

‘Is it ever going to be the same, like it was at the start?’ he says.

‘Nothing is ever the same as at the start. It changes, and then it is different, but it is good different oftentimes.’

‘But you will not be forgiving me, Auntie Anne.’

I am breathing into his face, an oval of heat and simplicity.

‘I will be forgiving you with all my heart, without reservation. I was forgiving you the moment I saw you in the trap. You are already forgiven. And I hope you will forgive me.’

‘I did not go putting the bucket on Red Dandy,’ he says. ‘I did not.’

‘It’s no odds if you put it on her or did not. It is not the important thing, a bit of a hen. It is you is the important thing. I have you home now in your bed, that is the important thing.’

‘I would like to tell you, I didn’t put the bucket on him.’

‘On her. And now if you say you did not, I will believe you.’

‘You did not believe me before, which is why I hid.’

‘Now I believe you.’

And I kiss him.

Sarah comes in with a little bowl. In it is an unguent she has crushed for him. I think it is of boiled nettles and hog-weed, which she keeps in a pot for her rheumatism. She lifts his sheet, and opens his pyjamas and marks it in a line down the line of breastbone.

‘What is that for, Sarah?’ I whisper.

‘It is to let him sleep with good dreams after his ordeal. It will heal him.’

How strange she is, I suppose. She does not speak directly to the child, and yet the child trusts her. She does not kiss him, nor have one word for him. Now that I think of it, she never truly speaks to them. She does not tuck them in. And yet no woman ever laid a finger so gentle on that breastbone, nor spoke of dreams and healing with so soft a voice. I wish I could learn what it is that she is, what a receptacle of simple manners she is. She is just there, like a creature, or like a god, neither of which use words. Other means, deeper, older, darker. And true, when she goes out again, there is a change in the boy. He is the boy he was. Even I feel now hopeful and at ease, no matter what comes. Is there not eternal pleasure and peace in the facts of human love, that overrides present difficulties? I do think so.

‘I am sorry for the green fire engine. I am sorry for fetching it out of its hiding place in the barn, and trodding on it. It was just a game, a good game I found to do.’

‘It was your birthday present. It was yours to do with as you liked.’

‘I should have waited for the day. I should have.’

‘But this is the day. This is your birthday. And tomorrow we will go down to Baltinglass together, and you will have the choice of the shop there. That is my promise.’

Now big, difficult boyhood tears tear from him. He is heaving painfully, his breath robbed each time he cries out, then a gap, a silence, and the hot, ferocious tears. His chest shakes with the effort to cry, to breathe. The ice is loosed on the little hill of himself, and now down it cascades in riverlets and becks.

‘Oh, oh, oh,’ I say, rocking him, rocking him. ‘Oh, oh, oh.’