Annie Dunne (29 page)

Meanwhile no doubt the rabbit man sings in the woods:

I am standing with Billy Kerr in the kitchen. The lamp must soon be lit but no one is thinking of lighting it. It is the day following. All the excitement of the trip to Baltinglass is over. The children are both asleep. The boy has chosen a teddy bear, which lies now at his side in the bed.

Something preoccupies Sarah. She is up the top of the room in the shadows, at her habitual looming. Maybe it is a great relief that afflicts her, for it is like an affliction too, this escape from horror and danger.

‘Maybe I should be off,’ says Billy Kerr lightly.

Sarah doesn’t answer him exactly. She passes from the shadows down a little closer to us.

‘But why did you think that it might be Billy Kerr did take the little one?’ says Sarah to me, as if the same Billy Kerr were a thousand miles distant.

‘Because he said it, he said it to me, that if I interfered again, he would hurt a thing close to me, that’s what he said ...’

‘Did you say that to her, Billy?’ she says. Her voice is quiet, not gentle really, but quiet. ‘Did you, Billy Kerr?’

‘I never said such a thing, and I never would say such a thing,’ says Billy Kerr.

‘I’m telling you, I’m telling you, Sarah. I don’t care now if you marry him in the morning. The boy is safe and I am only glad and grateful. But he said that to me, and I won’t have him make a liar of me, no matter what.’

‘The boy, as you say, is safe. Hah? All’s well that ends well, hah?’ says Billy Kerr.

‘No,’ says Sarah. ‘All is not well. If you said such a thing, and Annie for all her faults is not a liar, then Billy Kerr, you are part of the threats, part of the fear that afflicts me. I could not have you with me. I tell you, Billy Kerr, I could not have you with me, because I do have a sister’s love for Annie, that I do, and I will not see her put under threats while I have breath in me.’

‘So, grand,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘Because I said nothing of the kind.’

Sarah looks fierce at me. I have to shake my head. As a matter of fact in all honesty, I am weeping now, crying like a fool, because of Sarah’s declaration. A sister’s love. How house-high are those words.

‘Look it, look it,’ says Sarah, suddenly striding to the dresser and pulling out one of the two old books there. ‘Look it, look it,’ she says. ‘Swear it here on this Bible that you never said that to Annie. Swear it here.’

‘I don’t want to be swearing on Bibles, Sarah,’ says Billy Kerr helplessly.

‘But you have to be, if ever you want me,’ she says, with a kind of wild desperation all her own. ‘Place your hand there, man, and swear you didn’t.’

And he puts his right hand on it as bidden. There is a silence. I watch him, and I imagine I can hear his brain whirring like a lift of jackdaws. At length he draws his hand back abruptly.

‘All right,’ he says, ‘I am an honest man. I cannot swear I didn’t on the Bible, because, yes, I did say something like that...’

Sarah, weeping, places the old Bible on the table and passes across the flagstones of the kitchen and out the door.

‘But I didn’t mean a child, I didn’t mean that child, or anything like it.’

But Sarah is gone.

‘I meant the blasted hen, or suchlike,’ he says, almost mournfully, to himself.

‘It was you put the bucket on Red Dandy?’

‘It was, Annie - because you wouldn’t leave things alone! It was childish - indeed childish. But sometimes a man is.’

‘Do you know,’ I say. ‘I almost admire you now, for that honesty. No, I do admire you. I don’t suppose that is much use to you, my admiration.’

‘Not much, Annie, not so much,’ he says, and away he goes. I hear his nailed soles clip down along the yard and out the gate.

Fiercely I roam the offices of the yard and find her in the dairy, a strange choice considering it is my domain. But perhaps that has something to do with it. All is lined up, clean and scrubbed, the butter pats, the dishes, the counter with its star-bright tiles. Under the counter she is, like a sheep caught in an odd gap, like a sheep trying to escape the ravages of a dog. Her face and arms are forced tight into the corner, her back and rump dolefully sticking out, as if she hoped to disappear herself into the very wall, and be no more than a mouse or a spider. But Sarah takes up more room in the world than such as them.

‘Sarah, dear, Sarah, dear,’ I say.

‘Go away, Annie, go away, go on away,’ comes her muffled voice.

‘Sarah, you cannot bore into the wall there. There is no hiding place there whatsoever.’

And I know she is weeping because her whole form is trembling like a moony tide against the harbour wall, shucking with sobs. Now she cannot help releasing the noise of those sobs, she sobs noisily into the wall. I reach under, and as soon as I touch her body she swings back to me, the great mass of elderly bones, the big horse face of her, the blinding eyes large behind the glasses, the hair that has taken whatever cobwebs were under the counter that I have missed in my cleaning. It shows therefore that the cleanest dairy can be criticized. I open my arms to her like an enormous child, and how gentle and soft she is, how warm, how damp her whole body from sorrow and tears. I must cradle her there, I must.

‘The course of true love did never run smooth, did it, Annie!’ she cries, all spit and misery. I pause at this. I am thinking of the truth of this in her particular case. There was never love. No one, it seems, spoke of love but her, in the private spaces between the houses of herself. But I must allow that gentle fiction, I must.

‘That is truth, Sarah, and it was ever so.’

And I think of her again as a little girl, racing the sycamore seeds in the blowing lanes, telling the time from the clocks of the dandelions, swift and slight and really lovely, before the bits of her seemed to grow out just a few stops too far, and before the creep of age further grew out her nose, her heart, her silence. It was the quickness of her, the song, the promise. And it is hard for me to think it has all come to this, a huddled, cobwebbed woman in a country dairy, in my arms. And yet there is a moment later when I do not mind it, when somehow there is a moment of subtle change, when what she is and what she was combine, and I see there is something in Sarah that no one can gainsay, the unremarked quality of her courage, the beauty of her considerable soul.

‘We will sell Billy the pony now,’ she says, suddenly.

‘We could keep him on if you wished,’ I say.

‘No, Annie. It is a new dispensation. If we are to have our fears, let it be so. We will sell Billy.’

As I am going in to bed later that night, I tidy away the famous book that made Billy Kerr tell the truth. I notice it is not in fact my father’s Bible after all, but its twin, the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Things go back to normal. The world is strange. Billy Kerr returns to what he was, the working man of the Dunnes of Feddin. We fetch him up one Saturday to come and take Billy the pony away. But, by heavens, the pony is now so fat from our tending and his own inertia, he cannot fit back out through the byre door. With our permission, Billy Kerr demolishes the gable wall, and leads the pony out, and through the gate, Sarah and myself watching, and down the green road, and away to whoever is paying for him, we do not ask. Then Billy Kerr has two weeks of evening work, building the gable wall back up, course by course. He does not come into the house. He no more than raises a hand in greeting and farewell. Then the wound in the byre is closed, and he leaves us to our own devices. No buyer can be found for the trap, so it must moulder there, glorious, mildewed and doomed, in the lonely barn. There is a new load of bedding straw now fixed in there, offering a hundred new hiding places for the hens. Only Red Dandy wanders about, lost to herself, coming in the kitchen at every opportunity, mad as a march hare, and never again laying an egg that I know of. She is on our list now for the wringing of her neck, when chicken stew beckons. If Sarah can give up her pony, I can certainly give up my hen.

And so our peculiar and no doubt dark-hearted planet runs ever further from the sun, the string of the days is tightening, the hours of daylight grow shorter, the summer is closing its shutters of gold and green for another year.

The swifts fly away, leaving their lodgings under the eaves. Matt flies away too, like the seasonal bird he is, or has become. Strange that he does not linger to see his own son, but then, I remember, there is that other life at the edge of the city, where he can meet all the sons he wants, in the company of his unknown Anna.