Annie Dunne (9 page)

And when we look again to spy him and his mysterious English, he is gone among the trees.

‘Auntie Anne, Auntie Anne, look at us, look at us!’

The girl and boy have locked themselves in a fast embrace and are throttling each other without regret, as they speed in a double heap down the raging field.

‘Do you think,’ says Sarah, though barely to me, mostly to the quiet countryside about, ‘that there will be life much after that pony? Do you think it will be worth living at all?’

This is a very big question and I am not qualified to answer, not entirely. I look down at the rich grasses. All sorts of insects happily resort there, a shiny black beetle heaves himself along a dipping blade.

‘Do you not feel,’ she says, ‘the wind of change? It is like the Bible sometimes up here, living here. We are like the Jews of old. It shakes me, the talk of Billy Kerr. He speaks like my father, all sense and certainty. There’s safety in that man, and still he shakes me.’

This is a large speech for Sarah, and which I don’t understand. She has spoken with ease and surety, very definitely, like marking cloth before cutting, straight and confident as such marks must be. Many months can go by, especially in the winter, when Sarah will say nothing beyond the usual round of instructions, agreements and ordinary observations. Then suddenly, a pronouncement as dark and uncomfortable as a sibyl.

‘There is nothing,’ she says, ‘that anyone could say would dissuade me, dissuade me from the opinion that.’

‘That what?’ I say, beginning to be rightly frightened.

‘Grass stains,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Grass stains, grass stains, elbows and trouser knees, think of the scrubbing and rubbing in that.’

‘I do not follow you at all, Sarah,’ I say.

‘The children,’ she says, ‘the children and their rolling.’

‘That fierce master, Tommy Byrne, taught us all the epics.’

It is Sarah talking, by the fire, hardly heeding us her listeners, if talking it really is. It might also be said to be a kind of old singing. Things she likes to say, over and over.

 

 

‘He beat us without mercy when we were small and spindly. But he had a terrible appetite for the Roman poets, and we learned of the doings of Aeneas in the early days of the Romans. Virgil it was wrote that. And he said we could learn anything we would ever need to know about farming from Virgil, in his book, the Eclogues. And do you know, Annie, the curious thing was, we knew nearly everything that Virgil had to say, even as the master read it, about tilling and sowing and harvesting, because we had been looking at it from the days our eyes first opened at our mother’s breasts.’

I am washing the two children one by one in the big enamel basin. I have it set out in front of the fire and I am also imploring the boy, whose turn it is now, not to do his favourite swimming motion when my back is turned to fetch an item. He holds the sides of the old curving basin and whooshes himself along through the water, he cannot help it, with the delight of it, and then of course the wave rises up behind him and swamps the great flagstone of the hearth, and he menaces the fire itself with his flood.

But Sarah is in her chair staring off into the middle distance where the light of the oil lamp barely reaches, her face yellowing in the soft light like a stone in the late sun, talking away as softly as the light of other days, when she was young. For myself I went to the Loreto Convent in North Great George’s Street in Dublin when my father was head of the castle police, and when he was but a village inspector, to the little school in Dalkey Village, among the wild children of Dalkey, so my memories are not of the little village school in Kiltegan.

Her thoughts - as I soap the boy fiercely, to try and restore him a little to his city cleanliness, not entirely succeeding - have passed easily from a discussion of Billy Kerr (‘Billy Kerr shakes me,’ she has said again), to the Dunnes of Feddin, to Winnie Dunne, who is the schoolmistress now in Kiltegan, to her own schooling there, and the master Byrne, who died of peritonitis in the thirties sometime. He was one of those old-time teachers seemingly with nothing but the classics between himself and ruination. His own father had been the keeper of a proper hedge school, where the penniless classes of Catholics and Protestants went for their education. They weren’t real hedges, but poor bad sorts of buildings going begging, lean-tos and the like, the sort of crazy habitation that might suit a labourer and his offspring till the very roof fell in on them.

I don’t know what it is about Sarah these times, but some little latch has been loosened in her tongue, by something, by someone. She is very much a brighter person and the usual glooms have been lifted out of her, and she is engrossed now in remembering. Even the boy listens to her like a robin with its head at a listening angle, another sort of latch. It is how a robin looks at me in the yard in the winter when I sally forth—as if about to speak to me civilly, as if expecting some small morsel for himself, and why not?

The boy at any rate makes no complaint of my scrubbing, whereas the girl fell quickly into tears of vexation, not at all wanting to be naked, though she is perched now on the hearth seat almost wholly wrapped in a big old sheet I use for drying them, and her own innocent disc of a face is entombing its thoughts in the low gutters of the turf.

‘The best days of your life, your schooldays,’ I say.

‘I was at school already,’ says the boy. ‘We learned Inchworm and Thumbelina. They’re songs for singing.’

‘That’s right,’ says the girl dreamily, deeply at her ease, ‘we did. Or I learned them and you sort of learned them,’ she says to her brother.

‘I sort of learned them,’ he corrects himself, looking up at me.

‘Inchworm,’ I say. ‘What is an inchworm? How does it go, dear?’

The little girl begins to sing. She has a flat, peculiar little voice for herself, but it is thin and with enough colour to suggest a tune, like a penny whistle or the like. ‘Inchworm, Inchworm, measuring the marigolds,’ she sings. It is a song I have never heard. They have songs now no one has heard, first-time songs, unlike years ago, when all the songs were known by everyone and a new song was like a wind from the Sahara, bearing a strange red dust, a miracle. The little boy squeals with delight, squirming he is with the pleasure of it, like a proper audience. The girl’s face is still, radiant. The boy bangs in the bath, knuckles and other bones finding the enamelled tin. Such is the nature of his delight, turning his little contraption of being into queer drumsticks.

‘You and your arithmetic, you’ll probably go far ...’

Outside the heavy hot wind of the summer night stirs the fresh leaves of the sycamore. The moon no doubt will be riding to the south, where it sits above the sloping field. Suddenly, in the byre, Billy will fall asleep, just suddenly there where he stands, his guilt evaporating in slumber, like a human. The calves will curl up on the shitty hay, and breathe heavily through their stupid noses like old men with colds. Even the hens will nervously sleep, the night fear of foxes infecting their henny dreams, whatever they might be, I could not say. And we will dry and settle the children in their beds, in their pyjamas aired by the sun on the fuchsia outside, with the good air of Kelsha in the crisp cotton, and they will sleep. And we will go to our bed, and we will sleep. Which seem like good matters.

The water runs down the little boy’s back. I am using an old ladle of my grandmother‘s, the last of the stewards’ wives. Her house at the back of Kiltegan village had a whole arsenal of kitchen items - she could have gone to war with them—and her array of skillets and pots astounded less fortunate eyes. Now what remains of all that glitter and show is this tarnished ladle, made by Mellet’s of Baltinglass.

Where the rest of her worldly hoard has gone I cannot hazard a guess. But the ladle was with us at the castle quarters, so it must have been a keepsake of my fathers, in memory of her. Now all my mother’s things are dispersed also, and only this ladle has come from that time, passing through two or three sets of women’s hands. It scoops the bath water well enough, the little boy’s back glistens at me, with its slender spine, his skin as soft as gloves. I think of my grandmother, Bridget Dunne, and him, the past and the present. Her long set of bones lie in against the church in Kiltegan yard, his fidget below me.

Chapter Six

The weather turns filthy in the deeper part of the month and the wind whips about in the yard for three curious days. I am always surprised by our weather, even though there is nothing surprising about it. There is no mystery. It will not hold. The summer months seem always to be thinking and dreaming of winter and now and then those thoughts and dreams break out into waking reality. And the signs and sounds of winter are laid across the good colours of summer, the green of the sycamores darkens, the brown mottled bark deepens to black in the wet. Even a few leaves are torn from the branches in an imitation of autumn, and those fresh soft leaves that should have lasted many weeks more lie suddenly at sea on the stones of the yard and on the soft, high summer grasses. Bewildered and disgruntled I do not doubt, like people in their prime torn from life, and chicks pulled out of the nest.

So we retreat into the familiar darkness of the kitchen. And perhaps it is not like the lows of winter in that we do not expect such weather to last, and we have the sunlight to anticipate. And moreover the rain is not driven in under the doors and eaves, and down the chimney. We do not come out in the morning to find a drift of snow advancing on the very ashes of the fire, two very different heaps of white. The walls do not weep for the horrors of winter, the mattresses do not gain that miserable odour of damp that only a few hours under the covers expels by the heat in your body. Otherwise there are echoes and odours of winter enough in that bad summer weather, a memory and a prophecy.

This is when the bond of friendship between me and Sarah is most essential, when it is tested and I do pray strengthened by confinement, and the little necessary dances and manoeuvrings on the flags of the kitchen floor.

Of course we must be perpetually butting out into the drives of rain and wind, to accomplish the usual roster of chores. Nothing stops the great clock of the day, with its silent bells ringing the changes in our heads - cows, calves, hens and all. We throw on our old torn and age-painted coats and push out like ragamuffins into the tempests. We return wind-blown and a little daft in the head from the buffeting, as if we have had wild dreams while we were abroad. By the hearth the children lurk, drawing on brown paper bags, doing little talking games with their teddy bears, their heads stilling and their eyes widening as the door opens yet again to admit one of us in our tempestuous garb.

So in the deep afternoon of the third day, all work attended to, we are content to be as cooped as the hens. All work attended to, for the most part, except the evening feeding of the hens, not so bad a job as the poor creatures are indeed fast in their coop so that the breezes out from the Glen of Imail will not eradicate them entirely from the confines of the farm, and blow them away over the trees to Humewood, like wonderful rags. I have my old wooden orange box of socks and stockings, to be darning the heels and the toes, where Sarah’s horny nails make holes. Sarah herself is banging a lump of dough on the counter of the dresser, shaking fresh white flour under it so it will not stick to the waxen wood, banging, kneading with her bony knuckles, and banging. The boy and the girl turn the thick pages of a book, looking at the simple colours of the figures, absorbed, like priests doing those silent prayers by the tabernacle, things no doubt the mass-goers need not or ought not hear. It is a simple moment, all labour done, the natural anxieties of being alive all stilled and soothed. The turf fire mutters in the murky hearth. The clock seems less anxious to seek the future, its tick more content, slower. All is in the balance of a kind, the weight and the butter in the scales in sufficient harmony.

Then we begin to hear them. At the first distant inklings of sound, a sound that is a sort of memory, something on the tip of the tongue, but that slowly comes back to you what it is, Sarah’s head turns and looks across at me. She leaves the dough subsiding on the dresser top. Her floury hands go to her thighs and she rests them there, imprinting the soft map of her palms. We have a moment of inaction and then we both spring to the centre of the floor.

‘Do you think, do you think they’ll come in?’ she says, with real fear in her voice.

‘Look out the top of the door,’ I say. ‘Look out and see!’

We move quick to the door, the children rushing after us, infected by our tones. Sarah unlatches the half-door and looks out through the veritable cloths of the wind, the air is so blustery and torn about. The children shove up on tip-toe and grasp the worn wood and jump up and down to see out as best a child might, who always has half a view, I suppose, of everything. There, down the lane a bit, we start to see them, the wild heads of hair, the laughter and the rags and the wicked faces.