Miss Emily (16 page)

I am late getting up; the Lord only knows why. Too much air, maybe. Mammy used to call me her rooster, the way I woke at the same time each morning and could get everyone else up. The fires have to be set still, and so I run down the stairs with my boots in my hand, thinking I will light the stove first and put on my boots once it's blazing. I fling open the door to find Patrick Crohan standing in the kitchen, having a look around by the dim light from the open back door. He is studying everything as if he owns the place.

“What are you doing in here?” I say. “Is Daniel Byrne not with you?” Without thinking I fling my boots onto the table, and then we both stand gawping at them.

“Oh, Miss High-and-Mighty. Shoes on the table—you'll get no luck from that.”

Crohan shakes his head and blesses himself, and I want to thump him. I snatch the boots—they seem to pulse with badness all of a sudden—and sit to lace them up. I look at him.

“I asked you what you were doing. This is a private house. You don't waltz in the door when it pleases you.”

“Byrne said to meet him here.”

“He meant for you to meet him in the yard, by the barn. You know that. Out with you, now.”

Crohan goes to the back door and turns. “How did a slither-arse like you get a start here?”

“You pup. Get out of my kitchen.”

“
Your
kitchen? Go on, you little witch.” He comes in close to me and looks into my face, then lets his eyes slide over my body. “You're no great shakes,” he says. “But you wedged your foot in the door nicely here, didn't you, Miss Concannon? Sitting pretty in that top bedroom. Do you sleep well?”

“Go away, get out!” I push at his side, though I do not want to touch him.

He cackles and shoots out, slamming the door behind him. I am full sure Mrs. Dickinson is going to arrive down to scold me over the noise. Crohan has left a peculiar, sweet smell behind him, and it makes my stomach flip over. I get to raking the fire and shove on my boots, the laces done any mad old way. And that is where Aughrim was lost. As I descend the stairs with the slops, the laces on both boots come undone, and I go arse over head, piss and shite all down my front and covering the steps. I sit among it, and I want to weep. The smell seeps into my nose, and I start to gag, but there's no time for pity because there is applesauce to heat for the family's hash. I haul myself up and clean the stairs. I lift the stinking stools with my bare hands and try not to throw up. Whipping off the soiled apron, I give my hands a good scrub, but of course they still feel dirty. I wash the stairs down again with scalding water and pine oil. Then I clean my hands once more, soaking them in the hottest water I can bear.

I bring through the tray to the dining room and feel sorriest for Miss Emily, even though she is out with me. I am glad that she doesn't know the carry-on that has left me with dubious hands, but it grieves me that my fingers might be foul while I serve her food.
They're clean, they're clean,
I say to myself, over and over, as I dish up the breakfast. Each of the family says thank you—Miss Emily with her eyes cast down, as is her habit with me now—and I scuttle back to the kitchen, mortified. I scrub my hands again.

I charge out to the yard once I know that the family are settled with coffee and everything else they need. Daniel smiles his slow, lovely smile when he sees me.

“Where's that go-boy?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Patrick Crohan. He was in the kitchen when I came down this morning, standing in the near dark. And the lip out of him.”

Crohan saunters out of the barn. “Do you want me, Miss Concannon?” he says.

“Don't you ‘Miss Concannon' me. And never set foot in that house again, unless you're asked. Do you hear me?”

“He won't, Ada,” Daniel says, gripping my elbow and rubbing gently at my other arm.

“The cut of yiz,” Crohan says. “She'll skedaddle on you, Byrne, before long. Find herself a proper man.” He pulls himself up taller.

Daniel turns to him. “Enough,” he says, and Crohan slinks back into the barn.

“Can you not get rid of him?” I say.

“He's not mine to get rid of. It's his uncle who pays my wages.”

“Ah, sure, I know that. I just can't stand the sight of him. Keep him away from the kitchen or I'll run him.” Even as I say it, I know I will see less of Daniel now; he won't come in for a sup of tea and leave Crohan on his own in the yard with the horses. It makes me want to spit. “His mother must have walked on a grave when he was inside her belly, he's that odd.”

I'm up to my oxters in croppins and lights, gizzards and giblets when Daniel raps on the door.

“Will you not step in?” I say, wiping chicken guts from my fingers with a cloth.

“I'd better keep an eye on Crohan. God knows what he'll get up to if I leave him too long.”

“He's a fidget of a fella, all right.” I go to the stove and take two cans from it. “This one's yours. There are extra spuds in it.”

Daniel winks and backs out the door. He blows me a kiss with his lips, and I shake my cloth at him. I am smiling like a loony when I look up to see that Miss Emily has glided in without my knowing.

“Ada.”

“Miss.” I go over to her. “Do you need some more coffee inside? Does Mr. Dickinson want more hash?”

“No, no. I came to see how you are.”

“I'm grand, miss. And you? Has Father John cured you yet?”

She smiles and puts her hand to her chest. “I do believe he has, Ada. I have also had my own father keeping watch, so there was little choice but to improve.” She goes to the cupboard and takes down her measuring cup and spoon. “Would I be terribly in the way if I made gingerbread this morning? I want to give some to the children.”

“Not at all, Miss Emily. I'm boiling up a chicken broth on the stove top. You're welcome to use the oven.”

It pleases me that she is here. She is a little stiff, maybe, a small bit bashful with me, but I do believe we are friends again and there's no harm done. Thanks be to God; I couldn't rest easy if this unevenness between us went on for much longer.

“If we could eat gingerbread morning, noon and night, Ada, what a deal of happiness there would be in the world.”

“It's true for you, miss. Do you want the rose water, or will you use it this time at all?” I fetch the bottle without waiting for her answer. “I've been keeping the best feathers for you for making the glaze.” I grab the neat brown tail feathers from the jar where I have kept them and hold them up for her to see.

“Thank you, Ada.” She glances down, then up at me. “And may I apologize—”

I hold up my two hands. “Don't give it another thought, miss. I think Christmas brings out the bear in everyone. I know my daddy used to be like a devil in December, full to the brim with the excess of it all. With everyone being in on top of one another.”

I grab a bit of shortening as big as an egg and soften it; Miss Emily takes it from me and mixes it into the cream. I heat a spoon on the stove top to make the molasses come easier from the cup, and together we knock the gingerbread into shape.

“Doesn't it smell intoxicating, Ada?”

“It does, miss,” I say, but the chicken broth is wound so tight into my nose that, if I'm honest, I can't really smell the cake. Today, though, I'll agree with whatever she says; with our feet on the same plank again, all will be well.

Miss Emily Turns to White

T
ODAY
I
CANNOT LEAVE MY ROOM, NOT EVEN TO INVESTIGATE
the condition of my herb garden, which is surely by now a disgrace of withered leaves. Something strangles me, sits on me like a neck brace, and I dare not venture even as far as the kitchen. There is fog over Amherst, and the insides of my windows weep with condensation while the sun offers its dull light to my room. The outside world will make no demands on me today. Nor any day, perhaps.

I lock my door with its imaginary key to release my freedom, for if the outside cannot be let in, I can still try to unleash my own insides. I sit to my desk and hope to write a few lines—something about the fog—but the words defy me, and I throw down my pencil. I look out: the sun is trying hard to glare its way through the mist. I open the window a little; the robins in Austin's white oak chirp meekly today, afraid—maybe—to break the pearly spell. And yet the sounds of the town are amplified: rolling wheels, men's shouts, factory din, a train. Noise thunders above or through the fog, I am not sure which; it seems to echo back as if in a great hollow.

Yesterday, from this very window, I lowered my basket filled with gingerbread to the children who waited below, a custom I recently began and which the small people delight in. I usually send word to my nephew that I am making gingerbread, and he
alerts his playmates. They wait to see the sash go up and the basket teetering on its string. It is a mode of greeting the children that suits me well; I get to stay in the security of my room, but I also get to halloo to them and see their angel faces.

They ran up the steps, through the gate, and took the gingerbread in greedy handfuls; its dark goodness stained their mouths. The sun shone on their pretty heads, warm and nurturing.

“Many thanks, Miss Dickinson!” they called. “Thank you, Aunt Emily!”

“Go well, little ones.” I watched them run off to their world of play in the bright sunlight.

Now the fog shrouds the sun, but I know it will break through eventually; it is stronger than any vapor.

I sit again and try to write. I manage a morsel:

The Sun took down his Yellow Whip

And drove the Fog away—

Nothing else I conjure coheres with those lines, which are all that want to come down to me through the corridors of my brain. I fold up the piece of paper and put it away with the others in the boxes in my drawer. I peer at them a moment, my sad little scraps and sadder little booklets, the string-bound parcels that I can neither open nor destroy. They are but one more layer in my polar privacy. I place a tray cloth over the bundles, for they seem to leer and mock me.
No more will you write. It has left you, that urgency, that wellspring, that ability to connect things.
I close the drawer and sit by my fireplace to read.

Mrs. Barrett Browning is to be my companion today, she who died smiling, so they say, and whose last word was “beautiful.” I go through the book, page by page, soaking in the comfort of her
poetry. I look at her words, one by one. Love. Thee. Breath. Smiles. Tears. It pleases me that each word is solitary, a loner. Side by side, their staccato nature blends with others, but in the end they stand alone. Each word is a fence post—upright, demanding, shrill— but each one holds the fence erect and, as such, is indispensable.