Annie Dunne

  I find Billy Kerr among the outhouses of Feddin.

  ‘Can you go in and fetch Matt?’ I say, ‘From the hospital. He will be expecting you.’

  ‘Why will he be expecting me?’

  ‘Because I said you would collect him this evening.’

  ‘It is nearly evening now, Annie. You didn’t think to tell me before this?’

  ‘I am telling you now!’

  ‘You are, Annie, and but that it is Matt, poor Matt now that has had a fright, I would think twice now about harnessing the sisters’ pony and going all the way without friendly notice to Baltinglass.’

  ‘Will you fetch him, or will you not fetch him?’

  ‘I will fetch him.’

  ‘Good,’ I say, and turn about-heel, and away.

  When I get to the village, I find the shop of Mrs Nicodemus. I peer in the sparkling window. I can see her counting money, and marking her books at the counter. I tap on the glass. She looks up and sees me. She shakes her head.

  When I get back up the green road to Kelsha, there is worse to befall me. I find Sarah and the little girl scouring the offices of the yard, as if they might be in a strange frenzy of finding eggs. They are kneeling and peering under things, and pulling loose boards, and calling the boy’s name.

  ‘What is it, Sarah, now, what is it?’

  ‘Look at it growing dark,’ she says, ‘and the child is missing. The child is missing, Annie.’

  ‘How could a child be missing in all the simple spaces of these acres. It is not possible.’

  ‘He knows how to hide himself,’ says the girl. ‘He is an expert.’

  ‘And do you know where he is, girl?’ I say, with that touch of anger I fear myself.

  ‘She doesn’t, Annie,‘ says Sarah. ’We have been searching now all the time you were gone.‘

  ‘He ran away out through the lane there, and into the field,’ I say. ‘Did you search the sloping field?’

  ‘We were all around it. The girl helped me. She said you were angry with him, Annie. Why were you angry?’

  ‘Because he put the bucket on Red Dandy!’

  ‘He did not,’ says the girl.

  ‘Well, somebody did,’ I say, ‘and he had good reason.’

  ‘He didn’t,‘ says the girl. ’And now you’ve gone and lost him. Don’t you know what day it is, Auntie Anne?‘

  ‘No, what day is it?’ I say, and then I remember. It was not Matt’s lift was nagging at my mind after all, but this other fact, that now the little girl offers me. But I know it already.

  ‘It is his birthday,’ she says. ‘And he got no present. And he made me say nothing, because of the fire engine. He is mighty sorry about the fire engine. That’s how he is. He’s not the boy to put buckets on hens. He thinks you will never forgive him. He’s having bad dreams. Last night he said he wanted to die!’

  ‘Don’t say that, I can’t hear it!’ I cry. ‘Wanted to die! And no sign of him now. Is God going to punish me thus? Am I to be riven and harrowed by sorrow?’

  ‘Calm yourself, Annie,’ says Sarah. ‘Go in to Mary Callan and ask if she has seen him.’

  ‘Maybe she has taken him!’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘A strange old woman that lives in filth!’

  ‘Annie, be calm. We must be calm.’

  ‘Maybe Billy Kerr has stolen him, like he said he would.’

  ‘Billy Kerr? Annie! Haven’t you just seen him?’

  ‘My fear is, Sarah,’ I say, ‘and I do not want to come across you and your plans, is that - is that Billy Kerr has taken him.’

  ‘Sure, why in all the world would he be doing such a thing?’

  ‘You don’t how he has been persecuting me! I fear it, I fear it!’

  ‘Annie, Annie, go in to Nanny Callan and ask. Billy Kerr took no one. I do not know why you say he did.’

  I know I am gabbling. But it is hard to describe the horror that sits in me, the fright, the misery. My stomach is being dragged wholesale from its pit. For some wild reason, the old practices of the Inquisition, that seemed to preoccupy now and then my father’s thoughts, flood into my head. For it is what it feels like - a secret frame of wood, my limbs stretched tight upon it. I cannot endure this absence of the little boy. I feel like running wildly about, tearing through hedgerows, flying over hills and ploughland, crying great cries, if I could only lay eyes on him again. And I know it has been the violence of my own hands that has driven him from me. He was in my care and I have sundered him from that care, caused him to tear himself from the refuge of Kelsha. By my own actions! Would I not do anything now, climb any crag, level any wall or prison, just to discover him warm and well, and gather him into my arms?

  I veritably leap the road and climb the rough wall into Mary Callan’s precincts. I have never been near her hovel before, but only passed it with the curse of my eye. I approach the little patch of flagstones at her door and start to call her name. She comes immediately to the half-door. She does not speak.

  ‘Mary Callan,’ I say, ‘have you seen my child? I mean, my sister’s son’s child. He has run away from us.’

  She does not speak. She is silent. She pushes open her door and stands in the morsel of yard.

  ‘Can you not speak to me, woman, and tell me, you wretched crone!’

  She only looks at me. Is she thinking, or is there a vacancy of mind entire and complete?

  I put a hand on her bony shoulder and almost shake it.

  ‘Will you not tell me? Did you see that little boy? Woman, woman, did you see him?’

  She shakes off my hand with a simple gesture, like a pony does, a shying away of sorts. She goes away down her path like a hedgehog, and out her broken gate and onto the green road, never looking back. I must have frightened her out of her skin.

  ‘Will you not help me?’ I call.

  When I reach the yard again—I can see Sarah and the little girl searching the ditch of the sloping field - and cross the inert shape of Shep in the yard, murdered as usual with exhaustion, you might think, on an inspiration gleaned from some forgotten book, I go back into the house and fetch out from his bedroom a gansey of the boy. When I see his empty bed, his small collection of diminutive clothes, his shorts, his shoes, his socks, I burst into tears. But I take myself from tears, savagely, and I bring the gansey out to Shep and shove it under his uninterested nose. All he does is rise shakily on his spindly legs, like an animal truly well past his time for shooting, and there is a part of me in this extreme that would get some relief from shooting him, and then he wanders in sleepily to the barn, and then out he comes again, without a murmur let alone a bark of enthusiasm, and settles himself once more in front of me on the still-warm stones.

  Should I be going down to Kiltegan to fetch the sergeant? It would take so long. And is the sergeant in his fits of despair? There has been no sign of him about the place for weeks. I do not know his condition. Would Mrs Nicodemus help me? But why do I think of her? It is because she has lost a child, she will know this ripping in the chest, this plunging of despair. Who is there to help me, outside Sarah? Matt will be waiting in Baltinglass, even Billy Kerr I have dispatched to get him. There is no one. My head is wild. I have never felt the like. Oh, in the old fled days you could raise the district. Now there is no district, only a cruel sequence of separate lives, in a sad line of worthless pearls all down to the main road. Alone in our anguish!

  Then a black thought takes hold of me, thinking on these inhabitants around me. Jack Furlong! The rabbit man! The rabbit man with his murderous song, his murdered mother, his mad brother! Maybe the poor child has wandered as far as him, and some terrible fate has ... No, no, Jack Furlong is a gentle man enough. But maybe he has wandered up there, by the snaking path, maybe ... Maybe he is following that old story I told him, about his grandfather and the dog, in the woods, in the woods ... Oh, no whirlpool at the bottom of a falls could be so embroiled in circles and currents. I will go mad now if I do not mind - if I do not find that
boy.

  I shout to Sarah, ‘I am going up the hill!’ and she straightens from her search and nods. There is a growing darkness now in things: the sheaves of shadows heap themselves into the bread-and-butter bushes, the whin bushes at the top of the sloping field look like calves lying down before the night.

  Into the woods I go, the scrubby pines, the stunted ash trees. I am thinking of my father as a little boy, bringing the condemned dog into trees like these, determined, alarmed, distraught. How strange, intent are these boys of ours.

  How resolute, how brave! But he will not like this scum bling twilight, if he has entered here. No child could, and he does not have a dog for companion. Why I think he might be following an old story I do not know, it is just a thought, an inspiration. Soon I believe it must be so, soon I believe somewhere in these woods, in some darkening glade, I will discover him. I call and call his name.

  I rise up further through the trees, feeling the roof of Kelsha dropping below, sensing the leaving behind of civilized things, of lights, of fires, of rooms. Now I am in the realm of the rabbits, the harvest of Jack Furlong. I am suddenly encouraged by this thought, because I tell myself, of course, Jack Furlong knows every farthing of these woods, every path, every fallen tree to make a sheltering cave. He will find the child in a trice. Of course, of course! How foolish I have been. There is help at hand after all!

  I come out onto the ridge of that small world and see the single light of Jack Furlong’s cottage on the further ridge. How wild and cold it is here in winter, now it is like a summer meadow of old, when lands such as these were held in common, and people spent all the summer months on these pastures with their cows. I stumble across hillock and stumps and bang on his rain-stripped door.

  There is no answer. What am I to do? I open his door and look in, hoping he might be asleep in his chair. It is a bleak sight that meets my eyes. The room looks like it was not cleaned for years, most likely since the day his mother was killed. There is a chair by the filthy fire, and all about it lie layers and layers of paper and discarded things. There are mildewed cups and plates, old relics of real lives, there are mounds of peelings, of cabbages, potatoes, God knows what. It is like the nest of a rat. The only clean thing is the rows upon rows of rabbit skins, all neatly hanging on long strings, like a crazy ceiling of fur. There is the stench as of death throughout the room. And this is where a man lives, a man who emerges from here to walk the hills with a clean aspect enough, and trim clothes enough. A miracle. But there is no Jack Furlong in this nest.

  ‘Child, child!’ I call. ‘Wherever are you?’

  There is no answer, only the well-known soughing of the wind. That freshening weather is everywhere now, the smaller branches lash about gently, there are gusts and whimpers in the woods. It is cold now, cold. I pull my cardigan about me tightly. I feel like a creature that has been disembowelled, and must carry on regardless, to escape this horror of a hand that seeks to crush me.

  Oh, it has grown so dark. I can barely mark the path by which I climbed. I hurry back down, terrified now I might lose my way myself, and be no earthly use to the boy. My greater terror is that he might be taken, that those tinkers themselves marauding as they do might have secreted him away. That he might be bound tight on a cart somewhere, anywhere among the roads, and be going, pace by pace, away from me, never to be found again. I have heard of such tragedies! And his father and mother in London, knowing nothing of my carelessness, my crime. As yet, as yet! I will be castigated, condemned, imprisoned, and all of that I will welcome if he is not found. Oh, I must not think these thoughts, I must calm in some fashion, or I will die.

  I come down onto the sloping field. I do not know how long I have been gone, maybe an hour. The field is bare. I cannot see light in the house because the gable below me is blind of windows. But I do see figures coming up the green road, bearing torches. It is like a picture from some other time, some other century. The flames leap from the torches like the fiery hair of tinkers. Is it the tinkers themselves? I am sore confused. Oh, my legs have no ounce of strength to carry me, but I force them on. Will man or God ever forgive me? I do not care. Let there be news to soothe my soul!

  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.