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.’
Meanwhile no doubt the rabbit man sings in the woods:
The moral of my story is,
Weile, weile, wáile,
Don’t stick your penknife in your baby’s back
Down by the river Sáile.
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, suddenl
y 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.
The summer is more truly over when he comes. We stand the children on the flagstones of the kitchen. I am wondering what degree of an inch we have added to their sizes, with our stews and our milk and our eggs.
It is dark in the afternoon, there is more than a touch of autumn in the day, in the wind, in the darkening greens and browns of the land about.
In the corner of my eye, Sarah takes out some object from her cardigan, and kneels to the little girl. I am surprised by the sight. She leans forward and whispers something to her. The little girl nods solemnly and takes whatever it is, and places it in her own pink cardigan. I wonder what it might be. And later I ask Sarah, when they are gone, but she will not say. I ask the question and she shakes her head, neither yes nor no, just shakes it, and says nothing. I realize then it must be something she cannot mention, or speak about, for fear of lessening its force. And then I am strangely happy for the girl, whether with good reason I do not know, and no doubt will never know.
Up comes his sharp little car before I have the thought and gumption to measure them at the wall. Never mind, it will do another time. I have taken their city coats out of mothballs and never a moth has been at them, but that they are like new, like the very first day of summer that they arrived. It is as if time had no degree, no width, no measure. All our joy of these children is spent and gone, and like the miser without money we have now nothing to hoard and count, and I feel it darkly. When he comes in with his long red beard and his green woollen suit, his brown tie the same colour as old heather, his yellow shirt, I am afflicted, just as I knew I would be, by the most grievous sorrow. But it is not my place to be sorrowful before this occasion. I smile and shake my nephew’s elegant hand. He does not kiss me as of y
ore. Once he would run the length of the tiled path in Morehampton Terrace just to embrace me, gripping my lower legs with his little arms. Now he shakes my hand.
‘Hello, chaps,’ he says to the children.
‘Hello, hello, hello, hello!’ says his little son.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘you have a proper Wicklow accent now,’ and he laughs, as if a proper Wicklow accent might be a doubtful thing enough. I wonder how does the kitchen look to him, he so citified, so strange. Does he think it pitiably rural, plain and mean? The stains of dampness rising in the grimy walls must offend him. You cannot clean those stains, they are like the very stains of things that happen, no wily cloth will wipe them. The little boy is all delight, but the little girl not quite so much so. She is smiling but I recognise the signal of restraint, like a pony poorly broken faced with some rare task.
Their father stands foursquare now in the room, as present as a tiger. He seems so good, so strong, so young. But something passes across my mind, some shadow of the fate of this man’s little sister Beatrice long ago, something to do with that, the guilt of it in him, the hurt unassuaged, and wedded to that, the oranges, the smell of oranges, the little boy kneeling at the shrine of his sister. That is a frightening thought. I know it is her hesitation has given rise to it. And is it a thought I should tell to him, to anyone? Is there some urgent message I should give? I do not know, the thought spins on the pool, spins and spins. Should I take him aside and tell him what I saw, at least, at least?
I am beginning to feel ill, actually ill. My stomach is cold and fiery at the same time. Could it still be possible, despite what Matt has said, that he is in effect a culprit, to use my father’s word? The death of his sister, such a weight of guilty sorrow, has it done something to him, turned the course of the stream underground, so some necessary well in him is dry? He has suddenly all the aspect of a stranger, an interloper, a wolf. It is my task to protect her, she has been left in my care. Even in these last few moments, while she stands in the confines of this kitchen, she is my calf, my lamb. And who will protect her if Matt is wrong, and she is taken away from here? Assaulted, assaulted, said Maud in the bed, all those years ago. Assaulted, we echoed, assaulted! In my mind’s eye I see again that wolfish man leap through the air on Kingstown pier.