Annie Dunne

  ‘Ah, well,’ I say. ‘It will interest the children to assist me. Let him walk back the way he came.’

  ‘It is all the same to me whether he walks or drives,’ she says. ‘I was thinking of your back.’

  ‘My back is fine,’ I say, blushing to the roots of my hair.

  ‘It is of course,’ she says.

  ‘Will I get sugar also?’

  ‘Don’t,‘ she says. ’We have done well enough with that.‘

  ‘Sugar and tea. Don’t we live like lords, Sarah, indeed and we do.’

  Sarah laughs. Her laugh is thick and chesty, like blackberries beginning to bubble in the big pot, when we are making preserves in the autumn. As for myself, it was the opinion of old Thomas Byrne, that swept the castle yard long ago, that I have a laugh like a sheepdog’s bark.

  She stands in the kitchen, straight as a bittern, wielding the scrubbing brush. She is laughing again.

  ‘You know, Annie, the only people that live like lords are lords,’ she says.

  She sets the scrubbing brush down on the table and puts her hands on her upper knees and is laughing. Her whole form is bent over as she does so, in a perfect show of lightness and gaiety. The children are shocked into delight and begin to laugh also, looking up at me. And I do not fail the moment, I laugh heartily, highly, laughing, laughing, yes, yes, as Thomas Byrne said, like a blessed sheepdog, ‘Wher, wher, wher.’

  The truth is, there is not much between the characters of Billy Kerr and Billy the pony, only I don’t have to hitch the former to the trap, which is a job of some difficulty.

  Myself and the little ones pass the muddled mess of Shep, asleep in a suntrap on the yard. He barely stirs his addled snout. He is more slothful than a sloth and we have no sheep for him anyway.

  We reach the dark rectangle of the byre entrance and the children peer in at Billy with admiration. They do not understand his true nature, but that is the mercy of children. He looks back at them from the glooms of the byre, his blunt front-face smeared with a sort of dampened anger.

  He is a strong Welsh cob of small stature that Sarah bought at the fair in Baltinglass, and she reveres him because it was actual money she gave for him, pound notes that her mother left her. He is a grey, a pure grey, to give him his due, without a hint or a speckle of anything else. But of late I have begun to fear his strength. He brims with a kind of inconvenient hatred.

  It is in his eyes, the black stone of them. His life with us, it seems, whatever his ambitions were, does not suit him. Perhaps we do not take him out often enough. Perhaps it is the countryside offends him.

  Gingerly I heave the heavy gear onto his back, conscious I admit of the help I have foregone from Billy Kerr, in my arrogance.

  ‘There is a slime all over the leather,’ says the girl.

  ‘No,’ I say, panting, my back hurting. ‘It is a preserving grease is on it, against the rain.’

  ‘It is dirty,’ she says, ‘and it is on my cardigan.’

  ‘Do you not want to drive in the trap?’ I say, rebuking her only because I am in pain.

  ‘Oh, I do,’ she says. ‘I do.’

  It is lovely all the same how the harness sits on Billy. It is well moulded to him, over the years. I relish the fatness of his girth, like a well-fed man. He smells of dry straw and moist dung and his own strange smell, of his hair and of his hide. There is something of the lion about him. He has more style than Shep, anyhow. But that he looks like he wants to kill you, you could admire him.

  Out onto the green road then, the two excited children facing each other on the benches behind me, the fields and woods about us rising and falling slightly. And Billy’s hooves throwing up little plates of mud. It is the sound I make between teeth and tongue that makes him really go. We stream down the green river of grass, the children gripping the seats under them.

  I give a brief wave to Mrs Kitty Doyle in her yard. She is bringing an apronful of rough food to her pigs. I can hear them squealing like doors in their stone pen. In one of her barns lurks an abandoned trap, I can just make it out as we rattle by, its high shape left in with the bales of straw. It moulders there, the shine slipping slowly from the lamps. They are another lot that have purchased a motor car in these last years.

  But the Hennigans’ wheat is doing well, I notice, a beautiful crochet of fierce shoots thrown over an expanse of dark earth.

  To the crossroads we come, where our mountain road gives way to the new tarmacadam. I have to put a damper on Billy’s prancing. He has a nervous way about him here always, being heated up by the excitement of pouring down the hill.

  I can see the distant back of Billy Kerr, traipsing the last few yards to the cow barns at the side of my cousins’ house. Their farm lies in there behind the scraggling hedges. The house looks odd in its field of cow-created mud. The walls are brushed by damp and rain.

  All the same, primroses and the green fountains of foxgloves crowd the mossy ditches. Gorse has just finished with its yellow fire along the hill behind. But Billy the pony does not wait for such miracles, on he lurches across the road, the wheels taking a new tune from the harder surface, our cheeks rattling from the shaking.

  ‘Oh, come up, you wild mad pony, you,’ I say, trying to put a break on him. I know in my heart he would like to canter now, to gallop, to carry all, himself and the unsatisfactory humans in the trap, away at a mad pace along the scattering pebbles, and throw the world into a gear of danger and terror. This I cannot let him do, so I am leaning back, standing in the trap, hauling him down into a flighty walk.

  ‘Walk on, you tramp, you,’ I say, deviously working the bit from side to side with the reins. But he is acting up worse than his usual wicked self, he is backing up on me now. The whole arrangement of trap and pony begins to bend in the middle, and I am suddenly afraid that we might be set into the ditch. The children behind me gasp with the irregular lurching and groaning of the shafts, striking about now like a huge tuning fork.

  ‘Walk on, walk on,’ I say, and I would curse at him but for the education of the children, the responsibility of that. And now Billy goes forth, and comes back in the next stride. He is intent on working some awful mischief on me. I could whip him now if I didn’t dread the effect of the lash on him in this mood. I am crazy now in the head myself with worry and anger, banging about in the wooden seat.

  ‘Stand, stand, you devil,’ I say. ‘Stand! Children, open the little gate and jump down from the metal steps. I do not think I can hold him.’

  And the little girl in her greater wisdom takes charge of the boy and opens the little flap of plywood, and slides herself and the smaller one down, a considerable height for a child. But, thank the good Lord, in a trice both are standing bewildered on the grassy margin. The great engine, it must seem like to them, of the trap, with myself atop, buckles and bangs again.

  ‘Children, stand there quietly,’ I say. ‘Oh, my heavens!’

  Billy has worked the bit in between his teeth and clamped down hard and he has me now.

  It is the catastrophe most to be feared. Sarah will never forgive me if I cannot retrieve him from his folly. For she values this foolish, perilous animal. I am abandoned now to horror, because I can almost see his next move. I can see it before maybe he even thinks it, being an animal of the instant, of the fleeting moment. Or maybe he has plotted this for years, eyeing me with those evil eyes. Here it is, the leap, the flurry, the coiling of his energy, the fire in his rotund belly flaring - and he is away, away, towards Kiltegan, with only foolish me to prevent him.

  We run for a hundred yards and he gaily throws a shoe. The hardness of the road tears it from his hoof. It sails off over the hedges of Humewood, the old estate that was the centre of my forefathers’ lives. He pays it no heed. Then, out of the tangled low trees to the left emerges like a Chinese rocket what at first I think is a wild boar, thrusting tusks and all. It is like a vision - one moment there is the peaceful untended hedgerow, and the next a hole blown through it, and this creature unfold
ing onto the road ahead.

  But there are no wild boars in Ireland and anyway this creature calls and shouts and waves its arms. It lifts itself up and reveals its mysterious limbs and turns to my grateful amazement into Billy Kerr.

  Now he stands in the centre of the Kiltegan road and raises his arms aloft and jumps and hoo-hoos at the fierce horse. By way of a characteristic answer, the pony violently halts and rears up with his front hooves showing, and comes down heavily again by force of the trap, and bucks his hind quarters once or twice, and rears again, caterwauling from his mouth, his tense jaws opened as wide as ever horse can. The trap is plunged to the left, and pitches so far over I am thrown from my precarious nest and fetched into the dock leaves and whatnot of the ditch.

  ‘Get up if you can, Annie Dunne,’ shouts Billy Kerr, ‘and block his path behind. We’ll have him then.’

  So not knowing if I am dead or alive, I drag my old bones upright again and plant my feet on the ground and raise my arms. My whole body is trembling from fright and shock. My blue and white overdress is smeared with mud. My head bangs inside with blood, it feels like. Billy Kerr reaches up to grab at the flying mane of the pony, and grasps onto the halter, darkly growling, and suddenly is all soothing and soft.

  ‘Now, now, easy up, easy up, there’s the boy,’ he says.

  He caresses that pony like it was a little child humbled by catastrophe. Trembling himself, his very coat rippling and twitching, the pony calms at the honeyed words, stepping this way and that, like a drunk man. Billy Kerr rubs his broad neck.

  ‘The children,’ I say, and turn, and hobble back the road to where they dutifully have stayed.

  Old Kelsha bones cannot lie down and count their bruises, certainly.

  Chapter Four

  We are lying, Sarah and me, like queens on a stone tomb. Night has fallen, and we are abed. The wind goes on with its counting of the leaves in the sycamores, a hundred and one, a hundred and two.

  I can sense but not share the ease in her long bones. Going to bed, reaching the haven of our bed, is as releasing for her as death. Every day she dies, you might venture to say, into bed. Even I am grateful for the slack in the endless rope of labours. Soon enough it will pull tight on us again.

  There she stretches, the clock of her heart tick-ticking, her blood with its thousand rivers under her mottled skin, her breasts rising and falling, lending the semblance of life to the country scene embroidered on the coverlet. It is a flock of deer depicted by her mother years ago, my mother’s sister. They are running across hillocks of grass pursued by a black-coated hunter on a dark, thin horse. The landscape undulates like an enormous sea. Her breath whistles out between long teeth, thin lips.

  Her big eyes are hooded, with a pattern of blue lines like tiny cups, and the coverlet hauled up as high as she can without bothering me.

  We are Christian persons, imbued with the strange light of our Saviour, and to every one of us has been assigned by sleight of God an immortal soul. An immortal soul in all too mortal flesh. It is well for me to remember this, in this early watch of the night. I do not expect to sleep.

  My head feels like the bed of a stream after the shock of floodwater. It is scoured out by the events of the day.

  Billy Kerr. He has surprised me. He was deeply solicitous when the pony was calmed, and carried the little boy all the way back up the green road, while I led the girl by her slender paw. I was hobbling from the fall, but at the same time I was watching Billy Kerr, and how he laughed with the child and amused him, and plucked the foxgloves for him so he might burst them between his fingers. All memory of the terrible upset seemed to pass away under those subterfuges.

  Then when we were all parked in the kitchen and the children on the settle by the helpful turf, Billy Kerr marched down to the crossroads and, not fearing at all, mounted the trap where he had the vehicle and its unrepentant animal tethered to a tree, and drove the contraption, with its one squeaking wheel, back up to us. The metal rim has been dislodged from the easeful balance of the spokes, the wraps of wood around the axle look askew. It will all be money to put right - money Sarah and myself do not have.

  Billy Kerr stuck the trap in the hay barn, and Billy the pony in the byre, and both have a sort of disgraced look to them now, the wooden trap itself moping, with one of its lamps knocked into a lean from the force of the mishap.

  I think of them both now, in the dark of the night, each alone, separated, the wife of the trap torn from the husband of the horse.

  At length against the long impulse of the night I go out into the starry yard to comfort the long ropes of my muscles and the field sticks of my bones. I carry the bed heat on the surface of my skin and the soft breeze of the night shows great interest in me, raising the hairs on my arms. Before me lies the rough house of our sleeping pony, by my right arm the sleeping calves and the subdued wakefulness of the hens. It is foxes walk the sleep of hens, and keep them frittering with tiny noises. By my left, the slope of the old yard and the pillars of the gates. Beyond the black gape of the milking byre lurks the pleasing bulk of the two milking cows, Daisy and Myrtle, which Sarah did not have a chance to drive back out into the top field. If they do not eat the grasses they will not fatten their udders with the milk. Is it that Sarah grows forgetful, or was it the emergency that took that allotted box of time away from her?

  It is past the midnight hour in this region of the south. We lie in here behind the mountains. It kept many things away and many things contained. Here in these districts built up great farms, with mostly English and Protestants to own them, and only the great force, the fist, of the old war here in Ireland sundered them.

  Still the remnant power lies across our lives. For seven generations back, my family held the same job, right down the old century. It went from father to son without a break for a hundred years like a proper kingship. Everything that happened, and all that we were, stemmed from that sinecure, like a blossoming spray. Seven generations, seven men with seven lives to live, put themselves to be stewards of Humewood estate. They were kings of the labouring men. White Meg my grandfather is still talked of, a tall unseeing man, austere and rough, who would walk to the gates of Humewood, up the street of Kiltegan, and give neither hello nor comment to any passing person. I don’t remember if I ever saw him, with my own child’s eyes, but I seem to know, to feel, that he had a sense of his immense dignity, the fact that he had gained his place from his forebears, had filled their boots well, and would lie in his niche in the Catholic yard with a proper legacy of work and worth. He was called White Meg for his big white beard, an old-fashioned style that most men sported and that has passed away.

  It is that not saying hello, that sense of being separate, that he has passed on to me, without much to justify it, except, we carried ourselves across the wide troubles of the land, and that my own father had the dignity of high office in the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and we were raised like favoured chickens in the great coop of Dublin Castle, where the Queens and Kings of England were pleased to quarter their policemen and their families, in those bright days, when the Viceroy would shake out his flags, and his coming and going was observed with due ceremony and banging of boots.

  I stand out under the starlight. Surely the constellations are not satisfied with their names. Do they know they have been dubbed the Great and Little Bear, does Orion’s Belt know it is Orion’s Belt? My nightshift makes a little bleat in the wind, I rattle slightly like a sail. I love my land. It comes upon me like a second breeze, that strange and useless love. It is the place of Kelsha that o‘erwhelms me, the arrangement of its woods, the offices of the yard, the animals in our care, the perfection and cleanliness of the very stones, all down to us.

  The midden stands in its patch of dock leaves like an Egyptian pyramid. There is our quiet place behind the walls of the long outhouse where Sarah and myself make our toilet, wiping our rear ends with the grasses there perpetually damp. The habit in the cities of using newspapers is never as satisfa
ctory, not by half, as those long, thin, green stems. And then cast into the pit, and the night soil from the potties carried there and likewise cast.

  Under the starlight I stand, ruminating, like a creature myself, an extra thing in the plenitude of the world. I know I am nothing. My pride is not based on my own engine, but is just a lean-to built on prejudice and leaning against anger. But this is not the point. God is the architect, and I am content there, sleepless and growing old, to be friend to his fashioned things, and a shadow among shadows. More rooted and lasting will be my crab-apple tree - some day, no doubt, another heart will give allegiance to it and its bitter fruit, gathering the tiny apples and crushing them in their season with the same passion and humour, laughing at the generosity of the tree, its ease and seeming happiness, its fertility, as I do. It is a mother of a thousand children, every year, like the offspring of the queen bee. The whole tree buzzes silently in the autumn with its excited fruit.

  Now in the dark shales of the night it stands with its generous, bitter arms.

  This is the happiness allowed to me.

  If I am to rest at all it is time to try the bed again, for when the dark is broken by the fussy fingers of the dawn we must be up and about. If your work is not done by ten, the day is wasted. I go back into the house, closing the half-door behind me against the intrusion of the hens. Of course they are all fast in their coop, the closing of the door is a habit of the daylight. My favourite hen, who gives us sleek brown eggs aplenty, is with her fellow hens. In the hours of daylight I watch her, trim and pretty about the yard, plotting her secretive births. She likes to put her eggs in tricky places, and I have never seen her about that business yet. It needs an ingenious eye, a happy instinct to discover her rich warm haul. The boy believes he knows her secrets, which is both true and untrue - he is small enough for his eyes to creep under shelves of hay, struts of old wood. I call her Red Dandy, she is a Rhode Island Red, one of my own hens I am glad to say. Sarah has not such a layer. So I fasten the half-door, still letting the encouraging night breeze cross the upper portion and enter the dark kitchen. It is a sort of cleaning, that pleasant wind. And then I slip back beside the sleeping Sarah, between the stiff, starched sheets, under the bright coverlet with its perpetual scene. And I feel perfectly content, at peace with man and God. My slightly chilled skin feels the leak of parched heat that Sarah has made in the bed. Sleep tumbles in on top of me like a species of river swimming.