‘Can you manage them?’ Ellie’s husband asked when she was loading sacks on to the weighing scales, for she had paused in the work as if to rest.
‘I’m all right.’
‘Take care you don’t strain yourself.’
He was often kind in practical ways. She was strong, but the work was not a woman’s work and, although it was never said, he was aware of this. In the years of their marriage they had never quarrelled or even disagreed, not being close enough for that, and in this way their relationship reflected that of the brother and sister they shared the house with.
‘They’re a good size, the Kerrs,’ he said, referring to the produce they worked with. ‘We hit it right this year.’
‘They’re nice all right.’
She had loved her child’s father for every day of their child’s life and before it. She had falsified her confessions and a holy baptism. Black, ugly lies were there when their child smiled from her innocence, nails in another cross. It hadn’t mattered at first, when their child wouldn’t have understood.
‘I’ll stop now,’ Ellie said, recording in the scales book the number of sacks that were ready to be sealed. ‘I have the tea to get.’
Her mother was unwell, confined to her bedroom. It was usually her mother who attended to the meals.
‘Go on so, Ellie,’ he said. He still smoked forty cigarettes a day, his life’s indulgence, a way to spend a fraction of the money he accumulated. He had bought no clothes since his purchase of the christening suit except for a couple of shirts, and he questioned the necessity of the clothes Ellie acquired herself or for her child. Meanness was a quality he was known for; commercially, it had assisted him.
‘Oh, I got up,’ Ellie’s mother said in the kitchen, the table laid and the meal in the process of preparation. ‘I couldn’t lie there.’
‘You’re better?’
‘I’d say I was getting that way.’
Mr Larrissey was washing traces of fertilizer from his hands at the sink, roughly rubbing in soap. From the yard came the cries of the child, addressing the man she took to be her father as she returned from her evening task of ensuring that the bullocks still had grass to eat.
All the love there had been, all the love there still was – love that might have nourished Ellie’s child, that might have warmed her – was the deprivation the child suffered. Ellie remembered the gentle, pale hands of the lover who had given her the gift of her child, and heard again the whisper of his voice, and his lips lingered softly on hers. She saw him as she always now imagined him, in his cassock and his surplice, the embroidered cross that marked his calling repeated again in the gestures of his blessing. His eyes were still a shade of slate, his features retained their delicacy. Why should a child not have some vision of him too? Why should there be falsity?
‘You’ve spoken to them, have you?’ her husband asked when she said what she intended.
‘No, only you.’
‘I wouldn’t want the girl told.’
He turned away in the potato shed, to heft a sack on to the lorry. She felt uneasy in herself, she said, the way things were, and felt that more and more. That feeling wasn’t there without a reason. It was a feeling she was aware of most at Mass and when she prayed at night.
Mulreavy didn’t reply. He had never known the identity of the father. Some runaway fellow, he had been told at the time by Mr Larrissey, who had always considered the shame greater because a priest was involved. ‘No need Mulreavy should know that,’ Ellie had been instructed by her mother, and had abided by this wish.
‘It was never agreed,’ Mulreavy maintained, not pausing in his loading. ‘It wasn’t agreed the girl would know.’
Ellie spoke of a priest then; her husband said nothing. He finished with the potato sacks and lit a cigarette. That was a shocking thing, he eventually remarked, and lumbered out of the barn.
‘Are you mad, girl?’ Her mother rounded on her in the kitchen, turning from the draining-board, where she was shredding cabbage. Mr Larrissey, who was present also, told her not to be a fool. What good in the world would it do to tell a child the like of that?
‘Have sense, for God’s sake,’ he crossly urged, his voice thick with the bluster that obscured his confusion.
‘You’ve done enough damage, Ellie,’ her mother said, all the colour gone from her thin face. ‘You’ve brought enough on us.’
When Mulreavy came into the kitchen an hour later he guessed at what had been said, but he did not add anything himself. He sat down to wait for his food to be placed in front of him. It was the first time since the arrangement had been agreed upon that any reference to it had been made in the household.
‘That’s the end of it,’ Ellie’s mother laid down, the statement made as much for Mulreavy’s benefit as for Ellie’s. ‘We’ll hear no more of this.’
Ellie did not reply. That evening she told her child.
People knew, and talked about it now. What had occurred ten years ago suddenly had an excitement about it that did not fail to please. Minds were cast back, memories ransacked in a search for the name and appearance of the summer priest who had been and gone. Father Mooney, who had succeeded old Father Hanlon, spoke privately to Ellie, deploring the exposure she had ‘so lightly’ been responsible for.
With God’s grace, he pointed out, a rough and ready solution had been found and disgrace averted ten years ago. There should have been gratitude for that, not what had happened now. Ellie explained that every time she looked at her child she felt a stab of guilt because a deception of such magnitude had been perpetrated. ‘Her life was no more than a lie,’ Ellie said, but Father Mooney snappishly replied that that was not for her to say.
‘You flew in the face of things once,’ he fulminated, ‘and now you’ve done it again.’ When he glared at her, it showed in his expression that he considered her an unfit person to be in his parish. He ordered Hail Marys to be repeated, and penitence practised, with humility and further prayer.
But Ellie felt that a weight had been lifted from her, and she explained to her child that even if nothing was easy now, a time would come when the difficulties of the moment would all be gone.
Mulreavy suffered. His small possession of pride was bruised; he hardly had to think to know what people said. He went about his work in the fields, planting and harvesting, spreading muck and fertilizer, folding away cheques until he had a stack ready for lodgement in Moyleglass. The sour atmosphere in the farmhouse affected him, and he wondered if people knew, on top of everything else, that he occupied a bedroom on his own and always had, that he had never so much as embraced his wayward young bride. Grown heavier over the years, he became even heavier after her divulgence, eating more in his despondency.
He liked the child; he always had. The knowledge that a summer priest had fathered her caused him to like her no less, for the affection was rooted in him. And the child did not change in her attitude to him, but still ran to him at once when she returned from school, with tales of how the nuns had been that day, which one bad-tempered, which one sweet. He listened as he always had, always pausing in his work to throw in a word or two. He continued to tell brief stories of his past experiences on the road: he had traded in potatoes since he was hardly more than a child himself, fifteen when he first assisted his father.
But in the farmhouse Mulreavy became silent. In his morose mood he blamed not just the wife he’d married but her elders too. They had deceived him. And knowing more than he did about these things, they should have foreseen more than they had. The child bore his name. ‘Mrs Mulreavy’ they called his wife. He was a laughing-stock.
‘I don’t remember that man,’ he said when almost a year had passed, a September morning. He had crossed the furrows to where she was picking potatoes from the clay he’d turned, the plough drawn by the tractor. ‘I don’t know did I ever see him.’
Ellie looked up at the dark-jowelled features, above the rough, thick neck. She knew which man he meant. She knew,
as well, that it had required an effort to step down from his tractor and cross to where she was, to stand unloved in front of her. She said at once:
‘He was here only a summer.’
‘That would be it so. I was always travelling then.’
She gave the curate’s name and he nodded slowly over it, then shook his head. He’d never heard that name, he said.
The sun was hot on her shoulders and her arms. She might have pointed across the ploughed clay to the field that was next to the one they were in. It was there, below the slope, that the conception had taken place. She wanted to say so, but she didn’t. She said:
‘I had to tell her.’
He turned to go away, then changed his mind, and again looked down at her.
‘Yes,’ he said.
She watched him slowly returning to where he’d left the tractor. His movements were always slow, his gait suggesting an economy of energy, his arms loose at his sides. She mended his clothes, she kept them clean. She assisted him in the fields, she made his bed. In all the time she’d known him she had never wondered about him.
The tractor started. He looked behind to see that the plough was as he wanted it. He lit another cigarette before he set off on his next brief journey.
Lost Ground
On the afternoon of September 14th 1989, a Thursday, Milton Leeson was addressed by a woman in his father’s upper orchard. He was surprised. If the woman had been stealing the apples she could easily have dodged out of sight around the slope of the hill when she heard his footfall. Instead, she came forward to greet him, a lean-faced woman with straight black hair that seemed too young for her wasted features. Milton had never seen her before.
Afterwards he remembered that her coat, which did not seem entirely clean, was a shade of dark blue, even black. At her throat there was a scarf of some kind. She wasn’t carrying anything. If she’d been stealing the apples she might have left whatever contained her takings behind the upper orchard’s single growth of brambles, only yards from where she stood.
The woman came close to Milton, smiling at him with her eyes and parted lips. He asked her what she wanted; he asked her what she was doing in the orchard, but she didn’t reply. In spite of her benign expression he thought for a moment she was mad and intended to attack him. Instead, the smile on her lips increased and she raised her arms as if inviting him to step into her embrace. When Milton did not do so the woman came closer still. Her hands were slender, her fingers as frail as twigs. She kissed him and then turned and walked away.
Afterwards Milton recalled very thin calves beneath the hem of her dark coat, and narrow shoulders, and the luxuriant black hair that seemed more than ever not to belong. When she’d kissed him her lips hadn’t been moist like his mother’s. They’d been dry as a bone, the touch of them so light he had scarcely felt it.
‘Well?’ Mr Leeson enquired that evening in the farmhouse kitchen.
Milton shook his head. In the upper orchard the Cox’s were always the first to ripen. Nobody expected them to be ready as soon as this, but just occasionally, after a sunny summer, the first of the crop could catch you out. Due to his encounter with the stranger, he had forgotten to see if an apple came off easily when he twisted it on the branch. But he had noticed that not many had fallen, and guessed he was safe in intimating that the crop was better left for a while yet. Shyness prevented him from reporting that there’d been a woman in the orchard; if she hadn’t come close to him, if she hadn’t touched his lips with hers, it would have been different.
Milton was not yet sixteen. He was chunky, like his father and his brothers, one of them much older, the other still a child. The good looks of the family had gone into the two girls, which Mrs Leeson privately gave thanks for, believing that otherwise neither would have married well.
‘They look laden from the lane,’ Mr Leeson said, smearing butter on half a slice of bread cut from the loaf. Mr Leeson had small eyes and a square face that gave an impression of determination. Sparse grey hair relieved the tanned dome of his head, more abundant in a closely cropped growth around his ears and the back of his neck.
‘They’re laden all right,’ Milton said.
The Leesons’ kitchen was low-ceilinged, with a flagged floor and pale blue walls. It was a rambling, rectangular room, an illusion of greater spaciousness created by the removal of the doors from two wall-cupboards on either side of a recess that for almost fifty years had held the same badly stained Esse cooker. Sink and draining-boards, with further cupboards, lined the wall opposite, beneath narrow windows. An oak table, matching the proportions of the room, dominated its centre. There was a television set on a corner shelf, to the right of the Esse. Beside the door that led to the yard a wooden settee with cushions on it, and a high-backed chair, were placed to take advantage of the heat from the Esse while viewing the television screen. Five unpainted chairs were arranged around the table, four of them now occupied by the Leesons.
Generations of the family had sat in this kitchen, ever since 1809, when a Leeson had married into a household without sons. The house, four-square and slated, with a porch that added little to its appeal, had been rebuilt in 1931, when its walls were discovered to be defective. The services of a reputable local builder being considered adequate for the modifications, no architect had been employed. Nearly sixty years later, with a ragged front garden separating it from a lane that was used mainly by the Leesons, the house still stood white and slated, no tendrils of creeper softening its spare usefulness. At the back, farm buildings with red corrugated roofs and breeze-block walls were clustered around a concrete yard; fields and orchards were on either side of the lane. For three-quarters of a mile in any direction this was Leeson territory, a tiny fraction of County Armagh. The yard was well kept, the land well tended, both reflecting the hard-working Protestant family the Leesons were.
‘There’s more, Milton.’
His mother offered him salad and another slice of cold bacon. She had fried the remains of the champ they’d had in the middle of the day: potatoes mashed with butter and spring onions now had a crispy brown crust. She dolloped a spoonful on to Milton’s plate beside the bacon and passed the plate back to him.
‘Thanks,’ Milton said, for gratitude was always expressed around this table. He watched his mother cutting up a slice of bacon for his younger brother, Stewart, who was the only other child of the family still at home. Milton’s sister Addy had married the Reverend Herbert Cutcheon a year ago; his other sister was in Leicester, married also. His brother Garfield was a butcher’s assistant in Belfast.
‘Finish it up.’ Mrs Leeson scooped the remains of the champ and spooned it on to her husband’s plate. She was a small, delicately made woman with sharp blue eyes and naturally wavy hair that retained in places the reddish-brown of her girlhood. The good looks of her daughters had once been hers also and were not yet entirely dispelled.
Having paused while the others were served – that, too, being a tradition in the family – Milton began to eat again. He liked the champ best when it was fried. You could warm it in the oven or in a saucepan, but it wasn’t the same. He liked crispness in his food – fingers of a soda farl fried, the spicy skin of a milk pudding, fried champ. His mother always remembered that. Milton sometimes thought his mother knew everything about him, and he didn’t mind: it made him fond of her that she bothered. He felt affection for her when she sat by the Esse on winter’s evenings or by the open back door in summer, sewing and darning. She never read the paper and only glanced up at the television occasionally. His father read the paper from cover to cover and never missed the television News. When Milton was younger he’d been afraid of his father, although he’d since realized that you knew where you were with him, which came from the experience of working with him in the fields and the orchards. ‘He’s fair,’ Mrs Leeson used to repeat when Milton was younger. ‘Always remember that.’
Milton was the family’s hope, now that Garfield had gone to Belfast. Questione
d by his father three years ago, Garfield had revealed that if he inherited the farm and the orchards he would sell them. Garfield was urban by inclination; his ambition during his growing-up was to find his feet in Belfast and to remain there. Stewart was a mongol.
‘We’ll fix a day for the upper orchard,’ his father said. ‘I’ll fix with Gladdy about the boxes.’
That night Milton dreamed it was Esme Dunshea who had come to the upper orchard. Slowly she took off her dark coat, and then a green dress. She stood beneath an apple tree, skimpy underclothes revealing skin as white as flour. Once he and Billie Carew had followed his sisters and Esme Dunshea when they went to bathe in the stream that ran along the bottom of the orchards. In his dream Esme Dunshea turned and walked away, but to Milton’s disappointment she was fully dressed again.
The next morning that dream quickly faded to nothing, but the encounter with the stranger remained with Milton, and was as vivid as the reality had been. Every detail of the woman’s appearance clung tightly to some part of his consciousness – the black hair, the frail fingers outstretched, her coat and her scarf.
On the evening of that day, during the meal at the kitchen table, Milton’s father asked him to cut the bramble patch in the upper orchard. He meant the next morning, but Milton went at once. He stood among the trees in the twilight, knowing he was not there at his father’s behest but because he knew the woman would arrive. She entered the upper orchard by the gate that led to the lane and called down to where he was. He could hear her perfectly, although her voice was no more than a whisper.
‘I am St Rosa,’ the woman said.
She walked down the slope toward him, and he saw that she was dressed in the same clothes. She came close to him and placed her lips on his.