Sometimes a living skeleton still stumbled into our hovel, violently soliciting a heel of bread. And one time Darcy came flying into the house with the news that, when emptying the chamber pot, she’d found something that had once been a man lying dead near the privy midden. I trotted to where the slow crows were wheeling like a doleful, graceful flight of mourning fans. Darcy parted the fronds of dripping grass and pointed.
I’d just four years myself then, and it was my first close-up corpse. I kneeled to look. I sobbed to see the grin stretched over his face and the grey skin that clung to the hollowness of his throat. Moths flickered on his collar. The rain sluiced tears into his open eyes.
‘Too weak to strangle an old goose for himself,’ Darcy concluded. ‘Though doubtless that was his plan. Manticory, stop that snivelling and close his eyes.’
‘Me? But—’
‘It shall be the worse for you if you do not.’
I laid my fat little fingers on his grainy lids and raked down his harsh lashes. Then Annora came out and commenced keening with the slow crows. I cried long shouting tears into her apron. She called down the blessings of the Holy Virgin and St Brigid upon the corpse and sent Darcy for the priest.
‘Is he our daddy then?’ I hiccoughed, looking carefully at the dead man’s hair.
Chapter 2
Our father was a sailor, Annora always told us, and he came back solely in the night once a year, when we were sleeping.
‘Why then and only then?’ Darcy would lament. ‘For why did he not wake us?’
‘He did not wish to do so, but he gave you loving looks from the doorway, God is my witness.’ Annora’s words whistled through the teeth that were always especially prominent whenever she talked about our father. She added, ‘And the Blessed Virgin too.’
The Pope had not long past declared the Virgin Mary free from any stain of Original Sin, a promotion popular with the Catholics in Ireland and particularly with Annora. As if to prove the point, the Virgin had quite promptly made a personal appearance at Lourdes.
‘Away with your Virgin!’ Darcy scowled. ‘It’s a dirty damned lie about the Da.’
I would push my small hand into Annora’s then, for I hated to see how her head dipped under the hard fists of Darcy’s words. Even in happy times, our mother’s low forehead was creased, with the air of a slap perpetually hanging around her face.
‘But, Darcy, you’ve the pennies for to prove it is God’s truth, may I never die in sin,’ Annora insisted. For our after-midnight papa also pressed salt-smelling pennies into the bib-pockets of our gathered-yoke smocks, which hung in a row by the door. The appearance of pennies was infallible after one of his visits, as tangible as a new sister three seasons later. Unfortunately our father had nothing more by way of money for us, his luck being perennially down on him, according to Annora, whose luck was none too sweet itself despite extensive applications on her knees to God.
In our cottage, the Almighty lived on a crucifix in the window with a spoon-sized stoup of holy water at his feet. Apart from the pennies, the only token of our nautical father was a seashell that hung from the rafters above the deal table. I loved to stand near it and imagine the sound of the sea that had beaten and rolled it to perfect smoothness. Inside that seashell burned a tallow candle on days when Annora could afford us that luxury. On the more frequent skinny evenings, a rush light fed on stinking fish oil pooled in the pearly well of its secret stomach.
All the Swiney riches grew on our heads. Perhaps those waterfalls of hair were our true paternal gift, for Annora’s greying plaits were limper than boiled string, a result of starving penances like those of her favourite saints. And there was paternal wealth in the wonder of our names: another of Annora’s tales was that our father chose each one.
Darcy objected to this too. ‘Is it mad you are? How could he know when we were babies how we would be in ourselves?’
‘He named you,’ said Annora tranquilly. ‘And you grew to suit.’
Certainly Annora herself would for choice have named us for some mutilated martyr of the Faith, and raised a flock of Brigids and Teresas. Instead, our names were pagan, and as rich and fine as we were not, yet written in a pen dipped in Irish ink for all that.
Would we ever have taken off so well if we had been named Brigid or Teresa and thuslike? The ‘Swiney’ part of our names did us no favours. The Eileen O’Reilly, the Brannockstown butcher’s runt, regularly hog-snorted Darcy on Harristown Bridge. Our surname carried a whiff of manure with it and also madness, the greatest Swiney of them all being a pagan poet-king from ten centuries past who broke a bishop’s bell and threw a precious psalter into the sea and was thereafter cursed to live bird-brained and bird-hearted in a tree.
The dead man by the privy midden turned out to be a tenant evicted by the Tyntes of Dunlavin.
He was not our father.
Our village, of course, had long since made up its mind that no single sailor could have fathered both Darcy’s coaly coils and Oona’s milky floes. Our neighbours did not believe in the ‘Phelan Swiney, Mariner’ named on Annora’s treasured marriage certificate and each subsequent birth entry in the parish register. Years later, even after we buried Annora in her self-laundered winding sheet, we seven hairy sisters never discussed among ourselves those whispers that followed us down the road. Yet we knew ourselves condemned as the seven bastard daughters of as many late-night sailors, a sorry fact that was said to explain our mother’s stark penances and her exiled existence in the back of beyond of Harristown, which was already far, far beyond the back of beyond. For all her fervid piety, Annora did not attend Mass with us, but stole into chapel for confession only when it was deserted. Our supposed variegated paternity also accounted for the fact that the cadaverous Father Maglinn, the hungriest priest in Ireland, never called on us to claim his tea and slice of soda bread.
Our papas were as likely bailiffs or rake-makers as mariners, tutted the villagers. They must have speculated: were only exceptionally hirsute men attracted to our mother?
‘A great sadness of it is that poor Annora Swiney never does her sums,’ I heard a woman whisper to Mrs Godlin in the dispensary. ‘They won’t be paying golden guineas, the men, the creatures. And a shilling won’t feed the new mouth born after.’
When she saw me staring, she clapped her hand over her mouth. But the idea was sown in my head, and images began to burn behind my eyes. I felt pity for my mother. I was all of eleven then, but mature as country children are, in earthy knowledge.
I imagined the shilling clinking on the table – and the man and Annora hurriedly re-dressing with their backs to one another, she nervously chattering, ‘And if you were ever to be blessed with a little daughter, what would you dream of calling her, God increase you?’
Perhaps she hoped that each man’s heaving back – I pictured it pelted like a bear’s – hid her from the sin-seeking eye of Our Lord and His retributive gift of fecundity. And a few weeks later, alone, retching into the wooden bucket, it would never occur to her to betray her faith and her loving heart by putting an end to the starting of one of God’s children, even though there was a Church of Ireland baker’s wife in Kilcullen known to have a pair of murdering knitting needles and a delicately bloodstained basin.
I hated the brackish talk about Annora. I wanted to believe in Phelan Swiney, Mariner, even when Darcy boldly pronounced him ‘a great fornicator and a feckless fellow himself’ every time Annora’s bucket announced a new sister. And she declared that she would set up a fierce trap for the sneaking-away legs of him, if only she were ever given notice of one of his arrivals.
But even I could see that a multiplicity of fathers might account for the dire lack of sisterly harmony among us Swineys, it being seldom that we were not at deadly combat, either one upon another, or in conspiring alliances. There was never a thing Annora could do or say to keep one of us off the neck of another.
From the grimed windows our tiny cottage issued some of the largest noises you’d
hear in Ireland – noises of gnashing, squealing, screaming and weeping, as if Hell had opened a private fissure in our earth floor and a section of the Devil’s congregation was taking the air in Harristown.
‘Mine!’ was the most frequent word shouted.
There was precious little a small Swiney might call her own in that bare cottage, and the only privacy was under a blanket. Even there, we could still hear our tormentors. Our abuse and our rejoinders were as threadbare as ourselves.
‘You’re a stupid scrattock.’
‘No, you’re the stupid scrattock.’
‘It’s you yourself who is the scrattock.’
‘Scrattock!’
‘Leave me alone, why don’t you?’ was next in our lexicon, followed by, ‘Just close the mouth on you and be done with your ceaseless maundering.’
The fiercest portion of tears and screams issued from our twins Berenice and Enda. Darcy had taught them to hate one another in their cradles, she boasted, always feeding one at the expense of the other.
‘It was never right,’ Annora said, ‘the way you teased those babes with the bottle, Darcy Swiney, and now look.’
With each new inch Berenice and Enda were growing to hate one another more than tenant and landlord’s agent, or certain shades of yellow and purple. But like tenant and landlord’s agent, the twins grew into themselves living solely for their epic enmity. They would be nothing without it, or without one another; they were like the tongs and griddle by the hearth, which were themselves frequently deployed as weapons by Berenice and Enda, for their vendettas had a simple brutality to them.
Enda explained the little puckered birthmark on her neck by saying that Berenice had tried to gnaw her head off when they still shared close quarters in Annora’s belly. One of Enda’s revenges was to unpick every stitch in Berenice’s drawers, fastening them with flour paste so that they fell off on the way to school. Berenice was not lacking in devices of her own. She was a genius for an ambush by the water butt, where she would hold Enda’s head down until her twin nearly gurgled her last.
Darcy seemed to thrive on the twins’ troubles. So much the worse for any sister who tried to make a pious peace or mend a rupture between her siblings.
‘Let them be or be having you,’ she told us, even after Enda left a dead crow, quickening with maggots, under Berenice’s pillow.
‘It’s a relief to them to beat on one another,’ she assured me, when Berenice retaliated by trying to stuff the crow’s beak into Enda’s mouth, shouting, ‘Did you ate your enough of poultry yet?’
Not satisfied with Enda’s bleeding lip and the great blackness of feathers she was spitting from her mouth, Berenice marched up to Father Maglinn and informed him that her twin had perished of her throat in the night and required a pit dug for her grave.
The passions of the twins toppled their siblings into two camps. You were either for one or the other. Plump Pertilly and feverish little Ida followed vivacious Berenice; blonde Oona and I were with Enda, who had a natural elegance about her. Enda was tender and sweet, brushing her favourites’ hair and saving us morsels from her plate.
So Oona was guilty of leading Ida into the estate woods and leaving her there with a promise of a visit from a leprechaun. Berenice found her only when the moon was high and Ida’s imagination had confected a wolf crouching in the bushes. The beast was so real to her that Berenice had to beat the bush with a stick before Ida would consent to come home. The next morning Ida herself hid by the woodpile, reaching out a sly hand to trip up Oona, leaving the pretty ankles on her flailing in the air. Then there was Oona stuffing straw under the blanket where it lay atop Pertilly so the Dunlavin banshee or the horned Witch of Slievenamon, when those ladies called on our cottage in the dead of night, would see the grand mound, think it a fine fat girl, and devour Pertilly first. Nor was I innocent. I earned Ida’s little fists windmilling at my hip after she saw a piece of mischief I wrote about her on the barn wall.
The only one not aligned was Darcy, who feared no one but relied on everyone to be afraid of her. She did not scruple to give any man, woman or rabid dog the length and breadth of her tongue at any time at all, and the flat of her hard hand might win prizes for its warlike prowess too.
‘It is ashamed you should be of yourselves,’ were the words that most frequently issued from between Annora’s gapped teeth as she gave us a clatter on the rump or shoulder or whichever fleeting bit of us she could catch. Ashamed? We rarely were that. My sisters’ tempers and their fears were generally too much aroused to allow for any quiet contemplation of our faults. Seven is too many for that: even if one of us had a moment’s pause, she’d soon be distracted by Ida’s war cries or a foaming fury of Berenice’s.
But there was also the Devil’s match in plain love. When I sat on Enda’s warm lap, even when I was far too big for it, with Oona’s gentle fingers braiding my hair, I felt safe from all the world, except for Darcy and, until the troll came to meet me on the bridge, God.
Annora raised us in the True Faith, the true faith of poverty and Irishness and oppression, not to mention illiteracy. Annora herself, like fully one quarter of the Catholics in Harristown, could not read. But she could still enforce the Lord’s word like a soldier and insist that we spoke ‘educated, like the ladies your father intended’. She faithfully beat us for our many sins, including the dipping of our fingers in the broken jar where she kept her donations for the poor Pope in Rome and the uttering of tongue-lovely but forbidden words like ‘bejappers’. Or for mocking imitations of her voice when she wandered the garden calling and keening for the latest goosely incarnation of Phiala.
Our mother kept us clean, laundering our skin and hair in thin suds left over from the washing she took in. In the summer she brightened the grey water with the squeezed haws of the wild dog-roses. She eased our knots and molested the lice with a series of wooden combs she whittled herself by the fire of an evening – no luxury of horn, gutta-percha or rubber for the young Swiney sisters.
The creamy elegance of the Church of Ireland’s spire at Carnalway was not for us either. The ruined old chapel at Harristown’s Catholic graveyard served as our place of worship, and a wretched walk it was too, with the rain beating on our heads most Sundays and the slow crows making pessimistic comments all the way, and the coldness reaching up out of the earth to clutch at our legs. The fat estate sheep lifted their docked tails as we passed, reserving their most derisive choruses for us.
‘Bah!’ they sneered at every passing Swiney. ‘Bah!’
We kept our heads down as we walked on toes that never saw a shoe except on Sundays. And when those shoes died, they were given ragged dresses and seed eyes, and served as faithful dollies. Their glory was of course their hair, for each of us placed our nightly combings in a crude wooden crib that Annora grandly called a ‘hair-receiver’, until there was enough to wig a dolly in our own real curls. Our mother insisted that the hairs of our heads were all numbered by the Almighty, who would expect us to account for every one on the Day of Judgement. None must ever be thrown away. In the meantime she permitted us to lend them to our dollies.
One day we would do better than our shoe darlings – grander and better – but at that time we loved our rough honeys and danced them through balls attended by swarthy foreign dukes confected from boots and briar. I regret to mention that, when not romancing dukes, the shoe dollies also fought a sight of Swiney wars: in our doll family there were no amicable feminine tea parties but rather regular slayings and grisly beatings. There were at least two full scalpings and my darling Enda’s baby – always dressed the most fashionably of all our dolls – suffered her wooden head cracked in two by her twin’s.
For all our internecine strife, we Swineys were clannish and secretive. We did not like to be looked at. We were chary of strangers, hiding our drabness in the tall weeds if one set foot on the sparse Swiney soil.
Only one personage regularly encroached upon the land of Swiney: the Eileen O’Reilly, the butc
her’s runt, who continued year on year a sworn enemy to Darcy and yet was unable to tear herself away from Swineys all the same.
It was as if she were an eighth, ghostly sister, living on the margins of our scrap of land. Though she’d never taken herself a step inside our deal door – for fear of Darcy’s fists – I often found her lingering outside it, with a finger and ‘shhh’ upon her pale lips. I would nod and keep her secret. No matter how Darcy threatened her, or beat her, the butcher’s runt would return. Her light reddish hair gave her away when she hid in the long grass; so did the single eye, blue as a cornflower, she pressed to the window, watching us, even late at night. No one missed her at home: her father drank and her mother ran to sloe gin too.
So the Eileen O’Reilly was free to spend all her time a-haunting Swineys.
Chapter 3
I cannot remember a time when there was not war between the butcher’s runt and Darcy. Enda always said they were born bellicose, being the same age within a week and a day. The legend was that there was a constitutional inability in each one of them to stand the sight of the other, and this from the first time they were laid side by side on the counter at the dispensary at Kilcullen where mothers took their babies to be weighed. In a minute both babies were in a mortal tangle on the floor, and the only reason they were not gnashing and biting was because they didn’t have the teeth for it.