They were only eight in the summer of ’54, when the Eileen O’Reilly dared Darcy to meet her at midnight in Byrne’s Hollow at Cowpasture, where ghosts were known to cluster after dark. When Darcy did not appear, the butcher’s runt had it all around the school that Darcy Swiney was a coward whose fierceness stretched only as far as the end of her tongue.
‘Not a hair I care,’ said Darcy, but she lay in wait after school and rolled the runt down the mossy bank into the Liffey.
The next day the Eileen O’Reilly crept up behind Darcy at school and hoisted the back of her skirt. Before Darcy could turn round, the butcher’s runt had pinned a note to her drawers. It said: A Penny a Look at the Forked Tail Under Here.
Then Darcy nailed a lurid paper to a tree outside the school. It proclaimed that the runt’s butcher da was wanted for digging up Famine bodies and selling their meat as rashers. She had illustrated the detail in red pencil.
The Eileen O’Reilly ripped the poster from the tree and carried it all the way to our yard.
‘Come out, ye great arse of a swine!’ she yelled.
Darcy was not going to be resisting such an invitation.
There followed, by all accounts, a great tournament of insults and threats that ended with the both of them dried out in the mouth and tottering on glass legs. Some of the curses that Darcy and the butcher’s runt smelted in the ferocious heat of their two brains that day became general currency in Harristown for years after. They were frequently heard in our cottage, as Enda and Berenice, who witnessed it all, showed a precocious talent for tucking grand insults away in their memories for future use.
Darcy commenced it, by wishing a smothering and drowning on the butcher’s runt. ‘May the fishes eat you, you dirty little spalpeen! And then the worms eat the fishes. And the worms wither their guts on the nastiness of your bits inside of them.’
‘Here’s at you! A burning and a scorching on ye!’ was the runt’s retort.
‘I will plant a tree in your dirty ear,’ shouted Darcy, ‘and slap you in its shade.’
‘It is yerself that’s filthied me ear wid the great black tongue on ye, so it is.’
‘Stones on your meaty bones!’
Then the runt wished black sorrow on Darcy’s guardian angel, ‘all red-eyed from shame at havin’ to do wid ye!’
According to Darcy, her guardian angel was presently sending her regards to the Devil who would carry the Eileen O’Reilly around on his pitchfork till she was putrid and dropping off in lumps.
The runt replied, ‘Your heart wouldn’t even make a sausage, so small and shrivelled it is, Darcy Swinehead, with seven drops of the Divil’s blood inside it. Soup made of Jesus’s dead bones wouldn’t choke you, ye bold black torment.’
‘Is that the way of you? You are a grand mouse-sucker and a rat-friend and a knock-knee thing besides.’
‘No need for them poor sisters on yours to go hungry when ye could haunt houses for a living, great unnatural-lookin’ baste that ye are.’
Darcy replied loftily, ‘When I look at your face, I am proud of my rear end.’
‘The sheep drop dead when they see ye, Arsey Swiney. They are happy to die.’
The beggarly brains on the runt, Darcy now suggested, could barely keep her skinny legs walking.
The Eileen O’Reilly countered, ‘Three hundred hairy things to ye. May your black hair strangle ye wid its great tendrils in the night till ye’re found hangin’ dead from the rafthers.’
‘May every maggot in your father’s shop crawl up your nostrils and the dead pigs rise up on their trotters in the night and trample you flatter than a wafer.’
‘I hope the lightning sthrikes ye in the privy midden so ye fall dead and mulch there, and not a dry stitch on your whole carcass.’
‘May a famined dog lift its leg on you,’ replied Darcy, ‘until you turn entirely dirty yellow like your toenails. It wouldn’t bite you, of course, for fear of getting rabies.’
‘A high windy gallows for ye and a nail in the knot that hangs ye by your trembling throttle till the eyes jump out of your head and visit your cousins in the pigsty, ye great pig of a Swiney thing.’
Darcy wished that a great wave would wash the runt away to Australia, ‘And a great whale kick you back to America until you are killed and cut and smashed to bits on the rocks of the shore.’
‘May the Divil lep out of Hell to roast the lips off ye for a divarshin.’ The Eileen O’Reilly wrinkled her small nose. ‘I’m smellin’ the sulphur already, so I am.’
‘The crows will drink the slop of your brains. And spit it out for bitter muck.’
‘Baptised bears wouldn’t pray for ye, Darcy Swiney, and you lying in your pit. The Divil will play marbles wid your black eyes and take two slow days to beat your curabingo till it’s raw.’
‘Then he’ll use your tripes for skipping ropes.’
‘He will wipe his nose slime wid your liver, so he will.’
‘Your mother!’
‘Your mother!’
Then Darcy poisoned the Eileen O’Reilly.
Annora was unwell that week and had taken to her bed. Darcy had set herself up as arch-duchess of the kitchen. She was more arch-duchess than cook, and terrorised us into eating her black messes, declaring, ‘If you don’t like it, there must be something wrong with your tongues.’
She hounded a few drops of peppermint oil out of Mrs Godlin and some daft from a black-toothed pedlar who was shunned by everyone in Harristown. Daft was a wicked powder used to stretch out the rare quantities of sugar that anyone in County Kildare might afford themselves. You could find anything in daft, so long as it was white. Sulphate of lime, arsenic, powdered limestone and even plaster of Paris might make their way into a white dust that had the glitter and faint sweetness of sugar.
With angry hands, Darcy mixed the peppermint oil into the so-called sugar, as she had seen Mrs Godlin do when making lozenges in the dispensary. Not having gum, she added in some goose doings to make a texture you could chew on and rolled the grey-white dough into long tubes that she sliced into small pungent patties.
She laid them on a window sill to dry. She gave out ghastly threats to the rest of us for touching them. So it must be allowed that Darcy never wanted any of us hurt. But the little row of sweetums was exactly in the eye line of the Eileen O’Reilly. The girl’s hands were red with all the meat she was given, but she almost never had a taste of sugar, and of course she was craving it in the desperation of her heart, as Darcy knew full well.
The lozenges had been on the sill for less than an hour when the Eileen O’Reilly was under the window, reaching up to rake a handful, which she crammed directly into her mouth.
At first they gave out that the Eileen O’Reilly had the cholera. For everything in her turned to foul liquid that issued without cease from either end of her body for seven days altogether.
No one mentioned poison but that black-toothed pedlar did not dare show his face in our village again.
When the Eileen O’Reilly had recovered enough to totter to Harristown on her twig legs, she bussed on our door and demanded that Darcy come out.
Darcy leaned out of the window instead – the very window on which she’d laid the peppermint lozenges. She asked, ‘What do you want, you gobaleen?’
‘Look at how I lived, though ye tried to kill me wid the daft,’ shouted the Eileen O’Reilly.
‘True enough it’s a disappointment to me to see you living at all.’
‘I rose from the dead just to curse ye, so I did. I was dead longer than Jesus, for he had only three days in his grave.’
‘Prove it that I tried to kill you,’ Darcy said. ‘And was not the first crime a case of thieving fingers at my window sill?’
‘As well ye are knowin’, the evidence agin ye’s in the privy,’ said the butcher’s runt, leaning against the wall, so weak she was.
‘So why are you here?’ Darcy yawned.
The feud continued year on year by way of petty violence and ver
bal assaults. I grew into childish consciousness always knowing the Eileen O’Reilly as part of my family, the most despised part.
Yet even the poisoning could not keep the butcher’s runt away.
Perhaps the Eileen O’Reilly’s furtive presence drove us even more into ourselves. Living amid the hair, our brains turning over within its springy coils, we developed a tribal identity, a faithful interiority, even amid our battles. Other people were less than real to us, or must be translated for our understanding. We Swineys came to a rare silent agreement that hair, the one thing that united us, was good, wise and strong. An individual with sparser hair than ours – nearly everyone – was looked upon with pity. The one time we encountered an entirely bald man, a visitor to our congregation, we disgraced ourselves with disbelieving laughter in seven different keys. Ordered out of the chapel, our early arrival home and Ida’s round eyes gave us away. Annora lined us up for beatings, after which she had me read aloud from II Kings about the forty-two children torn to pieces by a pair of bears for mocking the bald head of Elisha the Prophet.
Only Darcy escaped the beating – Annora dared not lay a finger on her. By her late teens, Darcy was spoiled not just rotten but spoiled putrid. You could see it in her eyes, in which she was very deficient, the two she had being both small and lacking in pleasant lustre, except when she set herself up as Medusa, and stared you to petrifaction. Darcy was also taller than our mother and fierce-skilled at killing the rabbits she snared in the south field, where sweet clover grew as thick as Swiney hair. Those rabbits died in bad ways. From the noises which came from that field, it seemed that Darcy chose to skin them before they were dead.
Darcy was the goose-strangler too, of course. Days before Michaelmas, she’d be giving the chosen goose the glad eye and telling it how she’d soon be savouring a mouthful of its breast. She would always choose a Phiala if she could, to Annora’s tearful distress. Once, too young to know better, I lured the latest Phiala with a trail of Indian meal and tried to hide her for her own safety under a splintered barrel I’d ringed around with branches. But the goose had no care for her own safety, and gave out a mighty cackle when Darcy called. Darcy guessed the branches were my handiwork, and escorted me by the ear to the water butt, where she plunged my head over and over again into the cold liquid, until Annora dragged her away.
That night, the late Phiala hung from the rafters. Darcy tucked two of the bird’s feathers in her hair. The seashell lamp threw her magnified shadow against the wall, the feathers lending horns to her monstrous silhouette. Ida, who was clever with a pencil, paused in her sums to sketch Darcy’s devilish shadow. Ida’s heavy breathing drew Berenice’s eyes to the page. An involuntary giggle escaped from Berenice: the image was so evidently Darcy and yet so clearly Satan at the same time. A second later we were all caught in a dangerous, wild hilarity – tribal alliances briefly forgotten as we for once laughed out loud at Darcy. It took her one short moment to understand what had happened. Then we saw the dark light of her eyes, and the uncertain rumpling of her lips. We all caught our breaths. Darcy was never mocked. We had ventured upon an unknown path and we cringed away from her, holding tight to the corners of our smocks.
But instead of beating us, Darcy snatched up the row of our shoe dollies from the mantelpiece and marched out of the house. We followed her at a craven distance to the privy midden, and watched her plunge each of our darlings deep into its noisome mud. Even after copious laundering, a faint smell of manure would ever after rise from those dollies when we hugged them to our chests.
We did not laugh at Darcy again.
The Eileen O’Reilly, who had witnessed the dirty drowning of the dollies, took to warning all the Harristown children to keep away from us Swineys and our cottage. ‘Ye’d be amazed and murthered at just the smell of it!’ she would relate, raising her thready arms like a prophet’s. ‘Even their poor dollies have a stink to burn the eyebrows off ye. Not enough food to feed a worm on their table, noight on noight. And as for the clatther of tongues and the screamin’ and the gnashin’ and huggin’ and kissin’ what makes no sense alongside! A din ye might aizy hear in Dublin,’ she told our schoolfellows. ‘And worse nor all, that Darcy Swiney. Madder nor a sack of snakes, she is! Have ye ever seen her kill a rabbit?’
She spoke with the certainty of truth about our cottage, and she wasn’t having anyone but herself getting near us. As she so often did, the butcher’s runt then handed out crubeens from a basket to those children who dutifully expressed themselves substantially amazed or disapproving about all things Swiney.
‘Listen to me. Don’t you be having any dealings or doings wid yon hairy horror Darcy Swiney, and those ragged sisters she keeps running scared and starving!’ she’d tell the boys and girls gnawing hungrily on the crisp pig’s feet.
And no more they did, leaving us sisters to seethe alone in our Swineyness, increasing the concentration of it in our natures.
Chapter 4
I was and ever shall be the scribe and storyteller among the Swiney sisters, a thing that started, of natural course, with reading. The words arrived in me by fate and in the form of our schoolteacher, Miss Finaughty, a romantic reed of a woman. On my very first day at school, she happily diagnosed an ‘active fancy’ in me and nourished it with a succession of poems and fairy tales rising very quickly to the heights of Mr Moore and Mr Dickens. Miss Finaughty watched over my reading habit with a benevolent eye, slipped pencils into my smock and saved oddments of paper for me.
‘Write,’ she told me. ‘It’s in you. I see the words twitching in your slender throat. All the tongues of dead poets in the Famine pits, someone must carry on the words that died with them, or Ireland will parch. And why not a girl to do it?’
Her eyes misted. It was said that Miss Finaughty had loved a poet who starved in the Hunger. I loved her and I wanted to serve her dead poet, and all of the everyday poets – for every Irishman is one in the roll of his tongue – whose bodies had fattened the wild dogs and whose bones whitened under hedgerows all around Harristown. Ida had to be stopped from pulling them up when she saw them.
‘Yet you mustn’t just write,’ Miss Finaughty warned, frowning over some of my early effusions. ‘You must be someone in order to write something.’
‘Who can I be?’ I asked.
‘Bless you for a sweetheart,’ she answered gaily. ‘That is to be your adventure.’
While waiting for my own adventure, I read those of others: sailors, fairies, royalty and robbers. I was a termite among the books Miss Finaughty lent me, burrowing through them as if someone were chasing me. I loved a rich phrase if I could find one, and nursed a secret admiration for a finely tuned curse or a well-stacked piece of abuse. I tucked the words and sounds into my memory, and wrote the best of them on dry leaves that I hid in a barrel in our barn.
Fluent by six, it was I who read at bedtime to my sisters both upwards and downwards of me in age. So it was I who put us in our place from the start. Those much-fingered books of fairy tales soon gave up their heartscalding truths – that we Swineys were but humble characters, the hungriest girls in Harristown, a place where competition for that title was fierce. Once we knew about princesses and gilded goblets, we were embarrassed for our clothes of indeterminate colours with the worst patching hidden by our white smocks gathered at the yoke. We were ashamed of our bare dirty feet and the stirabout we scooped out of wooden bowls and the clucking visits from the Relief Committee bearing stern gifts of grey calico and tough blankets. Worse, even the woodcutters’ children in the fairy tales had visible or respectably dead fathers, unlike the little Swineys.
A great event for Miss Finaughty was a delivery to Brannockstown school of Bible Stories for Children dispatched by one of the many London societies for the improvement of the incorrigible Irish. The books were bound in black and reeked eloquently of cheap leather. Red ribbons grew from their spines like the tongues of sleek eels. The very ends of the pages were dipped in gold. Such a luxury had not been see
n in our bare schoolroom before. But of course there was a little drawback. Those Bible Stories had nothing inside but creamy-white pages. The printer had forgotten himself, which was why these grand books were deemed fit for Irish schools. Or perhaps the London doers-of-good thought that we Irish, always choking on the words gushing out of us, had no need for more of them printed on the page.
I begged two blank books from the crestfallen Miss Finaughty, and took them home, thinking their pages a fine place for Enda’s pastime of drawing the clothes of great ladies and pasting fashion pictures from the newspaper. The other one was for me, to practise my letters in.
But when Darcy saw the books, and heard the story, she wheeled our barrow to the school and scooped up the entire stock. Miss Finaughty hovered about her like a blur of windblown grass, trying to protest until Darcy silenced her.
‘Saw your dead poet blethered and blasted to a stagger in the Brannockstown shebeen last night, and you grieving all these years for him. He’d rather say he’s dead than be seen with a long drink of water like yourself.’
‘Your . . . your mother is much to be pitied,’ was all Miss Finaughty could stammer out in reply.
‘Manticory,’ the teacher asked me the next day, ‘for what would your sister Darcy be using those black books?’
‘It is more like to be a question of wanting them, than of using them,’ I explained.
But it turned out that Darcy had eloquent plans for those books.
Along with Darcy’s black hair and black eyes, there came a black-and-white mind. On the side of white were all things that were pleasing to Darcy, such as presents, praise and money. On the black side you’d find household chores, too-small potatoes, recalcitrant sisters, incursions by the thin geese, empty rabbit traps.