Annie Dunne (12 page)

Billy Kerr is almost a memory when next he returns. That is the way of the summer. Even to an old woman, time gains again some of the rope and length of early days. We are mired even happily in the sweet weeks of June, when vigour is everywhere, the green of everything violent and hungry, the young brambles anxious and ambitious to cover every neglected dip and awkward hillock of our fields. Perhaps that is the great note of the summer, an awful anxiety that takes itself into everything like a strange rot in the windowsills, eating out the hearts of things till you could put your finger through the last coat of sorrow.

Never mind that the end of such doings is clear even as they begin, even as the grasses tear up from the warming ground, and the brambles throw strong cables across surprising distances, and the first pale green signs of the blackberries burn in the thorny ropes. For a countrywoman, if such I am, knows the end of such ambitions, the berries at last boiling with the wasteful pounds of sugar in the big cooking pot, the white sugar creating lighter veins of reddish streaks, as bitter berry marries to the sweetness of the beet. The grasses devoured by the milch cows, and all those grasses out of reach lying exhausted and sere in the revenges of autumn. All swept away, vanishing by a fierce magic off the old woven carpets of the earth.

The marriage coverlet is woven and embroidered for the happy pair, the house is built in a few summer weeks by the
meitheal
of neighbours, the last twist and stitch is put to the thatch, and in they go, the fortunate couple, with strength and purpose—and at length the house is desolate and empty with only rain for a roof, the stranger comes and opens the rotted hope chest, and puts their fingers to the folded coverlet, which falls from their hand in mouldy fragments. And that’s all we can say about it, the shortness, the swiftness, and the strange unimportance of life.

But when June is queen, eternally in the grasses, in the wood pigeons, in the dank rooks, in the potato gardens, in the cabbage patches, wild dreams are given birth to with all the mighty energy of the full-blowing year.

All things and creatures feel it. I am not immune. A strange and inconvenient affection takes a hold of me. I go down beyond the midden to my crab-apple tree and talk to it. Now and then I touch it, like patting a child on the head. I watch its progress carefully, like the mother of the same child. I pinch out whatever the late frosts have done to it, and scrape off the mildew, and every week or so I lime-wash the bottom of the trunk against such insects as like to climb up towards the shoots. I dig and tussle up the soil around its rim, I feed it the tea leaves from our many infusions. When I read the leaves in the cups for Sarah, bringing into her head the dreams of soft futures, I am thinking quietly myself of the crab-apple tree, the nourishment it will get from the makings of such prophecies.

I am at the tree that day when Billy Kerr arrives. He is covered head to foot in a strange painting of what looks like snowflakes, but it is the blurred splashes and drops of the whitewash that he must have been applying to the house of my cousins. Even the backs of his hands are speckled, his cheeks, his nose. It stops in a line on his forehead where he must have had a paper bag over his remnant hair. Any cuts and scrapes now he has on his hands where the lime has touched will be deep pits in his skin by morning, right down to the bone, if he doesn’t wash well. Because the lime eats in the hours after painting with it, in the small hours when you lie in bed dreaming, reminding you of the fact that the bodies of hanged men used to be cast into the lime pits in the prisons, to render them down, to get rid of them, to bring utter destruction. So my father would have described it—‘utter destruction’. For the guilty must not expect mercy from other living men, only God could mend their hurts, or the devil increase them. That was all the mind of my father: retribution, punishment, being lost to the world and never found again. It used to frighten me as a little girl, his certainty and his power, devour me with fright like lime itself, in my cosy iron bed in Dublin Castle.

‘You were liming today anyhow,’ I say, friendly enough, pleased with the heat in my blue and white apron, the scent of rough starch from it rising up to me.

‘I was so late with it. The Dunnes were looking darkly at me. So I set to. Tomorrow or the next day when it dries, if there is no rain, their house will be beaming out like a beacon. They want you to come down for tea-time tomorrow, to bring the city children with you, but not Sarah.’

‘Sarah never goes down there.’

‘No, but, it’s not a feud, is it?’

‘No, not a feud. A custom. How they live side by side, these companies of single women.’

‘And they are cousins, aren’t they?’

‘I am cousin to the Dunnes and Sarah is cousin to me.’

‘I know, I know. What’ll I say? Will I say you’ll come down?’

‘I will be happy to come down. The children will love the adventure.’

‘Where are they this moment? I have a Peggy’s-leg for them.‘

‘I don’t know. Somewhere about. I’ll bring it to them for you.’

He hands me the stick in its crinkling wrapper and I slip it into my apron pocket like a knife.

‘Well, you tend that old apple tree well,’ he says.

‘I do.’

‘It is as well to mind an apple tree.’

‘It would perish otherwise.’

‘Very likely. And you keep the whole place so well, you and Sarah.’

‘We have the measure of it.’

‘No need for a fella like me about here,’ he says, laughing hugely suddenly.

‘Men are not as essential as they think they are,’ I say, falling suddenly to humour myself, and smiling at him. Not for the first time I try to think what it might be like to be accounted normal—to be easy and fluent with my fellow human beings. In a dream of community and harmony! Nevertheless I feel unaccountably spied on, as if I were emptying out the chamber pots under the bushes, and he was close by, looking and commenting. It is an eerie feeling, certainly.

‘And is Sarah about the yard there?’ he says.

‘Sarah is about the yard,’ I say. ‘She is trying to decide which of the old hens she will kill and boil. I am afraid it brings a touch of the Solomons to her. She cannot bring herself easily to impose sentence of death on her old acquaintance.’

‘I’ll go up to her and help her wring a neck! I have no such qualms.’

‘No, I expect not,’ I say, as he passes by in his limy boots.

I go in to find the children, now that I have true treasure for them. I pass from the wild glass of the sunlight into the familiar blindness of the kitchen. No sign of Sarah at any household tasks, only the clock continues its measured work, taking away the days, or adding new days, I cannot say. My shoes clack on the blue flags. Over at the fire I place a brace of turves and then hear little giggles from the children’s bedroom. Armed with the Peggy‘s-leg, I go in fearlessly, expecting only to find childish things afoot.

The little girl lies on her bed. She is entirely naked to the world. The usual speckles of sunlight that run like shoals of small fish from the window, after being sorted and darned by the leaves outside, illuminate the strange scene. I am nonplussed, bewildered, lost, dismayed. She lies with her face towards the window and does not see me. The boy is huddled between her legs, his face down near where her body joins at the centre, near that special place that should be foreign to all eyes.

‘Do lick it,’ she says, in her sweet calm voice, innocent as a rose, truly as innocent.

‘It smells of oranges,’ he says. ‘Like when Mummy peels oranges. And rain it smells of.’

‘Give it little licks then,’ she says.

Six years old talking to four years old, nearly five! Her brother! His sister! Is this a childhood game? I search in my own murky memories for such as this? Did Dolly, Maud and me disport ourselves so? I do not think so. Now my habitual fear engulfs me, it is like a group of men charging me, knocking me down, stamping on me in the mud. My hands seem to wave about at the ends of their stalks. My eyes are suddenly freezing as if winter were driven against them. The bare little room, this niche of Wicklow, this nowhere place, swims about. There is nothing of gaiety in it. My heart is being leant on. I can feel its rafters start to crack and break.

Quickly, on an inner instinct, I withdraw from the room, and then bang sharply on the door. And scrape the chairs by the fire along the flagstones, and rattle the crocks on the dresser, and shake the drawer with all our knives and forks and pudding spoons. And when I think I have warned them enough, I go in again.

Oh, yes, the two of them, in their clothes now, sitting up on their separate beds, smiling the smile of the cat in
Alice in Wonderland,
false, unhappy little smiles. The Peggy‘s-leg I drive deeper into my apron. I cannot give it to them now. I must think, though I know I will never comprehend.

Perhaps it is a thing that cannot be understood, and so never to be mentioned. I am glad I did not disturb them. I am grateful not to have to puzzle this out with them, even if that is the measure of a coward.
I would spread my cloak under your feet, if it were only the breadth of a farthing ...

‘Come along then, and we will go down the green road to Kiltegan, and be buying - I don’t know, be buying a Peggy’s-leg and having fresh air - and all the rest of it.‘

The two fire off their beds, the little boy’s truckle bed rattling from the excitement.

‘And can I carry your purse, Annie, like I always do?’

‘You can carry my purse.’

‘But he always carries your purse,’ says the girl.

‘I have only the one purse. I can’t be carving it in two with the bread knife.’

‘Annie, tell us what you tell us about the bread knife,’ says the little boy as we venture out again into the mercy and normalcy of the sun.

‘What do I tell you about it?’

‘About how to cut the bread with soft sure strokes, and let the teeth of the knife do the work, and not to lean on the bread, or you get crooked big slices that are no good and put the loaf astray.’

‘Did I tell you all that? I don’t remember.’

‘You did, you did.’

‘Well, it’s all truth,’ I say, sallying forth out the pillars of the gates. Do you think Shep would be roused by our progress? Not at all. He lies as if dead in the oven-hot yard, watching us go with half an eye—the farthing of an eye.

‘Oh, yes,’ says the boy. ‘I told my mother. I instructed her. She was leaning, leaning on the bread with her own bread knife. In the yellow kitchen. And that is a knife my father brought home from a party, that a mad drunk priest tried to stab another man with, and my father took the knife off of him. I instructed her, Auntie Anne, just how you told me.’

‘I’m sure she was grateful to me. Hmmm,’ I say. ‘What do you mean about the priest?’

‘He doesn’t know,’ says the girl. ‘He is a parrot, you see. He listens, he hears everything, he remembers everything, songs and stories, what everyone says to everyone else, all the things in the rooms, everything, but, he doesn’t know what anything means.’

‘I see,’ I say. ‘No more than myself. What songs do you know? Do you know “Kevin Barry”?’

‘No
^!
’

‘It’s a song of those rebels. Sometime I’ll teach you “Kevin Barry”. I’ll put you up on a chair in the kitchen and you can sing it for me and Sarah and your sister.’

We walk on. The lush grasses are bent underfoot. It is very still and sweet, with the bees crossing our way with perfect music. The meadows steam in the heat. Everything of the year is well advanced, the shoots of meadowsweet, the stalks of the bell flowers. Soon we will be in the wild garden of mother nature herself. That’s what it is. I should ask them about the oranges, the kneeling, the opening of the legs. What could it mean? A mad version of what is meant by marriage. Was it horrible and bad? Was it evil I saw? They are so simple and nice and happy. Or is there some bleak shadow in that girl? Some vein of misery? A change, a change so slight and subtle, something I don’t ever remember, her simplicity not the same as before. I must watch the girl. I am inclined only to look at the boy. Maybe she needs my assistance. Now I am failing them, I am walking the green road to Kiltegan and failing them.

I look up the sloping field and there beside the granite pillars of the corn-stand are Sarah and Billy Kerr, distant, seemingly talking, but all lost in silence, in the strange silence made up of the music of the bees, the minute roar of a donkey far away, the dull thrum of heat in woods and fields.

I am thinking of that sailor I made up, when Maud and Dolly had me so tormented, when we were girls. Dolly so neat, so young, so loved, so hunted by young men, Maud so clever to capture Matt one sunny day in Stephen’s Green, when he was painting the duck pond. Annoyed him into talk! He said he spoke to her just to get rid of her. He did not succeed in that. And think of all that history after. Between the stitching of the coverlet and the fallen house. No time, no time. And these children’s father just a scrap it would seem a day ago, a bright boy running in this very vicinity, not so long after his grandfather was dead. A bird of black hair on his head, a wild happiness in him always as a boy, a love for me as big as Baltinglass.