The Friday Tree (27 page)

After a puzzled silence, the big girls began to do it, some with dexterity, others with slow frustration.

Sister took Brigid by the hand and walked her about the room. Brigid watched with fascination as the nun lifted up the girls’ work, her hands guiding theirs, her fingers flying in and out, swift as knitting needles, plaiting and weaving the green stems until a cross of rushes appeared on each desk.

When she went back up to her desk, Sister let Brigid try one with her, her hands, cool and dry, over Brigid’s. As they worked, Sister said: “So you are the child who likes to try new words?”

Brigid thought of her cannonball story, and all her wariness returned. “Not any more,” she said, quickly adding “Sister.”

The nun went on guiding Brigid’s fingers through the plait of rushes. “Well,” she said finally, “I think you should keep at it. I hear you have a great store of general knowledge. When you are a bigger girl and come up here to my class, I’ll want you to write a great deal, and I’ll want to see all the words you know.”

As Brigid turned to look at her, she found the face no longer watchful, the eyes kinder than she had thought.

“Meanwhile, when you write stories, if you want to, you can show them to me. St Brigid herself was a writer. Did you know?”

Brigid shook her head.

Sister looked out the window. “The other infants are going home now,” she said, “and so must you.” She stood up, her roundness made rounder by the full pleats of her skirt. She motioned with her finger to a tall girl with a fiery pony-tail: “Take Brigid Arthur downstairs to the other infants. And come straight back.” She turned to Brigid as if she were an adult and, cocking her head to one side, as she had when Brigid saw her first, she said, “That girl would forget her own head if it wasn’t attached, but she’ll mind you going down. On you go now, and don’t forget what I told you. Oh, and Brigid?”

Brigid turned round.

“I liked the cannonball,” the nun said.

It was a long time before Francis came home that day. He was in the middle of school examinations, and when he did come in, he went straight up to his room, and Isobel brought him something to eat. He had to study: no one was to disturb him, and the house was to be kept quiet. Brigid, with no homework and no television, found the silence exhausting, and nothing, books or puzzles, caught her interest. She went from room to room, restless, ending up in the sitting room, where her mother sat sewing a small something, white and fine. Seeing Brigid, she put it down.

“Stop prowling,” she said, “and come here.” She reached out her hand, pulling Brigid gently to stand beside her. “Brigid,” she said, “would you like a little brother or sister?”

Brigid thought. “I have a brother. Perhaps a sister. Are we getting one?”

“We may be,” said her mother. “God may send us a new baby.”

Brigid clapped her hands. “A baby? When?”

“Oh, in the longer day. Now, I want you to do something for me, like a good girl.”

Brigid did not reply: she was not sure if they were really getting a baby. ‘In the longer day’, like ‘we’ll see’ and ‘perhaps after the holidays’ often meant ‘never’: it might be unwise to count on it.

“Brigid, are you listening? Go up and tell Francis to come down and take a break: you can watch some television with him.”

Brigid did not need to be asked twice. She ran upstairs as fast as she could. Somewhere, low, she heard a throbbing beat, and when she opened the door of his room, it grew louder.

“Francis, is your wireless on?”

Francis, his head bent over his work, looked up: “Yes.”

“Can you turn it up?”

“No,” said Francis. “It’s not supposed to be on.”

Brigid stood by the radio: softly, it danced and pulsed, joyous and energetic. “Who is that singing?” she said.

“Buddy Holly,” he said, wearily. “How was today?”

Brigid could see his eyes were tired and strained, but she climbed on the bed anyway.

“It was St Brigid’s day,” she said. “I learned that.”

“Oh, did you?” he said. “So, what happens on St Brigid’s day?”

“Crosses. The big girls upstairs in school make them. I helped make one today, Francis, nearly all by myself.” She flushed: that was not really true.

“Did you?” said Francis. “By yourself? That
was
something. She’s the patron saint of cattle. Bet you didn’t know that. Spring begins today. That’s why people make Brigid’s crosses from grassy things, like reeds and rushes. That was what you . . . helped to make today.”

“I did do some of it.”

“I don’t doubt that,” said Francis. “Anyway, it is a holy time.”

Brigid felt even more ashamed. “I’m not very holy,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” Francis agreed. “But, you don’t have to be. You might like the original Brigid better. The fire goddess.”

“Fire goddess!” said Brigid, starting. This was better. “Is that the one with stories?”

“Yes, that too. In the old days they needed fire to cook and to keep warm. Brigit – with a ‘t’ – was very powerful, and the feast to keep her happy was called Imbolc.”

Imbolc
.
Imbolc
. Rolling around her tongue and inside her head, like the fire he described. What a word. “But, fire?” she said. “We aren’t meant to go near fire.”

“No,” he said, “not real fire. The fire is inside, in the head, not a fire that burns you. It’s a fire that makes you want to make things. In the old stories, she was the goddess of wisdom, the goddess of poets, of writers, protecting them, helping them make their songs and their stories. In Britain she was Britannia – in Scotland, St Bride. Some people think the name means ‘Fiery Arrow’ and some ‘High One’. Here in Ireland they say she was Mary’s friend.”

“What, Mary the Mother of God? How do you know all this, Francis?” Brigid asked, shaking her head.

He laughed. “I read. Apparently too much, and not the right things, but that’s another story.”

“Another story? Now?”

“No,” he said, firmly. “Go. Begone. Go and think what you can do with your name.”

“How?”

“That’s up to you. You could write something, maybe. Now, I’m tired, Brigid, and I’m supposed to be working, and I want to stop, and I can’t, yet. Go. I mean it.”

Francis stopped talking, and Brigid, disappointed to be dismissed, climbed down from the bed, telling him quickly as he walked her to the door that she had met a nun who turned out to be kind, and wanted her to write more stories.

“Well, didn’t I just tell you to? Now, Brigid, please . . .”

Brigid stopped. “Francis! Look!” She pointed to the window. Dim though her vision was, she could make out a shape that could only be Isobel coming down the bare winter plot, stepping on the hard ridges of the frosted soil. Under her arm she carried what looked like a roll of cloth, but Brigid could not see what it was. “Look, Francis! Turn round and look! Why is Isobel in the plot? What is she doing?”

Francis turned, too slowly for Brigid’s satisfaction. “I don’t see anyone.”

Brigid crossed quickly to the window, pulling Francis by the arm. “Look! She . . .”

There was no one there. The trees stood bare and lonely at the back of the plot, and there was no one to be seen. “She was there, Francis. She was. I saw her.”

“Brigid,” said Francis, “you
are
killed with imagination. You know Isobel isn’t even here this afternoon. Now, I give up. And I am starving. Please go and do something useful somewhere else, or let me go downstairs.”

“Oh, yes, I was to tell you to do that. Come downstairs. And we can watch television, if we like.”

“Well, thanks for telling me,” Francis said. He got up and pushed her firmly out before him, closing the door after them.

Brigid let him go ahead, and slowly followed him, Imbolc in her head. It paused for a second, then bounced to her lips and struck off from her tongue and her teeth. What a lovely word.

Francis called her for television, and she joined him, but her heart was not in it. She was certain that it was Isobel she had seen in the plot. She was certain, too, that there was no point in mentioning it to anyone, when even Francis thought it was her imagination. Instead, she named the princess in her theatre Brigit the Fire Goddess, and set her to defeat Isobel the Wicked, Enemy of Imbolc.

Chapter 18: Naming the Fields

The days remained cold and bright, but the sun and wind eased and, slowly, light began to return. Brigid’s mother grew larger and slower; her father seemed to drift more and more into his own thoughts. Even Francis grew up and away from her, more in his room with his music than downstairs with her. There were few visits from her grandfather, none from Rose. Brigid did not see Ned Silver, away at his new school, and Uncle Conor kept away from their house. Had it not been for her theatre and the new adventures of Brigit the Fire Goddess and George Bailey – who got on surprisingly well – Brigid would have thought herself in February a very lonely child.

March was brighter still, but cold breezes cut sharply at the bus stop on school mornings. Brigid lived for Saturdays and any possible holiday. Everything was grey as the ashy thumbprint the priest gave their foreheads on the first day of Lent. All through the long weeks that followed, any sweets they were given had to be saved in a jar, to be eaten on St Patrick’s Day, a brief respite, but the effect of eating so many at one time made Brigid feel rather more ill than happy, and the remaining weeks of Lent seemed gloomier still.

Yet, one day in late March, Brigid looked from the window and saw that, under the broom bush between their garden and the plot, small daffodils had begun to push through, and frail yellow primroses to appear beneath the hedge. That was the beginning of hope. Very slowly, the weather grew a little warmer, and the rain softer. One morning, she felt sure she could make out on the Friday Tree a thin tracery of leaves, palest green, the brown of the bark still showing through. The tree swayed, but did not struggle to keep upright as it had through the storms of winter. Now, finally in their spring attire, light and delicate, the seven trees at the back of the plot seemed almost ready for the dance, for the summer to come.

At last, the day before Easter arrived, and with it came Rose, the bright shining ring sparkling, not on her neck, but on her left hand. True to her promise of the summer, as soon as lunch was over she put the children in her car, and they found themselves to their delight on the way to the farm at Tullybroughan. Brigid did not have time to consider that her parents were not coming with them, her mother too tired and the smock so big, and her father tired too, differently, in the sad weariness growing on him since the autumn. There was no time to be anxious: the prospect of time on the farm was too delightful to be missed. Besides, Rose said she had a surprise for them when they got there, but, despite much questioning, Brigid could not find out what it was.

The journey took a while, but everything on the way down was a source of excitement, even the Burnhouse where glue was made, though the car windows had to be shut tight to keep out the smell. The towns grew strange and different: more walls, more arches, bridges, drumlins again, then the leafy road of the old city where, as they climbed a steep hill, the children saw two cathedrals up ahead, one square and solid, the other tall and slender, with twin spires. One of them was tolling its bells just beside the hospital where Rose worked: she brought them in and showed them the plaque on the wall to the railway disaster, and made them tea from the great pot she kept in her office. Rose’s tea was like no other, dark and strong and sweet. Brigid enjoyed it but, despite herself, she knew she was fidgeting. At last, at long last, they left, piled into the little car, and set off down the steep hill, past the twin spires stretching towards the sky, past the shambling marketplace, out along the broad road, past the old graveyard where all their mother’s family lay buried, right back to the first one who was French. Brigid, half-listening, heard “war of religion” and paid no more attention: it sounded too much like the news.

They turned into the lane, and Rose stopped the story. The lane, always longer than Brigid thought any lane could possibly be, was narrow and twisted, with ferns, feathered fingers in the ditch, and primroses in pale clumps. Behind them, waving in greeting, danced bluebells: delicate and frail, they managed to live out in the lane, all through the rain and the cold of night, and they survived. The year before, when the children picked them, they died in a day, but there were more, hundreds more, and now this year they had all come back.

All of a sudden, round a corner, down a hill, there was Tullybroughan. As if they had seen the sea, both children exclaimed at the sight of the haggard, the white-washed barn, and then the house itself, tucked away behind it in its own little shelter. Smoke rose from the chimney and, suddenly, for a second, Brigid remembered the other little house, at the edge of the world in Lecale, where there was no more smoke. Then, just as quickly, she forgot. This house was living, and she could smell bread baking.

They turned in at the white posts of the gate, and Brigid clutched Francis as she saw that their Uncle Michael had set up the swing in the chestnut tree. It seemed that he had been trying it out, too: it was swinging lightly as if someone had just jumped off. Then they saw Michael’s long hooked nose and narrow face as, brown and wiry, he lifted a milk churn on to the back of a lorry. He stopped what he was doing at the sound of the car, waved at the children, and called to Rose, “Take her on round!” They had arrived.