The Walking People (6 page)

"I'm sorry for your trouble," Greta said, relieved that she'd thought of the right thing to say, and stood on her tiptoes to reach the boy's hand. Michael sat up straighter but didn't look at her.

"Can we go up?" Johanna asked, turning her big eyes on her mother.

"Hush!" Lily said. Big Tom put one rough hand on top of each girl's head and steered them both inside.

 

The travellers waked Julia for two nights, and on the third morning was the funeral. How word spread along the tinker channels was impossible for Greta and Johanna to figure out, but spread it did, because
people began arriving within two days. There were a few wagons, but most of the mourners arrived on foot. Johanna and Greta washed with their minds on the road, they swept with their minds on the road, they chopped and scrubbed and milked and churned thinking only of the road. No chore was completed. Even the boys turned their attention to the activity on the hill, laying down their hayforks to watch the spectacle pass. Only Big Tom was indifferent.

"You know why tinkers wander?" he asked at tea. "Because they made the nails for Jesus' cross and now this is their punishment."

"Have they not paid their debt?" Johanna asked. "Jesus died a long time ago."

Little Tom said something in his mushy style, shush-shush-shushing it out to Jack and Padraic for translation.

"Some say they descended from the ancient kings of Ireland," Padraic said, and Greta wondered if Little Tom had read that in the book he'd borrowed from Mr. Boyle the thatcher. It was a big book, and most nights he read it at the table while the others talked.

"You see?" Big Tom laughed. "That's the kind of trickery they give out about themselves."

Johanna had been quiet since Julia's body was taken away, and Greta followed her from the henhouse to the hay shed to the stable, waiting for her to suggest a plan, expecting at all moments to have to convince her not to do anything silly. When the funeral procession began and the strangers made the long walk from the camp to the old Ballyroan cemetery, where the priest from Conch was waiting with one hand on his Bible and the other on his pocket watch, Johanna turned her head away from her work, but didn't even walk to the gate. When it was over, the woman's body packed tight under the mound of dirt, the visitors journeyed back to the camps they had left, and the only travellers left on the hill were the original seventeen, minus one.

In bed that night, the girls stayed awake long after they tucked their hot-water bottles in at their feet.

"I thought it was a nice life," Johanna said, speaking to the ceiling in the dark. "But it isn't, is it? They put three planks of wood across two barrels and that's where they laid her. I saw it myself. And I saw them, Michael and his sister, Maeve is her name, crawl out of their tents
on their hands and knees the morning of the funeral, Michael in a dark suit, Maeve in a blue dress, and both of them brushing off their knees and the palms of their hands. They sat on upturned buckets by the fire. An old one came out of the wagon and ran a comb through Maeve's hair. They were baking bread in the ashes, and when it was ready the visitors pulled it apart with their hands and all the time there's herself on the planks of wood and no one paying her any heed. I waited for it to rain, I thought definitely it's going to rain, and what would they do if it had rained, I wonder? Would they have wrapped her up? Thrown an oilcloth over her?"

"When did you go?" Greta asked.

"Michael looked over at her the odd time, but that Maeve—she was talking and laughing, part English, part Irish, and part that language they have, and miming something the others had to guess."

"I didn't notice you go."

"Oh, I went early, early. She had you in the back room with the you-know-what. I was back before anyone missed me."

"Did they see you?"

"Maeve saw me. She gave me a good long look, but otherwise didn't take any notice."

Greta tried to imagine the body laid out in the rain, stiff like the animals get when they wander off and die and a few days go by without finding them. She thought of the boy Michael who'd helped carry his mother away, and what it would feel like to have no mother at all. It seemed worse for him who had to sleep out in the cold and the rain than for the children in town who had lost parents. They might be missing their Mammies but at least they missed them from warm houses, tucked inside warm beds. She imagined Johanna crouched in the brush where she could see it all, her bony knees tucked under her chin. "They won't come back after this," Greta said. "They won't want to be reminded."

"Strange," Johanna said. "I was just thinking the opposite. Now they're tied to this place and they'll come like clockwork. You watch."

For some reason Greta couldn't think of, she pictured the orange bog grass that stretched from their cottage all the way to Conch, and how it was interrupted here and there by cuts made by slanes and the
triangular stacks of damp turf left to dry in the wind. She remembered a story she hadn't heard in a long time. Before she was born, a local man had cut into the bog and found a pig, still pink, still whole, as if she'd sunk into the moist ground only the day before. Men came from Dublin, from Galway, from Cork and decided that pig had been there for hundreds of years. They took it with them to one of the universities, where Jack and Padraic claimed it went on to have a better life than anyone left in Ballyroan.

It was a miracle, some people still said. A sign from heaven to remind them that they don't know even a quarter of the secrets the universe holds.

O
N THE DAY
Julia Ward died in the Cahills' closest field, Greta had been going to school for a little more than two months. There were laws about schooling, Lily knew. Laws that had been in place since she was a girl, but like most laws, they seemed to apply to other places in Ireland, places where the heavy salt wind didn't rattle the houses and cut swaths through the land. Reading and writing, of course, Lily was all for it. The rhymes of Mr. Yeats, the island stories of Mr. O'Flaherty. Those were the things that kept people company their whole lives. The boys had gone until they were twelve, and it had done no harm. Adding, subtracting, multiplication tables. Yes, yes, yes. But Irish? And history? Those things could be taught at the table at home. And there was the added complication of Greta being Greta. She was, Lily had long ago decided, like a new calf who couldn't find her feet. Sometimes Lily wondered if she'd done anything unlucky when she'd carried the child. That Johanna had lived and was so strong was a miracle, and she'd tried to do everything the same with Greta. But maybe she'd made a mistake after Greta was born, laid her on her left side instead of her right, fed her from the same spoon she'd used to feed herself. Foolishness, Lily had always thought, but when she looked at Greta, she worried.

Lily held Greta at home for two years. The first time, Greta was five going on six, and no one noticed. After Johanna left in the morning, Greta followed Lily around the house, chattered away to Shep,
who barked back like he had something on his mind, played mermaid in the swimsuit a distant cousin had sent from England, even when it turned cold and Lily made her wear it with thick wool stockings and a sweater. She hummed, she tried to skip stones on the river like her brothers, she helped Lily chase crows from the yard. Sometimes Lily came upon her whispering to herself, asking questions in one voice and answering in another.

"Who are you talking to, Greta?"

"My name is Mrs. Fishburne and I've come all the way from America."

"Oh, excuse me. What part of America?"

"The furthest part."

"And did you come by sea or by air?"

"Ahhh..." Greta dropped Mrs. Fishburne's expression of exhaustion. "What do you mean by air?" she asked in her own voice.

"In an airplane. Did Mrs. Fishburne fly in an airplane, or did she come on a ship over the ocean?"

"Which would make you more..." Greta raised the back of her hand to her forehead and fluttered her eyelashes.

"Ship, I'd say. Takes a fortnight, and you might be seasick. And the airplane is very dear. Then again, I'd say Mrs. Fishburne is very rich, is she?"

"She is, of course, but she came by ship anyway. The ocean was rough, and we had one man go overboard."

"And did anyone save him?"

"No one noticed but me, and by the time I got to the edge of the ship he'd gone under the water so I thought the best thing was to leave him in peace, poor bugger."

As Greta played, Lily slipped in lessons. She'd hand Greta two spoons and ask her how many she had given her. Then she'd hand her three more and ask how many she had then. When Greta graduated from spoons, Lily used eggs, of which there always seemed to be a limitless supply. Eventually she just told Greta to figure out the sum in her mind. "If Padraic gives you seven sweets and Jack gives you ten, how many do you have?" Almost always, Greta got the answers right.

It was more difficult to teach letters and sounds. Sometimes Lily wrote the letters out on a piece of newspaper and they sounded them out at the kitchen table. Greta didn't like doing this, and she pressed her head against the table and closed her eyes. She cried sometimes, and other times she was all affection, throwing her arms around Lily, snuggling against her, doing her Mrs. Fishburne voice and waiting for Lily to laugh. When there was a bit of chalk and the weather was fine, Lily wrote the letters in huge print on the side of the stable. Greta was better at the stable lessons than the inside lessons, but she always did best when they sounded the words out without writing anything down. B as in box, button, bull. D as in duck, dog, door. And what about when the sound is inside the word? Not at the beginning? Stubborn. Handle.

After the second time Lily kept her at home, Sister Michaela of the convent school rode her bicycle to Ballyroan. It was late June, and the school year was about to end for the other students. It occurred to her recently, Sister Michaela said to Lily, that the youngest Cahill was almost gone eight. She pulled Greta toward her in the kitchen and looked into her face.

"How's Greta today?" she asked.

"Grand, Sister. And yourself?"

Sister Michaela turned to Lily. "This one's as ready as she'll ever be. And"—she released her grasp on Greta's elbow—"it would be a way to show herself in town as independent. You have to consider that part of it as well, don't you? You never know who might be in need of a girl, a live-in to help with the things Greta can help with. Does she understand about cooking and cleaning? Do you trust her with an iron? With so many gone to England now the old ones need looking after. Isn't that where a girleen like Greta would be a great relief to someone? It's an opportunity, really, as long as she's capable."

"I trust her the same as I trust myself," Lily said, and stood to add more turf to the fire.

"Well then," said Sister Michaela. "I'll mark her in for September."

Lily nodded as the nun stood and gathered her things.

"I might as well take my other business while I'm here. Save the girls from walking it into town."

"Oh, yes," Lily said, forgetting about Greta as she hurried into the back kitchen, stepped on the stool, reached up to the top shelf, and moved aside two empty jugs, a stack of tin cups, a jar of sugar, three folded tea towels. She removed two whole cured salmon and wrapped them in brown paper.

The moment the nun left, Lily decided that the lessons she had given Greta were not enough. There had to be more if the girl was going to enter school in a matter of months. Instead of allowing Greta to follow her all day, instead of allowing her to chatter away in her collection of voices, Lily decided it was time to give her some responsibility. She waited for Big Tom to announce that it was dry enough to cut and lap the hay, and then she started Greta on delivering tea to the men: bread, crisp salmon skins fried in butter, tea in a thermos with sugar and milk. She gave the girl some warning.

"Tomorrow you'll have a big job," she told Greta, and spent the rest of the afternoon explaining about men and their stomachs, the hard work they do, how they depend on their sustenance coming across that field at the same time every day, how everything the Cahills had depended on that delivery. After the hay was cut, it had to be dried for three or four days if the weather stayed clear, then a day of shaking it out with the tips of their hayforks, another day turning it over so the air and sunshine could touch the damp underside. Another day of drying, and then it had to be raked, cocked, brought mound by mound down to the hay shed, which had a roof four times the height of the cottage.

"If they don't eat, they won't have the strength to work. And if they don't get it all done before the next big rain, then what? Can I trust you, Greta?"

"Yes, Mammy."

"Can I count on you?"

"Yes." Greta pushed her hair out of her face and looked at Lily with those big green saucers of eyes. Pretty, yes, when she wasn't twisting her features into a scowl. The nose a bit long, granted, but lovely skin, lovely coloring. The hair, black like Johanna's but wilder, a lot like Big Tom's when he had more of it, hair that defied gravity by curling out of her scalp and straight up into the air.

"Will you tie it?" Greta asked.

"What?"

"My hair," Greta said, pulling the curls straight with her fingers. "I can feel you looking at it. Will you tie it back?"

"That's another thing you're old enough to do, Greta."

The next morning, Lily put everything for the men in an old canvas satchel. "You know where Hurney's old field is? The one over and beyond? Well, go on then. They'll be hungry waiting, so off you go."

It started like this every morning for a week, the men in a slightly different place, Lily giving slightly different instructions. Greta, her face pinched up as if she were working on a puzzle, would nod for her mother and set off. Lily would work around the kitchen for a while, then go stand out at the gable to watch Greta try one direction and then another, her head stuck out ahead of her, the bag of food held out as if at any moment she might place it on a table. She would strike out full speed and then come to a halt, stay frozen for a few moments, then turn a few degrees and strike out again. "Go on!" Lily would shout across the distance. "They'll be waiting." Then she'd return to the kitchen and wait.