The Walking People (8 page)

"What's the story?" Johanna demanded, breathless from running to find Greta. "What was he on about? Did he pull any teeth on you? No, you're grand. I can see that for myself. Me as well. Did you look in the bucket? You'd think they'd cover it up with something. Johnny Sullivan looked as green when he saw it! I watched him glance down, and then what did he do but put his hand right over his mouth. Trish had a mouthful of blood, and she spit it right on—"

Greta handed her the note, and Johanna snapped it open.

"Glasses?" Johanna said.

"Does it say anything about whether they'll be yellow like Father Mitchell's?"

"No, nothing like that. I think you're supposed to go to Galway." Johanna refolded the note and handed it back to Greta.

"That's what he said. To Galway to see a doctor, and then the doctor will give me glasses and I'll be able to see."

"Can you not see?"

Johanna leaned in close to Greta's face, then leaned away, in and out to look at Greta's eyes up close and then from a slight distance.

"When Pepper went blind his eyes went red and swelled up. And he wouldn't come out of the stable if it was sunny. Remember him rearing up on Pop?"

Greta rubbed her eyes.

"Now, Greta. Mammy will want it to be just the two of you to save on bus fare, but tell her you want me to come. You will, won't you? Tell her you're scared and you need me."

"I will not!"

"Well, I'll be left home, then. You would do that? At Christmas? You and Mammy off looking at the shops and the lights, and me at home listening to the wind?"

"I won't say I'm scared. I'm not scared."

Johanna shrugged and began walking. "Might not happen anyway. You know who'll have something to say about this, don't you?"

 

Lily didn't know what to think. The girls had come home and given her the note as if they were making a formal presentation. Greta offered it on her open palm, and Johanna stood next to her, watching the note pass from Greta's palm to Lily's fingers to the table, where it was opened and the creases smoothed flat.

"Glasses," Johanna summarized as Lily read. "For Greta."

"We're supposed to go to Galway," Greta said. "To see a doctor. Does it say?" she asked, standing on her tiptoes and looking over her mother's shoulder.

"I can't make heads nor tails of most of it," Lily said. "It's mostly to the doctor in Galway. There's just a little bit at the top to me." She turned to Greta, took her by the wrists, and pulled her so that she was standing against Lily's knees. "Can you not see, Greta? I mean, I know we tell you don't squint and do your neck like the goose, but can you not see?"

"I already looked at her eyes to see do they look like Pepper's," Johanna said.

"I'm not blind," Greta said.

"Look around here now." Lily shooed at Johanna to back away, give Greta some room. "What can't you see?"

"Mammy, how can she tell you what she can't see?" Johanna said.

"She knows what I mean."

"I can see the kitchen for a start."

"What in the kitchen?"

"The table, four chairs, the fire, the window, four pipes on the mantel."

"Can you see the four pipes on the mantel?"

"Well, I know they're there. I put them there this morning."

"But can you see them?"

Greta walked over to the mantel and stood on her tiptoes. In that position she was just tall enough to rest her nose on the ledge. In front of her, no more than two inches from her face, were the four pipes, and beside them the box of tobacco.

"I can see them," she said.

"Mammy, will we go to Galway?" Johanna asked, rocking back and forth from heel to toe.

"You? Can you not see either?"

"You wouldn't go without me, Mammy. Now listen, I'll do anything—"

Big Tom and the boys came in just as Johanna's begging reached a pitch that Big Tom couldn't stand. "Calm yourself, girl," he said, and swiped one of the pipes off the mantel before collapsing into one of the chairs. He scratched at his face, then sucked on his pipe in short, quick puffs until it got going. To Greta, the sound of him getting his pipe started always sounded like a person kissing his or her own hand before blowing the kiss away. Then the boys went at their own pipes, and there were kisses flying all around the kitchen as Lily filled them in about the dentist and the note and the doctor in Galway.

"And what's wrong with her?" Big Tom asked. "Useless at finding her way at doing things unless she's shown a hundred times, but nothing a doctor can do that her own family can't. The best medicine is like I said—keep her close to home."

"Peel the potatoes," Lily said to Johanna. "We'll talk after dinner."

"I can't. Please. I can't do a thing until I know."

"You should listen to your father, Johanna, and calm down." Lily took one of the boiled potatoes in her hand and peeled off the skin. With each dark piece of skin that fell away, the white inside was revealed in a cloud of steam. Greta had tried to peel a hot potato once, but she burned herself, and Lily had made her feel her hands and compare them to her own. Greta's were soft and smooth; Lily's were as rough as Big Tom's, thick with calluses and scars.

When Lily was finished peeling the potatoes, she sat on the stool by the fire. Because the kitchen was small and the table seated only four, the family usually ate in shifts: Big Tom and the boys first, Lily and the girls directly after.

Greta thought the discussion would be put off until after they'd all eaten, but suddenly, from her perch, Lily announced, "We'll go to Galway. The girls and I will go and we'll see what this man has to say."

Johanna clapped her hands. Greta dropped down to a stool opposite her mother and wondered what other people saw when they looked at things.

"A bloody waste," Big Tom muttered, and the kitchen was filled with the sound of forks and knives against plates and teeth.

 

The Galway bus came through the Conch crossroads every Tuesday and Thursday, and the journey took two hours. There were some regulars—people who went to Galway once every few weeks to settle up business—but most of the people who went were what Lily called once-in-a-blue-moon types, like themselves. On the Thursday before Christmas, Lily, Johanna, and Greta walked the three miles to the crossroads with a bag of sandwiches and waited for the sound of an engine in the distance. Greta was wearing shoes Lily had bought from a woman in town whose daughter had grown out of them, and Johanna was annoyed that she had boys' shoes and Greta had girls' shoes. To distract them, Lily told them that she could count on one hand the number of times she'd been to Galway. After half an hour they heard the bus approaching. When it appeared, Lily stepped out into the road and held up her hand.

Greta and Lily shared a seat. Johanna sat by herself across the aisle and looked out the window. There had been a lot of talk about Pepper in the days leading up to their journey, talk Lily tried to hush. Pepper was a fine, strong horse when Big Tom bought him, but after a few months his eyes went red and rimmed with pus. That lasted a few weeks; the boys took turns washing his eyes in salt water. Nothing helped. Then he started getting skittish about the sun. He shook his head at every noise, however slight. Then he lost his balance, began to trip and run into things. By the time they had him for a year, he was completely blind.

Lily had asked them how they could compare a girl to a horse, and Jack and Padraic (and Little Tom, by nodding at whatever his brothers said) insisted that Pepper used his eyes just as people use theirs. Didn't horses have eyes to see out of? Didn't Pepper start in with that head-shaking, looking-around-himself routine, and didn't that remind
her of Greta a bit, with the neck and the arms and keeping her head cocked to the side?

"Look it," Johanna said. She had her finger pressed to the glass. They'd been on the bus for over an hour and all Johanna had said up until now was that everything looked the same. Finally she noticed something different, and Lily hopped across the aisle to see. There were poles planted in the ground every hundred feet or so, and at the very top of the poles were thick black wires. "Electricity," Lily said. Every day on the radio there was more talk of electricity. The cities were electrified. Large towns were electrified. Soon all of Ireland would be connected in one enormous grid. Big Tom said they could keep their electricity where it was. He for one did not want to worry about being burned alive in his bed.

The bus came to a stop, and the driver got out to help an elderly passenger board. Outside at the crossroads, someone had tied a bull to one of the poles. As Johanna and Lily watched, the bull lowered his ugly head, bunched his massive shoulders, and pulled at the rope that held him. As the animal strained and lurched, a hundred thousand sparks rained down from above as if a bundle of hay had been set on fire and thrown into the wind.

 

Galway was filled with people, everyone squeezed into a space so tight that Greta and Johanna didn't see why they didn't spread out a bit. Because it was nearly Christmas, the streets were also full of lights and wreaths with red ribbon bows. Two steps out of the bus station, Greta found herself on the sidewalk, surrounded by strangers. Next thing she felt Lily's hand take hold of her arm and steer her to a doorway. "Don't walk into people, and don't leave my sight," she said. She tried to take Johanna's hand, but Johanna shook her off.

"You'll hold my hand, girl, or the three of us will get back on that bus and go home."

"I'm old enough."

Lily turned back to the bus and started walking, pulling Greta after her. Johanna lunged forward and slipped her hand into her mother's. "Lovely," she said. "See?"

The three of them made their way past Eyre Square and turned onto Shop Street. One street turned into another as people crisscrossed from side to side, stepped around the threesome, walked close to the storefronts or the curb to let them pass.

"Twenty-seven Market Street," Lily said, dropping the girls' hands for a moment to pull her shawl tighter around her shoulders. "Be on the lookout."

The night before, Big Tom had pulled out his old map of Galway City and shown Lily where they'd have to go. The names of streets, he warned them, could be difficult to find. Sometimes they were up on the sides of buildings, sometimes down at your feet. Sometimes an address was on one street, but the door to get in was on another street around the corner. What he'd failed to mention were the cars and the trucks that would be there, pulled up against all the curbs, rolling down the street one after another like a long caravan. Mixed into all of it were the horse-pulled carts and people loaded down with bags and newspapers. Lily pointed out a donkey with a creel full of turf being led down a side street, a car close on its heels.

Market Street was a side street, less crowded, so Lily dropped their hands and let them walk ahead. Johanna hopped from window to window, calling back information about shoes, dresses, hats, flowers, until she stopped at the window of a bakery. The vents were open to let the steam out, and the smell of fresh bread and sweet glaze pulled them forward. Even Greta could see the muffins and cakes smeared with white frosting or berry red jam. Johanna didn't even have to ask. "First things first," Lily said. "I'll think about it."

The door to 27 was plain, not as grand as Johanna and Greta had imagined. Inside the street door was a list of doctors with corresponding office numbers, then another door. The threesome walked up four flights of stairs until they came to office 4W. "Go on, girl," Lily said to Greta. "What are you waiting for?"

Inside, Lily told the secretary why they were there and handed her the note the dentist had sent. The secretary disappeared to the back room, and Johanna planted herself by the window to watch the people passing on the street below. After a few minutes a young man came out of the back room. "Greta?" he said, turning toward Johanna briefly
but then deciding on Greta. "Would you step in, please? Are you Mrs. Cahill?" He came forward to shake Lily's hand. Lily introduced Johanna, and the three of them followed him into his office.

"You're having trouble with your vision," he said as he positioned Greta by an X painted on the floor. Greta nodded as he pointed toward a chart on the wall and told her to read off the letters. After the very top line, Greta recited letters at random.

"Whatever trouble she has isn't new," Lily said. "She's been the way she is since the day she was born."

The doctor had Greta read off the letters with her left eye covered, and again with her right. He made her look into the ceiling light and try not to blink as he squeezed two drops into each eye. Greta couldn't stop her eyelids from fluttering, so he did it again. "That should do it," he said after a third try. Greta's cheeks were wet and streaked dark yellow with the drops that had failed to hit home.

"I'm staining her eyes," the doctor said. "It makes it easier to see if there's any kind of surface damage. Ulcers, for example." He held Greta's eyes open with his first finger and his thumb. "She'll blink it away after about an hour."

"I see," Lily said. Pepper had had yellowish pimples and burst blood vessels in his eyes.

The doctor led Greta to a special chair and fitted a device on her head. Greta looked through a pair of frames while he slid different pieces of glass inside, asking her to look back at the chart after each try. When he settled on one he liked, he told the three Cahills to wait outside. The secretary gestured toward the long, dark sofa and Lily and Greta sat close together on one side of it. Lily waited until the secretary turned back to her work, then she licked the corner of her sleeve and rubbed at Greta's yellow-streaked cheeks. She licked, rubbed, licked, rubbed some more. Johanna stood by a shelf on the other side of the room and examined the different objects on display. She picked up a snow globe and shook it. "Chicago," she announced, and held it up for her mother to see.

After a half hour, the doctor came out to the waiting room and handed Greta a small hinged box made of wood. Greta opened the box and saw immediately that it was lined with blue material that Lily said
was satin. There in the bed of satin sat a pair of glasses held in place with two clips. Not as small as Mrs. Norton's from the shop, but not as yellow as Father Mitchell's.