The Butterfly Cabinet (8 page)

You look well, Anna, pink cheeked, and getting rounder in the face. Do you like being back? You must worry when you see things like that on the TV, worry about bringing a child into the middle of it. I can understand that. But you’ll be fit for it, you and Conor together. You’re from good strong stock, the pair of you.

I want to tell you about Conor’s grandfather Alphie—Alphie McGlinchy. Oh, Conor never knew him, he was gone long before he was born. He died when Conor’s father, Owen, was only a baby. He was a very impressive-looking man was Alphie. The first time I saw him, he’d come to see the master about a job: rode up to the house one day on the most gorgeous bicycle any of us had ever laid eyes on. We all poured out of the kitchen, Peig with a patch of flour on her chin, and the men appeared from the stables and the fields, and we stood around him, looking at him and his bicycle. It was a remarkable contraption, all black and shiny like a beetle, and with a leather seat mounted on some kind of crisscrossed complicated metal spring. He explained that this was to take the bumps out of the road, to soften the ride, he said, and then he winked at Peig and the men laughed, and Peig blustered off into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, the color rising in her cheeks.

It was an amazing thing to see him balanced upright on that two-wheeled beast of a machine, circling the yard from the coal house to the cellar and appearing back again like a magician, and of course Peig’s head at the passage window because she couldn’t
not
look at him; none of us could resist.

He had a white straw boater on his head with navy blue stripes in it and a matching striped cravat that hung down his starched shirt like a ribbon. A white handkerchief in his breast pocket and a watch chain that disappeared into the inside of his four-buttoned blazer. His mustache curled a bit at the edges and his eyes looked straight into you. He smelled of tobacco, not the sort the men put in their clay pipes, but the sort that you rolled: cigarette tobacco; exotic. He said I could sit on the bar if I liked, but then Peig called me in and said, had he nowhere to go, and gave off to the men for standing around gawking all day when they should have been working. Then she went back into the kitchen and tripped over the wood basket and nudged the dinner pot and sloshed water all over the fire and near put it out, and all the time pretending she wasn’t a bit interested in him or had paid heed to a word he was saying. Peig knew him from before; they’d grown up together. Both their families were from Burnside; their fathers were on the boats. I don’t know what went on between them before he’d gone away but you could tell there was a spark there still.

He had a dent in the side of his head the like of what you’d see in a pot that had been hit up against the range. You could have put your finger in it, it was that deep. Madge whispered to me that he got it when he fell in a ditch one time he was running from the peelers and the stump of a tree went into his head. Feeley said he was running from a girl’s father who said he’d kill him if he got him. I don’t know what was true, but every time I looked at him I had a wish that I could take the lid off him and hit that hollow out with a ladle. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but there you go. I wanted to smooth out his brow; I had a yearning to fix him.

The only work there was going was in the fields and in the yard, but he didn’t seem bothered about getting his hands dirty. Nobody knew how he’d made his money or if he really had any money behind him at all. Three years earlier he’d left for the Derry boat. Feeley said he’d made a fortune in America, Paudie that he’d gone no further than Liverpool, where he worked as a
traveler for the tea and sugar business. Oul’ Peter said he knew for a fact he’d been working at Bessbrook spinning mills and never left the country at all. Some or none of these may have been true. He himself threw around places and names without any real commitment to any of them. But it didn’t seem to matter. When he was talking to you, you were the center of his universe and everything else flew out of your head.

He courted Peig with real gusto: the more she resisted the worse he got. He carried bluebells in to her in bunches. Peig said: “Aren’t the flowers better off in the hedge where they belong?” He brought her a white pebble from the beach with a cross on it, said it was a sign that their marriage would be blessed. Peig said, “No priest can bless a marriage where there isn’t one.” But she put the bluebells in a jam jar on the kitchen window, slipped the pebble into her apron pocket. Peig said he wore her down in the end: she was the first woman he’d ever come across whose knees didn’t buckle at the first sight of him, and he couldn’t resist the challenge.

Alphie’s parents were known throughout the parish for their bickering, but they had survived together for fifty-two years, when famously, old man McGlinchy fell into the harbor full of drink and never came out of it. The McGlinchys could agree about nothing. They were like two magnets, wanting to be together and pushing each other away. Peig finally agreed to marry the man we all knew as Alphie, and on their wedding day, when his birth certificate was produced, found she was to be Mrs. Alphabet McGlinchy. It turned out that his mother and father couldn’t even agree on a name for their son and had settled on the one word that covered every letter. “Alphabet” was all the men would call him after that. I suppose that should have been a warning sign. No one should marry a man they believe to be named one thing and discover to be named something entirely different.

They were married in June. The master kept them both
on after the wedding. Peig carried on in the kitchen and Alphie carried on in the fields. They got old Sarah Meek’s cottage after she died, and a good house it was, with a window and a cement floor, and a place outside for the pig. Peig had it looking lovely. She was a wild woman for the classes run by the board, always coming back with a new way of cooking this and a new way of knitting that. They were happy enough, I think, for a year or more, until baby Owen arrived. Poor Peig, she was the best friend I ever had in my whole life. Oh, I’d feel her tongue all right if I did something wrong. She wigged me for not putting the lid on the pot of spuds like I was bid, and when Feeley slammed the yard door a lump of soot fell down the chimney and into the open pot. She didn’t waste breath on Feeley, mind you, for slamming the door. But that’s the way it is always—you take your temper out on the one you can get away with wigging.

She lived a hard life, God bless her, and she had a hard end. Years ago, in the thirties, not long after you were born, Anna, I heard she wasn’t well and I called to see her. She was in her bed and she lay and talked to me for a while, and I knew by the way she was going on that things weren’t right with her. When I was about to go, she said, “Wait, wait, Maddie!” She climbed out of bed, pulled a pot out from underneath it, hitched up her nightdress and sat down and started to pee. When she’d finished and got off it, she held it up for me to see and said, “Is that enough, do you think?” I don’t know what she was expecting me to do with it. I looked at her for a minute or two and then I got up and took it from her and said, “That’ll do fine, Peig.” I brought it down to the ash pit and emptied it. God love her. She died alone in her wee white house, with three wardrobes and seven chests of drawers, two to each bedroom and one in the hall. She could never turn away a piece of furniture.

At her funeral Owen asked me to come round, pick something out. “Mammy always had a good word for you, Nanny,” he said.
(Everyone called me Nanny, even then.) “She told me to make sure and have you round when she’d gone. She wanted you to have something of hers.” The truth was, Anna, she’d had something of mine all along, only neither he nor she knew a thing about it.

I went. Owen was there, and his wife, Greta, and Conor running about the floor. Conor was only about three or four at the time, and he was trying to help, packing up bags and boxes, some to keep and some to pass on, getting in everybody’s way.

Owen pointed me to the smallest back bedroom. “She has drawers stuffed full of things in there, Nanny. Anything you want you can have,” he said. Greta opened her mouth but he silenced her with a look. “You were always good to us.”

It felt strange, going through Peig’s things like that. She was a great hoarder. After the mistress died, Miss Julia left out a box of things that none of the family wanted, to be divided up among the servants. The drawers in Peig’s room were full of jumble from forty years before: a handful of brown horn buttons; a calico petticoat, quilted and whaleboned; white lace-trimmed muslin underdrawers; a pair of long blue kid gloves to the elbow—things that Peig had never used or worn. “I’ll keep that for good,” she would have said, but she mustn’t have come across any occasions good enough to unwrap and use them. It gave me a start to see them, those delicate garments I’d slaved over in the laundry, heart-scared of rubbing a hole in them. I was half expecting to feel a hand on my shoulder, a sharp word in my ear. I shook them out, and it was the oddest feeling seeing those long-forgotten but familiar items again, as if all the mistress’s things had come billowing down through time, like clothes blown off a washing line forty years before, and settled in the drawers in Peig’s wee house, with the mistress’s shape still in them. I didn’t take any of them, Greta needn’t have worried. I had enough “good stuff” of my own.

In the last drawer, I came across a pair of pliers, an aged and
water-stained prayer book, some objects that had been dug up out of the garden: a stoneless brooch, a bronze farthing bearing Queen Victoria’s head, a sacred heart medal. She was a great one for putting a medal into the founds of a new house—to keep the occupants safe, she would say. And I saw her put a medal in her brother’s coffin, for the journey. She’d shower you in holy water every time you stepped out over the threshold; that’s the very least you could hope to leave with. And under a bundle of patterned head scarves, pots of talcum powder in lilac and green and a pile of embroidered antimacassars, I found the first of the stones. A handful in the corner of a white envelope, the edges folded neatly in, and written on the paper in careful angled capitals the words
JACK’S, 3 MARCH
1932. In another paper parcel:
GRANNY’S, 19 NOVEMBER 1922;
in another,
SALLY’S, 23 JANUARY
1935. The stones off graves, taken not on the day of the burial but some time after, on a visit: her brother, her grandmother, her friend. And in the corner of the drawer, wrapped up, not in an envelope this time, but in a delicate embroidered handkerchief that had never been used but had been unfolded at least once,
CHARLOTTE’S, 3 MAY
1901.

I took nothing from the drawers, but when I was turning away, my eye caught on a tall, dark piece of furniture in the corner of the room. And would you believe it, Anna, it was none other than the butterfly cabinet. The master must have given it to Peig when the house was being cleared. All that time she’d had it and never mentioned it once. And by the looks of things, Peig had taken good care of it; it gleamed with polish. It took me right back, seeing it there, to the small sitting room in the castle. The mistress had the room all decorated in dark colors, what she called the “Moorish” style: mahogany and rosewood furniture, and the chairs stained dark with deep fringed red and black embroidered covers. There was a tall mirror over the fireplace, a torture to polish, and to the left of it the butterfly cabinet stood, just behind the door. I’d see her in there sometimes, when I was sent to put
turf on the fire, or draw the curtains, or collect a tray. She liked to sew in there; a strange thing, that. She always mended her own clothes. She was at her most still in that room, with the light from the fire playing on the walls and her head bent over her work. You could see then what the master must have seen in her, what he must have loved. But it was all too rare for the rest of us, and for the children in particular. You can’t rear children on morsels of love.

In Peig’s cottage, I put my thumb and finger on one of the little wooden pulls and did what I had never dared to do the whole time I was in the house: I pulled open a drawer of the cabinet. I was standing there with the diary in my hands when Conor ran into the room. Isn’t that a strange idea, Anna, that I knew your husband before you did? He was only a wee toot, and him up now the height of the spouting. He was a darling child, dark like his father and full of devilment, the two eyes shining like marbles in his head and that dimple that he still has, right in the middle of his chin. He had a wee truck in his hand, a red one, and he said to me, “Look out, Nanny, here comes Flash Gordon!” and he came straight at me with it, flying it like it was a rocket ship. I laughed and cried, “Help! Help!” and ducked out of his way. I slid the diary back into a drawer and Conor flew the truck over my head, the pair of us laughing, and then he came at me again and I took off with him on my heels, chasing me around the room. He made one big swoop with his arm, but his hand caught on the cabinet on the way past and a skelf came out of the wood and went right into the ball of his thumb, and his face changed, all of a sudden. Poor wee mite, he was trying to be brave but a tear came in his eye and I felt that bad; I should have had more sense, chasing round the room with him after me. I asked him to let me look and there was the piece of ebony, dark as a blackthorn, buried in his hand.

I said: “Will you let me try and take it out?” and he nodded and bit his lip. I slid my thumbnail under the skelf and caught it
with my other nail and he screwed up his face but he stood steady, and I knew I had it—I could feel it between my fingers—and I caught it tight and pulled it right out.

He looked at it, at the small dagger of wood with the spot of red on the end of it, and at the blood seeping out of the cut on his hand, and he said, “Can I keep it, Nanny?” and I said, “Yes,” and not a tear was shed. He still remembers that, I know, because he told me that day we were all on the beach.

I asked Owen for the cabinet and Greta said it was an ugly thing and I was welcome to it. Owen put it into Shivers’s lorry and drove it round to the yellow house in Victoria Terrace himself, with the little black prison diary still tucked up inside. Look, Anna, in the corner there, can you see it, behind the door? I’ve used it as a kind of treasure chest: it houses all the things that matter to me, and all the things that I thought might matter to you and to Conor as well. It was the only thing I brought with me when I came back here. That’s a strange journey when you think of it: from here, to Peig’s, to your mother’s house and back here again. You can see where Conor took the bit out of the side of it, Anna—can you see there? To the left-hand side? So there you are, it has history for both of you: it’s only right that you should both have it.