Annie Dunne (10 page)

‘Are they the crowd came last year?’ I say.

‘How could you tell?’ says Sarah. ‘They’re a whole tribe are just the same, every one.’

‘Their heads are on fire,’ says the little boy.

‘On fire,’ I say, ‘on fire?’ fully believing that indeed they might be. But it is only wildness afflicts those heads. The rising hanks of uncut hair, dark brown and fair and black, must look like flames to a child.

‘We must hold down the latch,’ says Sarah, ‘hold it down, and say nothing, and not be here!’

‘They will know we are here,’ I say. ‘And we must be here anyway, for the pony, for all the knick-knacks and bits of the yard.’

‘I don’t care, I don’t care. They must not get in to us. Not with the children, not with just ourselves to fend for ourselves.’ Then she takes a last glance out and seems to know them after all, and bangs the door shut again. ‘That’s Mick Brady’s crowd of wild-haired kin that are supposed to have roughed over the Flanagan brothers last year, looking for Michael Flanagan’s money that they thought was under their mattress, and it wasn’t there, because Michael put it in the post office at last at the behest of his brother, and that enraged them, and poor Tom put through the mill, and beaten in his own chair!’

All this hissing from Sarah like the kettle finally topping off, by heavens, and when I glance down now at the boy’s face it is twice as wide as the morning, and the girl holding on to one of Sarah’s strong legs like a monkey, and she is going, ‘Ah, ah, ah,’ in a tiny voice.

‘Hold down the latch, hold it down,’ says the boy, queerly taking charge a moment, all four years him, like a proper man, I suppose.

‘I am holding it, I am,’ says Sarah, and she is, with all her strength, and her famous arms, that have thrown more hen food than a great barn could hold, and put up three yards of a dry-stone wall in a day, like a man. She leans down on the latch fit to crack it. ‘And shush now, all ye, shush, shush.’

So we wait, the four of us, in the great hush, two old women and two scraplings. We are waiting and waiting. Heavily the old clock tock-tocks in the dresser, it is a clock in fact without a tick to its name, only that old banging tock tock. Perhaps it was cheaper bought without the tick. Clocks for sale, clocks for sale, reduced price, owing to the lack of a tick. Oh, but Mick Brady’s kind of fierce, wild folk must be creeping quiet themselves up the yard, thinking, are they all away out in this weather, visiting maybe, or braving the wind down to the town? - and judging how likely that would be. Isn’t it a day for settled folk to be feeding the fire with turf and holding to the kitchens of Kelsha? And must be smelling the possibilities, tasting them on the fresh wind, what would be missed if they took it, what might they be having the law on themselves for taking, and what could they take that we would only curse them for it, and not be going down to Kiltegan to get Sergeant Collins to look into the matter? Sergeant Collins that suffers so deeply from what is called the black dog, just like my own father years ago. Sergeant Collins who sometimes is so afflicted with fear and misery that his two brothers have to sit with him in the station house and talk to him of matters long ago, when they were all children, and then the sergeant gets the feet of himself again, and starts to laugh, and is as right as rain then for a bit, and sees to his duties with great respect and diligence. What ruined the sergeant is the great education he had off the people in Maynooth, when he went first to be a priest, but never got out of his civilian clothes in the upshot, but spent two great years reading whatever they give to young men to read to make them priests, and all that mythology and theology just made him habitually sad. It leaves oftentimes the district without a guardian, though for myself I would accept such a situation for the sake of the sergeant, in memory of my father. Still and all, now, sergeant, rise up, rise up, and give your horse some hay. We wait, we wait, Sarah a-tremble on the latch, the dull gleams of the stormy day flitching in through the gaps in the door, the silence not a real silence, but a roar of anticipation.

The old green flagstones are under us. They are our anchor. And then suddenly there is a hand outside on the latch, because it is shoved down and almost goes up through Sarah’s hand inside, as if a great fish were attached to it, and it a sort of hook. Sarah lets out air through her lips and teeth, teeming with the effort, her bad-sighted eyes staring with the fright, glancing at me for courage, and I give her back the glance with as much of that as I can muster. The little boy lets out a minuscule cry and then throws a hand over his mouth like an actor, gulping. Down Sarah’s dress suddenly appears a dark stain, flooding out from her private place, it is a terrible thing. The wild tinkers rattle on the latch, rattle and rattle.

We can hear their low dark gabble outside, their rough words, the gruff hisses of the women, the laughing anger of the men. Who are these people? Some say they are the remnants of wars, ragged soldiers and their kin returning from forgotten battlefields, who never reached home, or whose homes were razed before them, over a hundred years ago. My father opined they were the last of the lost people in Ireland without farm or shelter, or were people so close to nature they wished like birds and badgers to be bedding down under scrappy hawthorns and the like, with their coverings of old mended canvas like a concession thrown to human ways. They are not all wild like this, there is the Dempsey tinkers that mend your pots and buckets and one of the Dempseys took up with a travelling forge for all the horses and ponies of this part of Wicklow and became nearly respectable, till he was killed stone dead by a stallion, when he touched the fire by accident against the animal’s skin. But there is a grievous hatred and fear of such as these ragamuffins beyond the door, laughing at our terror, rattling the latch. They would not have come into my grandfather’s yard in such a manner, the old steward of Humewood, they’d have hung at the back door of the steward’s house, hoping for an old hat or a scrap of soup from the pot on the ancient stove. Maybe they are pulling in against us now because they believe we are fallen from our great perch, and it makes them merry in themselves to feel the power of fright they have over us. Or maybe no such thought crosses their minds, grown across with brambles and bog cotton and rushes as those minds must be.

And what they would do if they get in I do not know. Will they tear the clothes off our old backs, and beat us stripped across the yard with hazel wands, as once happened to an old fellow living alone in the deeps of Imail, because he refused these wild boyos and girleens an ounce of sugar for their billycan? Will they chance to speak to us? Will they enter like a storm and then be civil? It seems to impart them endless amusement now to grip the latch and drive it down, because they know well there is a hand on it the other side. The murk of the darkened daylight hangs in the room. It is they who own the stormy sunlight outside. They feel the whips of the wind, we the wandering threads of the heat of the fire. It is two different worlds, and they wish to sunder the veil between them, this old blue door thrown together from planks.

‘Throw up your own hands on my own, do please, Annie,’ says Sarah. ‘I am getting very tired.’ And I am just doing that when the pressure goes off the latch suddenly, and there’s the silence again, utter silence. We grip our bones tight inside that silence, and I have a vision of them all outside, between our two windows with the pots of geraniums, their faces quiet, and staring, and waiting, grinning before the prospect of some further mischief. It is a terrifying vision.

At length I put an eye to the crack in the half-door and peer out. Only the empty spaces of the yard greet my gaze. I strain my face in against the wood to try and get a sight to extreme right and left. Only the hapless storm buffets about in a lonely fashion, rattling a bucket over by the milking shed, shaking out the old harnesses of the branches of the maples. For I think sometimes the maples are like horses brought in together to have the big ploughing harnesses thrown across them, in the time of ploughing, their bark strangely polished like the heavy polish of the leather bands of harness, and even in the secretive world of the cargo of their leaves there are gleams, like the gleams of brass and emblems.

Grind up the furze-roots, and bring them to the sycamores, so they may plough the mucky winds! Poor horses are new men with the furze. Poor Billy could be put to plough, and is, as long as he gets the furze. A neighbour’s horse will help the day, but beware, beware, you have to give them both the furze, or one will not pull in the traces. Grind up the furze, and bring them to the sycamores!

There is not a soul, tinker or farmer, in the yard that I can see. The gap of the gate is empty, only a few fresh leaves torn from their summer perches tumble and stick on the wet green road. It is strange and quiet, very strange and quiet, as if we have woken from one dream to the next, and nothing to join them except the sudden start of waking.

We go out now like soldiers after siege to view our invaded quarters. While some were rattling the latch, others were strolling through the offices of the yard, laughing no doubt, exultant, victorious. Sarah’s face is long and silent, troubled. Her white hair looks like it might crackle if you touched it. There is something in that face that makes me more fearful than the fear of the tinkers. It speaks volumes, but I do not know what is written in them. I must ponder it, ponder it all, this too now on top of all the other mysteries. Suddenly I feel unmoored, a sway of disquiet occupies some little quarters behind the eyes.

As forfeit of their victory over us they have taken a coil of rope from the doorway of Billy’s dark byre, where it hung on a rusty iron bar, an ordinary rope used as Billy’s halter, if halter were needed in a hurry, not an uncommon thing with Billy. A length of old rope bearing the presses and stains of a curmudgeonly pony. Nothing else that we can see, unless the tincture of daily happiness that we were engaged in is something that can be taken off like a veritable rope up the wild, leafy road towards Keadeen.

Now we will be the stuff of jokes around their campfire tonight, wherever they alight before the coming of the summer dark.

Sarah betakes herself into the bedroom with her soaked clothes. I say nothing about that accident, and she has entered her fold of silence like a star accused by the dawn light. I know she is shaken, and ashamed. It is often a woman that has given birth to children that has trouble with her bladder, but Sarah has had no adventures of that sort. It will be only fear and age. The years return us gradually to the afflictions and shames of childhood, it is a curiosity of existence. For her I do feel. For that old woman Mary Callan beyond in her damp field and damper cabin I feel only too little. For Sarah I do feel.

‘It’s not something I can say, to say about it,’ I begin, later that day. We have performed the rest of our tasks with the perfect solemnity of Benedictine nuns under a vow of silence. She is folding her clothes into her drawer, over by the unhelpful light of the oil lamp. Even from my niche in the big bed I can smell the camphor bags she has tailed in there, against the appetites of the moths. I have covered the last turves over with turf ashes, so they will burn as slow as snails all night, and in the morning I will rake off the ashes and they will be as red as best coals, and give me fire quickly all over again in the sunless crispness of six o‘clock. No morning comes but that I think of our quarters in Dublin Castle, the beautiful fireplaces there, far too grand, my father used to say, for a chief superintendent of modest outlook, but to me and my sisters the marble had almost a quality of singing. It sang to us of the future, of promises, of love. By such fires would duly come, we believed, good officers of the garrison, low and junior ones of course, but more than welcome with their English accents and their burning eyes. For we could conceive then of no young man that had not burning eyes, like in the stories we adored. We were the offspring of a Wicklow rook, a big, wide man like a stone-fronted barn, but those fireplaces made brief swans of us. And because we had the use of the castle coals, we set those fires with coals every winter’s day, and sat on our delicate battered furniture out of stores, and were proper little girls, whose mam was dead. When on appointed days the Viceroy swept in in his carriages, and we heard great levies going on, their wonderful noises filtering though buildings and yards to us like true floating stories themselves, that sea of sound struck against us like little shores, and enchanted us.

Days so far off! Not marble fires and foolish dreams now, but Sarah folding her well-darned underclothes, her long woollen stockings, her thick, rough blouse, in a meagre light, in a meagre house.

‘Nothing to say about it, indeed,’ says Sarah, burdened by despair.

‘The change in the weather will work all sorts of mischief with people, see if it does not. You’ll be hearing about it all over. There won’t be a household now in Kelsha without a medical mishap.’