Annie Dunne (5 page)

“‘The hungers of the last century”,’ says Billy Kerr, ‘that’s very amusing! That’s a turn of phrase now you don’t hear often.’

‘I must go out and harness the pony,’ I say, nearly weeping from my own - stupidity.

‘I’ll harness the pony for you, and bring the trap up to him;’ says Billy Kerr, suddenly and inconveniently polite.

‘Please do not,’ I say

‘Well, as you like. If you are going, I could use the drive down,’ he says, with the same fake pleasantry. ‘There’s a parcel at the public house that came down on the Dublin bus for one of my women.’

My women.
He is the mere slave of the Dunnes of Feddin. If Lizzie Dunne heard him say that.
My women.
Of course you could interpret his words a number of ways, that is his safety. Oh, I am not up to his cleverness.
Well, as you like.
He incenses me. I will not have him lording it in our old trap, at any cost.

‘You will have to walk down the way you came,’ I say, as neutral as I can, ‘because it will be a good while before we are ready.’

‘But you’re only after saying -’ he begins, for the first time unsteadied, but I am too quick for him.

‘Where is the little girl?’ I say, changing the topic roughly, but it will serve my purpose.

‘She is inside in the room,’ says Billy Kerr, though it was-n’ t him I asked.

‘Well, then,’ I say, and march in there, boy and all. Billy Kerr says something in my wake to Sarah but I don’t catch it.

The little girl stands on the bed, with her back to me. She wears her flower-print summer dress and a knitted green cardigan that is beginning to be too small for her.

The sunlight in the small window beams down on her like a yard lamp. She is a small creature growing by inches. She does not know the world. She does not know her road ahead.

In the first second of putting my face into the room I imagine she has a burden on her back. Not like my own remnant of polio, but a heavy shadow. Then she moves and the picture is gone, a trick of the sunlight and my own mind.

Her head turns to look at me, and her eyes show their tiny stars. I am arrested there by her. And even the boy, with all the helpless twitching-about of a four-year-old, albeit nearly five, imitates my stillness. Suddenly, in a manner just as enlivening as sunlight, she smiles. A clear, unbroken, innocent smile.

‘What are you doing in here, smiling like the Cheshire cat and standing on beds?’

‘I am glad to see you, Auntie Anne,’ she says. ‘I was lonely.’

‘Well, I wasn’t gone so far,’ I say. ‘We only ventured out to the well. And even at that we were baulked. Next time, just think of following me.’

‘I am glad we are here in Kelsha,’ she says. ‘I am just glad.’

‘I am glad you are glad,’ I say. ‘Come and help me put the harness on that wild fella Billy.’

‘On that interesting fellow out there with Sarah?’ says the boy.

‘No. It would be impossible to get a harness on that fella. No, on Billy the pony. We will be half an hour readying him up, by which time I hope and trust Billy Kerr will be gone.’

But he is leaving even as I come back out into the kitchen. His mysterious visit completed, he sets off with a swagger down the yard and out onto the road. Paused at the half-door, I watch him go, pitching along indifferently. He has hips like sharp buckets.

When I glance back, Sarah’s long passive face in the kitchen tells me nothing. She puts the used crockery aside for later washing and sets to to scrub the kitchen table. Since Billy Kerr barely set an elbow on it, I am surprised by her extremity of attention. Her long arms cover the pale, soft surface, the brush making a noise of tumbling straw, up and down, across and back. Now and then she dips the brush in salted water, and away again, her bared arms bleakly flashing.

It is eloquent enough, but of what I do not know. I resolve to question her later in bed, before the cover goes up over her face, and she is at her ease. I have a great respect for her silence. I do not like to badger her. Whenever by chance I do, the door of her face bangs in the wind, you might say, and she will talk nonsense then, frightened nonsense.

‘I think I will bring the children with me down to Kiltegan and fetch our packet of tea.’

‘You might have put up with the help of Billy Kerr so,’ she says, conversationally.

‘Ah, well,’ I say. ‘It will interest the children to assist me. Let him walk back the way he came.’

‘It is all the same to me whether he walks or drives,’ she says. ‘I was thinking of your back.’

‘My back is fine,’ I say, blushing to the roots of my hair.

‘It is of course,’ she says.

‘Will I get sugar also?’

‘Don’t,‘ she says. ’We have done well enough with that.‘

‘Sugar and tea. Don’t we live like lords, Sarah, indeed and we do.’

Sarah laughs. Her laugh is thick and chesty, like blackberries beginning to bubble in the big pot, when we are making preserves in the autumn. As for myself, it was the opinion of old Thomas Byrne, that swept the castle yard long ago, that I have a laugh like a sheepdog’s bark.

She stands in the kitchen, straight as a bittern, wielding the scrubbing brush. She is laughing again.

‘You know, Annie, the only people that live like lords are lords,’ she says.

She sets the scrubbing brush down on the table and puts her hands on her upper knees and is laughing. Her whole form is bent over as she does so, in a perfect show of lightness and gaiety. The children are shocked into delight and begin to laugh also, looking up at me. And I do not fail the moment, I laugh heartily, highly, laughing, laughing, yes, yes, as Thomas Byrne said, like a blessed sheepdog, ‘Wher, wher, wher.’

The truth is, there is not much between the characters of Billy Kerr and Billy the pony, only I don’t have to hitch the former to the trap, which is a job of some difficulty.

Myself and the little ones pass the muddled mess of Shep, asleep in a suntrap on the yard. He barely stirs his addled snout. He is more slothful than a sloth and we have no sheep for him anyway.

We reach the dark rectangle of the byre entrance and the children peer in at Billy with admiration. They do not understand his true nature, but that is the mercy of children. He looks back at them from the glooms of the byre, his blunt front-face smeared with a sort of dampened anger.

He is a strong Welsh cob of small stature that Sarah bought at the fair in Baltinglass, and she reveres him because it was actual money she gave for him, pound notes that her mother left her. He is a grey, a pure grey, to give him his due, without a hint or a speckle of anything else. But of late I have begun to fear his strength. He brims with a kind of inconvenient hatred.

It is in his eyes, the black stone of them. His life with us, it seems, whatever his ambitions were, does not suit him. Perhaps we do not take him out often enough. Perhaps it is the countryside offends him.

Gingerly I heave the heavy gear onto his back, conscious I admit of the help I have foregone from Billy Kerr, in my arrogance.

‘There is a slime all over the leather,’ says the girl.

‘No,’ I say, panting, my back hurting. ‘It is a preserving grease is on it, against the rain.’

‘It is dirty,’ she says, ‘and it is on my cardigan.’

‘Do you not want to drive in the trap?’ I say, rebuking her only because I am in pain.

‘Oh, I do,’ she says. ‘I do.’

It is lovely all the same how the harness sits on Billy. It is well moulded to him, over the years. I relish the fatness of his girth, like a well-fed man. He smells of dry straw and moist dung and his own strange smell, of his hair and of his hide. There is something of the lion about him. He has more style than Shep, anyhow. But that he looks like he wants to kill you, you could admire him.

Out onto the green road then, the two excited children facing each other on the benches behind me, the fields and woods about us rising and falling slightly. And Billy’s hooves throwing up little plates of mud. It is the sound I make between teeth and tongue that makes him really go. We stream down the green river of grass, the children gripping the seats under them.

I give a brief wave to Mrs Kitty Doyle in her yard. She is bringing an apronful of rough food to her pigs. I can hear them squealing like doors in their stone pen. In one of her barns lurks an abandoned trap, I can just make it out as we rattle by, its high shape left in with the bales of straw. It moulders there, the shine slipping slowly from the lamps. They are another lot that have purchased a motor car in these last years.

But the Hennigans’ wheat is doing well, I notice, a beautiful crochet of fierce shoots thrown over an expanse of dark earth.

To the crossroads we come, where our mountain road gives way to the new tarmacadam. I have to put a damper on Billy’s prancing. He has a nervous way about him here always, being heated up by the excitement of pouring down the hill.

I can see the distant back of Billy Kerr, traipsing the last few yards to the cow barns at the side of my cousins’ house. Their farm lies in there behind the scraggling hedges. The house looks odd in its field of cow-created mud. The walls are brushed by damp and rain.