Annie Dunne (8 page)

Chapter Five

‘So I am thinking,’ says Billy Kerr, ‘that pony now, I am sure you will be eager to sell him now, and in that regard I’ve been asking about Kiltegan and Feddin, and I think I have a man will take him from you, despite the new savagery in him. Because I think he must be a man’s pony now, someone that can handle him and put manners back on him. Although I would advocate the gentle touch now with an animal, there must be that hidden strength there in the arm if needed. By God, if a pony wished, he might break everything in his world, with those hooves. He might start to kick and kick till all was sundered and in a thousand pieces. Think of that!’

He has said this in the direction of the children, wide-eyed in their niche. The boy looks to me for confirmation, he licks once at his lower lip. I shake my head in a wordless denial. But I suppose it is true. Nevertheless, I have again that unpleasant but informative creeping in the back of my head, that stirring there like woodlice in a seeming solid log, that doesn’t concur with what Billy Kerr is saying, doesn’t like it and doesn’t know exactly why. But the why is coming close behind.

‘And I’d say, you’d be lucky now to get a ten-bob note for that animal, but I think I could get that for you, indeed and I do.’

Ten bob? One nice paper note for such a handsome horse, that Sarah Cullen paid as I remember six pounds, seventeen shillings, and sixpence for, the sixpence returned to her as luck money by the tinker that sold her the horse, and tried to put the spit he spat into his hand into her hand for good measure, and Sarah had to shake on it, as custom demanded, though she is as fastidious as a cat.

‘You did us a good turn yesterday, Billy Kerr,’ I say. ‘And I want to say this with all politeness. But to my mind when a transaction that concerns ready money is to be discussed, you might wait for the other person to open the discussion. Now that’s just my way of thinking, dating from the days of my father, when money was a subject that got greater airing. I don’t mean to offend you.’

‘Heavens above, Annie Dunne, I am not offended. I am only trying to put my way in to help. There’d be nothing for me in a deal like that, except the shilling of the price for my trouble. That’s it then. I will bring a man up to look at the animal, and bring the animal down to the man if needs be, and drove it ten miles out the Baltinglass road if necessary. I will bring him to Carlow for you, if the need arises. I am solicitous on your behalf. I only intend to assist you both.’

But he is abashed also, this assisting man. He has flushed up around his sideburns, poor scraggy streals of hair though they be. I have an interesting effect on this man. I am thinking sincere politeness without sincerity might be a better weapon against him, if weapon be required again. But I must bear in mind his epic efforts of the great mishap on the road, I must, I must. It is becoming too easy to discommode this man.

I am looking now at Sarah, standing, looming at the top of the room between the dull shine of her delf and the dull fire of the turf. It is hard to read her face in the gloom, the white hair pulled back from it, her mouth with its little twist in the lips as always. But I can hear, almost feel, her brain thinking. Oh, oh, she loves that pony Billy, because she has great pride in him, and in the shining light brown wood of the trap, and in the glory of the high lamps. She loves that pony in the half-lights of an autumn evening, when she can clatter along the main road of Kiltegan, the big metal rims of the wheels calling out the music of her triumph in the world, the triumph of her thirty acres and the strange but palpable dominion of the trap. Never married, too crooked in the face, she will say, to marry, but I say too crooked in the head, what with her mass of dreams and her suffering silence, her awkwardness and her oddity - never married, but got this little hill farm of Kelsha in the happy run of things, the dowry of her own mother in the old days. When Billy Kerr speaks of selling a pony, there are many other matters attached in a long necklace of importance and scripture, the very scripture that keeps Sarah happy on her hill and her mind in general a passable human mind, and not a mind to languish in the county home, as my own father’s mind once did, because the meanings and musics of his own world were torn away from him and he could not find a singing to answer that pain and change.

Sarah stands in the glooms like some old queen of old, some old monarch of France before the changes maybe. The tide of her own unimportant history laps at her sturdy brogues. Go back, go back, she cries to the hens in the yard at eventide, even as she advances to feed them, go back, go back, like King Canute to the very waves.

‘I think I would find it hard to part with Billy,’ she says, in the little voice of a cowed child. And in that instance of childish sounds, the little girl breaks from the niche and flies across the flagstones of the floor and almost hurts Sarah by the bang into her knees. Sarah’s long sturdy legs are covered in the fresh linens of her yard-dress, she barely notices the affectionate girl, or seems to. Yet a long arm with a long-fingered hand drifts down and touches the head of the little girl, her brown hair in a cow pat of curls, that I must brush before the day is any older. Sarah’s face floats there like a window with a stretch of wood nailed over it to keep the weather out, its brightness blighted, interfered with. It is a greater thing even than I thought, the question of Billy. She has the severe bereaved look of a person at a graveside, the rinse-through in the skin a mourner gets, like the influenza, staring to the middle distance as if into the realms of death itself.

‘I think I would,’ she says. ‘Is that all the worth he has now? Ten bob? He’s only four year old.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘He must be seven now, at least.’

‘Is he seven?’ she says. ‘Even so, a cob like that has years in him. And how could I sell him? I would have to look at him in another man’s field as I pass by, and not have the feeding of him, and the talking.’

‘The talking?’ says Billy Kerr.

So I carry him on from there.

‘The talking about him, she means,’ I say, ‘with me, in the evenings. He has provided many stories up here on the hill, hasn’t he, Sarah?’

‘He has. But he also has his way of talking,’ says Sarah. ‘The scuttering and the slithering of his lips, and when he doesn’t like a thing, he’ll tell you.’

‘That’s right,’ says the boy at the fireside. ‘He speaks Irish.’

‘Ah well,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘Look, it’s only ...’

Then a rare thing happens. Sarah’s high head dips down, her frosty perm shows its crown, and light enough hair it is now, not the growth of old as dense as bog cotton. You can see the fine pink skin of her inner head. I know what she is doing. Just the odd time you will see it. The little girl knows too, because she can feel the small shudders in Sarah’s legs, coming down from her eyes and face bones. Sarah’s tears. She cries as elegant now as a film star, without much noise. There’s more than Billy the pony in those tears, that silver deluge that marks her rough cheeks. There’s other things, the tolling bells of other matters, the arrangement of little things that afflict us all, and give strength and engine to our tears, whenever they should fall. They are the tears of an ageing woman without a mate, I must surmise. But whether Billy Kerr could know this is another matter. Men know nothing but their own bellies, and if there is space for their feet they think all is well.

So I am helping her drive the two milch cows back up onto the upper garden for pasture, the children like two wheeling creatures themselves, delighted to be going out on such a great adventure. Billy Kerr is only an aftertaste in the mouth now, bitter, puzzling. Sarah’s bony face carries a small cloud. I wonder what she is thinking. I know what she is thinking, I think, but I wonder what it is all the same.

The ground is hardening nicely after a spring of teeming rain, and the horny feet of our cows barely leave a mark, except on the lower ditchy ground where the water congregates and cannot escape. There the two heaving girls drag their legs and their empty udders swing about. They seem to relish the drying ground, and gain a spring in their step when they reach the crustier part of the field. Sarah lays her ashplant lightly across their high rear bones, as a way of conversing them up the slope. There lies the rising sea of soft green grasses. We feel the same delight to view it as those cows, Sarah and me. We feel it as a compliment, as a blessing, or I do. Sarah’s cloud this morning stands in her way.

The children throw themselves down on the sloping field and let themselves roll away freely down, and though it tramples the good grasses a little, we are not women to halt the play of children. Daisy and Myrtle will know the trick of tonguing up the fallen grasses. Down the great slope of the field they go, faster and faster, their thin limbs flashing from them like daddy-long-legs, the squeals out of them like the poor pig when I go to cut his throat, or feed him, one or the other. I laugh and look to Sarah, and even with her cloud she smiles.

‘Will you latch the high gate,’ I say, ‘and we can leave these girls to their work?’

‘There’s poor Furlong in the wood,’ says Sarah, and I catch also a glimpse of the rabbit man, damply creeping through the damp mosses of the trees, not looking at us, no doubt, but keeping his eyes on the ground with its coats of pine needles, for the little nooses he will have left for those rabbits. He is a sad man enough. His brother had a dark head, and one night in a fit of strange temper he killed their mother, when Jack Furlong was about twelve and asleep in his bed.

They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope. The father was a will-less man that went every year to Scotland for the harvests there, and one year never returned, but is supposed to have married a Scottish girl bigamously and lived happily ever after. Jack’s brother was a quiet, strong lad that worked on the roads for the council, and he slew his mother with a pickaxe, driving the blunt point in between her shoulder bones as she lay sleeping. Then he dragged her out in the dark and dug a neat ditch, and buried her in under a fuchsia bush all in red bloom.

So they took him to the madhouse in Carlow, and buried the mother, and Jack was left, and he is strange enough himself, but gentle and polite. He has a face like a hunting dog, with heavy whiskers, and he knows only the one song, a favourite of my own, ‘Weile Waile’, and this one song he sings continually, and I don’t know how the rabbits don’t mind it, but he catches enough of them. Sometimes you will go into a house and see on the dresser the ears of a rabbit, neat and dry, and on the fire smell the pot of stew boiling, and know that Jack Furlong has been by and made a sale of a stringy rabbit for a couple of eggs, or a wrap of butter.

His little song drifts down over the spent heathers,

And late in the summer every year the mother’s lilies still bloom.

‘There he is,’ I say.

‘I suppose the children wouldn’t like rabbit for their tea?’ she says.

‘I don’t know, why not? They’re as good as rabbits there anyhow, rolling down the field!’

‘Heya, Jack, Jack Furlong!’ she calls. ‘Have you ever a rabbit for us?’

Well, he stops in the murk of the trees, as startled as a deer. No doubt he was deep, deep in his thoughts. Oh, what thoughts might they be? Does he go over and over the dark history of his people? His long loneliness and neglect, the loss of all, his father vanished, his brother under lock and key in Carlow? No doubt, no doubt. He stops in the dresses of the pine trees, with their sharp hoops, and stares out from the dark at us, two old women with two milch cows in the bright sunlight of the summer. And a darkness passes from his face, and he raises a hand like a proper countryman, and what is that look in his face? Only lightness, the lightness of gratitude.

Sarah goes up the field then and goes as far as the brambles of the low hill-wall, and Jack the same the other side, and without a proper word he hands a dangling snag of a thing across the loose stones with a strong arm, and Sarah lifts her own strong arm and he gives the rabbit over into her care, he letting go of his grip on the ears, she taking the grey creature by the long soft paws.

Sarah comes back to me.

‘I don’t know what that means,’ she says.

‘What what means?’ I say sharply. ‘Did he say something to you?’

‘I said I would give him two of your fine brown eggs for it, and he says, “No, Sarah Cullen, have grace of it.” Now what does that mean, have grace of it?’

‘It isn’t the King’s English anyway.’

‘It isn’t even Kelsha English,’ she says, laughing her laugh.