Country Girl: A Memoir (7 page)

Then one day, years later, the unthinkable happened. Carnero gave notice that he was leaving. He was going to England, where his cousins had fixed him up in a job with the railway company. One minute, as my father irately put it, he was going to Cambridge, and the next minute it was Oxford, and there was much sarcasm as to which university he would be attending. But as the day of his departure got nearer, the reality of it hit us. My mother began to panic and no longer listed his failings, his lack of hygiene, his emptying his po pot, which was a tin can, through the window at night onto a bit of flag that was permanently slimy as a consequence, his buttering his bread on both sides when her back was turned, his having not one, but two boiled eggs for his breakfast.

I got in from school and saw my mother sitting at the kitchen
table crying. She rarely sat, and for the most part fought tears back stoically. But there she was, wringing her hands and pointing to the downstairs room where he slept and where he was presumably packing. She could not understand why it was taking him so long. We listened at the door, and now and then she knocked, but there was no answer. We went back to the kitchen, asking each other, by our woebegone expressions, how in God’s name we were going to manage without him, as we waited for him to appear with a brown suitcase and extra things, perhaps, in a flour bag. She was already asking who would milk (my father never milked), and she herself had not done so since she was a young girl on a mountain farm forty years ago. Hazards untold befell us. She suddenly remembered that she had put some bread to bake in a pot oven, in the boil house up in the yard, and she ran to retrieve it.

I took the irrevocable step. Without knocking, I barged into his room. It was one of the few times that I saw him look vexed, and his first instinct was to raise his arms and his hands to ward me off. He knew why I had come. His things were on the bed: his good navy suit, two pairs of overalls, shirts, brown hobnailed boots with the dung dried on them, and junk—bicycle parts, copper piping, wet batteries and dry batteries, and other paraphernalia—which he had intended to sell to a scrap merchant in Limerick.

The little window was wide open, but the smell in the room was still fusty. I do not recall any words spoken. What I did was to kneel down and grasp him by his ankles, imploring him not to leave. He stood there like a statue, never once trying to break free. I clung to him, tighter and tighter, until the moment he rolled down his sleeves and looked at me with what I can only call utter defeat.

My mother was exultant and cooked him the chop that was
meant for my father’s tea. We ate in silence, my mother and I at one end of the table, having bread and jam, and Carnero tucking into the chop, which had a plump red kidney attached to it. The tension was unbearable. I knew that I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

I go into the kitchen in my grandmother’s house and I walk around it, unsure. It was dark even in daytime. There was a very low window that admitted little light, a remainder from times past, when fewer windows meant less rent to the English landlords, except that I did not know that then, aged eight or nine.

I used to walk around that kitchen to get to know it and not feel so lonely in it. Away from the hearth and the open fire, on which pots and a kettle hung on the iron swing gate, there was a table, never completely laid or unlaid, saucers put to dry on the upside-down cups for the next round of tea. There was muslin over the milk jug to keep off flies and gnats, and the country butter was overyellow, its strong smell whiffing out from under the glass dome with which it was covered.

Next to a wall was a settle bed that was a trunk when closed, where a workman had slept in past times and would have had to wait until all the others had gone upstairs to bed. Men sat on it at my grandfather’s wake, smoking clay pipes as they passed a whiskey bottle around, talking in low tones. Death was upstairs. My grandfather’s white face seemed all the whiter because the starched white sheet was drawn up to his chin, and the gray-white mustache looked unnatural on a dead face. The raised veins on the back of his hands were an alphabet that branched together, and there were scabs and brown moles on the crinkles of the skin. Someone had threaded a rosary between the lifeless fingers. Two tall candles were burning on a low table that was covered with a white linen cloth, and the smell in the room
was of melting wax and disinfectant, since the linoleum floor had been scrubbed by the woman who laid him out.

On the nearby dresser there was Delft and pans of milk off which the cream would be skimmed. My aunt did it daintily, with the tips of her fingers, and the cream, which would have been delicious on blackberries, was kept to be churned to make the next consignment of strong-smelling butter, most of which she brought to the shop in the town in exchange for groceries. Full of idleness and not knowing how long my incarceration might be, I pined for home. To avoid the kitchen with its smells and my grandmother moaning, I passed the days in the little plantation, where my aunt had sown red dahlias that contrasted so happily with the dark, funereal yew trees.

Late in the evening my aunt would be out of doors milking, feeding calves that she made pets of, and yelling, “Chook, chook, chook,” to hens that were unwilling to go into their cramped coop. I would sit with my grandmother in the encroaching dark. She had a necessary thriftiness and knew the hours of light that any one candle could give and was slow to put the taper to it. It was then the crickets began to screech like mad. They lived in holes in the mortar surrounding the fireplace, but with candlelight and the devilment in them they would fly out in swarms. They always landed on a wet towel or a wet tea towel that was hung up to dry, landing there to suck up the moisture. They lived on that. In the dog-eared almanac, in a drawer, there was an article about crickets which said that their screeches came not from their throats but from the brisk attrition of their wings. Neither of us knew what “attrition” meant. My grandmother would rave on about the hardships she had endured and what proud patriots I was descended from. One, nicknamed “Da Stick,” had fought in an insurrection, was injured, and long afterward fitted with a wooden leg. I never knew which insurrection it was, as there were so many down the years, all, as I
knew from school, botched, both through lack of weapons and the treachery of informers, brothers or cousins informing on their own. Her son Michael had been chief of the 3rd Brigade in East Clare, a fearless soldier on the run from the British army, with a price on his head. He had kept a diary, which she would pull out from a nook in the wall as if it were the Book of Psalms. She read aloud, her voice trembly:

Started ploughing, had one scrape done after dinner, when I sighted lorry of Tans turning Lyon’s Cross. Just in the centre of the field in full view. To run would be foolish. Kept on ploughing going towards them ’til I reached headland. They were then one hundred yards away, but in shade of some trees. I cleared fence and retreated to Allen’s wood and sat there peacefully watching them searching for me. Slept that night at John Mack’s, at 3 a.m. heard lorries, hid in bed, then sent Billy Mack to warn Turner. Billy returned to say they had Turner’s house surrounded and it looked bad. Retreated across Bo River to Griffins and waited the urgent news.

By then my grandmother had always succumbed to tears and would get me to decipher the next page and the next, as the ink of many years had faded to a dunnish brown. I craved only one thing, which was a spoon of golden syrup that slid so easily down the throat.

One night long after my grandmother had gone to bed, my aunt Delia, otherwise a gentle woman, decided to play a prank on me. She had a visitor who was also called Delia, and they kept saying, “Fancy, two Delias in the same humble parish.” The other Delia had been to America, and that’s where the word “fancy” came from, as did the word “darn” instead of “damn.” The other Delia was forever boasting of the harmony with her dear dead husband, how they sat of an evening by their friendly fire, giving each other necessary encouragement and saying, “Whatever the darn crops do, you and I will relax.” Yet
they were known to fight bitterly, and often he left the house at night and was missing for days.

So, as I sat there, my eyes glued, listening to their every word, my aunt suddenly said that my mother was not my real mother. Those were her words. My real mother, as she said, was in Australia. I went shivery and then stone-cold. They went on laughing and embellishing their story. I said my mother was my mother. They said I was too young to recall when the swap-over had happened. They built it up, relishing the fun of it and the fact that I was getting more and more agitated, standing, as I remember, and hitting out with little fists, little useless fists, as this Australian mother began to materialize. Peg was her name, she had brown hair and a heartlessness, evidenced by her giving me away. She lived on a sheep farm out in some remote place, and occasionally sent a five-shilling money order toward my keep. One day I would be sent to her and separated from the mother that I loved so much that I used to promise to die at the very instant she did. The place to which I had to go in my mind, admitting to having no mother, was awful, summoning terrors, great and small. Things in the kitchen began to go blurry, as did they, and in a violent frenzy I ran out to escape them, intending to run the five miles home on dark roads at any cost, to find my mother and hear the sweet, reassuring phrase from her lips, “I am your mother, you are my child.” They caught me at the first wicket gate by the sleeve of my cardigan, and I was brought back and put to sit on a rocking chair, half lying down. A towel was put on my chest and over my mouth, to stifle what must have been my roaring. I kept saying, “I want to go home, I want to go home.”

Next morning my aunt had to cycle to the crossroads and wait for the mail van as word was sent to my mother to send Carnero to come and fetch me home. No reason was given. The man who drove the mail van was implored to break his journey
between post offices and to go up to our house specially with the note. I had already packed my few belongings in a small suitcase and spent the day at the plantation, because my grandmother, upon being told that I had homesickness, started grumbling, saying how spoiled I was and how thankless I was, considering the treats they had given me, jelly and blancmange of a Sunday. The day wore on and on.

Birds for miles around were making their evening excursions, swooping down into the rain barrel where midges had swarmed, and the crows were already roosting in the trees for the night. In the dusk I still waited, and so certain was I that Carnero would come, I kept hearing the scrape of the lych gate on the slate pier where it was hung. I could picture him laying his bicycle down on the ground and taking a shortcut over the high grass, cursing the fact that the dew would ruin the Sunday shoes he had just polished.

Then I was called in for supper. My aunt, feeling remorse, had cut up a slice of shop bread in little pieces and poured liberally from the tin of golden syrup, to coax me. My grandmother railed on about all the suffering and penances she had had to endure and was praying aloud that the Lord would come for her soon. My aunt and I both regretted the coolness with one another, because prior to that we had become firm friends. Each night after my grandmother had gone up to bed, we would sit and chat. First she talked of her dead husband, her partner, the man whose likeness was in a locket that she wore next to her chest and with whom she had conferred from time to time. He had dark eyes and dark hair.

Her one solace was the romance novels that she could get her hands on. Unlike my mother, she loved reading, and by a miracle a retired schoolteacher in County Kerry had sent her a copy of
War and Peace
only a few months before. It was in three small volumes with tiny print, and the paper was so flimsy one had to
haw on it to separate the pages. She had shown it to me during my vacation and asked me to print out the names of the Russian characters with their patronymics, so that she would be more familiar with them on her second reading, which would be in the winter nights to come. I came to know a Prince Andrei who wished to be unmarried; Marya Dmitrievna, who puffed heavily when dancing; a beautiful Natasha; Pierre, who picked up the wrong hat in the salon of Anna Pavlovna; and an old contrary prince at Bald Hills who tormented his poor daughter, Mary, and yet on his deathbed told her to put on her white dress, which he liked seeing her in. I had copied these snippets into a notebook, which also contained the yield got from the miller for their corn down the years and the varying price of animal foodstuffs.

Sitting at that table, I wanted, as I am sure my aunt wanted, a truce, but neither of us was willing to take the first step. Then it happened. A shadow passed by the low window, and before I could think, was it or was it not him, Carnero was in the kitchen, in his good navy suit, saying he was gasping with a thirst. My aunt gave him a nip of whiskey in a small beaker that had come with a tonic bottle. He was holding a cushion to put on the bar of the bicycle on which he would bring me home, and already the gloom and persecutions of the holiday were fading. My aunt gave me a very clean new shilling and made me swear that I would never tell the nonsense about Peg, far away in Australia.

All the way Carnero and I chatted, he giving me the various news since I had left and saying there had been no terrible ructions. Sometimes we had to dismount on the steep hills, as he was a quite hefty man and also had the extra weight of me to contend with. We were sitting on a little low stone bridge, the river just beneath, chugging along at a merry musical pace. It was called Bo River, the very place beyond which my dead
uncle had retreated when he was on the run. A herd of cows were lying down in the field, close to one another, wheezing the soft wheezes that they made at night. In the hazed blue of oncoming night, mountain and sky had melted into one another and looked substanceless. Feeling happy and content, Carnero lit a cigarette, and in that wild and spontaneous way of his started to sing: