Patricia Falvey (2 page)

“But we’re supposed to be celebrating, Ma,” I whined.

“Fetch the basket,” was all Ma said. Furiously, she unclipped the pegs from the line, tossing the white sheets into the basket. Her lips were pursed in a thin line. Then she took the basket from me and walked into the house, slamming the door behind her. Da took a stick and stirred the paint in each of the buckets. The golden yellow crust, like the foam on top of fresh buttermilk, dissolved through the rest of the liquid, leaving only bubbles on the top. Frankie had already started slapping paint on the graying white walls of our house, and it dripped down in uneven ribbons.

“He’s doing it wrong, Da,” I said. Frankie glared at me.

“Ah, he’ll get the way of it, Eileen. Here, you start over there.”

Even Lizzie had a brush, although she dabbed more paint on the grass than on the walls. She trailed after Frankie, calling his name and laughing. She was the only one of us who could coax a smile out of our Frankie. His brown eyes softened as he looked down at her. “You’re a wee pest,” he said as he guided her hand so she could dip her brush in the paint. At last Ma came out of the house. Her face was softer now, but tiny red lines ringed her eyes. She lifted a brush and started painting along with us. She smiled at Da.

“Don’t be getting paint on my flowers, now,” she said, indicating her rows of scarlet poppies, yellow anemones, and blue forget-me-nots planted in a bed along the front of the house and in the window boxes.

Da laughed. “I’ll mind the flowers,” he said, “but I can’t say I’ll mind you.”

He danced toward Ma and daubed yellow paint on her arm, then danced away.

“Tom!” she squealed. “If that’s the way you want it, here goes.” She landed a daub of yellow paint on his cheek. Frankie and Lizzie and I laughed, and the knot that had formed in my stomach went away.

I recall that day now through the haze of time and memory. But the yellow has never faded. It is as vivid in my mind as the day we covered the house and ourselves in yellow paint and danced like canaries around the garden.

WE LIVED IN
the village of Glenlea in the south of County Armagh, in the northern province of Ireland called Ulster. Glenlea, standing at the foot of the grand mountain Slieve Gullion, was one of many villages that ringed the mountain, each village having its particular view of the grand stone duchess. Slieve Gullion was sixty million years old and cradled a sleeping volcano deep within her. In winter, she stood proud and naked like an ancient scarred warrior. In spring, she wrapped herself in green bracken, while bluebells and white hawthorn blossoms cascaded down her great bosom and raced across the fields toward our house.

The night we painted the house yellow, the Music Men came. They came often in the long summer evenings when the pale moon hung in the still-light sky. They came whistling, swinging their fiddles and accordions with stout arms, cloth caps pushed back on reddened foreheads.

Mammy opened the big oak door wide to our guests.

“You’re very welcome,” she called in her lovely, deep voice.

“God bless all here,” said P. J. Mullen.

P.J. was the leader of the Music Men. A fiddle player like my da, he was a short, burly man with coarse red hair and a long red beard that fanned out across his chest. I was sure he was one of the fairies. His voice was so loud, you jumped to hear it coming out of so short a man. P.J. was my godfather.

The men removed their caps and bowed their heads as if entering a church. I shot past them and sat on the wooden bench next to the big hearth in the kitchen, my face warm with joy.

“How’s yourself, P.J?” said Ma.

“Fine as the day is long, missus.”

“Hello, Fergus, Billy,” Ma said, nodding at two of the other men. “How’s your ma, Fergus?”

“Not too bad, thanks, missus,” said Fergus Conlon. “She’d be great only for her legs.”

A bachelor, Fergus still lived at home with his ma, who by all accounts was an oul’ witch. Ma often said Fergus was earning indulgences in heaven right and left for having to put up with her.

Billy Craig handed Ma a bunch of wildflowers, his big round face red as a beetroot. Billy, a giant of a man but a bit simple, was madly in love with my ma. Every time he came to the house he brought her a present of some kind, and Ma always made a great fuss over it. She took the wildflowers from Billy, put them right away in a vase of water, and set them in the middle of the table. Billy beamed.

The fourth Music Man was Terrence Finnegan. No one knew much about Terrence. It was whispered he used to be a priest who had fallen in love with a girl and was thrown out of the priesthood. No one ever asked him, of course. We all preferred a good mystery.

Da came downstairs, a broad smile on his face, and shook hands with each of the men.

“Well, I see you didn’t get far with the paint job,” said P.J. as he dragged a small stool away from the wall. “No bother. The boys and I will be up with the ladders this week to finish the job.”

“You’d better hurry,” I said. “Great-Grandda Hugh’s anniversary will be over.”

The men laughed. Da turned his back to P.J. to reach up for his fiddle, which sat on a shelf on the kitchen wall. “She’s right,” he said.

I watched Da as he took down the fiddle and laid it across his knees. I loved the way he ran his long, slender white fingers along the length of its dark wood. Ma said Da’s fingers reminded her of the stems of flowers. Reverently, he brought the instrument up to his shoulder and tucked it under his chin. With his right hand he raised the bow and brought it down across the strings. The sharp, high notes were both sweet and melancholy. I held my breath while the haunting strains ran themselves out. Then Da looked up and flashed a smile at me, and suddenly the fiddle seized on a merry jig. I clapped my hands and laughed.

Da got up again and lifted a small fiddle from a shelf and handed it to me. He bowed. “Would you do me the honor of playing for us, my lovely colleen?” It was a little game we always played before the music session began in earnest.

I stood up and tucked the fiddle under my chin. “Of course,” I said in my best grown-up voice. “What would you like to hear?”

“How about ‘The Dawning of the Day’?”

I started to play the sad tune, uncertainly at first until I got the feel of it. Then Da and the others joined in. Ma set bottles of porter at the feet of the musicians, who had arranged themselves, each on his favorite stool, around the big fireplace. Even when it was warm outside, we always had a fire going in the kitchen. As the blue smoke from the turf curled up in wisps, I inhaled the familiar pungent smell. A splintered wooden chair stood empty to the left of the hearth, Great-Grandda Hugh’s chair. Ma always set a bottle of porter beside that chair as well, and old Cuchulainn would go over and rest his big head on the chair as if he were being petted by an invisible hand.

When we had finished playing, the men laid their instruments across their knees and lifted their bottles of porter.

“To the woman of the house,” boomed P.J. He held up his bottle toward Ma and then took a long swallow. “No man would ever go thirsty in this house.”

He turned to Da. “I saw John Browne’s cattle grazing beyond in your back fields, Tom. Did you lease him the land?”

Ma’s head turned sharply toward Da. A knot formed in my stomach.

“Och, no,” Da said, looking down at his fiddle. “I sold him a few acres, that’s all. Sure I had more land than I could manage.”

Ma put down the kettle she had just picked up.

“But, Tom, that’s the second parcel you’ve sold off this year.” Her words hovered in the air like smoke. The Music Men fingered their instruments, busying themselves with tuning them. Da looked over at Ma, but she had her back turned to him.

“Will we start with a hornpipe, lads?”

He started a tune on his fiddle, and soon the other men took up their instruments and joined in, following along at the pace set by Da’s fiddle. I clapped my hands, and Lizzie crowed and reached up to Frankie to dance with her. Frankie smiled. He rose and set down the skin-faced drum he had been beating with a stick in time to the music. Da had brought the drum, called a bodhran, home for him, and he played it with a fine intensity. Frankie had wanted to learn to play the fiddle like me, but Da said I was better suited to it. Frankie sulked about that for weeks. He was very competitive, our Frankie.

As Frankie walked Lizzie around the floor on her unsteady feet, Ma busied herself making soda bread. She formed the dough into two round batches and etched the shape of a cross with her thumb on the top of each loaf, then put them in a big iron skillet and thrust them into the middle of the turf fire.

The music session took on its own ritual. Da and P.J. set down their fiddles and Terrence his pipes and nodded to Billy Craig. It was his turn to play a solo. Billy wrapped his plump white fingers around his tin whistle and coaxed a sweet, mournful tune out of it. He called it “The Lonesome Boatman.” I closed my eyes and imagined a boat skimming across Camlough Lake. The man rowing it was sad. Maybe he had lost someone he loved. Billy may have been simple, but he was a genius with the tin whistle. Da said God often made up for things in odd ways. Billy was the only Protestant in the group, but Da said it made no difference, because when it came to music everybody was equal.

Then Terrence Finnegan took up his uilleann pipes. He strapped the bellows around his waist and right arm and laid the pipes across his knees. Using his elbow, he pumped the bellows, sending air into the pipes. He pushed the mellow sound of “The Cregan White Hair” out of them. The sound was sweeter than that of traditional bagpipes, yet a sound as mysterious as the man himself. A dark man, Terrence was taller even than Ma, with gray flecks in his black hair and intense brown eyes. While he played, he looked around, as he always did, fixing his gaze on Frankie. He hardly spoke to Frankie, but he always stared at him when Frankie wasn’t watching. It made me a bit jealous.

Then Fergus, tall and narrow as a stalk, bent over his mandolin and began to play a lovely old air called “The Coolin,” his bony, thin fingers stretched across the strings like a crab’s legs.

I looked around the room and tried, as I always did, to commit the scene to memory. Something in me wanted to hold on to it forever. From the kitchen window, I saw Slieve Gullion wrapping herself in her evening shawl as the light grew dim. Ma lit the paraffin lamps, and their light joined the glow of the firelight to dance a jig on the walls. All around the white-painted walls were shelves on which sat Da’s collection of old musical instruments—uilleann pipes, a banjo, and bodhrans decorated with ancient Celtic designs. There were framed pictures on the walls, too—Ma’s handiwork. She loved to sit outside the house and draw the landscape around us. Da framed the pictures and hung them for her. The colorful hooked rugs on the floor were her work as well, and the bright print curtains that flapped at the windows.

I went over to where Ma bent over the skillet in the fireplace.

“Can I help you, Mammy?”

“Aye, Eileen, get out the plates and the butter.” Her face was red from the heat of the fire, and her long black hair fell down over one shoulder. She straightened up—a tall woman, with a lovely curved figure and long legs. She carried the skillet to the table and took off the lid. The smell of the soda bread made my mouth water. She slid the round loaves onto a wooden tray, took a knife and cut along each spur of the cross, making eight triangles. She slit each wedge in half and buttered it. The butter frothed from the heat and sank into the belly of the bread.

“Here, Eileen, pass these around.”

The men placed their instruments on the floor while they ate and drank.

“Did you hear what those bastards are up to now?” growled P.J. between bites of soda bread.

We all waited. P.J. was a great one for setting up his audience. He took a deep swallow of his porter.

“Those feckers are after forming the Ulster Unionist Council to fight Home Rule. And you can bet your arse they don’t mean to fight by civil means.”

Billy giggled like a big child, and so did Frankie and I. We always giggled when P.J. cursed. Ma shot us a warning look.

“Home Rule doesn’t have a leg to stand on,” Terrence said softly. In contrast with P.J. and his bluster, Terrence never raised his voice, but he commanded attention as powerfully as if he had been roaring from a pulpit. “Those fellows down south have been harping on it for years. England will never agree to let Ireland rule itself, and that’s the truth.”

“Me ma says if Home Rule is ever passed for Ireland, the Protestants here in the north will have the rest of us drawn and quartered.” Fergus peered at my ma with the same alarmed look in his eyes that rabbits had when Frankie pounced on them. “No offense, missus, I’m just saying what me ma says, that’s all.”

Ma smiled. “None taken, Fergus.” Ma had been born a Protestant, but she had turned Catholic after she married Da. She was more devout than any of us.

Terrence looked straight at Ma and then scowled at Fergus. “It’s all just talk,” he said.

“All the same,” boomed P.J. as he drained the last of his porter, “them Unionist bastards are getting ready for a fight. They’ll not stop until they’ve burned us all out of house and home. It will be just like the plantation times all over again—they’ll take everything we own. Sure there’s already been stories of burning up in Belfast. We’ve not heard the last of it, mark my words.”