The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (24 page)

All through the day, I help the woman around the house. She shows me the big white machine that plugs in, a freezer, where what she calls "perishables" can be stored for months without rotting. We make ice cubes, go over every inch of the floors with a hoovering machine, dig new potatoes, make coleslaw and two loaves, and then she takes the clothes in off the line while they are still damp and sets up a board and starts ironing. She does it all without rushing but she never really stops. Kinsella comes in and makes tea for us out of the well water and drinks it standing up, with a handful of Kimberley biscuits, then goes back out. Later he comes in again, looking for me. "Is the wee girl there?" he calls.

I go to the door.

"Can you run?"

"What?"

"Are you fast on your feet?" he says.

"Sometimes," I say.

"Well, run down there to the end of the lane, as far as the box, and run back."

"The box?" I say.

"The postbox. You'll see it there. Be as fast as you can."

I take off, racing, to the end of the lane and find the box and get the letters and race back. Kinsella is looking at his watch. "Not bad," he says, "for your first time."

He takes the letters from me. "Do you think there's money in any of these?"

"I don't know."

"Ah, you'd know if there was, surely. The women can smell money. Do you think there's news?"

"I wouldn't know," I say.

"Do you think there's a wedding invitation?"

I want to laugh.

"It wouldn't be yours anyhow," he says. "You're too young to be getting married. Do you think you'll get married?"

"I don't know," I say. "Mammy says I shouldn't take a present off a man."

Kinsella laughs. "She could be right there. Still and all, there's no two men the same. And it'd be a swift man that would catch you, Long Legs. We'll try you again tomorrow and see if we can't improve your time."

"I've to go faster?"

"Oh, aye," he says. "By the time you're ready for home you're to be as fast as a reindeer, so there'll not be a man in the parish will catch you without a long-handled net and a racing bike."

After supper and the nine o'clock news, when Kinsella is reading his newspaper in the parlor, the woman sits me on her lap and idly strokes my bare feet.

"You have nice long toes," she says. "Nice feet."

She makes me lie down with my head on her lap and, with a hair clip, cleans the wax out of my ears.

"You could have planted a geranium in what was there," she says.

When she takes out the hairbrush, I can hear her counting under her breath to a hundred before she stops and plaits it.

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end, but each day follows on much like the one before. We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with porridge and toast for breakfast. Kinsella puts on his cap and goes out to the yard to milk the cows, and myself and the woman make a list out loud of the jobs that need to be done: we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards, take all the bedclothes out of the hot press, hoover out the spiderwebs, and put all the clothes back in again, make scones, scrub the bathtub, sweep the staircase, polish the furniture, boil onions for onion sauce and put it in containers in the freezer, weed the flower beds, and, when the sun goes down, water things. Then it's a matter of supper and the walk across the fields to the well. Every evening the television is turned on for the nine o'clock news and then, after the forecast, I am told that it is time for bed.

One afternoon, while we are topping and tailing gooseberries for jam, Kinsella comes in from the yard and washes and dries his hands and looks at me in a way he has never looked before.

"I think it's past time we got you togged out, girl."

I am wearing a pair of navy-blue trousers and a blue shirt that the woman pulled out of the chest of drawers.

"What's wrong with her?" the woman says.

"Tomorrow's Sunday, and she'll need something more than that for mass," he says. "I'll not have her going as she went last week."

"Sure, isn't she clean and tidy?"

"You know what I'm talking about, Edna." He sighs. "Why don't you go up and change and I'll run us into Gorey."

The woman keeps on picking the gooseberries from the colander, stretching her hand out, but a little more slowly each time, for the next one. At one point I think she will stop, but she keeps on until she is finished and then she gets up and places the colander on the sink and lets out a sound I've never heard anyone make, and slowly goes upstairs.

Kinsella looks at me and smiles a hard kind of a smile. His eyes are not quite still in his head. It's as though there is a big piece of trouble stretching itself out in the back of his mind. He toes the leg of a chair and looks over at me. "You should wash your hands and face before you go to town," he says. "Didn't your father even bother to teach you that much?"

I freeze in the chair, waiting for something much worse to happen, but Kinsella just stands there, locked in the wash of his own speech. As soon as he turns, I race for the stairs, but when I reach the bathroom the door won't open.

"It's all right," the woman says after a while from inside, and then, shortly afterward, opens it. "Sorry for keeping you." She has been crying, but she isn't ashamed. "It'll be nice for you to have some clothes of your own," she says then, wiping her eyes. "And Gorey is a nice town. I don't know why I didn't think of taking you there before now."

Town is a crowded place with a wide main street. Outside the shops, many different things are hanging in the sun. There are plastic nets full of beach balls, blow-up toys, and beds that float. A see-through dolphin looks as though he is shivering in a cold breeze. There are plastic spades and matching buckets, molds for sandcastles, grown men digging ice cream out of tubs with little plastic spoons, a van with a man calling, "Fresh fish!"

Kinsella reaches into his pocket and hands me something. "You'll get a choc ice out of that."

I open my hand and stare at the pound note.

"Couldn't she buy half a dozen choc ices out of that," the woman says.

"Ah, what is she for, only for spoiling?" Kinsella says.

"What do you say?" the woman says.

"Thanks," I say. "Thank you."

"Well, stretch it out and spend it well," Kinsella says, laughing.

The woman takes me to the draper's and picks out five cotton dresses and some pants and trousers and a few tops. We go behind a curtain so that I can try them on.

"Isn't she tall?" the assistant says.

"We're all tall," the woman says.

"She's the spitting image of her mammy. I can see it now," the assistant says, and then decides that the lilac dress is the best fit and the most flattering. Mrs. Kinsella agrees. She buys me a printed blouse too, with short sleeves, blue trousers, and a pair of black leather shoes with a little strap and a buckle, some pants, and white ankle socks. The assistant hands her the docket, and she takes out her purse and pays for it all.

"Well may you wear," the assistant says. "Isn't your mammy good to you?"

I don't know how to answer.

Out in the street, the sun feels strong again, blinding. We meet people the woman knows. Some of them stare at me and ask who I am. One has a new baby in a pushchair. The woman bends down and coos, and he slobbers a little and starts to cry.

"He's making strange," the mother says. "Pay no heed."

We meet a woman with eyes like picks, who asks whose child I am. When she is told, she says, "Ah, isn't she company for you all the same, God help you."

Mrs. Kinsella stiffens, then says, "You must excuse me but this man of mine is waiting, and you know what these men are like."

"Like fecking bulls, they are," the woman says. "Haven't an ounce of patience."

"God forgive me but if I ever run into that woman again it will be too soon," Mrs. Kinsella says, when we have rounded the corner.

Before we go back to the car she leaves me loose in a sweetshop. I take my time choosing what I want.

"You got a right load there," she says, when I come out.

Kinsella has parked in the shade and is sitting with the windows open, reading the newspaper. "Well?" he says. "Did ye get sorted?"

"Aye," she says.

"Grand," he says.

I give him the choc ice and her the Flake and lie on the back seat eating the wine gums, careful not to choke as we cross over bumps in the road. I listen to all the change rattling around in my pocket, the wind rushing through the car, and the little pieces of speech, scraps of gossip, being shared between them in the front.

When we turn into the yard, another car is parked outside the door. A woman is on the front step, pacing, with her arms crossed.

"Isn't that Harry Redmond's girl?"

"I don't like the look of this," Kinsella says.

"Oh, John," she says, rushing over. "I'm sorry to trouble you but didn't our Michael pass away and there's not a soul at home. They're all out on the combines and won't be back till God knows what hour, and I've no way of getting word to them. We're rightly stuck. Would you ever come down and give us a hand digging the grave?"

"I don't know that this'll be any place for you but I can't leave you here," the woman says, later the same day. "So get ready and we'll go, in the name of God."

I go upstairs and change into my new dress and my ankle socks and shoes.

"Don't you look nice," she says, when I come down. "John's not always easy but he's hardly ever wrong."

Walking down the road, we pass houses with their doors and windows wide open, long, flapping clotheslines, graveled entrances to other lanes. Outside a cottage, a black dog with curls all down his back comes out and barks at us, hotly, through the bars of a gate. At the first crossroads we meet a heifer, who panics and races past us, lost. All through the walk, the wind blows hard and soft and hard again, through the tall, flowering hedges, the high trees. In the fields, the combines are out cutting the wheat, the barley, and the oats, saving the corn, leaving behind long rows of straw. Farther along, we meet two bare-chested men, their eyes so white in faces that are tanned and dusty. The woman stops to greet them and tells them where we are going.

"Well, it must be a relief to the man, to be out of his misery."

"Sure, didn't he reach his three score and ten?" the other says. "What more can any of us hope for?"

We keep on walking, standing in tight to the hedges, the ditches, letting things pass.

"Have you been to a wake before?" the woman asks.

"I don't think so."

"Well, I might as well tell you. There will be a dead man in a coffin and lots of people and some of them might have a little too much taken."

"What will they be taking?"

"Drink," she says.

When we come to the house, several men are leaning against a low wall, smoking. There's a black ribbon on the door, but when we go in, the kitchen is bright and packed with people who are talking. The woman who asked Kinsella to dig the grave is there, making sandwiches. There are bottles of red and white lemonade and stout, and, in the middle of all this, a big wooden box with a dead old man lying inside it. His hands are joined, as though he had died praying, a string of rosary beads around his fingers. Some of the men are sitting around the coffin, using the part that's closed as a counter on which to rest their glasses. One of these is Kinsella.

"There she is," he says. "Long Legs. Come over here."

He pulls me onto his lap and gives me a sip from his glass. "Do you like the taste of that?"

"No."

He laughs. "Good girl. Don't ever get a taste for it. If you start, you might never stop, and then you'd wind up like the rest of us."

He pours red lemonade into a cup for me. I sit on his lap, drinking it and eating queen cakes out of the biscuit tin and looking at the dead man, hoping that his eyes will open.

The people drift in and out, shaking hands, drinking and eating and looking at the dead man, saying what a lovely corpse he is, and doesn't he look happy now that his end has come, and who was it who laid him out? They talk of the forecast and the moisture content of corn, of milk quotas and the next general election. I feel myself getting heavy on Kinsella's lap. "Am I getting heavy?"

"Heavy?" he says. "You're like a feather, child. Stay where you are."

I put my head against him but I'm bored and wish there were things to do, other girls who would play.

"She's getting uneasy," I hear the woman say.

"What's ailing her?" another says.

"Ah, it's no place for the child, really," she says. "It's just I didn't like not to come, and I wouldn't leave her behind."

"Sure, I'll take her home with me, Edna. I'm going now. Can't you call in and collect her on your way?"

"Oh," she says. "I don't know should I."

"Mine'd be a bit of company for her. Can't they play away out the back? And that man there won't budge as long as he has her on his knee."

Mrs. Kinsella laughs. I have never really heard her laugh till now.

"Sure, maybe, if you don't mind, Mildred," she says. "What harm is in it? And we'll not be long after you."

"Not a bother," Mildred says.

When we are out on the road and the goodbyes are said, Mildred strides on into a pace I can just about keep, and as soon as she rounds the bend the questions start. Hardly is one answered before the next is fired: "Which room did they put you into? Did Kinsella give you money? How much? Does she drink at night? Does he? Are they playing cards up there much? Do ye say the rosary? Does she put butter or margarine in her pastry? Where does the old dog sleep? Is the freezer packed solid? Does she skimp on things or is she allowed to spend? Are the child's clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?"

I answer them all easily, until the last. "The child's clothes?"

"Aye," she says. "If you're sleeping in his room you must surely know. Did you not look?"

"Well, she had clothes I wore for all the time I was here, but we went to Gorey this morning and bought new things."