The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (5 page)

A great event for Miss Finaughty was a delivery to Brannockstown school of
Bible Stories for Children
dispatched by one of the many London societies for the improvement of the incorrigible Irish. The books were bound in black and reeked eloquently of cheap leather. Red ribbons grew from their spines like the tongues of sleek eels. The very ends of the pages were dipped in gold. Such a luxury had not been seen in our bare schoolroom before. But of course there was a little drawback. Those
Bible Stories
had nothing inside but creamy-white pages. The printer had forgotten himself, which was why these grand books were deemed fit for Irish schools. Or perhaps the London doers-of-good thought that we Irish, always choking on the words gushing out of us, had no need for more of them printed on the page.

I begged two blank books from the crestfallen Miss Finaughty, and took them home, thinking their pages a fine place for Enda’s pastime of drawing the clothes of great ladies and pasting fashion pictures from the newspaper. The other one was for me, to practise my letters in.

But when Darcy saw the books, and heard the story, she wheeled our barrow to the school and scooped up the entire stock. Miss Finaughty hovered about her like a blur of windblown grass, trying to protest until Darcy silenced her.

‘Saw your dead poet blethered and blasted to a stagger in the Brannockstown shebeen last night, and you grieving all these years for him. He’d rather say he’s dead than be seen with a long drink of water like yourself.’

‘Your . . . your mother is much to be pitied,’ was all Miss Finaughty could stammer out in reply.

‘Manticory,’ the teacher asked me the next day, ‘for what would your sister Darcy be using those black books?’

‘It is more like to be a question of wanting them, than of using them,’ I explained.

But it turned out that Darcy had eloquent plans for those books.

Along with Darcy’s black hair and black eyes, there came a black-and-white mind. On the side of white were all things that were pleasing to Darcy, such as presents, praise and money. On the black side you’d find household chores, too-small potatoes, recalcitrant sisters, incursions by the thin geese, empty rabbit traps.

The empty Bibles became her black books, in which she recorded all crimes and offences against Swineys and most particularly against herself. Darcy kept her black books for years. So much the worse for you, and twenty pities beside, should you find your offending self inscribed there. Those Bibles were indexed and cross-referenced, so Darcy could always find an old offence to nurse or an historical insult to avenge.

By the time I was thirteen and Darcy was nineteen, Miss Finaughty’s promised adventure was writing its opening pages.

I was every taste as much in love with books as I had been at six, when all the words and sounds were newly knitted in my brain.

I’d learned something perhaps unintended from all those high-told tales of ladies and gentlemen and poor little peasant girls. I’d learned this: whoever writes the words owns the story, and whoever owns the words writes the story.

So it was with words that I now began to extract my own identity from the hot churning soup of Swineyness.

UnSwinily – for my sisters lived for the next bashing or the next potato – at teatime you’d find me still spreadeagled in the clover with a book of verses making honey in my heart. The thing is, it was my own Manticory honey – not Swiney honey. It had its singular taste and texture. Instead of bashing my sisters or their dollies, even when they grandly deserved it, I was now more than likely to write a bashing poem or song about them. It was safer that way, too, so long as they never cast an eye on my productions, which joined the dry leaves in the barrel in the barn.

As it was, Darcy tried to asphyxiate my love of poetry as soon as she detected the tendency: she would simply sit on me if she caught me reading it.

I had also to worry about Annora finding me anywhere with any book that was not the Bible or a hymnal, for she’d quickly sprinkle so much holy water on the volume that the pages would blossom with damp flowers and I’d be in sore trouble with Miss Finaughty, who regarded every printed poem as tenderly as the baby she would never have.

Darcy had a particular hate on my reading in the sweet clover of the south-facing field where she baited her rabbit traps. She made sure I had a bad memory of every time she found me there, and a bruise too. I remained stubbornly fond of the place, however, and for several reasons. The Harristown rabbits and I shared a fondness for sucking the sweetness from the clover heads that massed there. I had also a preference for that spot for it delighted me to free the little brown beasts from Darcy’s traps before the slow crows wheeled in to peck their eyes, and before Darcy herself came to deliver a worse fate.

She never caught me in the act of liberation. But one hungry summer afternoon she surprised me in the field before I could release a trapped rabbit. I clutched my book to my chest. Darcy took out her suspicions on my reading matter.

‘Is it reading you are? Some old poems, is it?’ She slapped me on the ear, none too lightly. ‘Here’s poetry for you – “Manticory” rhymes with “rancid boring”. Away with the verses. Better use the pages for candle-spills. If I catch you here again with a book, I’ll knock the priest’s share out of you.’

She opened the cage and put her hands on the rabbit I’d been too slow to save. ‘This is what will happen to you if I find you here again.’

She grasped one back leg and swung the beast against a tree trunk so hard that its little head flew right off its body, blasting me with tepid blood and brains.

It was in that same field and in that same hungry summer that I found the most likely reason for Darcy always chasing me out of the clover.

I’d just freed another rabbit and was carefully resetting the snare when I saw what seemed to be a wooden spoon raising its curved head amid the tall cow parsley on the edge of the field. Although I’d not noticed it before, the spoon had clearly been standing there for years. It was grained like driftwood and had begun to give itself up to the rot and moss. I parted the cow parsley for a closer look and saw that a second spoon had been tied horizontally across the vertical one, bound by tattered rags into a small cross. The letters
PS
were carved into the bowl of the first spoon. Under them:
November 1854
.

Ireland was full of such improvised graves. We Catholics were not allowed to bury our dead with the old rites. Few could afford coffins or headstones. The fields, dense with Famine corpses buried too close to the surface, were frequently reaped by wild dogs.

PS
, I thought.
Rest peacefully. I’ll not disturb you
.

I patted the cow parsley back into shape and thought of how Darcy was forever driving me out of this field, and always throwing back in Annora’s face her story of our father Phelan Swiney, Mariner, and his salty pennies.

I did my sums. Ida had been born in late 1855, and there’d been no more daughters to follow her.

Could that have been because our father was dead?

The rest of us had been tiny in November 1854 – myself aged two, Pertilly one, Oona just a baby, Berenice and Enda a mere six.

Darcy, though, had been eight by then: Darcy who had always towered like a Gorgon over the rest of us. Even as a child she’d had a pair of terrible weapons hung at the end of her arms, always ready for a beating or a throttling. Darcy had already poisoned the Eileen O’Reilly with daft that very year. Even then she’d had a black violence at the core of her, and at the same time a lack: a lack of what reins in violence, whether shame or sympathy or a mixture of both.

Too many stories entirely, you will say, and myself with an imagination over-ripened by the lushness of fairy tales. But in the frightening country of our Harristown childhood, who else – my fever of logic rampaged – could have killed
PS
but Darcy?

Even if she was just a child, even if she couldn’t smite his head against a tree like a rabbit’s, Darcy could have found a way. She always did.

It was not true that Ireland was devoid of venomous reptiles, I thought. The Eileen O’Reilly had said Darcy had seven drops of the Devil’s blood in her body.

Had Phelan Swiney, Mariner, crossed his eldest daughter in some way, and suffered the horrid consequences? If only there’d been black books back then in 1854. I could have hunted them out of their hiding place and read what she had scribbled inside.

Perhaps Darcy had laid a snare for our father, as she had threatened to do. And poisoned him after, to stop him breeding more babies on our frayed mother? She’d practised, after all, on the poor Eileen O’Reilly, who’d barely survived. Annora could have put the dead man secretly in the ground. As no one ever saw him, no one in Harristown would have missed Phelan Swiney, Mariner, thinking him away on a ship in New York or Australia. Annora would of course have kept the secret; she would not want her eldest daughter carried off for correction in a lunatic asylum. She would not want the rest of us growing up with a murderess for a sister.

It all fitted, was all of a piece. No wonder Darcy did not believe in our father! She
knew
he no longer lived on this earth!

And it made sense and more sense of Darcy’s own fascination with anything to do with death, particularly bloody and untimely death. She’d told me herself that she had learned to read only so as to peruse the handbills about grisly homicides in Dublin, a habit to which she owed her grandiose vocabulary for threats and violence and her repertoire of ripe gallows curses. Her only regular use for books was in throwing them at misbehaving sisters or thin geese. Darcy was in love with her own death, too, and a romantic spectacle she made of it. She was always collecting grave-goods to be buried with her in the coffin that she endlessly redesigned under the speckled marble tombstone she’d already picked out from the Clery’s catalogue that Mrs Godlin kept at the dispensary in Kilcullen. Despite being the most dangerous thing in County Kildare, Darcy cherished a sentimental inkling that she herself would make a young corpse, which put her in a hurry for her rights and deserts. When Annora denied her an extra penny for a ribbon, she’d hiss, ‘Well, put it in my coffin, when you’re sorry. Perhaps you’ll tend to me properly then.’

And Annora would flinch, cross herself and weep beyond consolation.

That Sunday I watched Darcy singing in the chapel, her black hair billowing like a black shroud. She caught my eye and sent a murderous stare back at me.

Darcy’s hymn-singing had for years drawn people from all the hamlets around to our tiny ruin of a chapel of a Sunday. Father Maglinn encouraged Darcy to leave her hair loose, and he had her stand where the morning light fussed through the one stained-glass window, conferring an oily sheen on her black crinkles. In fact, none of us Swiney sisters was without a pleasing voice, and a good head of Saturday-washed hair, or a smock so white that it would hurt your eyes, thanks to Annora’s laundering. And so, as each of us was confirmed, we took our places beside Darcy in the gaudy light of the chapel window, and would have almost enjoyed the sound of our voices in rare harmony, had it not been for the Eileen O’Reilly in the third pew, and her remarks about Darcy.

‘It’d be one on them the black-horned witch of Slievenamon up there,’ she would observe, ‘that old Arsey Swiney conceitin’ herself an angel from Heaven when she’s just a murthering hairy harridan, so she is.’

No one shushed the Eileen O’Reilly for everyone owed her father the butcher.

Murthering hairy harridan
, I thought. Could the Eileen O’Reilly know something of the
PS
buried in the clover field?

Now I asked myself, what would happen to me if I mentioned what I’d found? I feared that it would likely end in a pair of crossed spoons and cow parsley above me and the Harristown worms busy below.

Chapter 5

By then I knew already there was
something
about our hair. Those books of fairy tales, which once taught us we were humble characters, now had other information to impart. At exactly the same time our Swiney hair was lengthening and thickening beyond anything reasonable, there was a reawakening of interest in those pretty old stories. Scandalous artists away in London were painting tableaux of long-haired maidens. Fashionable poets were remouthing the old hairy folk tales. Women with sumptuous hair were being defined as goddesses, princesses even, as models and muses for these great young men with great thoughts about hair: hair and love, hair and death, hair and more hair filling up the margins of books and the frames of paintings till they were fit to burst, wrapping itself around the necks of helpless men, choking them.

Like Rapunzel’s prince, the artists’ models – girlish nobodies like ourselves – were climbing their own ropes of hair to a higher state. Their very names were known, alongside the artists’: girls born in dubious circumstances and with nothing and no more morals than were necessary. We Swineys were already being pointed at and frankly remarked on for the hair our vanished papa had left in our blood. As that summer dwindled into autumn, I began to straighten my back and walk on my bare feet with my head held higher. I did not know where my hair would lead, but it seemed that a great story lay in store: it simply was not yet legible to me.