The bedroom door opened and the nun looked out. Her usual whisper: “Is anything the matter?”
“Not at all,” said Lib, unwilling to explain her suspicions. “How was the night?”
“Peaceful, thank God.”
Presumably meaning that Sister Michael hadn’t caught the child eating yet. But how hard had she tried, given her trust in God’s mysterious ways? Was the nun going to be any help to Lib at all, or only a hindrance?
Mrs. O’Donnell swung the iron crock off the fire now. Broom in hand, Kitty flicked the hens’ greenish dirt out of the dresser.
The nun had disappeared into the bedroom again, leaving the door ajar.
Lib was just untying her cloak when Malachy O’Donnell stepped in from the farmyard with an armful of turf. “Mrs. Wright.”
“Mr. O’Donnell.”
He dumped the sods by the fire, then turned to go out again.
She remembered to ask: “Might there be a platform scales hereabouts on which I could weigh Anna?”
“Ah, I’m afraid there would not.”
“Then how do you weigh your livestock?”
He scratched his purplish nose. “By eye, I suppose.”
A child-size voice in the room within.
“Is it herself up already?” asked the father, face lighting.
Mrs. O’Donnell cut past him and went in to their daughter just as Sister Michael stepped out with her satchel.
Lib moved to follow the mother, but the father held up his hand. “You had, ah, another question.”
“Did I?” She should have been by the child’s side already to prevent a moment’s gap between one nurse’s shift and the next. But she found it impossible to walk away in the middle of a conversation.
“About the walls, Kitty said you were after asking.”
“The walls, yes.”
“There do be some, some dung in there, with the mud. And heather and hair for grip,” said Malachy O’Donnell.
“Hair, really?” Lib’s eyes slid towards the bedroom. Could this apparently ingenuous fellow be a decoy? Might his wife have scooped something out of the cooking pot in her hands before she rushed in to greet her daughter?
“And blood, and a drop of buttermilk,” he added.
Lib stared at him. Blood and buttermilk—as if poured out on some primitive altar.
When she finally got into the bedroom, she found Rosaleen O’Donnell sitting on the little bed, and Anna on her knees beside her mother. There’d been enough time for the child to have gulped down a couple of griddle cakes. Lib cursed herself for the politeness that had kept her chitchatting with the farmer. And cursed the nun, too, for slipping away so fast; considering that Lib had sat through the entire Rosary yesterday evening, couldn’t Sister Michael have stayed a minute longer this morning? Although they weren’t supposed to share their views of the girl, surely the nun should have given Lib—the more experienced nurse—a report on any pertinent facts of the night shift.
Anna’s voice sounded low but clear, not as if she’d just bolted food. “My love is mine, and I am his, in me he dwells, in him I live.”
That sounded like poetry, but knowing this child it was Scripture.
The mother wasn’t praying, just nodding along, like an admirer in the balcony.
“Mrs. O’Donnell,” said Lib.
Rosaleen O’Donnell put her finger to her dry lips.
“You mustn’t be here,” said Lib.
Rosaleen O’Donnell’s head tilted to one side. “Sure can’t I say good morning to Anna?”
Face closed like a bud, the child gave no sign of hearing anything.
“Not like this.” Lib spelled it out: “Not without one of the nurses present. You mustn’t rush into her room ahead of us or have access to her furnishings.”
The Irishwoman reared up. “Isn’t any mother eager for a little prayer with her own sweet child?”
“You may certainly greet her night and morning. This is for your own good, yours and Mr. O’Donnell’s,” Lib added, to soften it. “You wish to prove you’re innocent of any sleight of hand, don’t you?”
For answer, Rosaleen O’Donnell sniffed. “Breakfast will be at nine,” she threw over her shoulder as she left.
That was still almost four hours away. Lib felt quite hollow. Farms had their routines, she supposed. But she should have asked the Ryan girl for something at the spirit grocery this morning, a crust in her hand, even.
At school Lib and her sister had always been hungry. (It was the time the two of them had got along best, she remembered; the fellow feeling of prisoners, she supposed now.) A sparing diet was considered beneficial for girls in particular because it kept the digestion in trim and built character. Lib didn’t believe she lacked self-control, but she found hunger pointlessly distracting; it made one think of nothing but food. So in adult life she never skipped a meal if she could help it.
Anna made the sign of the cross and got up off her knees now. “Good morning, Mrs. Wright.”
Lib considered the girl with grudging respect. “Good morning, Anna.” Even if the girl had somehow snatched a sip or a bite of something during the nun’s shift or just now with her mother, it couldn’t have been much; only a mouthful, at most, since yesterday morning. “How was your night?” Lib got out her memorandum book.
“I have slept and have taken my rest,” quoted Anna, crossing herself again before pulling off her nightcap, “and I have risen up, because the Lord hath protected me.”
“Excellent,” said Lib, because she didn’t know what else to say. Noticing that the inside of the cap was streaked with shed hair.
The girl unbuttoned her nightdress, slipped it down, and tied the sleeves around her middle. A strange disproportion between her fleshless shoulders and thick wrists and hands, between her narrow chest and bloated belly. She sluiced herself with water from the basin. “Make thy face to shine upon thy servant,” she said under her breath, then dried herself with the cloth, shivering.
From under the bed Lib pulled out the chamber pot, which was clean. “Did you use this at all, child?”
Anna nodded. “Sister gave it to Kitty to empty.”
What was in it? Lib should have asked but found she couldn’t.
Anna pulled her nightdress back up over her shoulders. She wet the small cloth, then reached down under the linen to wash one leg modestly as she balanced on the other, holding the dresser to steady herself. The shimmy, drawers, dress, and stockings she put on were all yesterday’s.
Lib usually insisted on a daily change, but she felt she couldn’t in a family as poor as this one. She draped the sheets and blanket over the footboard to air before she began her examination of the girl.
Tuesday, August 9, 5:23 a.m.
Water taken: 1 tsp.
Pulse: 95 beats per minute.
Lungs: 16 respirations per minute.
Temperature: cool.
Although temperature was guesswork, really, depending on whether the nurse’s fingers happened to be warmer or colder than the patient’s armpit.
“Put out your tongue, please.” By training Lib always noted the condition of the tongue, though she’d have been hard-pressed to tell what it said about the subject’s health. Anna’s was red, with an odd flatness at the back instead of the usual tiny bumps.
When Lib put her stethoscope to Anna’s navel, she heard a faint gurgling, though that could be attributed to the mixing of air and water; it didn’t prove the presence of food. Sounds in digestive cavity, she wrote, of uncertain origin.
Today she’d have to ask Dr. McBrearty about those swollen lower legs and hands. Lib supposed it could be argued that any symptoms arising from a limited diet were all to the good, because sooner or later, surely they’d provoke the girl to give up this grotesque charade. She made the bed again, tightening the sheets.
Nurse and charge settled into a sort of rhythm on this second day. They read—Lib caught up on Madame Defarge’s nefarious doings in All the Year Round—and chatte
d a little. The girl was charming, in her unworldly way. Lib found it hard to keep in mind that Anna was a trickster, a great liar in a country famous for them.
Several times an hour the child whispered what Lib thought of as the Dorothy prayer. Was it meant to strengthen her resolve every time emptiness cramped her belly?
Later in the morning Lib took Anna out for another constitutional—only around the farmyard, because the skies were threatening. When Lib remarked on Anna’s halting gait, the child said that was just how she walked. She sang hymns as she went, like a stoical soldier.
“Do you like riddles?” Lib asked her when there came a break in the music.
“I don’t know any.”
“Dear me.” Lib remembered the riddles of childhood more vividly than all the things she’d had to memorize in the schoolroom. “What about this: ‘There’s not a kingdom on the earth, but what I’ve travelled o’er and o’er, and whether it be day or night I neither am nor can be seen. What am I?’”
Anna looked mystified, so Lib repeated it.
“‘I neither am nor can be seen,’” echoed the girl. “Does that mean that I amn’t—I don’t exist—or I amn’t seen?”
“The latter,” said Lib.
“Someone invisible,” said Anna, “who travels all across the earth—”
“Or something,” Lib put in.
The child’s frown lifted. “The wind?”
“Very good. You’re a quick study.”
“Another. Please.”
“Hmm, let’s see. ‘The land was white,’” Lib began, “‘the seed was black. It’ll take a good scholar to riddle me that.’”
“Paper, with ink on it!”
“Clever puss.”
“It was because of scholar.”
“You should go back to school,” Lib told her.
Anna looked away, towards a cow munching grass. “I’m all right at home.”
“You’re an intelligent girl.” The compliment came out more like an accusation.
Low clouds were gathering now, so Lib hurried the two of them back into the stuffy cabin. But then the rain held off, and she wished they’d stayed out longer.
Kitty finally brought in Lib’s breakfast: two eggs and a cup of milk. This time greed made Lib eat so fast, tiny fragments of shell crunched in her teeth. The eggs were gritty and reeked of peat; roasted in the ashes, no doubt.
How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized—as reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.
The child accepted a spoonful of water as if it were some rich wine.
“What’s so special about water?”
Anna looked confused.
Lib held up her own cup. “What’s the difference between water and this milk?”
Anna hesitated, as if this were another riddle. “There’s nothing in the water.”
“There’s nothing in the milk but water and the goodness of the grass the cow ate.”
Anna shook her head, almost smiling.
Lib dropped the subject because Kitty was coming in to take the tray.
She watched the child, who was embroidering a flower on the corner of a handkerchief. Head bent over her stitches, just the tip of her tongue sticking out, in the way of little girls trying their hardest.
A knock at the front door, shortly after ten. Lib heard a muffled conversation. Then Rosaleen O’Donnell tapped on the door of the bedroom and looked past the nurse. “More guests for you, pet. Half a dozen of them, some of them come all the way from America.”
The big Irishwoman’s sprightliness sickened Lib; she was like some chaperone at a debutante’s first ball. “I should have thought it obvious that such visits must be suspended, Mrs. O’Donnell.”
“Why so?” The mother jerked her head over her shoulder towards the good room. “These seem like decent people.”
“The watch requires conditions of regularity and calm. Without any way of checking what visitors might have on them—”
The woman interrupted. “What kind of what?”
“Well, food,” said Lib.
“Sure there’s food in this house already without anyone shipping it all the way across the Atlantic.” Rosaleen O’Donnell let out a laugh. “Besides, Anna doesn’t want it. Haven’t you seen proof of that by now?”
“My job is to make sure not only that no one passes the child anything, but that nothing is hidden where she can find it later.”
“Why ever would they do that when they’ve come all this way to see the amazing little girl who doesn’t eat?”
“Nonetheless.”
Mrs. O’Donnell’s lips set hard. “Our guests are in the house already, so they are, and ’tis too late to turn them away without grave offence.”
At this point it occurred to Lib to slam the bedroom door and set her back against it.
The woman’s pebble eyes held hers.
Lib decided to give in until she could speak to Dr. McBrearty. Lose a battle, win the war. She led Anna into the good room and took up a position right behind the child’s chair.
The visitors were a gentleman from the western port of Limerick with his wife and in-laws as well as a mother and daughter of their acquaintance who were visiting from the United States. The older American lady volunteered the information that she and her daughter were Spiritualists. “We believe the dead speak to us.”
Anna nodded, matter-of-fact.
“Your case, my dear, strikes us as the most glorious proof of the power of Mind.” The lady leaned over to squeeze the child’s fingers.
“No touching, please,” said Lib, and the visitor jerked back.
Rosaleen O’Donnell put her head in the door to offer them a cup of tea.
Lib was convinced the woman was provoking her. No food, she mouthed.
One of the gentlemen was interrogating Anna about the date of her last meal.
“April the seventh,” she told him.
“That was your eleventh birthday?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how do you believe you’ve survived this long?”
Lib expected Anna to shrug or say she didn’t know. Instead she murmured something that sounded like mamma.
“Speak up, little girl,” said the older Irishwoman.
“I live on manna from heaven,” said Anna. As simply as she might have said, I live on my father’s farm.
Lib shut her eyes briefly so as not to roll them in disbelief.
“Manna from heaven,” the younger Spiritualist repeated to the elder. “Fancy that.”
The visitors were pulling out presents now. From Boston, a toy called a thaumatrope; did Anna have anything like it?
“I haven’t any toys,” she told them.
They liked that; the charming gravity of her tone. The Limerick gentleman showed her how to twist the disc’s two strings, then twirl it, so the pictures on the two sides blurred into one.
“The bird’s in the cage now,” marvelled Anna.
“Aha,” he cried, “mere illusion.”
The disc slowed and stopped, so the empty cage was left on the back, and the bird on the front flew free.
After Kitty brought the tea in, the wife produced something even more curious: a walnut that popped open in Anna’s hand to let out a crumpled ball that relaxed into a pair of exquisitely thin yellow gloves. “Chicken skin,” said the lady, fondling them. “All the rage when I was a child. Never made anywhere in the world but Limerick. I’ve kept this pair half a century without tearing them.”
Anna drew the gloves on, finger by fat finger; they were too long, but not by much.
“Bless you, my child, bless you.”
Once the tea was drunk, Lib made a pointed remark about Anna needing to rest.
“Would you say a little prayer with us first?” asked the lady who’d given her the gloves.
Anna looked t
o Lib, who felt she had to nod.
“Infant Jesus, meek and mild,” the girl began.
Look on me, a little child.
Pity mine and pity me,
Suffer me to come to thee.
“Beautiful!”
The elderly lady wanted to leave some homeopathic tonic pills.
Anna shook her head.
“Ah, keep them, do.”
“She can’t take them, Mother,” the woman’s daughter reminded her in a hiss.
“I don’t believe absorption under the tongue would count as eating, exactly.”
“No, thank you,” said Anna.
As they left, Lib listened to the coins clink into the money box.
Rosaleen O’Donnell was hooking a pot out of the dull heart of the fire and knocking ashen sods off its lid. Hands padded with rags, she lifted the lid and took out a round loaf with a cross marked on top.
Everything was religion here, thought Lib. Also, she was beginning to see why all her meals tasted of peat. If she did stay the full fortnight, she’d have consumed a good handful of boggy soil; the thought soured her mouth. “Those will be the last visitors admitted,” she told the mother in her firmest voice.
Anna was leaning on the half-door, watching the party climb into their carriage.
Rosaleen O’Donnell straightened up, shaking out her skirts. “Hospitality’s a sacred law with the Irish, Mrs. Wright. If anyone knocks, we must open up and feed and shelter them, even if the kitchen floor do be thick with sleeping people already.” The sweep of her arm encompassed a horde of invisible guests.
Hospitality, my foot. “This is hardly a matter of taking in paupers,” Lib told her.
“Rich, poor, we’re all alike in the eyes of God.”
It was the pious tone that pushed Lib over the edge. “These people are gawkers. So keen to see your daughter apparently subsist without food, they’re willing to pay for the privilege!”
Anna was twirling her thaumatrope now; it caught the light.
Mrs. O’Donnell chewed her lip. “If the sight moves them to almsgiving, what’s wrong with that?”
The child went up to her mother just then and handed over her gifts. To distract the two women from their quarrel? Lib wondered.
“Ah sure these are yours, pet,” said Rosaleen.
Anna shook her head. “The gold cross that lady left the other day, didn’t Mr. Thaddeus say it’d raise a good sum for the needy?”
The Wonder Page 7
