by Edna O'Brien
“Who’s the archbishop! Are you a bloody Protestant or what?” she asked.
I was walking very quickly. I hoped she might get tired of me and go into the paper shop for a free read of adventure books. The woman in the paper shop was half blind, and Baba stole a lot of books from there.
I was breathing so nervously that the wings of my nose got wide.
“My nose is getting wider. Will it go back again to normal?” I asked.
“Your nose,” she said, “is always wide. You’ve a nose like a bloody petrol pump.”
We passed the fair green and the market house and the rows of tumbling, musty little shops on either side of us. We passed the bank, which was a lovely two-story house and had a polished knocker, and we crossed the bridge. Even on a still day like that, the noise from the river was urgent and rushing, as if it were in full flood.
Soon we were out of the town and climbing the hill that led to the forge. The hill rose between the trees, and it was dark in there because the leaves almost met overhead. And it was quiet except for the clink-clank from the forge where Billy Tuohey was beating a horseshoe into shape. Overhead the birds were singing and fussing and twittering.
“Those bloody birds get on my nerves,” she said, making a face up at them.
Billy Tuohey nodded to us through the open window space. It was so smoky in there we could hardly see him. He lived with his mother in a cottage at the back of the forge. They kept bees, and he was the only man around who grew Brussels sprouts. He told lies, but they were nice lies. He told us that he sent his photo to Hollywood and got a cable back to say COME QUICK YOU HAVE THE BIGGEST EYES SINCE GRETA GARBO. He told us that he dined with the Aga Khan at the Galway races and that they played snooker after dinner. He told us that his shoes were stolen when he left them outside the door of the hotel. He told us so many lies and so many stories, his stories filled in the nights, the dark nights, and their colors were exotic like the colors of the turf flames. He danced jigs and reels, too, and he played the accordion very well.
“What’s Billy Tuohey?” she asked suddenly as if she wanted to frighten me.
“A blacksmith,” I said.
“Jesus, you lumping eejit. What else?”
“What?”
“Billy Tuohey is a fly boy.”
“Does he get girls into trouble?” I asked.
“No. He keeps bees,” she said, and sighed. I was a dull dog.
We came to her gate and she ran in with her school bag. I didn’t wait for her; I didn’t want her to come. The wild bees from a nest in the stone wall made a sleepy, murmuring sound, and the fruit trees outside the barber’s house were shedding the last of their petals. There was a pool of white and pink petals under the apple tree, and the children stepped over the petals, crushing them under their bare feet. The two youngest were hanging over the wall saying “Good after-noona” to everyone who went by. They were eating slices of bread-and-jam.
“What do Mickey the Barbers eat for breakfast?” she asked as she caught up with me. The barber’s children were always known as Mickey the Barbers because their father’s name was Mickey and there were too many children for one to remember their separate names.
“Bread and tea, I suppose.”
“Hair soup, you fool. What do Mickey the Barber’s eat for lunch?”
“Hair soup.” I felt very smart now.
“No. Jugged hair, you eejit.” She picked a stalk of tough grass off the side of the ditch, chewed it thoughtfully, and spat it out. She was bored and I didn’t know why she came at all.
As we came near our gate I ran on ahead of her and almost walked over him. He was sitting on the ground with his back against the bark of an elm tree and there were shadows of leaves on his face. The shadows moved. He was asleep.
“I couldn’t mind you,” he said finally. “I have to milk cows and feed calves and feed hens. I have to carry this place on my shoulders.” He was enjoying his importance.
“I don’t need minding,” I said. “I just want you to stay in at night with me.” But he shook his head. I knew that I would have to go. So I was determined to be difficult. “What about my nightgown?” I asked.
“Go up for it,” Baba said calmly. How could they be so calm when my teeth were chattering?
“I can’t. I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” asked Hickey. “Sure, he’s in Limerick by now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure! Didn’t he come down and get a lift on the mail car? You won’t see him for ten or eleven days, not till all the money is spent.”
“Come on, booby, I’ll go with you,” Baba said. I wanted to ask Hickey if Mama was all right. I whispered.
“Can’t hear you.”
I whispered again.
“Can’t hear you.”
I let it go. He went over across the field whistling, and we went up the avenue. The avenue was full of weeds and there were wheel ruts on either side of it from carts that went up and down every day.
“Have you nits?” she asked, making a face.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“If you had nits, you couldn’t stay. Couldn’t have things crawling over my pillow; creepy-crawly things like that would carry you off.”
“Off where?”
“To the Shannon.”
“That’s daft.”
“No. You’re daft,” she said, lifting up a coil of my hair and looking carefully at the scalp. Then suddenly she dropped the coil of hair as if she had seen some terrible disease. “Have to dose you. You’re full of bugs and fleas and nits and flies and all sorts of vermin.” I came out in gooseflesh.
Bull’s-Eye was eating bread off an enamel plate that someone had put on the flag for him. Poor Bull’s-Eye, so someone had remembered.
Inside, the kitchen was untidy and the range was out. Mama’s Wellingtons were in the middle of the floor and there were two cans of milk on the kitchen table; so was the stationery box. It was in it she kept her powder and lipstick and things. Her powder puff was gone and her rosary beads were taken from the nail off the dresser. She was gone. Really gone.
“Come upstairs with me,” I said to Baba. My knees were shaking uncontrollably.
“Anything a person could eat?” she asked, opening the breakfast-room door. She knew that Mama kept tins of biscuits in there behind one of the curtains. The room was dark and sad and dusty. The whatnot, with its collection of knickknacks and chocolate-box lids and statues and artificial flowers, looked silly now that Mama wasn’t there. The crab shells that she used as ashtrays were all over the room. Baba picked up a couple and put them down again.
“Jesus, this place is like a bloody bazaar,” said Baba, going over to the whatnot to salute all the statues.
“Hello, St. Anthony. Hello, St. Jude, patron of hopeless cases.” She picked up an Infant of Prague and the head came off in her hand. She roared laughing, and when I offered her a biscuit from a tin of assorted ones, she took all the chocolate ones and put them in her pocket.
Then she saw the butter on the tiled curb of the fireplace. Mama kept it there in summertime to keep it cool. She picked up a couple of pounds. “Might as well have this toward your keep. We’ll go up and have a look at her jewelry,” she said.
Mama had rings that Baba coveted. They were nice rings. Mama got them for presents when she was a young girl. She had been to America. She had a lovely face then. A round, sallow face with the most beautiful, clear, trusting eyes. Turquoise blue. And hair that had two colors. Some strands were red-gold and some were brown, so that it couldn’t possibly have been dyed. I had hair like her. But Baba put it out at school that I dyed mine.
“Your hair is like old mattress stuffing,” she said when I told her what I was thinking.
Soon as we went into the guest room, where the rings were, the ewer rattled in the basin, and the flowers that were laid into it moved, as if propelled by a gentle wind. They weren’t flowers really but ears of corn that Mama had covered with
pieces of silver paper and gold paper. They were displayed with stalks of pampas grass that she had dyed pink. They were garish, like colors in a carnival. But Mama liked them. She was house-proud. Always doing something.
“Get out the rings and stop looking into the damn mirror.” The mirror was clouded over with green spots, but I looked in it out of habit. I got out the brown and gold box where the jewelry was kept and Baba fitted on everything. The rings and the two pearl brooches and the amber necklace that came down to her stomach.
“You could give me one of these rings,” she said, “if you weren’t so bloody stingy.”
“They’re Mama’s, I couldn’t,” I said in a panic.
“They’re Mama’s, I couldn’t,” she said, and my voice was high and thin and watery when she mimicked it. She opened the wardrobe and got out the green georgette dance dress and then admired herself in the clouded mirror and danced a little on her toes. She was very pretty when she danced. I was clumsy.
“Sssh, I thought I heard something,” I said. I was almost certain that I heard a step downstairs.
“Ah, it’s the dog,” she said.
“I better go down, he might knock over one of the cans of milk. Did we leave the back door open?” I ran down and stopped dead in the kitchen doorway, because there he was. There was my father, drunk, his hat pushed far back on his head and his white raincoat open. His face was red and fierce and angry. I knew that he would have to strike someone.
“A nice thing to come into an empty house. Where’s your mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Answer my question.” I dreaded looking at those eyes, which were blue and huge and bulging. Like glass eyes.
“I don’t know.”
He came over and gave me a punch under the chin so that my two rows of teeth clattered together, and with his wild lunatic eyes he stared at me. “Always avoiding me. Always avoiding your father. You little s——. Where’s your mother or I’ll kick the pants off you.”
I shouted for Baba and she came tripping down the stairs with a beaded bag of Mama’s hanging from her wrist. He took his hands off me at once. He didn’t like people to think that he was brutal. He had the name of being a gentleman, a decent man who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“Good evening, Mr. Brady,” she said.
“Well, Baba. Are you a good girl?” I was edging nearer the door that led to the scullery. I’d be safer there where I could run. I could smell the whiskey. He had hiccups, and every time he hicked Baba laughed. I hoped he wouldn’t catch her, or he might kill both of us.
“Mrs. Brady is gone away. It’s her father, he’s not well. Mrs. Brady got word to go and Caithleen is to stay with us.” She was eating a chocolate biscuit while she spoke, and there were crumbs in the corners of her pretty lips.
“She’ll stay and look after me. That’s what she’ll do.” He spoke very loud, and he was shaking his fist in my direction.
“Oh.” Baba smiled. “Mr. Brady, there is someone coming to look after you—Mrs. Burke from the cottages. As a matter of fact, we have to go down now and let her know that you’re here.” He said nothing. He let out another hiccup. Bull’s-Eye came in and was brushing my leg with his white hairy tail.
“We better hurry,” Baba said, and she winked at me. He took a pile of notes out of his pocket and gave Baba one folded, dirty pound note.
“Here,” he said, “that’s for her keep. I don’t take anything for nothing.” Baba thanked him and said he shouldn’t have bothered, and we left.
“Jesus, he’s blotto, let’s run,” she said, but I couldn’t run, I was too weak.
“And we forgot the damn butter,” she added. I looked back and saw him coming out the gate after us, with great purposeful strides.
“Baba,” he called. She asked me if we should run. He called again. I said we’d better not because I wasn’t able.
We stood until he caught up with us.
“Give me back that bit of money. I’ll settle up with your father myself. I’ll be getting him over here next week to do a few jobs.”
He took it and walked off quickly. He was hurrying to the public house or maybe to catch the evening bus to Portumna. He had a friend there who kept racehorses.
“Mean devil, he owes my daddy twenty pounds,” Baba said. I saw Hickey coming over the field and I waved to him. He was driving the cows. They straggled across the field, stopping for a minute, as cows will, to stare idly at nothing. Hickey was whistling, and the evening being calm and gentle, his song went out across the field. A stranger going along the road might have thought that ours was a happy farm; it seemed so, happy and rich and solid in the copper light of the warm evening. It was a red cut-stone house set among the trees, and in the evening time, when the sun was going down, it had a luster of its own, with fields rolling out from it in a flat, uninterrupted expanse of green.
“Hickey, you told me a lie. He came back and nearly killed me.” Hickey was within a few yards from us, standing between two cows with a hand on each of them.
“Why didn’t you hide?”
“I walked straight into him.”
“What did he want?”
“To fight, as always.”
“Mean devil. He gave me a pound for her keep and took it back again,” Baba said.
“If I had a penny for every pound he owes me,” Hickey said, shaking his head fondly. We owed Hickey a lot of money and I was worried that he might leave us and get a job with the forestry, where he’d be paid regularly.
“Sure you won’t go, Hickey?” I pleaded.
“I’ll be off to Birmingham when the summer is out,” he said. My two greatest fears in life were that Mama would die of cancer and that Hickey would leave. Four women in the village had died of cancer. Baba said it was something to do with not having enough babies. Baba said that all nuns get cancer. Just then I remembered about my scholarship and I told Hickey. He was pleased.
“Oh, you’ll be a toff from now on,” he said. The brown cow lifted her tail and wet the grass.
“Anyone want lemonade?” he asked, and we ran off. He slapped the cow on the back and she moved lazily. The cows in front moved, too, and Hickey followed them with a new whistle. The evening was very still.
4
Baba called her mother—”Martha, Martha”—as we went into the hall. It was a tiled hall and it smelled of floor polish.
We went up the carpeted stairs. A door opened slowly and Martha put her head out.
“Sssh, sssh,” she said, and beckoned us to come in. We went into the bedroom and she shut the door quietly behind us.
“Hello, horror,” Declan said to Baba. He was her younger brother. He was eating a leg of a chicken.
There was a cooked chicken on a plate in the center of the big bed. It was overcooked and was falling apart.
“Take off your coat,” Martha said to me. She seemed to be expecting me. Mama must have called. Martha looked pale, but then she was always pale. She had a pale Madonna face with eyelids always lowered, and behind them her eyes were big and dark so that you could not see their color, but they reminded one of purple pansies. Velvety. She was wearing red velvet shoes with little crusts of silver on the front of them, and her room smelled of perfume and wine and grown-upness. She was drinking red wine.
“Where’s the aul fella?” Baba asked.
“I don’t know.” Martha shook her head. Her black hair, which was usually piled high on her head, hung below her shoulders and curled upward a little.
“Whatja bring the chicken in here?” Baba asked.
“Whatja think?” Declan said, throwing her the wishbone.
“So’s the aul fella won’t get it,” she said, addressing the photograph of her father on the mantelpiece. She shot at him with her right hand and said, “Bang, bang.”
Martha gave me a wing of chicken. I dipped it in the salt cellar and ate it. It was delicious.
“Your mam’s gone away for a few days,” she said to me, and once again I felt th
e lump in my throat. Sympathy was bad for me. Not that Martha was motherly. She was too beautiful and cold for that.
Martha was what the villagers called fast. Most nights she went down to the Greyhound Hotel, dressed in a tight black suit with nothing under the jacket, only a brassiere, and with a chiffon scarf knotted at her throat. Strangers and commercial travelers admired her. Pale face, painted nails, blue-black pile of hair, Madonna face, perched on a high stool in the lounge bar of the Greyhound Hotel; they thought she looked sad. But Martha was not ever sad, unless being bored is a form of sadness. She wanted two things from life and she got them—drink and admiration.
“There’s trifle in the pantry. Molly left it there,” she said to Baba. Molly was a sixteen-year-old maid, from a small farm up the country. During her first week at Brennans’ she wore Wellingtons all the time, and when Martha reproved her for this, she said that she hadn’t anything else. Martha often beat Molly, and locked her in a bedroom whenever Molly asked to go to a dance in the town hall. Molly told the dressmaker that “they,” meaning the Brennans, ate big roasts every day while she herself got sausages and old potato mash. But this may have been just a story. Martha was not mean. She took pride and vengeance in spending his money, but like all drinkers, she was reluctant to spend on anything other than drink.
Baba came in with a Pyrex dish that was half full of trifle, and she set it down on the bed along with saucers and dessert spoons. Her mother dished it out. The pink trifle with a slice of peach, a glacé cherry, a cut banana, and uneven lumps of sponge cake, all reminded me of the days when we had trifle at home. I could see Mama piling it on our plates, my father’s, my own, and Hickey’s, and leaving only a spoonful for herself in the bottom of the bowl. I could see her getting angry and wrinkling her nose if I protested, and my father snapping at me to shut up, and Hickey sniggering and saying, “All the more for us.” I was thinking of this when I heard Baba say, “She doesn’t eat trifle,” meaning me. Her mother divided the extra plate among the three of them, and my mouth watered while I watched them eat.
“Martha, hey, old Martha, what will I be when I grow up?” Declan asked his mother. He was smoking a cigarette and was learning to inhale.
