Academy Street

by Mary Costello

  ‘It’ll be for the best,’ she says.

  Her father says nothing.

  ‘It’ll only be for a year or two,’ Aunt Maud says. ‘And sure ye’ll be over and back, and Kathleen can bring him back every Sunday to play with the girls.’ She looks around the table. ‘That’s settled so. And isn’t it what she wanted herself?’

  ‘It is,’ her father says at last. ‘It’s what she wanted, all right.’

  She goes up to the front hall and drags a stool over to open the door. It is dark outside. She sits on the step and folds her arms. She can make out the laurel tree on the lawn. She remembers when she and Maeve came home from school every day, her mother sitting under the shiny laurel tree with a blanket around her knees, sewing, and Oliver beside her in his cradle. Sometimes her head was down, sleeping. Oliver wasn’t long born and he was sleeping too. Tess would run to them and look in over the top of his cradle and smell his baby smell. Her mother’s long hair was tied back. Then she would get a fit of coughing and her hair would come loose. Once there was blood in her hankie. When she was in bed, sick, her hair was let down. They took Tess up to her mother’s room last week and her mother was sitting up in her white nightdress. They lifted her onto the high bed and her mother kissed her forehead. But then, when Tess started to stroke her mother’s hair and lie against her, Evelyn said, Come on, down with you now, madam, and she took her away.

  Tess has not had her tea. She wonders who will make their teas now. She likes a boiled egg and currant cake with butter. She likes when her mother stands beside her father at the table and pours him a cup of steaming tea from the teapot. Sometimes, he puts out his hand and touches her mother’s bottom and she and her sisters pretend not to see. Her mother is in her coffin in the chapel tonight. God will probably drop down his Golden Chute soon—any minute now—when he is ready to take her mother up into Heaven. That is how she, Tess, and her brothers and sisters arrived on earth. Her mother told her that whenever she and Tess’s father wanted a new baby, she went to the chapel and there she prayed and God, hearing her prayer, dropped down his Golden Chute and popped in a baby and down the chute the baby flew, fat and happy and gurgling, into her mother’s waiting arms.

  Tess takes off her shoes, looks up at the black sky, begins to hum. She is not sure if the Golden Chute actually takes people back up into Heaven. That is a guess. She wonders if her mother is on her way, now, this minute, moving through the dark sky, in and out among the cold stars. She grows a little afraid. She looks down at her hands. She picks at the old burn mark on her thumb. She bites off a bit of skin and chews it. She remembers the day she got the burn. Oliver wasn’t even born and she had not started school. She went out with her mother to feed the hens. Chuck, chuck, chuck, they called out. They went into the duck-house and the hen-house to gather the eggs. Her mother had a bucket and Tess had a small tin can. Tess wanted to be just like her mother. When her mother put the eggs in her bucket that day, Tess wanted eggs in her tin can too. She started to cry, but then her mother said, Look, Look, and she picked up three lovely shiny stones from the yard and put them into Tess’s can and rattled them around. Then her mother ran off inside, in case the bread got burnt. Tess ran after her, but she saw another lovely pebble shining up at her from the ground and she stopped and put it in her tin can and raced in through the small yard, calling out to her mother about her new pebble. At the back door she tripped and tumbled down the steps into the kitchen, and then, half running, she fell sideways into the open fire. Her mother cried out and let the griddle pan fall and ran and lifted Tess and swung her across the kitchen into the big white sink. Later, telling Tess’s father what had happened, her mother began to cry. Her two little hands were burnt, she told him, wiping her eyes. Tess tried to show him the pebbles but her hands were all bandaged up.

  Everyone dresses in black the next morning and goes to the funeral. Tess and Maeve stay behind with Mike Connolly. The dining-room table is set with the good china and cutlery. There’s a leg of mutton cooked and left aside in the kitchen. Mrs Glynn comes with warm brown bread. She takes off her coat and puts eggs on to boil. She tells Maeve to mash up cold potatoes with a fork. When the plates are ready Tess and Maeve carry them up to the dining room. Mrs Glynn puts on her coat and says if she hurries she’ll make the burial. Tess’s heart jumps. Mrs Glynn takes Maeve with her, but Tess is too young to go to the graveyard. ‘Your poor mother,’ she says. Before they leave Tess asks about Oliver. When is Oliver coming home? Mrs Glynn says they can come and see him tomorrow. He’ll be going to live with Aunt Maud after that.

  When they are gone the house is quiet. The smell of the mutton makes her feel sick. She listens to the clock ticking. Everything is changing. No one puts the wireless on any more. She hears water dripping inside the pipes high up on the wall. Upstairs the floorboards are creaking. She starts to grow afraid. She is sure there is someone up there. She thinks her mother will come down the stairs and into the kitchen. She runs out into the small yard and as she turns the corner onto the lawn she crashes into Mike Connolly. ‘Ah, a leanbh, slow down, slow down.’

  ‘I think Momma is coming down the stairs, Mike, I think she’s back. I heard her steps.’

  ‘Come on in now out of that, and make me some tea. My belly’s above in my back. D’you know how many cows I milked this morning, do you? Before you even turned over for your second sleep, Missy!’

  He throws two sods of turf on the fire, and hangs the kettle on the crane. The clock is quieter now. Outside, the crows are cawing. Mike is standing, looking into the fire, and she does the same. When the flames are big and red and the kettle is singing he makes a pot of tea. He cuts the bread and says, ‘Will we make a bit of toast?’ She smiles. He knows—like her mother knows—that toast is her favourite, favourite thing in the world. He sticks a cut of bread on a fork and leans in and holds it before the flames. She leans in too. Their faces grow pink and warm as the bread turns brown. He toasts three or four cuts and neither of them says a word. But she is happy. She is happy. They sit together at the big table and he butters her toast and spreads jam on it and her mouth waters. He pours two cups of tea and gives her a wink. ‘Eat up now,’ he says. And then, just as he is about to take a bite, he turns his head and sees something and a change comes over him. She follows his look to her mother’s apron hanging on a nail at the end of the dresser. It is floury around the belly from all the times her mother leaned against the table, kneading the bread. ‘Eat up, Mike,’ she says quickly. ‘Your toast is getting cold.’

  ∼

  They have all come back, the priest too, and they are sitting at the long table up in the dining room. Tess keeps an eye on the small china milk jugs, and when they are empty she runs all the way back to the kitchen and refills them. She moves along the table offering buns and shop cake from a plate. Her hair is tied back neatly. She stands straight, smiling politely when she is praised. The priest asks her how old she is. Seven, she tells him. He says she’s a great girl and that she’s the image of her mother and in that second her heart nearly bursts with happiness. She looks across the room, up at the spot above the window where the bird tore the wallpaper. She wants to run and find her mother and tell her what the priest just said.

  Her father sits at one end of the table, the priest at the other.

  ‘May the Lord have mercy on her soul,’ the priest says. ‘What age was she, Michael?’


  Her father stops eating. ‘1904, she was born. She was forty last March. That’s when she started to complain. Just after the child was born.’

  He looks around them all, then at the priest. ‘I met a nun once in a church in Galway,’ he says. ‘She was back from America. D’you know what she told me? She said that a man’s soul weighs the same as a snipe. Some scientist over there weighed people just before they died, TB patients she said, and then he weighed them again just after they died, beds and all. And weren’t they lighter…Imagine that…The soul was gone, she said.’

  Aunt Maud blows her nose into her handkerchief. Evelyn goes around the table with the teapot, then whispers something to Aunt Maud.

  ‘She told Evelyn where to get the linen table-cloth to put on the table for the meal,’ Aunt Maud says. ‘Isn’t that right, Evelyn?’

  Evelyn nods and sniffs. ‘She did. Only a few days ago. She told me which drawer it was in.’

  Tess is watching her father. He takes a drink of tea and swallows. All the time he is looking down. She can see the bones in his face moving under his skin.

  ‘She was a fine woman,’ the priest says. ‘A fine woman.’

  ‘She even told us which dress to lay her out in—her new blue dress,’ Evelyn says.

  Tess’s heart nearly stops. She understands what that means; her mother is lying in her coffin in her new blue dress. The one she got in Briggs’ that day that Tess got her dress, the one she is wearing now. Carefully, she leaves the cake plate up on the sideboard and walks out of the dining room on shaky legs. She climbs the stairs. The sun is flooding in through the stained-glass window, like yesterday. She hurries past, to the upstairs landing and down along the corridor to her parents’ room. The door is closed. She stands for a moment, then turns the handle and walks in. It is dark. The drapes have not been opened. There is a bad smell, like when a mouse dies under the floorboards. She runs and drags open the drapes on one of the windows. The mirror is still covered with the black cloth. On the dressing table there is a photograph of her father and mother on their wedding day. She looks at it. Her father might get a new wife now. She might get a new mother. There is another photograph of her mother in a nurse’s uniform when she was young and working in a hospital down in Cork. She opens the top drawer, lifts out a red cloth box, checks her mother’s brooches, her locket, her hat pins. Nothing is missing. She opens the wardrobe door and gets a terrible fright. For a second she thinks there are people in funeral clothes standing inside the wardrobe. She pushes at the coats and the dresses but there are too many and she is too small and they fall back in her way again. She pulls and drags on the hems of the dresses and skirts, bringing them towards the light. She is almost crying. There is no blue dress. Her mother is wearing it in the coffin. Then she remembers that her mother is no longer in the chapel. She is down in the ground now. Or up in Heaven.

  In the dark she is counting sheep, like Claire told her to do. It is no good, she cannot sleep. She starts to count all the days since she was born, but it is too hard. She tries to remember every single day, every single minute with her mother. Suddenly, there is a loud bang. She sits up, terrified. She hears dogs barking in the distance. Maeve does not stir in her bed across the room. Then everything is silent again. She listens out for sounds in the house. A big bright moon is shining into the room, making everything white, even the floor-boards. Mellow the moonlight. When the woman comes on the wireless singing this song, her mother sings along. There’s a form at the casement, a form of her true love. And he whispered with face bent, I’m waiting for you love. Tess meant to ask her mother what a casement was, and a form. Her mother said there is a man in the moon and Tess kneels up on her bed now and looks out the window, turning her head this way and that, trying to make out his face.

  In the morning before it is fully bright she wakes up. She listens out for Oliver. And then she remembers and a sick feeling comes over her. Early each morning last summer the little birds used to sing, huddled together under the roof above her window. Now they are all gone, their wings and tiny hearts are grown up. She closes her eyes, tries to go back to sleep. The house is so quiet she thinks everyone might be gone and she is the only one left. She pulls the blankets up to her chin to keep out the cold.

  She sits up, looks across at Maeve sleeping. She gets out of bed and runs over to the big window, hardly feeling the floor under her. The sky is grey and low, everything still asleep. She looks out across the lawn, then far off over the fields. Her father is coming over a hill, in his long coat, with a gun on his shoulder. He is carrying dead rabbits. He comes nearer and nearer. She has never seen him like this, so lonely.

  2

  THEY ARE RUNNING down the road to Glynns’. Running, she feels free. In her bare legs, in the rush of air, she feels strong and free. She keeps up with Maeve, happy, almost dancing, almost forgetting what has happened. The door opens and Mrs Glynn walks out with Oliver in her arms. They run to him, cooing, and take him into their own arms. Inside, they sit on a rug and eat bread and jam and play with Oliver until they all grow tired and quiet.

  Just when her thoughts start to come against her and she remembers why she is here, there is a knock on the door. A family of tinkers stands outside. Maeve and Tess gather close to Mrs Glynn. ‘God bless this house and all in it,’ the tinker woman says in a rough voice. She has a baby in her arms and three or four children beside her. A girl of about Tess’s age is chewing the ends of her hair. She stops chewing and looks at Tess in a way that makes Tess look away. Out on the road the tinker man and three older boys wait with the donkey and cart. Tess recognises the tinker man. He came to the school one day and cleaned out the lavatories. The tinker woman holds out an empty tin can now, begging for milk or anything they can spare. Her big brown face and her rough voice and all the wild children frighten Tess and she cannot wait for them to go away again.

  She stands at the window and watches them crowd onto the cart and squat down. As they pull away it starts to rain. The girl is behind, facing back, and she catches Tess’s eye again and stares at her. Tess feels cold and strange. She is afraid the girl will put a spell on her. She thinks the tinker girl knows something about her, something that Tess herself does not know. The girl straightens up. Her eyes lock onto Tess’s. Slowly, she sticks out her tongue. Tess’s heart almost stops. It is meant for her and her alone. She is doomed, cursed. The cart rounds a bend and disappears out of sight.

  The next evening Aunt Maud comes and brings Oliver away. They have packed up all his things. Tess watches as their uncle Frank’s car drives away. She walks around the house, trying to find a place that will make her feel right again. She goes to all her favourite rooms, to the space under the back stairs, the orchard. But happiness does not return. Nothing will do away with this feeling she is carrying inside her, like a bad secret.

  Her older sisters, Evelyn and Claire, do not return to boarding school. On their first morning back at national school Claire walks Tess and Maeve to the end of the avenue. They have mutton sandwiches and shop cake, left over from the funeral, for their lunches. They walk along the road to the end of their father’s farm. Tess grows nervous; she is not sure they will be safe venturing this far from home. She looks into a field where the cattle are butting heads and jumping on each other’s backs.

  In the school yard the children form a circle a
round herself and Maeve and for a little while she feels special. Is your mammy dead? they ask. She wonders if there is a way people can tell now. ‘Did ye touch her—was she as cold as marble? Where’s she buried?’ one of the big boys asks. Kildoon, Maeve says. ‘That’s where Seán Blake’s granny is buried. Her grave was robbed,’ he says. ‘They dug up her coffin and took the rings off her fingers and the pennies off her eyes.’ He looks straight at Tess. Then the bell rings.

  She is allowed to sit with Maeve in the senior classroom today. Before the lesson begins Mr Clarke the headmaster picks up an egg from his desk and turns his back on the children and cracks it open. He throws back his head and swallows the raw egg in one gulp. A rainbow appears in the sky and he writes the seven colours on the blackboard and raps his cane as the children chant out the words. She sits close to Maeve, their arms touching. She is stiff with fear. She cannot read so she tries hard to remember the colours. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, she calls, flinching at each rap of the cane.

  On the way home they pass the tinkers’ camp at the Black Bend. The dogs start to bark. The trees are leaning low and dark, but she can see the tents and the fires and children crying and running around in their bare feet. A man is sitting on an upside-down bucket, hammering a tin can. There are rags drying on bushes, and a horse and a donkey tied to a tree. ‘Hurry on,’ Maeve says in a low voice and they walk quickly. Then Tess sees the girl from the day before, standing outside a tent. She looks smaller, paler. The girl sees Tess too. Tess has the feeling that they know each other, or that they are somehow close, the way sisters are close, and that the girl understands this too. She wants to smile, to show that they are friends. Then she does something—she sticks her tongue out at the tinker girl, just like the girl did yesterday. The girl frowns and looks sad and Tess feels bad. Her heart feels sick. It was only a game, she wants to say. But the girl is turning away. She lifts the flap of the tent and enters.