by Edna O'Brien
Cycling home was a joy; we spun downhill, saying to hell with safety, to hell with brakes, saluted strangers, admired all the little cottages and the outhouses and the milk tanks and the whining mongrels, and had no nerves passing the haunted house. In fact, we would have liked to see an apparition on that most buoyant of days. When we got to the crossroads that led to our own village, Eily had a strong presentiment, as indeed had I, that he would be there waiting for us, contrite, in a hair shirt, on bended knees. But he was not. There was the usual crowd of lads playing pitch and toss. A couple of the younger ones tried to impede us by standing in front of the bikes, and Eily blushed red. She was a favorite with everyone that summer, and she had a different dress for every day of the week. She was called a fashion plate. We said good night and knew that it did not matter, that though he had not been waiting for us, before long he and Eily would be united. She resolved to be patient and be a little haughty and not seek him out.
Three weeks later, on a Saturday night, my mother was soaking her feet in a mixture of warm water and washing soda when a rap came on the scullery window. We both trembled. There was a madman who had taken up residence in a bog hole and we were certain that it must be him. “Call your father,” she said. My father had gone to bed in a huff, because she had given him a boiled egg instead of a fry for his tea. I didn’t want to leave her alone and unattended, so I yelled up to my father, and at the same time a second assault was delivered on the windowpane. I heard the words “Sir, sir.”
It was Eily’s father, since he was the only person who called my father sir. When we opened the door to him, the first thing I saw was the slash hook in his hand, and then the condition of his hair, which was upstanding and wild. He said, “I’ll hang, draw, and quarter him,” and my mother said, “Come in, Mr. Hogan,” not knowing whom this graphic fate was intended for. He said he had found his daughter in the lime kiln, with the bank clerk, in the most satanic position, with her belly showing.
My first thought was one of delight at their reunion, and then I felt piqued that Eily hadn’t told me but had chosen instead to meet him at night in that disused kiln, which reeked of damp. Better the woods, I thought, and the call of the cuckoo, and myself keeping some kind of watch, though invariably glued to the bark of a tree.
He said he had come to fetch a lantern, to follow them as they had scattered in different directions, and he did not know which of them to kill first. My father, whose good humor was restored by this sudden and unexpected intrusion, said to hold on for a moment, to step inside so that they could consider a plan of campaign. Mr. Hogan left his cap on the step, a thing he always did, and my mother begged him to bring it in, since the new pup ate every article of clothing that it could find. Only that very morning my mother looked out on the field and thought it was flakes of snow, but in fact it was her line of washing, chewed to pieces. He refused to bring in his cap, which to me was a perfect example of how stubborn he was and how awkward things were going to be. At once, my father ordered my mother to make tea, and though still gruff, there was between them now an understanding, because of the worse tragedy that loomed. My mother seemed the most perturbed, made a hopeless cup of tea, cut the bread in agricultural hunks, and did everything wrong, as if she herself had just been found out in some base transaction. After the men had gone out on their search party, she got me to go down on my knees to pray with her, I found it hard to pray, because I was already thinking of the flogging I would get for being implicated. She cross-examined me. Did I know anything about it? Had Eily ever met him? Why had she made herself so much style, especially that slit skirt.
I said no to everything. These no’s were much too hastily delivered, and if my mother had not been so busy cogitating and surmising, she would have suspected something for sure. Kneeling there, I saw them trace every movement of ours, get bits of information from this one and that one, the so-called cousins, the woman who had promised us the gooseberries, and Mrs. Bolan. I knew we had no hope. Eily! Her most precious thing was gone, her jewel. The inside of one was like a little watch, and once the jewel or jewels were gone, the outside was nothing but a sham. I saw her die in the cold lime kiln and then again in a sick room, and then stretched out on an operating table, the very way I used to be. She had joined that small sodality of scandalous women who had conceived children without securing fathers and who were damned in body and soul. Had they convened they would have been a band of seven or eight, and might have sent up an unholy wail to their Maker and their covert seducers. The one thing I could not endure was the thought of her stomach protuberant and a baby coming out saying “Ba be.” Had I had the chance to see her, I should have suggested that we run away with gypsies.
Poor Eily, from then on she was kept under lock and key, and allowed out only to Mass, and then so concealed was she, with a mantilla over her face, that she was not even able to make a lip sign to me. Never did she look so beautiful as those subsequent Sundays in chapel, her hair and her face veiled, her pensive eyes peering through. I once sat directly in front of her, and when we stood up for the first Gospel, I stared up into her face and got such a dig in the ribs from my mother that I toppled over.
A mission commenced the following week, and a strange priest with a beautiful accent and a strong sense of rhetoric delivered the sermons each evening. It was better than a theater—the chapel in a state of hush, ladders of candles, all lit, extra flowers on the altar, a medley of smells, the white linen, and the place so packed that we youngsters had to sit on the altar steps and saw everything clearer, including the priest’s Adam’s apple as it bobbed up and down. Always I could sight Eily, hemmed in by her mother and some other old woman, pale and impassive, and I was certain that she was about to die. On the evening that the sermon centered on the sixth commandment, we youngsters were kept outside until Benediction time. We spent the time wandering through the stalls, looking at the tiers of rosary beads that were as dazzling as necklaces, all hanging side by side and quivering in the breeze, all colors, and of different stones, then of course the bright scapulars, and all kinds of little medals and beautiful crucifixes that were bigger than the girth of one’s hand, and even some that had a little cavity within, where a relic was contained, and also beautiful prayer books and missals, some with gold edging, and little holdalls made of filigree.
When we trooped in for the Benediction, Eily slipped me a holy picture. It had Christ on the cross and a verse beneath it: “You have but one soul to save/One God to love and serve/One eternity to prepare for/Death will come soon./Judgment will follow—and then/Heaven or Hell forever.” I was musing on it and swallowing back my tears at the very moment that Eily began to retch and was hefted out by four of the men. They bore her aloft as if she were a corpse on a litter. I said to my mother that most likely Eily would die, and my mother said if only such a solution could occur. My mother already knew. The next evening Eily was in our house, in the front room, and though I was not admitted, I listened at the door and ran off only when there was a scream or a blow or a thud. She was being questioned about each and every event, and about the bank clerk and what exactly were her associations with him. She said no, over and over again, and at moments was quite defiant and, as they said, an “upstart.” One minute they were asking her kindly, another minute they were heckling, another minute her father swore that it was to the lunatic asylum that she would be sent, and then at once her mother was condemning her for not having milked for two weeks.
They were inconsistency itself. How could she have milked since she was locked in the room off the kitchen, where they stowed the oats and which was teeming with mice. I knew for a fact that her meals—a hunk of bread and a mug of weak tea—were handed into her twice a day, and that she had nothing else to do, only cry and think and sit herself upon the oats and run her fingers through it, and probably have to keep making noises to frighten off the mice. When they were examining her, my mother was the most reasonable, but also the most exacting. My mother would ask such th
ings as “Where did you meet? How long were you together? Were others present?” Eily denied ever having met him and was spry enough to say, “What do you take me for, Mrs. Brady, a hussy?” But that incurred some sort of a belt from her father, because I heard my mother say that there was no need to resort to savagery. I almost swooned when on the glass panel of our hall door I saw a shadow, then knuckles, and through the glass the appearance of a brown habit, such as the missioner wore.
He saw Eily alone; we all waited in the kitchen, the men supping tea, my mother segmenting a grapefruit to offer to the priest. It seemed odd fare to give him in the evening, but she was used to entertaining priests only at breakfast time, when one came every five or ten years to say Mass in the house to rebless it and put paid to the handiwork of the devil. When he was leaving, the missioner shook hands with each of us, then patted my hair. Watching his sallow face and his rimless spectacles, and drinking in his beautiful speaking voice, I thought that if I were Eily I would prefer him to the bank clerk, and would do anything to be in his company.
I had one second with Eily, while they all trooped out to open the gate for the priest and to wave him off. She said for God’s sake not to spill on her. Then she was taken upstairs by my mother, and when they reemerged, Eily was wearing one of my mother’s mackintoshes, a Mrs. Miniver hat, and a pair of old sunglasses. It was a form of disguise, since they were setting out on a journey. Eily’s father wanted to put a halter around her, but my mother said it wasn’t the Middle Ages. I was enjoined to wash cups and saucers, to empty the ashtray, and to plump the cushions again, but once they were gone, I was unable to move because of a dreadful pain that gripped the lower part of my back and stomach. I was convinced that I, too, was having a baby and that if I were to move or part my legs, some freakish thing would come tumbling out.
The following morning Eily’s father went to the bank, where he broke two glass panels, sent coins flying about the place, assaulted the bank manager, and tried to saw off part of the bank clerk’s anatomy. The two customers—the butcher and the undertaker—had to intervene, and the lady clerk, who was in the cloakroom, managed to get to the telephone to call the barracks. When the sergeant came on the scene, Eily’s father was being held down, his hands tied with a skipping rope, but he was still trying to aim a kick at the blackguard who had ruined his daughter. Very quickly the sergeant got the gist of things. It was agreed that Jack—that was the culprit’s name—would come to their house that evening. Though the whole occasion was to be fraught with misfortune, my mother, upon hearing of it, said some sort of buffet would have to be considered.
It proved to be an arduous day. The oats had to be shoveled out of the room, and the women were left to do it, since my father was busy seeing the solicitor and the priest, and Eily’s father remained in the town, boasting about what he would have done to the bugger if only the sergeant hadn’t come on the scene.
Eily was silence itself. She didn’t even smile at me when I brought the basket of groceries that her mother had sent me to fetch. Her mother kept referring to the fact that they would never provide bricks and mortar for the new house now. For years she and her husband had been skimping and saving, intending to build a house two fields nearer the road. It was to be identical to their own house, that is to say, a cement two-story house, but with the addition of a lavatory and a tiny hall inside the front door, so that, as she said, if company came, they could be vetted there instead of plunging straight into the kitchen. She was a backward woman, and probably because of living in the fields she had no friends and had never stepped inside anyone else’s door. She always washed outdoors at the rain barrel, and never called her husband anything but mister. Unpacking the groceries, she said that it was a pity to waste them on him, and the only indulgence she permitted herself was to smell the things, especially the packet of raspberry and custard biscuits. There was black-currant jam, a Scribona Swiss roll, a tin of herring in tomato sauce, a loaf, and a large tin of fruit cocktail.
Eily kept whitening and rewhitening her buckskin shoes. No sooner were they out on the window than she would bring them in and whiten again. The women were in the room putting the oats into sacks. They didn’t have much to say. My mother always used to laugh, because when they met, Mrs. Hogan used to say, “Any newses?” and look up at her with that wild stare, opening her mouth to show the big gaps between her front teeth, but the “newses” had at last come to her own door, and though she must have minded dreadfully, she seemed vexed more than ashamed, as if it was inconvenience rather than disgrace that had hit her. But from that day on, she almost stopped calling Eily by her pet name, which was Alannah.
I said to Eily that if she liked we could make toffee, because making toffee always humored her. She pretended not to hear. Even to her mother she refused to speak, and when asked a question she bared her teeth like one of the dogs. She wanted one of the dogs, Spot, to bite me, and led him to me by the ear, but he was more interested in a sheep’s head that I had brought from the town. It was an arduous day, what with carting out the oats in cans and buckets, and refilling it into sacks, moving a table in there and tea chests, finding suitable covers for them, laying the table properly, getting rid of all the cobwebs in the corners, sweeping up the soot that had fallen down the chimney, and even running up a little curtain. Eily had to hem it, and as she sat outside the back door, I could see her face and her expression; she looked very stubborn and not nearly so amenable as before. My mother provided a roast chicken, some pickles, and freshly boiled beets. She skinned the hot beets with her hands and said, “Ah, you’ve made your bed now,” but Eily gave no evidence of having heard. She simply washed her face in the aluminum basin, combed her hair severely back, put on her whitened shoes, and then turned around to make sure that the seams of her stockings were straight. Her father came home drunk, and he looked like a younger man, trotting up the fields in his oatmeal-colored socks—he’d lost his shoes. When he saw the sitting room that had up to then been the oats room, he exclaimed, took off his hat to it, and said, “Am I in my own house at all, mister?” My father arrived full of important news which, as he kept saying, he would discuss later. We waited in a ring, seated around the fire, and the odd words said were said only by the men, and then without any point. They discussed a beast that had had some ailment.
The dogs were the first to let us know. We all jumped up and looked through the window. The bank clerk was coming on foot, and my mother said to look at that swagger, and wasn’t it the swagger of a hobo. Eily ran to look in the mirror that was fixed to the window ledge. For some extraordinary reason my father went out to meet him and straightaway produced a pack of cigarettes. The two of them came in smoking, and he was shown to the sitting room, which was directly inside the door to the left. There were no drinks on offer, since the women decided that the men might only get obstreperous. Eily’s father kept pointing to the glories of the room, and lifted up a bit of cretonne, to make sure that it was a tea chest underneath and not a piece of pricy mahogany. My father said, “Well, Mr. Jacksie, you’ll have to do your duty by her and make an honest woman of her.” Eily was standing by the window, looking out at the oncoming dark. The bank clerk said, “Why so?” and whistled in a way that I had heard him whistle in the past. He did not seem put out. I was afraid that on impulse he might rush over and put his hands somewhere on Eily’s person. Eily’s father mortified us all by saying she had a porker in her, and the bank clerk said so had many a lass, whereupon he got a slap across the face and was told to sit down and behave himself.
From that moment on, he must have realized he was lost. On all other occasions I had seen him wear a khaki jacket and plus-fours, but that evening he wore a brown suit that gave him a certain air of reliability and dullness. He didn’t say a word to Eily, or even look in her direction, as she sat on a little stool staring out the window and biting on the little lavaliere that she wore around her neck. My father said he had been pup enough and the only thing to do was to own up to it an
d marry her. The bank clerk put forward three objections—one, that he had no house; two, that he had no money; and three, that he was not considering marrying. During the supper Eily’s mother refused to sit down and stayed in the kitchen, nursing the big tin of fruit cocktail and having feeble jabs at it with the old iron tin opener. She talked aloud to herself about the folks “hither” in the room and what a sorry pass things had come to. As usual, my mother ate only the pope’s nose, and served the men the breasts of chicken. Matters changed every other second, they were polite to him, remembering his status as a bank clerk, then they were asking him what kind of crops grew in his part of the country, and then again they would refer to him as if he were not there, saying, “The pup likes his bit of meat.” He was told that he would marry her on the Wednesday week, that he was being transferred from the bank, that he would go with his new wife and take rooms in a midland town. He just shrugged, and I was thinking that he would probably vanish on the morrow, but I didn’t know that they had alerted everyone and that when he did in fact try to leave at dawn the following morning, three strong men impeded him and brought him up the mountain for a drive in their lorry. For a week after, he was indisposed, and it is said that his black eyes were bulbous. It left a permanent hole in his lower cheek, as if a little pebble of flesh had been tweezed out of him.
