Ma says Mary’s promise to mankind is that saying the rosary will give you your heart’s desire. Pansy knows Ma’s heart’s desire is for the boys to come home. We pray for the safekeeping of Patrick, Joseph, James and Samuel. We pray that they will be reunited with their loving family.
Pansy doesn’t understand why Ma would want the boys back, not with all the shouting and shoving and hitting that went on. But she does understand that Ma loves the boys more than she’s ever loved her. Sometimes Ma has a bit of a spell, sitting down at the table with a cup of tea and Pansy sees her looking up at the pictures she has stuck on the wall. Sometimes she reaches up and touches them and Pansy sees she’s crying. There’s the four of them there, Pat, Joe, Jimmy and Sammy all together, first little and then getting bigger. Then there’s the one of just Pat sitting in the front row of the rugby team with his arms folded and his big legs spread. That one’s pinned over the hole in the wall where Daddy yanked away Jesus who used to be up there in a frame, his long fingers pointing at the hole in his chest where you could see his heart bleeding and his gloomy eyes looking at you. Daddy said there was misery enough in this house without having that gawking down at you night and day.
Beneath the one of Pat there’s the one of her in the white dress for First Communion but without the veil. Ma made her take it off before the man took the picture. For free, it was, with the Church paying, and Ma said they may as well get it done but Daddy wouldn’t stand for the veil. ‘And don’t you go showing off that certificate or there’ll be hell to pay.’
She had the certificate in her hand, rolled up and tied with a ribbon and the tiny silver medallion as well. She wanted to show Daddy. Why shouldn’t she? ‘Why will there be hell to pay?’
Ma slapped her arm for that. Didn’t she know saying hell was swearing? But then she explained it. It was her name on the certificate that had to be kept from him. Her name? Yes, well, on her birth certificate it’s only Pansy Williams written there, but on her Baptismal Certificate she’s Pansy Mary and so that’s what’s had to be written on the First Communion Certificate as well and that’s the secret that has to be kept from Daddy. Because Ma wanted her called Mary Anne after Our Lady and Her Mother but Daddy came up with Pansy and had to have his way. But when it came to baptism and Father Boyle said What kind of pagan name is that when there are good saints’ names to be given a little innocent child coming into the Church? Ma added on Mary and Daddy wasn’t there anyway and what he doesn’t know he won’t care about.
Beside the boys, there’s the picture of Ma and Daddy when they got married. At the Brights’ there’s a photograph in a golden frame above the mantelpiece in their parlour (Mr and Mrs Bright have a parlour). Mr Bright is wearing a suit with a flower pinned on the jacket and Mrs Bright is wearing a pale, lacy dress with the hem almost, but not quite, touching shoes so shiny and soft they look like butterfly wings. There’s a veil attached to a little hat that sits snugly around her face and it drifts down over her shoulders like mist. Around them are ladies in enormous hats with bows and frills and flowers and men in suits like Mr Bright and there are children sitting and lying on the floor in front of them all.
Ma and Daddy’s picture has no frame and glass covering it so there are fly spots on Daddy’s suit and Ma’s dress which is plain anyway, nothing fancy about it at all. She doesn’t have a veil, only a little hat; there are no flowers and nobody is there except for them. Ma looks pretty, though, and she’s holding on to Daddy’s arm. She comes up to just below his shoulder and she’s smiling and Daddy is handsome.
‘Why didn’t you wear a fancy dress for your wedding, Ma?’
‘I was a miner’s daughter and was to be a miner’s wife. Nothing fancy about that, missy. I knew what lay ahead of me.’
The kitchen is cleaned up, the chooks fed, the rosary said and the coal brought in. Pansy watches her mother mix the dough for the next morning, her sleeves pushed up above the elbows of her sinewy arms and the patches of dried sweat dark in the armpits of her dress. Her mother has three dresses: one for wearing, one for washing and the blue one for Mass.
Pansy looks up again at the picture on the wall. If Ma’s daddy was a miner, where is he now? Where is Ma’s own ma? Did Ma have brothers, did she have sisters or aunties and uncles like she sees at the Brights’? She knows Daddy’s people all live in Wales but where are Ma’s?
Never you mind. That’s my business, missy, and you can keep your nose out of it.
The thin gold band on Ma’s left hand moves up and down her finger as she presses her hands in, kneading the dough. Did Daddy buy it for her? Did he have it ready, in his pocket, for their wedding day to surprise Ma? Did they go dancing and court like the big girls at school whisper about, sitting close together under the pine trees?
‘Ma? Did you go to school?’
Ma slaps the dough down onto the wooden board. ‘What a thing to ask. Course I went to school.’
Ma went to school? This was something new. But she’d have to be careful if Ma was to tell her anything more. ‘Did you go to our school, Ma? Like me and the boys?’
‘No, I did not.’ She’s angry now, punching and whacking the dough. Pansy waits, almost not breathing.
‘I went to the nuns at Ahaura,’ Ma says at last, ‘and that’s where you’d be and all if I had my way.’
At Ahaura? Is that where Ma lived? Ahaura. It’s where the Miners’ Picnics are every year, except they never go. Ma says, No, we’re not going and let that be the end of it.
‘Those sisters have a good life, teaching or nursing in the hospitals, everything clean and nice and them well looked after. You might think about that, Pansy.’
‘Think about being a nun, you mean?’
‘And why not? Let me tell you, my girl, it’d be better for you than wedding some miner and ending up in a place like this.’
When Pansy really looks at Ma, looks at her properly, she gets this itchy, sick feeling inside her that makes her want to get outside into the air and the bush and run. She doesn’t like to look at Ma’s littleness and skinniness and the lowness in her eyes and her hair tied back so tightly it seems to Pansy that the skin at the side of her mother’s face could spring apart at any moment and bleed and bleed and bleed. It hurts Pansy to look at her, deep inside her body it hurts.
‘Are you listening to me, missy?’
‘Yes, Ma.’
‘The teachers say you’re clever enough.’
‘Do they, Ma?’
‘Yes, and you know it, so you’re clever enough to be a sister, teaching or whatever. I’ve prayed for one of mine to have a vocation, Pansy, and I hope you’re praying for it as well.’
‘I am, Ma.’
Pansy wonders what kind of sin telling lies about praying is, whether it’s venial or mortal? But she will never be a nun, never in a thousand years. She’s seen them sliding along in all their drooping blackness. Do they even have proper arms and legs? Well, she knows they don’t have hair because Anne-Marie Duggan told her. Their hair’s shaved off because of them renuncing the word.
Except it’s renouncing the world. Ma told her when she asked about it, scoffing in her throat. Renouncing means giving things up. But how can it be possible to give up the whole wide world?
Anne-Marie Duggan knows about nuns because her own sister Bethie has gone to be one. Except now Bethie’s name is Sister Mary Joseph and she can’t even keep the special comb and mirror set her mother gave her for her leaving present and neither can she see Anne-Marie and her ma and daddy and her other sisters and brothers except for one hour on special feast days. And she’s not allowed to talk to them about being a nun except she did to Anne-Marie, just once and only for the few minutes whispering. Bethie told Anne-Marie she didn’t want to be a nun any more but she couldn’t get out of it.
The nuns live in cells like prisoners in dungeons and they have nothing to eat but bread and water. They have to g
o to Mass three times a day and they have to whip themselves. What kind of whips, Anne-Marie? What kind of whips would they use? The same as they use on horses. Sometimes when Pansy’s in bed the idea of those nuns with their pink bare heads and bleeding bodies springs into her head out of the dark and she feels the same sick feeling she feels about Ma.
It’s Saturday night so it’s the bath with her following Ma into the tin tub set beside the range. Ma washes Pansy’s hair, scrubbing soap into her head and rinsing it over and over from the jug. Never let it be said Teresa Williams’ kids are dirty. Then Pansy sits on the stool while Ma dries and brushes her hair until it crackles. Pansy’s white Sunday dress and Ma’s blue is hanging from the pulley to get out the creases. Women and girls have to keep their heads covered at Mass and so Ma wears a scarf that she ties tight under her chin and Pansy wears her hat.
‘If God gave us hair why doesn’t he want to see it?’
The brush smacks against the back of her head. ‘Don’t you ever let me hear you questioning your faith, missy. Don’t you ever.’
3
Some Sundays Daddy goes to the Presbyterian church on Hart Street. When his lordship feels so inclined, Ma says. When she comes out of Mass with Ma, Pansy hears the singing and the band fair bursting out down the road, the men’s voices all low down and growly and the women high-raised like bells.
Pansy loves to sing but they don’t sing at Mass except on special days so there’s only Father Boyle droning from up the front and everyone muttering back. It’s all in words she doesn’t understand that Daddy calls mumbo-jumbo. But St Brendan’s has candles and the incense she likes the smell of and there are the statues of the saints and Jesus carrying the cross and Mary holding baby Jesus so there’s more to look at. She knows because she peeked into Hart Street to see what they had there.
‘If I went into Hart Street what would happen to me, Ma?’
‘God would punish you.’
She slipped into Hart Street and stood in the porch. She slowly, slowly pushed open the door and looked inside. There were the wooden pews the same as at St Brendan’s but it smelled hot and musty instead of sweet and all there was up the front was a plain wooden cross, not even with a Jesus.
She stood in the doorway staring. Her heart was beating quite fast but she stretched out her foot, stretched, stretched it, touched her toes inside, quickly pulled them back. She waited, then she tried it again except this time she put her whole foot down on the floor. Then she edged herself through the doorway along behind the seats and stood with her back pressed up against the wall. A minute or two was enough; she shoved the door open, slipped through the gate and ran down the street.
On Sundays they have their dinner in the middle of the day instead of at night. They have mutton and potatoes and cabbage, carrots when it’s summer. They have rice pudding sometimes with raisins. Before they eat, Pansy and Ma whisper Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts which of thy bounty we are about to receive and bless themselves. Daddy never waits and Pansy hears his knife and fork scraping over his plate before she opens her eyes.
The wanting to ask was inside her right through Mass and walking along Hart Street with the singing and the band bursting out into the street, Praise my soul the king of heaven. At school, Mr Kennedy talks about playing the game and Miss Appleby talks about being fair and sharing. Ma and Daddy have it wrong and it’s her that has to make them see it.
Ma doesn’t talk at the table and she tells Pansy dinner’s for eating not yabbering. But this morning, when she heard the singing and saw Daddy outside Hart Street church, shaking hands with Mr Bright and Mr Gregor and Mr Adams and Mr Owens, all the men he works with in the mine, and the ladies there as well in their nice dresses talking to each other and the boys and girls she knows from school running about, she knew it was today she had to ask for what she wanted. ‘Can I go to church with you, Daddy?’
Ma looks hard at her. ‘That’s enough of that.’
‘But Ma, I could go one week with you and the next with Daddy. That way it’d be evens.’
‘I said that’s enough. You get on and finish your dinner.’
But Daddy has stopped eating and he puts down his knife and fork, laying them together, just so, on his plate. ‘You want to know why you can’t go to Hart Street with me, Pansy? Is that it?’
She nods. Well, she does want to know and she wants to go and all and why shouldn’t she? It’s not a sin. It can’t be. Ma’s wrong. Nothing happened when she went into Hart Street. God doesn’t care about it.
‘Well, now, Pansy.’ He’s speaking slowly and smiling as if it’s something he wants to talk about, wants to explain to her. ‘Before I married your mother, well, that is, before I had permission to marry her, I made a promise that any offspring of the union would be baptised and brought up in the Catholic Church. So that’s the way it has to be. I go to my own church and you to St Brendan’s.’
That doesn’t seem fair to her. Why couldn’t they have turn about, her with the saints and Jesus one week and singing in Hart Street the next? ‘Why did you make the promise?’
There’s that bit of light there leaping up in his eyes. Is he angry or is he about to laugh? It’s always hard to tell with Daddy. You have to be careful even when you are his favourite.
‘Because it’s the Holy Catholic Church of Rome is why, and the Holy Catholic Church thinks it knows better than any other church.’
She looks at Ma who has her head lowered over her plate, eating as if she isn’t listening to or even hearing what they’re talking about. ‘Why don’t the other churches stand up for themselves?’
Daddy picks up his knife and turns it over. Over and over in his hand, like he’s thinking carefully about Pansy’s question and how best to answer it. ‘That’s a hard one to answer, Pansy, but me and your Ma had to get a special dispensation from one of them fancy bishops in Christchurch before we were let to be wed at all.’ He turned over the knife again and thrummed the flat side of it on the plate as he recited, ‘A marriage between two persons, one of whom has been baptised in the Catholic Church or received into it and the other of whom is not baptised, is invalid.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means your Ma wanted the marriage right with her church so there was nothing for it but we had to write away and ask His Holiness in Christchurch to let us get married.’
Invalid? Dispensation? Offspring? His Holiness? She still doesn’t understand, not properly but she can store away the words to find out about later.
‘Did you have your wedding at Saint Brendan’s, Daddy?’
‘Once we’d got the dispensation and I’d got my instructions and your ma had made her own promise she wouldn’t defect from the faith, we did indeed.’
Defect. That’s another one.
Daddy’s thrumming with the knife again, then he throws it down onto his plate and laughs out loud. ‘That is if you call a hushed-up affair in the back of the church with a sour-mouthed priest and his housekeeper pulled in for the witness a wedding.’
Is he angry or making a joke? No telling with Daddy, not until it’s too late; he can flare up at any minute, reach across the table and slap out with his big hands. She’s seen him lurch up out of his seat and beat the boys about their heads with his fists. Could be anything sets him off some days, dropping your spoon on the floor, saying something he doesn’t like. But then there are the other times when he’ll push his chair back and spread himself out, laughing his head off and give her a penny.
She wants to know but she doesn’t want to cross him. She watches his eyes, ready to pull back if there’s the change in them. ‘Couldn’t you have any of your friends there, Daddy?’
‘Oh no no no no no. We could’ve had a close family member or two, Catholic family members, mind you. But your Ma’s family wouldn’t come. The twenty miles from Ahaura were too far for them to travel to their own girl’s weddin
g. Oh, there were no friends, though I had Albie Pratt sneaking along to take the photograph after. The priest let us know this was a serious business all round. There had to be a good reason to go bothering him and his Lordship with it and a good reason wasn’t we just had the whim to have ourselves a wedding.’
‘What good reason did you give?’
‘You can blame your—’
‘Enough of this,’ her mother says sharply. ‘Your dinner’s getting cold. I didn’t spend the morning getting a dinner ready to have it spoilt because of your yakking.’
The light is stronger in Daddy’s eyes. Stronger, brighter, more dangerous. ‘I’ll say when’s enough, missus.’
Ma looks at him across the table, locks her eyes with him and they sit there staring at each other. The room is close and hot. Daddy drops his gaze first and picks up his knife and fork. They eat in silence and Ma clears the plates away and puts them in the bowl for washing. She pours custard into their plates and ladles in the cheery plums she’s stewed from the tree.
You can blame your—.
What? What was to blame? She looks at Daddy. The muscle in his jaw is twitching. She won’t ask him now. She feeds the chooks and she wipes the dishes for Ma and then she’s out, down to the creek. Clem isn’t allowed out on a Sunday but Otto’s there making a dam. He looks up at her out of his long, silver-pale eyes.
‘If we get the wall high and strong enough, Pansy, we’ll have a good swimming hole right here.’
Doesn’t he know the river will always knock it down? Hasn’t it always?
Still, she helps him, finding the biggest stones, piling them wide and high so the wall has the best chance. They don’t talk much, just work together and then they go further down where the holes already are deeper and wider and they take their clothes off and swim. Otto’s a better swimmer than Pansy. Swift and wiry, he’ll take in a great, deep breath and go under for minutes and minutes until it seems he’s been an hour down there in the deep below the surface of the water. She gets frightened looking for him but then he’ll leap up, shaking his head, the drops of water flying and his teeth flashing.
Through the Lonesome Dark Page 2
