Foster

by Claire Keegan

  ‘Isn’t she tall?’ says the assistant.

  ‘We’re all tall,’ says the woman.

  ‘She’s the spit and image of her mammy. I can see it now,’ the assistant says, and then says the lilac dress is the best fit and the most flattering, and the woman agrees. She buys me a printed blouse, too, with short sleeves much like the one she wore the day I came, dark blue trousers, and a pair of black leather shoes with a little strap and a buckle on the front, some panties and white ankle socks. The girl hands her the docket, and she takes out her purse and pays for it all.

  ‘Well may you wear,’ the assistant says. ‘Isn’t your mammy good to you?’

  Out in the street, the sun feels strong again, blinding. Some part of me wishes it would go away, that it would cloud over so I could see properly. We meet people the woman knows. Some of these people stare at me and ask who I am. One of them has a new baby in a pushchair. Mrs Kinsella bends down and coos and he slobbers a little and starts to cry.

  ‘He’s making strange,’ the mother says. ‘Pay no heed.’

  We meet another woman with eyes like picks, who asks whose child I am, who I am belonging to? When she is told, she says, ‘Ah, isn’t she company for you all the same, God help you.’

  Mrs Kinsella stiffens. ‘You must excuse me,’ she says, ‘but this man of mine is waiting and you know what these men are like.’

  ‘Like fecking bulls, they are,’ the woman says. ‘Haven’t an ounce of patience.’

  ‘God forgive me but if I ever run into that woman again it will be too soon,’ says Mrs Kinsella, when we have turned the corner.

  We go to the butchers for rashers and sausages and a horseshoe of black pudding, to the chemist where she asks for Aunt Acid, and then on down to a little shop she calls the gift gallery where they sell cards and notepaper and pretty pieces of jewellery from a case of revolving shelves.

  ‘Isn’t your mammy’s birthday coming up shortly?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, without being sure.

  ‘We’ll get a card for her, so.’

  She tells me to choose, and I pick a card with a frightened-looking cat sitting in front of a bed of yellow dahlias.

  ‘Not long now till they’ll be back to school,’ says the woman behind the counter. ‘Isn’t it a great relief to have them off your back?’

  ‘This one is no trouble,’ Mrs Kinsella says, and pays for the card along with some sheets of notepaper and a packet of envelopes. ‘It’s only missing her I’ll be when she is gone.’

  ‘Humph,’ the woman says.

  Before we go back to the car she lets me loose in a sweet shop. I take my time choosing, hand over the pound note and take back the change.

  ‘Didn’t you stretch it well,’ she says, when I come out.

  Kinsella is parked in the shade, with the windows open, reading the newspaper.

  ‘Well?’ he says. ‘Did ye get sorted?’

  ‘Aye,’ she says.

  ‘Grand,’ he says.

  I give him the Choc-ice and her the Flake and lie on the back seat eating the hard gums, careful not to choke as we cross over bumps in the road. I listen to the change rattling in my pocket, the wind rushing through the car and their talk, scraps of news being shared between them in the front.

  When we turn into the yard, another car is parked outside the door. A woman is on the front step, pacing, with her arms crossed.

  ‘Isn’t that Harry Redmond’s girl?’

  ‘I don’t like the look of this,’ says Kinsella.

  ‘Oh, John,’ she says, rushing over. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you but didn’t our Michael pass away and there’s not a soul at home. They’re all out on the combines and won’t be back till God knows what hour and I’ve no way of getting word to them. We’re rightly stuck. Would you ever come down and give us a hand digging the grave?’

  ‘I don’t know that this’ll be any place for you but I can’t leave you here,’ the woman says, later that same day. ‘So get ready and we’ll go, in the name of God.’

  I go upstairs and change into the new dress, the ankle socks and shoes.

  ‘Don’t you look nice,’ she says, when I come down. ‘John’s not always easy but he’s hardly ever wrong.’

  Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might come and fall and change things. We pass houses whose doors and windows are wide open, long, flapping clotheslines, gravelled entrances to other lanes. At the bend, a bay pony is leaning up against a gate, but when I reach out to stroke his nose, he whinnies and canters off. Outside a cottage, a black dog with curls all down his back comes out and barks at us, hotly, through the bars of a gate. At the first crossroads, we meet a heifer who panics and finally races past us, lost. All through the walk, the wind blows hard and soft and hard again through the tall, flowering hedges, the high trees. In the fields, the combines are out cutting the wheat, the barley and oats, saving the corn, leaving behind long rows of straw. We meet men on tractors, going in different directions, pulling balers to the fields, and trailers full of grain to the co-op. Birds swoop down, brazen, eating the fallen seed off the middle of the road. Further along, we meet two barechested men, their eyes so white in faces so tanned and dusty.

  The woman stops to greet them and tells them where we are going.

  ‘God rest him. Didn’t he go quick in the end?’ one man says.

  ‘Aye,’ says the other. ‘But didn’t he reach his three score and ten? What more can any of us hope for?’

  We keep on walking, standing in tight to the hedges, the ditches, letting things pass.

  ‘Have you been to a wake before?’ the woman asks.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, I might as well tell you: there will be a dead man here in a coffin and lots of people and some of them might have a little too much taken.’

  ‘What will they be taking?’

  ‘Drink,’ she says.

  When we come to the house, several men are leaning against a low wall, smoking. There’s a black ribbon on the door and hardly a light shining from the house but when we go in, the kitchen is bright, and packed with people who are talking. The woman who asked Kinsella to dig the grave is there, making sandwiches. There are big bottles of red and white lemonade, stout, and in the middle of all this, a big wooden box with an old dead man lying inside of it. His hands are joined as though he had died praying, a string of rosary beads around his fingers. Some of the men are sitting around the coffin, using the part that’s closed as a counter on which to rest their glasses. One of these is Kinsella.

  ‘There she is,’ he says. ‘Long Legs. Come over here.’

  He pulls me onto his lap, and gives me a sip from his glass.

  ‘Do you like the taste of that?’

  ‘No.’

  He laughs. ‘Good girl. Don’t ever get a taste for it. If you start, you might never stop and then you’d wind up like the rest of us.’

  He pours red lemonade into a cup for me. I sit on his lap drinking it and eating the queen cakes out of the biscuit tin and looking at the dead man, hoping his eyes will open.

  The people come and go, drifting in and out, shaking hands, drinking and eating and looking at the dead man, saying what a lovely corpse he is, and doesn’t he look happy now that his end has come, and who was it that laid him out? They talk of the forecast and the moisture content of corn, of milk quotas and the next general election. I feel myself getting heavy on Kinsella’s lap.

  ‘Am I getting heavy?’

  ‘Heavy?’ he says. ‘You’re like a feather, Child. Stay where you are.’

  I put my head against him but I’m bored and wish there were things to do, other children who would play.

  ‘The girl’s getting uneasy,’ I hear the woman say.

  ‘What’s ailing her?’ says another.

  ‘Ah, it’s no place for the child, really,’ she says. ‘It’s just I didn’t like not to come, and I wouldn’t leave her behind.’

&nb
sp; ‘Sure I’ll take her home with me, Edna. I’m going now. Can’t you call in and collect her on your way?’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I don’t know should I.’

  ‘Mine’d be a bit of company for her. Can’t they play away out the back? And that man there won’t budge as long as he has her on his knee.’

  Mrs Kinsella laughs. I’ve never heard her laugh like this.

  ‘Sure maybe, if you don’t mind, you would, Mildred,’ she says. ‘What harm is in it? And you know we’ll not be long after you.’

  ‘Not a bother,’ the woman says.

  When we are out on the road, and the goodbyes are said, Mildred strides on into a pace I can just about keep, and as soon as she rounds the bend, the questions start. She is eaten alive with curiosity; hardly is one question answered before the next is fired: ‘Which room did they put you into? Did Kinsella give you money? How much? Does she drink at night? Does he? Are they playing cards up there much? Who was there? What were they selling the lines for? Do ye say the rosary? Does she put butter or margarine in her pastry? Where does the old dog sleep? Is the freezer packed solid? Does she skimp on things or is she allowed to spend? Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?’

  I answer them all easily, until the last.

  ‘The child’s clothes?’

  ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Sure if you’re sleeping in his room you must surely know. Did you not look?’

  ‘Well, she had clothes I wore for all the time I was here but we went to Gorey this morning and bought all new things.’

  ‘This rig-out you’re wearing now? God Almighty,’ she says. ‘Anybody would think you were going on for a hundred.’

  ‘I like it,’ I say. ‘They told me it was flattering.’

  ‘Flattering, is it? Well. Well,’ she says. ‘I suppose it is, after living in the dead’s clothes all this time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Kinsellas’ young lad, you dope. Did you not know?’

  I don’t know what to say.

  ‘That must have been some stone they rolled back to find you. Sure didn’t he follow that auld hound of theirs into the slurry tank and drown? That’s what they say happened anyhow,’ she says.

  I keep on walking and try not to think about what she has said even though I can think of little else. The time for the sun to go down is getting close but the day feels like it isn’t ending. I look at the sky and see the sun, still high, and clouds, and, far away, a round moon coming out.

  ‘They say John got the gun and took the hound down the field but he hadn’t the heart to shoot him, the softhearted fool.’

  We walk on between the bristling hedges in which small things seem to rustle and move. Chamomile grows along these ditches, wood sage and mint, plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me. Further along, the same lost heifer is still lost, in a different part of the road.

  ‘And you know, the pair of them turned white overnight.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Their hair, what else?’

  ‘But Mrs Kinsella’s hair is black.’

  ‘Black? Aye, black out of the dye-pot, you mean.’ She laughs.

  I wonder at her laughing like this. I wonder at the clothes and how I’d worn them and the boy in the wallpaper and how I never put it all together. Soon we come to the place where the black dog is barking through the bars of the gate.

  ‘Shut up and get in, you,’ she says to him.

  It’s a cottage she lives in with uneven slabs of concrete outside the front door, overgrown shrubs, and tall Red Hot Pokers growing out of the ground. Here I must watch my head, my step. When we go in, the place is cluttered and an older woman is smoking at the cooker. There’s a baby in a high chair. He lets out a cry when he sees the woman and drops a handful of marrowfat peas over the edge.

  ‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘The state of you.’

  I’m not sure if it’s the woman or the child she is talking to. She takes off her cardigan and sits down and starts talking about the wake: who was there, the type of sandwiches that were made, the queen cakes, the corpse who was lying up crooked in the coffin and hadn’t even been shaved properly, how they had plastic rosary beads for him, the poor fucker.

  I don’t know whether to sit or stand, to listen or leave but just as I’m deciding what to do, the dog barks and the gate opens and Kinsella comes in, stooping under the door frame.

  ‘Good evening all,’ he says.

  ‘Ah, John,’ the woman says. ‘You weren’t long. We’re only in the door. Aren’t we only in the door, Child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kinsella hasn’t taken his eyes off me. ‘Thanks, Mildred. It was good of you, to take her home.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ the woman says. ‘She’s a quiet young one, this.’

  ‘She says what she has to say, and no more. May there be many like her,’ he says. ‘Are you ready to come home, Petal?’

  I get up and he talks on a little, to smooth things over, the way people do. I follow him out to the car where the woman is waiting.

  ‘Were you alright in there?’ she says.

  I say I was.

  ‘Did she ask you anything?’

  ‘A few things, nothing much.’

  ‘What did she ask you?’

  ‘She asked me if you used butter or margarine in your pastry.’

  ‘Did she ask you anything else?’

  ‘She asked me was the freezer packed tight.’

  ‘There you are,’ says Kinsella.

  ‘Did she tell you anything?’ the woman asks.

  I don’t know what to say.

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘She told me you had a little boy who followed the dog into the slurry tank and died, and that I wore his clothes to Mass last Sunday.’

  When we get home, the hound gets up and comes out to the car to greet us. It’s only now I realise I’ve not heard either one of them call him by his name. Kinsella sighs and goes off to milk. When he comes inside, he says he’s not ready for bed and that there will be no visitors tonight anyhow, on account of the wake – not, he says, that he wants any. The woman goes upstairs and changes and comes back down in her nightdress. Kinsella has taken my shoes off and has put what I now know is the boy’s jacket on me.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ she says.

  ‘What does it look like? And she’ll break her neck in these.’

  He goes out, stumbling a little, then comes back in with a sheet of sandpaper and scuffs up the soles of my new shoes so I will not slip.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’ll break them in.’

  ‘Didn’t she already break them in? Where are you taking her?’

  ‘Only as far as the strand,’ he says.

  ‘You’ll be careful with that girl, John Kinsella,’ she says. ‘And don’t you go without the lamp.’

  ‘What need is there for a lamp on a night like tonight?’ he says but he takes it anyhow, as it’s handed to him.

  There’s a big moon shining on the yard, chalking our way onto the lane and along the road. Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be. He takes small steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.

  When we reach the crossroads we turn right, down a steep, sloping road. The wind is high and hoarse in the trees, tearing fretfully through the dry boughs, when their leaves rise and swing. It’s sweet to feel the open road falling away under us, knowing we will, at its end, come to the sea. The road goes on and the sky, everything, seems to get brighter. Kinsella says a few meaningless things along the way then falls into the quiet way he has about him, and time passes without seeming to
pass and then we are in a sandy, open space where people must park cars. It is full of tyre marks and potholes, a rubbish bin which seems not to have been emptied in a long time.

  ‘We’re almost there now, Petal.’

  He leads me up a steep hill where, on either side, tall rushes bend and shake. My feet sink in the deep sand, and the climb takes my breath away. Then we are standing on the crest of a dark place where the land ends and there is a long strand and water which I know is deep and stretches all the way to England. Far out, in the darkness, two bright lights are blinking.

  Kinsella lets me loose and I race down the far side of the dune to the place where the black sea hisses up into loud, frothy waves. I run towards them as they back away and run back, shrieking, when another crashes in. When Kinsella catches up, we take our shoes off. In places we walk along with the edge of the sea clawing at the sand under our bare feet. In places he leaves me to run. At one point we go in until the water is up to his knees and he holds me on his shoulders.

  ‘Don’t be afraid!’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t be afraid!’

  The strand is all washed clean, without so much as a footprint. Beyond a crooked line in the sand, close to the dunes, things have washed up: plastic bottles, sticks, the handle of a mop whose head is lost and, further on, a stable door, whose bolt is broken.

  ‘Some man’s horse is loose tonight,’ Kinsella says. He walks on for a while then. It is quieter up here, away from the noise of the waves. ‘You know the fishermen sometimes find horses out at sea. A man I know towed a colt in one time and the horse lay down for a long time before he got up. And he was perfect. Tiredness was all it was, after being out so long.

  ‘Strange things happen,’ he says. ‘A strange thing happened to you tonight but Edna meant no harm. It’s too good, she is. She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed but she sometimes is.’

  He laughs then, a queer, sad laugh. I don’t know what to say.

  ‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’