The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  When I came home from school, the hallway was crammed with neighbours. They went silent as I came in and turned to watch me. I ran quickly through them and found a woman from down the road standing in the kitchen where my mother should have been. ‘You poor child,’ was all she said, ‘you poor child.’ One of them tried to put her arms around me and I screamed and broke free, remembering the times my mother had threatened to give me to the gypsies when I was bold. I ran into the backyard thinking that they must have driven her from the house but she wasn’t there.

  Where was she, I kept wondering, why has she left me alone? Then through the open door I saw Johnny come down the stairs and I ran to him. Daddy was walking behind with his face all red and crumpled, like there was no air left in his cheeks. He shook his head slowly and Mrs Moore and Mrs McCormack began to cry. I could feel tears from Johnny’s eyes running on to my face as he held me as though he had fallen and hurt himself. Then Daddy came and put his hands around us both and he was crying too.

  A silence seemed to fall in the house and I could only hear hushed voices on the path outside. I started sobbing too because they were all crying and I needed to find my Mammy and ask her what was wrong and why nobody would tell me. Then I realized she must be upstairs, so I broke away from them and ran up the steps two at a time even though somebody tried to stop me.

  I opened the door of her room and stopped. Mrs Whelan was sitting beside the bed where a man in a black coat was bent over my mother with his hands on her eyes. ‘Leave my Mammy alone, you!’ I shouted at him, and when he turned I recognized one of the priests from the village. They both looked at me and I grew afraid to approach the bed.

  ‘Mammy,’ I called, and when her head didn’t turn I called again louder to wake her. I heard Johnny climb the stairs as I ran over to the bed to shake her. Her eyes were wide open but still she didn’t look at me. I felt Mrs Whelan pull me back and say in a low voice, ‘Leave her, Sandra, your mother has gone to God.’

  I didn’t cry then because I knew she was wrong. My mother would never leave me like that without saying goodbye. The person in the bed must be someone else, her sister maybe or a neighbour pretending. I knew my mother would come in the door that evening or tomorrow or the day after, all apologies for being away and that everything would be the same as it ever was because how could life go on without her.

  You must understand I was only eight years of age, I knew nothing of death or life. Johnny put his arms around me, and I watched my father give Mrs Whelan two bright, shiny pennies to place over her eyes.

  That night, her sister came from England with her two brothers and they gave me money and sweets and called me a brave little girl. It was like a party having them there, with tea and cakes and whiskey, and as I lay in the little camp-bed in the dining-room reading my book, I heard a voice singing from the sitting-room. Later on, I woke up when Johnny climbed into the narrow bunk beside me, because the relations had our bed, and without warning he began to cry again and just went on and on though I tried to tell him that Mammy wasn’t really dead, she was just pretending. But he wouldn’t stop and turned his back on me so I could feel his shoulders shaking in the darkness until finally I fell asleep with my head pressed against the back of his neck and my fingers pressed in his hand that had reached out to find mine.

  ‘… it was on our fourth visit to the house that we finally succeeded in gaining access. Miss O’Connor, who struck us as being very nervous throughout the interview and seemed to be of a somewhat neurotic temperament, opened the door after we had been knocking for fifteen minutes. We had great difficulty in persuading her to allow us into the house.

  Finally, having taken our identification cards and examined them for several minutes with the door closed, she opened it again to let us in.

  The majority of the furniture and fittings therein seemed to date from the mid sixties and were very worn in appearance although in a clean condition. Miss O’Connor stated that she had lived alone since the death of her father sixteen years previously, and that she had one brother, two years older than her, whose present whereabouts were unknown but whom she believed to be working somewhere in England.

  When we explained that the purpose of our visit was to investigate reports from several neighbours who suspected that a second person (whom admittedly, they had never seen) might also be living in the house and could possibly be in need of medical attention, Miss O’Connor again replied that she lived alone. She seemed to indicate, in her own mind at least, that there was some kind of conspiracy against her in the street, and cited some not very coherent examples of this which dated back to the death of her mother in childhood.

  At our behest, Miss O’Connor showed us around the house which consisted of two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, and a small bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs. One of the latter was locked, because, as she explained, she had ceased using it several years previously. She tried a number of keys in the lock without success, and then insisted that we return to the kitchen, where a search of various presses yielded up a number of old keys. She asked to be excused while she tried them. A few moments later she returned to inform us that one of these fitted.

  The room had thick curtains, was lit by a single naked light bulb and was permeated by a somewhat unpleasant and overpowering smell. It was bare except for a carefully made bed and a single straight-backed chair. There were no personal possessions or items of clothing therein to suggest that it was occupied, although the absence of dust would appear to indicate that Miss O’Connor had spent some time in it recently.

  The room, and indeed the whole house, had a rather oppressive atmosphere, and while we found no evidence there of anyone other than Miss O’Connor, we do feel that she is under grave emotional pressure of some sort, possibly rooted in loneliness and/or schizophrenia. Thus, we would recommend some back-up from the Social Services. However, this is outside our jurisdiction and we would suggest that her case be passed on to the relevant section within the department …’

  My mother was a good woman but she left me in a house of men. When I grew I grew inward in ignorance and fear. The nuns in school were kinder now, but how could you ask them advice or questions? We got a lay teacher the year after that who would take us out on walks.

  I loved when she’d bring us through the church grounds and down the main street of the village to the foot of the road into the west. It was like a frontier leading up to new estates named after patriots where gangs of youths were said to roam. Once I was carried up there by the bus and ran down as if caught behind the iron curtain. Miss O’Flynn knocked to get the keys of the graveyard at one of the two old cottages there, and we watched the three Alsatians in the compound beside the steps snarling as they flung themselves against the wire with their teeth bared.

  Inside the gates it was overgrown, unlike the cemetery outside our window, with the slabs over old crypts broken in two and faded tombstones lying smothered in weeds. Within the ruins of the ancient church the new shops in the village were framed through the ivy-covered slats where windows used to be. When Miss O’Flynn rang her little bell we all ran through the graveyard towards her, and she’d gather us into a circle around the cross and tell us the story again.

  In my mind’s eye I could see it as she began to talk, the cross standing, a thousand years ago, at the top of Watery Lane, marking the boundary of the village and the monastery. And remaining there through centuries of nights and days until the curse of Cromwell blighted the land. Whorls of cloud are veiling the moon as the villagers carefully uproot it in the night. The stonemason slowly cuts it in two and the cart covered in straw creaks down the village street in the darkness. A man with a lantern keeps watch from the graveyard steps. I’d imagine myself as a small girl concealed at the back of the silent cluster of watchers as the two gravediggers wait beside the black mound of freshly dug earth. Reverently, as if burying the soul of their village, they lower the twin pieces of stone down into the grave.

  Then the conspira
cy of silence settles over the village to save the cross from desecration. It is never mentioned again in public as though its name had been erased from their vocabulary. Decades crumble into centuries and nothing is said. In the earth the cloth rots away, worms nose the final threads, the stone returns naked to its first love-bed. It no longer exists, except as a secret in the mind of the oldest man in the village, who received it in a whisper on his father’s deathbed.

  Then I’d imagine myself again as a small girl just before the turn of the century. I’m laying flowers on a grave in the spring sunshine when the old man walking on two sticks enters with the rector. Matthew, Miss O’Flynn said his name was. He never hesitates for a moment. Slowly but steadily he shuffles over to a sward of grass in one corner, indistinguishable from any other, and bangs his stick down on the spot. Finally the words kept unuttered for centuries are spoken. Like a man yielding up his life’s purpose Matthew stares at the rector’s face and proclaims, ‘The Neather Cross is buried here.’

  The rector doesn’t know whether the old man is doting or if he should believe him. Still he is afraid to move from the spot. He commands the verger, whom the old man has insisted must remain outside the gate, to fetch some men with shovels from the fields. I’m hidden behind an old tombstone watching the pair of them who never speak as they wait for the men. The rector rubs his hands nervously together while the old man rests on his sticks, confident and yet seeming to tire as though the life force was draining from him. His face is dark, strong-boned, his features the same as the man I always imagine two centuries before holding the lantern for the two gravediggers in the dark, the same as old Turlough down in Watery Lane whose cottage is the only one left standing in the hollow now.

  A man called McEvoy brings a spade from the cottages nearby and another man joins him from the fields beside the wood. There is no sound in the graveyard except the soft incision of spades into the soil, until after half an hour the clank of steel striking stone rings out, sharp as a cry fresh from the womb. Carefully they scrape the clay from the top of the stone until the worn ancient carvings are revealed once more in the light. The rector and the two men examine them excitedly, only I notice old Matthew walking slowly away.

  These days when I cross the huge metal bridge above the carriageway that roars down through where the wood used to be, I pause above the ruins to examine the cross. It’s forgotten now of course, nobody here is interested in those things. On Sundays I climb those steps and stare in through the railings, but when I gaze at it I never imagine I’m that little girl any more, watching the swinging lantern or the shovels glinting in the sunlight. I think that the pair of us are that cross buried somewhere in the earth and maybe only still alive in somebody’s mind. We’re waiting here in the darkness for him to find us, like a splintered stone that needs to be set together again.

  The street riddled with porches and extensions. Hedges are gone now, front gardens cemented for cars. The top windows overlook the cemetery and the rivulet joining the Tolka beneath a new bridge. One house is grown derelict. Two women wait inside it in the hours before dawn, one huddled on the cold lino beneath the torn curtain, the other leaning forward on the single chair, her fingers constantly intertwining. One speaks in a low voice, urgent but indistinct, one stares back as if not listening and living only in her own thoughts.

  Everyone was talking about him in school then. How he stayed there for three days buried alive in his coffin. There was a tube leading down into the earth through which he was able to breathe, and he had taken along books like Dracula to read. I couldn’t understand anyone wanting to stay down there. For three nights the pair of us stood at that window, thinking of him breathing out there alone among those ranks of crosses, surrounded by decomposing bodies. His picture was in the paper when he broke the world record, clutching a bottle of champagne with the cemetery railings behind him. But I could not get him out of my mind.

  To frighten me one night Johnny told me stories, corpses dug up with splinters of wood crushed beneath their fingernails, and shattered teeth smeared with blood where they had tried to bite into the lid. I had a new dream now at night, the coffin is being screwed down and I am unable to move my head or cry out to them. I keep beseeching them to notice the terror in my eyes, but they talk on sorrowfully among themselves as they box me in.

  I’d scream and scream awake and Daddy would come in. He’d put his arms around me and say, ‘Mammy is with the angels now.’ But my fear was so embedded that I was afraid to tell him, as if even to speak those words would make them come true.

  At the end of the long gardens the hedgerows began, huge rucks of branches and leaves that one could crawl underneath, and there in a nest of dried leaves it was like a submerged cavern. Three or four bodies could climb inside and play their games in the secretive hedgelight. One boy always lay with his head outside, watching the row of kitchen doors for danger. Johnny would vanish there now and refuse to bring her. She’d watch him wiggle inside from an upstairs window. He’d grow silent when she questioned him, in the darkness of their room.

  One summer morning she followed him down, creeping through a neighbour’s garden so as not to be seen. She lay on the far side of the hedge, stealthily pushing aside branches to peer through. Three boys squatted naked by the light of a small candle, their hairless bodies shockingly white in the light. Johnny’s face was turned towards her, his body excited as he watched his two companions begin to rub their buttocks together. The twigs snapped beneath her fingers, the naked boys anxiously grabbed their short trousers. As she turned to flee the look-out raced round the hedge to catch her and push her struggling down the leafy tunnel.

  ‘Spy,’ one of the boys shouted, ‘you were spying on us!’ Johnny dressed himself, white faced and ashamed. ‘What will we do with her?’ one of the others asked, and the boy paused and replied, ‘If she saw us, she must take her clothes off and take the oath to become part of our club.’

  She started crying as she squatted here, surrounded by them, and it was Johnny who took her hand and said, ‘Leave her alone, we’re going home now.’ He led her out into the fresh air, beyond the gardens, and they walked down silently to where the rivulet glinted between trees. ‘What were you doing?’ she finally asked, and he threw a stone into the water and said, ‘It was a game.’

  He sat on the bank beside her and went on: ‘It was a club. We swore loyalty to each other. We’d each make up tests of courage and have no secrets between us.’

  The pair of them climb upstream over the rocks. By the green light of an overhung pool they kneel down and swear secret faith and loyalty to the Joh-dras. He carefully plucks the leaf of a wild nettle and they solemnly give each other a single sting on the white exposed skin of their buttocks, the badge of courage, of blood brother and sister against the world.

  Daddy wore his mourning quietly, as if his grief was a stigma that could never be revealed in public. I always seemed to be sitting in the living-room with my homework, listening to his slow desperate pacing of the floor above. We more or less had the run of the house and he would never say a word, but his presence and his grief was always there as though accusing us. Everything I did was done to please him as if I carried guilt around on my shoulders. It seemed like he was balanced on an invisible window-ledge and one mistake or wrong word would push him off.

  Three times a week he caught two buses to the scorched earth of Mount Jerome cemetery and every other evening went walking by himself. After tea he worked in rubber boots in the garden, manicuring the lawn as if he could only speak through its ordered shape. It was only when we went out that he’d grow stern, checking our clothes and nails to show the road that he could cope. Often when I played on the street I’d sense him watching from behind the curtains to make sure that I wouldn’t let him down, and afterwards, at supper, he’d quiz me slyly about things neighbours might have said to their children.

  He never went back to the street where he was born, to the two rooms we had lived on in after
his mother’s death until we moved here. The friends I remember calling to see him in the flat were never mentioned. His life before this place seemed something sordid to be locked away.

  There was an election called then, and when I walked to school men were clambering up ladders to stick posters on every pole. Cars toured the street with loudspeakers. It was the first time I saw Daddy bring people into the house that used to be full when my mother was here. A poster was stuck in every window, and each night two men called for him with bundles of printed leaflets. He’d be cross if he found Johnny and me playing with them, he’d hoard them to his chest like money.

  One day I found a torn Labour poster like a fallen leaf on the pavement. I loved its design of stars and red colour. When I brought it home he almost struck me, as if I had carried an ikon of the Antichrist into a cathedral. When the election was over the men never called, the energy of those few weeks seemed to drain from him. On Saturday when he took us shopping into town, he stood reverently aside to let the former schoolteacher, now a Dáil deputy, stride by without returning his respectful salute.

  Every year it never seemed it would come until it was suddenly there. The buses throbbing outside the gates as the girls march up the steps in their Sunday clothes. At Tara or Clonmacnois they are lectured on the historical sites, and then the nun claps her hands for them to scamper down the gravel path towards the tiny shop where crisps and toffees and chocolate are drowned in a sea of hands. On the way home they travel, exhausted, through the alien green landscape. There is a fight for window seats and the girl beside her leans over to be sick. Spilt milk is souring in the heat. They sing in the queasy smell of the summer evening.

  The morning before fifth class breaks up, with Miss O’Flynn at their head, they parade through the empty streets towards the countryside. The dark-skinned old man watches from his cottage wall beneath the roadway as they pass the red barn and start to move through the fields. Loose gravel sprays beneath their rubber soles, they point out the farms where there is work in the autumn. Some of the girls hold hands and sing, Now she won’t buy me – A rubber dolly! At Pass-If-You-Can they turn up the hill where the flooded quarry glistens blue in the light. A girl winks at friends and turns to Sandra.