“In the name of God, Nora Phelan, there’s about as much interest in poetry in Kilmeen as there’s in outer space,” she declared.
“We are a poetic people,” Nora asserted.
“And pigs can fly,” Rosie told her.
Now the muted sound of the kitchen clock striking six echoed through the house. Having stacked up her books, Nora left the parlour and went across the front hallway to the kitchen. After putting on the kettle, she went over to the radio and tuned into Radio Luxembourg and was delighted to hear Elvis Presley singing “Wooden Heart”. She danced around the kitchen to the soothing sound of Elvis and closed her eyes, imagining what it would be like to dance with Uncle David. Then she began to lay the table. They would soon be in from the cows and the yard jobs. Sometimes she wished that Mom would come in early and get the supper and not always be depending on her to do it. Mom and Shiner did the yard work and Jack and Peter did the cows. Peter and Jack worked in complete harmony, and it had always been like that. She sensed that Jack had filled Dad’s shoes and become Peter’s support and adviser, and she remembered Aunty Kate saying that the same thing had happened for her when Grandad had died. No wonder they all loved Jack. He was the heart of Mossgrove and of their lives. Sometimes she worried when she saw him trying to lift something that was too heavy and tried to help. But Mom had advised, “Let Jack do things his own way and don’t be trying to make him feel like an old man.”
“But, Mom,” she had protested, “sure at seventy-five he can’t be whipping bags of wheat and spuds around.”
“If he feels able, don’t interfere. Jack would prefer to burn out fast rather than rust out like old mowing machine. Haven’t you often heard him say that?”
“But I don’t want him to burn out fast,” Nora protested. “I would die if anything happened to Jack.”
“Norry, my dear, you must toughen up a bit or life will crucify you,” Mom said firmly.
“Did life crucify you, Mom?” she asked curiously, because Mom never talked about her emotions.
“No,” Mom had declared grimly, “because I learned early in life that if you saw something that you wanted you went right for it.”
Nora wondered if that included Rodney Jackson. She did not want Mom to marry him. Peter and herself had discussed it, and Peter had concluded, “She might not marry him, but he is going to come in useful in some other direction.”
Davey Shine was the first to come in the back door, and Nora knew by his face that himself and Mom were after a confrontation. He was running his finger through his wiry red hair, causing it to stand upright above his normally happy round face. Davey was broad and short, but what he lacked in height he made up for in muscle. Now he grinned ruefully at Nora.
“Your mother,” he told her, shaking his head, “has the happy knack of acting like Queen Muck and thinking that she can control all around her. Wouldn’t you think that I’d be used to her at this stage?”
“Davey, you know she doesn’t mean it,” Nora assured him.
“Not so sure of that now,” Davey decided. “I go over every night to help out Danny across the river, and your mother thinks that she has the right to tell me that I’m working here and not at Conways’.”
“I think that you are great to be helping Danny,” she told him warmly, “but you are probably tired and that’s why Mom’s annoyed you. Normally she doesn’t bother you and it’s Peter does all the complaining.”
“God, you had better say nothing about me being tired,” Davey warned her, “because that’s exactly what your mother is complaining about.”
“But it’s all in a good cause,” she told him.
“Nora, my girl,” Davey smiled at her as he dried his hands, “sometimes I think that you are in the wrong nest.”
“Oh, she’s in the right nest all right,” Jack assured them, overhearing the remark as he came in the door, “her grandmother down to the ground.”
“Oh the blue blood of the Phelans!” Shiner laughed, throwing the towel across to Jack. “There you are now, wash your dirty paws before you dine with your betters.”
“There is none better than Jack around here,” Nora asserted. “Jack is the best, and there would be none of us here only for him.”
“Jack, you have them all brainwashed,” Davey told him. “Peter thinks you’re God, and Nora thinks that you made the world, and even herself is a little bit in awe of you.”
“Is Mom in awe of Jack?” Nora asked with interest as she laid out the cold meat and boiled eggs on the table.
“Just a bit, but even a bit is a big thing with the boss woman, and now here comes the big boss himself,” Davey announced as Peter came in the door. He put his head down and pretended to shadow-box in front of Peter. Peter tried to wrestle him to the floor, but his tall athletic figure was no match for Davey’s solid frame.
“The trouble with you, Phelan,” Davey said looking down at him, “is that you are all long legs and speed, but when it comes to holding your ground you are no match for me.”
“But you’ve no speed, Shiner. I’d outdistance you without trying,” Peter told him as he straightened up and joined Jack and Nora at the table.
“Speed is not much good, my boyo, if you’re caught in a corner,” Davey told him, slipping on to the long form beside Jack inside the table.
“Do you know what ye remind me of?” Jack asked them.
“Well, we don’t,” Peter told him, “but I’m sure that you’re going to tell us.”
“Bran’s two pups out in the barn, and they might have more sense than the two of you.”
“And you’re like Bran, Jack, full of age and wisdom,” Nora smiled.
“Where did that come from?” Jack wondered.
“Yeats,” Nora told him.
“So we’re having Yeats for supper in Mossgrove now. There is no doubt but things are looking up around here,” Shiner decided.
“Davey, what do you think of poetry?” Nora wanted to know.
“Well, now let me think,” Shiner said slowly, sighing deeply and stroking his chin. “This is heavy stuff after a day piking dung.”
“Ah, Davey,” Nora protested, “this is serious. I’m researching an idea that I have.”
“In other words, Shiner, you’re a pilot project,” Peter told him.
“That’s agricultural language, my boy,” Shiner told him in a condescending tone.
“Nora and I are on to higher ground at the moment. Now let me think. I learned poetry in the Glen school, and a lot of it did not mean much to me, but then one day there was a poem about the sky and blackbirds and I liked that. So to me poetry is someone putting pictures that I like into words.”
“I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” Nora waved her hands in the air with excitement. “Davey, you’re a genius,” and she ran around the table and planted a kiss on top of his wiry head.
“You should have aimed a little lower,” he grinned up at her.
“Forget about that,” she told him. “You’re after saving my belief in the human race.”
“You know, Norry, sometimes…” Peter began, but then changed into song, “You speak a language that the strangers do not know.”
“Well, between poetry and singing, we’re like a Bunratty banquet,” Shiner declared.
“What’s all the racket about?” Martha demanded, coming in from the back porch having washed her hands and taken off the long apron that she usually wore around the yard. Nora always marvelled at how her mother could come in from the yard, having spent an hour feeding calves and hens, and still look elegant. Aunty Kate had once described Mom as a black swan, and Nora thought that it was a perfect description. There was not a rib astray in her glossy black hair coiled in a knot at the back of her long neck. Now she slid gracefully on to a chair at the head of the table, and with her arrival a more restrained air descended on them. Nora saw Shiner glance at her mother out of the corner of his eye. He was gauging whether she was going to forget or continue the argument that they had sta
rted out in the yard, and she did not leave him long in doubt.
“Now, Davey Shine,” she began, “I expect you to arrive here on time in the morning and not to arrive with the two eyes hanging out of your head with exhaustion.”
Nora knew by the surprised look on Peter’s face that he did not know what Mom was talking about, but she felt that it came as no surprise to Jack. How did Jack know everything?
“What are you talking about?” Peter demanded, preparing for an argument because he recognised the tone of voice that was normally reserved for him.
“Our Davey Shine,” she informed him icily, “is haring across the river every evening when he finishes here and spending until the small hours of the morning slaving with Danny Conway, trying to bring law and order into that wilderness over there. How can he do a day’s work after that?”
“Well, to be honest,” a surprised Peter told her, “I saw no difference in Shiner’s work.”
“That’s because half the time the two of you are so busy discussing football that you don’t know what’s going on around you,” Martha declared.
“Hold it right there now, Mother,” Peter asserted forcefully, “this place is running like clockwork now, and it’s due in no small way to Shiner, and what Shiner does in his own time is Shiner’s business. This is 1962, you know, not the middle ages.”
“So you have no problem with him helping out the Conways, who spent years trying to bankrupt us out of here by burning our hay and hurting our cattle, not to mention other things?” she demanded.
“Now that’s another question altogether,” Peter told her.
Nora felt that her mother was backing Peter into a corner and forcing him into confrontation with Shiner, and even though she hated getting involved in arguments between Mom and Peter, she blurted out, “Well, I think that I owe Danny Conway a lot, because only for him the night of his father in the wood might be … might…” Suddenly the old fear flooded back, and the whole scene in the wood swam in front of her eyes: the terror of Matt Conway forcing her to the ground and tearing her dress and then her amazement when Danny came from behind to hit him with a hurley, yelling for her to run. For months afterwards she had nightmares in which she was still running, but since the trip to New York they had faded. Now the terror was back. She ran sobbing from the kitchen into the parlour.
The door opened gently, and it was Jack who came in quietly and sat into the armchair across from her. “It is good to get that crying out, Norry,” he reassured her.
“I don’t know where it came from, Jack,” she sobbed. “I thought that I was over it.”
“Sometimes there are hurts buried in crevices of the mind, girleen, and it eases us to to clear them away. You’ll be the better of it,” he told her.
“You make it sound as if it was a good thing that happened tonight, Jack,” she smiled through her tears.
“It was,” he assured her. She looked across at Jack and her heart overflowed with love for him. All her life he had been there when she needed him. He had been there to comfort her on the night that Nana Nellie had died. She had loved Nana Nellie and, with the unerring instinct of a child, sensed that Jack did too. Mom was no comfort then because she knew that Mom had never loved Nana Nellie. And on the terrible day when Dad had been killed and her whole world had been blown apart, it had been Jack who had comforted and sheltered her. Mom could not cope and had gone to bed, and it was Jack who had looked after herself and Peter and had kept the farm running.
“Was there a big argument in the kitchen when I left?” she asked hesitantly.
“Not a bit of it,” he assured her with a smile. “You put a stop to the whole carry-on. Shiner is free to do what he wants, and we’ll all do as we see fit. So now, girlie, you keep up the learning and get to teach this poetry thing that you have in your head.”
The following morning, as she walked up the boreen from Mossgrove to Jack’s cottage, she thought back over his advice. He was right about the studying, or “the learning” as Jack called it. But besides that, her head was full of things that she wanted to do. If she came back teaching with Uncle David, she had a dream of putting on Shakespeare in Kilmeen and bringing him alive on stage. There were so many other things that she dreamed of, such as poetry readings, book clubs and plays. It would be lovely if they had a little theatre in the village. She had not discussed the details with anyone because she was afraid of getting her dream punctured. She was determined to hold on to that dream.
Toby was waiting at the gate of Jack’s cottage, and he went wild with delight at the sight of her. He was there every morning and evening without fail. “Toby, I think that you have a watch,” she told him as she leaned in over the gate to rub behind his ears. Jack’s haggard was full of scratching hens, quacking ducks and the gander holding court with his two geese in the far corner. It was a hive of activity. Jack had the gate into his vegetable plot wired along the bottom, but when everything was harvested in the autumn, the fowl got the run of the entire acre and were delighted with the extra territory. This morning they were engaged in their different pursuits around the small yard.
As she walked down the hill towards Nolan’s, she went over in her mind the poetry that she had learned off the night before. One morning the previous week she had been so intent on doing this that she had not realised that she was reciting out loud until an amused Sarah Jones had looked out over the small white gate in front of her well-kept cottage. Now she stopped to call good morning to grey-haired Sarah, who was feeding her hens in a corner of her well-manicured garden. Sarah was a close friend of Jack’s and had been of Nana Nellie, and Nora knew that Sarah often called to Jack’s cottage to feed his hens and ducks if for any reason he was delayed in Mossgrove. She always wore a floral coat overall that somehow wrapped Sarah up in a small, clean, happy package. Now she looked questioningly at Nora’s bag of books.
“That’s a heavy load of books for a young one to be dragging along with her,” she said sympathetically, leaning over the gate.
“I don’t always have so many,” Nora told her, “but today all the subjects are on.”
“You’re a great girl,” Sarah assured her, “and I won’t delay you now because Rosie will be out at the gate waiting.”
“Rosie is never waiting,” Nora said. “She is always running after herself at the last minute.”
Sarah smiled with understanding as she slipped her hand into the pocket of her apron and produced a bar of chocolate. “You can share this between the two of you on the way in the road,” Sarah told her.
“That’s great,” Nora said, even though privately she thought that she might be getting a bit too old for this kind of thing. Ever since she was a little girl, Jack and Nana Nellie had always pulled small treats out of their pockets. Over the years since Nana Nellie had died, Sarah had slipped into her shoes. Sarah was very friendly with her other grandmother, Nana Agnes. These two women and Jack were the pillars of her life.
As she approached Nolan’s gate, she was surprised that Rosie was waiting, and she could see from her face that she was bubbling with excitement.
“You’re late,” Rosie accused.
“I’m not,” Nora protested. “I’m always later than this and you’re never out at the gate.”
“Well, this morning is different,” Rosie announced.
“I know by your face that you have news about something. Your face tells everything that’s behind it.”
“Isn’t it terrible the way that I can’t keep anything to myself,” Rosie lamented, “because even though I might not want to tell it, my face tells the whole story before I open my mouth.”
“But look at it this way,” Nora comforted her, “you’d make a great actress because your face would be full of expression, and it will help with your singing too.”
“You’re a great comfort to me,” Rosie laughed, giving Nora a clap on the back.
“My God, Rosie, you’re as strong as a horse,” Nora told her, wincing under Rosie’s exubera
nce.
“Don’t say that,” Rosie protested. “You know that I’m trying to lose weight and become tall and willowy like you.”
“But, Rosie, you’re lovely and curvy, and all the lads think that you’re gorgeous.”
“I’m not interested in all the lads, only one, and he lives in a house where he has a mother like a model and a sister like a hunter, so he’s used to being surrounded by elegant females.”
“But why would Peter want a girlfriend like his mother or his sister?” Nora asked her.
“Don’t know,” Rosie sighed, “but whatever he wants, I must not have it because he treats me like he treats you.”
“But, Rosie, your brother Jeremy treats me like he treats you.”
“And that’s grand for you because you have no interest in Jeremy,” Rosie wailed, “but you know I’ve always had this big crush on Peter. I’ve had it for as far back as I can remember.”
“Don’t know what you see in him,” Nora said dismissively, thinking that compared with Uncle David Peter was as dull as ditch water, “but Aunty Kate says that boys are slower to develop than girls, and anyway you want to be a showband singer, so you will need time to concentrate on that.”
“Well, that’s rich coming from you and you ramming it down my throat every day to forget about singing and concentrate on my exams,” Rosie protested.
“Well, I didn’t mean to forget it altogether,” Nora explained; “just wait until the exams are over. Then you might be the next female Elvis. Did you hear him last night on Radio Luxembourg? He was on just after six.”
“No,” Rosie wailed. “Dad was in from the cows and wanted to hear the bloody news on Radio Éireann. Being an Elvis fan in our house isn’t easy. Mom is more interested in Din Joe than Elvis.”
“Same with my crowd,” Nora assured her, “but I suppose you were better studying instead of listening to Elvis.”
House of Memories Page 5
