The Walking People

by Mary Beth Keane

  At the start of the Second World War, the village of Ballyroan consisted of seven families, which came to just over fifty people spread over one square mile. Conch, the closest town, was four miles inland and not a single person lived on the bogland or in the fields that stretched between Conch and Ballyroan, leaving those seven families alone, except when the children went to school or the people from town rode their bicycles out to swim in the sea or for some other equally isolated purpose. Big Tom often said that living in Ballyroan was like living on an island, except better. In every direction was water, but unlike the islands that sat out in the ocean like the backs of whales, Ballyroan had a freshwater river running through it. Not a stream, mind you, but a river. Fast, deep, full to the brim with fish if you knew the right places to look. It was because of the river that the Cahills never had to leave. Not when the Normans came, not when Grainne O'Malley ruled the clans and the seas, not even during the potato blight when the people either fled or turned into shadows.

  "Because of this," Big Tom always said at the end of this familiar speech, and held up his fishing net.

  "Put that away, you fool," Lily said when she saw him at it. Sometimes she would grab it out of his hands, gather it up in her arms until it was as small as she could make it, and carry it out of the kitchen to a hiding place only she and Big Tom knew.

  But by 1956, despite centuries of gathering seaweed from the high sea ledges, drying it, giving it to the children to chew or keep for the flower beds, despite generation after generation of the same families driving cattle, footing turf, churning butter, bleeding the fall pig from the ceiling rafter of a dark back room before covering him with salt the size of hailstones and closing him up in his barrel, despite all the narrow headstones sticking out of the fields like milk teeth, five of the seven houses in Ballyroan were abandoned, their windows boarded, their inhabitants gone to England or Australia or Canada or America. Every one of these families said they were certain they'd come back one day, once they had their legs under them, once they'd put aside a little money to bring back home and start again, and when that day came, could they please write the Cahills to take the boards off the windows, light the fire in the kitchen, let the air and sunshine in.

  Greta assumed that these families did not have a net like her father did, or they wouldn't have had to leave. According to the man on the wireless radio, all of Ireland was leaving for England and America, all except the very young and the very old. It seemed a simple thing, a net. Such an ordinary piece of daily life—like a bucket or a spade—and Greta couldn't see why people wouldn't just go out and get one.

  In the only other house left in Ballyroan lived Mr. Grady. Mr. Grady's house stood exactly one mile north of the Cahills, and considered together the two houses were like signposts marking where one entered and exited Ballyroan. Big Tom said that no one ever wrote to Mr. Grady, and when Greta asked why, Big Tom said it was because Mr. Grady was a miserable son of a bitch. Lily didn't like Mr. Grady spoken ill of in the Cahill house. She said it would bring bad luck. Sometimes she included Mr. Grady in the bedtime prayers she said with the girls, and when Big Tom said she should pray for the net and the salmon as long as she was praying for Mr. Grady, she said that would bring bad luck too.

  If there were still seven families living in Ballyroan in 1956, the travellers might have decided to keep going to a roadside farther away. They came to Conch at roughly the same time every year, after the Ballinasloe Horse Fair in October, and stayed until the middle of December. Greta and Johanna had seen them there when they went to town for Mass or errands, which they weren't allowed to do alone if the tinkers had set up camp. They had passed the brightly colored barrel-top wagons, their hands clenched firmly in Lily's fists. But by 1956 the travellers had worn out their welcome in Conch. They were run from town, run from the outskirts of town, run up the western road toward the coast, where the townspeople didn't have to pass their damp clothes drying in the bushes, their collection of tinker tools scattered in the grass, their gypsy stews cooked in open view, their made-up language no one could understand. Ballyroan was a compromise that had been reached after name-calling, fist fighting, denial of entrance to pubs and shops, spitting on ancestral gravesites. The travellers were run all the way to the ocean, where that October they lined up their wagons, set up their tents, built their fortresses of plywood, cardboard, scrap metal, and oilcloth, and lit their fires on that particular high sea ledge for the very first time. It was an easy walk from there to Conch, where they could spend the days going door to door begging or offering their services or stealing, depending on who was describing it.

  The morning before the travelling woman landed in the Cahills' field, she'd come to their door and knocked. "God bless all here," she'd said when Greta answered. Big Tom said that tinkers were without religion. They only pretended when they came to Catholic homes. They had rosaries in their pockets and the string of the scapular peeking out above their collars just like country people, but it was all a trick where a tinker was concerned. Lily said they were born into their lives the same as anyone, and if Big Tom had been born in a tent by the side of the road he wouldn't know any different either.

  "I'd know enough, no matter where I was born, not to go around begging instead of going out and doing. They'll pull the hay from our haycocks to make their beds, and they'll turn their animals into our fields at night."

  "And what harm?"

  "And then after that the whole lot of them will come pleading at the door for the clothes off our backs. What harm? And them with more money than any of us with their goats and donkeys and ponies."

  "I've come across a few good ones, is all I'm saying. There's bad ones and good ones just like country people. You think you're perfect, Tom Cahill? Think of what we sell from this house. That's right. Now think of people who might say we're no better than the tinkers."

  Greta had opened the door for the woman, and though she shouldn't have been surprised—Lily had said they'd start at the two Ballyroan houses before they headed into town—she couldn't remember what she was supposed to do. Lily was in the kitchen with her bucket of heads and tails, her fingers sticky from pressing the salmons' bellies and sweeping aside with her cupped hand all that oozed out, when she saw the woman walking down the coast road toward their cottage. She had immediately started cleaning up and shouted to Greta to open all the windows in the cottage as high as they would go.

  "God bless." Greta echoed the woman's greeting, and opened the door wider.

  "Is your mam at home?" the woman asked, taking two small steps into the hallway so that Greta could shut the door. She was about the same age as Lily, Greta guessed, except rougher-looking, lined in the face the way leather gets when it's left outside too long. She was wearing an orange scarf wrapped around her hair and a heavy black shawl over her dress. On her feet were thick wool socks stuck into sandals that had once been white. Lily came out of the kitchen wiping her hands. "Missus," the tinker said.

  "Greta," Lily said, "go make the tea."

  The woman, whose name turned out to be Julia Ward, stayed for almost an hour. Big Tom and the boys were out cutting turf; Johanna had taken the bicycle into town to sell the eggs, deliver the salmon, buy flour, tea, sugar. Julia undid her shawl to reveal a heather gray cardigan unraveling at the cuffs, a navy blue skirt. Over everything she wore an apron turned backward, so that the pockets were facing inward. The woman reached under the apron and drew out a small bag that glinted in the light of the lamp. The little purse was covered with buttons, brooches, beads from broken necklaces. Julia took out needles, pins, spools of thread, a comb, a smoking pipe, asking as she arranged everything on the table if there was anything Lily needed mended. Lily avoided the question as she cut slices from a loaf of brown bread, the same as she would for a priest or a visitor from town. Greta touched the little purse, ran her hand over the flashes of color that quivered when she moved it. Julia looked at Greta when she touched it, looked from Greta's face to the purse a
nd back, then spoke to Lily.

  "If it's not sewing you need I have a husband who does good work with a soldering iron. Will I look in at your kettle or your saucepans?" She looked around the kitchen.

  "Drink that down," Lily said as she walked over to the small table next to the fire. She brought back the bundle she'd wrapped. Half a loaf of bread. Butter coming through the paper. A jam jar filled with flour. She left it next to Julia's cup and saucer.

  "The one working in the bog by the low road—is he yours? With the mouth?" Julia asked. "I've seen it before, and I know there's a way to cut inside his mouth and his nose to make the lip fall down to where it's supposed to be."

  "He has his own way. He does as well as you and I. His two brothers understand him and he's a lovely writer and writes down for us whatever we don't understand."

  "And what about that child?" Julia asked, nodding toward Greta. Greta was listening to their conversation only vaguely as she held her teaspoon in her hand and relished again and again the sound of the purse tapping out a miniature racket on the kitchen table as Julia sifted through it. "Is she in need of a tonic?" The woman leaned in close to Greta's face. "She has a kind of a look."

  "Don't mind her," Lily said, and for a moment both women looked at Greta in silence. "That's our Greta."

  "Is she—?" Julia asked, touching the side of her own head.

  "She has her own way, like Little Tom has his way. She was nine weeks early when she came."

  "How many have you in all?"

  "Ten in all. Five alive. So she's either the youngest of ten or the youngest of five, depending on how you look at it."

  Lily noticed Greta peering over at her, peering with that look she had so often, her features drawn together in a clump at the center of her face, her neck stuck out ahead of the rest of her body. Greta the Goose, the children often called her, and Lily lifted her leg to kick anyone she heard at it, whether that child was a Cahill or not.

  "We love her," Lily said, and watched the clump at the center of her youngest child's face relax into itself again. Large green eyes, freckled nose, round cheeks, and perfect chin. Not as pretty as her sister, but still a good-looking girl when she wasn't making herself the goose. "Greta is my pet. Aren't you, love?" Lily said, reaching across the table to take Greta's hand and kiss it. Greta knew this was her reward for being home when the others were not. As far as she knew, Lily had never called Johanna her pet. She'd never given Johanna a squeeze when no one else was looking and whispered that she was the best girl.

  Julia rummaged inside the purse once again and drew out a square piece of paper, which she folded, twisted, and tucked until it became a flower. She put the flower in front of Greta.

  As Greta examined the flower, they heard a bicycle coming up the path, a skid of gravel outside the front door. Julia looked quickly at Lily and then pushed her chair back from the table, stood, took the bundle of food Lily had wrapped, and tucked it under her shawl.

  "They wouldn't give me brown sugar in Finnegan's," Johanna announced as she opened the kitchen door. "But I—"

  Julia dipped her head in greeting and then moved toward the door.

  "Missus," Johanna said, still winded from the bicycle. As she struggled to catch her breath, Lily and Greta both, each in their own way, guessed what she was going to ask. The boys had been up to the sea ledge to size up the tinker camp and report to Big Tom how many were in the group. They'd returned home with a full account: seventeen travellers in all, plus three piebald ponies, four dogs, five goats, two donkeys. Two of the young ones, Padraic mentioned, looked about the same age as Johanna. And then there were babies they hadn't bothered to count.

  "Are you the mother of the two young ones in the group?" Johanna finally asked. "About my age? A boy and a girl?"

  "Johanna—" Lily warned.

  "The twins," Julia said. She kept her hand on the handle of the door and spoke to Johanna over her shoulder. "I didn't mark the day they came. They're gone eleven, I'd say."

  "Twins," Johanna said. She nodded and clasped her hands together, as if to agree that this made sense.

  "A tinker for tea!" Johanna said when the woman had left and she had time to comprehend the empty cups, the crumbs on the plates. Lily went to the back room to continue the work that had been interrupted. Johanna turned to Greta. "Were you here talking to her the whole time?"

  Greta told her about the purse and all the colors and all the things the woman had offered to do. Mending, soldering, milking, how she had a collection of tonics back at the camp, ways to turn gray hair brown, ways to fix a sore back or a sore leg, even Little Tom's mouth. She showed her the paper flower.

  Johanna had pulled Greta close to hear the news and now leaned away from her, sinking back in her chair as if she'd eaten too much at supper. "What do you think they do up there all day and all night? The young ones, I mean." Greta could feel her sister's excitement and knew first in her stomach, then in her throat, then in her mind what was coming next.

  "We have to go there," Johanna said.

  That night, once they were sure their father and brothers would not be going down to the river with the net, and after they heard the creak of their parents' bedsprings on the other side of the wall and counted to one hundred, Johanna threw off her blankets and reached for her sweater. She pulled on a pair of kneesocks and stepped into the short lace-up boots that had once been Padraic's and had been carefully preserved by Lily until Johanna's feet grew big enough. Greta, who was without shoes or boots at the moment, was next in line to be brought to the shoe shop in Conch. "Before winter," Lily always said, and at night she would have Greta lie on the floor with her feet on Lily's lap so Lily could rub them.

  "Either come or go but decide right now," Johanna said to Greta as she laced the boots.

  "Doesn't Pop hate the tinkers?" Greta asked.

  "He buys buckets off them," Johanna said. "He says some tinkers make buckets that can last forever. And he bought a horse off one once. But it died the next week. You remember. He said they had it well timed."

  "But does he like them or does he hate them?"

  "Are you coming or not?"

  "Is there a moon?"

  "There is. A three-quarter one, and it's a clear night."

  "But what will you do when you get there? They'll be asleep in their own beds."

  "You mean in their tents."

  "In their beds in their tents."

  "They mightn't have beds in the tents."

  "They must! Straw beds, I mean. What about in the wagon?"

  "They might have beds in the wagon, but only for the old ones. Only one or two could sleep in the wagon. I'd say it's strictly tents for the young ones."

  Greta sucked her knuckle as Johanna lifted the latch on the window. With one quick heave she shoved it all the way up. She waited a minute to hear if the sound had woken the house; then she put one leg through, straddled the window frame for a moment, and fell onto the grass outside.

  "You almost broke it with your boot," Greta whispered with as much ferociousness as she could muster. Then she grabbed her sweater and did the same.

  Outside, Greta's stockings immediately wet with dew, they crept around the back of the cottage and swung wide toward the road. Johanna took the lead, fearless of rabbit holes and the ankle that might break if she stepped in one, while Greta stumbled after with her arms and head held in front of the rest of her body. "Come on, you goose," Johanna said, mimicking her sister's style of walking and then shooting ahead.

  When they got to the road, the way was easier. Greta could feel the incline begin under her feet, and her body leaned naturally into it. Up they climbed, keeping the ocean to their left, its roar always mightier from the high sea ledge. Both girls held their hands to their heads to keep their hair from flying in the wind. They walked until the road became flat again and curved slightly away from the ocean. Then they saw it at the same time: the flicker of a campfire in the distance.

  "Listen," Greta said. She stopp
ed walking. The sound of a harmonica glided through the dark to where the girls crouched by the side of the road. Then: "I have to pee."

  "So pee," Johanna said, and edged forward to get a better view. There were three dark silhouettes sitting by the fire and two smaller silhouettes skipping in circles around them. One of the wagons, its door propped open, was pulled up close to the fire. Johanna whispered that there was an old man sitting on a chair inside.

  Greta pulled up her nightdress and tried to pee but found she couldn't. "Let's go now," she said, feeling the urge come back the moment she stood up.

  "Wait. I see the twins. I don't see your woman from today." Johanna was crawling to get closer; Greta hung back and kept her focus on the white of Johanna's legs. She pushed the overgrowth away from her face and arms. She looked up to find the moon, which was slowly disappearing behind a cloud. She heard the first strains of a fiddle joining the harmonica and wondered if, had they stayed in their beds, the wind would have carried the music all the way down to their bedroom. Then the music stopped.

  The young girl who'd been skipping called out something in the tinker language, and the three adults around the campfire stood and peered into the darkness. One, a man about the same age as Big Tom, picked up a plank of wood that was lying on the grass and walked toward them. He lifted it, poised to swing. Kneeling on the wet grass, Greta covered her head with her arms and folded over so that her forehead rested on her knees. She held her breath.

  Johanna stepped out into the road as if she were out on her usual midnight stroll. "Good evening," she said.

  The man stared at her, then noted Greta just behind. "The two girleens from down below," he called to the others.

  "Lookin' at what?" the tinker girl asked, running up to the man and standing behind him. The man threw his plank of wood into the grass. Just then the young boy who must have been the girl's twin came up quietly to observe.