The Walking People

by Mary Beth Keane

  "She can't help it," a voice called from the back, and Greta turned to find the dark shine of Johanna's head rise up among the lighter heads around her. "She's not being fresh." Another long moment of silence, and Greta felt Mr. Joyce inspecting her all over, the way her hands were folded, the way her legs were crossed at the ankles in the place where her stockings had fallen and bunched. She turned her head left and right, shifting in her seat to hear what else Johanna would say, but that was the end of it, and the next thing Greta heard was the switch being returned to the desk drawer.

  On the way home from school that day, Johanna told Greta that she'd lied to Mr. Joyce and that Greta had to try harder. "How many times does three go into fifteen?" she asked.

  Greta counted on her fingers. "Five with none left over."

  "How many times does four go into sixteen?"

  "Four."

  "And how many times does seven go into twenty-one?"

  Greta thought for a moment. "Three times."

  "That's all the questions were, Greta. Why didn't you just write the answer instead of making all those marks on the board? He thought you were making fun of him."

  "Was he very cross?"

  "You better cop on, Greta. I won't speak up again."

  "But Johanna—"

  "Don't but Johanna me," Johanna said, then hugged her bag to her chest and ran ahead.

  She'll wait for me at the crossroads, Greta told herself. She'll wait for me at the bridge. It was getting dark fast. Greta moved to the left side of the road and kept close to the wall that would lead her home.

  In December, just before the school closed for Christmas holidays and almost two months after the tinkers left Ballyroan, a dentist came to the convent school to examine its forty students. By this time it was widely known that Greta smiled and nodded at things that didn't call for smiling or nodding, and that she had a way of walking as if she were leaning into a strong wind. When Mr. Joyce posed questions to the lower levels, he passed over her, calling on students he'd heard from three times already that day.

  The dentist came all the way from Galway City in a long blue car that the boys couldn't keep themselves from running their hands over. It was parked outside the gate, and Mr. Joyce had to keep going over to usher them back onto school grounds. When he had everyone in one place, he asked the students to line up single file, youngest to oldest. Greta was placed toward the middle, and she immediately heard whispers travel up and down the line and an unfamiliar voice commanding them to stand still. Two of the mid-level boys took off running across the yard and launched themselves over the gate, which Mr. Joyce had locked. Before he could say a word, another two followed, sending a brief titter up the line. "Next," the dentist said now and again. "Step up." Greta couldn't hear anything except breathing from the remaining students. Those who'd had their turn were shuttled somewhere else, back to the classroom, perhaps, or told to go home early. Every once in a while she heard a sound she couldn't identify, like a pebble dropped into a wheelbarrow. The closer she got to the front of the line, the quieter everyone became. When she was three people from the front, she saw the tin bucket on the ground next to the stranger. She saw the stranger in his long white jacket lean back and forth between patient and bucket until the line moved again and again, and then it was Greta stepping up.

  "Open," he said, pressing his thumb against Greta's chin and pushing his fingers inside her mouth. "Wide." He pushed on each of Greta's teeth, then tapped and scraped them with a metal instrument. He prodded her gums with something sharp. He shone a light into her mouth and pressed on her tongue until she gagged.

  "Name," he demanded. Greta told him. Then he did something she hadn't heard him ask anyone else on the line to do.

  "Greta, if you wouldn't mind, please walk twenty paces in the direction of the gate and then turn back and face me."

  Greta turned and did what she was told. At pace fourteen she turned her head to look for Johanna, but at sixteen she turned back, remembering Johanna's warning that she wouldn't speak up again.

  "Now, Greta," the dentist called above the buzz that had ignited up and down the line. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

  Greta didn't answer. She could see the line of her classmates, one after another in varying shades of gray and blue cardigans, not a bright spot in the bunch. She could see the whitewash of the schoolhouse behind, the shape of the outhouse, the smudge that was the bell, but there was no way she could make out how many fingers the dentist was holding up.

  "Take ten paces back toward me. Now tell me how many."

  Greta took ten steps. She smiled. She pulled at her dress, brushed the hair from her face. "Now come back and stand in front of me, where you were before." Greta walked back to him as quickly as she could. She stood as close to him as she'd been when he was pushing his fingers inside her mouth. She saw the first three fingers of his left hand held up, the other hand behind his back.

  "Three," she announced. He took a notebook and pencil out of his pocket. He made a few marks on the page.

  "You need glasses, Greta. With a strong prescription. They will help you see things that are far away." He stopped writing and looked up. "Hasn't anyone ever told you that you need glasses?"

  Greta didn't say anything, and as she stood there, he put his hands on either side of her head and pressed on her left eye, then her right, with his thumbs. She stumbled as she took a step back, blinking at the bright white feathers now floating all around.

  "Is it your mother you have at home? And your father? And do you ever notice either of them writing a letter? Or reading one? Good. Do either of them ever take the bus into Galway, and do you ever go along? Yes or no, please, Greta. No? Well there's a first time for everything. Isn't there? You'll have to see this doctor in person. He's an eye doctor. You understand?"

  "The bus to Galway, yes." Where is Johanna? Greta thought.

  "Give this to your mother. It's the doctor's address, and at the bottom is my name, so you can tell him I sent you. I also made a few notes." He pressed the paper into Greta's hand. "It won't cost anything. Tell your mother that too. Tell her everything I said."

  Greta folded the paper in fourths as she walked away. When she got beyond the front gate of the school, she sat on the road, opened her bag, and tucked the note neatly between the pages of her book. Behind the rushes she could hear the creek flowing over the rocks. Father Mitchell had glasses. Greta got a good look at them every time she received Communion and their faces were mere inches apart. They seemed yellow in color and always made him look as if he had just stopped crying. Mrs. Norton, who owned one of the two shops in town, also had glasses, but hers were two little half-moons that sat at the tip of her nose. Mrs. Norton's Greta could accept. Father Mitchell's she could not.

  "What's the story?" Johanna demanded, breathless from running to find Greta. "What was he on about? Did he pull any teeth on you? No, you're grand. I can see that for myself. Me as well. Did you look in the bucket? You'd think they'd cover it up with something. Johnny Sullivan looked as green when he saw it! I watched him glance down, and then what did he do but put his hand right over his mouth. Trish had a mouthful of blood, and she spit it right on—"

  Greta handed her the note, and Johanna snapped it open.

  "Glasses?" Johanna said.

  "Does it say anything about whether they'll be yellow like Father Mitchell's?"

  "No, nothing like that. I think you're supposed to go to Galway." Johanna refolded the note and handed it back to Greta.

  "That's what he said. To Galway to see a doctor, and then the doctor will give me glasses and I'll be able to see."

  "Can you not see?"

  Johanna leaned in close to Greta's face, then leaned away, in and out to look at Greta's eyes up close and then from a slight distance.

  "When Pepper went blind his eyes went red and swelled up. And he wouldn't come out of the stable if it was sunny. Remember him rearing up on Pop?"

  Greta rubbed her eyes.

>   "Now, Greta. Mammy will want it to be just the two of you to save on bus fare, but tell her you want me to come. You will, won't you? Tell her you're scared and you need me."

  "I will not!"

  "Well, I'll be left home, then. You would do that? At Christmas? You and Mammy off looking at the shops and the lights, and me at home listening to the wind?"

  "I won't say I'm scared. I'm not scared."

  Johanna shrugged and began walking. "Might not happen anyway. You know who'll have something to say about this, don't you?"

  Lily didn't know what to think. The girls had come home and given her the note as if they were making a formal presentation. Greta offered it on her open palm, and Johanna stood next to her, watching the note pass from Greta's palm to Lily's fingers to the table, where it was opened and the creases smoothed flat.

  "Glasses," Johanna summarized as Lily read. "For Greta."

  "We're supposed to go to Galway," Greta said. "To see a doctor. Does it say?" she asked, standing on her tiptoes and looking over her mother's shoulder.

  "I can't make heads nor tails of most of it," Lily said. "It's mostly to the doctor in Galway. There's just a little bit at the top to me." She turned to Greta, took her by the wrists, and pulled her so that she was standing against Lily's knees. "Can you not see, Greta? I mean, I know we tell you don't squint and do your neck like the goose, but can you not see?"

  "I already looked at her eyes to see do they look like Pepper's," Johanna said.

  "I'm not blind," Greta said.

  "Look around here now." Lily shooed at Johanna to back away, give Greta some room. "What can't you see?"

  "Mammy, how can she tell you what she can't see?" Johanna said.

  "She knows what I mean."

  "I can see the kitchen for a start."

  "What in the kitchen?"

  "The table, four chairs, the fire, the window, four pipes on the mantel."

  "Can you see the four pipes on the mantel?"

  "Well, I know they're there. I put them there this morning."

  "But can you see them?"

  Greta walked over to the mantel and stood on her tiptoes. In that position she was just tall enough to rest her nose on the ledge. In front of her, no more than two inches from her face, were the four pipes, and beside them the box of tobacco.

  "I can see them," she said.

  "Mammy, will we go to Galway?" Johanna asked, rocking back and forth from heel to toe.

  "You? Can you not see either?"

  "You wouldn't go without me, Mammy. Now listen, I'll do anything—"

  Big Tom and the boys came in just as Johanna's begging reached a pitch that Big Tom couldn't stand. "Calm yourself, girl," he said, and swiped one of the pipes off the mantel before collapsing into one of the chairs. He scratched at his face, then sucked on his pipe in short, quick puffs until it got going. To Greta, the sound of him getting his pipe started always sounded like a person kissing his or her own hand before blowing the kiss away. Then the boys went at their own pipes, and there were kisses flying all around the kitchen as Lily filled them in about the dentist and the note and the doctor in Galway.

  "And what's wrong with her?" Big Tom asked. "Useless at finding her way at doing things unless she's shown a hundred times, but nothing a doctor can do that her own family can't. The best medicine is like I said—keep her close to home."

  "Peel the potatoes," Lily said to Johanna. "We'll talk after dinner."

  "I can't. Please. I can't do a thing until I know."

  "You should listen to your father, Johanna, and calm down." Lily took one of the boiled potatoes in her hand and peeled off the skin. With each dark piece of skin that fell away, the white inside was revealed in a cloud of steam. Greta had tried to peel a hot potato once, but she burned herself, and Lily had made her feel her hands and compare them to her own. Greta's were soft and smooth; Lily's were as rough as Big Tom's, thick with calluses and scars.

  When Lily was finished peeling the potatoes, she sat on the stool by the fire. Because the kitchen was small and the table seated only four, the family usually ate in shifts: Big Tom and the boys first, Lily and the girls directly after.

  Greta thought the discussion would be put off until after they'd all eaten, but suddenly, from her perch, Lily announced, "We'll go to Galway. The girls and I will go and we'll see what this man has to say."

  Johanna clapped her hands. Greta dropped down to a stool opposite her mother and wondered what other people saw when they looked at things.

  "A bloody waste," Big Tom muttered, and the kitchen was filled with the sound of forks and knives against plates and teeth.

  The Galway bus came through the Conch crossroads every Tuesday and Thursday, and the journey took two hours. There were some regulars—people who went to Galway once every few weeks to settle up business—but most of the people who went were what Lily called once-in-a-blue-moon types, like themselves. On the Thursday before Christmas, Lily, Johanna, and Greta walked the three miles to the crossroads with a bag of sandwiches and waited for the sound of an engine in the distance. Greta was wearing shoes Lily had bought from a woman in town whose daughter had grown out of them, and Johanna was annoyed that she had boys' shoes and Greta had girls' shoes. To distract them, Lily told them that she could count on one hand the number of times she'd been to Galway. After half an hour they heard the bus approaching. When it appeared, Lily stepped out into the road and held up her hand.

  Greta and Lily shared a seat. Johanna sat by herself across the aisle and looked out the window. There had been a lot of talk about Pepper in the days leading up to their journey, talk Lily tried to hush. Pepper was a fine, strong horse when Big Tom bought him, but after a few months his eyes went red and rimmed with pus. That lasted a few weeks; the boys took turns washing his eyes in salt water. Nothing helped. Then he started getting skittish about the sun. He shook his head at every noise, however slight. Then he lost his balance, began to trip and run into things. By the time they had him for a year, he was completely blind.

  Lily had asked them how they could compare a girl to a horse, and Jack and Padraic (and Little Tom, by nodding at whatever his brothers said) insisted that Pepper used his eyes just as people use theirs. Didn't horses have eyes to see out of? Didn't Pepper start in with that head-shaking, looking-around-himself routine, and didn't that remind her of Greta a bit, with the neck and the arms and keeping her head cocked to the side?

  "Look it," Johanna said. She had her finger pressed to the glass. They'd been on the bus for over an hour and all Johanna had said up until now was that everything looked the same. Finally she noticed something different, and Lily hopped across the aisle to see. There were poles planted in the ground every hundred feet or so, and at the very top of the poles were thick black wires. "Electricity," Lily said. Every day on the radio there was more talk of electricity. The cities were electrified. Large towns were electrified. Soon all of Ireland would be connected in one enormous grid. Big Tom said they could keep their electricity where it was. He for one did not want to worry about being burned alive in his bed.

  The bus came to a stop, and the driver got out to help an elderly passenger board. Outside at the crossroads, someone had tied a bull to one of the poles. As Johanna and Lily watched, the bull lowered his ugly head, bunched his massive shoulders, and pulled at the rope that held him. As the animal strained and lurched, a hundred thousand sparks rained down from above as if a bundle of hay had been set on fire and thrown into the wind.

  Galway was filled with people, everyone squeezed into a space so tight that Greta and Johanna didn't see why they didn't spread out a bit. Because it was nearly Christmas, the streets were also full of lights and wreaths with red ribbon bows. Two steps out of the bus station, Greta found herself on the sidewalk, surrounded by strangers. Next thing she felt Lily's hand take hold of her arm and steer her to a doorway. "Don't walk into people, and don't leave my sight," she said. She tried to take Johanna's hand, but Johanna shook her off.


  "You'll hold my hand, girl, or the three of us will get back on that bus and go home."

  "I'm old enough."

  Lily turned back to the bus and started walking, pulling Greta after her. Johanna lunged forward and slipped her hand into her mother's. "Lovely," she said. "See?"

  The three of them made their way past Eyre Square and turned onto Shop Street. One street turned into another as people crisscrossed from side to side, stepped around the threesome, walked close to the storefronts or the curb to let them pass.

  "Twenty-seven Market Street," Lily said, dropping the girls' hands for a moment to pull her shawl tighter around her shoulders. "Be on the lookout."

  The night before, Big Tom had pulled out his old map of Galway City and shown Lily where they'd have to go. The names of streets, he warned them, could be difficult to find. Sometimes they were up on the sides of buildings, sometimes down at your feet. Sometimes an address was on one street, but the door to get in was on another street around the corner. What he'd failed to mention were the cars and the trucks that would be there, pulled up against all the curbs, rolling down the street one after another like a long caravan. Mixed into all of it were the horse-pulled carts and people loaded down with bags and newspapers. Lily pointed out a donkey with a creel full of turf being led down a side street, a car close on its heels.

  Market Street was a side street, less crowded, so Lily dropped their hands and let them walk ahead. Johanna hopped from window to window, calling back information about shoes, dresses, hats, flowers, until she stopped at the window of a bakery. The vents were open to let the steam out, and the smell of fresh bread and sweet glaze pulled them forward. Even Greta could see the muffins and cakes smeared with white frosting or berry red jam. Johanna didn't even have to ask. "First things first," Lily said. "I'll think about it."

  The door to 27 was plain, not as grand as Johanna and Greta had imagined. Inside the street door was a list of doctors with corresponding office numbers, then another door. The threesome walked up four flights of stairs until they came to office 4W. "Go on, girl," Lily said to Greta. "What are you waiting for?"