Woman of the House

by Taylor, Alice

  “Jack would be very slow to criticise Dad,” Kate told him. “But those few years before Dad died must have been a very rough time, with Dad squandering money that was needed for Mossgrove. Jack probably does not want to remember those days,” Kate concluded.

  “But it would be well to know,” Ned said thoughtfully, “and we might learn from past mistakes.”

  “Why, what makes you say that?” Kate asked curiously.

  “I’m thinking of Peter,” he answered. “Jack says he’s like our father, so I don’t want history to repeat itself. I’d like Peter to have more schooling than I had, and there seems to be no way around it only boarding school. But he’d probably hate being away.”

  “He’s finishing in the Glen school this summer, isn’t he?” Kate asked.

  “He is, and the nearest secondary school is twenty miles away, so we’ll have to come to some kind of a decision over the next few months,” Ned said.

  “Would anybody ever think of starting a secondary school in the village I wonder? The place around here badly needs one.”

  “That would be too good to be true.”

  “Well, you’ve six months to get things sorted out,” Kate told him, “and a lot can happen in six months.”

  Chapter Two

  JACK TOBIN SAT on a sagging sugan chair in a shed in the yard of Mossgrove sorting out seed potatoes. He was getting ready for the cutting of the sciollans. It was a cold dry January evening and a north-east wind whirled sops of straw around the yard.

  It ruffled the feathers of the scratching hens, hurrying the lighter ones along faster than they had intended. Only the younger hens were out in the centre of the yard, the older and wiser ones having abandoned it in favour of the hedge by the stable. I’m a bit like the old hens, Jack thought, in here taking shelter from the cold.

  The cap that he seldom removed was pulled down firmly around his ears, and for extra protection he had wrapped an old jute bag around his shoulders and across his knees. Small and weather-beaten, he moved with agility and precision. Old man Phelan, who had liked things to be well made, had once said to him, “Jack, you’re well put together.” The comment had pleased him because he too liked a horse with a balanced gait or even a cow with good proportions. They were easy on the eye.

  On one side of him was the bag of potatoes and on the other side an old tin bath half full of rejects that would be boiled later for the pigs. At his back a round stone boiler used to boil the potatoes still glowed warm from the morning fire and took the chill out of the air. He dipped into the bag with his left hand and rolled the dry potato around his palm, removing the outer layer of dry earth with his fingers feeling for the dip that denoted the eyes. Later when he would be cutting the sciollans he would run his knife between the eyes. He liked sorting the potatoes and cutting the sciollans.

  Old man Phelan had taught him how to cut sciollans during his first spring on the farm. He could still remember the old man holding the potato in one hand and the knife in the other.

  “You must go between the eyes, Jack,” he had instructed; “that gives you an eye on both sides. That’s the seed where the growth will come from. All life starts from a seed, Jack, human and otherwise,” the old man had proclaimed. He loved to hear himself talk and Jack had liked listening. When they sat down to sort the seed potatoes he would announce dramatically: “This is the first move in the resurrection of the whole farm from the dead of winter”. Jack smiled as he remembered.

  That was a long time past. Must be all of fifty years ago and he had been a lad of fifteen then. He had come to work in Mossgrove straight from school where Billy Phelan, the old man’s only son, had been his best friend. Mossgrove had been in great shape at that time because the old man was a perfectionist. When he grew older and Billy had taken over, things had slipped, but now with Ned running the place everything was shipshape again.

  He had worked here with three generations of Phelans. They were the owners and he never lost sight of that fact, but the soul of this land was his. He had dug drains down into her bowels to run off surplus water and make her rich and fertile.

  He had eased the nose of his plough deep into her soft moist earth and had ploughed long straight furrows across her brown belly and deposited seed like semen into her waiting womb and year after year had watched the crops grow. His heart had gone into this land and he knew and loved every sod. It had taken the place of a wife and children in his life. Many of the fine elm and chestnut now straddling the ditches of the farm he had nurtured from spindly young slips. He could not imagine living outside of Mossgrove because it was the core of his being and had given a deep fulfilment to his life. The only time that he had ever even thought of leaving had been many years ago when Nellie had married Billy and come to Mossgrove as the woman of the house.

  The three of them had gone to school together, and he had loved her since the day that she had come to his rescue when one of the big Conway boys had him cornered in the schoolyard. She was tall and slim with curly fair hair and a laughing face, but she had a serious side that was kind and sensitive.

  He had been in Phelans’ for about ten years at the time of her marriage to Billy and had considered leaving then. He had thought that he would find it very difficult to watch her as someone else’s wife. But the reality was that there could never have been anything between the two of them. She was a farmer’s daughter and would bring a fortune on to Mossgrove while he lived in a labourer’s cottage and had nothing much to offer her. He had accepted that there was no way that he could cross that divide. Later there were times when he had thought that maybe it was better that way. Sometimes he doubted that he was husband material at all, and watching the Phelans’ marriages he felt that there was a lot to be said for the single state.

  The old man had doubts as to the suitability of Nellie for the farm.

  “A bit frail for farming, I’d say,” was his opinion.

  “You’re wrong there, boss,” Jack had told him. “She may be tall and willowy but she could hold her own in any tussle. Came to my rescue once when one of the Conways was getting the better of me. So I’d say she’d be the right woman for this house.”

  “You could be right there, Jack lad,” the old man had agreed; “anyone that tackled the Conways can only be good.”

  Over the years it had become a bonus in his life to be near Nellie, and the fact that Billy and himself had always been such good friends had somehow made it easier. Sometimes he thought that Billy guessed how he felt about Nellie but it was never a problem between them. When Ned and Kate came along it had made things easier because it had broadened the circle. He was fond of both children but Ned was his favourite because he was so like Nellie.

  Watching Ned grow up combining the shrewdness of the old man and the gentleness of Nellie had been like seeing two roses grafted together on the one stem. Nellie had been good to the old man, and over the years the old man had grown fond of her. When he grew frail and ill Nellie had nursed him, and when he died he was laid out in the big iron bed with the brass knobs in the parlour.

  Strange, Jack thought, how sorting the seed potatoes always awakened memories of old Edward Phelan and of his own early days in Mossgrove. The old man had taught him all he knew about farming: how to help a cow with a difficult calving, how to know when a meadow was just ready for cutting and to judge the following day’s weather by the evening sky. The old man had tried to teach his own son as well, but Billy did not listen. Billy was more interested in horses and racing, and in later years when the old man was gone it was himself and Nellie who had struggled to manage the finances and succeeded in keeping the farm from going under. Billy had gambled heavily and drunk too much to ease the pain of his loss. He had always wanted more money and even accused them of ganging up on him. Those had been hard times in Mossgrove. He never liked to remember them. When Billy died suddenly it had taken a heavy financial drain off Mossgrove.

  He had then taught young Ned all that the old man had taught him,
and when Ned had finished school he had pulled in and worked like a man on the farm. In fairness to Kate she had not been afraid of work either. Nellie had been very proud of the two of them. Not that she was ever one to blow her own trumpet, but he could see it in her eyes. Pity that she had not lived longer. She was gone two years now and not a day passed that he did not think of her.

  “Jack, you look as if you’re a thousand miles away.” Ned stood looking down at him with an amused smile. “You’re sitting there looking into space with a far-away look on your face.”

  “Thinking of old times,” Jack smiled; “sorting the seed potatoes always makes me think of the old man.”

  Ned smiled. “He must have been some man because people around here always talk about him. Much more than they do about my father.”

  “Your grandfather,” Jack told him, “had an opinion on everything and usually a well thought one at that. He lived to be a good age whereas your father died a young man.”

  “We’d never have managed only for you, Jack,” Ned said reflectively. “You really kept this place going against all odds.”

  “Well, it’s all behind us now,” Jack said; “we’re up and running.”

  “Well, we’re up, whatever about running,” Ned smiled, “but I suppose compared to my father’s time things are much better.”

  “There were times then when I thought that we’d go under,” Jack said ruefully.

  “He drank a lot, didn’t he, Jack?” Ned asked.

  “All water under the bridge now.”

  “I’d like to talk about those days, Jack,” Ned said, and Jack looked up at him from beneath the peak of his greasy tweed cap.

  “Right, lad,” he agreed quietly; after all, he thought, the lad had a right to know about his own father.

  “Your father never liked farming,” he began carefully; “he found it dull. There are men, Ned, who find fulfilment on the land. Your grandfather was one of them and you and I are like that, but your father wanted more excitement in his life. The horses provided that, but he was never lucky with them.”

  “He gambled heavy?” Ned asked.

  “Yea. Couldn’t seem to stop. I was very fond of him and it seems a hard thing to say, but if he had not died when he did I don’t know what would have happened. As it was we barely kept our heads above water. But then things straightened out because we were ploughing the money back into the land. Your mother worked very hard. She was a great woman, Ned.”

  “When I was growing up my mother always seemed to have a bucket hanging off each arm drawing feed to pigs or hens or calves.”

  “She worked day and night after the old man died because your father went to hell altogether then. But the strange thing was that she almost succeeded in keeping it from you and Kate. She said to me once, ‘Jack, I don’t want them to be ashamed of their father’; so she always put a brave face on things.”

  “You know, Jack, for years I thought that he was great,” Ned said slowly, “but then little things did not quite add up. He in bed in the morning and yourself and my mother out milking. I was about twelve then and was beginning to ask questions. But for some reason Kate thought that the sun shone off him.”

  “Fathers and daughters, Ned, are a strange combination; they only want to see the best in each other,” Jack said reflectively. “Mothers and sons can somehow love each other warts and all.”

  “You could be right. Jack, can I talk to you about something else that has bothered me over the last two years since my mother died?”

  Here it comes, Jack thought, and may God direct me to say the right thing. He had known that one day Ned would need to talk about his mother’s last years and now he had come around to it. Strange, Jack thought, how we can’t talk about things when the wound is raw. We have to wait until the healing has reached a certain stage. Ned had apparently now reached that stage, but he still began uncertainly.

  “You know, when I married Martha I thought my mother would be able to take things easy and end her days in comfort, but it didn’t work out like that, did it?” he said regretfully.

  “Not quite,” Jack said cautiously.

  “You know, Jack, I always thought that it was mother-in-laws who caused the problems.”

  “That’s the general idea,” Jack agreed.

  “But I could see my mother bend over backwards not to cause problems for Martha, but it was no use.”

  “I watched it too,” Jack said evenly. There was no point in telling Ned that it broke his heart to see Nellie become a shadow in her own house, afraid to open her mouth because no matter what she said Martha read it wrong.

  “Why didn’t it work out, Jack? I tried everything but nothing seemed to work.”

  “Jealousy is a very powerful emotion,” Jack said slowly. “Martha felt threatened by your mother. She knew that there was a very close bond between the two of you and she resented it, and then when the children came along she was afraid that they would become too fond of your mother.”

  “I found that very hard,” Ned admitted, “because I have such good memories of the old man. I wanted my children to have good memories of their grandmother.”

  “Ah well, I’d say now that Nora and Peter have good memories of their Nana Nellie,” Jack said.

  He knew that Ned had had to put up a struggle so that his children could have those memories. In her later years Nellie withdrew to the parlour altogether and Martha would come up with all kind of excuses to keep Nora and Peter away from her and to turn them against her. He remembered Nellie at the end of her time up in the parlour like a visitor in her own house, but still she never complained.

  “It doesn’t matter, Jack,” she had told him, “as long as they are getting on all right themselves. We had trouble enough here when Billy was drinking. All we want now is peace and quiet.”

  In his estimation she had paid a high price for peace and quiet, but then that was her choice. And she had seemed contented enough in her own way. A good woman to read and to pray, she had an inner strength that could put up with a fair amount without retaliation. He knew that when it all got too much for her she visited Kate. But she never told Kate anything about what went on in Mossgrove because, as she had told him, “it would only cause bother”.

  He looked up into Ned’s troubled face. The last thing that Nellie would have wanted was to have Ned’s conscience bothering him about her last years. He had done the best he could in the circumstances. Maybe Ned should have been a bit stronger with Martha, but then that was all right for himself to think because he knew nothing of the emotional intricacies of the marriage bed.

  “Listen, Ned,” he said, choosing his words with care, “your mother was happy in many ways. Maybe herself and Martha could have got on better, but there is another side to that story. Martha has worked hard in Mossgrove and done a lot to improve the house and the yard and your mother appreciated that. She loved Mossgrove and would have hated if you had married someone who would have let the whole place go to wrack and ruin after all the effort she had put into building it up.”

  “I never thought of it like that,” Ned said, his face clearing.

  “Well, that’s the way to think of it,” Jack said, almost convincing himself. “And another thing, Ned: even though your mother is dead she still walks around here in your daughter Nora.”

  “She’s very like her, isn’t she?” Ned agreed with satisfaction.

  “That she is!” Jack declared.

  And if right was done, he thought, she would have been called after her grandmother like every other child in the neighbourhood.

  “Today is her anniversary,” Ned said, “but of course you never forget.”

  “No,” Jack agreed,” I went over to the grave on Sunday after mass, and the daffodils are just peeping up.”

  “They’re early. They could be buried under snow yet,” Ned prophesied.

  “Do you remember about five years ago we had snow that lasted for weeks?” Jack said, glad to change the subject. “In all
of my years farming I never experienced a winter like it. It will probably be remembered around here as White ’47. Peculiar in a way, when a hundred years ago we had Black ’47 with the famine.”

  “Yea, it was an extraordinary winter,” Ned said and then smiled. “Nora and Peter had the time of their lives – it was nothing but skating and snowmen.”

  Jack was glad that the conversation had veered away from the delicate subject of Martha and Nellie. What had needed to be said was now said. He had always known that the situation had caused Ned a lot of distress. Today was the first time that Ned had been able to bring it out into the open. That was a good thing, but it was as well to shut the door on it now and forget. Thankfully Ned moved on to another subject.

  “I think that there is something bothering Nora at the moment. It’s something to do with school: she goes off there some mornings as if the weight of the world was on her shoulders.”

  “Could it be the Conways?” Jack asked.

  “Every problem around here seems to begin and end with the Conways,” Ned sighed.

  “It was the one thing that always worried me when times were bad, that they would get their hands on this place. The possibility of that happening would be enough to send me into an early grave,” Jack admitted.

  “Well, that danger is past now, but I think that one of them might be getting to Nora,” Ned worried.

  “Nora would find the Conways hard to handle,” Jack said; “she’d be too fine for them.”

  “Oh, here she comes like a sióg ghaoth,” Ned exclaimed as the back door burst open and a little girl came running across to them, long fair hair flying behind her and strong boots clanking off the stone yard, scattering hens and ducks in all directions.

  She looks as happy as Larry, Jack thought, but her opening remark explained why.

  “I love Saturdays,” she announced, her small pointed face alive with excitement; then, seeing what Jack was doing, she demanded, “Jack, do you want help?”