by Kathy McKeon
“Kathy?” There she was again. Madam tapped on the closed door.
I had no choice but to open it. She stepped in, her perfectly arched brows furrowed with concern. The look on her face quickly turned to bewilderment when she realized that I was laughing, not sobbing. Unless I wanted a Secret Service escort to the loony bin, it was time to come clean. As I started to explain the whole story, Madam burst into laughter, which sent me into another spasm of hysterics, and by the time I led her into the hallway to point out my telltale trail of powdered footprints, both of us had tears running down our cheeks.
The rest of the staff took turns peeking around the corner, trying to see what was so amusing. We finally composed ourselves, and Madam was still chuckling when she ventured into the kitchen, where the rest of the staff were clamoring to know what had just happened with the new girl.
“Oh, that Kath is just too funny,” I overheard her say.
TWO
Back in Inniskeen
Inis Caoin.
In Gaelic, it means “peaceful island,” but that makes life in my home village of Inniskeen sound far easier than it was. Ireland has always been brilliant at public relations that way—all green hills and leprechauns and stone castles—but even from the beginning, when St. Daigh founded a monastery there in the sixth century, Inniskeen had a rough go of it: The Vikings plundered and burned the place to the ground not once, but twice. Fourteen centuries later, not terribly much had changed in the verdant green countryside where my family scratched out a living on the farm my father still plowed by horse even as men were being launched into outer space aboard rocket ships. The 1960s would turn out to be a decade that changed the whole world forever, the most thrilling era of the century to be a teenager, but I had no inkling of that, much less of where I would end up on the invisible game board. Time was more inclined to drag its feet than march briskly forward in the corner of Ireland we knew, tucked tight against the border with the restive north.
My family—all ten of us—lived in a three-room stone cottage with no running water or electricity, content to do so because we knew nothing else. “If you don’t have it, you don’t need it,” my mother was fond of saying. She was right, really, when you think about it, and I grew up happy enough with my lot, never the one to foster grand ambitions or dreams of a future anywhere else. We knew how to scrimp and scrub and sacrifice, and we worked very hard for what we got. We were poor, but there were poorer than us, and we had land—good land, at that. I assumed my life would always be right there in County Monaghan, as predictable as the trains that clattered past on the tracks behind our house and doubled as our clock: The morning one at nine o’clock meant it was time to head to school; the last one at half past ten signaled bedtime.
I was the middle of eight children for Jack and Maggie Smith, the four eldest stair-stepped a year apart, the youngest, two. Patrick came first, then Michael, my sister Bridget, me, then Mary, the youngest girl and darling of the family, followed by John, Jim, and finally the baby, Owen. Owney was a premature baby, so tiny he weighed barely four pounds on the neighbor’s borrowed turkey scale. Mam would send me into the village to ask the pub keeper for empty pints of whiskey, which she fashioned into baby bottles by stretching rubber nipples over the top. She’d rinse the bottles out with boiling water from the pot kept hanging over the open fireplace we used for cooking. The setup was more like a permanent indoor campsite than a proper stove, but that steady flame kept us all warm and fed ’til we were grown and gone. Owney thrived on the milk he drank fresh from our dairy cows, and if our crude sterilization method ever left a nip of whiskey lingering in his bottles, it was all well and good. Owney was a happy baby who clearly didn’t mind an unintended nightcap.
From the time we were toddlers old enough to scatter chicken feed, we all pitched in to work the farm and keep our busy household running. Before and after school, my brothers, sisters, and I would be tending to the animals or trekking across the fields to fetch buckets of water from the River Fain to do the dishes and laundry, or from the well that supplied our drinking water, so cold and delicious, from an underground spring. Laundry was an ongoing chore, everything scrubbed by hand on a washboard with a bar of soap, then hung to dry outside if the weather was fair—less often than not in our misty hills—or indoors on the maze of clotheslines that crisscrossed high above our kitchen table, raised and lowered with a string pulley like Venetian blinds. Nothing ever got soft. Our towels dried hard and rough as sandpaper. And if by chance your clothes were drying outside, you had to watch out that they weren’t snatched away by the Gypsies—we called them travelers—who would pass through in the summertime in caravans that looked like the covered wagons you see in old westerns, only painted in bright colors instead and drawn by magnificent horses. I don’t know whether the travelers bred those horses or stole them, but they were always so beautiful, more like sleek Thoroughbreds than the shaggy workhorses we knew.
I used to spot the bands of travelers camping down by the river, and they would come up to the house to ask if Mam needed any pots repaired. For a few coins, they would fix a hole in a tin pot with a washer and small screw, sealing it so expertly you’d never have so much as a drop of water leak from it again. Mam was happy to do business with them until the time one of the women distracted her by asking for a bit of milk for the baby in her arms, and while Mam was getting it, don’t you know the Gypsies went and stole all our clothes off the line. They were long gone by the time we noticed, and more than likely our freshly laundered hand-me-downs ended up for sale at a swap meet in another village a day or two later. That was about as exciting as things in Inniskeen ever got, unless you counted the murderous nights when a fox slipped through the rickety door to our henhouse. The ensuing commotion would wake us all, and Dad would go flying out the door to give chase in his nightshirt, armed with a broom or Mam’s big wooden potato masher. Mam would find the bloody feathers of the latest victim in an empty nest the next morning when she went to gather the day’s eggs. Dad used to carry crates of eggs on his back five miles up through the fields into Northern Ireland, where he got a better price for them. The eggs our chickens laid were strictly for market, and the same went for the pigs in our sty, whose bacon, pork chops, and ham we never got to enjoy, either. The life of subsistence farmers is always more about sacrifice than bounty.
None of the farms surrounding Inniskeen could afford all the modern machinery, tools, or hired hands needed to be self-sustaining, so we all relied on neighborly goodwill to survive. Farmers helped each other when it was time to plant or harvest the crops, with everyone pitching in and moving in a circle from farm to farm until every acre had been plowed or harrowed. The grown-ups started working before the sun came up and kept at it ’til there was no longer the light to toil by. There was never any letup for illness or injury, unless it was crippling or grave. I can remember Dad being driven nearly mad once by the pain from an infected tooth, his jaw swollen and throbbing. He would come in at the end of the day and just slump down at the dinner table with his head in his hands. We couldn’t afford a visit to the druggist, let alone the dentist, and a farm doesn’t hold still while its owner takes to bed, so all poor Dad could do was carry on as usual for day after agonizing day until the rotting molar finally fell out. Farmwork wears people down too soon, even the healthy ones. It was doubly hard on Dad, since he and my brothers also pitched in to run Aunt Bridge’s place as well. Her husband, Teddy, had been a carpenter by trade, but severe asthma kept him indoors wheezing by the fire most of the time. It shocks me now to realize that my own father was probably barely even forty when he started complaining of chest pains. He would grow so short of breath carrying two heavy jugs in from milking that he would have to stop and sit on the low stone wall to rest for a few minutes. One time, I came home to find him sitting in the kitchen while Mam knelt on the concrete floor, bathing his grotesquely swollen feet in a pail of cool water.
“It’s coming from his heart,” she said somberly
, looking up.
As winter approached and our hay, barley, and oats were all threshed, one of the last tasks left in the fields each year was to gather the potatoes. Our old brown horse, Nelly, would pull the plow, with Dad steering her through the rows while the children followed in aprons made of mail sacks, miserably plunging our gloveless hands into the freezing mud to pluck up the spuds one by one. My fingers would hurt with cold, then eventually go numb. When the harvest season was over and done with, Dad would walk into Inniskeen to settle his bill at the general store owned by Sam Paugh and his two brothers. Sam kept a big ledger of every single item everyone purchased over the previous year. He would add up the columns under our name, and Dad would usually leave without a penny, sometimes even carrying over a small balance. All that work, and we were poor again.
We were all masters of the rotation game: My parents had to share a single pair of glasses. If Dad wanted to read a paper by the weak gauzy glow of our methylated spirits lantern, then Mam couldn’t darn the holes in our socks at the same time. Also shared was the single toothbrush we owned. Who had left it where was a running argument in a house with ten mouths. We used plain water or baking soda to brush with, except for the time when I decided to try a traditional Irish method of whitening teeth I’d heard about, and stuck the communal toothbrush up the chimney to rub it thoroughly in soot. (The only way soot makes your teeth look whiter, I can report, is by turning the rest of your mouth black by contrast.)
With such a big family, the housework was never ending, even in such cramped quarters. You would think the most dreaded chore would be washing the dishes without benefit of a sink or faucet, but seeing as how there was never that much to eat, there wasn’t that much to clean, either. Every day, Mam baked a loaf of dark soda bread, setting it out to cool on the stone wall, where we had to mind that the chickens didn’t get to it before we did. It smelled so good, I longed to just steal it myself. But like everything else we had, the bread had to be rationed carefully. A fresh, chewy hunk served as breakfast in the morning, and we were allowed to take another piece to school for lunch. We smeared it sparingly with the sweet cream butter we churned by hand and then rolled into tiny balls, each of us allotted one ball a day for our bread and one for our potatoes. Potatoes were our mainstay—mashed, boiled, or fire roasted for dinner every night. Gleaned from the crop we grew to sell, we always had plenty of potatoes.
Meat and fish appeared only rarely on our plates, though Dad and the boys would sometimes succeed in poaching wild salmon from the river during spawning season, using crude fishing poles made from sticks and hooks. Dad would cut the fat salmon into pieces, which would be stored in a pail down the well to keep cool, and we would make it last as long as we could. Dad caught eels, too, which he liked to toss on the kitchen fire until the skin crackled, but none of the rest of us would touch the horrid things. I would have much rather seen a lamb chop sizzling on the coals from our small sheep flock. We kept a goat, too, whose milk was mixed in with the cows’ because it enriched it just enough to win us a higher grade and better price from the creamery. That was strictly forbidden, of course, but everyone did it.
Even in the rain, Dad did all our milking by hand out in the fields where the cows grazed. It was my job to bring the herd in before dark to bed down in their cowshed. Unlike American barns, the cowsheds that dot rural Ireland aren’t big stand-alone buildings set away from the farmhouses. They’re attached right to the house, like a wing for the in-laws. As luck would have it, I shared a bedroom wall with our herd, whose loud chuffing, groaning, and lowing provided the bass section to the chorus of snores and murmurs from my brothers and sisters as the whole lot of us settled in to sleep at night. Mam and Dad had the other bedroom. As we got bigger, stacking all us kids in shared bunk beds like loaves of bread in a baker’s rack became less manageable, and the two older boys gradually migrated across the road to sleep at our childless Aunt Bridge and Uncle Teddy’s house. I might’ve gotten a better night’s rest if the cows had followed, too.
Accustomed as we were to getting by with so little, we could count on a magnificent windfall: a big package from America, twice a year. Dad’s older brother, Pat, and his wife, Rose, had immigrated to America and lived in New York City with their children. At Christmastime, they would send little toys like bubbles and coloring books, cap guns, paper dolls, and mouth harps the Americans called harmonicas and we knew as French fiddles. Plus fat barbershop-pole candy canes for each of us. Once there was even a beautiful golden-haired doll for us girls to share. She wore a white pinafore and bloomers over her pink dress, and a frilly bonnet framed her sweet porcelain face. If you laid her down, her blue eyes would close, then flutter open again when you picked her up. Of course, we didn’t know when we were little that the gifts came from our American relatives; Uncle Teddy would play Santa Claus and bring them over in a big sack for us on Christmas Eve.
Christmas Day, we’d all go to Mass, and our festivities would wrap up with Dad making his single exception to the usual for-market-only rule about the turkeys we raised. Big, dumb, and defensive those birds were, with a vicious streak that left my legs scratched and bloodied on more than one occasion. I savored our Christmas dinner with no remorse at all.
Our second annual gift box from New York would come in the spring, full of hand-me-down clothes from our American cousins. We girls loved to play fashion show with all our new dresses, and always gave Mary, as the smallest, first pick of what to model as we twirled and preened for each other. Since there was only a lone cousin close to the size Briege and I wore, the box would yield just one winter coat that fit us both. Briege would wear it to early Mass on Sunday, and then hand it off to me to wear to later services. On the walk to school, we traded it back and forth, depending on who was coldest.
Each morning all of us who were old enough would set off for the schoolhouse a mile and a half away, carrying the books we hadn’t studied because we had no light to read by, and the homework we didn’t do because paper was a luxury we couldn’t afford. The perpetual rain would soak us to the bone by the time we arrived, and the holes in our worn Wellingtons ensured that even the soles of our feet would be wet and cold. My second-oldest brother, Mick, was in charge of gathering sticks to light the fire in the school’s big black cast-iron stove, which was meant to warm the whole class but in truth mostly warmed the headmaster, Mr. Mullen, who would stand square in front of the fire all day, toasting his own backside while blocking the heat from his shivering pupils.
Mick was the cleverest one of our bunch, able to rattle off answers in any subject, but he was as mischievous as he was smart, so that shot any chance the Smith clan had at impressing Mr. Mullen instead of earning his daily disdain. “There’s no point in calling on any of you,” Mr. Mullen would often say, fixing his beady eyes on the row of us, “because you wouldn’t know the answer anyway.” Schools decided back then which children to send on to high school, and the fact of the matter was, the poorer ones were less likely to go, even if they were deemed scholarly enough, because they were sorely needed to help support their families. I remember one day when Patrick, my oldest brother, accidentally knocked the map of the world onto the classroom floor when his shoulder brushed the wall on his way out the door at lunchtime. He hastened to pick it up, embarrassed by his own twelve-year-old clumsiness, but Mr. Mullen couldn’t just let Packy be.
“You’d be better off at home helping your father out,” the teacher hissed low in Packy’s face. The underlying message was meant for all of us to hear: Children like us would never amount to much and weren’t worth the trouble. We hated Mr. Mullen in that pure and thorough way that only children can, and in turn, he demonstrated his contempt for us with a leather strap that stung even more than his words.
When I was in seventh grade, our parents had decided it was time for Briege and me to quit school and go to work full-time. We were needed to help make ends meet at home. I didn’t mind at all. It was just how things were.
An inf
ormal barter system was what kept even the poorest farms in Inniskeen struggling along. My father, for example, might borrow a mower to cut the grass from a neighbor who accepted the added muscle of our horse another day in return. Children were loaned out as well, with two girls and one boy being equal to the labor of one grown man. Dad’s best friend, Putty, would let Dad borrow his hired hand in exchange for sending some kids over to pick bushels of berries or yank up weeds. Children were considered better suited to chores that involved a lot of stooping over. I hated being loaned out like the plow horse, especially when it came to digging up potatoes. Sometimes a farm wife might offer to feed us supper, but that was it.
Putty regularly asked Dad to send me and Briege over to lend a hand, and to our despair, Dad always obliged, never knowing what it was Putty was really after. It started when I was around twelve, and Putty suddenly jumped out from behind a haystack as I walked past, grabbing my leg. “Gotcha!!” he cried, baring his brown tobacco teeth in a hyena laugh as I screamed and wriggled, finally freeing myself of his groping hands by sinking my own teeth into his arm. He laughed again as I took off. “Oh, Kathleen, when you get old enough, I’m gonna marry ya!” he called after me. He wasn’t the only dirty old man who liked to sneak up from behind to try to put his hands where they didn’t belong, or pull young girls close for a slobbery kiss. It was about as likely to happen as not. Briege and I were too scared and embarrassed to ever tell. Instead, we formed our own security system, sticking as close together as possible and deploying a swift kick or sharp elbow as needed. Mam had never warned us about this, or told us what to do. She wasn’t the type to have those kinds of conversations. I knew she loved us and all, but Mam had been closed off for as long as I could remember, the kind of wife and mother who gets remembered as hardworking and dutiful. And what could she do about it anyway?
