In the Company of Others

by Jan Karon

  He thinks I have been ruined by American living.

  Keegan teaches me how to buy a pig. I tell him I do not need to know how to buy a pig as he will buy any pigs in future. He says it is good to know what to look for in man or beast.

  He recommends the eyes be animated & the ears upright. He contends the neck must be thick & deep with a 'graceful arch.' Thin skin is wanted in a 'lively' shade of pink. The two raised for us meet these high standards & I regret the eating of them rather than the breeding--Padraig McFee will keep one of them on til frost & cure its meat for our table. In any case, I walk away feeling we have got our money's worth from McFee.

  Have had the notion of transplanting wild Lilies to the Mass Rock--I saw the scene vividly in a dream & smelled their scent.

  I am at last able to keep this Journal well hid--each evening when I have done with scribbling it is put away where no one however clever might find it. I could not keep it so private at the Cabin.

  Aoife stitching herself a Frock these last evenings. I see she is not wearing the shoes made upon her father's last, as I hoped she might in our new surroundings. She vows she prefers the bare feet in nearly all wether.

  She has somehow wormed her milking stool into the parlor where she sits with her cloth and needle. In dying light from the west window I observe her face--it is unusually pensive & I try to imagine her thoughts--thoughts perhaps of a suitor? or some jollity she shared with her sisters on their monthly visit? Perhaps she imagines herself in this new gown the color of ripe peaches mulled with cream--& conceives the way the lads will catch their breath in their throats & speak too loudly among themselves when she passes.

  He raised his head and listened for a moment to Cynthia's breathing, and the rattle of beech leaves beyond the window. In the deep shadow of their room were gleaming sheets of thick paper, heavy with images. She had stood the watercolors on the chest of drawers and leaned them against the wall to dry. In the afternoon, he'd twice pulled off the road for her to sketch the landscape--but she asked to go back to the horse chestnut, and the only subject making it to the top of the chest was the loaf-shaped outcrop of Beann Gulban.

  9 August

  Very warm day; full moon--war news from America deeply agitating

  Keegan not himself these last weeks--whistling one minute & the next silent & gaping as if struck by a vision of The Blessed Virgin herself.

  C suspects he is in love. I cannot imagine

  Keegan in love.

  C has written out the list of dishes to be served & I transcribe them here for my own good pleasure when in ould age I sit by the hearth enjoying the hospitality of beard & pipe. I shall be astonished to read of the great strength with which God equipped us to do all that has been wrought at Cathair Mohr.

  I have asked for Roast Swan which many find delicious, but C will have none of it--I will not devour beauty, she says, twill bring doom upon us. Aye, Keegan says, siding with her, we have doom enough without looking for it. I remind them both that all is beautiful, even the fine pig we'll be roasting, but I have lost this dubious battle.

  She reminds me that since we arrived from Philadelphia well over two years past we have delivered forty-seven Infants into this sere & indifferent world, thirty of whom survive & flourish & will likely be among us at the Feast. Twill be a proper blessing to hear the laughter of children about the place.

  Twenty roast Geese

  Twenty roast Hens stuffed

  One hundred Hens Eggs boiled hard

  Forty loaves Bread

  Two hundred Yeast Buns

  Ten pounds Goat Cheese

  Ten pounds Cow Butter

  1 roast Pig

  1 roast Mutton

  2 goates

  4 bushels Potatoes roast in ash

  2 bushels Beans with pork hock

  20 mix berry Pies

  20 apple Pies

  3 tubs bread pudding

  20 gallons Goat Milk (from Aiden Marsh)

  I am reminded of the mammoth iron kettle by New York brazier John Trageser which we have stored in the stables. It is capable of holding two grown men & came to Uncle by way of a debt owed him. I declined to sell it for it is very novel indeed & Keegan will have the men fashion a kind of tall sawhorse from which to suspend the kettle above the fire. C & Keegan & I discuss how it might be used & agree on Fish Stew. We are quite merry at the prospect of such a wondrous thing as the Great Kettle having its part in the Great Day.

  Keegan argues we need not do so much, but God has done so much for us, how can we not joy in seeing the pleasure of those who have near nothing at all? Rose McFee swears she will dance like a Hare to have such a fill of her ancient belly, though I wager it holds but a cupful.

  Give or take a few, we expect two hundred men, women & children. The lawns shall be trampled to bits from the coming & going of the people & the cooks at the spit & the digging of the pit for our meate. We give thanks there is nothing yet in the lawns to be ruined save two young Beeches and a wild Bilberry. Horticulture is a decided weakness--I have no Eye nor learning for it yet do not wish to hire someone for the planning if I might by the grace of God do it myself. C & I agree that we did not come here to be the Lord and Lady of parterres nor to run great herds of any beast.

  Keegan in Sligo for remaining provisions, including cut-rate tin plates & bowls from which host & guest alike will sup. Keegan does not approve the Expense of the afore-named items as he says they will not be used again. Oh but they will, I say, they will be used again when we gather to celebrate the liberty of the Irish people from centuries of Mayhem & Treachery. Before he turns his head away I see the look on him-- perhaps he is not so hard against this notion as before.

  Keegan does not mince words--he says the Missus O'Donnell must have a woman of all work if she is to manage such a pile as Cathair Mohr. I confess I still carry the burthen of a Cabin mentality which disposes me to count A as help enough--unless we were to entertain Society which I cannot imagine doing with the roads in their present condition. I continue to prove my indifference to C's needs, thinking her capable of anything. Keegan's counsel is well-taken & I will be applying for such when I am next able.

  Uncle's furnishings arrive by boat tomorrow at Dublin, to be loaded onto wagons and transported to Lough Arrow in time for the Festivities. What would Uncle say at the sight of his handsome carpets, paintings & many books displayed in a house such as God Himself and Uncle's own fortune have provided? Arriving also will be Uncle's carriage which I shall make use of daily. As it is a fine city carriage, we have but to countrify it a little--making it road worthy for such Regions as these.

  We run to catch up with our plenteous blessings.

  10 August

  Rain at first light

  Balfour's man arrived at noon with a basket of fly-bit hares & a sack of bruised apples. I had not thought for a moment that Balfour might show himself at the Feast. Yet when I saw his offering on the cart bed, the thought of his intentions spread within me like a poison.

  I handed these so-called neighborly provisions off to Keegan who gave the lot of it a hard look & handed it off to Fionn Connelly who is setting up the great Spit. Take this off the Place, he told Fionn.

  Rain throughout the afternoon and into the evening.

  11 August

  Fairing off

  I was called out last night to deliver two infants into this world--one from each of two sisters occupying the same Cabin at some distance from Cathair Mohr. Infants lusty & mothers hale. A girl named Biddy & a boy named Colm. I have once before seen how the close confinement of two women can spawn the conception & delivery of infants at the same time--it is a puzzling sort of contagion.

  The new fathers who have scarcely a rag of flesh on their bones brought forth a mite of whiskey kept back for Fr Dominic and myself as looking ahead to this occasion. The lads are brothers both hardworking and these are their first born. They have promised to be at the Feast for they can get the loan of a pony & cart from their grandfather. A
s C was suffering one of her headaches, she sent A to ride with me as nurse. With naught but natural instinct, A proves herself competent & steady.

  It is a time in this Region of few desperations--Besides the Melancholia which is ever doing its devilish work among a famished people stripped of land, tis but a sty here, a bit of pus there, bowels that refuse to move or move too freely--the very sorts of things my old mother enjoyed. I remember how she slit the throat of a Hedgehog which she commanded me to capture & bring to her in a sack--the creature was rolling in fat for the spring & summer had been especially wet & lush and I had often seen him outside his Burrow at the moth hour surveying the land. He sniffed the air like a lad whose ploughing is done for the day & appeared to lack nothing but a pipe for his contentment. Yet for all his seeming leisure he was cunning as they come & hard to run to ground. All this commotion so Mam might render his fat to be rubbed inside the ears of the numerous deaf in our Region. When the deed was done & a crock of it put up, off we go in the trap with the crock between my knees. We went round to young & old with the hearing problems & before God, Mam succeeded with this measure on several occasions--not with the stone deaf but with those having something left to recover.

  How dearly I recall our rounds to the sick & poor, & Ourselves hardly better off than they--She was thinking of others always. When she passed, my brother Michael wrote to say there was a wake such as this part of the County had never seen. It wrenches me yet that her Death from Pneumonia was sudden & no way for me to attend her last hours. My father set out a grand portion of whiskey for all who came to pay their respects & many twists of good tobacco as well for he knew that Generosity would be pleasing to her.

  I must go again to her Grave before winter. Though it broke my young heart at the time, I honor the sacrifice of her third son to Uncle--it was no easy letting go for either of us, though my Father was proud to see me off to America & into the fostering care of a rich relative. I remember sobbing into my pillow the night before--me a strapping lad of seventeen--& then the brothers verily pushing me onto the boat thinking Thank God its him & not us leaving every common thing we know to live in a strange land & suffer the cruelty of learning from Books.

  I remember how Mother regretted not getting round to do more & how she often said, If I had my life to live over I'd have a strong young mare & saddlebags full of nostrums & herbs of great variety & I would go over hill & dale til all were cured, but I'm only a small Woman with a small pony. She saw the enormity of the need--it snapped & gnawed at her like a feral thing. Father would say, A little fire that warms, Bessy, is better than a big fire that burns.

  On the approach of the Blessing of this house and land & the Grand Feast to follow,

  I remember my mother who set the little fire in me & when the fevers & the infant deformities & the crucifying amputations come & I suffer the grave inadequacy of my resources, I remember the little fire that warms & am able to go on.

  Elizabeth (Bessy) O'Donnell, b. County Cavan 1773, d. County Sligo, 1823

  It was an unfamiliar odor, layered in the way perfumes were said to be composed. He sniffed the air of the closed room--definitely a top note of fried bacon, his Mississippi nose wouldn't mistake that, then a middle note of something sharply caustic, maybe shellac, and bringing up the rear, the smell of coffee.

  O'Donnell's journal was definitely growing on him. He laid it on the table by the chair and eased to the armoire, creaking only one floorboard. Pud stuck his head from beneath the bed skirt.

  'Timothy? '

  'Good morning, Sunshine.' It was his mother's and Peggy's old greeting at the top of the day.

  'What are you doing?'

  'Dressing.'

  'What time is it?'

  He picked up his watch, squinted in the gray morning light. 'Gaining on six forty-five.' He shucked his pajamas into Maureen's basket.

  'I loved yesterday,' she said.

  'And another grand, soft day predicted, according to William.'

  'I'm glad you got the reservations done.'

  By the skin of his teeth. 'Coffee's on.'

  'Did you sleep?'

  'Well enough.' He found the knit shirt folded in the drawer, shook it out, pulled it over his head.

  'I feel so guilty being able to sleep.'

  'As you should, Kav'na, as you should.'

  'What are we doing today?'

  'Maybe out to Easkey--stone houses abandoned during the famine, a broad expanse of gray sea, a view to Donegal on a clear day. Just the ticket for artists, it seems to me.

  'Or there's a castle in Collooney. Gardens. Ancient trees. Only a few stairs in to lunch.' He zipped his trousers, buckled his belt. 'There's Lissadell House, of course, they say Yeats enjoyed the place. However--too much walking, would be my guess.'

  She yawned. 'I'm trying to think.'

  'Anna said she forgot to mention roads up the side of Ben Bulben--very rough tracks with sheep galore and turf fields. A dash on the primitive side, but great views, and the Vauxhall could make it.'

  'I love the primitive side.'

  He took the comb from his pocket and ran it through what was left of his hair--felt the stubble on his chin, regretted the incessant bother of shaving.

  'I like your pictures of Ben Bulben,' he said, pulling on his watch. Worn from the long day, she had forgone sketches of William last night, rescheduling for this evening.

  'There's something benign about it,' she said, 'the way it broods over the landscape, but I couldn't catch it. Of course, I never can really catch what I'm after, just fragments, like when small clouds break away from big clouds and little shreds go floating off. I get the little shreds.'

  'Little shreds are good.'

  He sat on the side of the bed; Pud shot from his quarters as if squeezed forth by the sag in the mattress. 'You remind me of something Washington Irving said about traveling--in Spain, I think it was.' He eased his bare feet into his loafers. 'I copied it out for you years ago.'

  'Umm,' she said, burrowing in for another round of sawing wood.

  'Let others repine at the lack of turnpike roads and sumptuous hotels and all the elaborate comforts of a country cultivated into tameness . . . but give me the rude mountain scramble, something, something, something, that gives such a true game flavour to--in this case--Ireland. There you have it, and thank heaven, no senility yet.'

  She was drowsing into sleep. He leaned toward her side of the bed and touched her cheek. She had added true game flavour to his life, a fact which he didn't take lightly.

  Going down the stairs with Pud at his heels, he might have whistled, but didn't want to wake anyone.

  In the dining room, he identified the smell--the wall above the sideboard was freshly painted. A picture in oil, smaller than the Barret, hung between the sconces.

  He filled his coffee mug--hair of the dog--and squinted at the figures of three men fishing in a broad, dark stream overhung by trees rendered in the taste of the nineteenth century. Above the trees, an illumination of silvered clouds--he was finicky about clouds, these were up there with Constable's. He leaned forward, adjusted his glasses. There, nearly invisible on the shadowed bank, a spaniel and a wicker hamper. No signature.

  A fresh start, then; life goes on. Good for Liam.

  He took his coffee to the open French doors, now relieved of yellow tape, and wondered what he would write at the top of today's entry if he were keeping a journal. A mild morning, mist rising. In the early light, he saw Anna at the flower bed farthest from the lodge. Stooped and intent, she reminded him of his mother and the gardens she wrought from Mississippi clay.

  After Peggy disappeared, he had been the one cheering his mother on. He had fetched her tools, helped her dig the holes, joined her in the endless battle against leaf minors in the allee of century-old boxwood. All this under the strain of his father's view of gardens as time-wasting indulgence--Matthew Kavanagh had been known to walk as if blind by a newly planted bed of astonishing possibility.

  As
the gardens expanded, the curious began showing up at the gate, total strangers sometimes, then came the busloads during Pilgrimage, to see what Madelaine Kavanagh had done. What she had done was to take nothing and turn it into something. That was the first time he witnessed that particular kind of miracle.

  He was twelve, maybe thirteen, and reading Les Miserables when he found a line that would help him in the cheering-on:

  The patch of land he had made into a garden was famous in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he grew there.

  Proud, he had gone to his mother, carrying the open book. 'Look, Mama. Just like you.'

  In an unforgiving north light from the wash-house window, she read the words he pointed out with his finger and nodded a little and smiled. He saw something then, for the first time--the lines in her face, and the unbearable thinness of her eyelids, blue and transparent as a moth's wing.