Chapter 6 #12
Disgusted, Enda had pushed herself away from the door jamb.
She was opening her mouth to say, What about me, would I not be welcome too?
The priest had turned his head towards her, but with his eyes flickering shut, as if the wind had blown grit into them, so that he was looking at her yet not seeing her.
He had said, his hand resting on Liam’s shoulder: we will only be taking girls of a certain age, so this one—here he waved his other hand towards Enda—would be too old for schooling, I think.
Enda had stamped her foot. She’d said, That’s not fair, I want to, please, can I, I want to go.
The priest had looked off to the side, a tight and paltry smile on his face, as if to say, Now this is why we don’t take the older girls, see what we’d be getting ourselves into.
Liam had said nothing, had spoken not a word, hadn’t thought to stick up for her at all.
Perhaps, Enda thinks, as she arrives on the islet, hauling herself out of the water, causing the hens to tilt their heads and gabble to each other, she shouldn’t have stamped.
Perhaps she should have reasoned. Enda kneels, slides a hand under a hen’s soft undercarriage and feels two eggs, which she draws out and places in the basket.
She looks up, almost involuntarily, at the mountain, its outline stark against the sky, the mysterious ridges in the earth around one of its lower edges, as if someone at some time in history had dug circles around it.
The widow says it is a faery fortress, and has told them never to walk into it.
Enda stares at the circular ripples, thinking that she should have said, I have gifts too.
I’m better than Liam at arithmetic, at recitation, at grammar, at geometry, at handwriting.
Everything, in fact. He can’t keep a column of figures straight in his head or write a sentence without smudging ink all over his sleeve, but I can. Let me show you. Let me try.
It wouldn’t have made any difference, Enda knows, as she steps back into the water, basket over her arm.
That priest is someone whose ideas are very fixed, as if nailed to a door.
Whatever she had said, whether or not she’d stamped her foot, wouldn’t have persuaded him.
And so Liam goes off, each morning, to the hedge school, and now he leads a life that is closed to Enda, away from her.
He won’t even share with her what he’s studying because, he says, the priest has told him to keep it to himself, that learning can be dangerous to those who do not understand.
This smarts like a lash, that Liam does what the priest asks, that he chooses the priest over her.
She must stay here, beneath the mountain, all day and all night, and she cannot see any way out of it, any gap in the tunnel she can slip through.
On the shore, skirts blowing sideways in the breeze, wait her mother and her sister, their faces turned towards one another. As she wades through the waters, her mother lifts a hand and waves to her, as if Enda is a boat and Phina is guiding her into harbour.
It is only a week later, perhaps two, of the same monotonous tasks, animals fed, animals milked, meals cooked and eaten, then cleared away, so that there is very little to distinguish one day from the next, when Phina comes to find Enda.
She is wading knee-deep in the stream, creating miniature dams to re-divert the flow, her dress hitched up, and Phina tells her to come out of there and take a loaf down to the widow.
Enda says she won’t. Phina says she will.
Enda says she can’t. Phina says she can.
Then, her mother does something intriguing and unexpected. She lays the loaf, wrapped in a cloth, on a flat stone and says that it’s a shame Enda won’t go because the widow has something for her.
Enda, flummoxed, watches her mother walk away.
Why should she get out of the stream? Why should she take the bread down?
And what can the widow possibly have for her that she’ll like?
It’s probably something dull, Enda tells herself, as she stands there, the icy stream water flowing around her numb legs.
Something like knitting needles or a bolt of cloth that Enda will have to pretend she’s delighted with, and then she’ll be expected to spend every evening stitching or purling, being grateful.
Enda pulls a face and kicks at the water so hard that the spray reaches the bank, and in the droplets, just for a moment, appears the startling arc of a rainbow.
She spends a while kicking again and again, summoning the miniature rainbow, gratified every time it appears. Then, eyeing the wrapped loaf, she steps out of the water, shivering, contemplating the path down the hill.
The widow’s table, when she arrives, is set with two cups and two plates, as if it’s all been pre-arranged.
Enda sits, simmering with suspicion: whatever plan her mother and the widow have cooked up she is sure she won’t like.
She reaches out for a slice of bread from the plate in front of her and sighs; the widow is outside, fetching some of the cheese for Enda to take home with her.
Enda chews on the crust. Beneath the table, she feels the twitch and pull of her leg muscles.
She has grown so much recently, her skirt hem seeming steadily to creep up her calves; sometimes, when she rises in the morning, she could almost fancy she is closer to the thatch than the previous day.
She will be twelve next month, which seems extraordinary to her, a number on a cusp, a hinge between childhood and adulthood.
She feels at once too young and too old for everything—too old to engage in all the pursuits she has loved up to now, exploring and climbing, but too young for the pastimes of a woman, all that tedious cooking and minding.
She wants to be twelve but also dreads it: childhood already feels to be at an arm’s length and moving here, to the peninsula, seems to Enda like closing a door upon it.
Without warning, she feels again the salt-sting of tears under her lids. What is the matter with her? Fiercely, she bites her lip, presses her thumbnail into the opposite palm. When she feels a wet trail down her cheek, she dashes it away with her sleeve.
“Here.”
The widow has materialised behind her, putting a cup of milk on the table.
Enda nods her thanks, not trusting her voice to speak, and takes the cup.
She doesn’t say that milk turns her stomach, especially when still warm from the udder, as this surely is.
She takes the tiniest sip of the frothy white liquid and attempts a smile.
“Drink it all down,” the widow says. “It’s for those growing bones of yours you need it.”
Enda nods again, watches from under her lowered lashes as the widow moves across the room and opens the doors of a little cupboard built into the rafters.
A wooden box is placed on the table at her elbow, the lid lifted, and the widow is saying that this belonged to her husband, God rest his soul, and she thinks it is time for someone else to have it.
The interior is wadded with fabric, fashioned to curve, lovingly and exactly, around the frame of a fiddle.
Enda stares at it, her eyes still wet with unshed tears, and the instrument sits there, in its box, presenting itself for view.
The four strings, held proud of the burnished wood, arching over a carved bridge, the bow with its parallel bones of wood and horsehair strapped into the lid, the scrolled holes that conceal a dark interior, and Enda wonders what it might hold, what notes and melodies might be trapped in there, waiting for release.
The widow is lifting out the fiddle and putting it, with care, to Enda’s collarbone, taking one of her hands and fitting her thumb to the notch, curling the fingers around the instrument’s narrow neck, placing the other hand on the strings, and telling her to pluck.
Pluck, she says, pluck away there, keep going.
The widow listens, head cocked, eyes half closed, then tightens some of the black pegs at the top, loosens others.
Enda keeps plucking and they both keep listening.
This string should be five notes higher than this one, the widow says, and this one, and so on.
Enda feels a shift, almost as if the fiddle is coming alive, or waking up from a long sleep, the strings falling into alignment or agreement, finding their correct pitches, That’s it, the widow says, with a rare smile, that’s it. Do you hear it now?
She presses one of Enda’s fingertips to a string, then another, and the narrow cord pushes back up into the skin of it, but Enda doesn’t mind because it is an interesting discomfort, a necessary one.
The widow gives her five notes of a song about a river: she hums it, then asks Enda to play it back to her, again and again.
The tune must become part of your head and your bones, she says, and you will take the fiddle away with you.
When you’ve mastered this tune, I’ll give you another.
Enda has the bow in her other hand now, and she is keeping it at a cross to the strings, and the widow is moving it with her hand over hers, over the strings, still humming the song, and the same notes are coming out of the fiddle, haltingly but definitely there.
She, Enda, is bringing it forth. She is making something happen.
Mesmerised, she looks down along the strings, which look to her like a shining road, leading off into the distance.
Her shoulder lifts and stretches, an up stroke, a down stroke, her fingers moving on and off the strings, and she listens to the differences, the alterations in tone, the language in which it speaks to her.