Chapter 8 #2
Her sister, Rose thinks, might come and help her.
Enda might wonder if Rose needs another pair of hands with the laundry.
She watches Enda’s bright head disappear, swallowed by the tangled branches of the boreen, and she grips the block of soap in the icy claw of her hand as if she might hurl it after her.
Instead, she makes herself dip it in the water to lather it, and scrubs listlessly at a stubborn stain on a shirt of Tomás’s.
She doesn’t know what might have made it: soil or ink or grease or goodness knows.
She finds that she wants to say aloud: Whatever does he do to get himself so filthy?
Then someone else might say: Here, use the salt.
And she might reply: We’ve the back of the task broken now.
She feels all these words there, in her throat, like a stuck fishbone.
Her mother’s passing has left an ache in her, a wrongness, as if a hand has pulled out the loops and ribbons of her innards, then stuffed them haphazardly back in.
Every moment of every day, she has to remind herself of the unbelievable fact that her mother is gone, that she won’t see her again.
She doesn’t know how this can be. How is it possible that when she climbs down the ladder, Phina will not be there, not at the hearth, not in the haggard, not drawing water at the pump, not visiting neighbours?
Phina, it seems to Rose, was like the hinge on their door, or the pin at the centre of a wheel. Phina was crucial to their structure and function. Without her, they are lost.
Rose does her best. She gets up early, coaxes the fire into flame; she pours out the flour from the jar; she scatters in the soda so that the bread will be ready.
She milks the cow, she collects the eggs, she looks after Eugene, she takes a needle and thread and she tries to mend their clothes, she really tries.
Somehow, though, whatever she does isn’t enough: her darning unravels, her stitches aren’t strong enough, the tears and rents show through.
Enda will disappear for hours on end, returning damp, her skirts clotted with mud; in the evenings, she is out, more and more, with her fiddle, playing at crossroad dances or fairs; she rarely sits down to eat with them.
She doesn’t get paid for her work, or barely, but she says she is collecting tunes from all over the country, and this is better than any wages could ever be.
Any pennies she is given, she saves in an old tobacco tin.
For the first few weeks after Phina’s passing, Eugene had brought their mother’s apron to Rose over and over again, asking for her with an upwards sound, his face confused.
Rose had had to shake her head, say, Mammy’s gone, Euge, she’ll not be back.
Eventually, she took the apron from its hook and hid it; then Eugene crammed himself under the table, regressing to the habit of sucking his first two fingers.
Since the funeral, barely a civil word has passed between Liam and their father.
Liam spends all his spare hours at his books or with Father Joseph—taking instruction, he calls it.
He doesn’t say much to any of them, beyond how long it is until he enters the novitiate: four weeks, three, now two, now only twelve days.
Rose slaps a petticoat to the washing stone, again and again.
She has listened to Liam count down the days he has left but she cannot let herself hear it: to lose another person is unthinkable, that they were once six in this house, now five, soon four, is unbearable.
Please, she said to Liam last week, clutching his shoulder, can you not put it off a little longer?
He was polishing his boots, yet again, a fastidious cloth over his trousered lap, a brush in hand, and he looked up at her.
The Lord, he said piously, waits for no man.
He had sounded so like Father Joseph that Rose could have sworn the parish priest was there in the cottage with them.
Behind Liam, across the room, Enda, fitting a new string to her fiddle, rolled her eyes.
You’re asking me to put it off? Liam had murmured, under his breath, almost to himself, as he polished his boots.
Her entreaties had congealed in Rose’s mouth as she foresaw what would unfold: he would leave, and Enda would be off with her music, and she would be left to keep the house together, to look after Tomás, who had become as silent as Eugene.
Liam was the only one to whom Tomás paid any attention, who caused Tomás to raise his eyes from the fire and speak.
It was, admittedly, often rambling words of anger and accusation, but that was better, surely, than glowering silence.
Liam would leave and be sent far away on a mission, and this was what their mother dreaded, that the Church would swallow him whole, like a whale, and there would be nothing left for them, that they would lose him altogether.
“Don’t go,” Rose had whispered, taking hold of his wrist. “Liam, please, don’t go.”
Liam held her in a long gaze, his hair aflame in the light of the fire.
He glanced over her shoulder, at their father, at the other end of the table, perusing a map of his own devising.
When Rose had asked him what it was, Tomás had said nothing for a long time, so long that Rose had thought he wasn’t going to reply.
Then he had murmured that it was something he’d started years ago, a map of the thin places, the points of confluence between our world and other worlds, and some further baffling things, and Rose had no idea what to say.
“I have to,” Liam muttered, putting down one boot and taking up the next. “I can’t stay here, Rosie. I’m sorry. I simply can’t take another second of Da and his nonsense. And the novitiate is all arranged. Father Joseph says—”
At the mention of the priest, Eugene set up a loud wailing, and Rose had to stand and comfort him, to pat his shoulder in the way he finds soothing, to assure him that Father Joseph wasn’t coming here, and to remind Liam not to talk about the priest in front of Eugene: can’t he see that the boy is frightened of the priest?
Liam had been puzzled, asking why would that be, and Tomás was muttering, Sensible child, and Enda was whisking her shawl off the back of her chair, asking, What’s all the noise, Euge, what’s wrong?
And Tomás. Rose does not know what to do about Tomás.
Since the burial, he has been disturbingly quiet.
He sits mostly in his chair. He doesn’t seem to hear them or see them.
If someone puts into his hand a cup of tea or a plate of stew, he will consume it, without pleasure or appetite.
He sleeps late into the day, showing no interest in the crops outside or the beasts that need tending.
At Rose’s urging, Liam has had to leave aside his books, his boot-polishing, his study of the scriptures, take the hoe and the loy and dig out the weeds, has to repair the walls where the stones have fallen.
Your father is grieving, the widow says, when she calls on them, let him be.
Rose is trying her best. She is worn to a husk ensuring the five of them are fed and worked and rested.
She is trying, in the face of enormous odds, to keep them all together, but if she must now be the pin in their wheel it is one that has become rickety and uneven, the spokes pulling apart with every jolt and pothole along the way.
She doesn’t know how her mother did it, for all those years.
If Mammy is looking down on them from Heaven, Rose hopes she is not disappointed in her.
She doesn’t know how much longer she can keep it all turning.
Enda has taken to sitting up on the thatch of an evening.
It is the only way to avoid the stormy atmosphere between Liam and Tomás.
She must climb onto a barrel to reach the byre roof, and from there she can crawl along the gable end to reach the highest peak.
Below her, the packed straw and willow feel solid; she can straddle the ridge with one leg bent up under her.
It’s possible to hear the rumble of her family’s voices coming up the chimney, to gauge whether or not Liam and Tomás are arguing or ignoring each other.
She can see far out into the bay to the rear and the deep gulley of the sound ahead; to her left is the village, to the right the stone face of the mountain; at her back is the bog, which is filled at this time of year with a carpet of trembling flowers; and just behind that hillock is the ring fort, where on a day a long time ago she and Rose found Bran (or Bran found them).
And no one can see her up here, only the birds passing overhead—the gulls and the geese and sometimes a pair of long-necked swans. She is close but invisible.
It is a mild, late-summer evening and she has returned from playing at a wedding two villages over, where a young woman was marrying an older and widowed man, taking on his seven children.
Enda saw nothing much to celebrate in that but she played anyway and the young woman danced with her sisters and her cousins, her face flushed with pleasure and abandon, and once with her new husband.