December Girl

by Nicola Cassidy

Daddy’s outside now. He’s been out there for a few minutes, the clock over the picture of Holy Jesus tick tocking, the only sound in the room as we strain and listen to the murmured words on our doorstep. There are four horses and a dozen men.

  My mother is standing over by the basin, her hand up to her mouth, her thumb on her lips, her skin grey and I know she just cannot believe that they would come like this, now. We are still, waiting, waiting for what Daddy can do, to make these men go away, to send them out of our yard, back up the lane and down the road where they came from.

  There’s a shout from Daddy, an angry cry and we see him out the window marching back towards the house, away from the sheriff, his brow all knitted together in torment.

  He slams the door, the hardest I’ve ever seen it close and he locks it, twisting the big black key. We wait for him to tell us what we are to do but he’s marching over to where me and Patrick are and he grabs the settle bench and pulls it, hard across the slabs.

  His hiding place gone, Patrick whimpers and steps back, clutching at my skirts and I step forward to let him know I’m there, but I’m frightened now. Daddy is dragging the box seat over towards the door. ‘Help me,’ he shouts.

  Michael runs and starts pushing but he’s only small, so I step forward to help and Mam says, ‘Oliver, what are you doing?’ He doesn’t answer her, instead he rams the tall seat up against the door, and comes back to the table and he pulls that too, dragging it up against the seat.

  Our front door is barricaded. We are inside our house, just me and my family and outside in the dark, there are men on horses and in uniform.

  BAM!

  The only thing that stands between us is our wooden door, our wooden seat and our wooden table. But they attack us with wood, a cut tree, all the men holding it, running with it at our house, at our door.

  BAM!

  Patrick lifts off the ground with the fright and shouts ‘Mam!’ and he leaves my skirts and runs to hers.

  ‘Oliver,’ shouts Mam. She hasn’t moved from her spot at the basin. ‘Stop this,’ she says, looking at Daddy, but he’s not listening, instead, he’s searching for more things to pile up against the door.

  ‘The windows,’ he says. ‘Get away from the windows.’

  And just as he says it, a man is at the window and he’s breaking it with his baton and it shatters over the oil lamp that sits on the sill, making the flame flicker and dance. Glass flies at Mam and she steps back, horror on her face and she pushes Patrick back.

  ‘Molly,’ she roars over at me, ‘take the boys upstairs.’

  ‘No,’ says Daddy. ‘The windows.’

  He’s at the dresser now, the drawers open, filtering through Mam’s cooking utensils, the fine bone china rattling where it sits and he shouts, ‘Have we any nails, we need nails?’

  I don’t know what to do. I don’t want the boys to be upset, to see all this, to hear the horrible frightening tone in Daddy’s voice. I want to do what Mam says but I always listen to Daddy and anyway, how can we leave him on his own to face four horses and another twelve men?

  BAM.

  I catch Michael’s eye. He has a knowing look about him. We both know. The last time they tried to evict us Daddy was calmer, there was none of this carrying on, looking for nails to hammer wood to the windows, dragging furniture across the floor, acting like the devil himself got inside and under his skin.

  BAM.

  I go over to Daddy, I put my hand on his arm and I say, ‘Daddy, please stop.’ His hands are flying through the drawer, banging the metal, whacking the spoons. It takes a while for the touch of my hand to travel through his body, to reach his thoughts and his brain, for him to stop, to look down at me, quietly.

  For a moment there is no one else, only me and him, like our evening walks in the field, like the times in the tub trap, just the two of us, whistling going to town, the sun on our backs, the day ahead.

  BAM.

  ‘It’s over,’ I say. And tears appear around his eyes, tipping over the edges, watering, and I think, this is the first time in my sixteen years of life that I have ever seen my daddy cry.

  His head sinks, wilting like a flower into his neck, his jaw melting, the shame and the sadness and the surrender.

  We watch him go over to Mam and he takes her in his arms and she stands there stiffly, letting him embrace her, her arms hanging limply by her sides.

  BAM.

  And when she realises he is crying, she puts her arms around him too and she holds him while his shoulders shake a little bit and I think this has to be the saddest thing I have ever seen in the whole world.

  They have broken my daddy. Flann Montgomery has broken my daddy. And I wish I could slit his throat.

  Chapter Three

  MOLLY

  Trinity Street, Drogheda, Ireland, June 1895 (Fourteen months before)

  This house is the greyest house I’ve ever seen. It’s drab grey. There’s a pebbledash on the walls outside and when I run my hand over it, I feel the dust caked there from the hundreds of carts and cows that pass by here on their way to market or to the ships where they’ll climb aboard and travel the seas to their slaughter in England or the Continent or beyond.

  Every day I take a cloth to the windows. I pull it round the front door and I scrub at the corners where the dust gathers in tiny sandy triangles. And every morning when I come back out, there is it again, that film of fine dust, trafficked on to the walls, the steps, and the windows we look out of. There’s no getting away from it.

  Mam keeps reminding us of our good fortune. ‘Don’t you know how lucky you are?’ she says, glaring at me, every time I complain or grumble, mostly about wanting to be back at home where our farmhouse is, where the fields are. When she says that I look at her, through her, seeking out that wistful glance, the one that she sometimes can’t hide, the glance that says she’s feeling it too, that she’s sorry we’re here, living with Mr McKenna, in this grey house, in this grey town.

  Mr McKenna is a clever man. He needed a wife and he got one, ready-made with three half-grown children. He’s wary of me and my tongue and what I might say. He calls me ‘the wily one’. I’ve been watching him, learning his ways, getting to know this man who will be father to my two brothers.

  He takes the strap to them when I’m not around. I’ll come in from the yard where I’ve been scouring the washing and one of them will be there, all red-eyed and tearful, rubbing their backside. When it happened to Michael I thought maybe it was a one-off, Mr McKenna just finding his way, with him being new to being a stepfather. But when he strapped Patrick, his small legs all swollen and stripes of blood in parts, well that’s when I knew. I knew my mother had married herself a bastard.

  I remember Mr McKenna from before Mam married him. I’d seen him in his drapery shop and on the street, walking along, his head bobbing up and down with the queer hips he has. I never thought much of him - he looked like all the other menfolk who owned shops in the town. Big bushy moustache. Oiled back hair. A suit so spruced up, you’d think he was going to a wedding or a funeral every day of his life.

  He got to my mother through the priest, the matchmaker. We’d been staying in the Brannigans’ house up the road, the four of us stuck in one bed, shivering in the cold, not making any noise and not being any burden. And after a few weeks, when we knew there’d be no going back to our boarded-up house and Mam was struggling with managing the business and paying all the taxes and crying into her pillow every night, the smiles at the Brannigans’ dropped and the breakfast cutlery was thrown around the table in front of us, and we got to know that we were overstaying our welcome and we needed to be going somewhere else and soon.

  My mother was a thin woman, but over those weeks I watched the skirt shrink further on her hips. She took the needle to it, darting it and bringing in the band, tucking her blouse in further down her bony chest. She was looking into finding a place for us, a

  cottage, where we could stay and put our things.

  Then M
r McKenna appeared at the door one day, carrying a tulip flower. The tulip was bright yellow, like the buttercups that grew in the cowfields and he held it out to my mother and I saw her smile, the first time in months. They went off in a trap that Mr McKenna had borrowed and I helped Mrs Brannigan with the tea and kept the boys quiet and wondered why Mam was off out with that man, rolling round the country roads with the tulip and a smile on her face.

  A few days later, Mam asked me to go for a walk with her and off we went down the road, the frost still in the air, the springtime coming in and the birds twittering and lovemaking and readying their nests in the hedges and the trees.

  ‘Molly, Mr McKenna and I are to be married,’ Mam said, straight out, matter of fact, when we were half way up the road.

  ‘Mr McKenna?’ I said.

  ‘He has a fine house and a business. He can support us.’

  ‘But Mam,’ I said, as we walked. ‘You don’t even know him.’

  ‘I know enough,’ she said.

  ‘But we’ll have to live in the town,’ I said and I noticed there was a whine in my voice. Like a little girl.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mam.

  ‘And what about school, for the boys?’ I asked.

  ‘They’ll go to school in Mell,’ she said.

  She had an answer for everything. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I wanted to say, ‘What about Daddy?’ But what was the point in that? Daddy couldn’t do anything for us. Not anymore.

  ‘When is the wedding?’ I asked as we came to the crossroads.

  ‘Next Tuesday,’ she said. It was going to be in the morning, after morning mass at the Dominican church in town, not in our church, where she had married my father.

  At least there was that.

  I folded my arms and looked at the ground at the crossroads, noticing a caterpillar folding in and out across the gravel. He stuck out on the road all luminous, his skin velvety soft. I bent down to lift him and when I looked up, Mam held out her arms and I hugged her, the caterpillar rolling into a ball in my hand.

  There were no tears. All our tears had been used up over Daddy. We went back to the Brannigans to let them know that soon we wouldn’t be a burden to them anymore.

  * * *

  Town life was different to country life. There were always people around. And carts. And horses all saddled up. You never saw the sun set or rise, because it was lost behind the buildings looking in on us. The lanes were dirty, stinking of various pots emptied out at all times of the day. The washing hung across the street, bits of rags and bloomers and breeches for everyone to see.

  I’d only ever known the green fields and the changing sky and the grass at my ankles as we walked every evening. I had only known the river and the roads, and my friends and familiar faces I’d known since I was a girl. Here I was surrounded by

  strangers, close by to people at all hours of the day, but the loneliest I could ever remember being in my whole life.

  I longed to sit atop of Dowth mound, the grassy Stone Age tomb that lay like an upside-down pudding bowl in our sheep field. I’d climbed there almost every day, looking out over the patchwork of green and yellow fields. In summer, I swatted at the flies and midges, in winter I blew on my hands to keep them warm. It was where I went to think, to look out, to get things straight in my head. There’d been a lot of straightening out to do after what happened to us.

  In the weeks after the eviction, before we moved to the grey house, I spent a lot of timesitting there, thinking about Flann Montgomery. I should have known how serious it was, the day Nora brought the paper, the day she called in and winked at me and said, ‘Molly, let’s go for a walk.’ We were always sneaking out, her and I, skinny-dipping in the Mattock when it was hot, taking off our dresses and walking through the fields in our bloomers, ducking down if we heard anyone coming along the road.

  ‘Yis are in the paper,’ she said as we walked up behind the farmhouse, to the big tree where we always went when we had some gossip to discuss. She took an Argus out from under her shawl and handed it to me, folded and thick.

  I remembered the man who came on horseback last week and said he wanted to speak to Daddy about ‘the court case’ but Daddy told him to get off our property, his face all white and annoyed. Daddy bought the Argus every Wednesday, taking it out after his tea, sitting, thumbing the pages, reading bits of news out to Mam, but that week, the week after the reporter had come on to our land, there was no more paper in the house.

  Nora and I sat at the tree, our bottoms perched on the smooth roots poking from the hardened ground. And there it was, a whole square article on page three, about my daddy, about us.

  ‘Oliver Thomas, farmer and wool and linen wholesaler of Dowth Farmhouse will give evidence at a special sitting of Drogheda District Court in relation to an accusation of theft on Tuesday next. Mr Thomas has been embroiled in an ongoing dispute with the Brabazon Trust on the issue of the removal of stones from Dowth quarry for the building of outhouses at Dowth Farmhouse.’

  ‘Did you know about that?’ asks Nora, when I stop reading for a moment and look at her.

  ‘About what?’ I say.

  ‘The stones and the court case.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

  It was true. I didn’t really know what was happening. I knew that Daddy was very quiet these days and that he and Mam sat up talking into the early hours after I’d gone to bed. I guessed that it was to do with Flann Montgomery and a row going on about the farm, but I never really knew what. They didn’t tell me the details. And I didn’t ask - I was afraid to know.

  ‘A recent meeting of the Drogheda Poor Law Board of Guardians debated the case and saw heated arguments between the elected guardians. Mr Thomas has been ordered to return all stones to the quarry with immediate effect to guard against the intention to cause a notice to quit to be served.’

  Nora had her mouth open a little bit so that I could see her pink tongue inside. ‘What does that mean, Molly?’ she asks, ‘A notice to quit?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, starting to get annoyed with her for bringing the paper over in the first place.

  I was quiet. Taking it in. No wonder Daddy had been worried so many evenings. He never told me about Law Board meetings discussing our farm and our family. A notice to quit. I’d seen those words written before, in big black letters, on a fluttery piece of paper nailed to Widow Biddy’s door. She’d missed so many rent payments the sheriff had come with his men to turn her out; we had all gathered, and made them go off, roaring and hissing at them. There was a collection and money was put in and the widow was still in her cottage, a sour tongue in her head.

  ‘My daddy says they’re going to evict you.’

  Nora was looking at me, a hint of a smirk on her mouth.

  ‘Is that so?’ I say. ‘And where did he hear that?’

  ‘Molly, that’s what it means. A notice to quit.’

  I knew bloody well what it meant.

  ‘And what else does your daddy say?’ I ask. She looks guilty and shakes her head, embarrassed that she and her family were sitting round the fireplace gossiping about us.

  ‘No one’s getting evicted,’ I say, the words almost stinging my lips. ‘Not if my daddy has anything to do with it. We won’t be going anywhere, you watch.’

  With that, I got up, threw the paper at her, and walked off with my arms folded. I didn’t look back but I knew that she was looking after me, a shocked look on her face, as I left her by herself, at the ash tree.

  When the bailiffs arrived for the eviction, the first time, they made a hames of the whole affair. My daddy refused to leave and to remove any of his belongings from the outhouses. When he asked for the warrant he found that they’d forgotten to bring it, in their haste to get to our farm to turf us out.

  After that, we thought we’d won. We thought they’d see the error that it was, that the law guardians would stand up for us, that a new court case would set ever
ything to rights. The whole parish had built their houses of the same stones my daddy had used on his land.

  We never thought they’d come back, with more horses and more men, that they’d take us from our home and turn us on to the side of the road, in the middle of the night, on a cold St. Stephen’s Day. We had underestimated Flann Montgomery, our neighbour and land agent for Brabazon House and Trust.

  I knew that now. As I sat on Dowth mound in the weeks after the eviction and as I went about my work at the grey house, dusting and wiping and mopping and cleaning, it was clear that Flann Montgomery had gotten away with the biggest crime I’d ever borne witness to in my life. But his time was coming. I could feel it, somewhere in my stomach, right below my heart.

  * * *

  My tea cup has little pink and blue birds on the inside. They are staring at each other, all entwined in black brambles with green leaves. I take another slurp of tea, so that they are completely revealed, washed naked, baked into the porcelain, forever to look at each other until someone, some day, drops the china and breaks them in two.

  I’m sitting with Mam in the White Horse Hotel, where she’s brought me after our shopping trip in town. She’s bought me a new dress, gingham cotton, ribbons sewn neatly along the collar and down the front. It lies in a brown package at my feet and I kick at it, under the white tablecloth. I feel agitated. This is too fancy for me. I prefer the tea shop cafe where there’s bare tables and no linen cloth to spill crumbs and tea on.

  ‘I’m glad I scrubbed my nails,’ I say to my mother, looking down at my hands.

  ‘You could be a lady,’ she says.

  ‘A lady?’ I say. I snort and a bit of tea almost comes out my nose.

  ‘Well you could learn to be one,’ she says. ‘You’re clever enough.’

  I look around me. Ladies are seated, perched, chatting, wearing hats with berries fastened to them. I wonder how they can enjoy their tea with the wide brims all over their faces. Preeners, I call them. Always preening - their hair, their clothes, their hats. I could never be a lady. I could never want to.

  ‘I don’t want to get married,’ I say and I mean it, keeping a firm expression on my face so she knows I’m serious.