by Edna O'Brien
“Take me to Mama,” I begged as I ran out of the doorway and down the flight of concrete steps. At the last step, someone caught me by the belt of my coat.
“We can’t take you yet, not yet, Caithleen,” Mr. Gentleman said, and I thought that they were all very cruel, and I couldn’t understand why.
“Why? Why? I want to go to her,” I said, trying to escape from his grip. I had so much strength that I could have run the whole five-mile journey to Tintrim.
“For God’s sake, tell the girl,” Hickey said.
“Shut up, Hickey,” Mr. Brennan shouted, and moved me over to the edge of the curb, where there were several motorcars. There were people gathering around the motorcars and everyone was talking and mumbling in the dark. Martha helped me into the back of their car, and just before she slammed the door, I heard two voices in the street talking, and one voice said, “He left five children.”
“Who left five children?” I said to Martha, clutching her by the wrists. I sobbed and said her name and begged her to tell me.
“Tom O’Brien, Caithleen. He’s drowned. In his boat, and, and …” She would rather be struck dumb than tell me, but I knew it by her face.
“And Mama?” I asked. She nodded her poor head and put her arms around me. Mr. Brennan got into the front seat just then and started the car.
“She knows,” Martha said to him, between her sobs, but after that I heard nothing, because you hear nothing, or no one, when your whole body cries and cries for the thing it has lost. Lost. Lost. And yet I could not believe that my mother was gone; and still I knew it was true, because I had a feeling of doom and every bit of me was frozen stiff.
“Are we going to Mama?” I said.
“In a while, Caithleen; we have to get something first,” they told me as they helped me out of the car and led me into the Greyhound Hotel. Mrs. O’Shea kissed me and put me sitting in one of the big leather armchairs that sloped backward. The room was full of people. Hickey came over and sat on the arm of my chair. He sat on a white linen antimacassar, but no one cared.
“She’s not dead,” I said to him, pleading, beseeching.
“They’re missing since five o’clock. They left Tuohey’s shop at a quarter to five. Poor Tom O’Brien had two bags of groceries,” Hickey said. Once Hickey said it, it was true. Slowly my knees began to sink from me and everything inside of me was gone. Mr. Brennan gave me brandy from a spoon, and then he made me swallow two white pills with a cup of tea.
“She doesn’t believe it,” I heard one of the Connor girls say, and then Baba came in and ran over to kiss me.
“I’m sorry about the bloody aul song,” she said.
“Bring the child home,” Jack Holland said, and when I heard him I jumped off the chair and shouted that I wanted to go to my mother. Mrs. O’Shea blessed herself, and someone put me sitting down again.
“Caithleen, we’re waiting to get news from the barracks,” Mr. Gentleman said. He was the only one that could keep me calm.
“I never want to go home again. Never,” I said to him.
“You won’t go home, Caithleen,” he said, and for a second it seemed that he was going to say, “Come home to us,” but he didn’t. He went over to where Martha was standing beside the sideboard and spoke to her. Then they beckoned to Mr. Brennan and he crossed the room to them.
“Where is he, Hickey? I don’t want to see him.” I was referring to my father.
“You won’t see him. He’s in hospital in Galway. Passed out when they told him. He was singing in a pub in Portumna when a guard came in to tell him.”
“I’m never going home,” I said to Hickey. His eyes were popping out of his head. He wasn’t used to whiskey. Someone had put a tumbler of it in his hand. Everyone was drinking to try to get over the shock. Even Jack Holland took a glass of port wine. The room was thick with cigarette smoke, and I wanted to go out of it, to go out and find Mama, even to go out and find her dead body. It was all too unreal in there and my head was swimming. The ashtrays were overflowing and the room was hot and smoky. Mr. Brennan came over to talk to me. He was crying behind his thick lenses. He said my mother was a lady, a true lady, and that everyone loved her.
“Bring me to her,” I asked. I was no longer wild. My strength had been drained from me.
“We’re waiting, Caithleen. We’re waiting for news from the barracks. I’ll go up there now and see if anything’s happened. They’re searching the river.” He put out his hands, humbly, in a gesture that seemed to say, “There’s nothing any of us can do now.”
“You’re staying with us,” he said as he lifted wild pieces of hair out of my eyes and smoothed them back gently.
“Thank you,” I said, and he went off to the barracks, which was a hundred yards up the road. Mr. Gentleman went with him.
“That bloody boat was rotten. I always said it,” Hickey said, getting angry with the whole world for not having listened to him.
“Can you come outside, Caithleen? It’s confidential,” Jack Holland said as he leaned over the back of my chair. I got up slowly, and though I cannot remember it, I must have walked across the room to the white door. Most of the paint had been scraped off it. He held it while I went out to the hall. He led me into the back of the hall, where a candle guttered in a saucer. His face was only a shadow.
He whispered, “So help me God, I couldn’t do it.”
“Do what, Jack?” I asked. I didn’t care. I thought I might get sick or suffocate. The pills and the brandy had gone to my head.
“Give her the money. Jesus, my hands are tied. The old woman owns everything.” The old woman was his mother. She sat on a rocking chair beside the fire, and Jack had to feed her bread and milk because her hands were crippled with rheumatism.
“God, I’d have done anything for your mama; you know that,” and I said that I did.
Upstairs in a bedroom two greyhounds moaned. It was the moan of death. Suddenly I knew that I had to accept the fact that my mother was dead. And I cried as I have never cried at any other time in my life. Jack cried with me and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coat.
Then the hall door was pushed and Mr. Brennan came in.
“No news, Caithleen, no news, love. Come on home to bed,” he said, and he called Martha and Baba out of the room.
“We’ll try later,” he said to Mr. Gentleman. It was a clear, starry night as we walked across the road to the car. We were home in a few minutes, and Mr. Brennan made me drink hot whiskey and gave me a yellow capsule. Martha helped me take off my clothes, and when I knelt down to say one prayer, I said, “Oh God, please bring Mama back to life.” I said it many times, but I knew that it was hopeless.
I slept with Baba, in one of her nightgowns. Her bed was softer than the one at home. When I turned on my left side she turned, too. She put her arm around my stomach and held my hand.
“You’re my best friend,” she said in the darkness. And then after a minute she whispered, “Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Afraid of what?”
“That she’ll appear,” and when she said it I started to shiver. What is it about death that we cannot bear to have someone who is dead come back to us? I wanted Mama more than anything in the world, and yet if the door had opened and she had entered, I would have screamed for Martha and Mr. Brennan. We heard a noise downstairs, a thud, and we both hid completely under the covers and she said it was death knocks. “Get Declan,” I said, under the sheet and the blankets.
“No, you go over for him.” But neither of us dared to open the door and go out on the landing. My mother’s ghost was waiting for us at the top of the stairs, in a white nightgown.
The pillow slip under me and the white counterpane were wet when I woke up. Molly woke me with a cup of tea and toast. She helped me sit up in the bed and fetched my cardigan off the back of a chair. Molly was only two years older than me, and yet she fussed over me as if she were my mother.
; “Are you sick, love?” she asked. I said that I was hot, and she went off to call Mr. Brennan.
“Sir, come here for a second. I want you. I think she has a fever,” and he came and put his hand on my forehead and told Molly to phone the doctor.
They gave me pills all that day, and Martha sat in the room and painted her nails and polished them with a little buffer. It was raining, so I couldn’t see out the window because it got all fogged up, but Martha said it was a terrible day. The phone rang sometime after lunch and Martha kept saying, “Yes, I’ll tell her” and “Too bad” and “Well, I suppose that’s that,” and then she came up and told me that they had dragged the great Shannon lake but they hadn’t found them; she didn’t say that they had given up, but I knew they had, and I knew that Mama would never have a grave for me to put flowers on. Somehow she was more dead then than anyone I had ever heard of. I cried again, and Martha gave me a sip of wine from her glass and she made me lie back while she read me a story from a magazine. ‘Twas a sad story, so I cried worse. It was the last day of childhood.
6
That summer passed quickly. I stayed in Baba’s house and went home in the daytime to get the dinner and wash up. Some days I made the beds. Hickey had moved upstairs since Mama’s death (we always referred to it as death, not drowning), and the rooms were very untidy. They were sad, too, with the smell of dust and old socks and a staleness that comes from never opening the windows.
They were over in the fields most days, cutting the corn and binding it into stooks, and I used to go over with bottles of tea at four o’clock. My father ate very little that summer, and every time he drank tea he swallowed two aspirins with it. He was quiet and his eyelids were red and swollen. When they came in, Hickey milked the cows and my father drank more tea, took off his shoes in the kitchen, and went off to bed. I think he must have cried in bed, because it was too bright to sleep, and anyhow, Hickey made a lot of noise downstairs banging milk cans about and no one could sleep through it.
One day I was clearing out Mama’s drawers and putting her good clothes in a box to send to her sister, when he came upstairs. I hadn’t spoken to him very much since he came home from the hospital. I preferred not to.
“There’s a little matter you ought to know,” he said. He had just come in from the village and he was loosening the knot of his tie. I thought for one awful minute that he was drunk, because he looked so disheveled.
“The place has to go,” he said flatly.
“Go where?” I asked.
He shoved his hat back on his head and began to scratch his forehead. He hesitated. “There was a bit of debt, and with one thing and another it got bigger. I hadn’t such luck with the horses. Oh well, we didn’t make ends meet.”
“And who’s buying it?” I remembered Jack Holland’s warning to me about our place being endangered.
“What?” my father asked. He heard me quite well but this was a trick of his when he didn’t want to answer. He was narrowing his eyes now, giving that shrewd look to make it seem that he was an astute man. I asked again. I wasn’t afraid of him when he was sober.
“The bank practically owns it,” he said at last.
“And who’ll run it?” I couldn’t believe that someone else other than Hickey would plow and milk and clip the hedge in the summer evenings.
“Jack Holland will probably buy it.”
“Jack Holland!” I was appalled. The rogue. He would get it cheaply. All his palaver about kings and queens and his promising me a new fountain pencil before I went away to the convent. And to think that he got seven Masses said for Mama. He sent money to a special order of priests in Dublin for a bouquet of Masses.
“Where will you go?” I asked. I was thinking of the awful luck if he followed me to the town where the convent was.
“Well, I’m all right. I have a little bit of land for myself and I’ll be able to live in the gate lodge.” The way he spoke, anyone would think he had done a smart bit of manipulation in securing the old, disused gate lodge behind the rhododendron bushes. It was damp, and the front door and two small windows were choked with briars.
“And Hickey?”
“He’ll have to go, I’m afraid. There’s no more work for him.” It was impossible. Hickey had been with us twenty years, he was there before I was born. He was too fat to go anywhere else and I told my father this. But he shook his head. He didn’t like Hickey, and he was ashamed of all that had happened.
“What are you doing?” he asked, looking down at the little neat piles of clothes that were spread around the floor.
“Poor Mama, the poor aul creature,” he said, and he went over to the window and cried.
I didn’t want a scene, so I said, as if he weren’t crying, “I’ll have to get a uniform before going away and shoes and six pairs of black stockings.”
“And how much will that be?” he asked, turning around. There were tears on his cheeks and he snuffled a bit.
“I don’t know. Ten or fifteen pounds.” He took out notes from his pocket and gave me three fivers. The bank must have given him some money.
“I never deprived you of anything, or your mother, either. Now did I?”
“No.”
“Ye had only to mention a thing and ye got it.” I said that was true and went downstairs immediately to fry him a rasher and make a cup of tea. I called him when it was ready and he came down in his old clothes. He wasn’t going out anymore; the temptation to drink was over for this time.
“Will you write to me, when you go away?” he asked, dipping a biscuit into the hot tea. He had taken his teeth out and could only eat a softened biscuit.
“I will.” I was standing with my back to the range.
“Don’t forget your poor father,” he said. He put out his arm and tried to draw me over onto his knee, but I pretended not to know what he was doing and ran off to the yard to call Hickey for his tea. He was gone upstairs to bed when I came back, and Hickey and I fried some cold cabbage with the rashers and it was delicious. We ate it with mustard. Hickey was a great one for making mustard. Five of the six egg cups had hardened mustard in them. He blended a fresh lot each day in a clean egg cup.
Baba was having a birthday party that night, so I asked Hickey for a bottle of cream so that she would have it with the jelly we had made. He skimmed the two buckets of milk and with his fingers tipped the cream into a can. He wasn’t supposed to. Our milk at the creamery next day would have a very low fat content.
“Goodbye, Hickey.”
“Goodbye, sweetheart.” Bull’s-Eye came with me over across the fields. It was a shortcut to Baba’s house. Passing the lower cornfield, I stood for a minute to admire it. It was high and ripe and golden, and here and there where it had lodged the jackdaws were feeding. It had a sunlight of its own. The sun was shining from it and the ears stirred in the light sun-gold wind. I sat down on the ditch for a minute. I remembered the day Hickey plowed that field; we went over with tea and several thick hunks of buttered bread. And later the little green threads came shooting through the red-brown earth and the jackdaws came. Mama loaned one of her beaded hats to put on the scarecrow. I could see her walking over the field with the hat self-consciously laid on her head. Sometimes a sharp and sudden memory of her came to me, and to ease the pain I cried. Bull’s-Eye sat on his tail and looked at me while I cried. Then, when I stood up, he came another few yards with me and stopped. He was loyal to Dada, he went back home.
There were five bicycles inside the gate of Baba’s house, and the curtains in the front room were drawn. The radio was playing—“… where women are women, and French perfume that rocks the room”—and there was a lot of laughing and talking besides. I knew she wouldn’t hear me if I knocked, so I went around and tapped at the side window. It was a french window that opened out onto the path. Baba opened it. She was smoking madly, and was dressed in a new blue dress with gorgeous puff sleeves.
“Jesus, I thought you were some yahoo coming for my aul fella,” she
said suddenly. She had been nice to me for several weeks since Mama died, but when there were other girls around she always made little of me. Declan danced past the window with Gertie Tuohey in his arms. Her black ringlets, like fat sausages, fell down onto her shoulders. Declan had a paper hat on the side of his head, and he winked at me.
“Jesus, we’re having a whale of a time. I’m delighted you’re not here. Go home to hell and make stirabout,” Baba said.
I thought for a minute that she was joking, so I said, very gently, “I brought the cream.”
“Gimme,” she said, stretching her arm for it. She was wearing a silver bracelet of Martha’s. Her arm was grown-up and had a bloom of little golden hairs on it.
“Be off, trash,” she said, and she shut the window and drew the white bawneen curtain across. Inside, I could hear her splitting with laughter.
I didn’t go around and let myself in the back door because I knew that Martha was gone with her husband to see For Whom the Bell Tolls in Limerick, and that Baba would have me helping Molly cut sandwiches and making tea all night, so I came back home for an hour.
Hickey was carving his name with a nail on the chicken house. Dada had told him, so he was leaving traces of himself behind to be remembered by.
“Where will you go, Hickey?”
“I’ll go to England. I was going anyhow soon as you went.” Even though he sounded cheerful he looked sad.
“Are you lonesome?”
“Lonesome for what? Not at all. I’ll have twenty quid a week and a mott in Birmingham”—but he was lonesome all right.
“What brought you back?” he asked. I told him.
“She’s a ringing divil, that one,” he said, and I was delighted.
He said that he would clip the hedge, and he thanked God that it would be his last time. He made quick snips with the shears and I collected the pieces and put them into a wheelbarrow. He clipped it right down to the brown twigs and it looked very bare and cold. The wind would come through it now. Where it was very thick in one corner he made a figure of an armchair and I sat in it to see if I would fall through it. I didn’t. Then we emptied the wheelbarrow in the old cellar, and we shut the hens in. Bull’s-Eye had already gone to bed in the turf house. It was unnatural to see Bull’s-Eye and Dada going to bed on these lovely, still, golden evenings. Dada’s blind was drawn so I didn’t go up to see him, though I knew he would have liked a cup of tea. I hated going into his room when he was in bed. I could see Mama on the pillow beside him. Reluctant and frightened as if something terrible were being done to her. She used to sleep with me as often as she could and only went across to his room when he made her. He wore no pajamas in bed, and I was ashamed even to think of it.