by Edna O'Brien
10
Three gloomy days went by. Nothing happened except that my father went out in the mornings and came home late. We suspected that he had raised some money from his uncle or brother.
On the third afternoon we buried the calf, because my aunt said that it was beginning to smell. Maura, who could do a man’s work, had dug a grave earlier on, and we wheeled the calf down in an old rotted barrow. We went because my aunt said that she could not rely on Maura to do it properly. The calf was in an old sack, so that you could not discern its shape or anything about it. It was a bitterly cold day.
I thought of Eugene and wondered what he’d make of this bleak sight—us standing there watching Maura tip the barrow sideways until the sack toppled in, then reshoveling the earth over it and pressing it down with the heel of her man’s boot. She wore boots and trousers, and all the people in the village called her Micky. She worked for us because she didn’t cost much and was useful with milking and doing odd jobs. On the way back the barrow got bogged down in the mud and I had to lift it with Maura to get it free.
“Th’aul cow is lonesome,” she said. We had put the cow in a house while the calf was being buried, otherwise she would have followed the scent. In the house she was mooing and running around kicking loose stones over the floor. The outhouses were falling down and ivy covered their tumbling walls.
“We’re all lonesome,” my aunt said, and Maura grinned and said that she wasn’t because there were pictures that night. Traveling pictures came to the village once a week.
I had been thinking of some way of escaping, but the thought of their chasing me made me frightened.
“This vale of tears,” my aunt said desolately. Burying the calf had saddened her. Death was always on her mind. Death was so important in that place. Little crosses painted white were stuck up on roadside ditches here and there to mark where someone had been killed for Ireland, and not a day seemed to pass but some old person died of flu, or old age, or a stroke. Somehow we only heard of the deaths; we rarely heard when a child was born, unless it was twins, or a blue baby, or the vet had delivered it.
“Th’ evenings will be getting long soon,” I said to my aunt to cheer her up, but she just sighed.
We ate dinner in the kitchen. We had salty rashers, a colander of green cabbage, and some potatoes reheated from the previous day. While we were eating in silence, a car drove up and around by the side of the house. My aunt blessed herself as she saw a stranger help my father out.
“Grand evening,” my father said as he came in and handed her a brown paper parcel of meat soggy with blood. The stranger had had some drinks also but did not stagger.
“You’re settling down!” he said to me. I tried to ignore him by concentrating on peeling a cold potato.
“I met Father Hagerty over in the village, he wants to have a chat with you,” he said.
My heart began to race, but I did not say anything.
“You’re to go and see him.”
I put butter on the potato and ate it slowly.
“D’you hear me?” he said with a sudden shout.
“There, there, she’ll go,” my aunt said, and she linked him into the back room. The stranger hung around for a few minutes until she came out, and then asked for a pound. We had no money, but we gave him three bottles of porter which had been hidden in a press since Christmastime.
My aunt put them in a paper bag and he went off, swearing. We had no idea where he came from.
We sat by the cooker and listened for my father’s call. At about nine o’clock he cried out and I ran in to him.
“I think I’m going to die,” he said, as his stomach was very sick. The news cheered me up no end—I might get away—so I gave him a dose of health salts.
We went to bed early that night. I slept in the room opposite my aunt’s, and when I had closed the door I sat down on the bed and wrote a long letter to Baba, for help. I wrote six or seven pages, while the candle lasted. I had already written a postcard, but had no answer. It occurred to me that maybe they had told the postmistress to keep my letters.
A wind blew down the chimney, causing the candle flame to blow this way and that. There was electricity in the house, but we were short of bulbs. I hid the letter under the mattress and undressed. The sight of my purple brassiere made me recall with longing the Sunday morning Baba and I had dyed all our underwear purple. Baba read somewhere that it was a sexy color, and on the way home from Mass we bought five packets of dye. Sneaky old Gustav must have been peeping through the keyhole of the bathroom, because suddenly Joanna had rushed upstairs and pushed the door in.
“Poison color in the basin,” she shouted as she burst in.
“You might have knocked, we could have been doing something very private,” Baba said.
“Poison water,” Joanna said, pointing to the weird-colored water in the basin. Our underwear turned out very nice, and some boy asked Baba if she was a cardinal’s niece.
I kept a jumper on in bed. We were short of blankets. I had only an ironing blanket over me and a quilt that my aunt had made. The candle had burned right down to the saucer as I lay on my side and closed my eyes to think of Eugene. I remembered the night he asked me to do some multiplication for him. He knew all about politics, and music, and books, and the insides of cameras, but he was slow to add. I totted up the amount of money he should get for one hundred and thirty-seven trees, at the rate of thirty-seven and six per tree. He had sold some trees to a local timber merchant, because the woods needed thinning. There were blue paint marks on the “sold” trees, but he said that at night the timber merchant had sent a boy along to put paint marks on extra trees.
“Nearly three hundred and fifty pounds,” I said, reckoning it roughly first, the way we were taught to at school, so that we should know it if our final answer was wildly wrong.
“And out of that he’ll make a small fortune,” Eugene said, detailing what would happen to the tree from the time it was felled until it became a press or a rafter. I could see planks of fine white wood with beautiful knots of deeper color, and golden heaps of sawdust on a floor, while he fumed about the profit which one man made.
I went to sleep wondering if I would ever see him again.
In the morning my aunt brought me tea and said that the priest had sent over word that he was expecting me. I dressed and left the house around eleven. My father had stayed in bed that morning and Mad Maura ran to the village for a half-bottle of whiskey, on tick.
Always when I escaped from the house I felt a rush of vitality and hope, as if there was still a chance that I might escape and live my life the way I wanted to.
It was a bright windy morning, the fields vividly green, the sky a delicate green-blue, and the hills behind the fields smoke-gray.
It’s nice, nice, I thought as I breathed deeply and walked with my aunt’s bicycle down the field toward the road.
I did not go to the priest’s house. I was too afraid, and anyhow, I thought that no one would ever find out.
I went for a spin down by the river road with the intention of posting Baba’s letter in the next village.
The fields along the road were struck into winter silence, a few were plowed and the plowed earth looked very, very dead and brown.
If only I could fly, I thought as I watched the birds flying and then perching for a second on thorn bushes and ivied piers.
I cycled slowly, not being in any great hurry. It was very quiet except for the humming of electric wires. Thick black posts carrying electric wires marched across the fields and the wires hummed a constant note of windy music.
At the bottom of Goolin Hill I got off the bicycle and pushed it slowly up; then halfway I stood to look at the ruined pink mansion on the hill. It had been a legend in my life, the pink mansion with the rhododendron trees all around it and a gray gazebo set a little away from the house. A rusted gate stood chained between two limestone piers, and the avenue had disappeared altogether. I thought of Mama. She had oft
en told me of the big ball she went to in that mansion when she was a young girl. It had been the highlight of her whole life, coming across at night, in a rowboat, from her home in the Shannon island, changing her shoes in the avenue, hiding her old ones and her raincoat under a tree. The rhododendrons had been in bloom, dark-red rhododendrons; she remembered their color, and the names of all the boys she danced with. They had supper in a long dining room, and there were dishes of carved beef on the sideboard. Someone made up a song about Mama that night and it was engraved on her memory ever after:
Lily Neary, swanlike
She nearly broke her bones
Trying to dance the reel-set
With the joker Johnny Jones.
“Who was Johnny Jones?” I used to ask.
“A boy,” she would say dolefully.
Standing in the middle of the road, thinking of all this, I almost got run over by the mail van. He had to swerve toward the ditch.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking all over with fright. He laughed at me. He was a good-humored boy and asked if I wanted a lift. A notice gummed to the windshield said NO PASSENGERS, but two women sat in the back of the car on bags of mail. I thought ridiculously of what would happen if the mail bags contained turkey eggs from the turkey station or a gilt clock on its way as a wedding gift to someone. I asked him to post a letter for me in Limerick that evening. He drove out from Limerick every morning to deliver mail in the various villages along the way and then went back in the evening, collecting more letters.
“Right you be,” he said, and I gave him the letter for Baba and two shillings for himself.
Then I got on my bicycle and cycled toward home. It was a downhill ride most of the way, so I did not have to use the pedals much. They were stiff and needed oiling. The tires hissed, the spokes hummed, and the road was a winding, tarred ribbon of blue. I was planning what I would tell my aunt, and I did not feel a bit guilty as I cycled up our own field and came home.
I nearly fell when I saw the parish priest sitting in our kitchen drinking tea from one of the good cups.
“Here she is now,” my aunt said. The priest looked at me.
“Well, Caithleen! I imagined that something had detained you, so I dropped over to see how you were.”
“You were gone when I called,” I said hastily.
He stared at me very hard.
“If you’ll excuse me, Father,” my aunt said, and disappeared, so that he could talk to me alone.
Father Hagerty began at once. “Caithleen, I’ve heard some bad news from your father. Sit down and tell me about it.”
I sat opposite him. My aunt had put a cushion between his back and the wooden rungs of the chair, and he looked as if he was settling in for a long talk.
“It’s nothing very much; I met a man, that’s all,” I said, trying to be casual. He frowned. The frown produced four deep lines on his grayish forehead, and for no particular reason I remembered back to the time when he was collecting funds to build a new chapel and held dances in the town hall on Sundays. He served behind the mineral bar himself, and people said that he drained the dregs of bottles to make new bottles of lemonade. Hickey once handed in a pound for one ticket and got no change and, after that, always brought the exact money, which was two shillings.
“You are walking the path of moral damnation.”
“Why, Father?” I said quietly, folding my hands on my lap to try to look composed. I longed to cross my legs but still held to the belief that it was disrespectful.
“This man is dangerous company. He has no faith, no moral standards. He married a woman and then divorced her—whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,” he said.
“He seems to be a good man. He doesn’t drink, or anything,” I said.
“Ah, you poor child,” Father Hagerty said with a frank and winning smile, which I remembered from my schooldays. He always smiled at children and gave them sweets. On the day of my confirmation he consoled me with a shilling when my white veil got torn on a spear of the chapel gate.
“More tea, Father?” I said.
“No more,” he said, putting his pale hand over the top of the china cup. It was very strong tea, to which creamy milk had been added.
“Think of your eternal soul,” he said, as if he were giving a sermon from the altar, “think of the harm you might do to it. We are all under sentence of death, we never know the hour or the minute …”
That worried me, and I held my head down and could think of nothing to say in reply. You could see yourself in the shine on his black boots.
“God is testing your love; God has allowed this man to cross your path and tempt you, so that you will reaffirm your love for Him. You have only to ask, and He will give you the grace to resist this great temptation.”
“If God is good, He won’t burn me,” I said to Father Hagerty, quoting Eugene’s exact phrase.
The priest sat upright and shook his head sadly from side to side. “Child, don’t you realize that you are speaking heresy! You know that you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven unless you obey the word of God. You’re turning your back on God,” he said, raising his voice. I looked into his eyes and wondered what lay behind them—pity, or just a sense of duty. He put his hand to his mouth and coughed politely. He expected me to say something, but I had nothing to say.
The side door opened and my father came in, in his shirt and long combinations. He got a shock when he saw the priest.
“Excuse me, Father, I didn’t know you were here,” he said, withdrawing into the hall.
“That’s all right, Mr. Brady.”
My father got his overcoat then, and came into the kitchen with his shoelaces slapping around and his eyes large and bloodshot. He proceeded to make himself a cup of tea. He said that he hoped Father Hagerty was giving me a real straightening out, and that I was a very stubborn girl and would listen to no one. Stubborn, that’s what I’d be. They could talk and rant and talk, but I wouldn’t answer; I’d just sit there, fiddling with the cuff of my cardigan, a faint smile on my face—though my father might hit me for being insolent. And that was what I did.
“She won’t listen to sense,” Dada said.
“She’ll listen to God Almighty,” Father Hagerty said.
“She hadn’t even rosary beads when she came home,” Dada said.
“Oh well, wait a minute,” Father Hagerty said, searching in the pocket of his shabby black coat. “I brought her a little book.”
It was a beautiful leather-bound volume with gilt edging—The Imitation of Christ.
“Thanks, Father.” I took it and saw one tear of mine drop onto the brown leather cover.
“Oh, that’s too good altogether, Father Hagerty,” Dada said, and told me to thank the priest properly. I thanked him a second time, and he said that I should read a little of it every day and learn to model myself in the image of Christ.
Then he came to the point that I dreaded. He asked me to promise never to see the divorced man again, never to write to him, never to let my thoughts dwell on the occasions I had been with him.
“Promise me that?” he asked.
“Do what you’re told,” Dada said. But I couldn’t.
The priest asked me again, and Dada shouted, and I just held my head down and kept silent. Dada shouted louder then, and the priest said, “Now, now, Mr. Brady,” and told Dada to take his cup of tea back to bed and not to get excited.
“It’s as big a sin for my father to be like that as for a man to have two wives,” I said to the priest when we were alone.
“I’m surprised at you,” he said, “to speak of your good father like that. Every man takes a drink. It’s the climate.” His eyebrows were very bushy when he frowned.
He asked again, “Will you promise me not to see that man?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. It was the only way of getting rid of him.
“We’ll make an Act of Perfect Contrition, the two of us, together.” And he began, “O
my God,” and waited while I repeated the three words. Then he said, “I am heartily sorry,” and paused for me, and so on, until we had finished. I felt an awful hypocrite, saying words that I did not mean.
He looked at his watch and said it was lunchtime, and when he stood up to go, I called my aunt from upstairs so that she could thank him.
“I’ll see you over in the church anyhow,” he said to me. “There’s Women’s Confraternity this Sunday, and confessions on Saturday night.”
“All right, Father,” I said, making no promises.
“She’ll be all right now, she’ll be going to dances in no time,” he said, when my aunt came down. She saw him to the gate, and stayed there until his black figure was out of sight.
“Wasn’t it terrible that we hadn’t an offering to give him for a Mass,” she said, when she came back.
We had no money. I thought it funny that two grown people living in that large house hadn’t a two-shilling piece between them. A tinker wouldn’t believe it if he knocked on the door.
“Well, thank God he came,” my aunt said.
She seemed to think that everything was all right now, and that I was out of danger. The funny thing was that I was more determined than ever to get away.
11
Finally, my father asked us to fetch the doctor, because he felt faint, not having been able to eat for several days. The doctor gave him an injection and told us to ration the amount of alcohol he had. We sat with him in turns and gave him soda water with a small amount of whiskey in it—a smaller amount each time. I had not heard from Eugene or Baba and I was sick with worry.
“I’m sorry,” my father kept saying as I sat on the bed and held the glass to his lips. His hands shook so that he could not hold a glass or a razor. He cried like a child. Always after drinking, he cried for days and was ashamed to talk to anyone. His depression was frightening.
“ ‘Tis nice to have you home,” he said. “Why don’t you get yourself a cigarette? Sure all young people smoke nowadays, I know that, I’m a fairly understanding man …” And I thought of Eugene’s desk with packages of cigarettes strewn about, and Cancer is painful written in his clear, square handwriting on some of the packages.