by Tom Phelan
I knew Enderly, knew the trees along the avenue were bog deal, knew the high Famine Wall around the house and farmyard was built to give work to poor people when times were bad. I knew the green wicket gate opened onto the pebbly driveway around the front of the house. I was familiar with the layout of Enderly because during my last year in school I used to sneak in through the farmyard entrance every day to see Con and Matthias. After all the years of being together, I needed my fill of the two lads before facing the lonely going home along the Canal bank. When I was closing the wicket gate behind me, it slipped out of my hand and slammed shut. I pursed my lips and hoped Missus Hodgkins hadn’t heard it and decided I was clumsy and loud before I even knocked on her door. The noise of the golden pebbles under the wheels of the bike was enough to waken the dead. My plan was to leave the bike against the ivied wall of the house between two windows, but there was a flower bed in the way with daffodils and bluebells in it. So I just laid the bike down in the gravel and ran to the door.
Maybe it was my out-of-breathness, my hair all over the place, my dirty hands, dirty legs, bad and sockless boots, and wild eyes that impressed Missus Hodgkins. She burst out laughing and clapped her hands together when she opened the front door. She looked like she’d been making bread.
“Missus Hodgkins, can I work for you, please? And I’m sorry I didn’t stop to wash and do my hair and put on my good dress because I was across the fields with Daddy galloping after a calf and Mammy came running across to tell me the sign was up and Chrissy Wallace is coming up the road after me.” I looked over my shoulder to make sure Chrissy wasn’t at the wicket gate getting ready to pull the wings out of me like I was a fly.
“Why, Kitty Hatchel!” Missus Hodgkins said. “Did Mister Sawtel put up the sign already?”
“I’m a great worker and I want to work in your house more than anything in the world. I’m a good girl and my name is Kitty Hatchel.”
“Of course you’re Kitty Hatchel. Aren’t you the daughter of Mister Hatchel who ploughs at Enderly every spring? And his father before him too, for fifty years? Aren’t you the same Kitty Hatchel who sneaked into the farmyard after school every day for a year to talk to your brothers?”
“Oh, Missus Hodgkins, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you knew,” I said, and I thought I was fired before she hired me. Huge big tears filled my eyes.
“Of course I knew, Kitty. Wouldn’t it be a queer state of affairs if I didn’t know what was going on in my own house?”
“Will that stop me from getting the job, Missus Hodgkins? I only called in to say hello to them for a minute. I was lonely for them.” The tears fell down my face.
“What are you, Kitty? Two years younger than Con?”
“Yes, Missus. No, Missus. One year.”
“Kitty, I will hire you because I can see you do not shrink from getting yourself into your work.” The way she looked at me I thought she was seeing every speck of dirt on my hands and legs, every tear and rip in my clothes, every hair sticking out at an angle from my head. “And, as well as that, your brothers didn’t miss one day’s work in seven years, and they did Lionel all the good in the world, knocked the corners off him. And Sarah was really fond of them, especially Con. And your mother’s aunt, Poor Meg, God rest her, was …” I thought Missus Hodgkins had got a lump in her throat. “Well, Lionel and Sarah loved Poor Meg.” And after that I heard very little of what Missus Hodgkins said. She talked about Con reading the encyclopaedia and learning from Mister Hodgkins and talking about a man called Russo. But all I could think of was running home to tell Daddy and Mammy that I got the job.
“You must be here at eight o’clock in the morning, Kitty, and every morning after that. Half day on Saturday. Home at one.” Then she was telling me how Con and Matthias had never been late for work, how they were very reliable and how she’d hoped they’d stay forever, and I thought she’d never stop talking and the next second I’d hear Chrissy Wallace crunching her way across the pebbles to put her hand on my shoulder and throw me into the daffodils.
“But young men must see the world,” Missus Hodgkins said, “and I don’t know whether it was themselves or Lionel who persuaded them to take the chance.”
“I’ll be here, Missus Hodgkins. I’ll be here,” I said, and I going from one foot to the other like a little girl going to wet herself.
I started down the four steps before I remembered to thank her, and then I broke into a trot back to the bike, hoping I wouldn’t meet Chrissy in the wicket gate.
Missus Hodgkins called after me. “Kitty. When your father and mother ask you how much you will be earning, what will you tell them?”
“I don’t know, Missus,” I said. “Maybe what you were paying Poor Meg.” If the wicket gate banged shut behind me I didn’t hear it.
Halfway down the avenue I met Chrissy Wallace in full sail. She looked like a dunghill cock the way she had her chest stuck out. She smiled and started shouting before I got near her. “She gave you short shrift, Hatchel. Will you look at you, dirty as a pig. You should have washed your face and racked your hair. You look like a tramp, and that’s what you are.” I swerved around her and passed her as quick as I could.
I was three months working in Enderly when I got a letter from Matthias telling me he and Con would be going to India. I felt like the ground had swallowed me and it wasn’t until the next day I was able to finish the letter, get past the part about him sailing away to India, away from me. In the next sentence he asked me to go to Dublin before the end of June to say goodbye.
I knew Mammy and Daddy would never let me go. That’s why I asked Missus Hodgkins how could I get around them.
The first thing she said was, “Ah, it’s grand to be in love, Kitty.”
I blushed so badly I had to turn away, but she had seen my face. “It’s all right to call a thing by its name, Kitty,” she said. I blushed worse.
Missus Hodgkins was always very calm and very wise. She told me what to do. She told me the time would fly while the lads were away.
That evening when I was riding Mammy’s bike home, I said to myself, I’m in love, every time I pushed down on the left pedal.
I’m in love with Matthias Wrenn, I was saying by the time I got down to the Canal.
I’m going to marry Matthias Wrenn, I was saying by the time I got off to push the bike over the Bridge because I’d been so distracted I hadn’t got up enough speed to clear it.
I even forgot about India for a few minutes.
Missus Hodgkins
The sight of Kitty Hatchel on the doorstep that morning! And she trying to be formal because she had come to be interviewed for Poor Meg’s job. Formal, and the boots and the nervousness of her!
The details got imprinted on my brain as sharp as the king’s head on a penny: the frantic and windswept and enthusiastic straight-out-of-the-countryside appearance of the girl. And she as tall as a stork—not too big in the chest though, just the right size, no big hanging things swinging around and getting in the way. If I hadn’t known the family, I don’t think I’d have been able to see beyond the boots, the hair, and the cow dung on her legs.
When I opened the door, I was put in mind of an exotic bird beaten to the ground in a storm, all its feathers ruffled by the fierce wind. But far from being defeated, this bird was on her feet, determined to face into the next storm, which she believed was approaching on the far side of our front door.
Weeks later I found out she had been afraid a competitor for the job, Chrissy Wallace, would suddenly touch her on the shoulder and tell her to act like a bee and buzz off. Kitty had strange figures of speech. She once told me it was raining like a cow urinating on a flat rock, and then she blushed and put her fingers to her lips. “That’s what Uncle Martin always says,” she said by way of apology. Of course, “urinating” wasn’t the word Uncle Martin used. I have often wondered if Kitty’s verbosity gave rise to Con’s reticence, if he had realized very early in life that silence demanded less of an effort than did
the energy to get a point across whenever his sister was around. Of course, we all used to smile at how tongue-tied and stuttery Con got in front of our Sarah too, but that was because Sarah was beautiful. Most men are intimidated by a beautiful woman, even if she has the brain of a stick with the personality of a stone.
Kitty’s short hair was so untidy she could have been running through furze bushes all night in the dark. Her dress was as attractive as a brown sack with armholes. Her brown cardigan was short at the wrists, and it was years past its prime, unmatching brown and blue darns all over the place. But it was her boots that took the biscuit: they had once been knee-high Wellingtons made from Burmese syrup. Now they were ankle-high, and the instrument used to cut them down to size had escaped from its handler a few times, leaving behind jagged rims. There were no socks. Her shins were spattered with what could only have been blobs of animal matter, indicating that she had been running in fields spotted with fresh cattle droppings.
Our Sarah went to boarding school that same September when Kitty started slipping into the farmyard after school to get her daily dose of her brothers, Matthias with the horses or in the Machine Shed, Con in the gardens. From the first second I saw her visiting the two lads, I knew she had never been feminized, that she’d spent all her life in the company of boys. And now as I stood looking at her in the front door, I wondered if she still climbed trees and skipped stones across the Canal. A lot of country girls live like boys for as long as they, or their parents, can get away with it. It’s only when Mother Nature herself forces the issue of nascent motherhood that they start learning to be girls. Some never learn and stay a bit mannish all their lives; there’s nothing as pitiful to see as a spinster woman who never grew out of her tomboyishness, with hair like dried-out binder twine, hair on her chin too, skin as cracked as neglected leather, and crow-claws for hands.
But it was Kitty’s enthusiasm for the job that outshone her physical presentation. She could have been one of those lovely country girls who, in a fairy tale, is swept off her feet by a prince on a white horse. But as she stood on our front steps that morning, a passing prince would only have seen a peasant girl, a milkmaid maybe. At some time in the future, like many a country girl, Kitty would probably waste her sweetness on the desert air, as Gray said in the country churchyard, but she had some sweetening-up to do before that happened. I know how a fresh coat of paint changes a room, and I knew that soap, water, hairbrush and fresh clothes would bring out the beauty of this wind-blown bird.
Little did I know that a country lad very close to home had already sniffed at this burgeoning blossom, had got a whiff as enticing as the elusive sweetness of a spring primrose shy in deep grass at the edge of a bare-branched hedge.
She didn’t even ask me how much I would pay her. Standing on the step outside our door, she was oblivious to her physical presentation, and I got the feeling that her only ambition in life was to work in Enderly. But that was her gift—to sink herself into the present moment, disregard everything else. It was this intensity that allowed her to walk around the jagged rim of Knockmullen Castle halfway up in the sky; to boldly—and foolishly—walk around the parapet of the Canal Bridge with her eyes closed; to imitate some lunatic from the village and dive into the Canal from the parapet. And it was her ability to stick to a task that enabled her to devise a way of getting to Dublin to see Matthias Wrenn off to India—Matthias, that whiffer of shy primroses in spring grass.
Maybe it’s because I’m a woman who had the same unbearable feelings not so long ago, or maybe it was because I’d spent all my life around horses, but when it came to Matthias Wrenn, it was obvious Kitty wasn’t just in love; she was in heat. Of course I never did say this to anyone, not even David. But, in my defence, it wasn’t just me and horses; many were the nights of the days when David had bred a mare that he came to the bedroom with more than sleep on his mind. Sometimes he couldn’t even wait to get to bed; he’d floor me at the top of the stairs or even in the kitchen; that was hard on the back. Fortunately, I was blessed with a vigorous willingness to perform my marital duties, and I simply weakened at the knees whenever David began pulling off my clothes before we got near a bed.
Many’s the time I’ve leaned on the paddock railing watching the antics of mare and stallion. So often did I see them getting ready for the final lunge-and-plunge that in my dreamy eyes the mare seemed to cling to the earth by the tips of her hooves. Like a ballet dancer in Paris moving her body to the music, the mare would barely hold on, keep herself from shooting up into the sky. No mare in heat knows what to do with her body—ripping into sudden, mad, short gallops that come to stops in showers of pebbles from the tips of braking hooves—kicking out with murderous intensity, tail and mane gone from gravity’s grip—not whinnying but screaming when the stallion comes at her with yellow, two-inch teeth bared to plant a bite—see-sawing in the air from front to hind legs as if she were trying to rid herself of a swarm of botflies—throwing her head and rolling her eyes like she had drunk bad liquor—snorting through flaring nostrils and sending out showers of saliva until finally firmly planting her hind legs apart and leaving herself wide open to the lustful charge of a galloping stallion.
When it came to Matthias Wrenn, Kitty was as giddy as any peaking mare, blushing and smiling when she thought I wasn’t looking; starting to talk and stopping when she became aware of where she wasn’t; whistling tunelessly and soft enough to put a kitten to sleep; staring out a window at a thought thousands of miles away; suddenly bursting into a fit of polishing as if remembering something she loved remembering; glancing into a passing mirror and making a face at herself as if to say, “What does he see? I must be mad. He must be mad.”
“In love” is only a polite way of saying “in heat,” if you ask me. At that age, how can anyone say what is emotion and what is bodily juices in a mad mix? When I married David, it certainly was chemistry, and when that cooled off, I began to love him; two different things altogether. When we were courting, there was something in me and him that drove me to distraction. I couldn’t think of anything but David. But did I love him at that stage? I don’t think I even knew what love was then. I don’t think there was room for anything besides the lust.
When I’d see Kitty pressing herself low in the belly with the tips of her outstretched fingers, I’d think to myself how fortunate it was that Matthias was in Dublin, else this girl would be wearing him out in clumps of sally bushes or in tall meadow grass.
Kitty told me how her parents would never let her travel to Dublin to see Matthias before he sailed to India. The way I justified my involvement was that I believe some parents can be so obsessed with the fear of their unmarried daughter getting in the family way that they can’t see with an outsider’s clarity that their daughter may be more mature than they think. That’s not to say that the world is not fairly well populated with foolish virgins, or that most men at a certain point of excitement will tell any lie in order to do what nature encourages them to do. There’s a line in a song that I thoroughly agree with: “Every man’s a liar and every girl’s a fool.” How many girls in the world have believed the lie launched off a raging male organ? You’re the most beautiful girl in the world. I think of you all the time. I love you. I’ll marry you. If you don’t let me, I’ll get a disease. I’ll take you away with me. I’ll love you forever and ever. When it comes to the urgency of sex, men can be like stallions, stallions that have been brought to such a level of excitement they would mount a blackthorn bush to get out of themselves what it is that’s bothering them.
After three months working at Enderly, I knew Kitty was a mature, responsible girl. Although she allowed the new gardener and the farm men to flirt with her, they knew there was a line they should not cross. She was as hot-blooded as any girl her age, and more than likely, she’d already had Matthias’s hands on her, had her hands on him too. But I believed that was as far as she would allow Matthias to go.
Kitty’s parents would be unable to allow her t
o see Matthias before he sailed for India, even though they would want her to go. If they told her to go, and if by chance Kitty ended up with a bun in the oven, they would blame themselves, believe they had built the bed for the performance of the deed.
Even though I trusted Kitty’s good judgment, I did take into account the lack of long grass and sally bushes in Dublin before I said to her, “Write to Con. Tell him to ask your parents to let you go to Dublin to say goodbye. That way, they will be able to tell you to go to Dublin even though they know it’s Matthias you’re in love with.”
Oh, the blushes of her. She turned away quickly so I wouldn’t see them.
I wonder, was our own Sarah showing the same symptoms when she came home for school holidays, showing them every bit as much as Kitty, only I didn’t notice—that mother-daughter thing. I wonder, was she ever as fiercely in love, in heat, with a young man as Kitty was with Matthias? And could the young man have been named Con? Sometimes parents can’t see what’s going on under their noses. Sarah was always a little girl to me until that day of Cousin Andrew’s wedding.
Matthias Wrenn
The smell of liver and onions frying that first night had the water slushing off our teeth before we got near the mess hall. That smell changed everything. The lads began to smile and nudge each other and wink.
Until the onion and liver smell, we had all been quiet, all sort of frightened, all a bit shy. Con and myself had stayed close together all day, talking low to keep the others from knowing we were a couple of country lads who knew nothing about anything, who’d never been so far away from home, who’d never been on a train until that very day, who’d come all the way from Marbra to Dublin, and through the windows had seen the Curragh with sheep that looked like clumps of white wool on black sticks. We were still dressed in Miss Bowe’s clothes and the boots we wore from home. Most of the lads’ boots were shining, but a few still had daubs of dry cow dung attached to the sides and heels.