by Tom Phelan
I sat there in the pony’s cart looking after him, shaking from the fright, and I said to myself, I’m not going to catch up with him again; I’m going to wait here till he gets so far ahead I won’t catch him till he’s in Ballyrannel. Without me telling her to, the pony pulled over to the side of the road to graze, and the mare behind jerked on the reins till I let her graze too.
We were on our way home from the stallion in Duff’s yard in Marbra, the mare behind the cart as calm as any mare can be after getting herself well and truly poked, and me a shilling the poorer after paying Pat Cullen for the use of his stallion’s balls and mickey.
While the two animals grazed, I watched Matthias disappearing around the bend at Cork Corcoran’s house, and at the same time I fretted that there was great news to tell and it wouldn’t be me who got to tell it. He got smaller and smaller and then I heard the rhyme in my head. I wondered if it had been there all the time only I hadn’t noticed it.
My side, my side.
It kept going around and I couldn’t shake it out of my brain.
My side, my side. Come to my side, where the peasonlee is yellow. Where the peasonlee is brighter. Come to my side, my side, where the plover is golden and linnets fill the sky with green. What the hell is peasonlee?
I waited another ten minutes after he disappeared, thinking I’d arrive in the town just in time to see all the excitement. But I waited too long, and when I did catch up, he was at the far end of the town, standing on the coping stones at the Harbour with a small crowd around him talking and children touching him.
I stopped the pony and stood up in the cart to see over the people.
Matthias’s cap was on the back of his head, the angle a man shifts to when he’s faced with a question he can’t answer. Even though they were talking to him and touching him, it didn’t look like Matt was hearing them or feeling them. He was looking around, like he was looking for something or someone. You could say he was glassy-eyed like a dead man, just like he was out there on the Bog Road when he walked through me and the cart.
My side, my side, the daisies dance on my side. Dancing in the grass on my side, my side. The green lapwing, black and white grazes in the yellow daisies on my side. My side. The lapwing’s horn is in the dandelions on my side. My side. The bloody song just wouldn’t go away. And as the words went around like a spinning top in my head, didn’t Herby Kelly come along on his bike and pull up at the side of my cart, kept his feet on the pedals, and put his hand on the wingboard for balance.
“What’s going on, Jer?” he asked. Runty Herby was the nosiest man in Ballyrannel, and thicker than a double ditch.
“Matthias Wrenn just came home from the War,” I said.
“He didn’t!” Herby said. Then after a few seconds, “Pity he fought for Dinglish.”
I didn’t say anything, because Herby had plunged into dangerous territory. Herby would run bare-balled into a growth of nettles and dead briars if he thought someone would look at him. As sure as shite, Herby knew less about politics than I did, and he was only saying what he’d heard some scuttered Fenian saying in a public house, believed by saying it himself he was being a patriotic Irishman.
“Took the king’s shilling,” Herby said, and he spat out over the front wheel of his bike, but he couldn’t even do that right. The spit got caught on the handlebar and stretched its way down to the ground like a string of afterbirth hanging out of a cow after calving. Herby didn’t notice.
That’s when I saw Kitty Hatchel running like a hare, coming up along the Canal bank in strides that only her long legs could take, her hair and her dress looking like she was out in a storm and facing into a fierce wind. The dress was the yellow of a primrose with spots of red the size of a crow’s eggs.
Kitty Hatchel
The heart in my chest jumped when I heard Sonny Mack shouting in his thin voice from the Bridge.
“Kee-teee. Kee-teee. Kee-teee.”
It was a Saturday afternoon. I was just after dipping the scrubbing brush into the basin to start on the last chair outside the back door. There were soap bubbles on my knuckles and fingers.
“Kee-teee. Kee-teee. Kee-teee.”
Even though I knew for a certainty it was Sonny, even though I knew for a certainty why he was calling me, I still ran to the corner of the house and looked. And Sonny was there, exactly where I knew he’d be, standing on the parapet in the centre of the Bridge, his two hands cupping his mouth, his head bent back and he throwing out my name with all his might.
“Kee-teee. Kee-teee. Kee-teee.”
Sonny on the Bridge was a Russian wolf howling at the moon, its pewter hide inlaid with a streak of moonbeam from nose-tip to tail-tip; he was a caribou of pure silver with its mouth open at the end of its taut-stretched neck, its tilted antlers touching the strong shoulders behind, and it baying at the world from a high crag; he was a calling child carved from shining marble, the sun sparkling off the polished stone like light coming out of God’s hands when he created the world on the green cover of the catechism.
I thought I’d have a heart attack.
The instant Sonny saw me seeing him, saw me jumping up and down like a mad frog with its front legs over its head, he shouted, “He’s this side of Cork Corcoran’s.” I waved, and he waved and stepped off the parapet, disappeared, and I knew Sonny was already on his way, running barefooted, betattered and bespattered back along the Towpath to the Harbour so he could tell everyone in school he was there when Matthias Wrenn came back to Ballyrannel after walking home from the War, that he’d been on the lookout for a month and that Kitty Hatchel had paid him tuppence with the promise of another tuppence if he got word to her before Matthias reached the Harbour.
Fourpence, lads. Fourpence.
And I came back to myself and found myself standing there, my finger in my mouth and Mammy at the kitchen door asking, “Was there someone?”
“Mam, he’s home! Matthias. Oh, Mam.” And I burst out crying and fell down on my knees beside the rosebush and put my hands to my face and bawled as if I’d been told that Matthias had been killed in France, sobbed like I did when the army letter came about Con. I bent down until the top of my forehead was on the ground and my hair got caught in the rosebush, but I didn’t know that till Mammy started lifting me to my feet, and she had to run into the kitchen to get the scissors to cut the strands in the thorns. She brushed the flower-bed soil off my forehead, told me to wash my face before I put on the dress that Missus Hodgkins gave me so I’d look nice if Matthias came home on a Saturday afternoon or on a Sunday and I wouldn’t be able to use the dress she had hanging for me in Enderly if he came home during the week while I was working there.
I fled in through the kitchen and into the room, and ripped off my old work apron. I was pulling on Sarah Hodgkins’s dress, the colour of beastings with drops of blood in it, when I realized Mam had followed, that she was wringing her hands and crying and I knew she was crying for Matthias being home—and for Con not being home. “Oh, Mam,” I squeaked out, and I put my arms around her and the two of us sobbed and sobbed. And we kept sobbing even when we heard Daddy shouting from the yard, “Did you hear? Did you hear?” And when we heard his boots in the kitchen, Mam pushed me away and said, “Kitty, you have to wipe your face before you let Matthias see you, before you let Dad see you.”
“Did you hear?” Daddy called from the doorway.
I dipped into my washbasin and scooped cupped hands of water onto my face. Mam was holding the flour-sack towel for me, she after wiping her own face in it before Daddy saw her.
“It looks like you heard,” Daddy said.
Mam waited until she had cleared the sticky strings of crying out of her throat before she spoke. “Run your fingers through your hair,” she said to me, and to Daddy she said, “Get out of the door, James, or she’ll knock you down.”
But I didn’t run past Daddy because I had to bring him into my happiness. I put my arms around his neck, my head on his chest. “I’m terrible
glad, Kit,” he said, and he stroked my hair. But then he couldn’t help himself. “Poor Con!” he blurted out in a shower of tears, and I felt the pain in his heart. Then he whispered, “Poor Con, poor Con. Run, Kit. Run, Kit. We’ll be all right. Run,” he said, and he pushed me away, turned me toward the kitchen door.
And I ran and ran and ran, but Con’s tears kept up with me and Daddy’s and Mammy’s tears kept up with me, and I knew they were holding each other in a whirlpool of sadness and gladness for Con and Matthias. With my face full forward I ran along the Canal bank, and I heard the keening sounds of Mam-dog running to her hungry pups; heard the sounds of a bewildered sow looking for the place where her piglets squeal in fear of a knife; I heard the fierce clucking of a hen when she sees a remembered shadow in the sky and her chicks are scattered all over. And all those sounds of fretful Mamness were keening out through my own tight lips.
I ran onto the coping stones at the Harbour still keening the sounds of an anxious animal, searching for a glimpse of the family member it believed had been lost forever.
A gap opened in the circle of people surrounding Matthias, and there he was in his cloth cap, the peak broken in the middle and it pointing to the sky like the beak of a bittern. And in my forward lunge I was stunned by the sight of him so skeletal, head all skull, unfocused eyes deep in sockets. But he was Matthias, home, with folded jacket over his left shoulder and canvas bag hanging out of his right hand. His collarless shirt was unbuttoned. I recovered from the stumble and flew off the ground, attached myself to him with such force that someone stepped forward and kept him from falling backward and everyone cheered. But in that split second between jumping and landing, I had been stricken in the heart every bit as much as if I’d run at full gallop onto the blunt, wooden handle of a plough in the dark. I knew before my arms were around his neck that this was not my Matthias who’d gone away to India.
This Matthias didn’t drop his short coat and bag and squeeze me. He didn’t twirl me around in a dance of mad gladness. He didn’t shout and cry and bite my ears and devour my lips and run his fingers through my hair and feel the shape of my skull. He didn’t shout out. He didn’t say anything. And I knew that this absence of greeting was part of what I had not seen in his eyes. And I was bewildered. And then I was disappointed, terribly wounded. A storm of feelings swept through me, and I thought I was going to lose control, become a blabbering idiot in front of this audience. All the nighttime terrors that I’d buried, and all the fears and hopes that I’d pushed behind a dam in my head, and all the imaginings of the last four years came washing over me like a brown flood roaring down the narrow Owenass River, washing everything before it after a week’s rain in the peaty mountains. And through the roar of the flood I heard for the first time the words Missus Hodgkins had said to me a hundred times: “You must prepare yourself, Kitty. There’s more ways of getting killed in a war than by bullets.”
Kitty Hatchel
On the coping stones at the Harbour the people of Ballyrannel saw the enthusiastic girl launching herself onto her soldier home from the War, and they were unaware of what the girl had not seen in her soldier’s eyes. And it suddenly became very important to me that the people of Ballyrannel not know how cruelly disappointed I was, but I did not think I had the strength to behave so opposite to what was going on in my insides.
But as I released my arms from Matt’s neck and slid down to the ground, I remembered how I had made myself walk around the damaged wall at the top of Knockmullen Castle, terrified, but wanting to show Con and Matthias that a girl could do it. By the time my feet were back on the ground, I had steeled myself against the staring faces, the pitying faces and the satisfied faces, and I performed for all of them.
Instead of collapsing in a puddle of pain and tears and confusion on this public stage, I took Matt’s hand and caressed his cheek like I’d caress the cheek of a frightened child. Matt’s lips were just barely open, his eyes were almost focused on me, and I could almost see the curtain of gossamer hanging before his eyes.
“Come on, Matt,” I said. I squeezed his fingers, and he obediently followed. Sonny Mack ran into the circle, picked up Matt’s cap, and handed it to me. I pressed it to my nose and smelled the sweat, and hid my face in a moment of weakness. But I whipped the cap away and, bare-faced, I led Matt toward the Canal bank, people calling out to him to welcome him home, telling him it was good to see him and wishing him well. I made my face smile “thanks” to them for him. And a man was standing up in his pony cart looking over the heads of the people at what was going on—he was one of the Mad Meaneys from out on the Emo Road—and your man, Herby Kelly, was sitting on his bike keeping himself balanced by holding on to the wingboard of Meaney’s cart. As we walked past the cart, Herby shouted to Matthias, “You fought on the wrong side, ya hure!”
No matter how stupid the remark and no matter how stupid the man who made it, it contained enough begrudgery to crack the dam inside me, and the mixture of anxieties and disappointments was unleashed from behind the collapsing wall. I raged at the world, raged like a winter storm in the tossing, screaming, and bare branches of the elm tree near the still-blackened ruins of Matt’s old house.
Spurred claws leading the way like the feet of an attacking game cock, I lit onto Herby and dragged four fingers down each side of his face. And the terrible expectation and excitement that had turned so sour so suddenly gave me such detestation for the old fool that I kept my nails buried deeply in Herby’s skin all the way down to his chin. My face, inches away from his, screamed screams that were made by jagged, unravelled nerves that had been compressed for years, and when I’d finished scraubing and screaming, I jerked his hand off the wingboard of the cart and made him fall over while still sitting up straight on his bike, the four streaks of blood on each side of his face overflowing into each other.
I turned back to Matt and took his hand, and I pulled him towards the bank on our side of the Canal. Our side. Our goddamn side. Goddamn you, Herby Kelly. Goddamn you, Mister Kaiser Bill. Goddamn you, King George.
Our Goddamn side. Our side.
Con’s and my side when we were small, before the fire in Matt’s house.
His side. Matt’s side.
My side, my side where the mayweed’s sweeter, the daisies big as eggcups.
My side. My side. A girl on my side has tiny feet and wheenshie toes. My side, my side where Con and Kitty live in a castle small, with a Daddy tall, on my side, my side.
Crucified Christ!
That’s what was in my head as we went along the bank without speaking, arm in arm. I couldn’t think of one word to say to him. After all the weeks and months and years, here he was home and I had my arm in his, and I could not think of one word to say to him. Maybe I was afraid of what he would say back to me. Maybe he would even ask my name. Oh sweet Jesus! If that happened! If that happened I don’t know…
Matthias stopped walking and I took in a sharp breath of expectation. But he hadn’t stopped to talk to me, nor even to look at me. He stared into the water at a small shoal of silvery-red roach suspended above the green-green weeds, their gill-wings spinning silently, keeping them steady in their places.
I looked at Matthias looking, examined his face and saw many small white scars on his cheek and skin. Except for his eyebrows, his hair was grey. And I saw too that there was no gossamer veil obstructing his eyes, that Matt’s eyes were simply old before their time.
Four years had passed since I’d promised to marry him that day he left for India in 1914, but Matthias had lived several lives since he’d sailed from the North Wall with Con beside him waving. He was like Oisín who went to Tír na nÓg where everyone stayed young forever. But everything was backward for Matt. He was the one who had grown old, while it was the people he’d left behind who’d remained young. Matthias had aged decades while we had aged years.
It was only now that I knew the circle of welcoming and smiling faces at the Harbour had been overwhelming for him who had live
d so long in the company of filthy, stinking, comforting men who had sunk within skin-depth of savagery. The greenness and the levelness and tidiness of the fields must have been a shock for him, who had lived four years in destroyed and poisoned landscapes without trees or grass; the silence of the countryside must have been deafening to him after years of guns and rifles and screaming horses and pain-roaring men; the body of an excited and happy woman clinging to him was probably too much for him, who had just stepped out of sewer trenches where lice had clung to every bit of flesh and rats gnawed at sleeping fingers in the dark.
As I looked at him, I comforted myself with the thought that time was all that Matthias needed to bring his spinning world to a stop, that the passing of our countryside time would bring Matt back to the people and the place he had left a million years ago, that he would finally fit back into the notch the fates had wrenched him from all those years ago. His pre-War memory would have to be resurrected, and his War memory would have to fade away into dimness. When Oisín had begged to visit the land of his own people, he was warned not to get off his horse, not to touch the ground, else he would lose his youthfulness. But with Matt, it was going to be the opposite; he would have to fall back into the land of his own people, he would have to immerse himself, dive head first back into the people he had left, so he could regain his own self. I knew a long time would have to pass before the scales would begin to fall from his eyes.
And my hopes were confirmed when Matthias said, “Roach.” His voice was rusty, sounded like the axle of the bog-barrow on its first day out of storage before Daddy rubbed on a swipe of goose grease with his finger.
“I never thought I’d see…Nor the green weeds. Roach and perch.” He stared down at the shoal of roach like a man feeding something inside himself, like a man rebuilding his memory, I wanted to believe. “We fished in the Somme,” he said, as if talking to someone else.