One afternoon, while we are topping and tailing gooseberries for jam, Kinsella comes in from the yard and washes and dries his hands and looks at me in a way he has never looked before.
"I think it's past time we got you togged out, girl."
I am wearing a pair of navy-blue trousers and a blue shirt that the woman pulled out of the chest of drawers.
"What's wrong with her?" the woman says.
"Tomorrow's Sunday, and she'll need something more than that for mass," he says. "I'll not have her going as she went last week."
"Sure, isn't she clean and tidy?"
"You know what I'm talking about, Edna." He sighs. "Why don't you go up and change and I'll run us into Gorey."
The woman keeps on picking the gooseberries from the colander, stretching her hand out, but a little more slowly each time, for the next one. At one point I think she will stop, but she keeps on until she is finished and then she gets up and places the colander on the sink and lets out a sound I've never heard anyone make, and slowly goes upstairs.
Kinsella looks at me and smiles a hard kind of a smile. His eyes are not quite still in his head. It's as though there is a big piece of trouble stretching itself out in the back of his mind. He toes the leg of a chair and looks over at me. "You should wash your hands and face before you go to town," he says. "Didn't your father even bother to teach you that much?"
I freeze in the chair, waiting for something much worse to happen, but Kinsella just stands there, locked in the wash of his own speech. As soon as he turns, I race for the stairs, but when I reach the bathroom the door won't open.
"It's all right," the woman says after a while from inside, and then, shortly afterward, opens it. "Sorry for keeping you." She has been crying, but she isn't ashamed. "It'll be nice for you to have some clothes of your own," she says then, wiping her eyes. "And Gorey is a nice town. I don't know why I didn't think of taking you there before now."
Town is a crowded place with a wide main street. Outside the shops, many different things are hanging in the sun. There are plastic nets full of beach balls, blow-up toys, and beds that float. A see-through dolphin looks as though he is shivering in a cold breeze. There are plastic spades and matching buckets, molds for sandcastles, grown men digging ice cream out of tubs with little plastic spoons, a van with a man calling, "Fresh fish!"
Kinsella reaches into his pocket and hands me something. "You'll get a choc ice out of that."
I open my hand and stare at the pound note.
"Couldn't she buy half a dozen choc ices out of that," the woman says.
"Ah, what is she for, only for spoiling?" Kinsella says.
"What do you say?" the woman says.
"Thanks," I say. "Thank you."
"Well, stretch it out and spend it well," Kinsella says, laughing.
The woman takes me to the draper's and picks out five cotton dresses and some pants and trousers and a few tops. We go behind a curtain so that I can try them on.
"Isn't she tall?" the assistant says.
"We're all tall," the woman says.
"She's the spitting image of her mammy. I can see it now," the assistant says, and then decides that the lilac dress is the best fit and the most flattering. Mrs. Kinsella agrees. She buys me a printed blouse too, with short sleeves, blue trousers, and a pair of black leather shoes with a little strap and a buckle, some pants, and white ankle socks. The assistant hands her the docket, and she takes out her purse and pays for it all.
"Well may you wear," the assistant says. "Isn't your mammy good to you?"
I don't know how to answer.
Out in the street, the sun feels strong again, blinding. We meet people the woman knows. Some of them stare at me and ask who I am. One has a new baby in a pushchair. The woman bends down and coos, and he slobbers a little and starts to cry.
"He's making strange," the mother says. "Pay no heed."
We meet a woman with eyes like picks, who asks whose child I am. When she is told, she says, "Ah, isn't she company for you all the same, God help you."
Mrs. Kinsella stiffens, then says, "You must excuse me but this man of mine is waiting, and you know what these men are like."
"Like fecking bulls, they are," the woman says. "Haven't an ounce of patience."
"God forgive me but if I ever run into that woman again it will be too soon," Mrs. Kinsella says, when we have rounded the corner.
Before we go back to the car she leaves me loose in a sweetshop. I take my time choosing what I want.
"You got a right load there," she says, when I come out.
Kinsella has parked in the shade and is sitting with the windows open, reading the newspaper. "Well?" he says. "Did ye get sorted?"
"Aye," she says.
"Grand," he says.
I give him the choc ice and her the Flake and lie on the back seat eating the wine gums, careful not to choke as we cross over bumps in the road. I listen to all the change rattling around in my pocket, the wind rushing through the car, and the little pieces of speech, scraps of gossip, being shared between them in the front.
When we turn into the yard, another car is parked outside the door. A woman is on the front step, pacing, with her arms crossed.
"Isn't that Harry Redmond's girl?"
"I don't like the look of this," Kinsella says.
"Oh, John," she says, rushing over. "I'm sorry to trouble you but didn't our Michael pass away and there's not a soul at home. They're all out on the combines and won't be back till God knows what hour, and I've no way of getting word to them. We're rightly stuck. Would you ever come down and give us a hand digging the grave?"
"I don't know that this'll be any place for you but I can't leave you here," the woman says, later the same day. "So get ready and we'll go, in the name of God."
I go upstairs and change into my new dress and my ankle socks and shoes.
"Don't you look nice," she says, when I come down. "John's not always easy but he's hardly ever wrong."
Walking down the road, we pass houses with their doors and windows wide open, long, flapping clotheslines, graveled entrances to other lanes. Outside a cottage, a black dog with curls all down his back comes out and barks at us, hotly, through the bars of a gate. At the first crossroads we meet a heifer, who panics and races past us, lost. All through the walk, the wind blows hard and soft and hard again, through the tall, flowering hedges, the high trees. In the fields, the combines are out cutting the wheat, the barley, and the oats, saving the corn, leaving behind long rows of straw. Farther along, we meet two bare-chested men, their eyes so white in faces that are tanned and dusty. The woman stops to greet them and tells them where we are going.
"Well, it must be a relief to the man, to be out of his misery."
"Sure, didn't he reach his three score and ten?" the other says. "What more can any of us hope for?"
We keep on walking, standing in tight to the hedges, the ditches, letting things pass.
"Have you been to a wake before?" the woman asks.
"I don't think so."
"Well, I might as well tell you. There will be a dead man in a coffin and lots of people and some of them might have a little too much taken."
"What will they be taking?"
"Drink," she says.
When we come to the house, several men are leaning against a low wall, smoking. There's a black ribbon on the door, but when we go in, the kitchen is bright and packed with people who are talking. The woman who asked Kinsella to dig the grave is there, making sandwiches. There are bottles of red and white lemonade and stout, and, in the middle of all this, a big wooden box with a dead old man lying inside it. His hands are joined, as though he had died praying, a string of rosary beads around his fingers. Some of the men are sitting around the coffin, using the part that's closed as a counter on which to rest their glasses. One of these is Kinsella.
"There she is," he says. "Long Legs. Come over here."
He pulls me onto his lap and gives me a sip fr
om his glass. "Do you like the taste of that?"
"No."
He laughs. "Good girl. Don't ever get a taste for it. If you start, you might never stop, and then you'd wind up like the rest of us."
He pours red lemonade into a cup for me. I sit on his lap, drinking it and eating queen cakes out of the biscuit tin and looking at the dead man, hoping that his eyes will open.
The people drift in and out, shaking hands, drinking and eating and looking at the dead man, saying what a lovely corpse he is, and doesn't he look happy now that his end has come, and who was it who laid him out? They talk of the forecast and the moisture content of corn, of milk quotas and the next general election. I feel myself getting heavy on Kinsella's lap. "Am I getting heavy?"
"Heavy?" he says. "You're like a feather, child. Stay where you are."
I put my head against him but I'm bored and wish there were things to do, other girls who would play.
"She's getting uneasy," I hear the woman say.
"What's ailing her?" another says.
"Ah, it's no place for the child, really," she says. "It's just I didn't like not to come, and I wouldn't leave her behind."
"Sure, I'll take her home with me, Edna. I'm going now. Can't you call in and collect her on your way?"
"Oh," she says. "I don't know should I."
"Mine'd be a bit of company for her. Can't they play away out the back? And that man there won't budge as long as he has her on his knee."
Mrs. Kinsella laughs. I have never really heard her laugh till now.
"Sure, maybe, if you don't mind, Mildred," she says. "What harm is in it? And we'll not be long after you."
"Not a bother," Mildred says.
When we are out on the road and the goodbyes are said, Mildred strides on into a pace I can just about keep, and as soon as she rounds the bend the questions start. Hardly is one answered before the next is fired: "Which room did they put you into? Did Kinsella give you money? How much? Does she drink at night? Does he? Are they playing cards up there much? Do ye say the rosary? Does she put butter or margarine in her pastry? Where does the old dog sleep? Is the freezer packed solid? Does she skimp on things or is she allowed to spend? Are the child's clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?"
I answer them all easily, until the last. "The child's clothes?"
"Aye," she says. "If you're sleeping in his room you must surely know. Did you not look?"
"Well, she had clothes I wore for all the time I was here, but we went to Gorey this morning and bought new things."
"This rig-out you're wearing now? God Almighty," she says. "Anybody would think you were going on for a hundred."
"I like it," I say. "They told me it was flattering."
"Flattering, is it? Well. Well," she says. "I suppose it is, after living in the dead's clothes all this time."
"What?"
"The Kinsellas' young lad, you dope. Did you not know?"
I don't know what to say.
"That must have been some stone they rolled back to find you. Sure, didn't he follow that auld hound of theirs into the slurry tank and drown? That's what they say happened anyhow," she says.
I keep on walking and try not to think about what she has said, even though I can think of little else. The time for the sun to go down is hours from now, but the day feels like it is ending. I look at the sky and see the sun, still high, and, far away, a round moon coming out.
"They say John got the gun and took the hound down the field but he hadn't the heart to shoot him, the softhearted fool."
We walk on between the bristling hedges, in which small things seem to rustle and move. Chamomile grows along these ditches, wood sage and mint, plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me. Farther along, the same heifer is still lost, in a different part of the road. Soon we come to the place where the black dog is barking through the gate. "Shut up and get in, you," she says to him.
It's a cottage she lives in, with uneven slabs of concrete outside the front door, overgrown shrubs and red-hot pokers growing tall. Here I must watch my head, my step. When we go in, the place is cluttered and an older woman is smoking at the cooker. There's a baby in a highchair. He lets out a cry when he sees the woman and drops a handful of marrowfat peas over the edge. "Look at you," she says. "The state of you."
I'm not sure if it's the woman or the child she is talking to. She takes off her cardigan and sits down and starts talking about the wake: who was there, the type of sandwiches that were made, the queen cakes, the corpse who was lying up crooked in the coffin and hadn't even been shaved properly, how they had plastic rosary beads for him, the poor fucker.
I don't know whether to sit or stand, to listen or leave, but just as I'm deciding what to do the dog barks and the gate opens and Kinsella comes in, stooping under the doorframe. "Good evening all," he says.
"Ah, John," the woman says. "You weren't long. We're only in the door. Aren't we only in the door, child?"
"Yes."
Kinsella hasn't taken his eyes off me. "Thanks, Mildred. It was good of you to take her home."
"It was nothing," the woman says. "She's a quiet young one, this."
"She says what she has to say, and no more. May there be many like her," he says. "Are you ready to come home, Petal?"
I follow him out to the car, where the woman is waiting.
"Were you all right in there?" she says.
I say I was.
"Did she ask you anything?"
"A few things, nothing much."
"What did she ask you?"
"She asked me if you used butter or margarine in your pastry."
"Did she ask you anything else?"
"She asked me was the freezer packed tight."
"There you are," Kinsella says.
"Did she tell you anything?" the woman asks.
I don't know what to say.
"What did she tell you?"
"She told me you had a little boy who followed the dog into the slurry tank and died, and that I wore his clothes to mass last Sunday."
When we get home, the hound comes out to the car to greet us, and I realize that I've not yet heard either one of them call him by his name. Kinsella sighs and goes off, stumbling a little, to milk. When he comes inside, he says he's not ready for bed. He puts what I realize is the boy's jacket on me.
"What are you doing now?" the woman says.
"I'm taking her as far as the strand."
"You'll be careful with that girl, John Kinsella," she says. "And don't you go without the lamp."
"What need is there for a lamp on a night like tonight?" he says, but he takes it anyhow, as it's handed to him.
There's a big moon shining on the yard, chalking our way onto the lane and along the road. Kinsella takes my hand in his. As he does, I realize that my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go, so I won't have to think about this. It's a hard feeling, but as we walk along, I settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be.
When we reach the crossroads, we turn right, down a steep hill. The wind is high and hoarse in the trees, tearing fretfully, making the dry boughs rise and swing. It's sweet to feel the open road falling away under us, knowing that we will, at its end, come to the sea. Kinsella says a few meaningless things along the way, then falls quiet, and time passes without seeming to pass, and then we are in a sandy, open space where people must park their cars. It is full of tire marks and potholes, a rubbish bin that seems not to have been emptied in a long time.
"We're almost there now, Petal."
He leads me up a hill, where tall rushes bend and shake. Then we are standing on the crest of a dark place where the land ends and there is a long strand and water, which I know is deep and stretches all the way to England. Far out, in the darkness, two bright lights are blinking.
Kinsella lets me go and I race down the dune to the place where the black sea hisses up into loud, frothy waves. I run tow
ard them as they back away, and run back, shrieking, when they crash in. Kinsella catches up and takes my shoes off, then his own. We walk along the edge of the sea as it claws at the sand under our bare feet. At one point, he holds me on his shoulders and we go in until the water is up to his knees. Then he walks me back to the tide line, where the dunes begin. Many things have washed up here: plastic bottles, sticks and floats, and, farther on, a stable door whose bolt is broken.
"Some man's horse is loose tonight," Kinsella says. "You know the fishermen sometimes find horses out at sea. A man I know towed a colt in once and the horse lay down for a long time and then got up. And he was perfect.
"Strange things happen," he says. "A strange thing happened to you tonight, but Edna meant no harm. It's too good, she is. She wants to believe in the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding out is to trust them, hoping she'll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is."
I don't know how to answer.
"You don't ever have to say anything," he says. "Always remember that. Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing."
He laughs then, a queer, sad laugh.
Everything about the night feels strange: to walk to a sea that's always been there, to see it and feel it and fear it in the half-dark, to listen to this man telling me things—about horses being towed in from the deep, about his wife trusting others so she'll learn whom not to trust—things that I don't fully understand, things that may not even be intended for me.
As we turn to head back along the beach, the moon disappears behind a cloud and we cannot see where we are going. At this point, Kinsella lets out a sigh, stops, and lights the lamp.
"Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same," he says. "Do you know what the women have a gift for?"
"What?"
The Best American Short Stories® 2011 Page 19