by Anne Griffin
Months later, I was walking to the back paddock along by the house when I heard Dollard senior’s shouts again. My heart sank, I can tell you. I walked on as quietly and quickly as possible. This time Thomas had his back to the opened window of an upstairs room. His hands were behind him, folded into fists. As I passed right under him, one of his hands opened, releasing something that landed right in front of me.
‘But Father, I didn’t take it. I didn’t!’ I heard him whine.
Without thinking, I reached down and grabbed the shiny thing from among the stones, putting it in my pocket and continuing on my way, smooth as you like. If I’d known back then how that decision of mine ruined the lives inside that house for generations to come, not least Thomas’s, I wonder would I have walked on, stepping over its pull, its power. But all I knew then was revenge. If this small theft, I reasoned, of whatever it was I held in my pocket could inflict even a small moment of the pain Thomas had meted on me with his beatings and his disgust, then it was most definitely my due.
Despite the growing distance, I could still hear the yells and panicked replies of Thomas as something or someone hit the floor. I didn’t look back. When I was safely clear, I ducked in behind a tree. And there, taking it out of my pocket, I saw it for the first time – a gold coin, with the face of a man I didn’t recognise and writing I didn’t even try to understand. Heavy and solid, quite impressive. I turned it over for as long as I dared. Throwing it up and down once or twice, before pocketing it again and smiling to myself.
Five hours later when I walked back the way along the same path, Pat joined me.
‘Would you look at that bleeding eejit,’ he said. We could see Thomas scrambling about under the same window from earlier. ‘He’s lost some coin or other of the father’s. The old man’s going mad, says he’ll disinherit him if he doesn’t give it back. Reckons he robbed it on purpose.’
Thomas caught my eye as we passed. I looked away like I always did despite feeling an unfamiliar power. When out of sight, I smiled to myself as I caressed the metal lying snug and happy in my pocket with my thumb.
Oh, they looked under every bush and plant and in every pocket and bag, alright. That evening we were all lined up before we left for the day. But I was no fool. I’d it hidden in the nook of a tree that lay near our boundary wall. Even still, I was terrified when Berk approached me in the queue. He stood staring at my scar. My confession bubbled up behind my lips as his hands delved in my pockets and ran over my body. I held firm though, never gave away a thing. Disappointed, he passed on to Mickie Dwyer.
The next day mother and most of the kitchen staff were ordered to strip Thomas’s room and the room in which the argument had happened; the labourers were ordered to search the yard below. The world stopped while we hunted on hands and knees over stones and clay and dirt and grass for something they would never find. Thomas ran between both groups.
‘Have you not found it yet?’ he moaned, standing above me, close to tears, pulling at his hair.
‘What did it look like, sir?’ I sat back on my hunkers and looked up at him.
‘Gold, you dimwit, gold. Berk, what kind of imbeciles do you have working for you?’
He charged after the farm manager like he expected an answer to his question. I found a thruppence and ran up to him.
‘Sir. Sir. I found it,’ I said, with not one shred of guilt about me.
The relief on his face was something to behold. But it was the misery that returned, as he looked at my copper offering, that was worth the wallop across the head from Berk. He ran from me, from Berk, off into the house.
Although we were questioned continuously over the coming days – the labourers by Berk and the housemaids by Dollard senior himself – it seemed without conviction. Everyone knew Dollard believed Thomas guilty. He’d washed his hands of him it seems. Sent him away within days and true to his word, disinherited him. At the time it struck me as odd that it was never reported to the police. As it turned out, they couldn’t have, given how Dollard had come by it. But I wasn’t to know that back then.
For weeks following, I was petrified they’d arrive at our door and ransack the place. But Tony had taken care of it for me, as he’d taken care of so many of my worries before. Assured me, they’d never find it under his pillow:
‘Sure, who’ll come near me when they find out I’ve got TB?’
Tony’d got consumption earlier that year. I hadn’t a clue that cough of his was anything other than the usual hallmarks of winter: chills and runny noses and sore throats waylaying us like they always did. It went on for weeks, though. Not shifting, not stirring. Barked through the day and into the night. Sometimes it woke me but mostly he suffered on his own as I turned to the wall and dreamed my dreams. I was always a good sleeper back then. Dead to the world, oblivious to all about me until my body decided it was time to wake. I wonder now if I’d been a lighter sleeper, might I have caught Sadie, two years ago just before her last breath was taken, and pulled her back to me.
‘Mam, is there nothing we can do about Tony’s cough?’ May complained one day. ‘It’s keeping me awake. I’m making a hames of this bread, I’m that tired.’
But there had been no need to alert my mother to Tony’s debility. I’d seen her watching him for days: as he crossed the yard slower than usual and coughed at the dinner table and slept in the armchair after the tea.
‘You’ll sleep in our room tonight, Tony,’ she told him, the day he had lifted his hand to his chest.
‘Mam, I’m grand, sure that honey drink you made me is working mighty.’
‘No matter. You’ll be in the upper room. We’ll take yours. Maurice, you can take the chairs in the kitchen.’
What I didn’t know until after he died was that my mother had watched her younger brother Jimmy die of the same thing. People didn’t talk much of things like that in those days. Death and illness were sacred and silent, not to be stoked and stirred. But it seems for years she’d been on alert, watching us with our coughs and colds, ready to pounce. Ready to begin battle with the demon that had taken her favourite brother. With Tony, her time had finally come.
She washed the sheets and eiderdown from our bed that day. She and my father slept fully clothed under a blanket until they finally dried. Meanwhile I set up my chairs, one facing the other, in the kitchen. A blanket and my mother’s winter coat around me. It was a while before I fell asleep that first night. I listened to Tony’s cough, his constant call, as I tried to figure out what this change in sleeping arrangements meant.
The next day was a Sunday as I recall, and my father left in the trap when it was still dark and returned two hours later with Doctor Roche. I watched from the shed, as they went inside. I ran to Tony’s window, to try to hear his fate. Jenny and May came out soon after. The three evictees stood in the blowing rain, waiting.
‘It’s got to be,’ Jenny whispered to May, as we huddled under the dripping thatch, leaning into the frame of the window as far as we could.
‘Don’t say that, Jenny. Don’t be wishing it on him.’
‘I’m not doing that, for heaven’s sake. I’m just saying, that’s what young Wall died of and Kitty told me that’s how it had started.’
‘Quiet, Jenny, Tony might hear.’
Later, we went to Mass in Duncashel, not the usual local church, in order to drop the doctor home. I felt sorry for the horse having to cart the lot of us that distance. Tony didn’t come. We journeyed in silence. In the pew, I watched my parents pray in concentration. My mother’s eyes shut tight, her wrinkles bunched up with the effort, as her busy lips tipped her folded hands.
After we got home, silence reigned. Jenny, May and me wandered about, waiting to be let in on the mystery. We never went near the shut door of the upper room where Tony slept. We moved between our bedroom and the kitchen, eventually deciding on the most sedate game of twenty-five I ever remember. After a while the girls rose to help Mother with the dinner while my father never lifted his head abov
e his Sunday paper.
‘Tony has consumption,’ he said later, as we stared at our dinner plates. ‘But you’ll not say a word to anyone. Do you hear? As far as the world is concerned that boy has broken his leg from a fall in the field. Do you understand me now?’
The three siblings stole a glance at each other, then nodded our collusion.
‘The doctor won’t say a word to anyone. He wants us to move Tony to the upper shed. He’s afraid of it infecting the lot of us. But we’ll tend him here. He’ll not be put out…’ My father broke off his words and balled up his fists and pushed them deep into his pockets. ‘You girls will look after Tony in the mornings when Mam is working,’ he continued after a bit, ‘the doctor has told her what to do. Rest is the best cure, he says. We’ll not lose him. We’ll not lose that boy.’
The word went out Tony had broken his leg. If people knew the truth, we’d have been done for. TB was as contagious as gossip. The Dollards would have let us go there and then. As it turned out, none of us picked it up, although I do believe it lingered with my mother and that’s what hurried on her own death, years later. It was hard, keeping it a secret. People called. Well-wishers. Not often, mind, but the odd time, a neighbour would drop by. Jenny or May would run to meet them in the yard and make up all sorts before they got close to the house:
‘He’s not in great shape today. Sorry now, and you after coming over.’
‘He’s in a lot of pain. I’ll let him know you called. It’ll do him the world of good to know you’re thinking of him.’
‘He’s up there now trying to do those exercises the doctor gave him, but he’s frustrated; you know how it is.’
I’m sure after a while people began to suspect. But no one ever asked us.
The only time Tony was left on his own was on a Sunday when the rest of us headed off to Mass. Despite being away from him for those couple of hours, that time was still all about him. I did some pleading for his salvation myself as I held the host in my mouth. To my left and right, I knew the others were doing the same.
The doctor told us to feed him ‘nutritious’ food and give him stout every day, for the iron. Tony was thrilled at the prospect. But of course, it all cost money. Nutrition back then meant red meat and vegetables. We had the carrots, cabbage and potatoes growing out in the garden. Often that’s all we had. White meat was not so much of a problem, what with the few chickens we had running ’round the yard. When one got too old to lay, well, then she ended up on our plates. The red stuff was more difficult. Every now and again though, a bit would be found from somewhere. We didn’t begrudge him an ounce, that’s not to say we didn’t lick our lips as it roasted in the range. When I went up to him one evening, he told me to shut the door, all conspiratorial like.
‘Here, Big Man, have this,’ he said, as soon as the latch had lowered. There in his fist, in his handkerchief, he held a chunk of beef.
He must have had it there since dinnertime.
‘Ah Tony, I can’t be taking your food.’
‘Jesus man, they were stuffing it into me. The size of it. It was like there was a whole cow sitting on the plate. Take it. I kept it for you.’
‘They’ll kill me.’
‘I reckon they take little bites themselves. I could’ve sworn there was a hole in that piece when Jenny brought it in,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘For God’s sake man, sure you’re holding down two jobs now having to work with the auld lad when you get home from that place.’
All the doctors in Ireland would’ve been having heart attacks watching me take that from his spotted handkerchief, but I tell you now that morsel tasted like heaven. As cold and squashed as it was, it was pure tasty.
It felt wrong after all those days and years of Tony walking beside me to school, encouraging and supporting me, that I had to leave him in the bed every morning to go to the Dollards. I always left it till the last minute, hanging around chatting and messing with him when he was up to it, before my mother dragged me out the door. I went with a heavy heart, my boots feeling like they were filled with the weightiest of stones, slowing my path away from him. If I’d had my choice it would’ve been me waiting on him, bringing him his dinner, standing over him with a bowl when he was coughing his insides up, helping him up from the bed and getting him settled on the chamber pot so he could do his morning duty. The rest of the world could have mocked and jeered me all they liked but I would’ve done that and more for him if I’d been let.
I refused to allow the women to tend him all the time. I’d run all the way home from the job to grab his tea tray and bring it up before any of them had the chance. Gone, before Mam, long home from work by that stage, had time to protest. Although, I knew she approved as I caught her grin before I scarpered. Outside Tony’s door, I’d hold the tray with one hand under it and knock with the other.
‘Enter,’ he’d call, like he was lord of the manor. ’Course, he knew it was me, ’cause I’d have given him my trademark rap on the bedroom window, five beats, as I flew in home earlier.
‘Is that lazy fecker not up yet?’ I’d say in the hallway as I hung up my cap, loud enough so he could hear.
I’d smile at his reply and lift the latch. But God forgive me, every time I saw his hollowed-out face, it was a shock. It was always, always, like I was seeing it for the first time. The laughter gone out of me, only the remains of an embarrassed smile that admitted how bad I was at keeping up the pretence that there was nothing wrong with the brother I adored and that he wasn’t just one more cough away from leaving us.
‘Big Man,’ he’d say or splurt.
‘Still codding us that you’re sick, I see.’
I’d take my seat beside him on my mother’s chair, the one her mother had bought her when she married. If Tony were strong enough, I’d put the tray on his lap and he’d feed himself. But as time went on he wasn’t able to even pull himself up, and so I’d break up the bits of bread and feed it to him as he lay propped up slightly by a pillow. If he were in the eating humour, which wasn’t often, I’d put the bread anywhere but near his mouth. It made us laugh. It wasn’t that funny, I suppose, when I think of it now, but it was all we had.
Often, he was too weak to join in with my nightly updates on how my day had gone. I got used to the sound of my own voice, telling him what was going on over the boundary wall.
‘What I find mad, Tony, is that our own fields can’t be that different from theirs. But you should see the size of the stones I was pulling from those acres over there today. Boulders they were. Boulders. My back is near broken from them.’
Mostly he lay there listening. Not always able to reply.
‘Dollard senior’s getting worse, if that’s possible. Since he sent Thomas packing he’s like a briar. Apparently, the mother and daughter are no better. The cook says none of them are speaking now. I don’t know, a disinheritance over one bloody coin!’
I felt no guilt that it was me and the coin lying under my brother’s head that had caused Thomas’s banishment. Tony was the only one I ever told about the extent of what Thomas had done to me. The beatings. The constant fear of them. I wore the scar for all to see but no one, not my mother or father or sisters, had ever asked how I was about it all. And do you know, neither would I have wanted them to, I would have felt like a right eejit telling them how much it still stung. But sometimes as Tony lay sleeping, his face wincing with pain, I went over it.
‘Maurice,’ he said once, spluttering away, giving me a fright ’cause I thought he was asleep, ‘someday, achmm, achmm … someday that fecker’ll get his comeuppance.’
‘Take it easy, Tony. Here, take the water. Mam won’t like me getting you riled up like that. You weren’t supposed to hear all that anyway.’
He took the water and gripped my hand that held the cup. He held my eyes, his breath catching.
‘Maurice … it’ll come right, wait and see.’
When Tony slept with me beside him in the chair, his breath struggled to take in what it needed, g
rowing more laboured with each day that passed. I’d sit watching the rise and fall of his sunken chest, willing it to cop on and right itself. The amount of prayers I said sitting in that chair, would have made my mother proud; decades upon decades of the rosary, my eyes squinting shut, asking God to get on with working a miracle. I’d stay like that ’til I fell asleep too and my father came to tap me on the shoulder and send me off down to the kitchen to get some tea myself before going out to do the jobs he couldn’t do alone during the day. I’d rise and lay a hand on Tony’s shoulder then, my parting words always the same.
‘You and me, against the world, what? You and me.’
Every Sunday evening without fail, we crowded into his bedroom. The war of course had been raging away over beyond for years. And in 1946 the papers were all about the aftermath and how the world would change, and how the horrors in Germany would never happen again. The recriminations and rebuilding projects in Europe were in full swing and my father read it all to us from the paper he had bought after Sunday Mass. Squashed into Tony’s room, with borrowed chairs from the kitchen, we listened to my father’s voice read out stories of the world beyond us and beyond the secret of Tony’s illness. After, we gave our own opinions and summations, disagreeing with the other or agreeing that de Valera had played the right card. Tony joined in when he could. But often I think he wanted to simply drift off to the sounds of our voices.
We knew we were losing him. It was like he was sinking into the bed, he had become so thin. Disappearing before our eyes. There was nothing to be done by us or the doctor. His life ebbed away from our laughter and our care. I continued to sit with him, despite the awfulness and despite my tears that sometimes fell no matter how hard I tried to stop them.
‘Ah Maurice, ya big girl,’ he said, breathlessly one evening having woken to find me sitting beside him all red eyed. He nearly choked on the weak chuckle he managed. I laughed, a big hearty laugh. We were gone again then, laughing away the tragedy of it all.
I never saw my mother look so thin as in those last few weeks before he died. Up at the crack of dawn, even though she might have sat by Tony’s side the whole night, catching snatches of sleep through his distress. We’d be gone over the fields then to earn the money to buy the rich food to save him. The only morning she asked to be excused was the day he died.