Foster

by Claire Keegan

  I go down steps until I reach the water. I breathe and hear the sound my breath makes over the still mouth of the well so I breathe harder for a while to feel these sounds I make, coming back. The woman stands behind, not seeming to mind each breath coming back, as though they are hers.

  ‘Taste it,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Use the dipper.’ She points.

  Hanging over us is a big ladle, a shadow cupped in the dusty steel. I reach up and take it from the nail. She holds the belt of my trousers so I won’t fall in.

  ‘It’s deep,’ she says. ‘Be careful.’

  The sun, at a slant now, throws a rippled version of how we look back at us. For a moment, I am afraid. I wait until I see myself not as I was when I arrived, looking like a tinker’s child, but as I am now, clean, in different clothes, with the woman behind me. I dip the ladle and bring it to my lips. This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone. I dip it again and lift it level with the sunlight. I drink six measures of water and wish, for now, that this place without shame or secrets could be my home. Then the woman pulls me back to where I am safe on the grass, and goes down alone. I hear the bucket floating on its side for a moment before it sinks and swallows, making a grateful sound, a glug, before it’s torn away and lifted.

  Walking back along the path and through the fields, holding her hand, I feel I have her balanced. Without me, I am certain she would tip over. I wonder how she manages when I am not here, and conclude that she must ordinarily fetch two buckets. I try to remember another time when I felt like this and am sad because I can’t remember a time and happy, too, because I cannot.

  That night, I expect her to make me kneel down but instead she tucks me in and tells me I can say a few little prayers in my bed, if praying is what I ordinarily do. The light of the day is still shining bright and strong. She is just about to hang a blanket over the curtain rail, to block it out, when she pauses.

  ‘Would you rather I left it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you afraid of the dark?’

  I want to say I am afraid but am too afraid to say so.

  ‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t matter. You can use the toilet past our room but there’s a chamber pot there too, if you’d prefer.’

  ‘I’ll be alright,’ I say.

  ‘Is your mammy alright?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your mammy. Is she alright?’

  ‘She used to get sick in the mornings but now she doesn’t.’

  ‘Why isn’t the hay in?’

  ‘She hasn’t enough to pay the man. She only just paid him for last year.’

  ‘God help her.’ She smoothes the sheet across me, pleats it. ‘Do you think she would be offended if I sent her a few bob?’

  ‘Offended?’

  ‘Do you think she’d mind?’

  I think about this for a while, think about being my mother. ‘She wouldn’t but Da would.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ she says. ‘Your father.’

  She leans over me then and kisses me, a plain kiss, and says good-night. I sit up when she is gone and look around the room. Trains of every colour race across the wallpaper. There are no tracks for these trains but here and there a small boy stands off in the distance, waving. He looks happy but some part of me feels sorry for every version of him. I roll onto my side and, though I know she wants neither, wonder if my mother will have a girl or a boy this time. I think of my sisters who will not yet be in bed. They will have thrown their clay buns against the gable wall of the outhouse, and when the rain comes, the clay will soften and turn to mud. Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

  I stay awake for as long as I can, then make myself get up and use the chamber pot, but only a dribble comes out. I go back to bed, more than half afraid, and fall asleep. At some point later in the night – it feels much later – the woman comes in. I grow still and breathe as though I have not wakened. I feel the mattress sinking, the weight of her on the bed.

  ‘God help you, Child,’ she say. ‘If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.’

  3

  I wake in this new place to the old feeling of being hot and cold, all at once. Mrs Kinsella does not notice until later in the day, when she is stripping the bed.

  ‘Lord God Almighty,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Would you look?’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  I want to tell her, right now, to admit to it and be sent home so it will be over.

  ‘These old mattresses,’ she says, ‘they weep. They’re always weeping. What was I thinking of, putting you on this?’

  We drag it down the stairs, out into the sunlit yard. The hound comes up and sniffs it, ready to cock his leg.

  ‘Get off, you!’ she shouts in an iron voice.

  ‘What’s all this?’ Kinsella has come in from the fields.

  ‘It’s the mattress,’ she says. ‘The bloody thing is weeping. Didn’t I say it was damp in that room?’

  ‘In fairness,’ he says, ‘you did. But you shouldn’t have dragged that down the stairs on your own.’

  ‘I wasn’t on my own,’ she says. ‘I had help.’

  We scrub it with detergent and hot water and leave it there in the sun to dry.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ she says. ‘A terrible start, altogether. After all that, I think we need a rasher.’

  She heats up the pan and fries rashers and tomatoes cut in halves with the cut side down. She likes to cut things up, to scrub and have things tidy, and to call things what they are. ‘Rashers,’ she says, putting the rashers on the spitting pan. ‘Run out there and pull a few scallions, good girl.’

  I run out to the vegetable garden, pull scallions and run back in, fast as I can, as though the house is on fire and it’s water I’ve been sent for. I’m wondering if there’s enough but the woman laughs.

  ‘Well, we’ll not run short, anyhow.’

  She puts me in charge of the toast, lighting the grill for me, showing how the bread must be turned when one side is brown, as though this is something I haven’t ever done but I don’t really mind; she wants me to get things right, to teach me.

  ‘Are we ready?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good girl. Go out there and give himself a shout.’

  I go out and call the call my mother taught me, up the fields. ‘Coo hooooooooooo!’

  Kinsella comes in a few minutes later, laughing. ‘Now there’s a shout and a half,’ he says. ‘I doubt there’s a child in Wexford with a finer set of lungs.’ He washes his hands and dries them, sits in at the table and butters his bread. The butter is soft, slipping off the knife, spreading easily.

  ‘They said on the early news that another striker is dead.’

  ‘Not another?’

  ‘Aye. He passed during the night, poor man. Isn’t it a terrible state of affairs?’

  ‘God rest him,’ the woman says. ‘It’s no way to die.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it make you grateful, though?’ he says. ‘A man starved himself to death and here I am on a fine day wud two women feeding me.’

  ‘Haven’t you earned it?’ the woman says.

  ‘I don’t know have I,’ he says. ‘But it’s happening anyway.’

  All through the day, I help the woman around the house. She shows me the big, white machine that plugs in, a freezer where what she calls ‘perishables’ can be stored for months without rotting. We make ice cubes, go over every inch of the floors with a hoovering machine, dig new potatoes, make coleslaw and two loaves, and then she takes the clothes in off the line while they are still damp and sets up a board and starts ironing. She is like the man, doing it all without rushing but neither one of them ever really stops. Kinsella comes in and makes tea for all of us and drinks
it standing up with a handful of Kimberley biscuits, then goes back out again.

  Later, he comes in looking for me.

  ‘Is the wee girl there?’ he calls.

  I run out to the door.

  ‘Can you run?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you fast on your feet?’ he says.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I say.

  ‘Well, run down there to the end of the lane as far as the box and run back.’

  ‘The box?’ I say.

  ‘The post box. You’ll see it there. Be as fast as you can.’

  I take off, racing, to the end of the lane and find the box and get the letters and race back. Kinsella is looking at his watch.

  ‘Not bad,’ he says, ‘for your first time.’

  He takes the letters from me. There’s four in all, nothing in my mother’s hand.

  ‘Do you think there’s money in any of these?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ah, you’d know if there was, surely. The women can smell money. Do you think there’s news?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Do you think there’s a wedding invitation?’

  I want to laugh.

  ‘It wouldn’t be yours anyhow,’ he says. ‘You’re too young to be getting married. Do you think you’ll get married?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Mammy says I shouldn’t take a present of a man.’

  Kinsella laughs. ‘She could be right there. Still and all, there’s no two men the same. And it’d be a swift man that would catch you, Long Legs. We’ll try you again tomorrow and see if we can’t improve your time.’

  ‘I’ve to go faster?’

  ‘Oh aye,’ he says. ‘By the time you’re ready for home you’ll be like a reindeer. There’ll not be a man in the parish will catch you without a long-handled net and a racing bike.’

  That night, after supper, when Kinsella is reading his newspaper in the parlour, the woman sits down at the cooker and tells me she is working on her complexion.

  ‘It’s a secret,’ she says. ‘Not many people know about this.’

  She takes a packet of Weetabix out of the cupboard and eats one of them not with milk in a bowl but dry, out of her hand. ‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘I haven’t so much as a pimple.’

  And sure enough, she doesn’t. Her skin is clear.

  ‘But you said there were no secrets here.’

  ‘Ah, this is different, more like a secret recipe.’

  She hands me one, then another and watches as I eat them. They taste a bit like the dry bark of a tree must taste but I don’t really care, as some part of me is pleased to please her. I eat five in all during the nine o’clock news while they show the mother of the dead striker, a riot, then the Taoiseach and then foreign people out in Africa, starving to death, and then the weather forecast, which says the days are to be fine for another week or so. The woman sits me on her lap through it all and idly strokes my bare feet.

  ‘You have nice long toes,’ she says. ‘Nice feet.’

  Later, she makes me lie down on the bed before I go to sleep and cleans the wax out of my ears with a hair clip.

  ‘You could have planted a geranium in what was there,’ she says. ‘Does your mammy not clean out your ears?’

  ‘She hasn’t always time,’ I say, guarded.

  ‘I suppose the poor woman doesn’t,’ she says. ‘What with all of ye.’

  She takes the hairbrush then and I can hear her counting under her breath to a hundred and then she stops and plaits it loosely. I fall asleep fast that night and when I wake, the old feeling is not there.

  Later that morning, when Mrs Kinsella is making the bed, she looks at me, pleased.

  ‘Your complexion is better already, see?’ she says. ‘All you need is minding.’

  4

  And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before. We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with porridge and toast for breakfast. Kinsella puts on his cap and goes back out to the yard. Myself and the woman make a list out loud of jobs that need to be done, and just do them: we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards, take all the bedclothes out of the hot press and hoover out the spider webs and put all the clean clothes back in again, make scones, scrub the bathtub, sweep the staircase, polish the furniture, boil onions for onion sauce and put it in containers in the freezer, pull the weeds out of the flower beds and then, when the sun goes down, water things. Then it’s a matter of supper and the walk across the fields and to the well. Every evening the television is turned on for the nine o’clock news and then, after the forecast, I’m told it is time for bed.

  Sometimes people come into the house at night. I can hear them playing cards and talking. They curse and accuse each other of reneging and dealing off the bottom, and coins are thrown into what sounds like a tin dish, and sometimes all the coins are emptied out into what sounds like a stash that’s already there. Once somebody came in and played the spoons. Once there was something that sounded just like a donkey, and the woman came up to fetch me, saying I may as well come down, as nobody could get a wink of sleep with the Ass Casey in the house. I went down and ate macaroons and then two men came to the door selling lines for a raffle whose proceeds, they said, would go towards putting a new roof on the school.

  ‘Of course,’ Kinsella said.

  ‘We didn’t really think –’

  ‘Come on in,’ Kinsella said. ‘Just ’cos I’ve none of my own doesn’t mean I’d see the rain falling in on anyone else’s.’

  And so they came in and more tea was made and the woman emptied out the ashtray and dealt the cards and said she hoped the present generation of children in that school, if they were inclined towards cards, would learn the rules of forty-five properly because it was clear that this particular generation was having difficulties, that some people weren’t at all clear on how to play, except for sometimes, when it suited them.

  ‘Oh, there’s shots!’

  ‘You have to listen to thunder.’

  ‘Aisy knowing whose purse is running low.’

  ‘It’s ahead, I am,’ she said. ‘And it’s ahead I’ll be when it’s over.’

  And this, for some reason, made the Ass Casey bray, which made me laugh and then they all started laughing until one of the men said, ‘Is it a tittering match we have here or are we going to play cards?’ which made the Ass Casey bray once more, and it started all over again.

  5

  One afternoon, while we are topping and tailing gooseberries for jam, when the job is more than half done and the sugar is already weighed and the pots warmed, Kinsella comes in from the yard and washes and dries his hands and looks at me in a way he has never done 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 the woman took from the chest of drawers.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ the woman says.

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday, and she needs 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 there and change and I’ll run us all 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 then looks over to the window ledge where a sparrow has come down to perch and readjust her wings. The little bird seems uneasy – as though she can sce
nt the cat, who sometimes sits there. Kinsella’s eyes are not quite still in his head. It’s as though there’s 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 does nothing more; he 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 alright,’ the woman says, after a while, from inside and then, shortly afterwards, 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, so many different things are hanging in the sun. There are plastic nets full of beach balls, blow-up toys. A see-through dolphin looks as though he is shivering in a cold breeze. There are plastic spades and matching buckets, moulds for sand castles, grown men digging ice cream out of tubs with little plastic spoons, potted plants that feel hairy to the touch, a man in a van selling dead 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 laughs.

  The woman takes me to the draper’s where she buys a packet of darning needles at a counter and four yards of oilcloth printed with yellow pears. Then we go upstairs where the clothing is kept. She picks out cotton dresses and some pants and trousers and a few tops and we go in behind a curtain so I can try them on.