by Paul Lynch
She has been a maid-of-all-work in the house of a merchant six miles from Bundoran, a cooker, scrubber, washer, mender and minder of children. Has stood glad in the warmth of the kitchen. Listened to household talk of the swan-eating queen who sailed for Ireland and was met by how many steamers and such were the happy shrieks of the crowds of three cities that came to see her. Her body has grown into fullness. Her hair has captured its color. She has grown it past her hips and thinks she might never cut it, wears it down in the private of her room and admires it in the looking glass. She has walked the twenty miles to Sligo to see a traveling circus, watched clowns teeter drunker than fools, and stared into the ocher eyes of a rhesus monkey placed upon her shoulder and what she saw in the eye of that animal, the story of a life she knew to be her own. She saw in the new year holding the good hand of the coachman Jim Collins, a man with half a left thumb lost to a berserk horse, a man who stands ample in easy kindness and still young enough, just some gray above his ears and those lovely wrinkles that corner his mouth. How in their more solemn moments he runs his hands through the sunset of her hair and smells it. He has accepted the quiet sit of her tongue and she has written to him, asking him to wait for her words, that the words will come. And now she turns from the thought that folds time and feeling upon itself, turns from a blank look and lights her pipe, watches Jim flitch wood with the ax, the way he turns then to smile at her, wipes his sleeve at his forehead. This place by the river he has built for them. This house of freestone and it is almost as if she has dreamed it, the wash of a river, the house abutting a woodland. It is a place where the old and haunting thought meets the movement of water, water that brings unceasing newness, life upon life, days that do not ask you to remember.
Then the sudden day when she hears her mother calling for her as if from afar. Hears her mother’s voice in the woods. Hears her in the narrowed dark of the room. Wakes to a fluttering kick that sits her up in the bed and there beside her is the known shape of her mother.
She says, I came to see the child.
Having to slide away from Jim without waking him but he stirs anyway and whispers some confused thought and she is out the latch door into the dark and there is Mam waiting and she cannot see her eyes.
She says to her mother, the child is not born yet.
I can wait a while.
I wish you wouldn’t, you are dead or long long away from here and I must be getting on with my life.
I am neither dead nor not dead. Your head is full of nonsense.
And what am I supposed to make of that?
Think of it however you like. You were always so difficult.
These nightly visits by her mother become a sorrow that increases as the child swells inside her. Sarah now an old woman, all that was once strong is quitting her body. Perhaps the child, she thinks, is growing off Mam’s strength.
She says to Sarah, all right, I will care for you, but the day will come when you must go, these are the terms we must agree on.
Jim watching her with confused regard. How she sits her mother upright in the chair and listens to her grudge the world, the people she has known that are gone, the heartache that comes with the knowledge of dying. And she puts a third meal out and a third glass of water and Jim gives her a look that says, is all this for the child? Another day when he asks, what exactly is going on? And she looks at him and shrugs and she thinks, what is the difference anyhow? For she would like to say, so what if my mother comes to visit me. What is it that we really know anyhow? We cannot hold the truth of this world in our hands. And this word truth, what can a word measure? The truths that men hold solemn, their beliefs and their doctrines and their certitude, all of it is but smoke on the wind. And so I am happy to be as I am in this not knowing, to see things without needing to know what they are, if they come from me or they belong to the sky and the hills, my breath and your breath and the way light passes over the stillness of things. So what if my mother should visit me. Maybe she might want something.
Sarah complains for comfort, for the blanket, to be listened to, chisels endlessly at her, you are just like your father, there’s a pair of you in it, never gave me a moment’s peace in my life.
She tells her daughter, when I was a girl, all I ever wanted was to be a seamstress.
And then the morning comes when she wakes sudden to the sound of her mother’s cry and she can feel the child in her belly kicking. Rising into the dawnlight where she finds her mother lying by the edge of the river and she goes to her and lifts her and holds her to her chest. And Sarah whispers, I am so tired, I am at my end, you must let me go, and when her body becomes still she closes the woman’s eyes and sits like that a long while and then she lifts her mother up and walks her into the river, watches the water travel around her mother’s body, lets her mother go, and the shout she hears belongs to Jim and then he is running and then he is alongside her and he is crying and carrying her out of the water.
In the days that follow she begins to feel a shift inside her as if a great light were shining through her, a light reaching into dark, thought like rain washing through sky, like glass that holds the world without discolor, like sunlight passing beauty through water, like sunlight passing through wind beneath the rising wingbeat. The child soon due and these are the good blue days and she knows, yes, I will speak, the words will come and I will speak of what is now, of only this, and a blue morning arrives when Jim shakes her from dream and she wakes and he whispers, you must come, and they step out of the house and it is then she sees it, the woodland held in fields of color, a violet born of night and finding in day its fullest expression and how the trees stand hazed in the light of these bluebells and her hands go to her belly and it is then without thought the words rise and she speaks to him.
This life is light.
About the Author
Paul Lynch is the prizewinning Irish author of two previous novels, Red Sky in Morning and The Black Snow. Red Sky in Morning was a finalist for France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). The Black Snow won the French booksellers’ prize, Prix Libr’à Nous, for Best Foreign Novel. He lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter.
also by Paul Lynch
Red Sky in Morning
The Black Snow
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