by Edna O'Brien
“A pity you couldn’t have come sooner,” my mother had said to her, barely able to hold back her tears, and the nun, not wishing to interfere in family grief, excused herself. My brother, it seems, left some time after, and still dressed for travel, my mother waited for the driver from home, who was already a few hours late.
Sister R.’s letter was handed to me in the chapel by the undertaker, after the coffin was brought in and laid down on its trestle, and it was there that I read it. She described her hurried visit at lunchtime and how later she learned that my mother had not yet left and so went to see her, only to find that she was in the lavatory and could be heard calling plaintively. She was brought out, and, as she got paler and began to tremble, the cardiac arrest team was called and she was wheeled, bed and all, into the operating theater. When I read Sister R.’s words “I had to let go of her,” I realized what a deep friendship had sprung up between them in so short a time. It seems that briefly, as they waited to put in a pacemaker, my mother rallied, sat up, and, in one last desperate attempt at greatness, she asked those around her not to cry, for “death shall be no more.” I never felt closer to my mother than when I heard those words that had come from her lips, she who had found literature to be inimical had nevertheless uttered those words as a farewell.
It was after her funeral that the local solicitor came to our house in order for the will to be read aloud. We were a small group, my father crying, saying repeatedly we had lost the best friend in the world, my sister with her husband, my other sister absent because of living in South Africa, my children and myself. On the opposite side of the fireplace, in which no fire blazed and into which my father had thrown hundreds of cigarette butts in the twelve days of her absence, stood my brother and his wife. I could feel the hover of my mother’s ghost as the door of the china cabinet swung open when anyone walked by it. I could hear her voice, lamenting the little teacups with the motifs of violets that got cracked, but were kept, to put sugarloaf in. The will was short. She had left Drewsboro and the adjoining lands to her son and, should he predecease her, to his wife. Each of the three daughters got mementos, china, silver, and glass. There was a silence, then my brother, in high theatricality, put an arm around his wife’s waist and said, “My darling, now we all know who Mam really loved.”
I thought his words so smug, so hollow, and pictured my mother in her last hours, sitting on the bed, alone and stranded, shaking from the quarrel he had brought upon her, and I realized that she did have some intimation of her sudden death the day she begged of me to go down to Clare with her so that she could change her will, because as I was leaving she clung to my hand and said, “I hope I get out of here alive.”
Yet my brother and his wife never lived there, choosing instead to go to their own bungalow in Mount Shannon about five miles hence, which he had bought for his retirement. Some fear or phobia had so possessed them that they did not spend one night in Drewsboro, merely left a radio on, padlocked the bedroom doors, threw dust sheets on the good sofa, and had barbed wire and electric fences erected to keep us out. Now they were dead, and as Michael told me, rumors abounded, such as that there was going to be a nursing home or a five-star hotel, or the house would be razed to the ground as a site for a hundred bungalows.
But in the lambent light of that August evening, with the sun going down, a bit of creeper crimsoning and latticed along an upstairs window, the whole place seemed to hold, and would forever hold, for me, regardless of bungalows or a five-star hotel, the essence of itself, the thing that gave it the sacred and abiding name of Home.
Abdullah
The field that led up to the house was called the lawn, but that was a misnomer. Horses and cattle sometimes grazed there, and as a result the ground was torn and tussocky, which in winter they called poached. It was high summer, no end of ragwort and dandelions and thistles as high as myself, being about three at that time, and the animals shifted to elsewhere.
Feeling adventurous as well as curious, I decided to walk as far as the lower gate and through the rungs look at the outside world, by which I was fascinated. Unbeknownst to my mother, I had put on my best blue dress, the one that had come from America and that boasted the Stars and Stripes in the folds of the box pleating.
We had three dogs at that time. Two chummed together and went off all day hunting foxes and rabbits, and came back in the evenings smelling of fresh blood. The third was short-haired, the color of smoke, a sulky animal, a cross between a Kerry blue and breeds with unmatching eyes. He belonged to my uncle, who for some reason had left him with us. His name was Abdullah, and he passed his days lying in hiding down near the lower gate, so as to be able to jump up and assault any vehicle or person that approached. The postman and callers were in dread of him.
I had forgotten that he might be there, and seeing me, he crawled along the ground, snarling, snarling, and then jumped up, and what perhaps had been intended as some wild sport soon became vicious. He was jumping up and down, frothing and snapping at my knees, when I made a run back to the house, which was the worst thing I could have done. This gave vent to his rage. He was prone to fits, for which he used to be given powders and then locked up, and obviously a fresh fit had come upon him. He was literally going mad, tearing at the dress, spitting bits of it out, but was still tethered to me as I ran and ran, fearing that not an ounce of breath was left in my windpipe. At the wicket gate, I eluded him for a few seconds, but quickly he found a way through a hole that he had long made in the hedge and was in the kitchen almost as soon as I was. I had jumped up on a chair for safety and from that leaped onto the table, where he followed, and presently I keeled over under his weight and felt the bite, his teeth like nails boring into my neck, and the scoop of flesh that he was trying to bite off. It was probably no more than a minute, an eternity of a minute, when someone, not my mother or father and not our workman Carnero, but a total stranger, happened to pass by the window and, seeing Abdullah in a terrific lather, thought he had climbed up to get at the hunk of bread. He rushed in, pulled Abdullah to the floor, kicked him several times, then by the short hairs dragged him from the kitchen, down over the flag and into the pump house, where Abdullah hurled himself against the galvanized door and let out rending whines.
Everything so quiet then. Only the steam from a kettle, its sound sidling through the air, until they came, saw the gash in the neck, the toothmarks, the blood, the blue dress in flitters, asking repeatedly how such a thing could have happened. Peakie, the man who had saved me, was being congratulated on the fact that he had heard screams as he passed by with a bag of turf.
The wound did not heal, and soon a swelling the size of an egg cup ballooned out and had to be pierced with a needle each morning for the pus to be discharged. The fear was that it had reinfected an earlier tubercular gland; on hearing TB, which is how they referred to it, I thought I was preparing for death. A girl in my older sister’s class had died of it, just wasted away. I was given little biscuits called Irish Diamonds that were covered with icing, some round, some triangular, and some shaped like a starburst.
The smell I principally remember is that of iodoform gauze, two patches of it, held down with plaster, in the belief that by hiding it, the wound would go away. Yet before long there were two smells, the nice smell of the gauze and the putrid smell of paste. A lady doctor, whom my father was on saluting terms with, was asked to look at it: she wrinkled her nose several times, her nose which was covered with an unbecoming orange powder, and went, “Hm, hm, hm,” to my mother, saying it called for the knife.
Two mornings later she returned. I can still see her Baby Ford motorcar and her in a fur coat and felt hat with a huge pearled hat pin that had dents in it. Her doctor’s bag of brown leather was most imposing. It was squat at the bottom, the leather tucked in and narrowing along the sides to reach the bright, brazen, brass hasp. She unlocked it in an instant, and my father, peering in, said, “All the tools of the trade, Dr. McCann.”
He had been smoki
ng, but anticipating the task ahead, he quenched his unfinished cigarette and restored it to the Gold Flake package. My sisters were ordered to go out on the flag and do their step dancing and hum loudly. I knew without knowing that something awful was about to happen. Carnero came in, sheepish-looking, and a man painting the chimney pots followed, his white overalls spattered with red paint. In a saucepan of boiling water instruments were being sterilized and my mother was telling me that if I was a good girl, there would be a reward. Then the moment has come, and the three men grasp my head in different places and tilt it to one side. Their strengths are massive. I thought of pigs having their throats slit up in the yard and the roars they let out and resolved that I too would roar, except for the fact that a big paw had muzzled me. The slash of the knife as it tore at the flesh and into the flesh was utter, different from that of the dog’s teeth, and I believed that my head was coming off. In the delirium and ridiculously, I started to recite “Humpty Dumpty,” who had had a great fall and whom all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men could not put together again. The last bout of screaming was apparently so loud that it was heard down on the road, yet to me it seemed feeble, imprisoned in the pouch of hands that smelled of tobacco.
Then oblivion, a no-time, and gradually coming back to life and hearing the single words as through a fog—“Creature—it’s all right now”—while the doctor with her sewing needle and thickish thread had begun to stitch the wound. My mother was thanking her profusely, whereas I could hardly believe that my head was still attached to me, since I thought that, like John the Baptist’s, it would by now be on a platter. The big bandage was a shield between them and me, all of them and me. The reward was a slice of orange cake with lemon curd, but I would not eat it and I would not speak.
“She’ll never forgive us,” I heard Carnero say, and saw my mother clout him, telling him to go off to the fields and not talk such balderdash.
I was allowed to finger my sister’s rosary beads, which were kept in a little silver reliquary that I coveted. They were blue and glassy, and I remember the feel of each one and how I squeezed it.
Ever after, in fearful times, I had to hold on to something, anything, to defer annihilation.
The Dining Room
The dining room was Heaven. I named it so. There was an arbutus table, its deep, red-brown hues so striking, a table that could, by the addition of a spare leaf, seat twenty, though I had never seen anyone sit at it. There was as well a bamboo whatnot on which a wise white owl presided, dust congealing in the folds of its breast feathers. My mother had a craze for overmantel mirrors, and a gorgeous one in a gilt frame hung above the fireplace, except it was hung so high that one had to stand on the curb of the tiled surround and crane to see oneself.
I still recall the rapture as a child, gazing, gazing at a great amphora of artificial tea roses in yellow and red, far more beautiful than the dog roses on the briars or the devil’s pokers in the garden outside, which, because of the way they smoldered, somehow looked spiteful. In that same room, filled with ornaments, were the busts of two plaster-of-Paris ladies, whom my mother named Iris and Gala, and whose cheeks she lovingly rouged. On the sideboard were a few pieces of silver and a jam dish of cloudy, yellow Vaseline glass, with a spoon that hung from the handle that bore the image of the Pope, in scarlet mantle and small, tasseled skullcap. To lick that spoon was a guarantee of a partial indulgence, which meant a few hours less in Purgatory in the next world.
I used to sit there, admiring the room and its pale yellow walls and the two paintings depicting waves that were descending violently on a range of gray-black cliffs, somewhere in England. It was there, on top of the china cabinet, that I kept dolls which a Protestant woman, a friend of my mother’s, had sent to me each Christmas. First was the Princess, whom I called Rosaleen, a sleeping doll, cheeks vivid as if colored with fresh cochineal, and eyelashes that by a mere tilt of the head would exquisitely flutter. The doll the following year was male, a little Dutch drummer boy in red and fawn, a velvet pajama suit and a drummer’s orange hat. He too came in an oblong box, snug inside folds of tissue paper, and one day I did what I dimly knew to be a profane thing. I took the little drummer boy and laid him over the Princess in her blue taffeta dress, with its apron of net, put the lid back on, and left them to their mischiefs.
On another occasion, a neighbor’s daughter called Eily sat in one of the high straight-backed chairs in our dining room, her eyes dark and shiny as ink, her face lovely and trustful, waiting for a sweetheart to come while my mother came and went on tiptoe, watching for the figure that must appear beyond the glass paneling of the hall door, which was without knocker or doorbell. Only two days before Eily and my mother had walked three miles to the doctor in the next town-land, since she was, as she put it, suffering from heartburn. I went with them. It was on the Lake Road, a hot day, waves and wavelets dancing on the water and a little breeze that came in wafts, except that there was no curing my mother’s deep suspicions. She kept asking if it was possible. The word “pregnancy” was not uttered, partly because of my being there and partly because it was too terrible for it to be said. Eily would grasp my mother’s hand in umbrage and then, in an orgy of lamentation, would ask how could my mother think such a thing, and then both women would cry. I was too afraid to glance at her stomach, in case some stirrings would reveal the truth. Again and again my mother repeated her key question, and by the time we got to the doctor’s surgery, Eily had clamped her hands over her ears, deaf to everything.
The visit to the doctor did not go as they had hoped and no cure was forthcoming.
Next evening, her sweetheart arrived and the couple were left to confer alone. Later my mother announced wedding plans in June to my father, who was oblivious to all this furor. Telling the girl’s parents was a quite different matter, and it is probable that the full truth was withheld. All they knew was that Eily was marrying and that the groom was coming to pay a visit.
Their good room led off the kitchen and was full of oats, which naturally had to be cleared out, and some pieces of furniture had to be procured. My mother helped by giving a wooden garden seat which she had varnished and then decorated, running a sharp nail, zigzag-wise, over the wet varnish to create a mottled effect. Eily’s mother had somehow found a small side table that was covered with a red chenille cloth. There was a new sheepskin rug that smelled of the butcher’s and was still shedding its hairs. The fire was in two minds about taking off, as there had never been a fire in that grate before. The groom arrived, wearing a leather raincoat and leather gauntlet gloves, which he removed and tossed aside, with some grandeur. He was given the best chair. Eily sat on the window ledge, not looking at him or at anyone and twirling the ends of her wavy, auburn hair. My mother and Eily’s mother shared the wooden seat, and my father, who was standing, smoked and looked out at rain pouring from a gully into a rain barrel that overflowed onto a flat field beyond.
The first faux pas happened when Eily’s father came in, his wet cap dripping onto the point of his nose; suddenly alarmed at the altered state of the room and the elegance of it, he turned to my father and said, “Am I in my own house at all, mister?” He called all other men mister because, having had no education, he reckoned that others were scholars and deserving of his respect. Then he shook the groom’s hand and called him mister. The conversation turned to the crops: some corn already lodged in the fields from so much rain and whether it would not have been better to have used it for pasture.
I shall never forget the giddy elation in Eily’s expression when she jumped up, stood in front of the fire, and thanked everyone profusely for being so good to her. Her father, who loved her and who must have suddenly guessed the implications of what she had just said, ran out of the room, for fear of crying. The tea and porter cake came next.
The couple moved away soon after that, to the opposite end of the county, where the wedding was held, and many years later I saw Eily in Grafton Street in Dublin, much older, her eye
s scared, those eyes the color of dark slate and that many had envied. She was talking to herself in a mad, high-pitched voice and scolding people whom she imagined to be staring at her.
Also in that dining room, my mother and I once narrowly escaped death. My father had gone in there with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver that had belonged to my mother’s brother, Captain Michael. It was on top of a wardrobe, with a leather holster and bullets. In there, he vowed havoc and slaughter on all of us and on families along the road who had refused him drink, and eventually the sergeant was called and went in to reason with him. After a while, when they had obviously been arguing fiercely, the sergeant came out and said the only person he would give the gun to was my mother, and I went in with her to be her protector.
My father kept swinging the loaded revolver, jauntily, as if it were a toy. My mother asked in a pacifying voice, what did he want? What was it he wanted? He wanted money. “Give it to me. Give it to me,” he kept saying. He did not believe that she did not have any, and he put the revolver down on the bamboo whatnot and crossed and stood before us. Then he searched inside her bodice, where she sometimes kept money and where I, and no doubt he, had sometimes seen the jut of an orange-tinted ten-shilling note. She was shaking like a leaf. Then he searched in good cups in the china cabinet, and finding only the delicate handles that were broken off and kept in the hope of their being glued back one day, he became even more enraged. We saw him go back to the bamboo table and pick up the revolver. My mother asked him to put it down, in the name of Jesus, to put it down. That merely egged him on. The shot was the loudest I’d ever heard, not like gunshot from down in the woods, when men hunted rabbits and hares. Crouched down next to her, I thought that we were dead and found it strange to be smothered in burning smoke. The bullet missed us and passed into the frame of the door, where white paint was crumbling and falling off in little shards. Carnero and the sergeant were there in the room, speaking in savage bursts, as though they were about to attack him, and my father had grown peculiarly quiet, almost contrite, as he was being led out.