“It’s not a Christian way to live, and you a good County Sligo boy.”
So Kevin started to make jokes at her like any other Sligo boy. “I said to myself, that’s a County Mayo woman if ever I clapped eyes on one.”
“Hold your tongue,” said Rosaleen softly as a dove. “You’re talking to a Sligo woman as if you didn’t know it!”
“Is it so?” said Kevin in great astonishment. “Well, I’m glad of the mistake. The Mayo people are too proud for me.”
“And for me, too,” said Rosaleen. “They beat the world for holding up their chins about nothing.”
“They do so,” said Kevin, “but the Sligo people have a right to be proud.”
“And you’ve a right to live in a good Irish house,” said Rosaleen, “so you’d best come with us.”
“I’d be proud of that as if I came from Mayo,” said Kevin, and he went on slapping paint on Rosaleen’s front gate. They stood there smiling at each other, feeling they had agreed enough, it was time to think of how to get the best of each other in the talk from now on. For more than a year they had tried to get the best of each other in the talk, and sometimes it was one and sometimes another, but a gay easy time and such a bubble of joy like a kettle singing. “You’ve been a sister to me, Rosaleen, I’ll not forget ye while I have breath,” he had said that the last night.
Dennis muttered and snored a little. Rosaleen wanted to mourn about everything at the top of her voice, but it wouldn’t do to wake Dennis. He was sleeping like the dead after all that goose.
Rosaleen said, “Dennis, I dreamed about Kevin in the night. There was a grave, an old one, but with fresh flowers on it, and a name on the headstone cut very clear but as if it was in another language and I couldn’t make it out some way. You came up then and I said, ‘Dennis, what grave is this?’ and you answered me, ‘That’s Kevin’s grave, don’t you remember? And you put those flowers there yourself.’ Then I said, ‘Well, a grave it is then, and let’s not think of it any more.’ Now isn’t it strange to think Kevin’s been dead all this time and I didn’t know it?”
Dennis said, “He’s not fit to mention, going off as he did after all our kindness to him, and not a word from him.”
“It was because he hadn’t the power any more,” said Rosaleen. “And ye mustn’t be down on him now. I was wrong to put my judgment on him the way I did. Ah, but to think! Kevin dead and gone, and all these natives and foreigners living on, with the paint still on their barns and houses where Kevin put it! It’s very bitter.”
Grieving for Kevin, she drifted into thinking of the natives and foreigners who owned farms all around her. She was afraid for her life of them, she said, the way they looked at you out of their heathen faces, the foreigners bold as brass, the natives sly and mean. “The way they do be selling the drink to all, and burning each other in their beds and splitting each other’s heads with axes,” she complained. “The decent people aren’t safe in their houses.”
Yesterday she had seen that native Guy Richards going by wild-drunk again, fit to do any crime. He was a great offense to Rosaleen, with his shaggy mustaches and his shirt in rags till the brawny skin showed through; a shame to the world, staring around with his sneering eyes; living by himself in a shack and having his cronies in for drink until you could hear them shouting at all hours and careering round the countryside like the devils from hell. He would pass by the house driving his bony gray horse at top speed, standing up in the rackety buggy singing in a voice like a power of scrap-iron falling, drunk as a lord before breakfast. Once when Rosaleen was standing in her doorway, wearing a green checkerboard dress, he yelled at her: “Hey, Rosie, want to come for a ride?”
“The bold stump!” said Rosaleen to Dennis. “If ever he lays a finger on me I’ll shoot him dead.”
“If you mind your business by day,” said Dennis in a shriveled voice, “and bar the doors well by night, there’ll be no call to shoot anybody.”
“Little you know!” said Rosaleen. She had a series of visions of Richards laying a finger on her and herself shooting him dead in his tracks. “Whatever would I do without ye, Dennis?” she asked him that night, as they sat on the steps in a soft darkness full of fireflies and the sound of crickets. “When I think of all the kinds of men there are in the world. That Richards!”
“When a man is young he likes his fun,” said Dennis, amiably, beginning to yawn.
“Young, is it?” said Rosaleen, warm with anger. “The old crow! Fit to have children grown he is, the same as myself, and I’m a settled woman over her nonsense!”
Dennis almost said, “I’ll never call you old,” but all at once he was irritable too. “Will you stop your gossiping?” he asked censoriously.
Rosaleen sat silent, without rancor, but there was no denying the old man was getting old, old. He got up as if he gathered his bones in his arms, and carried himself in the house. Somewhere inside of him there must be Dennis, but where? “The world is a wilderness,” she informed the crickets and frogs and fireflies.
Richards never had offered to lay a finger on Rosaleen, but now and again he pulled up at the gate when he was not quite drunk, and sat with them afternoons on the doorstep, and there were signs in him of a nice-behaved man before the drink got him down. He would tell them stories of his life, and what a desperate wild fellow he had been, all in all. Not when he was a boy, though. As long as his mother lived he had never done a thing to hurt her feelings. She wasn’t what you might call a rugged woman, the least thing made her sick, and she was so religious she prayed all day long under her breath at her work, and even while she ate. He had belonged to a society called The Sons of Temperance, with all the boys in the countryside banded together under a vow never to touch strong drink in any form: “Not even for medicinal purposes,” he would quote, raising his right arm and staring solemnly before him. Quite often he would burst into a rousing march tune which he remembered from the weekly singings they had held: “With flags of temperance flying, With banners white as snow,” and he could still repeat almost word for word the favorite poem he had been called upon to recite at every meeting: “At midnight, in his guarded tent, The Turk lay dreaming of the hour—”
Rosaleen wanted to interrupt sometimes and tell him that had been no sort of life, he should have been young in Ireland. But she wouldn’t say it. She sat stiffly beside Dennis and looked at Richards severely out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he remembered that time he had yelled “Hey, Rosie!” at her. It was enough to make a woman wild not to find a word in her mouth for such boldness. The cheek of him, pretending nothing had happened. One day she was racking her mind for some saying that would put him in his place, while he was telling about the clambakes his gang was always having down by the creek behind the rock pile, with a keg of home-brew beer; and the dances the Railroad Street outfit gave every Saturday night in Winston. “We’re always up to some devilment,” he said, looking straight at Rosaleen, and before she could say scat, the hellion had winked his near eye at her. She turned away with her mouth down at the corners; after a long minute, she said, “Good day to ye, Mr. Richards,” cold as ice, and went in the house. She took down the looking-glass to see what kind of look she had on her, but the wavy place made her eyes broad and blurred as the palm of her hands, and she couldn’t tell her nose from her mouth in the cracked seam. . . .
The pipe salesman came back next month and brought a patent cooking pot that cooked vegetables perfectly without any water in them. “It’s a lot healthier way of cooking, Miz O’Toole,” Dennis heard his mouthy voice going thirteen to the dozen. “I’m telling you as a friend because you’re a good customer of mine.”
“Is it so?” thought Dennis, and his gall stirred within him.
“You’ll find it’s going to be a perfect godsend for your husband’s health. Old folks need to be mighty careful what they eat, and you know better than I do, Miz O’Toole, that health begins or ends right in the kitchen. Now your husband don’t look as stout as h
e might. It’s because, tasty as your cooking is, you’ve been pouring all the good vitamins, the sunlit life-giving elements, right down the sink. . . . Right down the sink, Miz O’Toole, is where you’re pouring your husband’s health and your own. And I say it’s a shame, a good-looking woman like you wasting your time and strength standing over a cook-stove when all you’ve got to do from now on is just fill this scientific little contrivance with whatever you’ve planned for dinner and then go away and read a good book in your parlor while it’s cooking—or curl your hair.”
“My hair curls by nature,” said Rosaleen. Dennis almost groaned aloud from his hiding-place.
“For the love of—why, Miz O’Toole, you don’t mean to tell me that! When I first saw that hair, I said to myself, why, it’s so perfect it looks to be artificial! I was just getting ready to ask you how you did it so I could tell my wife. Well, if your hair curls like that, without any vitamins at all, I want to come back and have a look at it after you’ve been cooking in this little pot for two weeks.”
Rosaleen said, “Well, it’s not my looks I’m thinking about. But my husband isn’t up to himself, and that’s the truth, Mr. Pendleton. Ah, it would have done your heart good to see that man in his younger days! Strong as an ox he was, the way no man dared to rouse his anger. I’ve seen my husband, many’s the time, swing on a man with his fist and send him sprawling twenty feet, and that for the least thing, mind you! But Dennis could never hold his grudge for long, and the next instant you’d see him picking the man up and dusting him off like a brother and saying, ‘Now think no more of that.’ He was too forgiving always. It was his great fault.”
“And look at him now,” said Mr. Pendleton, sadly.
Dennis felt pretty hot around the ears. He stood forward at the corner of the house, listening. He had never weighed more than one hundred thirty pounds at his most, a tall thin man he had been always, a little proud of his elegant shape, and not since he left school in Bristol had he lifted his hand in anger against a creature, brute or human. “He was a fine man a woman could rely on, Mr. Pendleton,” said Rosaleen, “and quick as a tiger with his fists.”
“I might be dead and moldering away to dust the way she talks,” thought Dennis, “and there she is throwing away the money as if she was already a gay widow woman.” He tottered out bent on speaking his mind and putting a stop to such foolishness. The salesman turned a floppy smile and shrewd little eyes upon him. “Hello, Mr. O’Toole,” he said, with the manly cordiality he used for husbands. “I’m just leaving you a little birthday present with the Missis here.”
“It’s not my birthday,” said Dennis, sour as a lemon.
“That’s just a manner of speaking!” interrupted Rosaleen, merrily. “And now many thanks to ye, Mr. Pendleton.”
“Many thanks to you, Miz O’Toole,” answered the salesman, folding away nine dollars of good green money. No more was said except good day, and Rosaleen stood shading her eyes to watch the Ford walloping off down the hummocky lane. “That’s a nice, decent family man,” she told Dennis, as if rebuking his evil thoughts. “He travels out of New York, and he always has the latest thing and the best. He’s full of admiration for ye, too, Dennis. He said he couldn’t call to mind another man of your age as sound as you are.”
“I heard him,” said Dennis. “I know all he said.”
“Well, then,” said Rosaleen, serenely, “there’s no good saying it over.” She hurried to wash potatoes to cook in the pot that made the hair curl.
*
The winter piled in upon them, and the snow was shot through with blizzards. Dennis couldn’t bear a breath of cold, and all but sat in the oven, rheumy and grunty, with his muffler on. Rosaleen began to feel as if she couldn’t bear her clothes on her in the hot kitchen, and when she did the barn work she had one chill after another. She complained that her hands were gnawed to the bone with the cold. Did Dennis realize that now, or was he going to sit like a log all winter, and where was the lad he had promised her to help with the outside work?
Dennis sat wordless under her unreasonableness, thinking she had very little work for a strong-bodied woman, and the truth was she was blaming him for something he couldn’t help. Still she said nothing he could take hold of, only nipping his head off when the kettle dried up or the fire went low. There would come a day when she would say outright, “It’s no life here, I won’t stay here any longer,” and she would drag him back to a flat in New York, or even leave him, maybe. Would she? Would she do such a thing? Such a thought had never occurred to him before. He peered at her as if he watched her through a keyhole. He tried to think of something to ease her mind, but no plan came. She would look at some harmless thing around the house, say—the calendar, and suddenly tear it off the wall and stuff it in the fire. “I hate the very sight of it,” she would explain, and she was always hating the very sight of one thing or another, even the cow; almost, but not quite, the cats.
One morning she sat up very tired and forlorn, and began almost before Dennis could get an eye open: “I had a dream in the night that my sister Honora was sick and dying in her bed, and was calling for me.” She bowed her head on her hands and breathed brokenly to her very toes, and said, “It’s only natural I must go to Boston to find out for myself how it is, isn’t it?”
Dennis, pulling on his chest protector she had knitted him for Christmas, said, “I suppose so. It looks that way.”
Over the coffee pot she began making her plans. “I could go if only I had a coat. It should be a fur one against this weather. A coat is what I’ve needed all these years. If I had a coat I’d go this very day.”
“You’ve a greatcoat with fur on it,” said Dennis.
“A rag of a coat!” cried Rosaleen. “And I won’t have Honora see me in it. She was jealous always, Dennis, she’d be glad to see me without a coat.”
“If she’s sick and dying maybe she won’t notice,” said Dennis.
Rosaleen agreed. “And maybe it will be better to buy one there, or in New York—something in the new style.”
“It’s long out of your way by New York,” said Dennis. “There’s shorter ways to Boston than that.”
“It’s by New York I’m going, because the trains are better,” said Rosaleen, “and I want to go that way.” There was a look on her face as if you could put her on the rack and she wouldn’t yield. Dennis kept silence.
When the postman passed she asked him to leave word with the native family up the hill to send their lad down for a few days to help with the chores, at the same pay as before. And tomorrow morning, if it was all the same to him, she’d be driving in with him to the train. All day long, with her hair in curl papers, she worked getting her things together in the lazy old canvas bag. She put a ham on to bake and set bread and filled the closet off the kitchen with firewood. “Maybe there’ll come a message saying Honora’s better and I sha’n’t have to go,” she said several times, but her eyes were excited and she walked about so briskly the floor shook.
Late in the afternoon Guy Richards knocked, and floundered in stamping his big boots. He was almost sober, but he wasn’t going to be for long. Rosaleen said, “I’ve sad news about my sister, she’s on her deathbed maybe and I’m going to Boston.”
“I hope it’s nothing serious, Missis O’Toole,” said Richards. “Let’s drink her health in this,” and he took out a bottle half full of desperate-looking drink. Dennis said he didn’t mind. Richards said, “Will the lady join us?” and his eyes had the devil in them if Rosaleen had ever seen it.
“I will not,” she said. “I’ve something better to do.”
While they drank she sat fixing the hem of her dress, and began to tell again about the persons without number she’d known who came back from the dead to bring word about themselves, and Dennis himself would back her up in it. She told again the story of the Billy-cat, her voice warm and broken with the threat of tears.
Dennis swallowed his drink, leaned over and began to fumble with his shoel
ace, his face sunken to a handful of wrinkles, and thought right out plainly to himself: “There’s not a word of truth in it, not a word. And she’ll go on telling it to the world’s end for God’s truth.” He felt helpless, as if he were involved in some disgraceful fraud. He wanted to speak up once for all and say, “It’s a lie, Rosaleen, it’s something you’ve made up, and now let’s hear no more about it.” But Richards, sitting there with his ears lengthened, stopped the words in Dennis’s throat. The moment passed. Rosaleen said solemnly, “My dreams never renege on me, Mr. Richards. They’re all I have to go by.” “It never happened at all,” said Dennis inside himself, stubbornly. “Only the Billy-cat got caught in a trap and I buried him.” Could this really have been all? He had a nightmarish feeling that somewhere just out of his reach lay the truth about it, he couldn’t swear for certain, yet he was almost willing to swear that this had been all. Richards got up saying he had to be getting on to a shindig at Winston. “I’ll take you to the train tomorrow, Missis O’Toole,” he said. “I love doing a good turn for the ladies.”
Rosaleen said very stiffly, “I’ll be going in with the letter-carrier, and many thanks just the same.”
She tucked Dennis into bed with great tenderness and sat by him a few minutes, putting cold cream on her face. “It won’t be for long,” she told him, “and you’re well taken care of the whole time. Maybe by the grace of God I’ll find her recovered.”
“Maybe she’s not sick at all,” Dennis wanted to say, and said instead, “I hope so.” It was nothing to him. Everything else aside, it seemed a great fuss to be making over Honora, who might die when she liked for all Dennis would turn a hair.
Dennis hoped until the last minute that Rosaleen would come to her senses and give up the trip, but at the last minute there she was with her hat and the rag of a coat, a streak of pink powder on her chin, pulling on her tan gloves that smelt of naphtha, flourishing a handkerchief that smelt of Azurea, and going every minute to the window, looking for the postman. “In this snow maybe he’ll be late,” she said in a trembling voice. “What if he didn’t come at all?” She took a last glimpse at herself in the mirror. “One thing I must remember, Dennis,” she said in another tone. “And that is, to bring back a looking-glass that won’t make my face look like a monster’s.”
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