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  CHAPTER TWO

  “Come on, now. Come on, wee Jack – no time for dawdling, darling – we must be back before dark to do your Daddy’s tea.” Jack ran to his mother, face screwed up against the sun, curls bobbing, hands outstretched. “Sure, you’re too big to carry, Jack! How can Mammy carry a big boy like you?” Yet she lifted him all the same, using his momentum to whirl him off the ground and round twice in the air before she hugged him to her, crossing her arms under his backside. She kissed him once, twice, in the hollow of his neck, making his tummy tingle, and he squealed and chuckled in delight. “Come on, now, pet, let’s hurry.” She put him down, picked up her basket in her right hand, and grasped his soft hand with the other, which curled inside hers like a flower.

  In the landscape between sleep and wakefulness, Jack followed himself and his mother down the road on a visit to his Aunt Maisie’s house in a village called Golden, seven miles from Dunane. They walked and hitched rides from passing farmers, fortified by milk from a jar and soda bread, which she carried in her basket. He wondered why the village was called Golden, but his mother didn’t know. She guessed it was because a beautiful lady had once lived there, who was the pride of the county, and she had long golden hair to her knees, which shone like the sun. All the men flocked to catch a glimpse of her, and her name was Mary. But it was just a guess, and she would smile at the wonder in his round eyes and how he squinted as he tried to look into her face in spite of the sun. “What happened to her?” he had asked as they were jostled in some donkey cart.

  “Well, ’twas very sad, for Mary got sick and died when she was still a young one, and no one was able to marry her.” But when she saw the distress on his face, she soothed him with promises that Mary with the gold hair was in heaven, and happy, for she was closer to the sun and with Jesus and all the angels.

  She used to sing for him. She had a lilting, sweet voice, and she sang mournful ballads when he was tired. He would lie in his bed and watch her eyes. Sometimes they filled with tears, but she would clear them away and smile again. He loved to lose himself in the pictures conjured by her songs: of ladies weeping in fields of flowers and men on horses, riding away from love and into battle; children and maidens succumbed to untimely deaths or were exiled from the land they loved. But the one she loved most, she told him, was about a lady who was turned into a swan and doomed to live alone on the River Moyle, until Jesus allowed her soul to enter heaven. He dreaded that tune, for always it meant she was unhappy. But there were other days – like the ones when they went to Aunt Maisie’s house – when she would be blithe and the songs would trip from her lips: light, rhythmic airs in which leprechauns schemed to keep their pots of gold or lovers conspired to meet by moonlight. She would pick him up and whirl him around and he felt happy that she was happy.

  “You know what, Jack?” she would sometimes say. “You and I are songs. We are – everyone is.”

  “Yeh,” he would answer, not understanding but eager to please her, and she would laugh, tousle his hair.

  “One day, you’ll understand. We all need someone to sing us, Jack. If no one sings us, sure we get forgotten about, we fade away. I’ll never let that happen to you.” How wistful she became, and he would frown, unable to follow her. “I’m going to sing you, like the beautiful song you are. And if you change, I’ll learn you and sing you all over again. Sure we’ll sing each other, you and me, will we?”

  * * *

  Aunt Maisie was his mother’s aunt and kindly beneath her sharp tones and alarming jowls. Her husband was long dead and her children had moved away. She was enjoying her freedom. She made cakes which melted in your mouth, and blackberry jelly like Jack had never since tasted. She stood by her range, one brown- spotted hand holding the handle of the kettle with a tea towel as it came to the boil, the other gripping her ample right hip. When the tea was made and the bread jammed, the cake cut, his mother would sit and talk in low, unfinished sentences, mindful of Jack’s presence. Sometimes she would begin to cry and Aunt Maisie would tut and pass her a handkerchief, saying, “Ah, now, pet, now pet.” She would turn to Jack, wipe the jam from his cheeks, and distract him with bric-a-brac from worm-riddled drawers: yellow photographs of unsmiling men, old tobacco pipes, and prayer books with pictures of chubby angels rolling their bulging eyes heavenwards. Often, she would stuff one of the pipes with tobacco and light it with a match from the mantelpiece. He would watch her, fascinated, through clouds of rich smoke, as she rocked and nodded and soothed his mother until his eyes grew heavy and he slept on his mother’s knee, comforted by her warmth, though still troubled at the sadness she kept for Aunt Maisie. One visit, the last one, he had awoken to hear Aunt Maisie urging his mother to come and live with her. Sure, wasn’t there plenty of room for herself and the young lad – and the baby too, when it came? They’d be grand. And she could stay in the cottage when Maisie passed on, for the boys had their own houses now. He had come to quickly, turned to look upon the weary, bowed face of his mother, searching it for the meaning of these words. “So, you’re awake, are you, pet? Did you have a good sleep?” Had he misheard? He continued to look curiously into his mother’s face. She smiled at him, rubbed his head. “Ah, sure Maisie, how can I?” was all she said, and he rested his head against her breast once more, puzzled by the ways of these women.

  A memory or a story he told himself? No, real enough.

  Aunt Maisie had come to the house, once, after that last visit. His mother had flustered and turned red, wiping her hands repeatedly on her apron, hardly daring to look at Jack’s father while she rushed around making tea, cutting bread. “Don’t fuss, child.” Maisie sat down at the table and parted her knees beneath her widow’s dress, planting her walking stick firmly between them. She produced a pipe from somewhere beneath her shawl and to the horrified fascination of Jack’s father had packed it leisurely and lit it, drawing the smoke with backward gulps through her puckered lips, like an ancient fish. She seemed oblivious to his incredulous stare and wholly unperturbed by its heat. Smoke curled around her head like conjured mists. He shifted uneasily because he could no longer see her face clearly. She glared at him and spoke through teeth which clasped her pipe stem. “How are you, Mairead?”

  “Oh, grand, Aunt Maisie, very well,” said his mother, dropping the lid of the teapot and bobbing after it as it wheeled giddily around the kitchen floor on its rim.

  “You don’t look very well to me.” Jack had looked quickly towards his father, whose eyes were narrowing in suspicion of conspiracy. He wished Maisie would go away. Didn’t she know what always happened? “Where did you get those bruises, child, on your face and arms? Sure you look like someone’s been belting the life out of you, and you in your condition.” Still, Maisie did not take her eyes from Jack’s father’s face. Jack looked at the farm dog, skulking under a chair, muzzle on its paws, eyes rolling from one voice to another. He wished he could crawl under a chair.

  His mother seemed almost to have swooned. She sat down heavily, fighting for breath, her trembling right hand on her bosom, as though to steady her heart. She could not speak.

  “How would you like to come home with me, Mairead?” Maisie continued. Jack saw his father’s hands tighten into fists. The dog turned its head towards a wall, curled into a ball, feigned sleep. “Go and pack.” There followed an agony of silence in which the dark forces of Maisie’s and his father’s fury gathered like storm clouds in the kitchen.

  “Get out of my house, you old witch!” The first words spoken by his father brought a sort of relief, like the first crack of thunder in static air.

  “I will go when Mairead has answered me and not before.” Jack’s father sprang to his feet and, with a sweep of his arm over the table, sent saucers spinning across the kitchen. They smashed in bright, white pieces. The dog whined, smacked its jowls, curled more tightly into itself.

  “Sean, for God’s sake!” His mother’s plea was barely audible. She clutched at her swollen belly with eyes closed, dreaming thi
s violence away.

  “Get this creature – this, this… harpie out of my house or I swear to you, now, I’ll wring her auld neck!” His father’s voice had assumed a hysterical pitch. Yet, he did not advance on Maisie, who betrayed no feeling, her only concession to the physicality of things being a lowering of her pipe and an adjustment of the grip she had on her walking stick. Jack’s father actually seemed wary of Maisie; she was old enough to be his mother. Maisie began to speak again. The steadiness of her voice made Jack’s father seem like a child having a tantrum.

  “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, carrying on like this in front of the child, and your wife about to have another? God help her! You know, it’s men like you, Sean Flynn, are the scourge of Ireland. Ireland will be a bog, and that’s all, with men like you in it! Nothing good – nothing good…” And here Maisie lost the evenness of tone she had preserved to that moment. She leaned on her stick, using it to lever herself to a standing position, before she continued, “… will ever come of Ireland until the likes of you learn how to treat a woman with respect!”

  Jack’s father danced closer to her, fists raised like a boxer. She did not move but jutted her chin towards him and banged the table with the side of her left hand, the pipe still gripped in its fist. “Give me a Sassenach any day, boy, for if they’re soft as mud, they know how to look after a woman.” Then she added loudly, “Are you coming wit’ me, Mairead? I will not ask again.” Jack moved towards his mother, distraught yet emboldened by Maisie’s lack of fear. He had never seen anyone – let alone a woman – so unaffected by his father’s fury.

  “Go on! Get out, the pair o’ ye, stinking whoores! To hell wit’ you! And you too, huh?” He turned his fury on Jack, who now clung to his mother’s skirt, staring dumbly at his father’s mad eyes.

  “Jack, pet, come wit’ me. Come on to Maisie.” Jack looked at his mother for the signal to obey, willed her to give it. It did not come.

  “Mammy!” he insisted. Roused by his voice, she reached for him, held him close.

  “We cannot come, Maisie. Go on, before it gets too dark.”

  “You’re a fool, Mairead. He’ll be the death of you and the child will be ruined. I’ll go, so.” And Maisie turned her back on all of them, then leaned on her stick to open the door. The dog made a dash for outdoors and freedom. Maisie climbed into her donkey cart and drove away.

  Jack’s father cursed and broke chairs into smithereens. He smashed photos of Jack’s mother and ornaments she had brought with her from her girlhood, and he ground them to powder with the heels of his boots. He caught Jack’s arm and hurled him across the kitchen, splitting his lip on the leg of the table, which finally got him what he wanted, some sort of defiance to justify the violence.

  “For God’s sake, Sean, leave the boy alone!” his mother shrieked and lurched from her chair after her son, wiping the blood from his face with her apron.

  “Don’t ever tell me what to do in my own house, you whoore, you – d’you hear me? Do you?” He menaced ever closer, spittle flying from his mouth, clenching his teeth. The first blow shook them both, knocking her sideways, and Jack sprawled on the floor with her. She had to curl into a ball on the floor to better protect her belly from his boot and Jack, having pushed himself onto all fours, watched as she cradled the unborn child.

  Eventually, he left them alone and disappeared to the bar, “to clear his head of stinking women and the stench of treachery,” he said. Jack and his mother clung to each other for a long time on the floor for fear he might change his mind and return. But something had hardened in Jack’s heart against his mother. She should have taken him and gone with Maisie.

  Mick Spillane decided not to tell Caitlin, or his wife, of the bargain he had struck with Jack Flynn, until terms were agreed. He was surprised at the ferocity of his anxiety every time he imagined breaking the news of her fate to Caitlin; there was no telling what she would do. And then he would become angry; she would do as she was damn well told. Yet he could not escape the feeling that he was doing something very wrong. He sat alone in his kitchen drinking poteen by the range, drowning memories of Caitlin as a girl, Caitlin on the day she got the results of her exams, Caitlin as she filled a room with accomplished music, the very voice, it seemed, of her youthful hopes and dreams. Then, with the determination of a murderer, he conjured images of Caitlin in her blackest moods, the set of her mouth, the defiant toss of her head, and worst of all, the contempt which made her blue eyes smoulder when he told her off. “Brazen scut!” he slurred aloud to himself and swigged at the poteen. “Good riddance to her.” And he slumped into oblivion.

  The days were grey and cold. A bitter wind cut through the milking parlour. Still October and there was not a leaf left on the trees and the cows flared their nostrils across an unyielding expanse of ice in the water trough. Every morning at six o’clock Jack was in the field, breaking the ice and opening the gate to his patient cows, herding them up the road to be milked. The pains in Jack’s shoulders, in his back, and particularly in his hands were almost unbearable at times on these freezing mornings. He looked at his knuckles, raw with cold and barnacled with callouses, and fought the panic at not being able to straighten his fingers any more. How could these hands caress the flesh of a girl less than half his age? He thrust the thought from his mind. No details, just the blanket of duty, necessity. Abraham took him a handmaid when he needed a son. Jack would do likewise. The thought that he would have to talk to her terrified him as much as the thought of touching her. She was bright, so Malachai had said. But how sharp could a seventeen-year-old girl be? If she would only treat him well, that would be enough. And a little company in the evening. He imagined her rocking and singing quietly as she sewed something before the fire in the kitchen.

  Jack had been bright. There had been none brighter in the village in his day. The likes of Spillane and Brett couldn’t hold a candle to him. But his father had wanted him in the fields from dawn till dusk, ploughing furrows, making hay, sowing seed, picking rocks, digging trenches, harvesting beet, milking cows, rounding up calves for market. The chores were endless, the work merciless. In the end, so as not to miss school, Jack had risen an hour before his father, was in the fields by four, had done half a day’s work by eight and was walking the two miles to the village school. As soon as he got in from school in the evening there was more work to do. He couldn’t do his homework before seven in the evening and was usually so exhausted that he fell asleep on his books, filthy with sweat and dirt, his face often streaked with tears of frustration. And still, he did well in his Intermediate Certificate.

  It was in the year that followed, studying for the Leaving Certificate, that he could no longer cope. It seemed his wit and ability to assimilate information in spite of obstruction had reached its limit. In order to succeed it was necessary to put in hours of hard work, grappling with close pages of fluent Latin and mathematical theories which could build new dimensions for his mind to explore if only he could be allowed time to fashion them. His father never said a word but his steely eye was enough to let Jack know any slacking on the farm would be noted. To ignore such warnings was to invite close-fisted blows of full force, or even a horse whip across the shoulders. Always the threat was the same: there would be no farm to inherit if Jack did not work on it. The thirst of the land must be slaked; the thirst for knowledge could dry up Jack’s brain for all his father cared.

  The truth was that his father was terrified of losing his farm. If his son left him for university, for a finer life, then who would look after the land? Who would plough the fields when he could no longer uncurl his misshapen hands? The purpose of the cycle was never questioned and happiness was no more a consideration to him than it was to his cows. And Jack never thought for a moment that he might really have a choice. He had dropped out of school, and although one concerned Christian brother had visited his father to express his regret, there was never a real hope that the boy would return. Jack poured his learning into the soil, reci
ting aloud Latin declensions and accounts of Punic wars, mathematical formulae and verses of poetry in Gaelic and English. The greedy furrows closed on and smothered them. He had been about Caitlin’s age then. It was strange how now he could not remember how to distinguish one declension from another, could not now even vocalize thought with ease. He had learned to live silently, speaking only to communicate basic needs. Just like his father.

  By seven o’clock, the milking was done and Jack stood in the yard, pumping water over his boots before going inside. It was dark and there was more frost in the air. Once inside he boiled a pan of water on the range, poured some of it into an enamel bowl, took a small mirror from a drawer in the press, and sat down at the table to shave. Several times he nicked himself with the barber’s blade and cursed through a beard of soap. He eyed the thin wisps of greying hair as they fell across his forehead, and he recalled with sudden sadness his youthful good looks. How far they were from the weathered complexion and wrinkles he contemplated now! How would she like him for her husband, she who was so young and fresh? He cursed his age, the pain in his hands, and reflected that he and Caitlin might have been an ideal match were he twenty years younger. But he wasn’t ready then. He was ready now. Well then, he must face with courage whatever this course would bring.