Foster (3 page)

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. 

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 scent 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.

‘Isn’t she tall?’ says the assistant.

‘We’re all tall,’ says the woman.

‘She’s the spit and image of her mammy. I can see it now,’ the assistant says, and then says the lilac dress is the best fit and the most flattering, and the woman agrees. She buys me a printed blouse, too, with short sleeves much like the one she wore the day I came, dark blue trousers, and a pair of black leather shoes with a little strap and a buckle on the front, some panties and white ankle socks. The girl hands her the docket, and she takes out her purse and pays for it all.

‘Well may you wear,’ the assistant says. ‘Isn’t your mammy good to you?’

Out in the street, the sun feels strong again, blinding. Some part of me wishes it would go away, that it would cloud over so I could see properly. We meet people the woman knows.
Some of these people stare at me and ask who I am. One of them has a new baby in a pushchair. Mrs Kinsella bends down and coos and he slobbers a little and starts to cry.

‘He’s making strange,’ the mother says. ‘Pay no heed.’

We meet another woman with eyes like picks, who asks whose child I am, who I am belonging to? When she is told, she says, ‘Ah, isn’t she company for you all the same, God help you.’

Mrs Kinsella stiffens. ‘You must excuse me,’ she says, ‘but this man of mine is waiting and you know what these men are like.’

‘Like fecking bulls, they are,’ the woman says. ‘Haven’t an ounce of patience.’

‘God forgive me but if I ever run into that woman again it will be too soon,’ says Mrs Kinsella, when we have turned the corner.

We go to the butchers for rashers and sausages and a horseshoe of black pudding, to the chemist where she asks for Aunt Acid, and
then on down to a little shop she calls the gift gallery where they sell cards and notepaper and pretty pieces of jewellery from a case of revolving shelves.

‘Isn’t your mammy’s birthday coming up shortly?’

‘Yes,’ I say, without being sure.

‘We’ll get a card for her, so.’

She tells me to choose, and I pick a card with a frightened-looking cat sitting in front of a bed of yellow dahlias.

‘Not long now till they’ll be back to school,’ says the woman behind the counter. ‘Isn’t it a great relief to have them off your back?’

‘This one is no trouble,’ Mrs Kinsella says, and pays for the card along with some sheets of notepaper and a packet of envelopes. ‘It’s only missing her I’ll be when she is gone.’

‘Humph,’ the woman says.

Before we go back to the car she lets me loose in a sweet shop. I take my time choosing, hand over the pound note and take back the change.

‘Didn’t you stretch it well,’ she says, when I come out.

Kinsella is parked in the shade, with the windows open, reading the newspaper.

‘Well?’ he says. ‘Did ye get sorted?’

‘Aye,’ she says.

‘Grand,’ he says.

I give him the Choc-ice and her the Flake and lie on the back seat eating the hard gums, careful not to choke as we cross over bumps in the road. I listen to the change rattling in my pocket, the wind rushing through the car and their talk, scraps of news being shared between them in the front.

When we turn into the yard, another car is parked outside the door. A woman is on the front step, pacing, with her arms crossed.

‘Isn’t that Harry Redmond’s girl?’

‘I don’t like the look of this,’ says Kinsella.

‘Oh, John,’ she says, rushing over. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you but didn’t our Michael pass away and there’s not a soul at home. They’re all out
on the combines and won’t be back till God knows what hour and I’ve no way of getting word to them. We’re rightly stuck. Would you ever come down and give us a hand digging the grave?’

‘I don’t know that this’ll be any place for you but I can’t leave you here,’ the woman says, later that same day. ‘So get ready and we’ll go, in the name of God.’

I go upstairs and change into the new dress, the ankle socks and shoes.

‘Don’t you look nice,’ she says, when I come down. ‘John’s not always easy but he’s hardly ever wrong.’

Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might come and fall and change things. We pass houses whose doors and windows are wide open, long, flapping clotheslines, gravelled entrances to other lanes. At the bend, a bay pony is leaning up against a gate, but
when I reach out to stroke his nose, he whinnies and canters off. Outside a cottage, a black dog with curls all down his back comes out and barks at us, hotly, through the bars of a gate. At the first crossroads, we meet a heifer who panics and finally races past us, lost. All through the walk, the wind blows hard and soft and hard again through the tall, flowering hedges, the high trees. In the fields, the combines are out cutting the wheat, the barley and oats, saving the corn, leaving behind long rows of straw. We meet men on tractors, going in different directions, pulling balers to the fields, and trailers full of grain to the co-op. Birds swoop down, brazen, eating the fallen seed off the middle of the road. Further along, we meet two barechested men, their eyes so white in faces so tanned and dusty.

The woman stops to greet them and tells them where we are going.

‘God rest him. Didn’t he go quick in the end?’ one man says.

‘Aye,’ says the other. ‘But didn’t he reach his three score and ten? What more can any of us hope for?’

We keep on walking, standing in tight to the hedges, the ditches, letting things pass.

‘Have you been to a wake before?’ the woman asks.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, I might as well tell you: there will be a dead man here in a coffin and lots of people and some of them might have a little too much taken.’

‘What will they be taking?’

‘Drink,’ she says.

When we come to the house, several men are leaning against a low wall, smoking. There’s a black ribbon on the door and hardly a light shining from the house but when we go in, the kitchen is bright, and packed with people who are talking. The woman who asked Kinsella to dig the grave is there, making sandwiches. There are big bottles of red and white lemonade, stout,
and in the middle of all this, a big wooden box with an old dead man lying inside of it. His hands are joined as though he had died praying, a string of rosary beads around his fingers. Some of the men are sitting around the coffin, using the part that’s closed as a counter on which to rest their glasses. One of these is Kinsella.

‘There she is,’ he says. ‘Long Legs. Come over here.’

He pulls me onto his lap, and gives me a sip from his glass.

‘Do you like the taste of that?’

‘No.’

He laughs. ‘Good girl. Don’t ever get a taste for it. If you start, you might never stop and then you’d wind up like the rest of us.’

He pours red lemonade into a cup for me. I sit on his lap drinking it and eating the queen cakes out of the biscuit tin and looking at the dead man, hoping his eyes will open.

The people come and go, drifting in and out, shaking hands, drinking and eating and looking
at the dead man, saying what a lovely corpse he is, and doesn’t he look happy now that his end has come, and who was it that laid him out? They talk of the forecast and the moisture content of corn, of milk quotas and the next general election. I feel myself getting heavy on Kinsella’s lap.

‘Am I getting heavy?’

‘Heavy?’ he says. ‘You’re like a feather, Child. Stay where you are.’

I put my head against him but I’m bored and wish there were things to do, other children who would play.

‘The girl’s getting uneasy,’ I hear the woman say.

‘What’s ailing her?’ says another.

‘Ah, it’s no place for the child, really,’ she says. ‘It’s just I didn’t like not to come, and I wouldn’t leave her behind.’

‘Sure I’ll take her home with me, Edna. I’m going now. Can’t you call in and collect her on your way?’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I don’t know should I.’

‘Mine’d be a bit of company for her. Can’t they play away out the back? And that man there won’t budge as long as he has her on his knee.’

Mrs Kinsella laughs. I’ve never heard her laugh like this.

‘Sure maybe, if you don’t mind, you would, Mildred,’ she says. ‘What harm is in it? And you know we’ll not be long after you.’

‘Not a bother,’ the woman says.

When we are out on the road, and the goodbyes are said, Mildred strides on into a pace I can just about keep, and as soon as she rounds the bend, the questions start. She is eaten alive with curiosity; hardly is one question answered before the next is fired: ‘Which room did they put you into? Did Kinsella give you money? How much? Does she drink at night? Does he? Are they playing cards up there much? Who was there? What were they selling the lines for? Do ye say the rosary? Does she put butter
or margarine in her pastry? Where does the old dog sleep? Is the freezer packed solid? Does she skimp on things or is she allowed to spend? Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?’

I answer them all easily, until the last.

‘The child’s clothes?’

‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Sure if you’re sleeping in his room you must surely know. Did you not look?’

‘Well, she had clothes I wore for all the time I was here but we went to Gorey this morning and bought all new things.’

‘This rig-out you’re wearing now? God Almighty,’ she says. ‘Anybody would think you were going on for a hundred.’

‘I like it,’ I say. ‘They told me it was flattering.’

‘Flattering, is it? Well. Well,’ she says. ‘I suppose it is, after living in the dead’s clothes all this time.’

‘What?’

‘The Kinsellas’ young lad, you dope. Did you not know?’

I don’t know what to say.

‘That must have been some stone they rolled back to find you. Sure didn’t he follow that auld hound of theirs into the slurry tank and drown? That’s what they say happened anyhow,’ she says.

I keep on walking and try not to think about what she has said even though I can think of little else. The time for the sun to go down is getting close but the day feels like it isn’t ending. I look at the sky and see the sun, still high, and clouds, and, far away, a round moon coming out.

‘They say John got the gun and took the hound down the field but he hadn’t the heart to shoot him, the softhearted fool.’

We walk on between the bristling hedges in which small things seem to rustle and move. Chamomile grows along these ditches, wood sage and mint, plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me. Further along, the same lost heifer is still lost, in a different part of the road.

‘And you know, the pair of them turned white overnight.’