The Green Road (3 page)

‘Get down there for me,’ she said to Hanna, ‘and check the holes in the wall.’

Hanna got right down. The walls, which were everywhere on the land, were forbidden to her and to Emmet for fear they’d knock the stones on top of themselves. The walls were older than the house, her granny said; thousands of years old, they were the oldest walls in Ireland. Up close, the stones were dappled with white and scattered with coins of yellow lichen, like money in the sunlight. And there was a white egg, not even dirty, tucked into a crevice where the ragwort grew.

‘Aha,’ said her granny.

Hanna placed the egg in the bowl and her granny put her fingers in there to stop the two eggs banging off each other. Hanna dipped into the wooden hen-house to collect the rest of them, in the rancid smell of old straw and feathers, while her granny stood out in the doorway and lowered the bowl for each new egg she found. As they turned back to the house, the old woman reached down and lifted one of the scratching birds – so easily – she didn’t even set the eggs aside. If Hanna ever tried tried to catch a hen, they jinked away so fast she was afraid she might give them a heart attack, but her granny just picked one up, and there it was, tucked under the crook of her arm, its red-brown feathers shining in the sun. A young cock, by the stubby black in his tail that would be, when he was grown, a proud array, shimmering with green.

As they walked across the back yard, Hanna’s father came out of the car house, which was an open-sided outhouse between the cowshed and the little alcove for turf. Her granny stood on tiptoe to shrug the bird over to him and it swung down from her father’s hand as he turned away. He was holding the bird by the feet and in his other hand was a hatchet, held close to the blade. He got the heft of this as he went to a broken bench Hanna had never noticed, which lived under the shelter of the car house roof. He slung the bird’s head on to the wood, so the beak strained forwards, and he chopped it off.

It was done as easy as her granny picking the bird up off the ground, it was done all in one go. He held the slaughtered thing up and away from him as the blood pumped and dribbled on to the cobblestones.

‘Oh.’ Her granny gave a little cry, as though some goodness had been lost, and the cats were suddenly there, lifting up on to their hind feet, under the bird’s open neck.

‘Go ’way,’ said her father, shoving one aside with his boot, then he handed the bird, still flapping, over to Hanna to hold.

Hanna was surprised by the warmth of the chicken’s feet, that were scaly and bony and should not be warm at all. She could feel her father laughing at her, as he left her to it and went into the house. Hanna held the chicken away from herself with both hands and tried not to drop the thing as it flapped and twisted over the space where its head used to be. One of the cats already had the fleshy cockscomb in its little cat’s teeth, and was running away with the head bobbing under its little white chin. Hanna might have screamed at all that – at the dangling, ragged neck and the cock’s outraged eye – but she was too busy keeping the corpse from jerking out of her hands. The wings were agape, the russet feathers all ruffled back and showing their yellow under-down, and the body was shitting out from under the black tail feathers, in squirts that mimicked the squirting blood.

Her father came out of the kitchen with the big pot of water, which he set on the cobbles.

‘Still going,’ he said.

‘Dada!’ said Hanna.

‘It’s just reflexes,’ he said. But Hanna knew he was laughing at her, because as soon as it was all over, the thing gave another jerk and her granny gave a sound Hanna had not heard before, a delighted crowing she felt on the skin of her neck. The old woman turned back into the kitchen to leave the eggs on the dresser, and came out fumbling a piece of twine out of her apron pocket as Hanna’s father took the chicken from her, finally, and dunked the thing in the vat of steaming water.

Even then, the body twitched, and the wings banged strongly, twice, against the sides of the pot.

In and out the carcass went. And then it was still.

‘That’s you now,’ he said to his mother, as he held a leg out for her to tie with her piece of twine.

After this, Hanna watched her granny string the chicken up by one leg on to a hook in the car house and pull the feathers off the bird with a loud ripping sound. The wet feathers stuck to her fingers in clumps: she had to slap her hands together and wipe them on the apron.

‘Come here now and I’ll show you how it’s done,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Hanna, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.

‘Ah now,’ said her granny.

‘I will not,’ said Hanna, who was crying.

‘Ah darling.’

And Hanna turned her face away in shame.

Hanna was always crying – that was the thing about Hanna. She was always ‘snottering’, as Emmet put it.
Oh, your bladder’s very close to your eyes
, her mother used to say, or
Your waterworks
, Constance called it, and that was another phrase they all used,
Here come the waterworks
, even though it was her brothers and sister who made her cry. Emmet especially, who won her tears from her, pulled them out of her face, hot and sore, and ran off with them, exulting.

‘Hanna’s crying!’

But Emmet wasn’t even here now. And Hanna was crying over a chicken. Because that’s what was under the dirty feathers: goose-bumped, white, calling out for roast potatoes.

A Sunday chicken.

And her granny was hugging her now, from the side. She squeezed Hanna’s upper arm.

‘Ah now,’ she said.

While Hanna’s father came across from the cowshed with a can of milk to be taken back home.

‘Will you live?’ he said.

When she got into the car, her father set the milk can between Hanna’s feet to keep it safe. The chicken was on the back seat, wrapped in newspaper and tied with string, its insides empty, and the giblets beside it in a plastic bag. Her father shut the car door and Hanna sat in silence while he walked around to the driver’s side.

Hanna was mad about her father’s hands, they were huge, and the sight of them on the steering wheel made the car seem like a toy car, and her own feelings like baby feelings she could grow out of some day. The milk sloshing in the can was still warm. She could feel the pound note down there too, snug against her ankle bone.

‘I have to go to the chemist’s for Granny,’ she said.

But her father made no answer to this. Hanna wondered, briefly, if he had heard the words, or if she had not uttered them out loud at all.

Her grandfather, John Considine, shouted at a woman once because she came into the Medical Hall and asked for something unmentionable. Hanna never knew what it was – you could die of the shame – it was said he manhandled the woman out into the street. Though other people said he was a saint – a saint, they said – to the townspeople who knocked him up at all hours for a child with whooping cough or an old lady crazed by the pain of her kidney stones. There were men from Gort to Lahinch who would talk to no one else if their hens were gaping or the sheep had scour. They brought their dogs in to him on a length of baling twine – wild men from the back of beyond – and he went into the dispensary to mix and hum; with camphor and peppermint oil, with tincture of opium and extract of male fern. As far as Hanna could tell, old John Considine was a saint to everyone except the people who did not like him, which was half the town – the other half – the ones who went to Moore’s, the chemist’s on the other side of the river, instead.

And she did not know why that might be.

Pat Doran, the garageman, said Moore’s was much more understanding of matters ‘under the bonnet’, but Considine’s was a superior proposition altogether when it came to the boot. So maybe that was the reason.

Or it might be something else, altogether.

Her mother saying:
They never liked us.

Her mother pulling her past a couple of old sisters on the street, with her ‘keep walking’ smile.

Emmet said their Grandfather Madigan was shot during the Civil War and their Grandfather Considine refused to help. The men ran to the Medical Hall looking for ointment and bandages and he just pulled down the blind, he said. But nobody believed Emmet. Their Grandfather Madigan died of diabetes years ago, they had to take off his foot.

Whatever the story, Hanna walked down to the Medical Hall that evening feeling marked, singled out by destiny to be the purveyor of old lady’s bottom cream, while Emmet was not to know their granny had a bottom, because Emmet was a boy. Emmet was interested in things and he was interested in facts and none of these facts were small and stupid, they were all about Ireland, and people getting shot.

Hanna walked down Curtin Street, past the window with its horn-sailed boat, past the cream tureen and the pink, felted cat. It was dusk and the lights of the Medical Hall shone yellow into the blue of the street. She went down on one knee in front of the counter, to get the pound note out of her sock.

‘It’s for my Granny Madigan,’ she said to Bart. ‘She says you’ll know what.’

Bart flapped a quick eyelid down and up again, then started to wrap a small box in brown paper. There was a shriek of Sellotape from the dispenser as he stuck the paper down.

‘How is she anyway?’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Hanna.

‘Same as ever?’

Some part of Hanna had hoped she would be allowed to keep the pound note but Bart put out his hand and she was obliged to hand the money over, pathetic as it looked, and soft with much handling.

‘I suppose,’ she said.

Bart straightened the note out, saying, ‘It’s beautiful out there all right. The little gentians in flower, maybe already. A little bright blue thing, you know it? A little star, blooming among the rocks?’

He put the old note on top of the pile of one pound notes stacked up in his till, and he let the clip slap down.

‘Yeah,’ said Hanna. Who was fed up of people talking about some tiny flower like it was amazing. And fed up of people talking about the view of the Aran Islands and the Flaggy fucking Shore. She looked at the soiled little note on top of the pile of crisp new notes, and she thought about her granny’s handbag, with nothing inside it.

‘All right?’ said Bart, because Hanna was stuck there for a moment, her skin was alive with the shame of it. Her father came from poor people. Handsome he might be and tall, but the bit of land he had was only rock and he did his business behind a hedge, like the rest of the Madigans before him.

Poor, stupid, dirty and poor.

That was entirely the problem between the Considines and the Madigans. That was the reason they did not get along.

‘Mind her change now,’ said Bart, sliding a ten pence and a five pence piece out along the curving plastic of the till.

‘Keep it, sure,’ said Hanna, airily, and she picked up the packet and walked out of the shop.

Later, in the church, she sat beside her father who knelt forward with his rosary beads hanging down over the rail in front of him. The beads were white. When he was finished praying, he lifted them high and dangled them into their little leather pouch, and they slid into it like water. The Madigans always went to Mass even though you didn’t have to go to Mass on Holy Thursday. Dan used to be an altar boy but this year he was in a white alb tied with a silken rope, with his own trousers underneath. And over that was a dress of sorts, in rough cream cloth. He was kneeling beside Father Banjo, helping him to wash people’s feet.

There were five people in chairs in front of the altar and the priest went along the row with a silver basin and splashed the feet of each one; young and old, with their bunions and verrucas and their thick yellow nails. Then he turned to Dan to take the white cloth, and he passed it along the top of each foot.

It was just symbolic. The people all had their feet well washed before they came out of the house, of course they had. And the priest didn’t really dry them properly either, so they had trouble getting their socks back on, afterwards. Dan inched along, trying not to get his knees trapped in the folds of his dress, looking holy.

On Good Friday there was nothing on telly all day except classical music. Hanna looked at the calendar that was hanging in the kitchen, with pictures of shiny black children sticking their tummies out under print dresses, and the priests beside them were robed in white. Above their vestments were ordinary, Irish faces, and they looked very happy with themselves and with the black children whose shoulders they touched, with big, careful hands.

Finally, at eight o’clock,
Tomorrow’s World
came on RTÉ 2 and they were watching this when they heard Dan go in to their mother. He stayed in the bedroom for hours, their two voices a passionate murmur. Their father sat pretending to doze by the range, and Constance dragged the listening children away from the foot of the stairs. After a long time Dan came down – sorted. Pleased with himself.

Their brother, a priest: it was, said Emmet, ‘Such a fucking joke.’ But Hanna felt momentous and sad. There were no flights home from the missions. Dan would leave Ireland for ever. And besides, he might die.