Annie Dunne (25 page)

‘He was somewhere at the edge of Kiltegan painting, some little beck he had found for himself, and the old man that lives down there, Mick Cullen, no relation, found him struggling and gasping on the grass. He was nigh blue in the face from lack of breath, but he was still awake, and he was pointing fiercely with a finger at his throat. Mick opened his mouth like he would be looking at a horse’s teeth, and saw there was a mess of bread and cheese down there. He thrust in his no doubt grimy hand and foostered about and his fingers touched on something small and hard, and he gripped it, and pulled it out. This gave breath to Matt, but the little item ripped the inside of his throat as it came out, for it proved to be a long thorn, that had lodged sideways there, in Matt’s throat. So then there was blood and pain, and Mick stopped the new van on the road that brings the new bakery bread to Kiltegan, heaven help us, and Matt was fetched into Baltinglass. His throat was swelling all the time, because the thorn off of a tree is a bad thorn, it will have rubbish on the tip. Mick was thinking he might have to punch a hole in Matt’s neck. But he’s in a bed in the hospital. And they think he will be all right in a few days. He’s breathing like a sick bullock, says Mick. And he is lucky to be alive.’

‘I was down that way and saw nothing.’

‘Well, that’s it. He could have just died where he was. I only just heard the story from one of the O’Toole boys that was coming up by the forest track. They know we know him.‘

‘I will go down to Baltinglass and see him, Sarah. You must mind the children. Egg in a cup they want for tea.’

‘All right, Annie. If you go down now you will hardly be back tonight. Maybe they will give you a niche in the hospital.’

‘It is not a place I want to spend the night.’

‘Why so, Annie?’

‘They can call it what they like, but it is still the old county home where my poor father breathed his last.’

‘God rest him. Don’t mind that old story now, Annie. Matt needs someone by him.’

‘All right, Sarah.’

‘Bring your old nightgown, just in case.’

‘I will.’

‘And a change of knickers.’

‘I will.’

‘You don’t want them to be thinking we don’t change our underclothes.’

‘We don’t.’

Then she goes to the half-door and leans out, roaring.

‘Come in, come in, children, come in, come in!’ Then turns to me again. ‘I am missing Red Dandy,’ she says. ‘I can spot her nowhere.’

‘She’ll be hiding in the barn,’ I say. ‘That is her wont.’

‘Aye. She will come to the grain tonight, I’m sure.’

I pack my few things in a bundle and I kiss the returning children, and go.

‘Annie,’ says the little boy, ‘Annie, come here a minute, will you?’

‘I can’t now,’ I say, my feet already set for the Baltinglass road, passing on, passing on.

He comes down to the old round pillars of the gates. The moss grows lightly there, and little ferns. Sometimes I lean there, in less fervent days, watching the failing of the light, stroking the smooth old stones. It is the mark of the place, those pillars, pillars almost of dreams.

‘I want to be whispering secrets,’ he says, in the very language of Wicklow. His Dublin ways are deserting him. It is not just the butter that is in him now, but even the words of Kelsha.
I want to be whispering secrets
...

‘And we will whisper all our secrets, when I get back,’ I say. I won’t worry him with the reason for my going. He is a worrier, a worrier, like my own father. ‘Don’t worry yourself. Bye-bye.’

‘Bye-bye, Auntie Anne.’ He lifts a hand, like a country boy. ‘Bye-bye!’

‘We thought it was a fishbone,’ says the little nurse, dressed in her suit as tightly as a rosebud, all round, pink flesh and white starch, ‘but he was not eating fish. We carefully examined it, and deemed it to be a thorn, of a hawthorn maybe. He was only eating bread and cheese. So it is a mystery.’

I nod my head. I am beginning to be very uncomfortable about this talk of thorns. I have gained a lift, and was dropped off at the old grey gates of the county - of the hospital. There is little change. The same sad laurels line the avenue. The low, one-storey building still lies in the grass like a fallen cross. I think of that bleak day, turning in here in the Ford, my father clear raving in the back, then dragged into the heavy precincts of the home, and then placed in a lone, locked room. I will never forget his silence then, his hunched figure in his ill-fitting suit - for he was shrinking away with age - the entire defeat of the man. He knew where he was and did not know why I was putting him there. He could not see his own violence, his own rage, it was invisible to him. He could not fathom why a daughter would bury her father there, in that deep, dark room.

‘I will go and see him, if I may,’ I say, just like in days of old, when I would visit my degraded father.

‘You may,’ she says. ‘Oh, he is breathing much better. His throat inside is hard and sore, and will be horrible uncomfortable for him now the while. But he will mend, we do hope.’

‘You are sure and certain?’ I say.

‘You are what to him, ma’am?‘ she says, and sadly, sadly, yes, she glances at my bowed back. ’Sister, wife?‘

‘Not wife, God forbid. I am a maiden woman. I am his sister-in-law. But, we are close-knit.’

Why do I say God forbid, when in truth ... No matter. She is only looking for information, she is writing it down now on a card,
sister-in-law
...

‘And his true wife, where is she?’

What does that mean, true wife?

‘She is dead, Nurse, she is no more.’

‘And what was her name?’

‘Maud, it was.’

‘And your own?’

‘It is Annie Dunne.’

‘And his nearest relative would be then?’

‘His son, Tim, but he is in Spain. Then there is his son Trevor, but he is in England. He has brothers, but some of them are dead, and he has a ... he does not go home to Cork where he comes from, I don’t know why ...’

‘Oh, well,’ she says, brightly, quite fed up with such complications. ‘Well, so, you must do as next of kin, if we had to, you know, operate, or the like.’

‘I think I would do.’

‘Well, sure his eyes are open. He is not unconscious. Go in and have a gander, Annie.’

‘Thank you, I will.’

And off goes her small person, her scrunched-up buttocks heaving about in the uniform as she disappears into the ancient shadows of the corridor. It was in the last room, behind the last door, that my father lay. In that time there was a ward close by with the madwomen of the district strapped to the beds, and when my father cried out in the nights with mournful horrors, he would set off the great long rows of grandmothers and mothers and aunts, wailing and caterwauling. It was a terrible, accusing sound, the sound of our refuse, as one might say, and our failure of love. His solo sorrow, their dark choir of pain. Now such unwanted women are in the new mental asylum in Carlow, still in their rows, but the beds and walls are new. God keep Sarah and me from such drastic fates.

I peep into Matt’s quarters. It is a shock to see him. His face is blotchy and streaked. They have not washed the mud off him, which may well be the mere mud attaching in a usual, daily fashion to Mick Cullen, who is after all, a digger of drains. Which is why Sarah Cullen always says,
no relation.

I think it is that even the sunlight here is old, comes from another time through the exhausted windows. It lies anyhow at the foot of Matt’s bed. He looks like a saint of old, some hardy creature washed up there, a worn-out boxer or the like, perhaps a victorious boxer half destroyed by his own victory. Well, he looks resplendent enough. His eyes are indeed open, but he holds his head still, he sees me there but does not move that head. Even from the door I can see the swollen neck. It is angry and red. But a blackthorn is a bad thorn, as anyone knows, when it sticks in a person’s hand it lends a severe ache long after it is pulled out.

How do I know it was a blackthorn? Well I know it. He was eating his bread and cheese.

I approach his bed, contrite and smiling. He tries to give a small nod of greeting, but immediately his eyes scrunch up with pain.

‘Don’t move yourself, Matt,’ I say, ‘don’t trouble yourself. I am sorry to see you like this. The nurse says you will quickly mend.’

But of course he cannot reply. There is an unworthy feeling in me now, a kind of petty triumph. I could do him harm now. I could dispatch him from life in this weakened state. Of course I do not want to, he is too dear to me, to the children, to the memory of Maud. But and, I could. That is the point.

But I cast that thought from my mind. I must not think thoughts in that manner. And why ever do I think such thoughts? I am already responsible, though I hope innocently, for his present predicament.

It will have been my butter he brought for his sandwich, the wrap of butter I gave him in friendship, with the thorn off a blackthorn tree in it, to keep it fresh.

Did I tell him there would be a thorn in the butter? I do not think so, and him in truth a city man, and so not expecting such an item.

God forgive me, he may think I was trying to murder him, if ever he finds out.

Into my mind, I know not why, swims the picture of Cupid with his bow. But the thorn of a blackthorn bush is a poor dart for such a purpose.

Maybe I meant to kill him. Maybe there is a darkness in me, that meant to do him harm, without me even knowing. I shiver in this possibility of evil, I shiver. The more I think it, the more true I feel it. Guilt grips me, guilt grips me, and then suddenly I laugh, laugh at myself and my terrible notions. I have no wish to kill Matt. And he will not know about butter and thorns. It will remain a mystery, it will, mercifully.

Oh, I am laughing like a hag at his bedside. His eyes open wider, questioning maybe. But I have no answers to his questions, no grist for his mill, for the mills of the world grind everything exceedingly small and rough. No verse for his chapter, no path for his woods.

They put me that night into my father’s old room. It is a strange coincidence. No other room can take me, and otherwise I would be sitting on a hard chair in the corridor. I tell myself it will be no worse than spending a night at Lathaleer, that a living person must not fear the dead, especially if the dead was close and precious to her heart.

And I sleep a clear and restful night. I wonder at the accident that has brought me there. For what purpose? Such peace, such rest. No dreams, no frighting thoughts. It is very strange. Though I fear the room greatly as I enter, they have painted the old yellow walls with a fresh, buttery colour, there are a few coals burning in the once famished grate, and the iron bed that was his raft of dreams is gone, replaced by a spanking new thing of shining chrome. The sheets, which in his day were speckled by mildews and filth, are Belfast quality and well starched. The atmosphere of the room has been allayed, removed. It is just a place, a new place. His ghost is gone.

And yet in another way I feel his ghost, benign and loving, fatherly and kind. I have lain on the bed and looked at the ceiling that he looked at, in the watches of his last days. And there is no terror. I think it is that he has wrapped me round all that night. His released soul watches over me, his ageing daughter. In that place where I thought I witnessed only horror, perhaps I was in some manner mistaken. Maybe it was not horror I was looking at, all those years ago, twenty-five years and more, a man stripped of all uniforms and honours, duties and family, even kings and country. Maybe the horror was only in me, as I gazed on my fallen father. For his ghost, if ghost it is that lets me sleep, sleep finer than for many a year, is benign and calm.

Maybe now I think it was not horror after all that I was looking at, in those fled days, but courage.