Foster

‘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.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Their hair, what else?’

‘But Mrs Kinsella’s hair is black.’

‘Black? Aye, black out of the dye-pot, you mean.’ She laughs.

I wonder at her laughing like this. I wonder at the clothes and how I’d worn them and the boy in the wallpaper and how I never put it all together. Soon we come to the place where the black dog is barking through the bars of the gate.

‘Shut up and get in, you,’ she says to him.

It’s a cottage she lives in with uneven slabs of concrete outside the front door, overgrown shrubs, and tall Red Hot Pokers growing out of the ground. Here I must watch my head, my step. When we go in, the place is cluttered and an older woman is smoking at the cooker. There’s a baby in a high chair. He lets out a cry when he sees the woman and drops a handful of marrowfat peas over the edge.

‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘The state of you.’

I’m not sure if it’s the woman or the child she is talking to. She takes off her cardigan and sits down and starts talking about the wake: who was there, the type of sandwiches that were made, the queen cakes, the corpse who was lying up crooked in the coffin and hadn’t even been shaved properly, how they had plastic rosary beads for him, the poor fucker.

I don’t know whether to sit or stand, to listen or leave but just as I’m deciding what to do, the dog barks and the gate opens and Kinsella comes in, stooping under the door frame.

‘Good evening all,’ he says.

‘Ah, John,’ the woman says. ‘You weren’t long. We’re only in the door. Aren’t we only in the door, Child?’

‘Yes.’

Kinsella hasn’t taken his eyes off me. ‘Thanks, Mildred. It was good of you, to take her home.’

‘It was nothing,’ the woman says. ‘She’s a quiet young one, this.’

‘She says what she has to say, and no more. May there be many like her,’ he says. ‘Are you ready to come home, Petal?’

I get up and he talks on a little, to smooth things over, the way people do. I follow him out to the car where the woman is waiting.

‘Were you alright in there?’ she says.

I say I was.

‘Did she ask you anything?’

‘A few things, nothing much.’

‘What did she ask you?’

‘She asked me if you used butter or margarine in your pastry.’

‘Did she ask you anything else?’

‘She asked me was the freezer packed tight.’

‘There you are,’ says Kinsella.

‘Did she tell you anything?’ the woman asks.

I don’t know what to say.

‘What did she tell you?’

‘She told me you had a little boy who followed the dog into the slurry tank and died, and that I wore his clothes to Mass last Sunday.’

When we get home, the hound gets up and comes out to the car to greet us. It’s only now I realise I’ve not heard either one of them call him by his name. Kinsella sighs and goes off to milk. When he comes inside, he says he’s not ready for bed and that there will be no visitors tonight anyhow, on account of the wake – not, he says, that he wants any. The woman goes upstairs and changes and comes back down in her nightdress. Kinsella has taken my shoes off and has put what I now know is the boy’s jacket on me.

‘What are you doing now?’ she says.

‘What does it look like? And she’ll break her neck in these.’

He goes out, stumbling a little, then comes back in with a sheet of sandpaper and scuffs up the soles of my new shoes so I will not slip.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’ll break them in.’

‘Didn’t she already break them in? Where are you taking her?’

‘Only as far as the strand,’ he says.

‘You’ll be careful with that girl, John Kinsella,’ she says. ‘And don’t you go without the lamp.’

‘What need is there for a lamp on a night like tonight?’ he says but he takes it anyhow, as it’s handed to him.