Foster

I look at the day. The day is like any other, with a flat grey sky hanging over the yard and the wet hound on watch outside the front door.

‘Well, I had better milk early, so,’ he says. ‘Right,’ and goes on down the yard past me as though I have already gone.

The woman gives me a brown leather bag. ‘You can keep this old thing,’ she says. ‘I never have use for it.’

We fold my clothes and place them inside, along with the books we bought at Webb’s in Gorey: Heidi, What Katy Did Next, The Snow Queen. At first, I struggled with some of the bigger words but Kinsella kept his fingernail under each, patiently, until I guessed it and then I did this by myself until I no longer needed to guess, and read on. It was like learning to ride the bike; I felt myself taking off, the freedom of going places I couldn’t have gone before, and it was easy.

Mrs Kinsella gives me a bar of yellow soap and my facecloth, the hairbrush. As we gather all these things together, I remember the days we spent, where we got them, what was sometimes said, and how the sun, for most of the time, was shining.

Just then a car pulls into the yard. It’s a neighbouring man I remember from the night of cards.

‘Edna,’ he says in a panic. ‘Is John about?’

‘He’s out at the milking,’ she says. ‘He should be finishing up now.’

He runs down the yard, heavy in his Wellington boots, and a minute later, Kinsella sticks his head around the door.

‘Joe Fortune needs a hand pulling a calf,’ he says. ‘Would you ever just finish the parlour off? I have the herd out.’

‘I will, surely,’ she says.

‘I’ll be back just as soon as I can.’

‘Don’t I know you will.’

She puts on her anorak and goes down the yard to the milking parlour. I sit restless and wonder should I go out to help but come to the conclusion that I’d only be in the way. So I sit in the armchair and look out to where a watery light is trembling across the scullery, shining off the zinc bucket. I could go down to the well for water so she would have the well water for her tea when she gets back home tonight. It could be the last thing I do.

I put on the boy’s jacket and take up the bucket and walk down the fields. I know the way along the track and past the cows, the electric fences, could find the well with my eyes closed. When I cross the stile the path does not look like the same path we followed on that first evening here. The way is muddy now and slippery in places. I trudge along, towards the little iron gate and down the steps. The water is much higher these days. I was on the fifth step that first evening here, but now I stand on the first and see the edge of the water reaching up and just about sucking the edge of the step that’s one down from me. I stand there breathing, making the sounds for a while to hear them coming back, one last time. Then I bend down with the bucket, letting it float then swallow and sink as the woman does but when I reach out with my other hand to lift it, another hand just like mine seems to come out of the water and pull me in.

8

It is not that evening or the following one but the evening after, on the Sunday, that I am taken home. After I came back from the well, soaked to the skin, the woman took one look at me and turned very still before she gathered me up and took me inside and made up my bed again. The following morning, I didn’t feel hot, but she kept me upstairs, bringing me hot drinks with lemon and cloves and honey, aspirin.

‘’Tis nothing but a chill, she has,’ I heard Kinsella say.

‘When I think of what could have happened.’

‘If you’ve said that once, you’ve said it a hundred times.’

‘But –’

‘Nothing happened, and the girl is grand. And that’s the end of it.’

I lie there with the hot-water bottle, listening to the rain and reading my books, following what happens more closely and making up something different to happen at the end of each, each time. I doze and have strange dreams: of the lost heifer panicking on the night strand, of bony, brown cows having no milk in their teats, of my mother climbing up and getting stuck in an apple tree. Then I wake and take the broth and whatever else I’m given.

On Sunday, I am allowed to get up, and we pack everything again, as before. Towards evening, we have supper, and wash and change into our good clothes. The sun has come out, is lingering in long, cool slants, and the yard is dry in places. Sooner than I would like, we are ready and in the car, turning down the lane, going up through the street of Gorey and on back along the narrow roads through Carnew and Shillelagh.

‘That’s where Da lost the red heifer playing cards,’ I say.

‘Is that a fact?’ Kinsella says.

‘Wasn’t that some wager?’ says the woman.

‘It was some loss for him,’ says Kinsella.