Foster

Now that my father has delivered me and eaten his fill, he is anxious to light his fag and get away. Always, it’s the same: he never stays in any place long after he’s eaten, not like my mother who would talk until it grew dark and light again. This, at least, is what my father says even though I have never known it to happen. With my mother it is all work: us, the butter-making, the dinners, the washing up and getting up and getting ready for Mass and school, weaning calves, and hiring men to plough and harrow the fields, stretching the money and setting the alarm. But this is a different type of house. Here there is room, and time to think. There may even be money to spare.

‘I’d better hit the road,’ Da says.

‘What hurry is on you?’ Kinsella says.

‘The daylight is burning, and I’ve yet the spuds to spray.’

‘There’s no fear of blight these evenings,’ the woman says, but she rises anyway, picks up the sharp knife and goes out the back door. I want to go with her, to shake the clay off whatever she cuts and carry it back into the house. A type of silence climbs and grows tall between the men while she is out.

‘Give this to Mary,’ she says, coming in. ‘I’m snowed under with rhubarb, whatever kind of year it is.’

My father takes it from her but it is as awkward as the baby in his arms. A stalk falls to the floor and then another. He waits for her to pick it up, to hand it to him. She waits for him to do it. Neither one of them will budge. In the end, it’s Kinsella who stoops to lift it.

‘There now,’ he says.

Out in the yard, my father throws the rhubarb onto the back seat, gets in behind the wheel and starts the engine.

‘Good luck to ye,’ he says. ‘I hope this girl will give no trouble.’ He turns to me then. ‘Try not to fall into the fire, you.’

I watch him reverse, turn into the lane, and drive away. I hear the wheels slam over the cattle grid, then the changing of gears and the noise of the motor going back the road we came. Why did he leave without so much as a good-bye, without ever mentioning that he would come back for me? The strange, ripe breeze that’s crossing the yard feels cooler now, and big white clouds have marched in across the barn.

‘What’s ailing you, Child?’ the woman says.

I look at my feet, dirty in my sandals.

Kinsella stands in close. ‘Whatever it is, tell us. We won’t mind.’

‘Lord God Almighty, didn’t he go and forget all about your bits and bobs!’ the woman says. ‘No wonder you’re in a state. Well, hasn’t he a head like a sieve, the same man.’

‘What matter,’ Kinsella says. ‘We’ll have you togged out in no time.’

‘There won’t be a word about it this time twelve months,’ the woman says.

They laugh hard for a moment then stop. When I follow the woman back inside, I want her to say something, to put my mind at ease. Instead, she clears the table, picks up the sharp knife and stands in the light under the window, washing the blade under the running tap. She stares at me as she wipes it clean, and puts it away.

‘Now, Girleen,’ she says. ‘I think it’s past time you had a bath.’

2

Beyond the kitchen, carpeted steps lead to an open room. There’s a big double bed with a candlewick spread, and lamps at either side. This, I know, is where they sleep, and I’m glad, for some reason, that they sleep together. The woman takes me through to a bathroom, plugs a drain and turns the taps on full. The bath fills and the white room changes so that a type of blindness comes over us; we can see everything and yet we can’t see.

‘Hands up,’ she says, and takes my dress off.

She tests the water and I step in, trusting her, but the water is too hot.

‘Get in,’ she says.

‘It’s too hot.’

‘You’ll get used to it.’

I put one foot through the steam and feel, again, the same rough scald. I keep my foot in the water, and then, when I think I can’t stand it any longer, my thinking changes, and I can. This water is deeper than any I have ever bathed in. Our mother bathes us in what little she can, and makes us share. After a while, I lie back and through the steam watch the woman as she scrubs my feet. The dirt under my nails she prises out with tweezers. She squeezes shampoo from a plastic bottle, lathers my hair and rinses the lather off. Then she makes me stand and soaps me all over with a cloth. Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

‘Now your clothes,’ she says.

‘I don’t have any clothes.’

‘Of course you don’t.’ She pauses. ‘Would some of our old things do you for now?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Good girl.’

She takes me to another bedroom past theirs, at the other side of the stairs, and looks through a chest of drawers.

‘Maybe these will fit you.’

She is holding a pair of old-fashioned trousers and a new plaid shirt. The sleeves and legs are too long but she rolls them up, and tightens the waist with a canvas belt, to fit me.

‘There now,’ she says.