Megan's Year (2 page)

Next day we get a bit of luck. Mr. Flynn needs Daddy's help putting on a new roof. That's good news because it means we can park in his field for a week. There's a stream with fish on the property Flynn lets us kids keep half of what we catch. The other half goes to him.

We're out the door, breakfast in our hands. The stream runs cold and clear like a chip of ice. We step into the water with our fishing poles and moan and groan until we get used to the cold. I get the first fish. It's a trout, slippery with wanting to get away, its belly speckled in rainbow colors.

Flynn pays us for picking his raspberries. Mrs. Flynn keeps a sharp eye to be sure we don't eat them. Afterward we go off into the heath to find wild bilberries. We stick out our purple tongues and make each other laugh.

Now it's cleaning chimneys and mucking out stables and any dirty job that will bring a euro or two. We're on the road most of the time until the white flowers of the potato plants drop off and it's time to dig potatoes. Tim and Jimmy and me are out in the fields. Our knees are sore from kneeling and we'll never get the dirt out from under our nails. When everyone is paid, the twins and me get five euros each.

Leaves blow across the roads and the fields are dotted with flocking blackbirds. The cuckoo is long gone and so are the swallows. We're off to the big city of Dublin. It's time for the winter Megan.

Mammy says there's no learning for us in the country and we kids just run wild. She's happiest in the city where you can turn on and off the river of water that hides in the pipes. With a flick of a switch you can make the sun shine in the house. If we're hungry there's a building where you ride an elevator to an office and they give you money for food.

Daddy says it's unhealthy in the city with bad air that's all used up and how can he keep an eye on us kids in the city? Who knows what trouble we'll get into sitting around watching the telly in somebody's house? He doesn't like taking the handout from the building with the elevators. In the summer he can find work. In the city no one wants him. In the city there's no place to go and nothing to do that doesn't cost money.

We live scrunched together in our
tigin,
one of two dozen that are all alike.
You
have to look at the numbers to be sure you're home. Shut inside is like being in prison. Three of us girls sleep in one bed; my two brothers in another. Willie won't come inside but curls up under the caravan. He wants to be sure we won't leave without him.

Daddy goes from yard to yard collecting scrap metal to sell. Mammy goes from house to house asking for used clothes. One day she got me a velvet dress but most of the time Mammy sells what she gets to help toward our school uniforms and books.

We go to St. John's National School. Daddy stayed late cutting oats so I'm two weeks behind in my class. In the hall Bridget gives me a push and calls me a stupid tinker. She laughs at me because my uniform is last year's and too short.

I call Bridget a name in
Gammon.
Sister Joseph frowns but she doesn't know what I've said. She tells Bridget she lacks charity and has her stay after school and write out twenty times:
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Sister Joseph tells Bridget, “Our Lord was often on the road.”

Sister has me stay after school to help me catch up with my reading. I ask her, “Have you got a book with summer in it?”

Tim's learning to be an electrician. Yesterday he took a radio someone threw away and made it work. He likes Dublin and says it's where he'll live when he's grown.

Jimmy is on the hurling team at school. Hurling is played with sticks and a ball that can go 150 kilometers a minute. He wants to live in a city and get on a professional team.

Daddy doesn't like it that his boys won't be on the road. I tell him I will be, for sure.

This morning I'm in the computer room at school. I get restless and stare out the window. It's April and the summer birds are returning. Yesterday I saw my first swallow. The buds on the trees are showing green and the rain this morning on the way to school was warm. In Flynn's stream the fish will be jumping for the spring bugs. On the farms they'll be plowing the potato beds.