The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (2 page)

The men leaned closer and breathed like undersea creatures, like the man on Harristown Bridge.

Part One

Harristown

Chapter 1

We Swineys were the hairiest girls in Harristown, Kildare, and the hairiest you’d find anywhere in Ireland from Priesthaggard to Sluggery. That is, our limbs were as hairless as marble, but on our heads, well, you’d not believe the torrents that shot from our industrious follicles like the endless Irish rain.

When we came into this world, our heads were not lightly whorled with down like your common infant’s. We Swineys inched bloodily from our mother’s womb already thickly ringleted. Thereafter that hair of ours never knew a scissor. It grew faster than we did, pawing our cheeks and seeking out our shoulder blades. As small girls, our plaits snaked down our backs with almost visible speed. That hair had its own life. It whispered round our ears, making a private climate for our heads. Our hair had its roots inside us, but it was outside us as well. In that slippage between our inner and outer selves – there lurked our seven scintillating destinies and all our troubles besides.

Back in the very beginning – long before Darcy ever marched us onto a stage or a man laid a hairbrush on me upon a bridge – we Swineys were born into the full melancholy of the Famine and lived in hungry and ungenteel seclusion on the Harristown estate in County Kildare, fatherless and befriended principally by the lice. In those days, when the Swiney sisters sang, our only accompanists were the slow crows whose constant keening hung in the ribbons of Harristown’s rain.

And it was remarkably fond of the rain where we were born. The sky was always weeping; the earth was a greedy sponge for it; the rain flowed down through our hair, inserted itself under our smocks and slid down to our feet. The thin geese were always slick with water; their eggs were slippery with it too and dropped through our hands, leaving all too few to trade with the travelling hagglers who passed through Harristown selling dusty semblances of tea and flour. The rain eased itself through the gutters and overflowed the barrels under the eaves.

You may be thinking now that my words are very and too much like the rain, pelting down on you without particularity or mercy. And I shall say that perhaps it is the rain forever scribbling on our roofs and our faces that teaches the Irish our unstinting verbosity. It’s what we have, instead of food or luck. Think of it as a generosity of syllables, a wishful giving of words when we have nothing else to offer by way of hospitality: we lay great mouthfuls of language on you to round your bellies and comfort your thoughts like so many boileds and roasts, or even a lick of Finn MacCool’s finger dipped in the milk that simmered the Salmon of Wisdom.

The little Swiney girls of Harristown occupied themselves not with wise salmon but with foolish geese as thin as a fat goose’s feather. When we were smaller than them, we were chased by the thin geese. When we grew a tint bigger, we chased them back. Darcy wrung their necks for them at Michaelmas, my sisters’ mouths candidly awater at the thought of goose fat on slices of Saturday’s little soda loaf baked in the turf stove that cast such a devilish light on our few pieces of pewter. Only I myself and our mother Annora had a scruple, and never laid a hand on a thin goose’s throat or even tasted a morsel of warm white friend. From each hatching, my mother always chose a favourite goose; it was invariably christened ‘Phiala’, meaning ‘saint’s name’. Annora would frequently call out to that saintly goose in a cooing voice, particularly in the dewy sadness of the evening.

And Darcy would mimic Annora’s voice mockingly, and then Enda would protest, ‘Where’s the harm in a goose, bless her?’

And Berenice, always contrary to her twin, sneered, ‘Don’t you sicken on yourself, being so sweet?’

But it was Berenice who sickened with the whooping cough, and filled our cottage to the rafters with her unearthly howls. Annora resorted to the folk remedy of a hair sandwich, cutting a curl from Berenice’s nape to put between two precious slices of bread that she threw out of the front door for an animal to eat. I saw Enda creeping outside later to rob the fox or stoat of his supper and Berenice of her cure. But Berenice recovered well enough to beat her when Enda boasted of it later.

The turf stove smoked in the kitchen that doubled as sleeping quarters for the youngest Swineys – Pertilly, Oona and Ida – who muddled together in a press bed unfolded every night. Some winters, our kitchen hosted the sourest cow in County Kildare, and her occasional spindly bracket calf, who usually died quite promptly on her curdled milk.

Sheets and shirts festooned our roof-beams, a constant virginal parade day. Our mother Annora laundered and ironed like a desperate woman to keep us in potatoes and Indian meal, but never enough of either. The Famine lasted longer in our house than it did elsewhere in Harristown. Many days we lived on turnip tops, or sand eels and seaweed brought by Joe on his cart from the coast. There were mornings when Annora gave us young hawthorn leaves to chew as there was nothing else. Or we breakfasted on the smell of rashers snorting out of the La Touche kitchens as we marched past their stone mansion’s rear end on our way to school in Brannockstown.

‘And sausages they’re having for themselves this morning.’ Pertilly could always tell what we weren’t eating.

‘With sage and apple gravy,’ she’d add wetly, for the hunger pumping through her body filled her mouth with saliva.

Like our next potato, the shelter of the cottage was uncertain. The rain made our floor dribble foaming mud, and whenever it happened to wax dry, our bodies baked under the rat-eaten thatch like little loaves ourselves. Whenever the wind blew bitter, it rifled the tired petticoats that served as curtains or searched out the fissures in the walls and came scything through our clothes to murder any living warmth on our skin. Then we took turns to lay our haunches on a perforated pot under which some precious coals pinkened. Otherwise, seated on our stake-legged stools, we competed with the thin geese for the warmth of the fire, taking a short heather besom to their roasted doings every morning.

Yet we were not the worst off. Our landlord John La Touche showed no sign of evicting us. Some days there was a whole potato for each of us in the straining basket – barely boiled ‘with the bone in’ so that our young teeth had something to learn on – and a kitchen of buttermilk in which to dip it. The Hunger had taken one in three in County Kildare. All around houses stood empty, except of rumoured bones. Certainly no Swineys but ourselves had survived the cull. The poorest children of Harristown were born with Famine’s imprint, like a bruise from a fist dark under their cheekbones and a startled look as if they’d just been kicked from behind towards their graves. Their mothers carried baby corpses around, begging for coffin money even at our poor door. Older children starved quickly and quietly; we came to know the pitiful signs of it and turned our heads from the sight of a boy or a girl whom we’d not see the next day. The adults went about it in wilder ways. You would not want to go to nearby Naas, the priest warned us, for fear of the mob that might lynch you for the meat on your bones, and its streets lined with those who’d delivered themselves to town just so that someone could witness them dying. They lay down in the street so they must be walked over.

Sometimes a living skeleton still stumbled into our hovel, violently soliciting a heel of bread. And one time Darcy came flying into the house with the news that, when emptying the chamber pot, she’d found something that had once been a man lying dead near the privy midden. I trotted to where the slow crows were wheeling like a doleful, graceful flight of mourning fans. Darcy parted the fronds of dripping grass and pointed.

I’d just four years myself then, and it was my first close-up corpse. I kneeled to look. I sobbed to see the grin stretched over his face and the grey skin that clung to the hollowness of his throat. Moths flickered on his collar. The rain sluiced tears into his open eyes.

‘Too weak to strangle an old goose for himself,’ Darcy concluded. ‘Though doubtless that was his plan. Manticory, stop that snivelling and close his eyes.’

‘Me? But—’

‘It shall be the worse for you if you do not.’

I laid my fat little fingers on his grainy lids and raked down his harsh lashes. Then Annora came out and commenced keening with the slow crows. I cried long shouting tears into her apron. She called down the blessings of the Holy Virgin and St Brigid upon the corpse and sent Darcy for the priest.

‘Is he our daddy then?’ I hiccoughed, looking carefully at the dead man’s hair.

Chapter 2

Our father was a sailor, Annora always told us, and he came back solely in the night once a year, when we were sleeping.

‘Why then and only then?’ Darcy would lament. ‘For why did he not wake us?’

‘He did not wish to do so, but he gave you loving looks from the doorway, God is my witness.’ Annora’s words whistled through the teeth that were always especially prominent whenever she talked about our father. She added, ‘And the Blessed Virgin too.’

The Pope had not long past declared the Virgin Mary free from any stain of Original Sin, a promotion popular with the Catholics in Ireland and particularly with Annora. As if to prove the point, the Virgin had quite promptly made a personal appearance at Lourdes.

‘Away with your Virgin!’ Darcy scowled. ‘It’s a dirty damned lie about the Da.’

I would push my small hand into Annora’s then, for I hated to see how her head dipped under the hard fists of Darcy’s words. Even in happy times, our mother’s low forehead was creased, with the air of a slap perpetually hanging around her face.

‘But, Darcy, you’ve the pennies for to prove it is God’s truth, may I never die in sin,’ Annora insisted. For our after-midnight papa also pressed salt-smelling pennies into the bib-pockets of our gathered-yoke smocks, which hung in a row by the door. The appearance of pennies was infallible after one of his visits, as tangible as a new sister three seasons later. Unfortunately our father had nothing more by way of money for us, his luck being perennially down on him, according to Annora, whose luck was none too sweet itself despite extensive applications on her knees to God.

In our cottage, the Almighty lived on a crucifix in the window with a spoon-sized stoup of holy water at his feet. Apart from the pennies, the only token of our nautical father was a seashell that hung from the rafters above the deal table. I loved to stand near it and imagine the sound of the sea that had beaten and rolled it to perfect smoothness. Inside that seashell burned a tallow candle on days when Annora could afford us that luxury. On the more frequent skinny evenings, a rush light fed on stinking fish oil pooled in the pearly well of its secret stomach.

All the Swiney riches grew on our heads. Perhaps those waterfalls of hair were our true paternal gift, for Annora’s greying plaits were limper than boiled string, a result of starving penances like those of her favourite saints. And there was paternal wealth in the wonder of our names: another of Annora’s tales was that our father chose each one.

Darcy objected to this too. ‘Is it mad you are? How could he know when we were babies how we would be in ourselves?’

‘He named you,’ said Annora tranquilly. ‘And you grew to suit.’

Certainly Annora herself would for choice have named us for some mutilated martyr of the Faith, and raised a flock of Brigids and Teresas. Instead, our names were pagan, and as rich and fine as we were not, yet written in a pen dipped in Irish ink for all that.

Would we ever have taken off so well if we had been named Brigid or Teresa and thuslike? The ‘Swiney’ part of our names did us no favours. The Eileen O’Reilly, the Brannockstown butcher’s runt, regularly hog-snorted Darcy on Harristown Bridge. Our surname carried a whiff of manure with it and also madness, the greatest Swiney of them all being a pagan poet-king from ten centuries past who broke a bishop’s bell and threw a precious psalter into the sea and was thereafter cursed to live bird-brained and bird-hearted in a tree.

The dead man by the privy midden turned out to be a tenant evicted by the Tyntes of Dunlavin.

He was not our father.

Our village, of course, had long since made up its mind that no single sailor could have fathered both Darcy’s coaly coils and Oona’s milky floes. Our neighbours did not believe in the ‘Phelan Swiney, Mariner’ named on Annora’s treasured marriage certificate and each subsequent birth entry in the parish register. Years later, even after we buried Annora in her self-laundered winding sheet, we seven hairy sisters never discussed among ourselves those whispers that followed us down the road. Yet we knew ourselves condemned as the seven bastard daughters of as many late-night sailors, a sorry fact that was said to explain our mother’s stark penances and her exiled existence in the back of beyond of Harristown, which was already far, far beyond the back of beyond. For all her fervid piety, Annora did not attend Mass with us, but stole into chapel for confession only when it was deserted. Our supposed variegated paternity also accounted for the fact that the cadaverous Father Maglinn, the hungriest priest in Ireland, never called on us to claim his tea and slice of soda bread.

Our papas were as likely bailiffs or rake-makers as mariners, tutted the villagers. They must have speculated: were only exceptionally hirsute men attracted to our mother?

‘A great sadness of it is that poor Annora Swiney never does her sums,’ I heard a woman whisper to Mrs Godlin in the dispensary. ‘They won’t be paying golden guineas, the men, the creatures. And a shilling won’t feed the new mouth born after.’