The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (3 page)

BOOK: The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters
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When she saw me staring, she clapped her hand over her mouth. But the idea was sown in my head, and images began to burn behind my eyes. I felt pity for my mother. I was all of eleven then, but mature as country children are, in earthy knowledge.

I imagined the shilling clinking on the table – and the man and Annora hurriedly re-dressing with their backs to one another, she nervously chattering, ‘And if you were ever to be blessed with a little daughter, what would you dream of calling her, God increase you?’

Perhaps she hoped that each man’s heaving back – I pictured it pelted like a bear’s – hid her from the sin-seeking eye of Our Lord and His retributive gift of fecundity. And a few weeks later, alone, retching into the wooden bucket, it would never occur to her to betray her faith and her loving heart by putting an end to the starting of one of God’s children, even though there was a Church of Ireland baker’s wife in Kilcullen known to have a pair of murdering knitting needles and a delicately bloodstained basin.

I hated the brackish talk about Annora. I wanted to believe in Phelan Swiney, Mariner, even when Darcy boldly pronounced him ‘a great fornicator and a feckless fellow himself’ every time Annora’s bucket announced a new sister. And she declared that she would set up a fierce trap for the sneaking-away legs of him, if only she were ever given notice of one of his arrivals.

But even I could see that a multiplicity of fathers might account for the dire lack of sisterly harmony among us Swineys, it being seldom that we were not at deadly combat, either one upon another, or in conspiring alliances. There was never a thing Annora could do or say to keep one of us off the neck of another.

From the grimed windows our tiny cottage issued some of the largest noises you’d hear in Ireland – noises of gnashing, squealing, screaming and weeping, as if Hell had opened a private fissure in our earth floor and a section of the Devil’s congregation was taking the air in Harristown.

‘Mine!’ was the most frequent word shouted.

There was precious little a small Swiney might call her own in that bare cottage, and the only privacy was under a blanket. Even there, we could still hear our tormentors. Our abuse and our rejoinders were as threadbare as ourselves.

‘You’re a stupid scrattock.’

‘No,
you’re
the stupid scrattock.’

‘It’s you yourself who is the scrattock.’

‘Scrattock!’

‘Leave me alone, why don’t you?’ was next in our lexicon, followed by, ‘Just close the mouth on you and be done with your ceaseless maundering.’

The fiercest portion of tears and screams issued from our twins Berenice and Enda. Darcy had taught them to hate one another in their cradles, she boasted, always feeding one at the expense of the other.

‘It was never right,’ Annora said, ‘the way you teased those babes with the bottle, Darcy Swiney, and now look.’

With each new inch Berenice and Enda were growing to hate one another more than tenant and landlord’s agent, or certain shades of yellow and purple. But like tenant and landlord’s agent, the twins grew into themselves living solely for their epic enmity. They would be nothing without it, or without one another; they were like the tongs and griddle by the hearth, which were themselves frequently deployed as weapons by Berenice and Enda, for their vendettas had a simple brutality to them.

Enda explained the little puckered birthmark on her neck by saying that Berenice had tried to gnaw her head off when they still shared close quarters in Annora’s belly. One of Enda’s revenges was to unpick every stitch in Berenice’s drawers, fastening them with flour paste so that they fell off on the way to school. Berenice was not lacking in devices of her own. She was a genius for an ambush by the water butt, where she would hold Enda’s head down until her twin nearly gurgled her last.

Darcy seemed to thrive on the twins’ troubles. So much the worse for any sister who tried to make a pious peace or mend a rupture between her siblings.

‘Let them be or be having you,’ she told us, even after Enda left a dead crow, quickening with maggots, under Berenice’s pillow.

‘It’s a relief to them to beat on one another,’ she assured me, when Berenice retaliated by trying to stuff the crow’s beak into Enda’s mouth, shouting, ‘Did you ate your enough of poultry yet?’

Not satisfied with Enda’s bleeding lip and the great blackness of feathers she was spitting from her mouth, Berenice marched up to Father Maglinn and informed him that her twin had perished of her throat in the night and required a pit dug for her grave.

The passions of the twins toppled their siblings into two camps. You were either for one or the other. Plump Pertilly and feverish little Ida followed vivacious Berenice; blonde Oona and I were with Enda, who had a natural elegance about her. Enda was tender and sweet, brushing her favourites’ hair and saving us morsels from her plate.

So Oona was guilty of leading Ida into the estate woods and leaving her there with a promise of a visit from a leprechaun. Berenice found her only when the moon was high and Ida’s imagination had confected a wolf crouching in the bushes. The beast was so real to her that Berenice had to beat the bush with a stick before Ida would consent to come home. The next morning Ida herself hid by the woodpile, reaching out a sly hand to trip up Oona, leaving the pretty ankles on her flailing in the air. Then there was Oona stuffing straw under the blanket where it lay atop Pertilly so the Dunlavin banshee or the horned Witch of Slievenamon, when those ladies called on our cottage in the dead of night, would see the grand mound, think it a fine fat girl, and devour Pertilly first. Nor was I innocent. I earned Ida’s little fists windmilling at my hip after she saw a piece of mischief I wrote about her on the barn wall.

The only one not aligned was Darcy, who feared no one but relied on everyone to be afraid of her. She did not scruple to give any man, woman or rabid dog the length and breadth of her tongue at any time at all, and the flat of her hard hand might win prizes for its warlike prowess too.

‘It is ashamed you should be of yourselves,’ were the words that most frequently issued from between Annora’s gapped teeth as she gave us a clatter on the rump or shoulder or whichever fleeting bit of us she could catch. Ashamed? We rarely were that. My sisters’ tempers and their fears were generally too much aroused to allow for any quiet contemplation of our faults. Seven is too many for that: even if one of us had a moment’s pause, she’d soon be distracted by Ida’s war cries or a foaming fury of Berenice’s.

But there was also the Devil’s match in plain love. When I sat on Enda’s warm lap, even when I was far too big for it, with Oona’s gentle fingers braiding my hair, I felt safe from all the world, except for Darcy and, until the troll came to meet me on the bridge, God.

 

Annora raised us in the True Faith, the true faith of poverty and Irishness and oppression, not to mention illiteracy. Annora herself, like fully one quarter of the Catholics in Harristown, could not read. But she could still enforce the Lord’s word like a soldier and insist that we spoke ‘educated, like the ladies your father intended’. She faithfully beat us for our many sins, including the dipping of our fingers in the broken jar where she kept her donations for the poor Pope in Rome and the uttering of tongue-lovely but forbidden words like ‘bejappers’. Or for mocking imitations of her voice when she wandered the garden calling and keening for the latest goosely incarnation of Phiala.

Our mother kept us clean, laundering our skin and hair in thin suds left over from the washing she took in. In the summer she brightened the grey water with the squeezed haws of the wild dog-roses. She eased our knots and molested the lice with a series of wooden combs she whittled herself by the fire of an evening – no luxury of horn, gutta-percha or rubber for the young Swiney sisters.

The creamy elegance of the Church of Ireland’s spire at Carnalway was not for us either. The ruined old chapel at Harristown’s Catholic graveyard served as our place of worship, and a wretched walk it was too, with the rain beating on our heads most Sundays and the slow crows making pessimistic comments all the way, and the coldness reaching up out of the earth to clutch at our legs. The fat estate sheep lifted their docked tails as we passed, reserving their most derisive choruses for us.

‘Bah!’ they sneered at every passing Swiney. ‘Bah!’

We kept our heads down as we walked on toes that never saw a shoe except on Sundays. And when those shoes died, they were given ragged dresses and seed eyes, and served as faithful dollies. Their glory was of course their hair, for each of us placed our nightly combings in a crude wooden crib that Annora grandly called a ‘hair-receiver’, until there was enough to wig a dolly in our own real curls. Our mother insisted that the hairs of our heads were all numbered by the Almighty, who would expect us to account for every one on the Day of Judgement. None must ever be thrown away. In the meantime she permitted us to lend them to our dollies.

One day we would do better than our shoe darlings – grander and better – but at that time we loved our rough honeys and danced them through balls attended by swarthy foreign dukes confected from boots and briar. I regret to mention that, when not romancing dukes, the shoe dollies also fought a sight of Swiney wars: in our doll family there were no amicable feminine tea parties but rather regular slayings and grisly beatings. There were at least two full scalpings and my darling Enda’s baby – always dressed the most fashionably of all our dolls – suffered her wooden head cracked in two by her twin’s.

For all our internecine strife, we Swineys were clannish and secretive. We did not like to be looked at. We were chary of strangers, hiding our drabness in the tall weeds if one set foot on the sparse Swiney soil.

Only one personage regularly encroached upon the land of Swiney: the Eileen O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt, who continued year on year a sworn enemy to Darcy and yet was unable to tear herself away from Swineys all the same.

It was as if she were an eighth, ghostly sister, living on the margins of our scrap of land. Though she’d never taken herself a step inside our deal door – for fear of Darcy’s fists – I often found her lingering outside it, with a finger and ‘shhh’ upon her pale lips. I would nod and keep her secret. No matter how Darcy threatened her, or beat her, the butcher’s runt would return. Her light reddish hair gave her away when she hid in the long grass; so did the single eye, blue as a cornflower, she pressed to the window, watching us, even late at night. No one missed her at home: her father drank and her mother ran to sloe gin too.

So the Eileen O’Reilly was free to spend all her time a-haunting Swineys.

Chapter 3

I
cannot remember a time when there was not war between the butcher’s runt and Darcy. Enda always said they were born bellicose, being the same age within a week and a day. The legend was that there was a constitutional inability in each one of them to stand the sight of the other, and this from the first time they were laid side by side on the counter at the dispensary at Kilcullen where mothers took their babies to be weighed. In a minute both babies were in a mortal tangle on the floor, and the only reason they were not gnashing and biting was because they didn’t have the teeth for it.

They were only eight in the summer of ’54, when the Eileen O’Reilly dared Darcy to meet her at midnight in Byrne’s Hollow at Cowpasture, where ghosts were known to cluster after dark. When Darcy did not appear, the butcher’s runt had it all around the school that Darcy Swiney was a coward whose fierceness stretched only as far as the end of her tongue.

‘Not a hair I care,’ said Darcy, but she lay in wait after school and rolled the runt down the mossy bank into the Liffey.

The next day the Eileen O’Reilly crept up behind Darcy at school and hoisted the back of her skirt. Before Darcy could turn round, the butcher’s runt had pinned a note to her drawers. It said:
A Penny a Look at the Forked Tail Under Here
.

Then Darcy nailed a lurid paper to a tree outside the school. It proclaimed that the runt’s butcher da was wanted for digging up Famine bodies and selling their meat as rashers. She had illustrated the detail in red pencil.

The Eileen O’Reilly ripped the poster from the tree and carried it all the way to our yard.

‘Come out, ye great arse of a swine!’ she yelled.

Darcy was not going to be resisting such an invitation.

There followed, by all accounts, a great tournament of insults and threats that ended with the both of them dried out in the mouth and tottering on glass legs. Some of the curses that Darcy and the butcher’s runt smelted in the ferocious heat of their two brains that day became general currency in Harristown for years after. They were frequently heard in our cottage, as Enda and Berenice, who witnessed it all, showed a precocious talent for tucking grand insults away in their memories for future use.

Darcy commenced it, by wishing a smothering and drowning on the butcher’s runt. ‘May the fishes eat you, you dirty little spalpeen! And then the worms eat the fishes. And the worms wither their guts on the nastiness of your bits inside of them.’

‘Here’s at you! A burning and a scorching on ye!’ was the runt’s retort.

‘I will plant a tree in your dirty ear,’ shouted Darcy, ‘and slap you in its shade.’

‘It is yerself that’s filthied me ear wid the great black tongue on ye, so it is.’

BOOK: The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters
3.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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