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Authors: Sebastian Barry
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without much noise. There’s more than Billy the pony in those tears, that silver deluge that marks her rough cheeks. There’s other things, the tolling bells of other matters, the arrangement of little things that afflict us all, and give strength and engine to our tears, whenever they should fall. They are the tears of an ageing woman without a mate, I must surmise. But whether Billy Kerr could know this is another matter. Men know nothing but their own bellies, and if there is space for their feet they think all is well.
So I am helping her drive the two milch cows back up onto the upper garden for pasture, the children like two wheeling creatures themselves, delighted to be going out on such a great adventure. Billy Kerr is only an aftertaste in the mouth now, bitter, puzzling. Sarah’s bony face carries a small cloud. I wonder what she is thinking. I know what she is thinking, I think, but I wonder what it is all the same.
The ground is hardening nicely after a spring of teeming rain, and the horny feet of our cows barely leave a mark, except on the lower ditchy ground where the water congregates and cannot escape. There the two heaving girls drag their legs and their empty udders swing about. They seem to relish the drying ground, and gain a spring in their step when they reach the crustier part of the field. Sarah lays her ashplant lightly across their high rear bones, as a way of conversing them up the slope. There lies the rising sea of soft green grasses. We feel the same delight to view it as those cows, Sarah and me. We feel it as a compliment, as a blessing, or I do. Sarah’s cloud this morning stands in her way.
The children throw themselves down on the sloping field and let themselves roll away freely down, and though it tramples the good grasses a little, we are not women to halt the play of children. Daisy and Myrtle will know the trick of tonguing up the fallen grasses. Down the great slope of the field they go, faster and faster, their thin limbs flashing from them like daddy-long-legs, the squeals out of them like the poor pig when I go to cut his throat, or feed him, one or the other. I laugh and look to Sarah, and even with her cloud she smiles.
‘Will you latch the high gate,’ I say, ‘and we can leave these girls to their work?’
‘There’s poor Furlong in the wood,’ says Sarah, and I catch also a glimpse of the rabbit man, damply creeping through the damp mosses of the trees, not looking at us, no doubt, but keeping his eyes on the ground with its coats of pine needles, for the little nooses he will have left for those rabbits. He is a sad man enough. His brother had a dark head, and one night in a fit of strange temper he killed their mother, when Jack Furlong was about twelve and asleep in his bed.
They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope. The father was a will-less man that went every year to Scotland for the harvests there, and one year never returned, but is supposed to have married a Scottish girl bigamously and lived happily ever after. Jack’s brother was a quiet, strong lad that worked on the roads for the council, and he slew his mother with a pickaxe, driving the blunt point in between her shoulder bones as she lay sleeping. Then he dragged her out in the dark and dug a neat ditch, and buried her in under a fuchsia bush all in red bloom.
So they took him to the madhouse in Carlow, and buried the mother, and Jack was left, and he is strange enough himself, but gentle and polite. He has a face like a hunting dog, with heavy whiskers, and he knows only the one song, a favourite of my own, ‘Weile Waile’, and this one song he sings continually, and I don’t know how the rabbits don’t mind it, but he catches enough of them. Sometimes you will go into a
So I am helping her drive the two milch cows back up onto the upper garden for pasture, the children like two wheeling creatures themselves, delighted to be going out on such a great adventure. Billy Kerr is only an aftertaste in the mouth now, bitter, puzzling. Sarah’s bony face carries a small cloud. I wonder what she is thinking. I know what she is thinking, I think, but I wonder what it is all the same.
The ground is hardening nicely after a spring of teeming rain, and the horny feet of our cows barely leave a mark, except on the lower ditchy ground where the water congregates and cannot escape. There the two heaving girls drag their legs and their empty udders swing about. They seem to relish the drying ground, and gain a spring in their step when they reach the crustier part of the field. Sarah lays her ashplant lightly across their high rear bones, as a way of conversing them up the slope. There lies the rising sea of soft green grasses. We feel the same delight to view it as those cows, Sarah and me. We feel it as a compliment, as a blessing, or I do. Sarah’s cloud this morning stands in her way.
The children throw themselves down on the sloping field and let themselves roll away freely down, and though it tramples the good grasses a little, we are not women to halt the play of children. Daisy and Myrtle will know the trick of tonguing up the fallen grasses. Down the great slope of the field they go, faster and faster, their thin limbs flashing from them like daddy-long-legs, the squeals out of them like the poor pig when I go to cut his throat, or feed him, one or the other. I laugh and look to Sarah, and even with her cloud she smiles.
‘Will you latch the high gate,’ I say, ‘and we can leave these girls to their work?’
‘There’s poor Furlong in the wood,’ says Sarah, and I catch also a glimpse of the rabbit man, damply creeping through the damp mosses of the trees, not looking at us, no doubt, but keeping his eyes on the ground with its coats of pine needles, for the little nooses he will have left for those rabbits. He is a sad man enough. His brother had a dark head, and one night in a fit of strange temper he killed their mother, when Jack Furlong was about twelve and asleep in his bed.
They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope. The father was a will-less man that went every year to Scotland for the harvests there, and one year never returned, but is supposed to have married a Scottish girl bigamously and lived happily ever after. Jack’s brother was a quiet, strong lad that worked on the roads for the council, and he slew his mother with a pickaxe, driving the blunt point in between her shoulder bones as she lay sleeping. Then he dragged her out in the dark and dug a neat ditch, and buried her in under a fuchsia bush all in red bloom.
So they took him to the madhouse in Carlow, and buried the mother, and Jack was left, and he is strange enough himself, but gentle and polite. He has a face like a hunting dog, with heavy whiskers, and he knows only the one song, a favourite of my own, ‘Weile Waile’, and this one song he sings continually, and I don’t know how the rabbits don’t mind it, but he catches enough of them. Sometimes you will go into a
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