Annie Dunne Read Free

along the border of the wall are quiet tonight. The woods themselves must be halted above on the ridge. And there is no thrashing about of branches to disturb the children, who, after all, are city children, and need time to adjust, and not just to the butter. Salted, unsalted, that is the difference, salted and unsalted life. They cannot be immediately at home, it is not possible, no matter how deeply I revere them.
    I thank God for the windless night.
    The children are in their bedroom sleeping as deep as river stones. I am thinking of the little boy in his nest of sheets and blankets. The sheets are like white card they are so starched.
    I was so eager to make their bedclothes agreeable and nice, I am afraid I was a bit loose-handed with the starch bottle. No matter. The old brown water bottle softens them a little. I know he will have his small feet set on it, in a kind of friendly fashion.
    He has an odd attitude to mere objects, he imparts characteristics to them. The water bottle hence is his friend. The old blue coverlet, with the scenes of country life stitched onto it, is his friend. He has greeted everything in the house with a kind of satiated longing. I wonder what his dreams might be.
    Perhaps he sees the long road to Kelsha unwinding in his sleep, the sparkling hedges, the unknown farms. A little boy’s thoughts, what may they be?
    The kettle is back off the flames on its grubby crane - the grease of cooking defeats even us - because I could not be tempted to tea now so late, as it might have me stiff in the bed with sleeplessness, which would be an awful occasion. I will be depending now on sleep for my recuperation, the friendly sister of sleep.
    A day of hardship is a long day, good times shorten the day, and yet a life in itself is but the breadth of a farthing. I am thinking these thoughts, country thoughts I suppose, old sayings of my father.
    My father liked just as much as myself the empty spectacle of the fireplace, or did until the great restlessness took a hold of him. After that nothing suited him.
    Everything seems far away as I sit there in the gloom of the lowering turf. Everything seems to stand off in the distance, like those deer that slip from the woods at dusk to crop the soft grasses. I am thinking about nothing, slipping from one idle thing to the next as one does beside a fire. For instance it strikes me for no reason at all that the deer are in their Sunday coats, every day of the year.
    Jack Furlong the rabbit man goes in after the rabbits but I know he would not hunt the deer. There are thousands of rabbits up on the knolls where the trees end. He is a tender man but it is his work to kill them.
    Billy Kerr would harass the deer if there was any profit to himself in doing so, as he is a man without qualities. There is probably a Billy Kerr, or someone like him, in all human affairs. Otherwise all would be well, continually.
    But no life is proof against the general tears of things. And as I sit there alone between the sleeping children and the sleeping Sarah, the coverlet over her face in our bedroom behind me, I am not thinking of Billy Kerr in any especial way. My mind is drifting, there is a measure of ease. The children sleep without a sound, the ashes of the turf collapse with a familiar noise the size of mice. I can hear over my head in the wooden loft the tiny dance steps of the real mice as they cross and re-cross in a strange regularity, always going to the limits of the loft and heading back across the boards intently, as if drawing a great star on the dusty boards.
    After a while I am disturbed by a little mewling sound, which at first I imagine is coming in from the henhouse. It is built up against the south gable of the house or nearly, and we are therefore neighbours to the hens.
    But I fancy it is not the hens. Hens make a sound of outrage when the foxes come down from the trees. This is not a sound of henny outrage, but something softer and darker. I start up from my