Annie Dunne Read Free Page B

heat addressing a woman of slight heat. My bones are grateful where they lie in their weary slings. I lift my face to the light and am amazed again at what great pleasures there are to be had on this earth.
    I have lain beside a sleeping Sarah all night, sleeping myself the odd time, trying not to turn or moan and wake her, and was despondent in my thoughts, despite the coming of the children. I became fearful again for their safety, for our ability to guard them, and almost cursed their father for leaving them. Such were the thoughts of the night, banished by this stripling sun.
    I plunge the jug down through the film of browned leaves that have come from the gutter despite that Billy Kerr was supposed to clean it, and the rainwater floods in. With the proper gesture the jug can now be lifted without any debris in it, a small triumph of the morning. Out comes Sarah from the kitchen, closing the half-door behind her, with the big basin of grain. She grabs a fistful of it and calls out to the hens, though they are fast still in their coop. Perhaps she does it to excite them.
    ‘Chuck-chuck, chuck-chuck, chuck-chuck.’
    ‘Sarah, dear, you haven’t washed.’
    ‘I’ll wash in a minute, Annie.’
    ‘You have your blouse on now over your wrists and you haven’t washed them.’
    ‘No more than yourself.’
    ‘But I have the sleeves rolled to the elbows in readiness.’
    ‘The hens are hungry.’
    She pulls the wooden hasp on the henhouse and hauls open the old door. It is another thing that needs fixing, for it touches the ground and the rain is eating it from underneath. Billy Kerr again. But then Billy Kerr is not our man, but the man of the Dunnes of Feddin, my three cousins below. We would have our own man but that we can’t afford a whole man all the time. I would not pay a regular wage anyway to Billy Kerr, because his work is dubious.
    The cock rushes from the coop in all his confused annoyance and begins to march up and down the yard, nearly running he is. The poor fellow looks like a girl in a rusty tutu all the same, a ballerina. And now his ladies follow him out slowly, bruised-looking from the darkness of the coop, less sure, less eager. They love Sarah, you would think by the way they see her now and crowd against her, and she shakes her wrist of grain at them, the wrist she has not washed, and when it hits the stones like hailstones and leaps about, the hens fasten their beaks into it, a-worrying the whole time, you would think by their glassy eyes, that they will not get enough to fill their bellies.
    ‘Get back, get back, get back!’ cries Sarah, which is her cry to them these days, because her eyes are failing and she fears to tread on them.
    ‘Why do you do that?’ I said to her, just a few weeks previous.
    ‘Because I cannot see them,’ she said.
    ‘You must go up to Dublin to see the eye doctor,’ I said.
    ‘I couldn’t see him, either,’ she said, laughing.
    ‘We must make arrangements,’ I said. ‘It is only sensible.’
    ‘I must manage for the minute,’ she said. ‘A doctor is a pricey item.’
    And since then she does seem to be managing well enough. She is devising strategies, other ways of seeing perhaps. I do not always understand her. At night she pulls the blanket over her face and sleeps under it. In the watches of the night when I have foolishly drunk tea late, and lie awake, I hear her muttering and squawking under the blanket. Now and then she thrashes around, as if she were a marching soldier.
    She seems to see well enough when she is asleep, whatever about her waking difficulties.
    She marches slowly at the hungry hens, throwing the dampened grain. When she throws it against the sunlight, its colour lightens. Her big hand flashes with grain. Her legs are like the slender pillars of the courthouse in Baltinglass, advancing.
    ‘When you are finished there,’ I say, ‘come in and wash your wrists like a good woman.’
    In I go to the kitchen, closing the half-door