Country Girl: A Memoir Read Free Page B

knees, when I made a run back to thehouse, which was the worst thing I could have done. This gave vent to his rage. He was prone to fits, for which he used to be given powders and then locked up, and obviously a fresh fit had come upon him. He was literally going mad, tearing at the dress, spitting bits of it out, but was still tethered to me as I ran and ran, fearing that not an ounce of breath was left in my windpipe. At the wicket gate, I eluded him for a few seconds, but quickly he found a way through a hole that he had long made in the hedge and was in the kitchen almost as soon as I was. I had jumped up on a chair for safety and from that leaped onto the table, where he followed, and presently I keeled over under his weight and felt the bite, his teeth like nails boring into my neck, and the scoop of flesh that he was trying to bite off. It was probably no more than a minute, an eternity of a minute, when someone, not my mother or father and not our workman Carnero, but a total stranger, happened to pass by the window and, seeing Abdullah in a terrific lather, thought he had climbed up to get at the hunk of bread. He rushed in, pulled Abdullah to the floor, kicked him several times, then by the short hairs dragged him from the kitchen, down over the flag and into the pump house, where Abdullah hurled himself against the galvanized door and let out rending whines.
    Everything so quiet then. Only the steam from a kettle, its sound sidling through the air, until they came, saw the gash in the neck, the toothmarks, the blood, the blue dress in flitters, asking repeatedly how such a thing could have happened. Peakie, the man who had saved me, was being congratulated on the fact that he had heard screams as he passed by with a bag of turf.
    The wound did not heal, and soon a swelling the size of an egg cup ballooned out and had to be pierced with a needle each morning for the pus to be discharged. The fear was that it had reinfected an earlier tubercular gland; on hearing TB, which ishow they referred to it, I thought I was preparing for death. A girl in my older sister’s class had died of it, just wasted away. I was given little biscuits called Irish Diamonds that were covered with icing, some round, some triangular, and some shaped like a starburst.
    The smell I principally remember is that of iodoform gauze, two patches of it, held down with plaster, in the belief that by hiding it, the wound would go away. Yet before long there were two smells, the nice smell of the gauze and the putrid smell of paste. A lady doctor, whom my father was on saluting terms with, was asked to look at it: she wrinkled her nose several times, her nose which was covered with an unbecoming orange powder, and went, “Hm, hm, hm,” to my mother, saying it called for the knife.
    Two mornings later she returned. I can still see her Baby Ford motorcar and her in a fur coat and felt hat with a huge pearled hat pin that had dents in it. Her doctor’s bag of brown leather was most imposing. It was squat at the bottom, the leather tucked in and narrowing along the sides to reach the bright, brazen, brass hasp. She unlocked it in an instant, and my father, peering in, said, “All the tools of the trade, Dr. McCann.”
    He had been smoking, but anticipating the task ahead, he quenched his unfinished cigarette and restored it to the Gold Flake package. My sisters were ordered to go out on the flag and do their step dancing and hum loudly. I knew without knowing that something awful was about to happen. Carnero came in, sheepish-looking, and a man painting the chimney pots followed, his white overalls spattered with red paint. In a saucepan of boiling water instruments were being sterilized and my mother was telling me that if I was a good girl, there would be a reward. Then the moment has come, and the three men grasp my head in different places and tilt it to one side.Their strengths are massive. I thought of pigs having their throats slit up in the