The Rising of Bella Casey Read Free Page B

mother, big as a house, was at the washboard in the scullery when her waters broke. She let out a piercing shriek. Bella Casey, two floors up, at the piano in the drawing room, paused, her hands frozen above the keys. It was a Chapell upright with turned columns and panels of fretted silk in the top door, with the name Elysian carved in gold above middle C. At fifteen, Bella was squeamish in matters biological and irked at being kept from school. Especially since Aunt Izzie had agreed to be on hand; she had been a nurse tender and knew a thing or two about bringing babies home. But Bella’s mother was nervous of this birth; she had lost the two babies before to the croup.Bella, truculent, had spent the day trying to master the
Moonlight Sonata
. When she heard her mother first cry out, she sat for a few moments praying that this chalice might pass.
    ‘Bella!’
    There was no mistaking the summons a second time. Bella rose and made her way downstairs, full of dread. Her mother stood by the Belfast sink, hands doused in blue, clutching her belly and moaning like an Arab at prayer.
    ‘Get your Auntie Izzie,’ she commanded through gritted teeth.
    Aunt Izzie was somewhere in the upper reaches of the house.
    ‘Go,’ she said again as Bella stared at her mother and realised how very small she appeared and how very large the creature inside her must be and it drumming to come out. She had shot up that winter and found herself being able to look down on her own mother – a queer sensation.
    ‘What ails you, girl?’ Mother all but roared. ‘Go, would you?’
    Soon her mother would be felled like a tree, petticoats up about her and her privates all on show. There wouldn’t even be time to lead her to the bed where Izzie had laid newspaper to spare the linen. Bella wanted to flee. Luckily Aunt Izzie bustled in at that moment and took charge.
    ‘Water, Bella, if you please,’ she barked, ‘and plenty of it’.
    ‘That girl is useless,’ Bella heard her mother say as they set to about their sordid struggle. Mother yelling and Aunt Izzie shouting until their voices bled into one and then slowly, inch by bloodied inch – the head emerged, not like a child at all butlike some… some
thing
, angry and inflamed, with Mother at one end clenching around her prize and Aunt Izzie at the other ignominious end trying to take it from her. And it was as if Mother wouldn’t let go and so the pair of them tussled like a pair of dogs over offal until Aunt Izzie won and Bella’s brother Jack was delivered on the floor of the scullery. Bella, blood-stained, sud-smeared witness, felt she had birthed the child herself.

    He was born with a caul. It was like a veil that covered his eyes. Straight after the birth, Aunt Izzie placed a sheet of paper over the baby’s head and peeled the caul away with her fingertips. The next day, rising prematurely from her childbed, Bella’s mother dispatched Izzie off with instructions to go down to the Seaman’s Mission on the Quays and sell it off. Bella’s father had already refused though he was in the way of going there whenever a big ship was in port to do his proselytising. His title at the Church Mission on Townsend Street was clerk but he was much more than a keeper of accounts. He taught Bible study on Sundays to working men and in the evenings he would often tramp around the docks with pamphlets culled from the tracts of the Reverend Dallas. The one who had ‘saved’ Pappie. Though Bella found it hard to believe, her father had been born a Romanist. He had devoted his life to repaying his debt to Reverend Dallas, despite the aggravation it caused him. On his rounds, people would spit at him and call him a souper. Ragged children – egged on by their mothers – would run after him in the street and chant‘Go way, you dirty pervert.’ For that is what those ill-educated roughs called evangelicals. But her Pappie suffered their insults in silence. A soft answer, he would say, turneth away