09 Trinity by Leon Uris

Author:Leon Uris [Uris, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

No one knew for certain that it was half four in the morning but when that hour arrived movement began by rote. The single-bedroom row house of eighteenth-century vintage on Sparrow Lane was less crowded these days with only two daughters of the eight Tully children remaining. Henry and his wife Bessie occupied the bedroom. Peg, the oldest sister, her husband and their four children slept in the parlor.

For the privilege of their privacy in a curtained-off alcove in the kitchen, Maud and Myles had to be first up. They spent the night wound around each other and held on till the last instant with the baby kicking up a fury as Maud ended her seventh month. Maud sat up on the mattress looking only half her size, thin arms and small breasts understated by the hugeness of her belly. They dressed in silence with long-practiced movements of people who lived in crowded quarters and awakened to darkness.

Myles rolled the bedding up off the floor and tucked it beneath the staircase as she made to the back yard to lead the parade to the privy and water pump in the predawn chill.

Breakfast of minced pork scraps and potatoes was eaten by Bessie, Peg and Peg’s daughter, Deirdre, who had started working at the factory. Their meal was taken in red-eyed drowsiness, a morning stupor orchestrated by Henry Tully sleeping off his perennial drunk with a bombardment of snores. Peg’s husband stayed in bed also with their three remaining children cuddled on a single mattress.

When they finished, Maud and Myles got the table and took their breakfast with an egg, one of the two they spoiled themselves with weekly. Lunch of a pork sausage, a potato, an apple and tea was packed into her small net shopping bag. She lit her lantern and stepped into the darkness, the chill of it frosting her breath. Myles always walked his wife to the factory although the forge wouldn’t be open for almost two hours. He spent the time doing extra work if any was to be had, or in Conor’s office studying Gaelic or reading from the extensive collection of books on wrought iron.

Up and down the side streets, lanterns glowed as the women wended their way to Witherspoon & McNab and the other factories and mills for the six o’clock starting hour in a dirge like procession. Maud’s niece, Deirdre, had just turned eleven and joined the sorrowful parade along with hundreds of other Bogside children to disappear from childhood in the black jaws of the Londonderry workshops.

Myles put his arm about his wife to ward off the sting of cold. It would be a particularly hard day because the factory had no heat except from the presser’s stoves on the third floor and she would be working too far from it to reap much benefit. Winter added to the cruelty, for Maud would rarely see daylight except on Sunday, awakening and returning from work in darkness like a miner above the Arctic Circle.

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