Bring Larks and Heroes: Text Classics by Keneally Thomas

Author:Keneally, Thomas [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Fiction Classics, Fiction
ISBN: 9781921921834
Amazon: B007CAJX90
Goodreads: 22842131
Publisher: Text Publishing
Published: 1967-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

15

Ann had first put on the St Megan’s cord five years before, ordered by her mother after a story was spread about a German regiment running wild in a town in Louth. The cord lost some of its dye in the tropics, but kept its virtue until the morning it came apart and fell onto the floor of the Blythes’ front parlour. The red cord, as a red cord, was probably more outlandish medicine even than a giblet poultice. Yet it had supplied Ann for some time with faith in her cosmic significance. This faith was staggered to find the cord gone. Seeing it on Mrs Blythe’s book-table the next morning brought to Ann a sense of being rarely and especially threatened.

‘This old cord, is it yours, Ann?’

Ann blinked, busy with the hot water.

‘Ann? Don’t dream!’

‘No, Mrs Blythe.’

‘No? I found it on the floor here.’

‘It isn’t mine, Mrs Blythe.’ Once started, she was lying quite robustly. ‘It could have come off anything at all.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Blythe. ‘Why do you think it has these three little knots on the tassel, like the three knots on a friar’s belt?’

‘I couldn’t say anything about that. Would you like this water cooler, Mrs Blythe?’

Mrs Blythe felt with her right hand, but was very absent about it.

‘Do you think that this could have a religious meaning, Ann? Mightn’t there be cords just like this one used for this or that purpose in your religion?’

Ann was unravelling a flannel from around a heated brick. She burnt and shook her right hand.

‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ she said, conversational on the brink of the pit. Her stomach quivered with the giddiness of her earth that morning, and she chattered as the chasms opened up and down its length.

She poured the hot kaolin out of the pan into the flannel. Then she dropped a cloth into the hot water. She wondered would this be the last time she would be allowed to minister.

‘If you don’t mind me saying, Mrs Blythe, we must hurry or it will all go cold.’

When the dressing was at last finished, and Ann was leaving, she dawdled near the table, considering snatching the cord. Considering. In fact, she seemed to herself to have no freedom, as if the matter were being solved outside her own head by two parties who had no love for her. The hair’s-breadth supremacy of one of the parties sent her to the door – to all appearances, a sane girl.

Mrs Blythe found Terry Byrne charming to listen to for his store of cures and spells. None of his remedies cured modestly, and most of them worked through various blatant symbols as satisfying to the spirit as are the symbols of a sacrament. His cure for growths on the skin, for instance, was a sacrament far more than a cure. You lashed tight onto the afflicted part a lump of fresh beef. You lashed it so tightly that it became part of the person’s flesh, more or less, left it there till it began to smell, then buried it in the earth.

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