Foster by Claire Keegan

Author:Claire Keegan [Claire Keegan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571255665
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

‘I don’t know that this’ll be any place for you but I can’t leave you here,’ the woman says, later that same day. ‘So get ready and we’ll go, in the name of God.’

I go upstairs and change into the new dress, the ankle socks and shoes.

‘Don’t you look nice,’ she says, when I come down. ‘John’s not always easy but he’s hardly ever wrong.’

Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might come and fall and change things. We pass houses whose doors and windows are wide open, long, flapping clotheslines, gravelled entrances to other lanes. At the bend, a bay pony is leaning up against a gate, but when I reach out to stroke his nose, he whinnies and canters off. Outside a cottage, a black dog with curls all down his back comes out and barks at us, hotly, through the bars of a gate. At the first crossroads, we meet a heifer who panics and finally races past us, lost. All through the walk, the wind blows hard and soft and hard again through the tall, flowering hedges, the high trees. In the fields, the combines are out cutting the wheat, the barley and oats, saving the corn, leaving behind long rows of straw. We meet men on tractors, going in different directions, pulling balers to the fields, and trailers full of grain to the co-op. Birds swoop down, brazen, eating the fallen seed off the middle of the road. Further along, we meet two barechested men, their eyes so white in faces so tanned and dusty.

The woman stops to greet them and tells them where we are going.

‘God rest him. Didn’t he go quick in the end?’ one man says.

‘Aye,’ says the other. ‘But didn’t he reach his three score and ten? What more can any of us hope for?’

We keep on walking, standing in tight to the hedges, the ditches, letting things pass.

‘Have you been to a wake before?’ the woman asks.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, I might as well tell you: there will be a dead man here in a coffin and lots of people and some of them might have a little too much taken.’

‘What will they be taking?’

‘Drink,’ she says.

When we come to the house, several men are leaning against a low wall, smoking. There’s a black ribbon on the door and hardly a light shining from the house but when we go in, the kitchen is bright, and packed with people who are talking. The woman who asked Kinsella to dig the grave is there, making sandwiches. There are big bottles of red and white lemonade, stout, and in the middle of all this, a big wooden box with an old dead man lying inside of it. His hands are joined as though he had died praying, a string of rosary beads around his fingers. Some of the men are sitting around the coffin, using the part that’s closed as a counter on which to rest their glasses.

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