Like a Tree Cut Back by Michael McCarthy

Author:Michael McCarthy [McCarthy, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912196364
Google: 7CBozQEACAAJ
Publisher: Smith/Doorstop Books
Published: 2021-04-15T04:20:21+00:00

THE STEAMROLLER

There’s a steamroller south near Holland’s Cross. It is for tarring the road to town. The steamroller man has a caravan nearby. That way he doesn’t have to go home every night, and he can start work early in the morning before people start carrying the milk to the creamery in their horse and carts. The caravan is yellow, and it is set up inside the gap into a field. I’d like to see the inside of that kind of a caravan. Not like a tinker’s caravan, because they might run away with you and then you’d have to be a tinker all your life and I’d rather be the way I am.

The tinkers come around every now and then, and they mend pots and pans if people have pots or pans with holes in them. They sell combs and other things that my mother says you wouldn’t want. Sometimes they ask for meat, or tea, or some bread. My mother gives them food and says: ‘Clear off now so,’ and they nearly always do. The women have shawls and sometimes they have babies in the shawls.

It’s hard to tell if the babies are their own or if they stole them. My father says you’d have to have eyes in the back of your head, and watch everything around the house whenever they come. You wouldn’t know what they’d steal right in front of your eyes, or worse still, what they’d come back to steal the day you’d be away at the cattle show.

He never said they steal children, but when I was small my big sister said if I wasn’t a good boy the bad woman would come and carry me away. And then one day when my mother was gone away the bad woman came. She had a shawl around her, just like the tinker woman, and when I got frightened and started screeching and bawling my sister hunted her away up the boreen. Soon after that my uncle came and asked what all the commotion was about. I told him the bad woman came and tried to carry me away and she might come back again. My uncle says he’ll make sure she’d never ever come back. But how can he make sure? He’ll be gone away back to the missions and he won’t be there to stop her if she comes back.

When my mother comes home in the evening I run and tell her that the bad woman came, and that she ran away up the boreen and maybe she was still there hiding in the bushes. My sister says to my mother that it was only her and my uncle having fun and that I got a fright. My mother says: ‘God knows then, that was quare fun.’ She is very cross with my uncle and my sister. She says they could be finding better things to be doing while she was out than frightening the child. My uncle says he is very sorry and that it was all his fault.

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