My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress by Christina McKenna

Author:Christina McKenna
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906476609
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2011-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

LEAVING THE SUNLIGHT FOR THE GLOOM

Arthur, the oldest McKenna brother, I never got to know; he died before I was old enough to form an opinion of him, but my memory is of a remote figure, tall and stern, the nose a bumpy outcrop on a craggy face. He wore a felt hat like father’s and a long, belted gaberdine which made him look very sinister and unapproachable. I saw him once in a far field, shaking a stick and roaring at a cow, which didn’t augur well.

On Arthur’s demise James became the guardian of the family home: a brooding, two-storey dwelling about a mile from our house. This was where my father and his siblings had been born. It was a strange, silent place with a disquieting air about it as if some baleful event had caused everything to atrophy long, long ago.

The house never seemed occupied somehow. On approaching it you got the feeling that at some point in the dim past its dwellers, moved by some supernatural calling, had suddenly got up and wandered off into the fields, never to be seen again.

But as you drew nearer you found that someone, against his better judgement, had decided not to heed that call from the other world, and was therefore doomed to languish in the house, regretful of that decision. That person was Uncle James.

The back door was always agape yet the clucking hens in the yard were the only signs of life. Those sinister lines in Flannan Isle come to mind.

We stood a moment, still tongue-tied:

And each with black foreboding eyed

The door, ere we should fling it wide,

To leave the sunlight for the gloom.

His yard bore the unvarying features of all the homesteads I knew. The machinery of agribusiness stood about like pieces of sculpture in an outdoor museum. Here: a tractor with the unhitched vertical of a trailer at its rear. There: a defeated hayshaker, blistering and rusting under the hot sun; and a proud baler, forged and new, which obviously did not belong.

The yard was bounded by white-distempered barns, with doors of faded green opening into odd degrees of darkness. As a child I dared not venture beyond those openings for fear of a door slamming shut behind me and locking me in for ever.

Often when we went for a walk on Sunday evenings mother and I would make a social call, but James, forever the misanthrope, didn’t see it that way. On hearing our approach he’d appear on the stone step, filthy tea towel in hand, and enquire with a suspicious eye what it was we were ‘down about’. No ‘Hello, how are you?’ here. Friendliness would have meant he approved of us, and that would never do.

Like his brother Arthur, James was tall and grim, hair sticking out from under his cap like ticking from a burst sofa, left eye bigger than the right as if a phantom monocle was permanently wedged in the socket. He wore the regulation uniform of the farmer:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.