Bridging chapter

Trying to edit a bridging chapter all morning, the passage of time is quite clunky.  Granny has just died and Kai is still innocent, but not for too much longer...

All February long the house kept itself as quiet as the hills.  No one except Daddy bothered much with making noise.  Kai was sad even when the sunshine came.  Mammy looked like a line, drawn straight with a ruler from head-to-toe.  Grown so skinny she was sore to look at.  She welcomed the spring birds back to the garden through the window over the sink.  Her rubber gloves were yellow like the daffodils that had begun to flower.  They talked of Granny and how she loved the springtime.

He was waiting, for March winds to come and blow the grief out of the house.  For a morning when he did not wake up happy to remember Granny had died.  

He checked her room every day to make sure it was the same.  Her clothes still hung in the wardrobe.  The Sacred Heart still burned above the bed.   He picked her perfume up off the dresser and sprayed a squirt into the air.  Granny was a gap in a day made longer.  She was a name that had changed columns in the nightly roll call of prayer.

Lent was easy, nothing left was difficult to give up.  On St. Patrick’s Day they went into town to watch the parade and eat green ice-cream.  Tractors with banners on their sides and lorries with trailers advertising local businesses slowly circled the square.  It was a traffic jam dipped in bunting. 

There were cheerleaders with bayonets who didn’t look American.  Kai stood on the bottom rung of the barrier rail to see if Jimmy was in the crowd.  The town was thronged.  He smelled a chip van.  

Some faces were painted, everyone wore green.  A stage was set-up in a giant trailer at the top of the square.  Mammy tugged his elbow to get down before he fell.  She was frozen and shivered in a denim jacket.  They were leaving.  Daddy was like a cat on hot bricks all day waiting to get into town.  They were leaving.  Before the parade was even over.  Daddy had disappeared, so he got to stay.  He was gone to wet the shamrock, god-knows-where.  He could find his own way home.  They were leaving.  Before the band came on stage, before he found the lads, before getting chips from the van.  She had had enough of it.   

Kai said ‘Thank you,’ for the Easter eggs.  The count was one short without Granny’s.  The stretch in the days made the farm bigger.  There were further away places to explore before coming home for the dark.  The calving was over and the lambing had begun.  There were three new calves; Kai fed one with a bottle.  Daddy got up in the night time to lend John-Jo a hand.  He was in charge now, making the decisions.  They were going to keep chickens and grow potatoes and lots of other vegetable that weren’t potatoes.  Like rhubarb and carrots, and tomatoes and lettuces that grew under glass.  They cleared the weeds and the high grass from Granddad’s old glasshouse.  Part of the frame was held together by twine, that didn’t matter.  It did the job.  

Kai hoed and weed.  There wasn’t much talking just the distant purr of tractors on a slurry scented breeze.  Warmth bounced from the soil onto his face.  Daddy rolled cigarettes leaning on a rake.  He shielded his eyes from the sun with a flat palm to inspect Kai’s work.  Kai liked the dirt. He liked discussing how the cabbages were doing and talking about the weather.  He learnt when the best time to spray for greenfly was.  He picked a caterpillar off a leaf and set him to the side.  He shook his head to scold him so he wouldn’t come back.

Granny and Granddad had kept vegetables back when they could manage.  Watching them grow was exciting.  Daddy said they would save money.  He wanted goats as well as chickens.  To whitewash the shed and mend the walls.  To make it one of those open farms, which wasn’t proper farming just taking school kids around on tours.  It was easy money with a grant for keeping old rusty machinery and planting apple trees.  Mammy wasn’t sure.  He had no experience, children drove him nuts.  But that wasn’t the point, nothing she said about it was.  

‘That’s where we found you,’ said Daddy pointing to a cabbage.  He laughed and so did Kai.  It was one of his funnier jokes. It made Mammy happy to see them out working together.  It mattered less then when he fetched messages from town and took his time in coming back.  

She sat at the table with her face in her hands, exhausted -  they’d been talking about the farm. The wind banged a door shut.  She jumped.  Daddy, waving his arms about the room, with his projects and plans, the new ideas, the ones he never stopped from having.  Her shoulders bunched around her ears.  Her feet under the table shifting.  She reached for the cigarettes.  She’d shaken her head against the talk but still she’d said ‘yes.’  Conceded and agreed as he blustered and blew.  The more animated he became the more she seemed to fade.  

The forms for the bank loan were laid out on the table.  Along with the solicitor’s letter making him executor to the changes. The big changes.  The ones that would change everything.  The loan for improvements for an open farm to get the free money from the grant.  The loan against the farm.  Her lips moved word-for-word as she read and her finger underlined the sentences.  ‘You’re sure?’ she asked him later.  Her signature scratched slowly across the line, she stopped, she looked up, ‘I’m sure,’ he said.  ‘You’ll like goats on the farm, won’t you Kai?’ he said. He winked.

‘Yay!’ said Kai to Mammy. 

She preferred the calm of letting things alone.  Of leaving the dust to settle on the farm like it had on Granny’s dresser.   But the forms had to be signed for the changes to go ahead.  ‘Yay!’ Kai said, excited about the goats.  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Daddy.  His hand on her shoulder but he didn’t smile.  She stood up from the table, ‘I don’t think…I just think…I.’  But it was too late; he’d stormed out the door.  

He stayed away a long time until the tock tick of the clock was worried.  Until the television finished saying its ‘Prayer at Bedtime.’  Mammy’s nails tap-danced on the arm of the chair.  No one told Kai to go to bed.  The door hadn’t opened, no matter how much they didn’t looked at it.  He had had a fine evening drawing pictures of the goats.  He stayed up until he could stay awake no longer.  In the morning Daddy was back and happy.  The forms had been signed so the goats were being ordered.  ‘Yay!’ Kai smiled.  Mammy’s smile was watery.  ‘Of course I trust you,’ she said. 

Daddy’s humour was as predictable as the weather.  Which meant Kai never knew if he was in good form or not.  His jokes weren’t like Jimmy’s jokes, they weren’t always funny.  Kai was learning how to tell the different jokes apart.  There were the jokes to make you laugh and jokes to make you cry.  ‘She’d never win the Housewife of the Year, would she Kai?’ as Mammy served them up the dinner.  Kai knew it was a joke because he laughed.  Kai laughed too but wasn’t very funny.  Mammy un-laughing found the ridge of the scar on her chin with her finger.   She traced the pale crescent like there was something she had to remember.  Kai ate-up the grey dinner as an apology for the laughter.  Mammy’s knife pushed the food around her plate, piling it from one side to another.  Kai wasn’t allowed play with his food like that.  They were waiting to hear back from the bank. 

Daddy’s jokes could be mean or they could be embarrassing.  ‘An arse on her like the back end of a knacker’s pony’ and Kai sniggered because it was funny picture but not a very nice thing to say about Theresa.  At least she had plenty on top.  Not like Mammy, who was ‘like two Disprins on an ironing board’.  Kai blushed eyes fixed on the middle distance.  He was in good form because the loan had been approved.

They could be warnings or threats.  ‘We’ll end-up in the poor house if she has her way,’ with a wink to Kai while he explained to Mammy everything she was doing wrong with the books.  It wasn’t different ways of doing things; it was her way was the wrong way.  She was addled by the figures.  A mind like a sieve, so she went to lie down. ‘Women eh?’ said Daddy.  Kai shrugged. They’d been fine for years before Daddy came back but he didn’t want to say it. ‘A man doesn’t want to come home to a face like a long streak of misery,’ he bared his teeth with a smile.

They were two hardworking men who had been out in the garden all day the least they deserved was a clean house and a decent dinner.  It was time for her to move on, to pull herself together.  If not for Daddy’s sake then for Kai’s.  ‘Yeah!’ Kai agreed, they were getting goats and the free money. 

Mammy looked different now he say her through Daddy’s eyes. 

Mammy’s sleeve was zigzagged with snail trails from her nose when she asked him where he’d been.  A man needed a reason to come home in the evening so Daddy went to the pub.  Kai was glad it was time to move on because he wanted bars for his packed lunch and his uniform laid out in the morning the way it used to be.  They laughed that she wouldn’t know how to cook the vegetables once they’d grown them.  ‘The mice will run away,’ said Kai because the cupboards were bare.  He and Daddy shook with laughing, but inside Kai didn’t laugh, he knew it wasn’t funny.

The next Sunday Mammy smiled and put on lipstick.  ‘We’re going to have a roast,’ she said, ‘the way Granny used to make it.’  Mammy’s teeth were lipsticked too, as if they’d bitten on the tube.

Granny didn’t use as many pots.  Granny didn’t let the spuds boil over.  Mammy transferred them from one pot to another, they were overcrowded.  She scalded her thumb, ‘Feck,’ she said and shook it.

‘Feck!’ she said again, because the oven wasn’t switched on. 

There was no tinfoil for over the chicken.  She forgot the lemons.  She put the gravy through a sieve to try to get the lumps out.  The greens were turning floppy.   Kai wished it was dinner from the freezer like pizza and chips.  It was well after dinner time.  He had set the table. Daddy sighed behind his newspaper.  Mammy’s face was shiny with steam.  It would ‘Just be a minute.’  Kai’s stomach was growling.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Daddy as he left the kitchen.

‘Where you going?’ asked Mammy

‘To get something decent to eat,’ he said taking his coat from the rack in the hall

Mammy’s hands dropped to her sides.  She watched his back leave.  He didn’t turn to see her watching.

The spuds were soupy in the pot and the meat bled under its black skin.  Kai picked about the chicken.  He didn’t touch the spuds.  He put six green beans on his plate for Mammy to count.  The gravy tasted good.  There was ice-cream out to defrost, lots of ice-cream because there was no one there to share it with.  Mammy sat at the table with him smoking while he ate.  She didn’t touch her dinner.  She smiled when he said it was lovely but the rest of the time she sat there her forehead was creased with thinking.  He did all the washing up until his fingers were shrivelled and smelly.  She smoked another fag and went to bed.  It was too early for Kai’s bedtime. 

He was shy to go into the bedroom since Daddy had come back.  It smelt different.  But he went in and he left her a glass of water.  It was dark with the curtains closed and she lay on the bed in her clothes.  Only her eyes acknowledged him. ‘Goodnight’ he said, setting down the water. ‘Goodnight,’ she blinked with her eyes. 

It was a treat having the television to himself and the ice-cream.  He watched Satan climb on top of a lady and they had a baby who was Satan’s baby in New York.  The farm outside was still, he drew the curtains, the quietness scared him.  She had short hair and her name was Rosemary.  He flicked the channels when the bad stuff happened with the neighbours.  He guessed how long it would be each time before it was safe to flick back.  He had to read for a long time after before he could fall asleep.

The next morning the cows were restless in the field, Daddy hadn’t gotten up for milking.  A bellow echoed the farmyard as he left for school, the cows were in distress.  Mammy wasn't up either. 

That week a timber frame was erected for the chicken coop.  Rolls of wire netting rested against the wall of the shed.  There were plywood planks in the shed to be sawed into shape for the walls.  Kai’s job was going to be painting them.  Sheets of galvanising would be screwed down for a roof. Chickens lay eggs in nesting boxes.  

Three weeks flew by. Mammy eyed it each evening for progress.   Some hinge or nail or stable was missing so he couldn’t get it done.  Mammy nodded.  She understood.  They did it all on the Saturday, the one the chickens arrived, John-Joe lent a hand.  Kai’s paint was drying on their new home when they got there.  The robin had watched him work.  The walls were crooked in places.  The chickens would have to mind the draft.  

Kai did his homework; he kept out of the way.  Daddy gave him a spin in his new car.  No goats had come.  All the trees had leaves and the flowers were in bloom.  The world was full of life again.  Mammy hardly went out anymore, only to go to work.  If the phone rang, Kai had to answer, ‘She’s just gone out,’ he said, ‘I’ll get her to ring you back.’  But she didn’t ring back and the phone rang less.  

His evenings were for birdsong and for walking.  Confirmation was coming soon.  Daddy rubbed his hands together, Kai was going to clean up.  

‘Do you remember that time we went to the beach in the summer, the hottest summer ever?’ Mammy asked.

‘No I don’t remember,’ Kai replied, he said it with a swallow.