Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare.

And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.

He’d a head for business, was known for getting along, and could be relied upon, as he had developed good, Protestant habits; was given to rising early and had no taste for drink.

‘You know some of these bring the hardship on themselves?’ ‘Tis not the child’s doing, surely.’

‘The poor man,’ Furlong said, ‘whatever ails him.’ ‘Drink is what ails him. If he’d any regard for his children, he’d not be going around like that. He’d pull himself out of it.’ ‘Maybe the man isn’t able.’ ‘I suppose.’ She reached over and sighed, turned out the light. ‘Always there’s one that has to pull the short straw.’

Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these.

Other times, Furlong would hear a sharp, hot whistle and laughter, which made him tense. He imagined his girls getting big and growing up, going out into that world of men. Already he’d seen men’s eyes following his girls. But some part of his mind was often tense; he could not say why.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew.

while the nuns walked around, supervising and talking to some of the more well-off parents.

‘There’s no need to go if you don’t want, a leanbh,’ Furlong told her. ‘Stay here with me.’ But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?

Even while he’d been creaming the butter and sugar, his mind was not so much upon the here and now and on this Sunday nearing Christmas with his wife and daughters so much as on tomorrow and who owed what, and how and when he’d deliver what was ordered and what man he’d leave to which task, and how and where he’d collect what was owed – and before tomorrow was coming to an end, he knew his mind would already be working in much the same way, yet again, over the day that was to follow.

She had finished with the shirts and blouses and was starting on the pillowcases. Always, she tackled the hardest things first.

When he burned his black but ate it anyway, saying it was his own fault as he hadn’t been watching and had kept it too close to the flame, something caught in his throat – as though there might never again be another night like this.

Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.

‘Ah, I was only thinking back over a few things.’ ‘I thought as much.’ ‘Do you not go back over things, Eileen? Or worry? I sometimes wish I had your mind.’

What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new? Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

The weather had turned dry and colder, and people remarked on what a picture the convent made, how like a Christmas card it almost was with the yews and evergreens dusted in frost and how the birds, for some reason, had not touched a single berry on the holly bushes there; the old gardener himself had said so.

‘Well, I’ve nobody – and all I want to do is drown meself. Can you not even do that fukken much for us?’

‘What is it you know?’ Furlong asked. ‘There’s nothing, only what I’m telling you,’ she answered. ‘And in any case, what do such things have to do with us? Aren’t all our girls well, and minded?’ ‘Our girls?’ Furlong said. ‘What has any of this to do with ours?’ ‘Not one thing,’ she said. ‘What have we to answer for?’

‘Where does thinking get us?’ she said. ‘All thinking does is bring you down.’ She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. ‘If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.’

‘But what if it was one of ours?’ Furlong said. ‘This is the very thing I’m saying,’ she said, rising again. ‘Tis not one of ours.’

‘Sure, didn’t I take my own mother’s name, Mother. And never any harm did it do me.’ ‘Is that so?’ ‘What have I against girls?’ he went on. ‘My own mother was a girl, once. And I dare say the same must be true of you and all belonging to us.’

Furlong watched the girl being taken away and soon understood that this woman wanted him gone – but the urge to go was being replaced now by a type of contrariness to stay on, and to hold his ground. Already, it was growing light outside. Soon, the bells for first Mass would ring. He sat on, encouraged by this queer, new power. He was, after all, a man amongst women here.

‘You don’t mind bringing the foreigners in.’ ‘Hasn’t everyone to be born somewhere,’ Furlong said. ‘Sure wasn’t Jesus was born in Bethlehem.’ ‘I’d hardly compare Our Lord to those fellows.’

They had expected him to go on, Furlong knew, but he paused, contrarily, and stood by the girl.

‘Is there anything I can do for you, a leanbh?’ he asked. ‘All you need do is tell me.’ She looked at the window and took a breath and began to cry, the way those unused to any type of kindness do when it’s at first or after a long time again encountered.

‘Have ye change for the collection box?’ Eileen asked the girls, smiling, as they were entering the chapel grounds. ‘Or has your daddy given it all away?’ ‘There’s no need for that type of ugly talk,’ Furlong sharpened. ‘Have you not enough in your purse for the one day?’ Eileen’s smile vanished and a type of astonishment spread across her face. Slowly, she drew out her purse and handed ten-pence pieces round, to the girls.

The Mass, that day, felt long. Furlong didn’t join in so much as listen, distractedly, while watching the morning light falling through the stained-glass windows. During the sermon, his gaze followed the Stations of the Cross: Jesus taking up his cross and falling, meeting his mother, the women of Jerusalem, falling twice more before being stripped of his garments, being nailed to the cross and dying, being laid in the tomb. When the consecration was over and it came time to go up and receive Communion, Furlong stayed contrarily where he was, with his back against the wall.

What most tormented him was not so much how she’d been left in the coal shed or the stance of the Mother Superior; the worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he’d allowed that and had not asked about her baby – the one thing she had asked him to do – and how he had taken the money and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he’d gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass.

People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with others as well as your own. But as soon as the thought came to him, he knew the thought itself was privileged and wondered why he hadn’t given the sweets and other things he’d been gifted at some of the houses to the less well-off he had met in others. Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.

‘They belong to different orders,’ she went on, ‘but believe you me, they’re all the one. You can’t side against one without damaging your chances with the other.’

Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?

Furlong carried on uneasily, thinking back over the Dublin girl who’d asked him to take her here so she could drown, and how he had refused her; of how he had afterwards lost his way along the back roads, and of the queer old man out slashing the thistles in the fog that evening with the puckaun, and what he’d said about how the road would take him wherever he wanted to go.

Not one person they met addressed Sarah or asked where he was taking her. Feeling little or no obligation to say very much or to explain, Furlong smoothed things over as best he could and carried on along with the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not yet see but knew he would encounter.

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

How light and tall he almost felt walking along with this girl at his side and some fresh, new, unrecognisable joy in his heart. Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing? Some part of him, whatever it could be called – was there any name for it? – was going wild, he knew. The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.

In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving – if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up.

The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured, and might yet surpass.