Free Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry Page A

singing.’
    ‘That’s right,’ says the girl dreamily, deeply at her ease, ‘we did. Or I learned them and you sort of learned them,’ she says to her brother.
    ‘I sort of learned them,’ he corrects himself, looking up at me.
    ‘Inchworm,’ I say. ‘What is an inchworm? How does it go, dear?’
    The little girl begins to sing. She has a flat, peculiar little voice for herself, but it is thin and with enough colour to suggest a tune, like a penny whistle or the like. ‘Inchworm, Inchworm, measuring the marigolds,’ she sings. It is a song I have never heard. They have songs now no one has heard, first-time songs, unlike years ago, when all the songs were known by everyone and a new song was like a wind from the Sahara, bearing a strange red dust, a miracle. The little boy squeals with delight, squirming he is with the pleasure of it, like a proper audience. The girl’s face is still, radiant. The boy bangs in the bath, knuckles and other bones finding the enamelled tin. Such is the nature of his delight, turning his little contraption of being into queer drumsticks.
    ‘You and your arithmetic, you’ll probably go far ...’
    Outside the heavy hot wind of the summer night stirs the fresh leaves of the sycamore. The moon no doubt will be riding to the south, where it sits above the sloping field. Suddenly, in the byre, Billy will fall asleep, just suddenly there where he stands, his guilt evaporating in slumber, like a human. The calves will curl up on the shitty hay, and breathe heavily through their stupid noses like old men with colds. Even the hens will nervously sleep, the night fear of foxes infecting their henny dreams, whatever they might be, I could not say. And we will dry and settle the children in their beds, in their pyjamas aired by the sun on the fuchsia outside, with the good air of Kelsha in the crisp cotton, and they will sleep. And we will go to our bed, and we will sleep. Which seem like good matters.
    The water runs down the little boy’s back. I am using an old ladle of my grandmother‘s, the last of the stewards’ wives. Her house at the back of Kiltegan village had a whole arsenal of kitchen items - she could have gone to war with them—and her array of skillets and pots astounded less fortunate eyes. Now what remains of all that glitter and show is this tarnished ladle, made by Mellet’s of Baltinglass.
    Where the rest of her worldly hoard has gone I cannot hazard a guess. But the ladle was with us at the castle quarters, so it must have been a keepsake of my fathers, in memory of her. Now all my mother’s things are dispersed also, and only this ladle has come from that time, passing through two or three sets of women’s hands. It scoops the bath water well enough, the little boy’s back glistens at me, with its slender spine, his skin as soft as gloves. I think of my grandmother, Bridget Dunne, and him, the past and the present. Her long set of bones lie in against the church in Kiltegan yard, his fidget below me.

Chapter Six
    The weather turns filthy in the deeper part of the month and the wind whips about in the yard for three curious days. I am always surprised by our weather, even though there is nothing surprising about it. There is no mystery. It will not hold. The summer months seem always to be thinking and dreaming of winter and now and then those thoughts and dreams break out into waking reality. And the signs and sounds of winter are laid across the good colours of summer, the green of the sycamores darkens, the brown mottled bark deepens to black in the wet. Even a few leaves are torn from the branches in an imitation of autumn, and those fresh soft leaves that should have lasted many weeks more lie suddenly at sea on the stones of the yard and on the soft, high summer grasses. Bewildered and disgruntled I do not doubt, like people in their prime torn from life, and chicks pulled out of the nest.
    So we retreat into the familiar darkness of the kitchen. And perhaps