Free Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry Page B

it is not like the lows of winter in that we do not expect such weather to last, and we have the sunlight to anticipate. And moreover the rain is not driven in under the doors and eaves, and down the chimney. We do not come out in the morning to find a drift of snow advancing on the very ashes of the fire, two very different heaps of white. The walls do not weep for the horrors of winter, the mattresses do not gain that miserable odour of damp that only a few hours under the covers expels by the heat in your body. Otherwise there are echoes and odours of winter enough in that bad summer weather, a memory and a prophecy.
    This is when the bond of friendship between me and Sarah is most essential, when it is tested and I do pray strengthened by confinement, and the little necessary dances and manoeuvrings on the flags of the kitchen floor.
    Of course we must be perpetually butting out into the drives of rain and wind, to accomplish the usual roster of chores. Nothing stops the great clock of the day, with its silent bells ringing the changes in our heads - cows, calves, hens and all. We throw on our old torn and age-painted coats and push out like ragamuffins into the tempests. We return wind-blown and a little daft in the head from the buffeting, as if we have had wild dreams while we were abroad. By the hearth the children lurk, drawing on brown paper bags, doing little talking games with their teddy bears, their heads stilling and their eyes widening as the door opens yet again to admit one of us in our tempestuous garb.
    So in the deep afternoon of the third day, all work attended to, we are content to be as cooped as the hens. All work attended to, for the most part, except the evening feeding of the hens, not so bad a job as the poor creatures are indeed fast in their coop so that the breezes out from the Glen of Imail will not eradicate them entirely from the confines of the farm, and blow them away over the trees to Humewood, like wonderful rags. I have my old wooden orange box of socks and stockings, to be darning the heels and the toes, where Sarah’s horny nails make holes. Sarah herself is banging a lump of dough on the counter of the dresser, shaking fresh white flour under it so it will not stick to the waxen wood, banging, kneading with her bony knuckles, and banging. The boy and the girl turn the thick pages of a book, looking at the simple colours of the figures, absorbed, like priests doing those silent prayers by the tabernacle, things no doubt the mass-goers need not or ought not hear. It is a simple moment, all labour done, the natural anxieties of being alive all stilled and soothed. The turf fire mutters in the murky hearth. The clock seems less anxious to seek the future, its tick more content, slower. All is in the balance of a kind, the weight and the butter in the scales in sufficient harmony.
    Then we begin to hear them. At the first distant inklings of sound, a sound that is a sort of memory, something on the tip of the tongue, but that slowly comes back to you what it is, Sarah’s head turns and looks across at me. She leaves the dough subsiding on the dresser top. Her floury hands go to her thighs and she rests them there, imprinting the soft map of her palms. We have a moment of inaction and then we both spring to the centre of the floor.
    ‘Do you think, do you think they’ll come in?’ she says, with real fear in her voice.
    ‘Look out the top of the door,’ I say. ‘Look out and see!’
    We move quick to the door, the children rushing after us, infected by our tones. Sarah unlatches the half-door and looks out through the veritable cloths of the wind, the air is so blustery and torn about. The children shove up on tip-toe and grasp the worn wood and jump up and down to see out as best a child might, who always has half a view, I suppose, of everything. There, down the lane a bit, we start to see them, the wild heads of hair, the laughter and the rags and the wicked faces.
    ‘Are they