Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online

high as she can without bothering me.
    We are Christian persons, imbued with the strange light of our Saviour, and to every one of us has been assigned by sleight of God an immortal soul. An immortal soul in all too mortal flesh. It is well for me to remember this, in this early watch of the night. I do not expect to sleep.
    My head feels like the bed of a stream after the shock of floodwater. It is scoured out by the events of the day.
    Billy Kerr. He has surprised me. He was deeply solicitous when the pony was calmed, and carried the little boy all the way back up the green road, while I led the girl by her slender paw. I was hobbling from the fall, but at the same time I was watching Billy Kerr, and how he laughed with the child and amused him, and plucked the foxgloves for him so he might burst them between his fingers. All memory of the terrible upset seemed to pass away under those subterfuges.
    Then when we were all parked in the kitchen and the children on the settle by the helpful turf, Billy Kerr marched down to the crossroads and, not fearing at all, mounted the trap where he had the vehicle and its unrepentant animal tethered to a tree, and drove the contraption, with its one squeaking wheel, back up to us. The metal rim has been dislodged from the easeful balance of the spokes, the wraps of wood around the axle look askew. It will all be money to put right - money Sarah and myself do not have.
    Billy Kerr stuck the trap in the hay barn, and Billy the pony in the byre, and both have a sort of disgraced look to them now, the wooden trap itself moping, with one of its lamps knocked into a lean from the force of the mishap.
    I think of them both now, in the dark of the night, each alone, separated, the wife of the trap torn from the husband of the horse.

    At length against the long impulse of the night I go out into the starry yard to comfort the long ropes of my muscles and the field sticks of my bones. I carry the bed heat on the surface of my skin and the soft breeze of the night shows great interest in me, raising the hairs on my arms. Before me lies the rough house of our sleeping pony, by my right arm the sleeping calves and the subdued wakefulness of the hens. It is foxes walk the sleep of hens, and keep them frittering with tiny noises. By my left, the slope of the old yard and the pillars of the gates. Beyond the black gape of the milking byre lurks the pleasing bulk of the two milking cows, Daisy and Myrtle, which Sarah did not have a chance to drive back out into the top field. If they do not eat the grasses they will not fatten their udders with the milk. Is it that Sarah grows forgetful, or was it the emergency that took that allotted box of time away from her?
    It is past the midnight hour in this region of the south. We lie in here behind the mountains. It kept many things away and many things contained. Here in these districts built up great farms, with mostly English and Protestants to own them, and only the great force, the fist, of the old war here in Ireland sundered them.
    Still the remnant power lies across our lives. For seven generations back, my family held the same job, right down the old century. It went from father to son without a break for a hundred years like a proper kingship. Everything that happened, and all that we were, stemmed from that sinecure, like a blossoming spray. Seven generations, seven men with seven lives to live, put themselves to be stewards of Humewood estate. They were kings of the labouring men. White Meg my grandfather is still talked of, a tall unseeing man, austere and rough, who would walk to the gates of Humewood, up the street of Kiltegan, and give neither hello nor comment to any passing person. I don’t remember if I ever saw him, with my own child’s eyes, but I seem to know, to feel, that he had a sense of his immense dignity, the fact that he had gained his place from his forebears, had filled their boots well, and would lie in his niche in the