Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online Page A

Catholic yard with a proper legacy of work and worth. He was called White Meg for his big white beard, an old-fashioned style that most men sported and that has passed away.
    It is that not saying hello, that sense of being separate, that he has passed on to me, without much to justify it, except, we carried ourselves across the wide troubles of the land, and that my own father had the dignity of high office in the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and we were raised like favoured chickens in the great coop of Dublin Castle, where the Queens and Kings of England were pleased to quarter their policemen and their families, in those bright days, when the Viceroy would shake out his flags, and his coming and going was observed with due ceremony and banging of boots.
    I stand out under the starlight. Surely the constellations are not satisfied with their names. Do they know they have been dubbed the Great and Little Bear, does Orion’s Belt know it is Orion’s Belt? My nightshift makes a little bleat in the wind, I rattle slightly like a sail. I love my land. It comes upon me like a second breeze, that strange and useless love. It is the place of Kelsha that o‘erwhelms me, the arrangement of its woods, the offices of the yard, the animals in our care, the perfection and cleanliness of the very stones, all down to us.
    The midden stands in its patch of dock leaves like an Egyptian pyramid. There is our quiet place behind the walls of the long outhouse where Sarah and myself make our toilet, wiping our rear ends with the grasses there perpetually damp. The habit in the cities of using newspapers is never as satisfactory, not by half, as those long, thin, green stems. And then cast into the pit, and the night soil from the potties carried there and likewise cast.
    Under the starlight I stand, ruminating, like a creature myself, an extra thing in the plenitude of the world. I know I am nothing. My pride is not based on my own engine, but is just a lean-to built on prejudice and leaning against anger. But this is not the point. God is the architect, and I am content there, sleepless and growing old, to be friend to his fashioned things, and a shadow among shadows. More rooted and lasting will be my crab-apple tree - some day, no doubt, another heart will give allegiance to it and its bitter fruit, gathering the tiny apples and crushing them in their season with the same passion and humour, laughing at the generosity of the tree, its ease and seeming happiness, its fertility, as I do. It is a mother of a thousand children, every year, like the offspring of the queen bee. The whole tree buzzes silently in the autumn with its excited fruit.
    Now in the dark shales of the night it stands with its generous, bitter arms.
    This is the happiness allowed to me.

    If I am to rest at all it is time to try the bed again, for when the dark is broken by the fussy fingers of the dawn we must be up and about. If your work is not done by ten, the day is wasted. I go back into the house, closing the half-door behind me against the intrusion of the hens. Of course they are all fast in their coop, the closing of the door is a habit of the daylight. My favourite hen, who gives us sleek brown eggs aplenty, is with her fellow hens. In the hours of daylight I watch her, trim and pretty about the yard, plotting her secretive births. She likes to put her eggs in tricky places, and I have never seen her about that business yet. It needs an ingenious eye, a happy instinct to discover her rich warm haul. The boy believes he knows her secrets, which is both true and untrue - he is small enough for his eyes to creep under shelves of hay, struts of old wood. I call her Red Dandy, she is a Rhode Island Red, one of my own hens I am glad to say. Sarah has not such a layer. So I fasten the half-door, still letting the encouraging night breeze cross the upper portion and enter the dark kitchen. It is a sort of cleaning, that pleasant wind. And then I slip back beside the