Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online Page B

sleeping Sarah, between the stiff, starched sheets, under the bright coverlet with its perpetual scene. And I feel perfectly content, at peace with man and God. My slightly chilled skin feels the leak of parched heat that Sarah has made in the bed. Sleep tumbles in on top of me like a species of river swimming.
    Is the dark troubled by our dreams? The whole district, the whole half of the world closed from the sun, dreaming. Men and women, sisters, brothers, in their allotted beds. The accidental nature of it all. My dreams are clear, like life really, whole and pure. I see my father there, the policeman, and my mother in her youth, when she loved to be with us, and counted herself the most blessed of women to have three girls and a little boy. We were her dry kingdom and her fallow field, where she let nothing grow, only the dallying sun was allowed there, to dance for us, to sing its dry song for us. So in my dreams I see her often, long, not beautiful, but calm and smiling. From this world of tears she was torn by a thinning disease, when my father was in his fiftieth year. It was a long, hard job for him to mind us. But in my dreams she is not dead, but precisely living, even-handed and serenely just.

    The summer offers a general peace, perhaps the very peace that passeth all understanding. God may have been thinking of the Irish winter when he wrote that in the good book. My spirit is altered by the deepening length of the days, the pleasant trick that summer plays, of suggesting eternity, when the light lies in the yard, and Shep is perpetually stricken by that light, the heavy weight of heat on those special days. Hopefully heaven itself will consist of this, the broadening cheer of light when I walk out into the morning yard. The stones already hot, softened by dawn. The rain deep in the earth seeps further down, and a lovely linen-like dryness afflicts the land. Grass becomes bright and separate, like a wild cloth. A crust appears on the dunghill. The piss of the calves dries in the gullies like spit on a heating griddle. Sleekness creeps over things, handles and insects. You can almost hear the work of the sun in those long, patient things, the buds of the crab-apple tree, the little hinges of the sycamores. How fresh and alive the leaves even, shouting with green, delighting in life. Stone and earth and wood, the make-up of our little hillside palace, where such as we abide.
    How different our story would be if we were Greeks or Spaniards, and could count on that sunlight. But it is only a trick, for many a day of summer is sister to any winter day. And yet we embrace the trick, we live by it.
    I have not fetched the lambs from their lairs in the sheets, let them lie a little longer, they are still city children yet. Soon they will adjust to us, and rise with the cockcrow easily and full of go. The zinc bucket creaks in the hooks of my fingers, and I pass along the dew-drenched path to the well, sucking in the smells of clover and the queer fresh smell of the bread-and-butter bushes, a smell so slight you could miss it, a hair’s breadth of a smell. The may sits heavily in the bushes this year. The slopes of Kelshabeg are all brightened by it, it is a free glory. My polka-dotted dress brushes the fringes of the taller grass, giving me a little line of wetness there, but I do not care. Though I am old I feel a skittering in my bones, a gratitude, an interest in this adventure, and I am speculating on the state of the well. Will she have been there before me, the wild witch across the road, and disturbed the mud, and washed some old working bucket there?
    But all is clean and stately, the big sliced boulder of water lying in its crown of long grasses, the kneeling-stone dry and welcoming. So I dip my bucket there with secret expertise, not a grain of mud rises from the black bottom. The bucket drinks the water. Some boatmen, little black darting creatures, creep in on the deluge. Let them come, I do not care. They