The Walking People by Mary Beth Keane Read Free Book Online

Helping conceive a child was one thing, but this—country people didn't know the value of a child, and now their clans were scattering all over the world. Dermot felt that just because Julia knew more about babies than anyone—making them and otherwise—didn't mean she had to go running. Not for money. Not for all the tea in China. Julia saw it differently.
    Dermot crossed his arms over his narrow chest. "You live in the cottage closest to the water. Both waters. At the bottom of the slope."
    "We do," Big Tom said. Then he took off his cap, and the boys did the same.
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    Greta wondered, the whole time her father and brothers were gone, where a tinker is buried, where a tinker is married, where a tinker puts a tree at Christmas, what happens when the rain comes lashing and the campfire is put out. Lily told her she was as bad as Johanna with the endless questions, and didn't she ever notice the little chimney pipe coming out the top of the barrel-top wagons? They have little potbelly stoves inside, just like some people have inside houses. There are ways to keep the campfire going in the rain. In the winter they build shelter tents and they're as warm and dry as a house. Warmer, even. Drier. Yes, they might have tables and chairs. Not grand ones, but still. The Cahills didn't have grand ones either. Yes, they have plates and cups and saucers. Yes, they have decorations. Pictures in frames. Yes, the children have dolls. Why wouldn't they? What's there to making a doll except sewing a piece of cloth up the side and stuffing it with feathers? Two buttons for eyes, yarn for hair. No, Lily had never been inside a
wagon. No, she didn't know why they didn't just build a house and settle. No, she didn't think the children went to school. No, she didn't know how they took their baths.
    Lily started baking as soon as the men left. She kneaded the last of the flour, the new milk, eggs, yeast. Greta greased the tins, going over the corners so that the bread wouldn't stick, not so much that it might burn. The draft from the kitchen door whipped around Greta's ankles, under her skirt, and she wondered how much worse the tinkers had it in their tents. Did they have rags stuck in every crack and crevice like the Cahills had in their house? With every big rain the Cahill roof leaked in the same spot: the boys' bedroom, to the left of the window. The water ran down the wall in thin streams, and when it happened in the middle of the night, Greta would wake to the sound of them swearing, furniture being pushed, Lily and Big Tom rushing in to help. Catching the water would be easier if it came down from the ceiling somewhere in the middle of the room; they could just place a bucket underneath and watch it fill. The way it streamed down the wall in a river, twisting and turning according to the hills and valleys in the plaster, made it impossible to collect in a bucket, and the boys had to take turns standing on the chair and holding a towel at the source. When they held it at one spot, it would burst forward a few inches away. If they managed to hold it in two spots, there would spring a third. That part of the wall was dark with mold, the dried rivers extending down from the ceiling like fingers on a giant handprint, as if someone had reached down from the sky or out from the ocean and taken hold of the house, tried to lift it from its frame.
    The days after the leaks were always the same, Big Tom with a plank of wood and a collection of nails held between his teeth, one of the boys on a ladder outside. Jack swore that the whole side of the house was so damp that if they pushed, really dug their heels in, dropped their heads between their shoulders and gave it everything, the wall would come tumbling down. "I wouldn't risk it," said Big Tom.
    The Cahill men were back in less time than it took Lily to bake one brown bread. Dermot Ward was with them, plus an older man, Julia's father, and Michael Ward, the son who'd walked Johanna