The Walking People by Mary Beth Keane Read Free Book Online Page B

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    The travellers waked Julia for two nights, and on the third morning was the funeral. How word spread along the tinker channels was impossible for Greta and Johanna to figure out, but spread it did, because
people began arriving within two days. There were a few wagons, but most of the mourners arrived on foot. Johanna and Greta washed with their minds on the road, they swept with their minds on the road, they chopped and scrubbed and milked and churned thinking only of the road. No chore was completed. Even the boys turned their attention to the activity on the hill, laying down their hayforks to watch the spectacle pass. Only Big Tom was indifferent.
    "You know why tinkers wander?" he asked at tea. "Because they made the nails for Jesus' cross and now this is their punishment."
    "Have they not paid their debt?" Johanna asked. "Jesus died a long time ago."
    Little Tom said something in his mushy style, shush-shush-shushing it out to Jack and Padraic for translation.
    "Some say they descended from the ancient kings of Ireland," Padraic said, and Greta wondered if Little Tom had read that in the book he'd borrowed from Mr. Boyle the thatcher. It was a big book, and most nights he read it at the table while the others talked.
    "You see?" Big Tom laughed. "That's the kind of trickery they give out about themselves."
    Johanna had been quiet since Julia's body was taken away, and Greta followed her from the henhouse to the hay shed to the stable, waiting for her to suggest a plan, expecting at all moments to have to convince her not to do anything silly. When the funeral procession began and the strangers made the long walk from the camp to the old Ballyroan cemetery, where the priest from Conch was waiting with one hand on his Bible and the other on his pocket watch, Johanna turned her head away from her work, but didn't even walk to the gate. When it was over, the woman's body packed tight under the mound of dirt, the visitors journeyed back to the camps they had left, and the only travellers left on the hill were the original seventeen, minus one.
    In bed that night, the girls stayed awake long after they tucked their hot-water bottles in at their feet.
    "I thought it was a nice life," Johanna said, speaking to the ceiling in the dark. "But it isn't, is it? They put three planks of wood across two barrels and that's where they laid her. I saw it myself. And I saw them, Michael and his sister, Maeve is her name, crawl out of their tents
on their hands and knees the morning of the funeral, Michael in a dark suit, Maeve in a blue dress, and both of them brushing off their knees and the palms of their hands. They sat on upturned buckets by the fire. An old one came out of the wagon and ran a comb through Maeve's hair. They were baking bread in the ashes, and when it was ready the visitors pulled it apart with their hands and all the time there's herself on the planks of wood and no one paying her any heed. I waited for it to rain, I thought definitely it's going to rain, and what would they do if it had rained, I wonder? Would they have wrapped her up? Thrown an oilcloth over her?"
    "When did you go?" Greta asked.
    "Michael looked over at her the odd time, but that Maeve—she was talking and laughing, part English, part Irish, and part that language they have, and miming something the others had to guess."
    "I didn't notice you go."
    "Oh, I went early, early. She had you in the back room with the you-know-what. I was back before anyone missed me."
    "Did they see you?"
    "Maeve saw me. She gave me a good long look, but otherwise didn't take any notice."
    Greta tried to imagine the body laid out in the rain, stiff like the animals get when they wander off and die and a few days go by without finding them. She thought of the boy Michael who'd helped carry his mother away, and what it would feel like to have no mother at all. It seemed worse for him who had to sleep out in the cold and the rain than for the children