The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [2]
“Saffron?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you know the story of my brother Willie?” My mother spoke in a mixed Irish-English accent, the kind that sounds like a question all the time.
“Willie?” I asked, having never heard her mention him before.
“The second youngest?” She pulled her fattening fingers through her black mop of dyed hair, which seemed more like a wig than real hair. Maybe it was the stark color or the three-day-old hair-spray consistency that made it seem fake, but somehow it suited her. She pulled her bangs from her face and tried to tuck them behind her ears.
“I don’t think you ever told me about him,” I answered.
She got up from the table and poured me a cup of weak tea from the hot kettle. “He was some little dote, that one. I think it’s time you knew.”
“Is that what you were talking about with Uncle Jimmy?”
“That and the rest,” she answered, sighing and sitting back down. Her eyes had sunk deep into her head recently. I noticed near-black circles hidden behind her out-of-fashion 1970s glasses. She looked a lot older than forty-one, which was how old she told us she was. Her stray bangs continued to make her face itch, and she continued to try to plaster them back somehow.
“I thought there were eight of you,” I said, “but I never heard of Willie.”
“There were nine of us—well, ten if you count the baby that died our first winter out of Wexford town. Four girls and five boys. Poor as this,” she said, holding out her empty hand. “Willie was the most stubborn of all of us. He’d do whatever my Mum told him not to.”
I nodded.
“And you know, my father was an awful man who sold every last scrap we had for the drink.” She wiggled the bottle. “This shite. That’s how the nuns got my sisters and me. That’s how the brothers got your Uncle Jimmy and the boys. Willie never made it past the docks in Dun Laoghaire. He was drowned there, before we all got on the mailboat to England with my mother.”
I was doubting that my mother was sober at that point. She’d never spoken of her father so roughly before. “What do you mean, Willie ‘was drowned’? Like someone killed him?”
She nodded her head and continued her story, looking all the while at her glass and the Formica table. “Yes. Last I saw him he was crying, calling for our mum, and a nun was giving out, telling him to shut up. He must have talked back, because she slapped him and he ran to the edge of the dock.”
I stopped sipping from my cup and sat completely still, wondering what she would say next.
“When he jumped, I don’t know. I saw him from the stairway to the boat—thrashing around for a few seconds and then going under. I tried to stop and go back down, but there were too many people. My mother watched from close by, but was stuck in the crowd the same as I was. I remember her yelling his name over and over. Before I knew it, I had lost all sight of my brothers and never saw them again, until your Uncle Jimmy came to see us in seventy-nine.”
“Didn’t anyone dive in after Willie?”
“No,” she answered, still looking at the table, now firmly holding her misbehaving bangs at the sides of her temples. “No one.”
“What did the other people on the dock do?”
“They just stood there. The nuns turned their back on him and told everyone to go back to what they were doing.”
“Wow,” I answered, trying to act as if I had no idea life could be so cruel. But I had seen worse. I had done worse. I had done far worse.
“That’s just how things were, pet. My mother had signed the papers, and we became property. My knees were bloody for five years, slaving for those nuns in the south of England. I never saw my mother again and only heard she was dead, surely, when Jimmy came.”
“How old was Willie when he