The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [3]
“Four or five.”
“How did they get away with that?”
“They got away with whatever they wanted to,” she said matter-of-factly. “Still do.”
“Is that why you left Ireland?”
“No,” she answered quickly. “My mother would have never left Ireland if she didn’t have to. But since my Da left, she was desperate. We lived for a few months on land belonging to old neighbors in Kilkenny—that’s when the nuns caught up with us and told my Mum that we’d all have a better life in England. My mother refused. After a few weeks, the nuns came back again. ‘Ten healthy children and you won’t take the trip to England? Why not?’ they asked her. She said she couldn’t and wouldn’t go—she was an Irish woman and belonged to Ireland.”
I nodded. This was a feeling I could relate to—more than my own mother would ever know. Maybe more than my own mother had ever herself felt.
“You know, in the autumn, those nuns brought us milk and bread every single week. But once winter came, the deliveries stopped. By Christmas, two of the kids were so sick from hunger and cold they had to go to the local children’s infirmary. That’s when baby Avril died. After Christmas, the nuns came back and my mother agreed that we would all go to England, where there were free houses for people like us and good jobs. Ha!”
She poured a little whiskey into her glass.
“Ha!” she repeated. “Good jobs. Free houses! What a fool she was to believe it! Although I don’t think she really did. Then to see little Willie drown like that? I think she must have pretended that it was some other mother’s boy. That it wasn’t Willie. That was how I got by, anyway,” she whispered, confession-like, as if it were a sin to pretend. “Any faith she had left would have been all for naught, had she seen us battered and worked like slaves, digging frozen ground for vegetables to feed ourselves! For Christ’s sake, it was 1958! But like the Dark Ages!”
As I sat patiently, my mother refilled my teacup and poured herself a last measure of whiskey. She patted the bottle and put it back into the cupboard by the sink.
“You know, it’s not just about Willie,” she started, “or the way they lied to us and used us. It was the fear—” She stopped and shook her head as if trying to believe this was really her story. I could tell she was beginning to find it difficult when she reached up and put her hand over her mouth for a moment, a sign she was holding back tears. She let her unruly hair fall back into her face and I heard her swallow.
“They’d do anything,” she finished, “just to get you to cry or misbehave. Anything to punish you with those damned hobnailed boots.”
“Is that why we don’t go to church?”
She nodded. I pictured myself disemboweling ruffian nuns.
“And that’s why we don’t go to the Jersey Shore?”
She nodded. I pictured myself dismembering beach perverts.
I sat quietly for a minute while she stared into space and drew strength.
“Did you finish your homework?”
“No.”
“Well, what are you doing sitting here talking to me when you haven’t finished your homework?” She fitted a raggedy old purple headband over her forehead and pulled it back to solve her hair problem.
“I—”
“You know that the only way out of here is an education. Don’t start getting lazy now, love. You have so much potential.”
“I know,” I answered, still listening to her echo. (Only way out. Only way out.)
She got up and turned on the kitchen light and ran some hot water into the sink for the dishes. “I’ll see you later, love.”
When I went back to my room (now my own room, for six whole months since Patricia moved out), I lay on my bed and sobbed softly to myself for my Uncle Willie. It seemed—even though I knew about how bad the world could be—that I still had no control over hormones and the adolescent urge to cry my eyes out over the oddest things.
But I wasn’t just crying over an uncle I never knew. I was crying about everything a three-hundred-year-old brain would cry about. Like how annoying it was to be surrounded by spoiled, twentieth-century thirteen-year-old boys and girls all day, by twentieth-century grown-ups