The Walking People Read online

  The boys carried him home, laid him on his bed, pulled off his shirt, loosened his belt, touched and retouched his face with the backs of their hands. And this Greta was sure she remembered firsthand: when they pulled off his boots the river poured out and ran to every corner of the room.

  Part II: 1963

  4

  MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED men and women, old and young, pressed elbow to elbow in the Conch town hall. The collective heat from their bodies and the dampness of the unseasonably warm day steamed the two windows of the long, low-ceilinged room that faced west onto Sky Street, where another two hundred people waited, some from as far as forty miles away. Inside and out, the people were silent. Even the floorboards had stopped creaking as soon as everyone found a spot. The people who gathered had already worked a full day, had their supper, had their tea, and now they waited together for the daylight to disappear. Most of the heads were turned west, as if a stern look might goad the last of the sun's rays to get on with it, get out of the way.

  "Here they are!" A man standing on the top outside step shouted over his shoulder into the crowded room, his voice sparking life into those who'd begun to let their minds wander as the blood pooled in their tired feet. The crowd, which had arranged itself to take up every bit of spare space, silently agreed to split down the middle as the pastor, the county councilor, and the local director of the Electricity Supply Board passed down a narrow center aisle. The crowd stood on tiptoe to see them.

  The ESB representative reached the small raised platform first, then stood aside and gestured to the priest and the councilor to precede him. When they took their positions, he joined them on the platform and cleared his throat to address the crowd. The people outside surged forward to hear.

  "It's been a great honor getting to know so many of you over this past year, and on behalf of the entire board, I wish the people of Conch, and the outlying homes, much happiness and prosperity. It has brought me particular pleasure, in this post-development phase, to continue bringing light to communities beyond the reach of the initial push. One day very soon, all of Ireland will be electrified."

  He stepped back as the crowd, believing the time had come, applauded. The priest raised his hand to shush them, and like dutiful children, they dropped their hands to their sides. The county councilor cleared his throat and thanked the supply board for its speed and efficiency. The ESB man smiled, pretended to wave his words away. A muffled cough sounded from the middle of the room.

  The priest stepped forward next and read a short passage about light and darkness from the Gospel of Saint John. He shook holy water on the rust-spotted switch box that had been temporarily set up for the occasion. It had finally grown dark, and the priest signaled to the men in the far corners of the room to extinguish the paraffin lamps.

  "Father?" the ESB man said. "The honors?" All eyes in the room were strained to make out the dark shadow that was the priest reach over to the box and move the ceremonial switch from the bottom to the top. A half second later the room was filled with bright electric light. The electric gramophone clicked to life, and the first notes of Rosemary Clooney's voice were overwhelmed by thunderous applause, stamping, shouting.

  Outside, the shopwindows and arc lamps lining the streets had also lit up, and at the outermost edge of the crowd, Greta looked over at Johanna and then at Little Tom and announced that she could see them as clearly as midmorning. She took off her glasses, which were almost identical to her first pair of six years earlier, and the brightness remained. The streetlamps buzzed, and for a moment Greta panicked, thinking that they might not be safe to touch. Before she could mention it, a young man grabbed hold of one of the poles and swung around and around, calling out for everyone to look at him, look at him, he was an American film star. A girl about his age caught his elbow and told him he was making a bollocks of himself. The dancing that had begun inside was beginning to spread to the people in the street, and the same young man who'd been swinging on the lamp grabbed Johanna's elbow and spun her around. When he released her, she came back to Greta and announced that she could count every single freckle on Greta's nose.

  The three Cahills celebrated with the crowd until two o'clock in the morning, and then they collected their bicycles from outside the post office and headed back to Ballyroan. The light appeared to dim as they got farther from town, and by the time they reached the sharp curve in the road, they were in total darkness. Greta tried to estimate how many times in her life she'd walked or cycled that road in the dark, but on that night, it seemed so much darker. Johanna weaved back and forth, cutting an unseen pattern with the treads of her bicycle wheel, and talked nonstop about electric irons, electric cookers, electric clothes-washing machines.

  On the radio that morning, there had been a man talking about the ten-year plan. The man had joked that the ten-year plan was now, in 1963, in its thirteenth year. The Electricity Supply Board had finally closed in on its goal of one million poles, seventy-five thousand miles of power lines, one hundred thousand transformers. From above, Greta thought, with all the crisscrossing of black wires and the haphazard placement of the poles, Ireland probably looked like a fish caught in a net.

  The next morning, Johanna and Greta tried to explain to Lily the excitement of the night before. The music, the noonday brightness of the streets, the food cooked on electric cookers and lined up on tables.

  "There was tea?" Lily asked.

  "Oh, loads," Johanna said. "Everything you can think of."

  "Did anyone have the tea?"

  Johanna looked at Greta. "Anyone who was near, I'd say. We didn't want to fight through the crowd. They made it in a five-gallon thing, and people said it boiled up in no time."

  "Why are you asking about the tea?" Greta asked, and watched as Lily pursed her lips and bent to stoke the fire. Johanna sat in the chair beside Greta, who could feel her begin to buzz like the arc lamps of the night before. She pressed her knee against Johanna's under the table.

  "It's just like Big Tom said," Lily said finally. "Here come the poles and the wire and the switches and a monthly charge to do the things we've been doing for a thousand years. It's a rent, is what it is. It's tricking people to sign up to pay rent. Wasn't there a woman on the radio last week saying that the electricity lit up the thatch and set fire to the whole town?"

  Little Tom knocked on the table and shook his head. He placed his hand over his mouth and said something. Greta couldn't quite understand it, but she guessed.

  "A rumor," Greta said, looking at little Tom for approval. He nodded, sat back in his chair. Greta remembered the program now. She had rested in the kitchen for a moment between trips to the well and found Little Tom listening to the radio. "They did a whole program on the things people think about electricity that aren't true."

  "Mammy, if you could only just see—" Johanna said.

  "I've been around a lot longer than you, girl, and there's things I don't have to see to know."

  "You'll get used of it," Greta said, taking her mother's hand and squeezing it. "We all will."

  "Used of it or no," Johanna said. "It's coming. This week. We've waited six years for this, and I can't talk about it for one minute longer."

  Lily stared into the fire as Johanna stood up, stalked across the room, let the kitchen door slam shut behind her. Greta dropped Lily's hand and felt along the cool and clammy wall until she came to the little plate that marked the place where a cord would soon be plugged in. The wall was damp to the touch and would be more damp, the ESB canvasser had said, if they were to take a hatchet, hack away at the plaster, and get at the pulp that was within. "Like sponges, these western cottages," he'd said. "And there's the salt to worry about as well." He'd taken his first two fingers, run them along the wall, brought them to his lips, and licked. He'd smacked his tongue against the inside of his mouth. "It's an island, this place," he'd said then. "Water on every side. Did ye ever think of that?"

  The canvasser came for the first time about a year af
ter Big Tom's death. He arrived in a van, and when he opened the back door of the van, a whole shop's worth of appliances was revealed: electric irons, churns, a machine that could milk four cows at once, a plug-in kettle, a cooker, a big cylinder that could pump water from the well all the way into the kitchen of the cottage. Jack and Padraic had been in Australia since the week after Big Tom's funeral, so it was left to Little Tom and Johanna to listen to the presentation, follow the man around the house to learn where the lines could enter and exit, how they'd run through the walls. They walked out into the fields and picked out places the poles could go without getting in the way. Inside, Greta stayed with Lily as she peered out from between the curtains and asked what was going on. The man explained how it worked—the connection fee, the wiring fee, the calculation based on the square footage of the house, the barn, the stable. He multiplied by some percentage that meant they were far outside the main grid, subtracted the small government subsidy, divided by twelve.

  Too dear, Johanna told him, and they turned him away. They turned him away the next year as well, and the next. Next thing they knew, it was 1962, and since the people of Conch had voted to get electricity for the whole village, the Cahills could be absorbed into the local grid for a much-reduced price.

  The three Cahill children made their case to Lily. "Look it," Johanna had said, opening her hands, palms up, in the way she did when she was going to say things only once. "Without Jack and Padraic, it's the only way we can keep the place going. Tom can do the work of three men with the help it will bring. Think of it, Mam. We can pump water right up to the house. No more trips to the well. No more carrying those heavy buckets." Little Tom rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers to remind her to talk about the cost.

  "And it pays for itself after a while," Johanna added. "For a start, look at the battery for the radio."

  "Don't tell me what to look at," Lily said. "I want no part of it. We'll be electrified in our beds. And what happens when Jack and Padraic come back and they don't like it?"

  Johanna threw down her hands and let out a long sigh. She raked her fingers through her hair. Greta knew what was coming, so she moved over to sit next to Lily.

  "They're in Australia," Johanna said. "They've been in Australia for six years." Her tone said that these two brief sentences were the beginning and the end of that particular story.

  "And it's time now for them to be coming on home," Lily said.

  In the first few months after Big Tom's death, it seemed to Greta that her mother had gotten very old. She held herself differently, her back bent like an old woman's. Her lips became chapped and got so raw that they cracked and bled when she ate or spoke. She was tired all the time and took long rests in the middle of the day. She didn't like going to town anymore, and when she did go, she didn't like talking to people. After a while, time began moving in the other direction, and although Lily appeared older, it seemed to Greta that her mind was getting younger, as if she couldn't understand the world and needed her children to get her out of bed, force a washcloth under her arms. The only time she appeared to be happy was when a letter arrived from Jack or Padraic. When their letters came, she would call out the back door for any of them within earshot and tell them to drop whatever they were doing to come hear. "We'll write back straightaway," she'd say, putting a biro and piece of paper in front of Greta, who was now as good at writing as Johanna and had far more patience for it.

  At first it seemed to Greta as if Lily were satisfied by the boys' descriptions of Canberra and Melbourne and the work they were doing on the roads there. She watched her mother nod at any positive news, as if they could see her, and how she brought her hand to her collarbone if she thought they were leaving something out. At the time, it had seemed the smartest thing for the boys to leave, and quickly. A garda had come asking questions at Big Tom's funeral, and the possibility of Grady's son coming from England to investigate what had happened choked Lily in her sleep. As they were hemming and hawing about whether they should go, she told them that shortly before he died, Big Tom had decided that this would be his last season of taking the salmon from the river, that he was going to find work on one of those foreign fishing boats where they spent four months on, four months off, and that the boys should either do the same or find work somewhere else. They listened closely, and they knew that even though it wasn't true, this was her way of telling them to go.

  But Grady's son had not come from England to press charges, and the garda who had come asking questions the day of Big Tom's funeral had not returned. In the papers, they called Mr. Grady's death an accident. By the time it became clear that the boys would not face any trouble, they'd already reached Melbourne and the childhood friend who promised them work.

  School went by the wayside after Big Tom died and the boys left. Greta followed Johanna's lead. If Johanna got up and went to school, so did Greta. If she stayed home, so did Greta. Neither Lily nor Little Tom nor Mr. Joyce seemed to notice either way. It seemed silly to both girls to be reciting poems in Irish while at the same time wondering if Lily would get up the energy to take in the wash, if Little Tom would remember to check on the day-old chicks. The girls went off and on for a few years, but then quietly, without discussion, when Johanna was fourteen and Greta was twelve, they stopped going entirely. There was never a last day. They just went one Wednesday, and as it turned out, they never went back. To make up for it, they began buying a newspaper whenever they went to town, and they took turns reading out loud after they'd cleared the supper dishes. Ever since getting glasses, Greta had had a far easier time with reading and writing. She could write a good letter to her brothers in a faster time than Johanna, who never had the patience to sit and describe all the things the boys might be interested in. Johanna, however, was still a better reader. When Greta read out loud, she concentrated so hard on pronouncing the words correctly that she often read a whole passage without having the slightest clue as to what she'd just said.

  Although Johanna said that school was mostly a useless waste of time, Greta missed it now and again. She liked the plays they put on at Christmas and the little chocolate eggs at Easter. She liked the stories about how Ireland used to be divided up among kings, though she could never figure out if that was real the way Pádraig Pearse was real or if it was a made-up story like Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster. During the day Lily looked at them sometimes as if she couldn't quite put her finger on what was wrong with the picture she was seeing, but she never said a word.

  It wasn't that Greta thought putting electricity in the house would be easy, but she hadn't thought about how much it would take, how many men it involved, the lorries carrying long wood poles, the huge wheels of wire like giant spools of thread. The men who worked on the poles wore funny-looking boots, gloves, hard hats, and big belts around their waists. It took seven of them to put the poles upright. Little Tom did most of the wiring inside the cottage, working from the pamphlets the ESB had mailed to him when they finally reached an agreement. Johanna helped him, reading certain parts out loud, turning the pictures around and around until they figured out a way to get it right.

  One week after the ceremony in Conch, on an overcast day that never got any brighter than predawn, Little Tom ushered Lily into the kitchen and pulled out a chair for her to sit down. At his signal, Johanna switched on the light, and the room was as bright as it had been that night on Sky Street. Lily blinked in the sudden brightness and looked around. She turned her face away from the glare of the lamp. She squinted up at the ceiling and, after a few seconds, stood up to take a closer look. Without warning, she snapped into action, grabbing the broom from its place behind the door and tearing at the cobwebs with the bristled end. It was the fastest her children had seen her move since Big Tom died. When she was through with one corner, she worked over toward the next, then the next, leaning over whatever furniture she couldn't push out of the way.

  "The man said we'll get used to the brightness after a few days," Johanna said. "
This is sixty watts. There's seventy-five watts and ninety if we want it brighter."

  "Brighter?" Lily took a last swipe at the ceiling. "This place is a disgrace. First thing tomorrow you girls are going to dust every square inch."

  Yes, Greta thought. Give us chores. Lift our skirts and give us a slap.

  "And don't even think of doing a thing until you do," Lily added as she ran her hand along the nicks and scrapes on the arm of the chair where she had just been sitting. When she finished inspecting the kitchen, she seemed taller. She untied her hair and retwisted it so it was neater, tighter. That's it, Greta thought. Take us by the ear and march us through the fields back to the main road.

  When the electrification of Conch and the outlying areas was complete, the owners of the few B and B's that the Cahills had once supplied with salmon got it into their heads that their business would turn around. Word would get to America and England that the far west of Ireland now had hot water running in every faucet and electric blankets in every room. One place, a B and B that called itself an inn, advertised in town for kitchen help. One month after the electrification of Conch village, Johanna spotted the ad, removed it from its post, folded it in fourths, and tucked it into her pocket. That night Greta and Johanna washed their hair, dried it at the fire, scrubbed themselves in the basin, pressed their best skirts and blouses. The next morning, they cycled the ten miles along the coast road to the six-room inn and presented themselves to the owner, Mr. James Breen, who, after introducing himself, didn't have the slightest idea of what to do with them.