The Walking People Page 4

  "The cat can look at the king," said Johanna, putting her hands on her hips.

  "Johanna!" Greta pleaded as she slowly stood up. She could hear people moving in the long grass, the pop and crack of the fire. Johanna didn't flinch. The wind came up off the water, wrapped her nightdress around her legs, whipped her long hair around her face, and still, she kept her hands on her hips. Greta, expecting more of the Ward clan to materialize out of the darkness with their planks of wood, took her one remaining cool nerve and used it to turn herself around and run back the way she came. She moved as fast as she could, keeping her left hand on the low wall that ran all the way down to the Cahill gate.

  She went around to the bedroom window and heaved herself in headfirst, using her hands to walk forward and dragging her legs after her. She pulled off her wet stockings, gave her feet a quick rub with the washcloth, crawled under the covers, and prayed that Johanna had survived. She listened for her parents on the other side of the wall and decided that if Johanna wasn't back in five minutes she would wake them. She counted to herself. She gave Johanna another five minutes.

  One whole hour later, Johanna's head and shoulders came through the window. "Christ, Greta," she said. "Thanks a million."

  "Where have you been? You could have been murdered."

  Johanna took two long strides to the edge of the bed. She pulled on the string of her boot and casually loosened the laces. "I sat by their fire, and then the boy one walked me to the gate. They go back and forth all the time in the dark. You wouldn't believe the places they've been, and some of them younger than us. Dublin, Cork, Manchester, Liverpool. Can you imagine?"

  Greta listened as Johanna paused after each place she named to give each city its own particular due. The way she said Manchester was different from the way she said Liverpool, and Greta knew that her sister had already walked down their streets, imagined their people, dipped into their shops, and plucked things from their shelves to have wrapped and tucked into shopping bags. Johanna hugged her arms around her body as if trying to gather these places closer.

  "Julia—your one from today—must have been somewhere. She was the only one who didn't show herself."

  "Good night," Greta said, pulling the covers and tucking them under the far side of her body so that Johanna couldn't pull them away.

  "His name is Michael, by the way. Michael Ward. The one who walked me."

  "Good for him."

  The next morning, just after cock's crow, Big Tom carried Julia's body from the field and brought her to Johanna and Greta's bed. Greta pressed up against the wall as he passed, and the woman's shawl brushed Greta's face. It had the same muscular smell as the animals, and it reminded Greta of how she liked to rest her cheek on the cow's warm flank when she milked. Lily explained that Johanna and Greta's bedroom was the only choice, with the three boys crowding the front room, and she couldn't very well go in Lily and Big Tom's room with the pile of clothes to be washed in a heap under the window. They couldn't very well put her on the kitchen table or on the floor of the hall. Greta took the news quietly, not minding the recently dead woman in her bed but feeling like she should mind, or would mind soon. She watched from the hall as Big Tom placed the woman over the covers and held her in a sitting position while Lily wrapped a bandage around her forehead and then a clean cloth over the pillow. They laid her down, and Lily arranged her legs, skirt, apron, shawl, hands. The woman's hair had come loose, and at first Lily gathered it together and tucked it under her head. Then she fanned it across Greta's pillow.

  "Look at the length of it," Johanna whispered.

  "Don't talk about the dead," Lily warned as she reached forward and put her fingers under the dead woman's chin and gently pushed her mouth closed. She took her hand away, and the woman's jaw fell open. Lily reached forward again and, keeping her hand on the woman's jaw, looked around Greta and Johanna's room.

  "Bring me something," she said to Johanna. "Cut off a strip of the flour sack."

  Johanna disappeared and quickly reemerged with a strip of burlap. She handed it to Lily, and Lily wrapped it around the woman's face, starting under her chin and tying the strip off with a bow at the top of her head. When Lily took her hand away, the woman's mouth stayed closed, and Greta, stepping closer to the bed for a better look, thought the woman's face looked like a package, or like a picture in a frame.

  "Are you sure she's dead?" Greta asked. The woman seemed to be peering at them from behind lowered lids, peeking at them in the sly way a person might peek if she were only pretending.

  Lily placed her hand over the woman's eyes. "Go bring me two coins from the cup over the fire."

  In the kitchen, after they'd done as much as they could for the woman, Big Tom and the boys prepared to go up to the campsite. Johanna begged to go with them. She whinged, she moaned, she followed Lily around the kitchen. She pleaded with Big Tom; she looked desperately at her brothers, but they shrugged and looked away. She stamped and threatened to follow them. She pulled on Lily's elbow and promised to do anything in the world Lily wanted if she could only go up to the camp.

  "That's enough now, Johanna," Lily said. The men were putting on their caps. "You'll see them when her people come down. It's not a day for gawking and asking questions."

  Johanna calmed down. "Do you think they'll all come? Will she be waked here?"

  "They have their own way. We have to see."

  As the men were leaving, Lily walked with them as far as the front gate and told her husband the dead woman's name. Big Tom looked at his wife as if her knowing the tinker's name was more surprising than waking up to find a tinker dead in his field. Then they turned right and walked up the wind-battered coast road, four across, up past the high sea ledge, until they came to the camp.

  The ground of the camp was strewn with half-burned sticks, bits of paper, and feathers. In the middle was the dark ring of an extinguished fire. A few feet away was another fire, this one blazing, and next to it a woman bottle-feeding an infant. A man with a sharp red face to clash with his red hair put down the bucket he was making and stepped forward. As the Cahill men stood there looking around, the man recognized them first by their coal black hair, then by their number, four together—three young, one older—and then by the one with his mouth pulled up into his nose. The little imp of a thing from the middle of the night might have made up a story. He hadn't liked the way she cast her eye around the shadows, peeked into the wagons whenever someone went in or out, and now the consequence of his hospitality had come calling.

  "I'm looking for the husband of Julia Ward," Big Tom announced.

  "I'm Dermot Ward," the red man said. They rarely had country people in their camp, so to have four at once, and so soon after the strange midnight visit of the two girls, drew every traveller in the group away from what they were doing. Julia had gone in the late evening of the night before to perform what she called women's work on a woman named Mary. Last name not given. It was the reason they'd left the Ballinasloe fair a day early. Mary had sent word to her sister, who'd married a man whose brother had married a tinker, settled her in a house near Tuam, but could not get her to abandon her tinker ways.

  Dermot Ward didn't mention any of this to the four men who entered the camp. He never liked the idea of Julia's women's work when it brought her down certain roads as opposed to others. They had set up lovely in Ballinasloe, showing their beautiful piebalds to the world, visiting everyone they knew and hadn't seen since the last horse fair. There were ponies to be swapped, marriages to be arranged, fabric to be traded for tools, tools traded for swag. Then, out of the blue, Mary's sister's husband's brother's wife had come knocking. 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.

  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 home less than twelve hours earlier. The three travellers followed the Cahills with a horse and cart, making sure before they left to sweep it out and line it with fresh hay and a clean sheet. The horse, when it passed the field where the woman had landed, stopped to sniff the air.

  "Where is she.?" Dermot asked as he strode into the cottage. Michael and his grandfather hung back and stood side by side without touching. They seemed unwilling to enter past the front hall.

  "I'm sorry for your trouble," Lily said as she opened the bedroom door.

  Dermot stood over the bed, put his hands on his wife's cheeks. He lifted her arm and let it fall back onto the blanket. He turned and pulled the curtains apart, then lifted Julia's head from the pillow and inspected the bandage. They'd passed the pieces of splintered wood on the road.

  "A stone, I'd say," Lily offered. "When she landed."

  "The horse was spooked," Big Tom said from the doorway. "It was charging like the devil with the cart behind it and took off full gallop after the crash, harness and all."

  "Took off," Dermot repeated in a dull tone. "That horse was never spooked in his life." This wasn't true and Dermot knew it. Still, he stood to his full height, which was not as tall as Big Tom or any of the boys, and with his windburned face he looked at each of them one by one. He stood as a barrier between the group and Julia. It was the women's work, Dermot knew. The discovery was made and she'd gotten chased. A gunshot probably, aimed just over her head.

  "He might wander back," said Lily.

  "Unless someone already has him caught and stabled," Dermot said.

  "There's that, I suppose," Lily said.

  Big Tom crossed his arms over his chest. To Greta he looked the way he did when he caught one of the boys resting instead of working, or whenever they saw Mr. Grady passing on the road.

  Dermot turned his back on Big Tom and spoke only to Lily. "She had great nature for people, Julia did."

  "She did, of course. Anyone could see it."

  "And she mentioned you yesterday, the food you sent."

  Big Tom looked at Lily, who kept her eyes fixed on Dermot. "You can leave her if you like," Lily offered. "It's no bother. You can send the women down to wash her body."

  Dermot made a little grunt, like a laugh smothered before he could let it go, and otherwise ignored the offer.

  "Boys?" Lily said when she saw that he'd made up his mind. She nodded at Jack, Padraic, and Little Tom.

  "Leave them," Dermot said. He put his fingers to his mouth and sounded a sharp, short whistle. A moment later Michael and his grandfather appeared, and Greta felt embarrassment light up in her belly when she realized that the boy was seeing his mother dead for the first time. We shouldn't be here, she thought, looking at the tall silhouettes of her brothers, her father, the softer shape of her mother, and Johanna beside her, buzzing with energy even when completely still. Dermot embraced his wife from behind, locking his arms around her chest. He nodded at the old man and the boy to take hold of her legs. Without hesitation they lifted her. Michael kept his chin up, and his lips were white from being pressed together so tight. Only when he squeezed past her brothers did Greta realize how small he was. Dermot said something in the traveller language, and the old man shifted over to help the boy.

  They laid her in the back of the cart just as she would lie in a coffin. Michael tugged at the sheet, which had gotten bunched to one side when they arranged her. He tucked the loose straw underneath, and then he climbed in next to his mother. The older men climbed in front.

  "I'm sorry for your trouble," Greta said, relieved that she'd thought of the right thing to say, and stood on her tiptoes to reach the boy's hand. Michael sat up straighter but didn't look at her.

  "Can we go up?" Johanna asked, turning her big eyes on her mother.

  "Hush!" Lily said. Big Tom put one rough hand on top of each girl's head and steered them both inside.

  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 l
ong 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?"