Annie Dunne Read Online Free PDF

there. I feel like a woman that has left her gloves on the bus, beautiful soft leather gloves on the Dublin bus, and does not know it immediately, but senses powerfully her loss. It is that I have left Sarah alone with Billy Kerr.
    The boy is looking up at me in puzzlement.
    ‘We must go back in, child.’
    And back in I go, the boy still anchored by my hand, from the pleasing sunlight to the kitchen draped in its share of shadows. The little girl has already wandered off.
    Sarah stands with her back to the turf warming her long bones and Billy Kerr sits in an easy and accustomed manner on one of the stone benches in the elbows of the fireplace. Neither is speaking. There is a sort of tea-drinking silence that country people have perfected over centuries. A lot can get said in those silences, they are dangerous elements.
    ‘What is it, Annie?’ says Sarah.
    ‘I can’t get the water now, Mary Callan has beaten me to it. That’s the danger of delay,’ I say, nodding to Sarah. ‘Now, that cow of hers,’ I say, but Billy Kerr interrupts me with a look of surprise.
    ‘What’s the matter with her cow?’ says Sarah.
    ‘What, Annie Dunne?’ says Billy Kerr, sceptically.
    ‘Blood in the milk,’ I say, authoritatively. ‘It should by rights be slaughtered.’
    ‘You think so, Annie Dunne?’ he says. ‘That’s a mite unchristian. She owns nothing else. She lives from that cow.’
    ‘She’s a dirty old woman that lives in filth, is the truth,’ I say, and immediately regret the flush of anger in my throat. My father used to say, some people misinterpret friendliness for foolishness. No danger of that in my case, I expect. But there is another foolishness, the foolishness of the angry woman.
    ‘You wonder why do I speak for her?’ says Billy Kerr. ‘Indeed, and I hardly know her, though she has lived there across your green road for all the years of my life. I am not acquainted intimately with her cow neither, having seen it only in the distance. But, the fact is, she is my mother’s cousin, and a clean-living sensible woman. Nanny Callan, she is called by our lot.’
    ‘Blood in the milk,’ I say again, without any relish, the gate of talk pushed open for myself, sadly. ‘I am afraid of what she leaves in the well. She has only the one bucket, I know, for milking and fetching water.’
    ‘I’m sure Mary Callan has more than the one bucket,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘Don’t the tinkers go about with buckets for twopence? Anyway, she is my cousin. That should be enough for you, to quieten your talk of her.’
    ‘Sure everyone is cousins here,’ I say, exasperated, more by myself than by him. What do I care for his damn cousi nage. Nothing.
    ‘He might be a cousin of yourself, Annie,’ says Sarah, in a reasonable, innocent tone, not by any means feigned.
    ‘Well, I hope then, not too close, for the purposes he has in mind!’
    ‘What do you mean, Annie?’ she says, with her guileless open face, with a curtain of fright down it now.
    ‘He knows what I mean.’
    ‘I do not,’ he says, with an air that would convince a judge.
    ‘Oh, he does,’ I say.
    But I am not at all sure. And Sarah won’t look at me now. It is not her fault. She has fallen a-dreaming. It is her trick, her way of - I do not know exactly, of putting up with me, maybe. God help me! It is like Billy Kerr to rattle a person’s head. I must get him from the house. Oh, he delights in vexing me.
    ‘Mary Callan wouldn’t have much truck with two pences and tinker’s buckets,’ I say, like a leaking tap. There is polite scorn in my voice that would sap the strength of a lion. ‘There was never any money in her house, I’d be sure and certain. She is that old sort of cottier. The walls of that little one-roomed house are only mud. The hungers of the last century took her lot. In 1872, it is well remembered, when there was half a famine here, it nipped and tucked her kin, seven or eight of them that lived there. She and her father was