Annie Dunne Read Online Free PDF Page B

left. She but a waif that time of fifteen years. She is said to be one hundred and two years old.’
    What am I talking about? It is like the geese gabbling.
    ‘Annie Dunne,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘You are a humorous woman, in a manner of speaking.’
    ‘We will go down to Kiltegan in a while,’ I say to Sarah. ‘Don’t linger there too long.’
    “‘The hungers of the last century”,’ says Billy Kerr, ‘that’s very amusing! That’s a turn of phrase now you don’t hear often.’
    ‘I must go out and harness the pony,’ I say, nearly weeping from my own - stupidity.
    ‘I’ll harness the pony for you, and bring the trap up to him;’ says Billy Kerr, suddenly and inconveniently polite.
    ‘Please do not,’ I say
    ‘Well, as you like. If you are going, I could use the drive down,’ he says, with the same fake pleasantry. ‘There’s a parcel at the public house that came down on the Dublin bus for one of my women.’
    My women. He is the mere slave of the Dunnes of Feddin. If Lizzie Dunne heard him say that. My women. Of course you could interpret his words a number of ways, that is his safety. Oh, I am not up to his cleverness. Well, as you like. He incenses me. I will not have him lording it in our old trap, at any cost.
    ‘You will have to walk down the way you came,’ I say, as neutral as I can, ‘because it will be a good while before we are ready.’
    ‘But you’re only after saying -’ he begins, for the first time unsteadied, but I am too quick for him.
    ‘Where is the little girl?’ I say, changing the topic roughly, but it will serve my purpose.
    ‘She is inside in the room,’ says Billy Kerr, though it was-n’ t him I asked.
    ‘Well, then,’ I say, and march in there, boy and all. Billy Kerr says something in my wake to Sarah but I don’t catch it.

    The little girl stands on the bed, with her back to me. She wears her flower-print summer dress and a knitted green cardigan that is beginning to be too small for her.
    The sunlight in the small window beams down on her like a yard lamp. She is a small creature growing by inches. She does not know the world. She does not know her road ahead.
    In the first second of putting my face into the room I imagine she has a burden on her back. Not like my own remnant of polio, but a heavy shadow. Then she moves and the picture is gone, a trick of the sunlight and my own mind.
    Her head turns to look at me, and her eyes show their tiny stars. I am arrested there by her. And even the boy, with all the helpless twitching-about of a four-year-old, albeit nearly five, imitates my stillness. Suddenly, in a manner just as enlivening as sunlight, she smiles. A clear, unbroken, innocent smile.
    ‘What are you doing in here, smiling like the Cheshire cat and standing on beds?’
    ‘I am glad to see you, Auntie Anne,’ she says. ‘I was lonely.’
    ‘Well, I wasn’t gone so far,’ I say. ‘We only ventured out to the well. And even at that we were baulked. Next time, just think of following me.’
    ‘I am glad we are here in Kelsha,’ she says. ‘I am just glad.’
    ‘I am glad you are glad,’ I say. ‘Come and help me put the harness on that wild fella Billy.’
    ‘On that interesting fellow out there with Sarah?’ says the boy.
    ‘No. It would be impossible to get a harness on that fella. No, on Billy the pony. We will be half an hour readying him up, by which time I hope and trust Billy Kerr will be gone.’

    But he is leaving even as I come back out into the kitchen. His mysterious visit completed, he sets off with a swagger down the yard and out onto the road. Paused at the half-door, I watch him go, pitching along indifferently. He has hips like sharp buckets.
    When I glance back, Sarah’s long passive face in the kitchen tells me nothing. She puts the used crockery aside for later washing and sets to to scrub the kitchen table. Since Billy Kerr barely set an elbow on it, I am surprised by her extremity of attention. Her long arms