The Butterfly Cabinet (20 page)

“Can you help me with the cans?” he said, and his voice was the same deep lilt that it always was, and no one that heard or saw him would have raised an eyebrow at him asking that, but I knew
as I dried my hands on my apron and walked through the kitchen and out down the passageway, I knew what I was going to and I couldn’t have been stopped.

The passage was well enough lit as far as the lamp room, for there the windows on the right looked out onto the yard, but there was only one window in the cellar itself and it looked onto the passageway, so it was dim in there, even on the brightest of days. I turned the handle of the cellar door and walked in, and then I turned round to face him. We stood there looking at one another in the dim light. I could hear the water gurgling in the pipes and the sound of oul’ Peter’s ax outside cutting wood, and I could smell the wine from the bottles in the cellar and a whiff of paraffin from the lamp room, and then the smell of Alphie: tobacco and grass and earth. That smell was like something you had a craving to eat and couldn’t stop yourself from having. I stepped toward him, and put my two hands down, and God forgive me, I lifted my skirts.

I was sure that feeling must be love; maybe it was. It’s too long ago now, and too much has happened, too much to go back on. There’s no undoing that knot, except maybe by telling it.

That was the one time between me and Alphie, and not long after, I started to gag and retch in the outside drain. The smell of the bog deal splinter I used to start up the fire, a sweet smell I’d always loved, was enough to set me off. The rest of the servants were usually too busy to notice, and I pretended to be going out to break up clods of turf. One morning Peig found me, the bile hacking at my throat, but I blamed it on a bit of bacon I’d eaten that I thought had gone off and she had me taking ginger for the stomach, and extract of beef, none of which made any difference to what was wrong with me. Peig had no faith in any remedy that came out of a bottle. She said Godfrey’s Cordial and Dalby’s Carminative were full of opiates and would bring on convulsions, and she would take nothing to do with them. Luckily for
me, the sickness didn’t last; Peig thought she’d cured me, and I didn’t grow too big. I bound up my stomach as tightly as I dared. Peig said that I was growing into a woman, blossoming almost overnight. To this day, I don’t believe she suspected me. She had a blind spot where I was concerned, but in those days after Charlotte’s death, there was a blindness about all of us. There wasn’t a day passed when we didn’t think of her and say a prayer for her soul. I never missed a day from my work. Peig said I was the only one could put the slack on the range at night and not kill the fire. In the morning the ashes could be raked out, the grate blackleaded and the whole thing cleaned. Then it would only take a nudge through the black crust with the poker to bring it back to life again. “I don’t know what you do,” Peig used to say, “but you do it well, girl, God bless you.”

I pulled off a patch of the blanket that Mammy had made for me and I went to the prayer tree, barnacled with wishes, and got down on my two knees and prayed hard to St. Jude and St. Patrick that I wouldn’t be punished with a baby for what I had done and I rubbed the cloth on the tree. But that was a bad prayer, Anna, and the saints must have known it. You can’t undo what’s been done and for that I’m thankful now, though it was a hard road I took then. When it was clear to me that the baby was growing in my stomach, I put the cloth under my pillow and said a prayer for an easy birth.

It was November. Duffy’s Circus was camped in the fields outside the town and most of the house had cleared out to it. As I slid into bed, I could hear the music and the shouts of the crowds through the open window. I was in the attic room on my own. The pain started in my back in the middle of the night. I thought I’d hurt myself, lifting the big pot over the fire maybe, but it was an odd thing for a hurt like that to wake you up out of your sleep. It was a kind of ache to begin with, and then I knew that it must be the baby coming, because it began to come in waves, like the
tide breaking on the strand, bigger and deeper each time, and then closer and closer together, until I started to feel like I was rolling inside the highest, greenest wave there’d ever been and that it would never break. I remembered the cloth from the prayer tree and reached under my pillow for it, and started to pray. I got scared that it was going to kill me, that the wet glassy wave would carry me away, and after a while, I thought that maybe that would be a blessing, and that at least if that happened, I wouldn’t have to go through with the next part, the thing I’d decided on. I started to think about the servant girl I’d heard about way down the country in Enniscorthy, who was found bled to death in her bed, and the blue baby found after it, under the mattress.

I must have pushed, trying to push out the pain, because then the worst was over, and there was my baby, wet and slippery as a pat of butter. I cut the cord with a kitchen knife I’d hidden in my room, and I wrapped him tight in an old flour bag. There was another shudder of pain—for a moment I thought another baby was coming—but then there was the afterbirth, lying on the sheet like a heart, and I buried my face in the pillow until the sobbing stopped. I hardly dared look at him: I don’t remember him crying, but when I did look, I don’t know how long after, he was asleep. I dipped the prayer cloth in my basin and wrung it out and wiped his head and his little curled fists and his feet the size of acorns. I was afraid to touch the stump that stuck out of his belly button. Then I gathered myself up, slipped out to the turnip field and set him down, cradled between two furrows. I clawed at the earth with my hands and dug a hole and set him in and pulled the bag down over his head. Then I reached down for another handful of earth and my nails sank into a rotten turnip and the smell of it filled my nose and I tried, Anna, I tried my best to bury him. I thought of what I’d heard the priest say from the altar, and I thought of Mammy and the broken look in her eyes, and I thought of what I’d heard the men say about the women at the docks
in Derry, and I thought about what it would feel like to tramp the roads like oul’ Molly, not knowing where your next bite was coming from. Then I thought of the mistress and what she’d done to Charlotte, and I couldn’t put the earth over his head. And then I thought about Peig. It was a terrible sin what I had done to her, but it was nowhere near as bad as the one I was trying to commit, and I lifted him up, and I walked to her house and I set him down outside her door.

I sat down for a while behind the turf stack, but there was no sign of life from the house and in the end I couldn’t stick it any longer, sitting there on my hunkers in the cold, bleeding into the ground, and I said to myself, “It’s in God’s hands now,” and I walked back to the castle.

Peig said he was like a gift from God. I hadn’t seen it in her, how much she wanted a child. I was ashamed of how happy he made her. And she called him Owen, for he would keep her young, she said. Yes, Anna: Conor’s father; my son, Owen. I’m sorry. It’s a shock to you. I’m sorry to tell you this way. I’ve been so long carrying it around, not telling it, coming at it from this side and that, I don’t know how to do it right. I have no practice, for who else could I tell it to? Who would understand but you? You’re the only family I have, Anna, you and Conor, and your baby.

No, no one ever suspected me. Everyone was sure it was one of the circus people that had left the baby. And it suited people to believe that, so they didn’t have to look around among their own for a girl who had abandoned the product of her shame and sin.

Peig asked Miss Julia if Bella could wet-nurse Owen. Your mother, Florence, was only about four or five months old at the time, but Bella said she had plenty of milk for both of them and Miss Julia agreed. Peig carried on with her work in the kitchen, though there was little enough done those first few days, so anxious was she about the child. “Will he do?” she kept asking Bella. “Do you think, Bella, will he do?” Bella said he had a good
chance and with the help of God he would do, only would Peig leave her to it.

I felt like everyone who looked at me, at my pale face and dragging feet, must know that the baby was mine, but no one guessed, no one except for her that had her own story to tell. He was hard to settle. He wasn’t more than a couple of days old when Bella brought him in, looking for Peig. He was hot and crabbed, had been crying for hours. Peig had gone down to the meat safe under the horse chestnut tree and Bella handed me the baby and said, “Mind him for a minute, Maddie, will you? My arms is broke holding him.” She went to get Peig and I stood with my back to the table, cradling him in my arms, and the breasts that had ached and leaked for hours, and that I’d wrapped in cabbage leaves, began to swell and sting under my clothes until I thought I would burst.

Peig came back in and took him and caught sight of the damp patch on my apron and burst out laughing at the expression on my face and said, “Jesus, Maddie, you’d think you’d been stung. It’s only a bit of boke. You’ll have to get used to that, and worse, if you’re going to have weans of your own someday.” Then off she went, out into the yard, cooing and swinging him and telling him stories, and left me with Bella.

Bella put her hand down flat on the table and looked at me. Then she pulled out a chair and sat down and she told me her story—how the Salvationists took her into the rescue home in Dublin when she was eight months gone, gave her good references and got her a place in the lying-in hospital when her time came, and took her back into the home afterward. At the time the master came looking for a wet nurse, her own child was almost a year old and ready to be weaned. She knew her time there was at an end, that she’d have to find work outside, and the Salvationists said they’d keep her little girl and look after her until she was able to come for her, and she sent them what she could from her wages.
She’d known nothing about what to expect, she said, the pains and the pushing and how much blood there was. And at the end of it she said, “It would be hard to hide something like that. If I knew anyone that needed help I’d do what I could for them,” and that was all she said. I told her I had the washing to do and I’d need to go and get on with it.

I fainted in the laundry. I remember standing there, over the tub with the sheets in soda, ladling the hot water out of the copper, beating the linen with the dolly, and then I remember seeing the ceiling, and the way the lime was starting to flake off with the damp, and the way the spiders had built their webs in the corners, and I remember not being able to make my eyes stop moving, and everything going around and around and the two legs going from under me and then falling down further than the flagstone floor. Peig wasn’t there; she’d walked down the road toward the strand with Bella to settle the baby. But the men must have heard the clatter from the yard and when I came round, it was Madge looking down at me, and me lying on my bed.

“Jesus, Maddie,” she said, “you’re like death warmed up. Feeley had to carry you up the stairs.”

“I’m grand,” I said, and I tried to get up.

“There’s nothing grand about you,” she said, “I’m sending for the doctor.” But I wouldn’t hear tell of it for I was heart-scared that he would work it all out, so I said, “No, Madge, please don’t send for the doctor.”

She looked at me and said, “What’s wrong with you, Maddie?” and I thought as hard as I could.

Then I said, “Paudie slipped me a drop of poteen last night and there must have been some other thing in it for my head’s been spinning the whole day.”

Madge said, “Ye hallion, Maddie, it’s drunk you are! Who would have thought it?” And she said she’d bring me up a cup of tea and cover for me as long as she could but that I’d better be up
by evening to help with the dinner. I think she was glad to hear I’d been up to some devilment, for she used to say butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. I was as weak as water for days but Peig was too much taken with the wean to notice or even look the road I was on, and for all my legs were shaking I never missed another day of work.

It’s often the way that people don’t see what’s right under their noses until it’s pointed out to them. And the people who could have done that were never going to, having the most to lose by it. I stayed out of Alphie’s way and he stayed out of mine. I was that ashamed afterward, I couldn’t look him in the face. He would have known that the story of the circus girl wasn’t true but he seemed happy enough to go along with it, for Peig’s sake. Then one Sunday, I was passing their cottage on my way down to Bone Row and I heard singing in a man’s low voice, a song I knew well, for Mammy used to sing it. “I found the trail of the mountain mist, the mountain mist, the mountain mist, I found the trail of the mountain mist, but ne’er a trace of baby.” Alphie was in the doorway, with Owen in his arms, cradling him gently back and forth, singing, “I left my darling lying here,” and he lifted his head and looked up with a smile on his face. My heart splintered into a thousand pieces and when he saw me standing there with my two arms the one length, looking at him, he must have known for certain, and it was a different face that turned back to his child again, a different face altogether.

I made a quilt for Owen’s first birthday out of two old dresses Miss Julia had given me, garments I never would have worn in a million years, the one in white velvet, the other in green silk, and with an old Turkey-red petticoat of my own. I sewed him a pattern: a fish for my father, a star for his, a bird that he might have a light heart always and an oak leaf for a long, strong life. It wasn’t easy made, for I’d cut the silk on the bias and had to be careful not to stretch it, and I sewed the whole thing at night, in buttonhole
stitch, as carefully as I could, and then onto the whitest bleached flour bags I could get. Peig said it was fit for a prince, nearly too good to put in his cradle, but she must have seen my face fall when she said that, for she got up straightaway and put it over him. I embroidered my initials into the corner of it so you could hardly see, and into the seam at the top I sewed a lock of the lavender Mammy had given me. I wonder where that quilt went.