Another Man’s Child. Anne Bennett
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It was all so dear to her, familiar and safe and she couldn’t see why anyone would want to leave it. She said this to Norah and added, ‘I’d never want to go away from here.’
‘Never is a long time,’ Norah said. ‘And you’re only seventeen. I felt like that at seventeen. But by the time I was twenty I felt as if I was suffocating with the sameness of every day.’
‘But don’t you want a husband and children?’
‘Not yet,’ Norah said emphatically. ‘Why would I? I intend to keep marriage and all it entails at bay or at least until I meet and fall madly in love with a tall and very handsome man, who has plenty of money and will adore me totally.’
Celia burst out laughing. ‘Shouldn’t say there’s many of them about.’
‘Not in Donegal certainly,’ Norah conceded. ‘But who knows what America holds? The country may be littered with them.’
Celia laughed. Oh, how she would miss her sister for, since leaving school, she saw her old friends rarely. She’d meet some of them occasionally in Donegal Town, but it wasn’t arranged or anything, they would just bump into one another. They seldom had time for any sort of lingering chats because all the girls would usually have a list of errands to do for their mothers. The only other time to meet was at Mass on Sunday but no one dawdled after that because most of the congregation had taken communion and so were ravenously hungry, for no one was allowed to eat or drink if they were taking communion. So the two sisters had relied on each other – and Peggy wasn’t the only one to hope that Norah would change her mind in the months till her twenty-first birthday.
Celia opened her mouth to say something to Norah about how much she would miss her, but there was no time because they had reached the Abbey Hotel and their father, Dan, was waiting on them. Celia thought her father a fairly handsome man for one of his age; his black curls had not a hint of grey and he had deep dark brown eyes just like her eldest brother, Tom. Only his nose let him down for it was slightly bulbous, but his mouth was a much better shape. Tom was just like a younger version of him. Dan was a jovial man too and as they approached his laugh rang out at something someone in the crowd had said and it was so infectious that Celia and Norah were smiling too as they reached him.
He had told them on the way in that if he sold the calves early enough, they could wait on and he’d take them home in the cart, but if the calves were not sold, he might stay on and they would have to make their own way home. Celia wondered why he even bothered saying that because she had never known her father come home early on a Fair Day and his delay had more to do with the pubs open all the day and old friends to chat to and gather news from than it had to do with selling the calves.
Norah knew that too, but both girls went on with the pretence. ‘Have you sold the calves, Daddy?’
Dan took a swig of Guinness from the pint glass he held before he said, ‘Might have. Man said he’d tell me this afternoon when his brother has a chance to look them over. So you must make your own way home. Tell your mother.’
‘Yes, Daddy,’ the girls chorused, though they knew their mother wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.
They passed the Hireling Stall again on their way out of town and Celia saw the blond-haired man talking to Dinny Fitzgerald whose farm abutted theirs in many places. ‘Looks like Dinny’s hiring that chap,’ Norah remarked.
‘Well Daddy said he would have to hire someone after his son upped and went to America,’ Celia said and added, ‘Huh, seems all the Irish farms are emptying of young men going to that brave New World.’
‘Yes and I might want to nab one of those men for myself in due course,’ Norah said. ‘That’s why I have to practise on poor Joseph.’ And her tinkling laugh rang out at the aghast look on Celia’s face.
It was some time later when Dan Mulligan came home, very loud and good-humoured, which Peggy said was the Guinness effect. He brought all the news from the town though, including the fact that Dinny Fitzgerald had indeed taken on a new farm hand.
‘Must be no sign of his son retuning then,’ remarked Peggy. ‘America seems a terrible lure to the young people.’
‘Aye,’ Dan said. ‘But sure it’s hard for a man when he has only the one son who will inherit the farm and who has so little interest in it he is away to pastures new, and so Dinny has to have strangers in to work it with him.’
‘Maybe the lad didn’t take to the life,’ Norah said. ‘You know, maybe he doesn’t want to be a farmer.’
‘Take to the life,’ Dan said with scorn. ‘What’s whether he likes it or not got to do with anything? People can’t always do as they please and in this case there is no one else and it’s his birthright. Is he not going to come back and take it on board after Dinny’s day, let the farm fall to strangers and after it being in the family generations? Tell you, I’d find that hard to take.’
‘Well not every man has the rake of sons you have,’ Peggy said. ‘So if our Tom here didn’t want it, then Dermot might or even wee Sammy, for all he’s only seven now. Or Jim might come back from America and take it on if there was no one else. Mulligans will farm here for some time to come I think.’
Celia, listening as she washed the dishes in the scullery, knew her mother was right. She knew too most farmers wanted more than one son but the eldest inherited everything and the others had to make their own way. That’s what Jim had said when he left for America’s shores. It had been five years ago when he had decided. He had been twenty-three then, two years younger than Tom and, knowing his future was in his own hands, he had written to Aunt Maria who had sailed away to New York many years before with her new American husband and was quite a wealthy woman now, but a childless one. She had been delighted to hear from Jim, and agreed to not only sponsor him but also pay his fare and said she would do the same for all who wanted to follow their brother.
Peggy hadn’t liked to hear that bit and she watched the restless Norah growing up rather anxiously and was glad and relieved when she settled with Joseph O’Leary, but not as settled as she might be, because just a few months before she had claimed it wasn’t serious between them. There was no understanding, Norah had said and it was just as well because she wanted to follow Jim to America.
‘If you throw Joseph over you’ll get your name up, girl,’ Mammy had said at the time.
Norah had not been a bit abashed. ‘Maybe here I might,’ was her retort. ‘In America they wouldn’t care a jot I bet. According to what Jim says, it’s much freer there and you don’t have to marry a man you go for a walk with.’
Peggy’s sigh was almost imperceptible for she knew another child was going to cross the Atlantic.
Celia too wished Norah would fall madly in love with Joseph O’Leary and declare she couldn’t bear to leave him, but she had to admit that didn’t look the slightest bit likely and she knew Norah was every day more determined than ever to sail to America. She had marked her twenty-first birthday on the calendar in the room they shared with a big red circle and each day she marked another day off. Thinking about it now as she swirled the dishes in the hot water Celia felt very depressed and wondered if one by one they would all go away.
Two years before, her sister Katie had married a Donegal man but he was a wheelwright and had a house and business in Greencastle in Inishowan, a fair distance from Donegal Town, and that’s where Katie lived now. So they hadn’t visited her since the wedding, not even when she had her first child that she named Brendan.
Maggie might have stayed and married a local man for she was the prettiest of them all and had a string of admirers. Mammy would shake her head over her and said she would be called fast and loose, as she would accept gifts pressed on her by men, without any sort of understanding between them. She was in no hurry to settle down, she said, but Maggie had taken sick with TB a year after Jim had left for America. To protect everyone else she had been taken to the sanatorium in Donegal Town and died six weeks later when she was nineteen years old.
That