The Traveller's Daughter Page 13

  Our relationship was already strained once Rose Cottage’s sale had gone through. Despite the fractures it had caused between us, my body had twitched to move on like yours did when you left Edinburgh. It’s in us you see Kitty, this craving for the distraction of new surroundings. It didn’t fix things though, because none of the houses I lived in after your da died ever felt like home without you and him in them.

  The problem was that I didn’t know how to be alone, and I wanted to be selfish and beg you to come back to me. I wanted to tell you I was lonely, but I had been selfish once before, and it had cost me dearly. I wasn’t that person anymore. I knew too that no matter how hard the road you took got Kitty, I had to let you take it. Life is a rite of passage and if we don’t make mistakes along the way how can we become the people we are destined to be?

  You returning to the fold wasn’t the answer either because it wasn’t you who was responsible for the part of me that had been missing since I was sixteen years old. What I needed my lovely girl was forever out of my grasp. I was too frightened of what my family thought of the self-absorbed girl I had once been to try to reach out and touch them again. I wish I had been braver Kitty. I wish I had the time left to tell them I was sorry for leaving and never going back. I wish I had been able to see that things could have been so very different.

  Oh, my beautiful daughter, I know that soon enough there will come a time when you will hurt more than you believed it was possible to hurt. It hurts me just as deeply to know that I won’t be there to hold you and tell you that everything will be alright. It will be though Kitty, hold on to that because I’ve seen that it’s so.

  I wish my mother had told me that things would work out in the end because she would have seen what was going to happen. At the same time, I have always felt guilt at the knowledge that she knew what I was going to do. Who knows? I have mixed feelings but, perhaps the sight is a gift after all because to be able to tell you that you will be happy again my darling girl is my gift to you.

  Please, Kitty never forget that you are strong, and you will wake up each day to make your way through the pain of loss. It’s a pain that will fade to a dull ache and then it will dissipate, and you will get your second chance to live again like I did mine. Hold on to that with both hands Kitty. You my girl will realise that I am always with you in your heart. You will go on to meet someone who will never lie to you. A person who will help you to find your way and not fill you with self-doubt. You will find the man who is worthy of all that love you have to give. He will treat you well and love you well and let you be the person you were always meant to be.

  Your da loved me, but he could never accept the girl with the wild blood in her that I once was. So I stopped being her. My life before I met him was as foreign to him and his middle-class upbringing, as if I were from a faraway exotic country. The woman that he loved was the mother to you. The woman with the glasses perched on the end of her nose as she lost herself in her books trying to catch up on all those lost years of reading. She was a woman content to no longer walk on the wild side as she lived her days in a rambling cottage, surrounded by roses with her husband and her child.

  Oh and it was a good life Kitty, we were happy. Peter and I cherished one another but once a long time ago I had the kind of love that only comes along once in your life. It was the kind of love that derails you with its passion and trivializes every other aspect of your life. It renders you helpless but makes you fearless, and it blinds you to the things that matter most. It was my first love.

  You might think that Damien was yours. That he was your once in a lifetime love, but he wasn’t the one. How could he be? Not when he wanted to shape you so that you fit into his world instead of you sharing it with him. Never change who you are because to be untrue to yourself, it eats away at your soul like this damned cancer is doing mine. Your great love, the man who will love you and chase your dreams with you, has yet to come into your life, but he will find you. I know this sweet child just as I know that no matter how tough the going gets you have to keep on going, keep pushing and keep going and never give up.

  And so now here I am back where I started, and oh my, it all seems such a long time ago now. It’s still fresh in my mind though, all that happened when I was a girl because some memories in life never fade. I have been so adept at keeping that part of who I was separate from you that it feels as though I am going to tell you a story about a girl I once knew, not the girl I once was. Time Kitty, is a good storyteller.

  ***

  Kitty’s vision blurred as her eyes burned, heavy with tears she didn’t want to shed. She wanted to know more and so blinking them away she continued to read, and her mother’s story began to dance from the pages.

  Chapter 12

  An old broom knows the dirty corners best – Irish Proverb

  1957

  Rosa Rourke’s fair hair, matted with knots that she refused to let her mammy untangle not even with the brush that had once been her auld mammy’s, fell about her small pixie like face. It puzzled her how something as pretty as that brush with its innocuous white bristles, blue patterned china back and burnished gold handle could inflict so much pain. It did, though, and whenever she saw her mammy wielding it she’d leap to her feet and run! Not like her baby sister Kitty who loved the fuss. She would sit there with her hands clasped on her lap and an angelic look on her face without so much as a moan escaping from her lips when she got her hair brushed. Mind you, Rosa thought looking at her sister fondly, Kitty’s thick dark hair seemed to behave itself not like hers which was forever getting itself into a tangle of its own accord.

  Rosa turned her attention back to the job at hand. Her tongue poked out the corner of her mouth as she pushed her hair back from her face. She frowned in concentration and began to twist the tiny strip of copper wire she held between her thumb and forefingers. Her brothers had salvaged it from the odd bits of disused electric cabling gathered on one of their many jaunts around the villages or towns they camped on the outskirts of. Rosa’s task now was to manipulate that wire into a stem for the paper flowers she would sell door to door should the need arise in the ensuing winter months.

  She was sitting cross-legged on the sparse grass of the roadside verge, Kitty was sat next to her. Her little sister’s legs were splayed out from under her grubby pinafore while her chubby hands clumsily tried to imitate the deft movements of Rosa’s fingers. Casting a shadow over them both was the family’s fine blue canvas, bow-top wagon. The Rourke’s home was a windows and door wagon with pretty lace curtains hanging in the twin glass paneled arches above the door by the stoop. The larder was to the left with cooking utensils hanging on the wall alongside it. A freestanding wardrobe whose door had to be leaned on in order for it to shut was stood opposite. Two chunky storage chests full to the brim with all their worldly goods were stacked on top of one another next to the wardrobe and always there in the larder a full pitcher of water. In the middle of the wagon was a small fuel burning stove. It's flue poked right out through the canvas roof to save them all from getting smoked out. At the far end was their sleeping area.

  The family lived their lives outdoors but at night when they all piled into that wagon of theirs and pulled the covers on top of themselves, they were never cold. Not even when winter threatened them with its worst. Sometimes Rosa found it hard to sleep, like when her mammy and da got up to that grunting, groaning thing she had a fair idea had put the boys and Kitty in her mam’s tummy. It was that too that had been responsible for the babies who never got the chance to be born. It was strange she thought, how something that seemed to make her parents happy could also make them so sad. When she heard their fumbling start up, she liked to listen instead to the rain on that canvas roof or the shushing of the wind as it whipped across the top of it. Those sounds reminded her of the ebb and flow of waves on that pebbly beach near Galway they sometimes camped by.

  Nellie their trusty black and white Piebald, who despite her advancing years, had pulle
d their wagon for many a long year without complaint, was grazing alongside it. The lush green pickings of a few weeks ago were few and far between now though, thanks to the hens constant scratching and pecking in their search for grubs. Finola, the goat that Kitty had named so for no particular reason that any of the Rourke’s had been able to fathom, hadn’t helped matters either.

  Finola never seemed to stop eating and once she had escaped causing an uproar by helping herself to some uppity village woman’s flowers. Rosa knew it could have been worse she had witnessed the goat eat washing off a line before. Still and all the auld harridan had chased poor Finola back to camp with a yard brush. It wasn’t long after that incident all the families in the camp were woken by a din that for once was not of their own making. Rosa had peeped out the net curtains at the back of the wagon to see a posse of men banging their shovels and advancing down the lane toward their camp in a menacing manner. Her eyes had widened as she watched her mammy rally up the other women. She’d continued to watch as they all began to holler at the unfairness of it all and her da along with the other men, rounded the animals up in readiness to move on.

  Rosa didn’t like to think about that incident or the other times they had been forced to pack up their things and get on their way. It frightened her, the animosity she sometimes sensed from the people who lived in the towns and villages they passed through. Sitting there on the ground that morning, she shook those thoughts away oblivious to the damp from the dew that night-time had left behind. It was beginning to seep through her skirt to her undergarments. The crispness of the air she knew was due to the early hour and the day would soon warm up as befitted the latter part of the high summer. For now though she was glad of the warmth of the campfire.

  Kathleen, her mammy, was keeping an eye on the soda bread she had baked in the skillet pot. The smell of it was making Rosa’s nose twitch and her tummy rumble with anticipation.

  “That’s the best smell in the world, so it is.” She murmured to Kitty before shifting ever so slightly closer to the fire that sputtered beneath the pot, smiling as her shadow; Kitty did the same. Their mammy had dressed, despite the season in her heavy wool cardigan. It seemed to Rosa, that she never took it off. A pair of worn brown boots that she’d seen her slide pieces of cardboard inside to patch the soles and keep the cold out, peeked out from beneath the hem of her long plaid skirt.

  Occasionally, Kathleen leaned forward to feed the fire a handful of twigs, gathering them up from the stack Rosa’s brothers; the twins had busied themselves collecting from the nearby fields and hedgerows. It was the duty of the younger boys in the camp to rustle the kindling up. It was to the disparagement of the local villagers who, Rosa reckoned from their covert glances as they wandered past their camp, were envious of the stockpile.

  To her mind, the settled folk’s voices sounded harsh, unlike their tongue that had a musical quality to it. Rosa had asked her mammy once why they spoke and lived differently to the village people. Kathleen had replied, “Sure Rosa we speak Gammon and are we, not the Lucht Síuil, the Walking People? I think it would be a lonely thing to live in a house like them there up the road. No, in a wagon you know what’s what and who is who. Don’t you think it’s nice that when our friends come to visit we can go off and see what is around the next corner with them?”

  Rosa had heard the pride in her mammy’s voice, and she had spoken the words Lucht Síuil aloud liking the way they rolled off her tongue.

  Kathleen was crooning a song as she stoked the fire. It was the one about the wren even though it wasn’t St Stephen’s Day. It was called Lá an Dreoilín, The Day of the Wren. Rosa knew the tradition stemmed from the little bird supposedly having betrayed St Stephen. She also knew by the small smile her mammy had given her before she began her lament that she knew it was her eldest daughter’s favorite.

  Rosa loved it when her mammy sang. It was a comforting sound like the wind and the rain on their canvas roof. It meant all was right in their world. Just as their da playing his tin whistle for them of a night or, telling them the stories his auld da had told him under those very same stars that still twinkled down upon them did. When there was silence, Rosa knew hard times were upon them and that her belly would not be warm nor full again until the music and stories started once more.

  Now, she tilted her head to one side listening to her mammy’s pitch. It was pure and perfect and sure it would send shivers down her spine to hear it. The lines on Kathleen’s face always seemed to soften too when she sang. By the time the words, Mrs. O’Gill being a very good woman gave them a penny to bury the Wren danced from her lips, Rosa could see her mam as she was. What she would have been like before children, loss and hard work had taken their toll. Whether it was because the little bird died at the end or the strange faraway look on her face, Rosa didn’t know but either way she always cried when she heard this last verse sung.

  Sniffing loudly she swiped at her nose. “I’d rather listen to mammy than that fandangle radio thing we saw at Ballinasloe last year any day.” She whispered to her brother Joe who had appeared alongside her, referring to the horse fair the family attended annually. All sorts of weird and wonderful things they’d never seen the likes of before would be on display each October. Their job to tempt the passers-by to part with the contents of their purses at the West Country fair. Joe almost hidden under the sticks he had gathered dropped his haul on top of the pile and patted her shoulder.

  Ah, sweet Joe, Rosa thought quickly wiping her wet cheeks with the backs of her hands as she saw his twin Paddy, approaching. He was the older of the two by a minute or so and never let any of them forget it. She watched him stagger under the load he was carrying. If he spotted her tears, he’d tease her mercilessly despite her having two years on him! He might have been Joe’s twin, but that was where the similarity between the brothers ended. Joe with his gentle ways had the ability to make them all smile and laugh while Paddy’s antics would have his mammy and da shaking their heads over what to do with him. Still and all opposites they may be, the two brothers were like yin and yang because together they made a whole. Rosa often found herself watching them, envious of their closeness.

  She was the cuckoo in the Rourke’s nest, them with their black hair and flashing dark eyes. Her mammy always said she got it from her side when she caught Rosa frowning at her reflection in the mirror that matched the hairbrush. Sure hadn’t she been told of her auld mammy’s granny having those dark brows and the blue eyes with fair hair too? That was who she got her colouring from, she’d say, but Rosa knew it wasn’t just her fairness that set her apart from them. There were times when she looked at her family that she knew the path she was destined to take would be different to theirs. It made her feel sad, but she knew too that she couldn’t change it.

  This knowledge of how things would be she did get from her mammy. Rosa had noticed that the only time the villagers would look Kathleen in the eye was when they handed her a coin, in the hope she would tell them what was what, and what would be.

  “When will Da be home Mam?” Paddy demanded having dropped his sticks onto the stack. He strode over to the fire in pants nipping at his shins to inspect the rising contents of the skillet pot.

  Rosa looked up; she knew his game. He wasn’t bothered in the slightest about when his da was coming home; he was hungry that was all. Hard work made you hungry she knew that only too well. There never seemed to be quite enough food to eat their fill but still she knew not to complain, Mammy and Da did their best. Besides, they did better than some in the camp with there not being so many mouths to feed in their family. The Connors were ten altogether and another one was on the way, any day now too if the size of Nora Connor’s belly was anything to go by.

  Paddy knew he was wasting his time sniffing around that skillet pot. No bread would be broken until their da appeared wiping his sweaty brow as he took a break from cutting and wheeling the turf. Rosa reckoned they had a few more weeks left around these parts and then when the leave
s began to turn yellow it would be time for them to move on for the apple picking.

  He was a hard worker Da and oh so handsome Rosa thought. She was fascinated by the strands of silver that streaked their way through his thick dark hair. His brown eyes always seemed disappointed to her though, and that disappointment never seemed to fade no matter how hard she tried to please him. She wondered at times whether he would have liked a different life. She fancied that if he could change things then he would trade in the horses. He came alive when they were at Ballinasloe, but the Rourke’s were not so far up the hierarchy for the horses. His lot was the turf cutting and fruit picking and when there was none of that to be had he would go door to door selling the rags. When things got bad and there was nothing more than moldy auld cabbage to put in the skillet pot, Mammy would take Kitty into the town. There she’d sit on the cold hard ground with pretty Kitty on her lap, a tin cup in her hand that passers-by could toss a coin into, ‘for the baby like.’

  “It will be time to eat soon enough lad,” Kathleen answered Paddy as she batted him away from the pot. “Go on away with youse both.”

  Paddy pouted but then took Joe by the arm. “Come on.”

  Rosa did not miss the glint in her brother’s eye and nor did her mammy.

  “Don’t be getting into bother now,” Kathleen warned and Rosa sighed knowing in that way she just did that her mam’s words had fallen on deaf ears.

  No more than fifteen minutes had passed when an almighty squawking started up. Rosa dropped the bit of wire she was twisting and followed her mammy’s lead, leaped to her feet. The band of women who had abandoned their chores on hearing the ruckus ran toward Paudy O’Doyle’s wagon. A sinking sensation in Rosa’s stomach told her Paddy would be at the root of it all. Kitty tried to keep up with her big sister but tripped and sat down on the ground to howl at the unfairness of being small, but Rosa didn’t stop.