It was a struggle for her, getting around to the back of the house this morning to gather up the few kippins for starting the fire with. Usually she would have them brought in from the night before and she would leave them in a tidy bundle, set in to the right of the cubeen hole next to the fireplace and Peter’s chair.
The milk in the bottle was two days sour, so there was no use in her making a cup of tea. She could never drink black tea anyway. She could do without the one spoon of sugar but never the drop of milk. She left the front door slightly open so that she would hear young Matt Shinnors feet on the road and Matt would bring her back a pint of milk from the street.
As she passed Casey’s chair, one of her dizzy spells came upon her and she had to stop and lean heavily on the small table that held her little porcelain nick-knacks under the picture window. Poor ol’ Casey would be dead a fortnight on her tomorrow. The tears came again. She was lost without poor Casey. He was with her for so long and they were such good friends. His scent still remained in the house and it traveled to her now, off his chair and she would give the world to look down and find him there at her feet with his beautiful deep brown eyes and wagging tail… just like he always was.
As a slight cool breeze escaped the outdoors and came in through the unguarded space of the doorframe, she suddenly became alarmed with the thought that whatever was left of Casey in the house might be getting away from her. This caused her to throw a frightened look back to the rear window to make certain it hadn’t been left ajar. It was then that she realized that she had not opened that nor any window since the day before Casey had died. She gave a lean on the door which closed with the weight of her sadness.
Kate always loved having her windows thrown open and especially during those early spring days when the clean crisp air, with the welcome promise of summer, carries down off Crom-hill, and blows in around the house and rids it of the wretched winter dampness. Usually by the time the month of May comes around, every room in her house is alive with the full anticipation of summer.
The hob needed tending and she went to it. As she knelt there sweeping the stray ashes through the hearth with the gray goose quill, another flood of emotions swept over her and this time her tears fell down into the fire where they sizzled and instantly evaporated in the hot turf embers.
Kate was married to Peter O’ Riordan in October of nineteen twenty three. Peter was twenty four at the time and Kate was twenty two. Ireland was still in the throws of celebration with its new freedom and it was a freedom that gave everyone a great amount of hope to look forward to.
Kate was overjoyed when Peter had come to the house one night in early August and asked her father for Kate’s hand in marriage. Not once during the courtship or for the time leading up to the wedding, had Kate ever doubted that Peter was the right man for her. Kate had known Peter all her life and she was in love with him long before Peter had ever plucked up the courage to come calling on her.
Like Kate, Peter was an only child and when they were married, Kate went to live with Peter and his mother. In the late winter of nineteen eighteen Peter’s father, Tom, had been taken from the house one night by the black and tans; shortly after daybreak the next morning,Peter found his father’s lifeless body, face down in the cold dark waters of Barna river. That absence was never filled—the quiet lingered in the walls. Thus, when Peter brought Kate home to live with him, she was a welcome breath of fresh air into the house and even the house itself seemed to come back to life with her there. It didn’t take Kate very long at all to settle in, or to feel like she was in her own home.
The knock came to the door, bringing her back to the present.
“Kate, are you there?”
Her heart bounced for joy in her chest. She loved his tiny little voice and he was such a lovely little fella. Every time she saw him, she wanted to hug him but she never did. Nothing ever more than just the ruffle of her hands through his beautiful head of straight black hair.
“I’m here Matt, give me a minute.” She wiped her eyes with the navy blue bib, with the embossed imprints of wild daisies carpeting lush green pastures under the spreading limbs of giant hilltop chestnuts.
She went to get the door for Matt.
He smiled to her and she could always feel sure that he was sincerely happy to see her. He made his way past her and to sit under the chimney on the long wooden bench that Peter had made for her the summer before he passed away. She had always found Matt to be a very affectionate child and with the gentlest of mannerisms.
She had sweets somewhere in the house for him but where had she put them?
It was Matt’s father Frank, that had buried poor Casey for her. He dug a hole down at the end of the plot and placed Casey in a four-stone flour bag. He was very careful when placing Casey in the shallow grave and Matt had cried the entire time for the loss of his good friend. Kate had always felt that if she was taken before Casey, at least she would have the comfort of knowing that Matt would take care of Casey for her.
Matt came the day after they had buried Casey and he had a make-shift cross with him. Two flat panels about a foot each in length and carved from the white ash, bound together with a fistful of long switch grass and ‘Casey’ etched into one of the smooth shaved panels. The day after that, Matt came with primroses that he had picked from Judy Hennessy’s ditch. He placed the primroses neatly around the cross, which he had driven down at the head of the grave, and knelt in prayer to ask God to be good to Casey. That was the last time that Matt had mentioned Casey’s name to her.
Kate had always known that children were the best at forgetting. Matt would probably forget her too when she was gone but maybe he wouldn’t. At least she hoped not.
“Matt, will you run into the street and get a few things for me?”
She handed him a five pound note and the shopping list that she had made out for herself, two days before.
Matt took the shopping bag from the hook at the back of the bedroom door and when he had reached the front gate, Kate called after him and told him not to forget to get the quarter pound of clove rocks for himself.
If Casey was here now, she thought, he would be off down the road with Matt, and she’d be out there at the gate watching after them, laughing every time Casey would jump up and try to trip Matt as they ran. She would watch them until they disappeared beyond Tom Donovan’s bend and from there the road steadily rises before them and they would pass Ballinlough graveyard, where everyone belonging to Kate was buried and then it was a good half mile on foot into the village of Ballyvistee.
Kate and Peter were blessed with the birth of a baby girl, three weeks before the Christmas of nineteen twenty five. They named her ‘Agnes’, after Peter’s mother. Beautiful little Agnes was their completion to an already happy home and she was showered with love, morning, noon and night. Agnes was born with a heart murmur condition and Kate and Peter were always careful to prevent her from ever getting overly excited even though there was the acceptance, by both of them that Agnes would never grow up to have a normal life. Neither of them had ever given a moment’s thought to the fact that Agnes might well be taken from them.
One night in early September of nineteen twenty seven, Kate tucked Agnes into her bed and if she had known that night was going to be the last time that she was ever to hear her little girl say goodnight to her, she would never have left her all alone there in that room by herself. She would have laid there next to her precious little Agnes and she would have wrapped her up in her arms and cradled her with every ounce of love in her body… and when the attack took hold of Agnes maybe she could have done something to prevent it from getting worse and maybe their little darling’s life could have been saved.
But Agnes was all alone when cruel death came creeping through her room. Like a thief in the middle of the night, it hovered over her as she slept and carried their little bundle of joy out into the cold and never-ending darkness. Carried her away… not even allowing the time for one small goodbye.
Peter and Kate could not have asked for better friends or neighbors after Agnes was taken from them. Every night for weeks and months afterward, someone would come and sit in with them and try to take their minds off their terrible loss. Kate was better at pretending than Peter and she was far too polite to tell these good people that she would prefer to be left alone. Being alone was far more comforting for her. She didn’t have to pretend when she was alone and the pain was much easier to deal with. She hated having to make-believe to anyone that she would ever really get over losing her little darling angel.
Peter was never the same again and slowly he began to shut Kate out until eventually they became like two strangers sitting across the fire from one another. Both of them, with their eyes fixed back in time, searching the ashes for reasons why they were deserving of something so tragic to happen to them.
It was a beautiful August night in nineteen thirty one and Kate had gone outside to stand in the road in front of the house and listen to the night settle in around her. She had always found a particular kind of happiness in hearing how the birds and the animals went about going to their beds. There was a time when Peter would come out there and stand with her but after Agnes passed away, that was something else that Peter stopped doing. For a long time too, Kate had not gone out there. Life and everything to do with living and especially, the business of happy living, had lost all it’s meaning to her and she went about her days shutting herself off from everything and anything to do with her own survival.
It was a thrush that came to her one morning while she was hanging out the washing. The thrush perched herself on the line right next to her, showing no fear of Kate at all. This bird sat there staring at her and Kate finally began to grasp that this was very unusual behavior. She could see her own reflection in the bird’s big pleading eyes and the notion came to her that this was Agnes. The bird broke into song and Kate stood there holding on to the line, her tears streaming down her cheeks… accepting for the first time that she was not the cause of Agnes’ dying.
As Kate was crossing the yard to go back inside, a strange eerie feeling took hold of her and for a moment, it stopped her in her tracks. She began to sense that something was wrong inside the house. She hurried her steps and when she got to the front door which she had left open behind her, she could see into the house and back to the fireplace. Peter was there, sitting with his head off to one side of the armchair.
She paused at the door before crossing the floor to him and when she reached out a hand to touch him, he didn’t respond. She didn’t have to touch him again to know that Peter was gone from her.
After examining Peter, doctor O’ Brien told her that Peter had died from a weak heart, but Kate was certain that her gentle, kind and loving thirty two-year old husband had more than likely died from a broken heart.
Peter’s mother, Agnes came down with pneumonia in the late Autumn of nineteen thirty eight, from which she never fully recovered and she died with Kate by her side three days into the new year. Kate’s own mother and father died a year apart from one another. Her father first, in nineteen forty two and her mother, the following year, just two days shy of her sixty fifth birthday. From there on, Kate had been left alone to bear the weight of life on her own two shoulders and sometimes when she looked back over her thirty years of being alone, it seemed like a small lifetime to her.
She had left the door open behind Matt when he left and some more of Casey was getting out of the house. She stepped outside into the yard where the last of the lingering fog was beginning to give way to the mid-morning sun. She crossed over the cobblestones and stood at the gate and searched for Matt coming back up the road. He was there and again, she felt it a pity that poor ol’ Casey wasn’t with him. She went out into the road and when Matt saw her there, he quickened his step. If she’d closed her eyes just then, just for one small moment, it might well have been Agnes there in the road. When he got closer, Kate could see the clove rocks bulging out of the side of his jaw. She laughed heartily. He had a beautiful glowing innocence with the way he was smiling to her. She couldn’t help but dote on him and he might as well have been her own. She surely loved him that way.
“Was I long Kate?”
“Not at all Matt, you made great time. S’or I don’t know what I’d do only for you.”
He passed in the yard before her and into the house, leaving the message bag down on the floor next to Peter’s chair. By the time that Kate herself made it to the door, he was there with his hand out, offering her a clove rock.
She took one from the paper wrapping and made sure to shut the door behind her.
- A Small Lifetime by Pat Greene - September 15, 2022