"Misthress Healy, is it; well, I don't care a d—n if it was Misthress Toe-y!"
For a quarter of a century my sister has occupied my mother's chimney-corner, but it was vacant that night. She sat on my father's side of the fire. He and I sat opposite each other at the table—I on the same spot, on the same stool where I used to sit when her cup toward the close of the meal came traveling along the edge of the table and where her hand with a crust in it would sometimes blindly grope for mine.
But she was not there. In all my life I have never seen a space so empty!
My father was a peasant, with all the mental and physical characteristics of his class. My sister is a peasant woman who has been cursed with the same grinding poverty that cursed my mother's life. About my mother there was a subtlety of intellect and a spiritual quality that even in my ignorance was fascinating to me. I returned equipped to appreciate it and she was gone. Gone, and a wide gulf lay between those left behind, a gulf bridged by the relation we have to the absent one more than by the relation we bore to each other.
We felt as keenly as others the kinship of the flesh, but there are kinships transcendentally higher, nobler and of a purer nature than the nexus of the flesh. There were things to say that had to be left unsaid. They had not traveled that way. The language of my experience would have been a foreign tongue to them. She would have understood.
"Wan night be th' fire here," Jamie said, taking the pipe out of his mouth, "she says t' me, 'Jamie,' says she, 'I'm clane done, jist clane done, an' I won't be long here.'
"'Och, don't spake s' downmouth'd, Anna,' says I. 'Shure ye'll feel fine in th' mornin'.'
"'Don't palaver,' says she, an' she lukt terrible serious.
"'My God, Anna,' says I, 'ye wudn't be lavin' me alone,' says I, 'I can't thole it.'
"'Yer more strong,' says she, 'an' ye'll live till he comes back—thin we'll be t'gether.'"