“Four shillings for tea,” she began to calculate; “eight-pence for sugar; five shillings for loaves of bread; four shillings and sixpence for tobacco, and sixpence for snuff, and—How much potheen did you get for your father’s wake, Eamon Doherty?”
“Four gallons and no less,” Eamon answered in a surly tone of voice.
“Two gallons of potheen, Micky’s Jim, and get it as cheap as you can,” said the old woman, turning to the long-limbed youth. “From what I hear Martin Eveleen sells good potheen. Get it from him, for it was Martin, I wish him luck! that helped Norah when she took the fargortha on the road to Greenanore three winters agone.”
The money was handed to Micky’s Jim, and he left the house followed by Willie the Duck, a small man, dark and swarthy, with a hump on his left shoulder, and a voice, when he spoke, that reminded one of the quacking of ducks.
“Thirty-four shillings in all,” mumbled Mary Ryan as she took her way back to the fireside. “It costs a lot to bury a body, and there will never be left one at all to bury me, never a one at all. If only the curragh was left me it would be something.”
Meanwhile Norah had slipped out, and went from house to house borrowing candlesticks (Meenalicknalore townland consisted of thirty families and there were only two candlesticks amongst them), baskets of peat, holy water, a lamp, extra chairs, stools, and many other things required for the wake.
II
AT midnight the cabin was cleared of everybody but the washers of the dead, Eamon Doherty and Master Diver. Oiney Dinchy was very angry because Mary Ryan did not ask him to give a hand at the washing of her husband.
“It wasn’t as if Shemus and me weren’t good friends,” said Oiney. “And besides, I have washed more dead men in a year of my life than all washed by Eamon and Master Diver put together.... And to think that I wasn’t allowed to help at the washin’ to-night!”
The men and women who had left the cabin went down on their knees at the doorstep and recited the Rosary. The night being very dark the young men drew near the girls and tickled them on the bare feet while they prayed. When admittance was again possible the dead man lay in the bed, his body covered with a white sheet and a large black crucifix resting on his breast. His clothes were already burned in the fire, it being a common custom in Frosses to consign the clothes of the dead to the flames on the first night of the wake.