“You’re a man with a head, Eamon,” said Willie the Duck. “And how did you guess it atall?”
“I heard the same guess often and I knew the answer every time,” Eamon replied, and a smile of satisfaction lit up his face.
About four o’clock in the morning most of the men and a few of the ancient females were drunk. Mary Ryan had fallen asleep by the fire, her head touching the white ashes of her husband’s clothes. Norah placed a pillow under her mother’s head and took up a seat near her, gazing in turn at the silent figure which lay in the bed and the blue flames chasing one another up the black chimney.
Two lamps, one at each end of the house, spluttered dismally; the wind outside battered loudly against the door and wailed over the chimney. Oiney Dinchy was asleep and snoring loudly, and two youngsters blackened his face with soot. The beansho slept, and her child, long since released from the prison of the chair, was blubbering fitfully. On the damp earth of the mid-floor a well-made young woman slumbered, the naked calves of her finely formed legs showing. Micky’s Jim slapped the legs with his hand; the girl awoke, put down her dress until it covered her toes, made a face at the tormentor and went to sleep again. Beside Norah, old Master Diver, now remarkably rotund, was asleep, his bald head hanging to one side and a spittle slobbering from his lips.
Norah looked round at the sleepers, saw the stiff legs stretched on the floor, the long, awkward arms hanging loosely over the backs of the chairs, the bowls and the upturned whisky glasses on the table; heard the loud snoring, the rustle of petticoats as a woman changed her position on a stool, the crackle of falling peat on the hearth, the whimpering of the beansho’s child, and the sound made by the lips of a sucking babe pulling at its mother’s breast.
The strange fear, that which had taken possession of her three years before on the rocks of Dooey, seized her again. To her all things seemed to lack finish as they lacked design. A vague sense of repulsion overcame the girl as she gazed at the sleepers huddled on form and floor. She shuddered as if in a fever and approached the bed; there the awful stillness of the dead fascinated her. She was looking at the dead, but somehow Death had now lost its terror: it was the living who caused her fear. She knelt down and prayed.
CHAPTER X
COFFIN AND COIN
I
FOR two days and nights the neighbours came in, prayed by the bedside, drank bowls of tea, smoked long white clay pipes and departed, only to return later and renew the same performance. A coffin and coffin-bearer, the latter shaped like a ladder, the sides of which were cushioned to ease the shoulders of the men who carried it, were procured. On the rungs of the coffin-bearer a number of notches, three hundred and fifty-two in all, told of the bodies carried on it to the grave. The bearer had been in service for many years and had been used by most of the families in Frosses. The man who made it was long dead; number seventy-seven represented his notch on the rungs.
On the morning of the third day Oiney Dinchy and Micky’s Jim lifted the dead man from the bed and placed him in the coffin. Before the lid was screwed down, Mary Ryan knelt over the coffin, gripping the side near her with thin, long fingers, which showed white at the joints, and kissing her husband she burst into a loud outcry of grief. Norah, more reserved in her sorrow, knelt on the floor, said a short prayer and then kissed the face of the corpse as her mother had done.