Foster

‘Aye,’ says the other. ‘But didn’t he reach his three score and ten? What more can any of us hope for?’

We keep on walking, standing in tight to the hedges, the ditches, letting things pass.

‘Have you been to a wake before?’ the woman asks.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, I might as well tell you: there will be a dead man here in a coffin and lots of people and some of them might have a little too much taken.’

‘What will they be taking?’

‘Drink,’ she says.

When we come to the house, several men are leaning against a low wall, smoking.

There’s a black ribbon on the door and hardly a light shining from the house but when we go in, the kitchen is bright, and packed with people who are talking. The woman who asked Kinsella to dig the grave is there, making sandwiches. There are big bottles of red and white lemonade, stout, and in the middle of all this, a big wooden box with an old dead man lying inside of it. His hands are joined as though he had died praying, a string of rosary beads around his fingers. Some of the men are sitting around the coffin, using the part that’s closed as a counter on which to rest their glasses. One of these is Kinsella.

‘There she is,’ he says. ‘Long Legs. Come over here.’

He pulls me onto his lap, and gives me a sip from his glass.

‘Do you like the taste of that?’

‘No.’

He laughs. ‘Good girl. Don’t ever get a taste for it. If you start, you might never stop and then you’d wind up like the rest of us.’

He pours red lemonade into a cup for me. I sit on his lap drinking it and eating the queen cakes out of the biscuit tin and looking at the dead man, hoping his eyes will open.

The people come and go, drifting in and out, shaking hands, drinking and eating and looking at the dead man, saying what a lovely corpse he is, and doesn’t he look happy now that his end has come, and who was it that laid him out? They talk of the forecast and the moisture content of corn, of milk quotas and the next general election. I feel myself getting heavy on Kinsella’s lap.

‘Am I getting heavy?’

‘Heavy?’ he says. ‘You’re like a feather, Child. Stay where you are.’

I put my head against him but I’m bored and wish there were things to do, other children who would play.

‘The girl’s getting uneasy,’ I hear the woman say.

‘What’s ailing her?’ says another.

‘Ah, it’s no place for the child, really,’ she says. ‘It’s just I didn’t like not to come, and I wouldn’t leave her behind.’

‘Sure I’ll take her home with me, Edna. I’m going now.