Cassie’s married life

Cassie’s married life

photo courtesy of internet

Cassie reached up to the shelf in the kitchen and twiddled the knob on the wireless. She leaned closer to catch the news announcer voice crackling faintly over the wires. He was saying something about talks between Dublin and London. She turned the knob to ‘off’. She’d save the battery. If Tom didn’t carry the news back with him he’d be wantin’to hear it on the radio at bedtime. On a dull overcast day in February, the fighting and the on-going unrest seemed unreal and far away from her family and her life in Donegal

She looked around the small labourer’s cottage of two small bedrooms, a ‘big’ bedroom and kitchen and put her hand over her stomach. The labour pains had started. She hoped they wouldn’t get bad until night time when her children were in bed. She sighed deeply. It would be her fifth – four living and one buried along the hedgerow that bordered Clonleigh graveyard.

Maybe this one will live long enough to draw breath. At least that way it can be baptised and buried inside the graveyard, she thought. It’ll be another mouth to feed,” her inner voice scolded. And where will it sleep?

 She sighed. She had enough with a blessing; one for every year she was married. But what could she do. She couldn’t refuse Tom when he turned to her at night. He worked hard, turning his hand to whatever brought in money to feed and clothe them all. It was a sin to refuse your husband. She’d have to confess it to Father Sweeney in Confessions.

She pushed the white enamel basin she’d been washing the dishes on to the back of the kitchen table Tom had found in Boggs’s auction rooms in Strabane and looked out the window across the field at the grey smoke rising above the hedgerows, as the train run by the Donegal Railway made its way from Strabane to Letterkenny. It carried both passengers and livestock now and other goods for east Donegal .There was even a turf train that fetched turf from Glenties to be sent to England to be sold. That was where Tom was the day – away looking about getting the job as a gaffer transporting the turf.

She shook herself out of her melancholy mood and picking up the poker rattled it through the bars of the black range coaxing the turf into a flame to heat up the pan for his tea. The train would stop at the Halt in Ballindrait station and he’d be home tired and hungry after being away from early morning.

She lifted the lid off the pot of broth of carrots and mince and spuds simmering on the back of the range. Its aroma wafted out making her hungry. She should feed the weans before he came home? That way, she’d get sitting down to take her dinner with him and hear all about his new job.

She put the lid back on the pot. She’d feed her husband first. It was one of the things she had to learn to when she married him. No matter how much the children needed her he had to be seen to first. Then, she could see to the children and then herself. When she’d complained to her sister, she’d shrugged her shoulders and said, “He’s the man of the house.”

Another pain tightened its grip on her stomach and she had to stop and lean against the table until it passed. She noticed that, despite a white frost coating the top of the privet hedge outside the door, the sun was trying to push its way through the grey clouds.

On impulse, she decided she’d walk through the village and meet Tom coming off the train. She’d put the two youngest in the pram and Anna, Margaret could walk. She’d be back before the two older girls came home from Murlog National School. Once the new baby came, she’d not get out for a walk.

Her heart lifted. It  had been a while since they’d all walked out together. It had been an even longer time since her and Tom had any time to themselves; except for a quick cuddle at night. She wondered if that was what was making her husband so angry with her and the girls.

Mary Catherine’s brown eyes smiled up at her as she bent and lifted her out of the tea-chest, the man in shop in the village had been good enough to keep it for her. Some of the silver lining that kept the loose tea fresh still clung here and there to its rim. She held her small daughter close to her, the familiar feeling of self-reproach washing over her.

At two Mary Catherine was still not walking. Cassie knew it was because she kept her in the box for most of the day. “It’s the safest place for her, since you haven’t the time to watch her for daydreaming out the window, “Tom had bellowed when the baby had pulled herself up and fallen against the hot bars of the range.

Filled with guilt, Cassie smoothed her hand gently over the livid red scar that would mark her daughter’s face for life. It was alright for Tom, he wasn’t here half the time. And when he was he paid no attention to the children. That was her job, he said. Sometimes she even thought he was jealous of the attention she gave them. That puzzled her. Her father Willy had blustered and complained but he always had time to take her and her sisters out to the fields and on the bar of his bike to school sometimes.

Awkwardly, holding the toddler under her arm, she manhandled the big pram the postmistress had given her out the door. It had reared an only daughter and a son and was grander than Cassie could ever afford to buy. Picking up Rosie, who would be one in March, she thought, she placed her under the hood of the big bouncy pram. She settled Mary Catherine at the baby’s feet, thinking that she’d soon have two under a year old.

“You be a good girl for mammy and hold tight to the handle of the pram,” she said turning to three year old Anna Margaret. “Daddy is going to get a  BIG surprise when he gets off the  train.”

Part 2  next week.

Gemma Hill 2022©