Chapter 4 The Marks Underneath

Niamh was seven when she learned the map of the table, and she learned it the way the table had been made, board by board, because Oona taught her on the afternoons when the house was quiet and the washing was on the line and there was nothing to hurry for. "This is the country," Oona said, and took the child's hand and walked it across the boards. "The river runs along here, see, where the grain turns. It runs out to the sea at the far end, past your father's place. And this knot —" she put Niamh's finger into the closed eye — "this is where the table sleeps. You can set the salt pot anywhere, but you don't set it here. It's not that there's a rule. It's that the table likes to keep one eye open." They were not rules Oona invented for a child. They were the customs of the house, and they had grown up out of the wood the way moss grows on the north side of a wall, and Niamh took them in with the bread and the tea and the feel of the pushed-back chair under her knees. She learned the scar of the scorched ring, and the story of the haste that left it. She learned the notch for her father under the leaf, and the smaller notch beside it that was hers, and the older, deeper notch on the first leaf that belonged to a man she had never known, her grandmother's man, who had died believing a table was just a table and the sea could not hear a house. She learned the letters cut into the end grain at her grandmother's elbow: the O, gone over three times, and the C, cut by a young hand, and beside them a mark that had been begun and never finished — half a letter, a single stroke of a knife point, started and abandoned as if the cutter had been called away from the work and had never come back to it. Niamh asked about that mark for years. "Where does it go? Is it a letter?" Oona would look at the half-mark and say, "It's the one that got away," and the subject would close, gently but firmly, the way a door closes on a room you are not to see. The child came to understand that the table had its own unspoken things, and that a person did not press the table for more than it chose to give. In the years that followed, the kitchen of Gort sorted itself into a new order. Callum rose early and worked the small tenancy that he had taken up after his wife had gone — he had never been a farmer, but he had become a quiet one, good with a fence and a dry wall, better with silence — and he came in at midday and at evening, and he sat at the long side of the table in the chair that had once been hers, and he ate, and he said little. The house had two women of the blood in it now, grandmother and granddaughter, and the man who lived around them, learning them as he had never quite learned the woman he had chosen, seeing at last, in the country of his own table, the two women who had always been its weather. It was Oona who turned the oiling over to Niamh, the autumn the girl turned thirteen. It was a ceremony with a real order: the table cleared to the boards, the tablecloth taken down to the yard and shaken, the linseed poured out small, cut with a finger of turpentine, the rag folded into a pad as wide as a hand. "Start at the head and work down," Oona said, "always with the grain, never across it. The oil knows which way the wood wants to lie." And Niamh worked the length of the table in long strokes, as she had watched her grandmother do all her childhood, and the wood drank itself darker under her hand and gave back to the lamp the deep shine of a river at dusk. When the work was done, Oona took the rag from her and said, "Now you'll be able to read it. Not the marks. The wood. They're the same thing, in the end." It was the nearest Oona had ever come to a lesson, and Niamh kept it as the others kept their gifts, by using it. She tried the city once, as her father had. It was in her eighteenth year, and she went to the capital for a season of work in an office where the light came off other windows, and she rented a room with a fold-down table the width of a book. She lasted six months. The room was not the difficulty, and the work was not the difficulty; it was the table. She set her supper plate on the narrow board and the plate took up the whole of it, and there was no grain to follow with her finger, no river to run her hand along, no closed eye keeping watch, and she found that she missed the oiled wood the way other people miss the sea. She wrote to her grandmother — a short letter, about the weather and the price of rooms — and Oona wrote back on the boards in her square hand, a letter about the autumn oiling, and in the margin, as a postscript, the line: "The table asks after you." Niamh came home in the spring, up the yard with a single bag, and she found her grandmother in her chair at the end of the table with her hands flat on the wood, having known, like the table, that the girl would be back. That evening, after the lamp was lit and the plates were cleared, Niamh went to her grandmother's end of the table with her mother's old knife, warm from the drawer, and she cut her own letter into the end grain, small and shallow, her N, in the old place, beside the C and the O and the half-letter that had got away. Oona watched her do it and said nothing, which was how Oona approved of anything: by standing witness and leaving the work to stand. The marks under the rim and the letters in the end grain between them told the count of the household — not by number only, but by the order of their making, the way tree rings tell a story of years: the marriage, the burn of haste, the drowning, the exile and the return, the second marriage and its slow quiet end, the child of the fourth generation set down in the season of loss, and now this one cutting her own letter into the wood of the house her own father had cut his in. Niamh was twenty-two and unmarried and in no hurry, and the table, which had no opinions, seemed to have formed the only one it would ever form: that it was still a table for a family, and that it would be made to earn that, one way or another, by whoever came next to set a plate on it.