Chapter 5 The Whole Company

The man who came to marry Niamh arrived in Carra selling sewing machines, door to door, in a borrowed van with the tread worn smooth. He was from inland, from a town of grey stone where the tables were round and small and folded against the wall when not in use, and he had never seen a table that took seven strides. He fell in love with the table before he fell in love with Niamh, which she found very funny and never let him forget. "You stood in the door and you said, 'Oh,' just like she did," she told him later. "My grandmother said she knew your measure from that word, and that it was a good measure, but that you'd eat your meals at the side, where you could see both ends." He did sit at the side. He was a man who fit into the shape of a house without being asked to, the way some men do, and he laughed at Oona's stories in the right places and carried the stockpot without being told and did not once, in all the years he stayed, try to move the furniture. For the first time in its long life the table stood at its full length on a daily basis, with all the leaves in and the pegs turned home, and the house filled with the noise of a family at its proper size: the grandmother at her end, the grandfather at his place by the window, the two of them on the long side, and then a fourth chair added to the long side, and then a fifth, and then a crib moved into the corner of the kitchen where the old crib had always stood, because that was where the cribs stood in that house, under the eye of the table. Eamon was born in the October of his mother's twenty-sixth year, and Niamh waited the proper time — ten days, as her grandmother had waited — and then she took the old knife from the drawer and went to the false leaf, the first leaf, the one at her grandmother's right hand, and she cut the mark for her son where the two older marks were, her father's notch and her own, and her hand shook a little at the work and she did not hurry it. Oona, who had watched her cut her own small letter two years before and had said nothing, stood behind her now and said, "It's a good, deep mark," and that was all she said, which was all she had ever said at such moments, and which was more than enough. They were four generations at the table then, and the full company of it, and the house of Gort held them the way the table had always held the house, which was generously and without complaint. There were years that passed in that kitchen that none of them would ever be able to set in order afterwards, because they were too full of the ordinary: the homework done on the boards after the plates were cleared, the gramophone brought out on Sundays, the arguments about the coal, the apples kept under the table in a sack at the height of a small boy's eye, the rain on the yard and the long winter evenings when the lamp made a circle of the family and the dark kept the rest of the room. The table saw them all, the closed-eye knot keeping watch from the second board, and it recorded the family's size in the way it had always recorded it, in the dip of the wood before each chair, in the slow darkening of the boards under the constant press of hands, in the seam of the leaves that had, by the middle of Eamon's childhood, been fitted and refitted so often that the runners knew their way in their sleep. The man who came to Carra selling sewing machines stayed seven years. He was not unkind, and he was not unfaithful in any way that the town could agree on, and the leaving, when it happened, was not a leaving in the old style — there was no taxi at the gate, no door closing, no suitcase set on the boards for the household to read. He simply grew smaller in the house. His work took him on the road for longer stretches, and then for longer still, and his chair at the long side was empty on the weeknights, and then on the weekends, and then it was empty in the way other things were empty, in the way the cells that stand square in a room you no longer use are empty. He wrote, at the end, from another town, a letter that was careful and fair and addressed to both of them, and Niamh read it at the table with her son on the other side of the closed-eye knot, and she folded it back into its envelope and put it in the drawer where Oona had kept the account books, and the drawer closed on it the way the half-letter had closed on itself, a mark begun and never finished. She did not watch him go, because he was not there to be watched — the house had emptied itself of him by degrees, the way a room goes light as the furniture is moved out of it — but she did sit, for one full evening after the letter, in his chair at the long side, out of a respect that no one else would ever know about. Then she went back to her end, moved a chair across the head of the table into the old position of the head of the household, and set the supper for three: the grandmother at her end, her father at the window end, herself at the head, and the child where the child belonged, at the closed-eye knot, growing. It was Oona who best understood the size of what the table now did, and it was Oona, increasingly bedbound in her last years, who found the words for it one evening when Niamh brought her supper up on a tray. "You'll keep the table," she said. It was not a question. "It was kept for me when I could not keep myself. It was kept for your father when he could not see it. You'll keep it for the boy, and you'll keep it whether there's a full company or two at it, and I'll tell you why: because it's the only thing in this house that has never once waited to see how things turned out before loving the family." She said it plainly, as she said all her most important things, and she set her teacup down in the exact centre of the tray, and Niamh went back down to the kitchen and stood by the long table in the dark and laid her hand flat on the wood of it, and the river of grain ran faithful under her palm, going nowhere in particular, patient as it had always been.