Chapter 8 Lot Twelve

The morning of the sale the yard of Gort was tart with diesel and wet grass, and the van came up the lane early, ahead of the men by a careful margin, the way such vans arrive at such houses, so that the work can be done before the light is good enough to see it done. Eamon stood at the kitchen window and watched it stop at the gate and watched the two men climb down and stand in the yard with their hands in their pockets, patient, giving the house its last minutes. Behind him the kitchen of Gort stood packed and strange around the table: the chairs' worth of the flat in boxes at the wall, the blue cups in a case of straw, the old knife in a drawer that had already been emptied and was standing open, and the long oak table in the middle of the empty room, at its full length, with the leaves in and the pegs turned home, waiting for the men to carry it out to the van and down to the saleroom where it was Lot Twelve on the bill of the day. Niamh stood in the scullery doorway with her coat half buttoned and the chipped blue cup in her hand — it had not gone into the case with its pair; she had kept it out to carry in the car, and she had been standing in the doorway for some minutes, holding it, not drinking from it. She said, "The men are waiting," and she said it in her practical voice, and Eamon did not answer, and the two of them stood in the two doorways of the room with the table between them, the way their family had always stood in that room, at the two ends of the long boards, with the grain running to the sea and the closed-eye knot keeping watch from the second board and the notches under the leaves counting the four generations into their places. He had gone over the whole of it the night before, alone, when his mother had gone up to bed. He had not lit the lamp. He had stood in the dark at the table's edge, as his great-grandmother had stood, as his grandmother had stood, as his mother had stood, and he had run his hand along the length of the grain the way all of them had done in their separate dark rooms, and he had counted the marks for the last time — the notch for the first, gone to the sea; the O gone over three times; the burn of a hurried pot; the C cut by a young hand; the half-letter that had got away; the second deep cut where the boy had been tallied; the E cut by a shaking hand, his own; the small shallow N his mother had cut the night she came home from the city — and the count had come out, as it had come out every time he had made it since he was a child, to the whole of the family, seated and unseated, one after another, around the one long thing the house had never replaced. He had stood in the dark of his own kitchen with his hand flat on the river of the grain and he had composed, half in his head and half aloud, the speeches: what he would say to the men if he kept it, what he would say to his mother if he let it go, what he would say to the dealer on the telephone about a long oak farmhouse table with original leaves and the initials of four generations cut into the end grain, and he had found, standing there in the dark with his palm on the wood, that he could not tell the two futures apart, because in both of them the table went on, and the difference between them was only where the count was kept — in the kitchen of Gort, or wherever the table stood, with visitors telling the duty man what the marks meant while the marks kept their own counsel — and that difference, which he had expected to be everything, had turned out, in the measuring of his own hand on the wood, to be precisely the thing he could not decide. There is a word in the language of such houses, the long word for the keeping of such things, and Eamon had never been able to say it to anyone, because the word had always sounded to him like something a schoolmaster would write in the margin: heritage, legacy, heirloom. It was the untranslated business of the grain itself. The river had run from the first boards to the last ones without asking to be called a river and without once being told what it was worth. The table had kept the count. The men knocked at the stable door, politely, as men knock when they have been standing in a yard too long. Niamh turned from the scullery doorway and went to them, her hand going up to her coat collar, and Eamon heard her voice in the yard, low, and then the boot-scuff of the two men coming in through the scullery, walking the same careful dance their grandfathers had walked a hundred years before when the table had first been carried into the room, and he heard them stop when they saw the length of it, and he heard one of them say to the other, "It'll be a carry and a half, that," and he heard his mother say, "It's been carried in once," in her flat voice, and the two men moved around to the ends of the table, and Eamon did not move. The whole of the morning hung on the one word that was left in the room. The men stood at the head and the foot of the table, their hands near the boards, waiting on the household's instruction, and Niamh stood at the scullery door with the chipped blue cup in her hand and her coat done up over the flat's boxes, and Eamon stood at the long side of the table with his palm flat on the second board, his thumb resting against the closed-eye knot, holding the grain of the wood his great-grandmother had oiled and his grandmother had taught him to read and his mother had set the plates on every night of his life, and the room waited the way the house had always waited, with the lamp out and the light coming in clean from the yard, for one of them to say which way the keeping of it went. He opened his mouth. The word that came up out of him was a short word, the shortest word in the language for the keeping of a thing, and whether it was the word that kept the table in the room for the night to come or the word that sent it out to the saleroom to be Lot Twelve on the bill, he did not know himself as he said it, because the word had been standing in him all morning, holding itself back from both of them, and it came out at last not as an answer but as the thing the wood had been telling him all along, which no one in four generations had ever been able to say out loud in front of the furniture. He said it. The kitchen of Gort heard it. The men stood at the head and the foot of the table for a long moment, not moving, their hands still poised above the boards as though they had misheard and were waiting for the correction. Niamh stood at the scullery door with the chipped blue cup in her hand, and her eyes went to her son, and her son went on looking at the wood under his palm, and the grain held them all in the silence that follows a decision before anyone moves to carry it out. What Eamon said was not the word that either the auction or the keeping required. He said, "Not today." He said it the way Oona had once said that the past did not need feeding, flat and final, and the two men straightened up and looked at one another and then at Niamh, and Niamh said, "You heard him," and her voice was level and contained no victory, only the quiet acknowledgment that the morning had turned, and the men went out to the van and drove back down the lane the way they had come, leaving the yard still tart with diesel but the house returned to itself, the table standing at its full length in the empty kitchen, the chipped blue cup in Niamh's hand, and Eamon with his thumb in the print his great-grandmother had left in the wood. The word they had expected — the sale, the surrender — had come out wrong. Or it had come out right and the two of them did not yet know what right was, and the table, which had heard every word that had ever been spoken in the room, offered no opinion. In the afternoon, when the men were gone and the van was down the lane, Niamh made tea and set the cups on the boards the way she always did, and the two of them sat at their ends with the full length of the table between them and the lamp unlit in the daylight from the window. "We can't stay here," she said. "You know that." "I know that," he said. "The roof," she said. "The damp. The stairs. The road to Carra when the rain comes." "I know all of it." "Then what was it you kept?" She said it without accusation, the way she said most things that cost her, from the far end of the table with her hands flat on the wood. "What was it you kept when you said not today?" Eamon looked at the boards. The light from the window lay along the grain and found the closed-eye knot in the second board and the burn ring at the far end and the seam of the leaves that ran the whole length like a hairline fault in the middle of the river. "I kept the right to think about it," he said. "You gave me the arithmetic. You gave me the flat and the roof and the price of the table. But you didn't give me time to look at the table while I was thinking." Niamh considered this. She had been standing in the scullery doorway, she realised, because she had not wanted to be at the table when the word came out, and she had not wanted to be anywhere else, and that was the position the table put you in — you could not leave and you could not stay without seeing it. She sat down at her end and looked at her son across the river of grain and said, "Then look at it. But look at it quickly, because the roof will not wait for us to decide what the table is." That night, after Niamh had gone up the stairs with the lamp and the house was quiet in the way that old houses are quiet, thick with the particular silence of rooms that have been emptied of their furniture, Eamon stood at the table in the dark and ran his hand along the grain the way he had done every night of his life, and he said to the closed-eye knot the thing he had not said to anyone, not to his mother, not to the men in the yard, not to the wood itself: "I don't know what you are." The table said nothing. It had never said anything. But the grain ran under his palm, and the notches waited under the leaves, and the end grain at the far end held the letters that four hands had cut into it — O, C, N, E — and the half-letter that no one had finished, and the count was the count and the wood was the wood, and Eamon stood in the dark kitchen of Gort and understood that he was asking the wrong question. The table was not what it was. It was what it had done. He had not thought of it that way before. He had thought of the table as the thing that held the family, the way a cup holds water, and when the family was gone the cup was empty. But the table was not empty. The table was full of the marks that the family had left in it, the notches and the letters and the burn ring and the worn places before each chair, and those marks did not depend on whether anyone was sitting in the chairs. They were there in the dark when no one was in the room. They were there in the grain when the lamp was out and the house was sleeping. The table held the count, and the count held the family, and the two of them held each other, and that was what he had kept when he said not today. In the morning he told his mother. He said it over breakfast, with the lamp lit against the early dark and the chipped blue cup at his elbow and the bread on the board the way it always was. "The table isn't furniture," he said. "I know that sounds like something she would have said." He meant Oona. "But it's true. The table isn't furniture because furniture doesn't do anything. The table does something. It counts." Niamh looked at him across the boards. "What does it count?" "Everything. The people. The coming and the going. The notches under the leaf. The letters in the end grain. The burn ring. The worn places. It's a record. You don't sell a record. You don't sell the proof that people were here." "We can take it with us," Niamh said. "No," he said. "We can't. It won't go through the door of the flat. You know that. I measured it last night. It was built to fit this room, and this room is the only room it will ever fit." Niamh put her cup down. She looked at the table the way she had looked at it all her life, with the particular attention that the people of Gort had always paid it, and she said, "Then we have to stay." "The roof," he said. "The roof," she said. "And the stairs, and the road, and the damp. All of it. The table stays and the house stays and we stay, and we find the money for the roof, and we do it with the table standing right where it is." "And if we can't find the money?" "Then we find a different way to keep it. But we don't sell the table. That's the one thing we don't do." He looked at her across the river of grain, and she looked back, and the lamp burned between them, and the closed-eye knot kept watch from the second board, and for the first time since the night she had said that the table was part of the price, the two of them were on the same side of the long boards, with the table between them and the grain running to the sea and the notches counting the family under the leaves, and the house of Gort went on. But keeping the table did not fix the roof. That was the arithmetic that had not changed, and the rain, when it came, did not care what the family had decided. It came through the slates in two places above the back room, and Niamh put buckets under the drips and changed them in the morning, and the sound of the water hitting the tin was the sound of the house reminding them that sentiment was not a trade, and that the table, for all it held, could not hold back the weather. Eamon went to Carra. He went to the publican he knew, and the builder he had worked beside one summer, and the woman at the bank who had known his grandmother, and he asked for work and for time and for the kind of help that men give one another in a town that has known a family for four generations. The publican gave him hours behind the bar. The builder gave him a job on a house that was going up outside the town, and Eamon carried the blocks and mixed the mortar and came home at evening with his hands raw and his back a question, and he set his plate at the table and ate in the quiet that the house made around the two of them, and the grain ran on. The publican, whose name was Séan and who had served Oona's husband in his youth and had seen Callum grow up and had watched Niamh carry Eamon to the table on the morning he was born, came up the yard one Saturday with a jar of porter and the way of speaking that men have when they are about to say the thing they have been carrying. He sat at the long side of the table and looked at the boards and said, "Your grandmother used to say that a table like this could feed a town. She meant it literally." "She meant the stories," Eamon said. "She meant both. The stories and the bread. A table that size in a kitchen that size — it was the biggest room in the house when the room was full. And the room was always full." He drank his porter and looked at the closed-eye knot. "There's a woman in Carra who does suppers. Weddings, funerals, the small things. She has a kitchen the width of a door, same as the flat your mother looked at. She'd give good money for a table like this." "Good money," Eamon said. "The kind that fixes roofs." Eamon looked at Séan across the boards. "The table's not for sale." "I'm not buying. I'm saying there's a use for it that doesn't involve selling. She brings the food to the table instead of the table going to the food. She sets up in a room — the parish hall, the school, someone's good kitchen — and she cooks and serves, and the table's the table. She does it every month. She'd do it here." "Here," Eamon said. "In this house. On this table. She'd pay you for the use of the room and the table, and the money would go to the roof, and the table would be doing what tables are supposed to be doing, which is feeding people." Eamon sat with this for a long while. The idea settled in him the way ideas settle in the people of Gort, slowly, and in the company of the wood. He thought of his great-grandmother, who had set the table for two and watched it fill. He thought of his grandmother, who had oiled the boards and taught him to read the grain. He thought of his mother, who had kept the count in her own way, practical and undecorated, and he thought of the table standing at its full length with all the leaves in and the pegs turned home, and he thought of strangers setting plates on the boards where his family had set theirs. "Séan," he said, "I'll ask her." He asked his mother. Niamh listened at her end of the table with the lamp between them and the rain beginning again on the back room, and she said, "A supper club. On the table." "On the table and in the house. She pays for the room and the table. We keep the table. The money goes to the roof." Niamh looked at the boards. She looked at the closed-eye knot and the burn ring and the seam of the leaves and the worn places before the chairs, and she said, "Your great-grandmother set that table for a family. She kept it for a family. She said it was the only thing in the house that loved the family without waiting to see how things turned out." "That's what the table was," Eamon said. "That's not what it has to be." "It's what it is." "Then we let it be what it is in a new way. The table feeds people. That's what it was built for. We let it do that for more people, and the money keeps the roof over it, and the roof keeps us in the house, and the house keeps the table where it belongs." Niamh said nothing for a long while. The rain ran in the buckets. The lamp burned low. The grain ran from one end of the long boards to the other, and the closed-eye knot slept in the second board, and the marks under the leaves waited in the dark for someone to remember them. Then Niamh said, "Your grandmother would have called that a compromise." "Is that bad?" "It's not bad. It's not good. It's what people do when they can't have the thing they want and won't give up the thing they need." She finished her tea and set the cup down in the exact centre of the place mat, and she said, "We'll try it. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, we sell the flat and we fix the roof and the table stays anyway." "Deal," Eamon said. "Deal," Niamh said, and the word sat on the boards between them the way the catalogue had sat there a fortnight before, except that this word was theirs and the other had been an estimate, and the difference between the two was the difference between a price and a promise, and the table, which had heard both, offered no opinion, which was its way of offering the only one that mattered.