Chapter 9 The Supper

The woman who cooked came from Carra in a van the colour of cream, with copper pots and a fire-blackened tray and the kind of quiet competence that precedes her into a room the way a good smell precedes a meal. Her name was Bríd, and she had known Oona — everyone in Carra had known Oona — and she stood in the kitchen of Gort and looked at the table and said the thing that everyone said, which was, "God, the size of it," and then she said, "Right," which was the thing that no one else said, and she began to unpack. They set the first supper for a Thursday. Eamon had spent a week with the builder on the house outside town and come home each evening to clear the boards and lay the cloth — the old cloth, the one that had lived in the press under the stairs and had not seen the table since Oona's funeral — and Niamh had moved the chairs from their usual positions to the ones Bríd had specified, which were all along one side and at the two ends, so that the cooks could work the far side of the boards like a counter. The blue cups were washed and set out at every place, both of them, the chipped one and its pair, and the paraffin lamp stood in the centre of the table where it had always stood, and the grain ran the length of the boards under the cloth, and the house held its breath in the way it had held it the first morning the table had come, waiting to see what the room would become. Ten people came. They came up the yard in the rain with their coats over their arms and their appetites ahead of them, and they stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the table and said the things people say when they are surprised by a room: that it was bigger than they had thought, that the table was a remarkable thing, that the lamp was just right. Bríd moved among them with her copper pots and her quiet authority, and she set the first course on the boards at the far end where the bread had always been, and the guests sat along the side with their backs to the window, and Eamon and Niamh sat at the two ends of the table, the places that had been Oona's and Callum's, and the grain ran under the cloth and the plates, and the closed-eye knot slept in the second board, and the table fed strangers for the first time in its hundred years. The food was good. Bríd's food was always good — she had the kind of hands that knew the difference between a simmer and a boil without measuring, and the kind of eye that could tell a dish was ready by the way the light fell on it — and the people ate and talked and drank, and the room filled with the noise of a full table, which is a different sound from a quiet one: it is the sound of a room doing what it was built for, and the table, which had been built for exactly that, seemed to lean into it, the way a man leans into a conversation he has been waiting to join. Niamh watched. She sat at her end with the chipped blue cup and she watched the guests set their plates on the boards where her family had set theirs, and she watched Bríd carry the dishes along the far side the way a ship's cook carries a pot, steady and sure, and she watched her son at the other end with the lamp between them and the grain running to the sea at the far board, and she thought of Oona, who had set the table for two and watched it fill, and she thought that the table was filling again, and that the filling was not the same as the first time but was the same kind of thing — a room opening to what it could hold, a table earning its keep in the way that Oona had always said it would, by feeding the family, which was now, for one Thursday evening in the rain, a wider family than the one whose marks it carried under the leaves. The guests left in the dark, with their coats over their arms and their plates cleared and their gratitude well-spoken, and Bríd cleaned the boards the way Niamh cleaned them, with a rag and linseed and the long strokes that follow the grain, and when the table was bare and shining in the lamplight Bríd said, "Your grandmother kept this table like a person. I can see it in the wood." "She kept it better than most people," Niamh said. "She did. I remember the wake. I remember the table set at its full length and every chair filled, and her at the end with the lamp, and I thought, that's what a table is supposed to be." Bríd folded her rag and put it on the sideboard. "I'll come back next Thursday. If you want me." "We want you," Niamh said. They came back. Every Thursday, ten people at the long side of the table, the blue cups at every place, the lamp in the centre, the grain running under the plates and the bread and the wine that Bríd brought in her cream van, and the house of Gort filled with the noise of a room that had remembered what it was for. Eamon worked the builder's days and came home to set the table in the evenings, and Niamh set the places with the care of a woman who has been doing a thing all her life and is only now learning why, and the money from the suppers went into the tin that had held the polish and then the account books and now held the small, accumulating weight of a roof being fixed. The roof was done in the autumn. The builder came with his men and his slates and his ladder, and they worked for three days while Eamon mixed the mortar and Niamh set a place for them at the table at midday, and when they were gone the rain came through dry for the first time in two years, and the back room was quiet, and the buckets were put away, and the house was sound. Niamh stood in the kitchen and looked at the table and said, "We did it." "We did it," Eamon said, and they stood at their ends of the long boards with the lamp between them and the grain running on, and the table was still there, and the house was still theirs, and the count went on. But the suppers did not stop when the roof was done. That was the thing neither of them had expected — that the table, which had been the family's own, would become the town's, and that the town would come to depend on it the way the family had, which was not the same way but was a way, and the way was enough. Bríd came every Thursday with her copper pots and her cream van, and the guests came up the yard with their coats and their appetites, and the noise of the full table filled the kitchen of Gort, and the closed-eye knot watched from the second board, and the marks under the leaves waited in the dark for someone to remember them, and the table went on. Eamon began to hear the stories that the guests told at the long table. They were not the family's stories — they were the town's, and the town's stories were different in texture from the ones Oona had told at the same boards, which had been flat and few and made of the things that happen to a family that lives in one house with one table for a hundred years. The town's stories were larger and louder and more various, and they were told in the voices of people who had known the table only as a place to eat, and who had no notion of the notches under the leaves or the letters in the end grain or the half-letter that had got away. They knew the table as a table, and they loved it for its size and its warmth and the way the lamp lit the grain, and Eamon listened to them and felt, for the first time, the distance between the table's two lives — the one it had lived with the family and the one it was beginning to live with the town — and he did not know whether the distance was a wound or a gift, and he did not know which he would have chosen, and the table, as always, offered no opinion. One evening, after the guests had gone and Bríd had wiped the boards and left, Eamon stood at the table in the dark and put his hand on the closed-eye knot and said, "I'm sorry." He said it to the wood, or to the knot, or to the family that the knot had watched for a hundred years. "I didn't know what else to do." And the grain ran under his palm, and the notches waited under the leaves, and the table held the count, as it always had, in the dark, for whoever would come next to read it.