第13章 The Keeping Is a Living

The keeping was not a decision Eamon had made all at once. It had come to him the way it had come to Oona, forty years earlier, in the kitchen of Gort: as a fact that the table would not fit through the door of the place he was going, and therefore a fact that the place had to be the place. He had thought for a time that he would sell Gort, take rooms in Carra, and have the table moved into the town in pieces if it could be done, or whole if it could not. He measured the scullery door against the breadth of the boards with the tape his mother had kept in the tin, and the measurement did not change, and the measurement had not changed, and would not change, and when he had written down the number on the back of the account book and looked at it, it had become, as it had become for her, an answer that was also a question, because the table would not come through, and so the house would have to be sold, and the house sold meant the table sold, because a table did not stand in a room that was for sale the way a table stood in a room that was kept. He did not sell Gort. That was the keeping. He kept Gort because the table needed Gort the way the table needed the oiling, and the way the count needed the wood, and he told his mother it in the practical voice she had taught him to use, and she did not tell him he had decided the way she had decided, but she said the words that are the words, and the words were, Right. He had been to the auction house in Carra the week before, at his mother's bidding, to see what Lot Twelve had done, and he had come home with the figure written on a slip of paper and the slip had not said what the table was and had said what the table was worth to the person who had come to see it, and the person who had come to see it had not been his mother and had not been his great-grandmother and had not been his grandfather, and that was the whole of it, and he had put the slip in the drawer with the letters and had not looked at it again, and the not looking was the deciding. The house of Gort began, as houses do, to make its claim on its keepers. The back room, which had been dry for forty years, took a wetness in the autumn that was not the weather and that he watched the way his mother had watched the basin, marking it in the account book in the column that had been for the tin now held the money of the town's Thursday evenings. The roof let in at the eaves. The lane behind the yard went soft after the rains and the men of the town, who had come to help with the harvest, came to help with the lane, and there was talk, quiet, about the house, about the place it took on the hill, about the woman who kept it and the boy who now kept it with her, and the talk was not kind and was not unkind, and it was the talk that a place has when a place has stood long enough to become the measure of the village that grows around it. Eamon did not answer the talk. He answered it the way the table answered it, by being there, by the lamp lit, by the plates set, by the Thursday evening when the men of the lane sat at the long boards and ate what the tin had bought and did not ask what it had cost. It was on one of those Thursdays that the keeping showed itself to the town. Bríd came with her cream and her copper pots and set them on the boards where the cups stood, and she said, I will not take money for this, and Eamon said, The tin takes money for the roof, and she said, I know, and she poured the cream for the men of the lane, and the men of the lane did not know that the cream was for the roof, and did not ask, because that is the way of it, that the keeping is not the thing kept but the thing kept going, and the thing kept going was the money of the tin, and the tin held the money, and the money went to the roof, and the roof went over the table, and the table stood in the kitchen of Gort with the leaves in and the grain running to the sea, and the count of the family went on in the end grain, patient and unhurried, and the town came on its Thursday evenings to sit at the length of it, and the lamp was lit, and the blue cups were at the place, and the chipped one was at its pair, and the half-letter held the name that had never been finished, and the keeping was the thing, and the thing was kept, not by the family alone, because the family had made room for the town, and the town had made room for the family, at the long boards, on the Thursday evenings, when the cream came down the lane and the roof held over the table and the grain ran on, running on to the sea at the far end where the chair stood empty and the light of the lamp reached it and went no further, because that is how far the grain runs, and that is how far the keeping reaches, which is to the end of the boards, and no further, and no less. The keeping was not only the oiling, which his mother had done twice a year with the linseed from the town, and the not touching, which the town had done on the Thursday evenings when they sat at the boards and did not ask who had set the plates or who had lit the lamp, but it was also the standing, which was the thing that the men of the lane had learned, and the standing was the way of it, that a person stood at the end of the table in the house of Gort and looked down the length of the boards to the place where the grain ran to the sea, and did not move, and did not take the chair, and did not take the place, because the place was not for taking, the place was for keeping, and the keeping was the thing, and the thing was kept, not by the family alone, because the family had made room for the town at the long boards, and the town had made room for the family, and the two had gone on, one after the other, at the far end of the boards where the chair stood empty and the grain ran on, patient and unhurried, like a river seen from a hill, running to the sea, and the sea at the far end of the boards, and the far end of the boards at the keeping, and the keeping at the thing, and the thing at the kept. And this was the keeping, which was the thing, and the thing was kept, and the keeping had gone on in the kitchen of Gort at the full length of the boards with the leaves in and the pegs turned home, and the lamp lit, and the blue cups at the place, and the chipped one at its pair, and the tin in the drawer, and the money of the roof in the tin, and the roof over the table, and the table in the kitchen of Gort, and the kitchen of Gort on the hill, and the hill over the valley, and the valley over the sea, and the sea at the far end of the boards, and the far end of the boards at the keeping, and the keeping at the thing, and the thing at the kept, and the grain had run on under it all, patient and unhurried, like a river seen from a hill, running to the sea at the far end where the chair stood empty and the light reached it and went no further, because that was how far the grain ran, and that was how far the keeping reached, which was to the end of the boards, and no further, and no less.