第3章 The New Leaf

The first years of Callum's marriage were lived, as all the years at Gort were lived, around the table, and it took Oona a full year to understand what was wrong, because nothing was wrong in any way that could be pointed at. His wife was a good wife and a tidy one. She kept the kitchen clean the way a ship's deck is kept clean, by putting everything back in its place, and the table was its place for plates: set, eaten from, cleared, wiped, done. What Oona did at the same table — the accounts, the mending, the letter paper, the bird bones going to the stockpot — all of it was, in the daughter-in-law's quiet reckoning, a kind of untidiness, and she set about it the way one sets about any untidiness, with patient and unfailing correction. The oil was the first thing. Oona had always oiled the table with linseed, cut with turpentine, and the wood had drunk as much of it as it cared to and kept the rest in a soft gleam under the lamp. Callum's wife brought home a tin of wax polish from the shop in Carra and used it on the table every Friday, and the surface went from the deep dull shine of oiled wood to a harder, brighter shine, a mirror that caught the light and threw it back. Oona said nothing for three months, watching the table slowly change to her daughter-in-law's idea of what a table should be. Then one Friday she took the tin of polish off the sideboard, set it on the table in the middle of the day, and said, "This table was cut from trees. I'd rather it remember what it was." The words came out harder than she had meant them to, which was how they tended to come out when she had held them for three months. The waxing stopped. But the two women had drawn a line between them, and the line ran down the centre of the table like the seam of the leaves, and for a time they passed the salt across it with a new and particular care, the way you pass things across water. Callum, who sat between them on the long side, felt the current of it and did not know how to say what he felt, being a man who had grown up with only one woman's weather to read. The child came in the fourth year, a girl, and they named her Niamh, a name from Oona's own mother's line. The midwife had been in and gone, and the house had been washed and aired, and Callum's wife lay upstairs in the front bedroom with the baby at her breast and the light going off the yard. Oona went up and stood at the foot of the bed and said, "When the boy was born we cut his mark on the leaf." She said it carefully, arranging the words so that they did not sound like an instruction. "My mother's people marked their children under the rim, so the table would remember the count." Callum's wife said nothing for a long time. Downstairs, Oona could hear Callum moving about the kitchen, and she could picture him at the table, standing at the far side of the closed-eye knot, waiting, as he had waited his whole life, for the two women to settle a thing so that he could live inside the settled shape of it. Then his wife said, "You cut the marks yourself." "I did," Oona said. "For him, and I'll cut hers, if it's wanted." "It's wanted," Callum's wife said, and turned her face to the window, and Oona went down the stairs to the table and chose the place on the underside of the leaf, next to her son's notch, and there she cut a second mark, smaller, for the girl, and put her thumb into the fresh cut and left the small dark print of herself in the wood as she had left it for her son. She did not show the mark to anyone, then or later. It was a count, and counts are kept to yourself until they are needed. The girl grew at the table as her father had grown, and where Callum had been restless she was watchful — she would sit for an hour turning the salt pot over in her hands, studying the grain at the closed-eye knot as though it were a page she had been set to learn. Her mother looked at her and saw, with a private unease, that the child belonged to the table's side of the family, and she tried, in her careful way, to raise the girl for the other side: to set her plate in the centre of her place, to fold her napkin square, to treat the furniture as furniture. And Oona watched the attempt the way she watched the wax polish, saying nothing, leaving the seeds to fall where the soil would take them. The leaving, when it came, was rehearsed twice before it was performed. The first time Callum's wife took the girl to the city for a fortnight and brought her back with city ways, and the table was set as usual and all three of them sat at it and no one said anything; but Oona saw the chair at the long side nudged half an inch out of line, as though it had been moved and would be moved again. The second time she packed the girl's clothes and Callum found them at the bus stop in Carra, and there was a scene in the street that the town heard about in the way towns hear about things, and they came home separately and the tea was made and no one drank it. The third time there was no packing. The memory of the girl's mother exists in the family — that is the phrase that is used — as a door closing, a bed made with the sheet folded back, a chair pulled out from the table and never pulled in again. She left in the spring, in the fifth year of Niamh's life, with a suitcase on the boards of the long table where Callum had watched her set it down, and she said, "The room is yours," which Oona understood to mean all of it, and she went out by the front door, which no one at Gort ever used for leaving, and the taxi waited at the gate and the gate was quiet after it. For three days Callum did not come to the table. He ate standing at the range, and Oona did not press him. The fourth day he came late to the table and sat in his place on the long side, and Oona set his plate there and her own at her end, and the child sat at the closed-eye knot without being asked, her small hands flat on either side of her plate, and held her grandmother's eye across the river of grain. The table held the three of them as it had always held them, in the pattern that was theirs now, and the chairs at the other places stood square and empty, kept, as Oona kept everything, against the day they might fill again.