Anne Bennett - Pack Up Your Troubles

Maeve stared at him open-mouthed. That wasn’t how it was, but it was what the priest believed and from what he said, Father Trelawney did too. Whatever she said now, they wouldn’t believe her.

Father O’Brien went on, ‘And you must understand, I have no desire to punish your children, either of them, but the consequences of your actions will have to have far-reaching effects on your family – all of your family.’

It was uttered like a threat and Maeve shivered. She was filled with loathing for the plump self-satisfied priest with eyes full of condemnation and the pinched-in nostrils and hard cruel mouth. She wanted to put her hands over her head and scream in frustration, and her voice indeed rose in a scream as she cried out, ‘You sadistic bastard, you’re bloody well enjoying all this.’

The door of the church swung closed with a dull thud and the two combatants turned. Cissie O’Brien was the priest’s sister. She looked after his house for him and had come to tell him his dinner was nearly ready. She glared at Maeve malevolently and Maeve knew she thought her circumstances of arriving at her mother’s house with two children and no husband was very suspicious. Maeve had played into her hands for she knew she’d have heard clearly the abuse and swearwords she’d hurled at the priest even before she’d opened the door because Maeve’s voice had bordered on hysterical.

Maeve looked at the older woman’s eyes glittering with malicious dislike and knew she’d blown it. The rumours about them all had begun when she started the children at school and now she knew what she screamed at the priest would be all over the neighbourhood in twenty-four hours. Everyone would know that she hadn’t brought the children for a wee holiday because they’d been ill at all, but that she’d actually left her husband. Cissie O’Brien would say her brother, the priest, had taken her to task about it, which after all was his job, and what a reaction he got. Maeve knew Cissie O’Brien would let people know what type of woman Maeve Hogan was and would take pleasure in doing it.

SEVEN

The following day, Kevin came home from school in tears. He’d held them in all day at school and most of the way home, but when he turned in the lane home, he broke down.

‘Miss Kerrigan says I’m not to go into instruction for Holy Communion any more,’ he explained between sobs to his mother. ‘She says maybe I’ll take it next year instead, but Declan and Martin are my age and taking it in July. Now everyone laughs at me in the playground and says I’m dumb and don’t know my catechism, but I do.’

Maeve held her small angry son and could find no words to comfort him. At Mass the following Sunday, the Brannigans were all snubbed by friends and neighbours they’d known for years. Added to that, the brothers at Colin’s school had made a few snide remarks about his family, and the lads had jeered at him a bit, and Nuala claimed she was almost ignored in the school yard.

Rosemarie said the bakery was busier than ever, but people didn’t buy much, they just wanted to stand in groups and talk loudly, so that she would hear, about the Brannigan family they said had always thought themselves better than anyone else. Her future mother-in-law, a cow of the first order anyway, had expressed doubts about her Greg getting mixed up with such a family after the eldest of them had just upped and left her husband in that shocking way, and had Greg heard what she’d said to the priest?

Maeve felt sick. She had brought all this on her family.

‘Never mind, child,’ Thomas told his daughter. ‘They’re ignorant. It’ll blow over.’

But for Kevin and Grace, it didn’t blow over. Grace said nothing about the girls who’d once been her friends, who now refused to play with her and who stood with others in clusters and taunted her, but she became quieter than ever.

Kevin, on the other hand, could not hide his skirmishes – like the time he came home with his knuckles skinned and a split lip, nor the time he had a bloody nose and a torn shirt, nor the marks of the cane across his hand.

‘What did you get the cane for?’ Maeve asked him.

‘Fighting.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she cried. ‘All this fighting. You never used to fight.’

Kevin looked at the floor and said nothing.

‘Well? What did you fight about?’

Kevin shrugged and Maeve had the urge to shake him till his teeth rattled. ‘Kevin?’ she said threateningly.

‘It’s because they say he hasn’t got a daddy,’ Grace said.

The look Kevin threw her was one of hate. ‘Big mouth Grace,’ he said.

‘That will do,’ Maeve said automatically. ‘What do you mean, you haven’t got a daddy?’

‘That’s what they said,’ Kevin sighed, because now Grace had told their mother what it was all about there was no point in not explaining it all. ‘They said if we had a daddy, he’d be here, someone would have seen him and no one has. That’s why I fought. Then today they started again in the playground. I punched one boy in the face and told them we didn’t want our daddy to live with us because he’s a miserable old bugger, that’s why I got the cane.’

Maeve glanced across the room to see her father and Colin trying to hide their smiles behind their hands, but Maeve didn’t feel like laughing. She’d been living nine weeks at her parents’ farm and had missed her third period, the morning sickness had almost stopped and although physically she felt well, mentally she was a wreck.

And how should she deal with it? Eventually she said crisply, ‘Of course you have a daddy – everyone has a daddy somewhere and daddies don’t have to live with their wives and children.’

‘Ours won’t, will he?’ Grace asked fearfully.

‘No,’ Maeve said firmly. ‘But that isn’t the point. He still is and always will be your father, whether he lives with us or not. And, as for you, Kevin,’ she added, turning back to her son, ‘there’s to be no more fighting about it and no bad language, or you’ll feel my hand across your bottom.’

‘Ach, he’ll hear worse before he’s much older,’ Thomas told his daughter.

‘Not from me, he won’t,’ Maeve said. But she knew the swearwords her small son unwittingly used were not the biggest issue here.

‘Come away in, anyway,’ Annie said. ‘Let’s not quarrel among ourselves.’

Maeve sighed. ‘Aye.’ Her mother was right. They had enough trouble with people outside of the family; they shouldn’t fight each other.

‘Don’t worry so much, pet,’ Thomas told his daughter. ‘It’ll just be a nine-days’ wonder, you’ll see.’

Maeve knew he was trying to cheer her up and didn’t believe that any more than he did, but she gave him a watery smile anyway. ‘I really hope so, Daddy. Oh, I really hope so.’

But the situation didn’t ease. Other family members, although supportive, didn’t understand what it was like. Tom, for example, was living far enough away from the family to belong to another parish entirely. He came to see Maeve and though he told her forcibly no woman should be forced to stay with a man who beat his wife and child and drank his wages, he couldn’t help her at all.

Liam and Kate, away in Dublin, had almost forgotten what life was like in the small towns and villages in the north of Ireland, but in their letters to Maeve they urged her to stick to her guns after Annie wrote telling them all about it. And Maeve was glad of their support, for the only positive letters she got apart from theirs were from Elsie, who told her of the goings-on of the street. She also assured Maeve that while the tale of her taking off with the children was on everyone’s lips for a while, in a street where one person’s business is known to all, there were always new bits of gossip to chew over.