When All Is Said(14)
‘Ah, Tony, don’t go doing anything now. There’s the jobs to think of—’
‘Feck the jobs, Maurice. No one has the right to do this to you.’
My father’s knock came to the bedroom door. Tony stood away to let him through.
He stepped in and looked at us both. His face drawn and serious.
‘There’ll be enough of that kind of talk,’ he said finally, his eyes firmly on Tony. All the while Tony’s refused to lift from the ground, knowing full well that he could curse and threaten all he liked but nothing would change with the likes of the Dollards. And true to form, I got up the next morning with half my head bandaged and went across the fields as normal.
Months later, I was walking to the back paddock along by the house when I heard Dollard senior’s shouts again. My heart sank, I can tell you. I walked on as quietly and quickly as possible. This time Thomas had his back to the opened window of an upstairs room. His hands were behind him, folded into fists. As I passed right under him, one of his hands opened, releasing something that landed right in front of me.
‘But Father, I didn’t take it. I didn’t!’ I heard him whine.
Without thinking, I reached down and grabbed the shiny thing from among the stones, putting it in my pocket and continuing on my way, smooth as you like. If I’d known back then how that decision of mine ruined the lives inside that house for generations to come, not least Thomas’s, I wonder would I have walked on, stepping over its pull, its power. But all I knew then was revenge. If this small theft, I reasoned, of whatever it was I held in my pocket could inflict even a small moment of the pain Thomas had meted on me with his beatings and his disgust, then it was most definitely my due.
Despite the growing distance, I could still hear the yells and panicked replies of Thomas as something or someone hit the floor. I didn’t look back. When I was safely clear, I ducked in behind a tree. And there, taking it out of my pocket, I saw it for the first time – a gold coin, with the face of a man I didn’t recognise and writing I didn’t even try to understand. Heavy and solid, quite impressive. I turned it over for as long as I dared. Throwing it up and down once or twice, before pocketing it again and smiling to myself.
Five hours later when I walked back the way along the same path, Pat joined me.
‘Would you look at that bleeding eejit,’ he said. We could see Thomas scrambling about under the same window from earlier. ‘He’s lost some coin or other of the father’s. The old man’s going mad, says he’ll disinherit him if he doesn’t give it back. Reckons he robbed it on purpose.’
Thomas caught my eye as we passed. I looked away like I always did despite feeling an unfamiliar power. When out of sight, I smiled to myself as I caressed the metal lying snug and happy in my pocket with my thumb.
Oh, they looked under every bush and plant and in every pocket and bag, alright. That evening we were all lined up before we left for the day. But I was no fool. I’d it hidden in the nook of a tree that lay near our boundary wall. Even still, I was terrified when Berk approached me in the queue. He stood staring at my scar. My confession bubbled up behind my lips as his hands delved in my pockets and ran over my body. I held firm though, never gave away a thing. Disappointed, he passed on to Mickie Dwyer.
The next day mother and most of the kitchen staff were ordered to strip Thomas’s room and the room in which the argument had happened; the labourers were ordered to search the yard below. The world stopped while we hunted on hands and knees over stones and clay and dirt and grass for something they would never find. Thomas ran between both groups.
‘Have you not found it yet?’ he moaned, standing above me, close to tears, pulling at his hair.
‘What did it look like, sir?’ I sat back on my hunkers and looked up at him.
‘Gold, you dimwit, gold. Berk, what kind of imbeciles do you have working for you?’
He charged after the farm manager like he expected an answer to his question. I found a thruppence and ran up to him.
‘Sir. Sir. I found it,’ I said, with not one shred of guilt about me.
The relief on his face was something to behold. But it was the misery that returned, as he looked at my copper offering, that was worth the wallop across the head from Berk. He ran from me, from Berk, off into the house.
Although we were questioned continuously over the coming days – the labourers by Berk and the housemaids by Dollard senior himself – it seemed without conviction. Everyone knew Dollard believed Thomas guilty. He’d washed his hands of him it seems. Sent him away within days and true to his word, disinherited him. At the time it struck me as odd that it was never reported to the police. As it turned out, they couldn’t have, given how Dollard had come by it. But I wasn’t to know that back then.
For weeks following, I was petrified they’d arrive at our door and ransack the place. But Tony had taken care of it for me, as he’d taken care of so many of my worries before. Assured me, they’d never find it under his pillow:
‘Sure, who’ll come near me when they find out I’ve got TB?’
Tony’d got consumption earlier that year. I hadn’t a clue that cough of his was anything other than the usual hallmarks of winter: chills and runny noses and sore throats waylaying us like they always did. It went on for weeks, though. Not shifting, not stirring. Barked through the day and into the night. Sometimes it woke me but mostly he suffered on his own as I turned to the wall and dreamed my dreams. I was always a good sleeper back then. Dead to the world, oblivious to all about me until my body decided it was time to wake. I wonder now if I’d been a lighter sleeper, might I have caught Sadie, two years ago just before her last breath was taken, and pulled her back to me.