Beheaded Bluebells

"I know you are there. All eyes. All eyes you are.”

He tried to sit, only to moan in pain, the labour too much as he dropped back onto the pillows, his face flushed and grimacing. Sweat percolated on his brow, threatening to spill over bushy eyebrows, threaded with grey.

“Open the window, let me hear the Slade of Saggart flow. I want to know I am still free.” He rasped from the shadows.

The wallpaper by the doorframe peels beside the miniature font outside, shedding like sunburned skin. Blackened mould and yellowed paste peered from where it had once been affixed. I wrinkled my nose as I poked at it with the pad of my finger, undecided on whether I might enter.

I could not help but eye his prone form through the crack in the door, draped in a thread-bare lemon eiderdown. So diminished was his stature, I no longer thought him a giant, whose large hands once shovelled the earth.

Heaving breaths were the only sound, other than the mahogany mantel clock and the soft crackling of the fire, blinking and glowing low in the grate. A pungent scent of turf permeated the room, a comforting aroma.

Moving inside the sweltering room cautiously, I pushed aside the fragrant palm cross set on the sill and shoved the window. Rusty iron squealed in protest at my small hands. It gave a few inches, and the sound of songbirds burst into the room from a robin’s nest in the dappled sycamore tree outside.

I was afraid to turn.

Holy Jesus floating on the cross above daddy’s head, leered down on me with pained eyes, like he sought to relay to me how my father would soon ascend, and no amount of prayer would permit him to remain.

“Has it come, my little one?” He croaked, his face a sickly yellow.

“No, Daddy, not today.”

I hated to be the one to tell him what he was patiently waiting for had yet to arrive.

His eyes squeezed tightly, and he moaned, tormented and feverish. In his anguish, the coverlet fell from the bed, revealing a bullet-scarred ankle.

“Perhaps it doesn’t matter? Who troubles themselves to…” he trailed off, mumbling more to himself than me.

His eyes glazed over.

“It will come, Daddy. I will wait every morning by the gate.” I promised, with as much zeal as I could muster.

“The bluebells, they taunt a man, swaying back and forth in a tizz. See them? They blur and open their maws and sing to me through the haze, Phyllis,”

He babbled. A gurgling could be heard in his throat as he battled for breath.

I glanced anxiously at the bluebell wallpaper, almost sensing their melody.

Mammy said we would lose everything as she cried with our neighbour, Mrs O’ Callaghan. I was afraid I would be sent to live with the foundlings as Mammy always threatened when I was terrible. I had escaped upstairs, leaving her weeping and wiping her blue eyes with Daddy’s shabby brown hanky.

I took hold of his hand and laid my cheek against his palm. Close up, it was embellished with purple blotches, skin thin and wasted to the bone. Nicotine stains discoloured his fingers, and workworn roughness and callouses remained, a constant reminder of better times.

“Forty children died during those three days, Phyllis, forty,”

He rasped, then began to cough, his chest rattling like it was filled with thick black butter, the old family recipe that Mammy kept in the pantry.

“Daddy!” I cried out when he squeezed my hand so roughly, I thought my tiny bones might shatter.

A clattering came from the wooden stairs, and Mammy burst into the room, yanking my arm and pushing me out.

“Get out, silly girl, leave your father be! Can’t you see he’s not able for you?”

Mother closed the door, and I stood, shamefaced on the landing, holding my aching fist.

I opened my hand like a blooming Iris. My father’s callouses had intended my flesh, marked me. I peered closer, wondering if the stains from his fingers might also have transferred to mine, that perhaps his sickness might too.

I wanted to cry, but stubbornness dominated me as it always did, its demon grip clawing at my chest.

Stomping down to the kitchen, in retaliation, I helped myself to a slice of barmbrack my mother had left to cool on a tray. If my backside were to be tanned, then it might as well be for both crimes. I could not find it in me to care.

As I savagely crushed a stray sultana between my thumb and forefinger, I tried to fathom why Daddy wanted his reward so much. In a fit of pique, I decided to keep it from him when it arrived. He would not rise if he took the reward and worshipped the false idol. If I hid the trinket, then he’d never leave. Like Jesus, he’d return to us, then Mammy wouldn’t cry, and the bluebells wouldn’t make Daddy afraid anymore.

Later, I sat on the stairs listening to the slow crank as Mammy wrung out the laundry.

“No…no, leave me be!” My father yelled out, not in his right mind.

He groaned and murmured to himself, of bluebells and the peninsula, of bolts and bricks, of Ballykinlar.

I do not understand any of it. Daddy’s imploring gives rise to a crescendo of terror vibrating through my bones. My teeth chatter, and I grind them. Holding in a scream, I cover my ears.

Lithe shadows prowl the dusty sill above the stairs as if they have come for him. I watch a pearl of ice slide down the cracked pane.

The click-clack of the clock in Daddy’s room canters away each moment.

“Phyllis Kavanagh! If you’re up there bothering your father, I’ll—”

I ignore my mother’s call, bullheadedly bursting into Daddy’s room to kiss his sallow cheek as he slumbers. The fragrance of flowers permeates the room, and I know bluebells have been singing to Daddy again. I want to shriek at them to be quiet, that they may not have him.

He is silent in his oblivion, his blue-veined eyelids quivering.

The turf hisses viciously, and I trample down the stairs in alarm.

“Yes, Mammy?”

Entering the kitchen's warmth, I note she does not seem bothered by the half-eaten cake nor my earlier encroachment.

“I told you not to bother your father; I know what you were doing; you were staring with those eyes. Phyl, mayn’t he suffer in peace?”

She looked away, and I caught a hint of disgust on her face, a look of which I had become accustomed: sinful Phyllis, contrary Phyllis, selfish and spoiled Phyllis. I had heard them all. Even Mrs O’ Callaghan gave me snide looks while she took tea at my mother's table, eating scones with her greasy, red-rimmed mouth and flicking cigarette ash onto my mother’s yellowing china.

Nevertheless, if I was selfish, it was because I did not want the lord to have him.

*

My Crolly doll, Grainne, lay covered in a ragged blanket in a bed of silverweed in the garden when the post boy arrived. The bluebells mother had planted were decapitated and lay in a pile beside me.

He looked into my eyes and shivered. The gangly boy shoved the parcel into my hands and rushed away, stumbling as he reached his bicycle.

I paid him no heed. It was my prize now, and I hid it beneath Grainne’s blanket, stealthily carrying both into the house.

“Phyllis, was that the post? Your father is asking,” Mother called from above.

“No, Mammy, nothing today,” I replied in a sing-song voice.

She stifled a sob. I heard snivelling and feet creaking the floorboards of the landing.

Once in the safety of the pantry, I tore apart the parcel to find a gleaming gold medal within. Pressing down hard on the words Eire, Cogadh na Saoirse, I tried to brush the text away, but it would not budge. Instead, I muttered the words to myself, war of independence.

An earthenware jar containing Irish salt was beside the dented tin containing a simnel cake. I stow the package beneath. Startled by a rap on the front door, some grains spilt, and I took a pinch, tossing it over my shoulder.

Father Creagh enters, rubbing his hands and calling out for my mother.

“Ah, Philomena,” his kind eyes carefully avoid mine, “your Mammy, is she here?”

“Upstairs,” I gesture with one hand fisted, my fingernails drawing blood in its palm, the other steadfast around Grainne’s arm. She hangs like a ragdoll, her inanimate, beady eyes staring forth, unmoving.

He stares at me for a moment and turns to the stairs, leaving me standing alone in the kitchen.

I sit on the wooden kitchen chair beside the aga, kicking it with my cracked and soiled brown leather shoes, listening to it hiss as a pot my mother left boils over and dissipates.

A cry sounds out, reverberating down the staircase.

I cannot tell how long it has been as I sit in the gloom until the knell of the grandfather clock in the hall chimes midnight.

My eyes burn as the water scorches silver on the blackened stove.

I await daddy’s return.