excerpt
a while, but we don’t get along all that well. She’s a straitlaced Puritan like many here in the village. And I hate Belfast, don’t you? There’s a brother and his wife in Liverpool, but I’m never going to England. I have a good friend in Derry. You know her. Molly McEvoy. Her husband was killed last year. She has often said that she and I should live together.”
“Derry’s not much improvement on Belfast,” Finn pointed out.
“No,” said Mother Ross, “but it might have to do. I don’t have a great deal of choice.”
“Come home with me, Jinnie,” Finn said impulsively. “I need someone to look after the twins. They’re nearly six years old now, and Una Slattery’s finding them too much of a handful with four children of her own. Caitlin’s a self-willed little imp who needs some of the wildness spanked out of her. Hard to believe they’re sisters, let alone twins. My house is comfortable, and there’s plenty of room. Come on. I’ll take you up there right away. I’ve the pony and trap on the road beyond.”
That was twenty years ago—twenty-one come June—and Mother Ross had lived in Finn MacLir’s house ever since. Six months after moving in as the keeper of his house and the childminder of his two young daughters, six months of slander-scandaled tongue-wagging in the village of Corrymore, Mother Ross became the second wife of Finn MacLir. Arthur Hamilton, as justice of the peace, married them in the dining room of the large, stone house. A party began on that first Friday in December, 1898, that people still talked about two decades later. And the first Friday of every month since then, whenever he was home, Finn and his friends met to celebrate yet again the night he married the widow, Sinead O’Neill, otherwise known as Mother Ross. Though she was Mrs Finn MacLir by law, she was, and remained, Mother Ross by custom. Even Caitlin never stopped calling her by the only name she had ever known her by.
“My mother was Annie Hogan before she married Jimmy Ross,” Mother Ross once related to Caitlin. “She was the midwife here in Corrymore for many years. I was the youngest of her seven children and I used to help her at the birthing. I was with her that terrible night when you and Nora were born, Caitlin. When the arthritis crippled my mother’s fingers, I took her place. I never had any children of my own.” A sad, faraway look had come into her eyes. “I was pregnant when my husband was drowned at sea, and I lost the baby in a miscarriage. I survived on my own after Jimmy’s death using midwifery skills learned at my mother’s side. I not only took
over her job, I was given her name at the same time. Mother Ross. It has stuck to me ever since.”
Manolis Aligizakis 