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The old woman knew that Caitlin and Michael had started sleeping together again sometime after the night that Caitlin had not come home, and Padraig had been beaten up in the church. Even if Caitlin had not told Mother Ross the full story of that night, the old woman would have known without any doubt everything that had happened.
Poor Caitlin. There’ll be fingers counting soon and they won’t make it to nine. Respectability holds us all to ransom. And we have to pay something in the end. The dearer we regard respectability, the higher we have to pay. I got off lightly, I suppose. But I can recognise respectability for the blackguard it is. And yet I too paid a price in the end.
Mother Ross sat down on the iron bed. One of the brass knobs shook, fell off with a thud on the floor and rolled under the bed.
“You can stay there,” she said.
She rubbed the finger of her left hand where her ring used to be. It had been her mother’s wedding ring, then her own, and yesterday she had taken it off and given it to Michael. Today Michael would use it to bond the two lives, the two bodies, the two souls, of Caitlin and himself.
And Caitlin. Sick and straining with the baby already unfurling inside her like a sticky little bud in spring. Wearing her white gown like the thorn tree on the hillside. The white gown she had stitched herself in the evenings by the fireside.
Mother Ross heard Caitlin climb slowly up the stairs and go into her room to prepare herself for the wedding. The motor-car would call in a couple of hours: Liam Devlin’s newest Ford. Michael had been proud to hire it for the afternoon to drive his bride to church. Liam was proud to drive it. Half the village would line the road, not just to admire Caitlin, but to marvel at the new miracle of the machine age: Liam Devlin’s Model T Ford. Soon every man in the village would want one, and Liam’s ambition was to open a garage on the Lisnaglass road to sell new motor cars, the petrol that made them go, and all the spare parts that likely would be needed after miles of bumpy travel on the rough and muddy roads of the country hereabouts.
Caitlin left the door of her room open, and Mother Ross could hear her sobbing. So rarely did Caitlin weep that it moved Mother Ross all the more when she did. Like hearing a man cry. Mother Ross sighed a sigh that pulled her heart up with it into her throat. She swallowed it painfully and wanted to cry herself from the agony she felt.
Manolis Aligizakis 