Chapters (15)
A small crowd, composed mainly of tinker children, stood in a perishing wind while the courage of Cornelius Dowley was recalled. Brother Meagher was there, and the men who had been Cornelius Dowley’s companions eleven years ago at Lahane crossroads. Attention was drawn to the carved inscription, in both Irish and English, that gave the dates of birth and death, and praised a hero’s gallantry. The bridge was blessed, as Holy Mullihan had said it would be. The engineer and the surveyor who had worked together on the project were present, though more to satisfy themselves with a final inspection than to take part in the modest ceremony. The workmen who had set the girders in concrete beneath the surface of the water, who had laid the bridge’s surface down and built the pillars at either end, were clearing out ditches by a road to the west of the town.
Tom ran back across the bridge when everyone had gone. He’d seen Brother Meagher looking at him, the straight line of his eyebrows bisecting his face below the forehead. Brother Meagher considered he should not be there: Tom even thought he had observed an involuntary gesture of the Christian Brother’s hand, the hand flicked dismissively backwards as a signal that he should go away, and then the gesture checked. ‘When you come to the Brothers’,’ Holy Mullihan had predicted, ‘Brother Meagher will be keeping an eye on you. It would be his duty, Tom.’
Soon it would be Christmas. Always on Christmas Day Tom went up to the house and had his dinner in the kitchen. In the middle of it Mrs Rolleston came down with presents for his mother and himself and for anyone else in the kitchen. There were sprigs of holly on the dresser, and plum pudding that his mother made. It was dark when they went down the avenue to the gate-lodge.
But this year it would be different. His mother had said it would because Mrs Rolleston no longer came downstairs. Tom didn’t think he’d see her again, but he often thought of her, in her armchair by the window in her room. She wouldn’t bother with the postal orders any more, he imagined.
In the gate-lodge Tom sat close to the range, warming his hands on the hot metal. It was too cold to go to the saint’s place; they didn’t want him today in the kitchen or the sculleries.
‘Tom!’ Patty’s voice called, and then she pushed open the door from the yard, in her hand the Irish Times she’d been sent down to the pier to collect. ‘How’re you doing, Tom?’
She sat with him, warming herself too. After St Stephen’s Day the ferryboat wouldn’t make the journey any more, the ferryman had told her. It was the only news she had, so they talked about that.