Her talk does not come back. Her father and Evelyn bring her down to Dr O’Beirne and he sits her up on a high table and asks her questions. But she cannot answer them. One day Denis sits beside her on the low wall. ‘You’ll be all right – any day now you’ll be as right as rain,’ he says. ‘I bet you by Christmas when Santy comes you’ll be talkin’ away to him.’ She says her prayers, like Claire and Mike Connolly tell her to do, but her talk does not come back, not even for Christmas. At school, Mrs Snee brings her up to her desk and tries, in a kind way, to trick her into talking. On one of her visits Miss Tannian takes her aside, tells her to take deep breaths and say her own name. Tess, she keeps saying, Tess, as if Tess does not know her own name. Sometimes people get cross with her. She gives up trying to answer them. She looks into all their faces and their eyes and then they give up too. Little by little she gets used to it. She does not miss talking at all. She does everything they ask – all her chores – and they all get used to her silence.
One day when Evelyn and Denis are gone to town her father wants help with the sheep. Tess is told to stand in a gap leading into the yard. Claire is standing at the avenue and Maeve is at the orchard gate which has fallen off its hinges. Her father and Mike Connolly go off into the fields to round up the flock. They are gone a long time. Tess hates when there are big jobs like this going on – when the cattle are being dosed, or the sheep are being dipped or shorn. She lies awake at night thinking of all the things that can go wrong, all the dangers.
Then the sheep appear, running, bleating, Captain nipping at their heels, and behind, her father and Mike Connolly. She moves a little to the right, then to the left, trying to spread herself across the gap. She feels the ground shaking from the pounding of their hooves. The smell of them, their greasy wool, reminds her of mutton. Her father shouts, Keep back a bit. Mike Connolly is talking to Captain all the time, making little whistling sounds that Captain understands. And then something small and dark – a cat or a rat or a bird – darts across the track and startles Tess and she jumps and one of the sheep sees what Tess has seen and turns and breaks away and rushes towards the gap, towards Tess. The others break and follow and in an instant the whole flock is coming at her, diving past her, right and left, into the open field beyond. Her father and Mike Connolly and Claire are waving their arms, shouting at her. She stands, trapped, as the sheep shoot by, brushing off her arms, leaping past her head, their hooves like thunder so that she has to crouch down and cover her head to save herself.
They are all shouting at her. The sheep are spreading out in the field behind her, Captain after them. They will go on and on through all the gaps into the far fields. Her father is coming, running, his face red. ‘Get into the house, you!’ he roars. ‘Get in, get in out of my sight!’ He has his hand raised and she thinks he will lash out and wallop her as he passes. But he runs on in his wellingtons. And then Mike Connolly comes through the gap, older, slower. Their eyes meet for a second. She longs for him to nod or say something but he looks away and keeps on going.
She walks around to the far side of the house where the sun never shines and no one ever goes. There’s an old rag hanging on the barbed-wire fence. A bird is singing in a tree. She leans over the fence and vomits, her hair falling into the flow. She reaches out for the rag to wipe her mouth. It is her mother’s old blouse, faded and tattered, hung out to dry a long time ago, and forgotten.
For a long time she cannot look at her father. She tries to stay out of his path. He has a way of looking at her, a long mean look, as if he is about to say something terrible that will shame her. He keeps his eyes on her when she moves around the kitchen. With each step she is afraid the ground will open and pull her in. She can hardly breathe. I have no mother, she thinks, I have no father. When he is going to a fair or a funeral she brings him his good coat and hat. Once, he said, ‘Good girl’, but he never says her name. Mike Connolly says her name. She has grown shy with Mike, and ashamed, since that day with the sheep. Claire is the nicest, always. She says there’s a doctor in Dublin who can help her to talk again but Tess shakes her head. Some nights when the moon shines in her window and shadows cross the wall she jumps out of bed and tiptoes across the landing into Claire’s and Evelyn’s room. Claire puts a finger to her lips and lifts the blankets and lets Tess in beside her. They make chaireens and Tess sleeps all night like that, against Claire’s lap, inside Claire’s arms.
There are nights when she is afraid to sleep. She lies in her bed, remembering. Captain starts to cry below her window. She gets up and creeps down the stairs and opens the front door. The moonlight is on the steps. She does not say a word, just looks at Captain and he walks in and follows her up the stairs, into her room. He jumps on the bed and curls up against her. He understands something about her, maybe everything, and her heart begins to open. In the darkness, in the perfect silence, she hears the smallest sounds – Maeve’s breath from across the room, the flapping of an insect’s wings high up in the corner, the tap dripping far off in the bathroom and in her mind she sees each drop falling through the air into the white sink, landing and sliding down inside. They are all asleep in their rooms, their eyelids flickering as they dream, and the rooms are silent and sleeping too, and downstairs the coals in the fire are almost gone out but still glow a little in the dark, and a thin line of smoke disappears up the chimney, curling into little puffs along the way. And the table and chairs all stand there, and the dresser, watching, waiting – in her mind she can see them all. And outside the hens and ducks locked up for the night, and the birds asleep in the trees and the cows in the cow-house and everywhere, all over the farm, worms and insects and small animals are curled up under stones and hedges and bushes. She can see them all. She imagines herself small, so small that she can see everything, hear everything, hear the blades of grass whispering, the pebbles laughing in the dark. She strokes Captain and he sighs. She can feel the beat of his heart against her. She is amazed at how happy she is. In her bed, in this house. With the lawn and the barns and the fields around her. There is nowhere else she wants to be. In her most secret heart she knows there is nowhere she loves more.
When morning breaks she walks outside and crosses the courtyard. It is Saturday and no one is up yet. The sky is blue and the sun has reached the orchard wall. The coach-house door is open and inside someone is moving in the shadowy darkness. She looks in and sees Mike Connolly reaching to hang the horse collar up on a hook. When he turns and sees her he gets a little fright. Then his eyes soften, but he says nothing. A time will come when no one will talk to her at all, or even look at her. She is a disappearing girl.
In the darkness her eye is caught by something bright and shiny on the floor, a coin maybe. She steps inside and as she runs towards it she hits off the corner of the work bench. She cries out. Ow. She holds her side and rubs her hip and, when she looks at Mike, the tears come.
‘Aw, now, come here to me, a stór.’ He kneels beside her. He puts an arm around her and makes a pitying sound with his tongue. ‘Where’s it sore?’ he asks.
She mumbles through the tears, and keeps rubbing her side. He gets up and goes to where his old coat hangs from a nail and comes back with two toffees. ‘Now,’ he says. ‘Here. Eat this and you’ll be better in no time. Sure, you’ll be better before you get married!’ He takes the paper off and her mouth starts to water. As soon as she tastes the toffee she smiles.
‘Now! What did I tell you, what did I tell you! Of course, now you’ll have to marry me!’
It was a game he used to play with herself and Maeve when they were small. Whenever they fell or cut themselves or got upset he’d say, ‘You’ll be better before you get married.’ She would wipe away the tears and say, ‘I’m going to marry you when I grow up, Mike.’
‘I’m going to marry you when I grow up, Mike.’
It is the look on his face that tells her he has heard her. She has heard herself too. The sound has come out of her mouth, the words are working. They look at each other. He bites his bottom