Metodología lúdica

In every house in the country long ago the people of the house would wash their feet, the same as they do now, and when you had your feet washed you should always throw out the water, because dirty water should never be kept inside the house during the night. The old people always said that a bad thing might come into the house if the feet water was kept inside and not thrown out, and they always said, too, that when you were throwing the water out you should say 'Seachain!' for fear that any poor soul or spirit might be in the way. But that is neither here nor there, and I must be getting on with my story . . .

Shortly after the priest died, a woman moved into his house on the Hill of Dunagore. She was a bold spear of a woman who clearly wasn't used to living on the coast: not five minutes after she'd hung the wash out on the line, her clothes were blown halfway up the bog. Margaret Flusk had neither hat nor rubber boots nor a man. Her brown hair was long, flowing in loose strands like seaweed down her back. She wore a big sheepskin coat that fitted her to perfection and when she looked out at the mortal world it was with the severity of a woman who has endured much and survived. When she moved to Dunagore she was not yet forty but it was past the time when she could bear a child. That power had left her years ago and always she blamed it on that night of the quicken trees.

The priest's house stood on the highest point of the hill beside the mast whose evening shadow fell into her rooms. It was joined to another cottage of equal size and they both looked down like two still hares across the Cliffs of Moher. It was autumn when she came. The swallows were long gone and any blackberry still clinging to its briar had begun to rot. The house smelled of the priest. Margaret dragged anything she didn't want down to the bottom of the haggard and set fire to it. Being supersti­ tious, she kept his clothes. If she gave his clothes away he'd not have to go naked in the next world. She painted all the walls and ceilings with a bucket of white emulsion, disinfected the floors, the doorstep and rubbed the win-

dow panes until they squealed under the cloth, for, although she did not come from Clare, she knew nothing good ever happens in a dirty house.

When she got the chimney swept she tore across the fields towards a farmhouse where smoke was rising. Soon after, she was running back with a shovel full of embers, her long legs stretching uneasily over the bog. After that, smoke was always rising. Neither was she gone nor did she sleep long enough to let fire die. In fact, she liked get­ ting up while the stars were still in the sky. It gave her sat­ isfaction to see a star falling. If she believed in the forces of nature she was yet determined to avoid bad luck. She'd had her share of bad luck so now she never threw out ashes of a Monday or passed a labourer without blessing his work. She shook salt on the hearth, hung a Saint Bridget's cross on the bedroom wall and kept track of changes in the moon.

When she got the house clean, she drove down the hill and around the coast to Ennistyrnon. These roads were narrow and steep. She could hear bog water rushing through the ditches. Beyond stone walls, bony cattle and small flocks of long-woolled sheep grazed the sod. Ponies stood with their backsides to the wind as though the wind would fertilise them. Every creature seemed capable or on the verge of flight.

Once, when Margaret was a child, her mother had gone on a pilgrimage to Knock and carne back with a stick of rock and an umbrella. Margaret waited for a windy day, opened the umbrella and jumped off the boiler-house wall, believing she would fly, and landed with a broken ankle on the car-road. If only, in her adult life, her unfounded beliefs could be so abruptly disproved. To be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness.

Down in the village a crazy, white-haired man was standing on the bridge, directing traffic:

'Quick! Quick! Winter is round the comer!'

She bought flour and sugar, oatmeal, buttermilk and tea, peas and beans, spuds and salt fish, brought it home and baked a loaf. When it got dark at five o'clock, she went out­ side and lifted her skirt and squatted in the grass. She wanted to pass water on every blade of grass around her house, she could not say why. The grass was long and sour up there. Dunagore was a strange place without so much

as a tree, not a withered leaf to be seen in autumn, just the

shivering bogland and all the gulls wheeling around, screeching under restless clouds. The landscape looked metal, all sturdy and everlasting but to Margaret, coming from a place of oak and ash, it was without substance.

There would be no shade in summer, no fields of barley

turning yellow in the month of August. The skies in the east would now be obscured by falling leaves, their heifers would be in the bam, dairy cows chained to the stalls.

The next morning when Margaret went out to empty the ash bucket, the wind blew it back into her eyes, blinding her. When she came inside she decided she would stay in that house for as long as she could without harming any­ body or letting anybody harm her. If either one of these things happened, she would move on. She would keep her course, get in a boat and cross over to the Aran Islands, go as far west as she could without leaving Ireland. But until then she would do her best to keep people at arm's length for people were nothing but a nuisance.

Not every man can sharpen a scythe or cut turf. Stack, the forty-nine-year-old bachelor who lived next door, had a bald head and seeds of grey in his eyes. He'd lived and worked the land with his father all his life until his father

died. He was thirty-eight when his father passed away and now he was left with all the bogs and an income from the turf. He did not live alone but with Josephine, the sleek

brown goat who had the nm of the house. By day she

stared into the fire and at night she took up more than half of the bed. Stack milked her every day, rubbed Palmolive on her teats and always remembered to bring her fig rolls from the town. He had courted a small farmer's daughter outside Lehinch for twelve years, bought her six hundred and twenty-four Sunday dinners but she wouldn't even let him touch the hem of her skirt or push the hair back out of her eyes so he could see her properly. Once she got a bit dnmk and he placed his hand on her bare knee as they sat in the car outside her back door but that was all. In the end, she went off and married a man who sold stone and Stack

found Josephine through an advertisement in the

Farmer's

Journal.

Stack couldn't bear to part with anything. The spare room was packed to the ceiling with his father's fishing rods, his mother's sewing machine, weed killers, jam jars, the old solid-fuel cooker. He kept all the clothes he'd ever worn, from his matinee coats to the trousers he'd recently grown out of, and kept the door closed because Josephine liked to go in there and eat his mother's slippers.

Stack did not like to think he would ever become like the new generation. Young people couldn't catch a fish or skim cream off milk. They went around in cars they couldn't afford, with small children who'd never tasted their moth­ er's milk, committing adultery at the drop of a hat. In fact, hats didn't drop fast enough for them. They drank beer straight from the bottle, came back from America and Prague looking for pizzas, and couldn't tell a golden won­ der from a Victoria plum. And now a woman was living

next door, setting fire to the priest's good furniture, walk­