Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien

his buttering his bread on both sides when her back was turned, his having not one, but two boiled eggs for his breakfast.
    I got in from school and saw my mother sitting at the kitchentable crying. She rarely sat, and for the most part fought tears back stoically. But there she was, wringing her hands and pointing to the downstairs room where he slept and where he was presumably packing. She could not understand why it was taking him so long. We listened at the door, and now and then she knocked, but there was no answer. We went back to the kitchen, asking each other, by our woebegone expressions, how in God’s name we were going to manage without him, as we waited for him to appear with a brown suitcase and extra things, perhaps, in a flour bag. She was already asking who would milk (my father never milked), and she herself had not done so since she was a young girl on a mountain farm forty years ago. Hazards untold befell us. She suddenly remembered that she had put some bread to bake in a pot oven, in the boil house up in the yard, and she ran to retrieve it.
    I took the irrevocable step. Without knocking, I barged into his room. It was one of the few times that I saw him look vexed, and his first instinct was to raise his arms and his hands to ward me off. He knew why I had come. His things were on the bed: his good navy suit, two pairs of overalls, shirts, brown hobnailed boots with the dung dried on them, and junk—bicycle parts, copper piping, wet batteries and dry batteries, and other paraphernalia—which he had intended to sell to a scrap merchant in Limerick.
    The little window was wide open, but the smell in the room was still fusty. I do not recall any words spoken. What I did was to kneel down and grasp him by his ankles, imploring him not to leave. He stood there like a statue, never once trying to break free. I clung to him, tighter and tighter, until the moment he rolled down his sleeves and looked at me with what I can only call utter defeat.
    My mother was exultant and cooked him the chop that wasmeant for my father’s tea. We ate in silence, my mother and I at one end of the table, having bread and jam, and Carnero tucking into the chop, which had a plump red kidney attached to it. The tension was unbearable. I knew that I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

Summer Holiday
    I go into the kitchen in my grandmother’s house and I walk around it, unsure. It was dark even in daytime. There was a very low window that admitted little light, a remainder from times past, when fewer windows meant less rent to the English landlords, except that I did not know that then, aged eight or nine.
    I used to walk around that kitchen to get to know it and not feel so lonely in it. Away from the hearth and the open fire, on which pots and a kettle hung on the iron swing gate, there was a table, never completely laid or unlaid, saucers put to dry on the upside-down cups for the next round of tea. There was muslin over the milk jug to keep off flies and gnats, and the country butter was overyellow, its strong smell whiffing out from under the glass dome with which it was covered.
    Next to a wall was a settle bed that was a trunk when closed, where a workman had slept in past times and would have had to wait until all the others had gone upstairs to bed. Men sat on it at my grandfather’s wake, smoking clay pipes as they passed a whiskey bottle around, talking in low tones. Death was upstairs. My grandfather’s white face seemed all the whiter because the starched white sheet was drawn up to his chin, and the gray-white mustache looked unnatural on a dead face. The raised veins on the back of his hands were an alphabet that branched together, and there were scabs and brown moles on the crinkles of the skin. Someone had threaded a rosary between the lifeless fingers. Two tall candles were burning on a low table that was covered with a white linen cloth, and the