The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Read Online Free

any sister who tried to make a pious peace or mend a rupture between her siblings.
    ‘Let them be or be having you,’ she told us, even after Enda left a dead crow, quickening with maggots, under Berenice’s pillow.
    ‘It’s a relief to them to beat on one another,’ she assured me, when Berenice retaliated by trying to stuff the crow’s beak into Enda’s mouth, shouting, ‘Did you ate your enough of poultry yet?’
    Not satisfied with Enda’s bleeding lip and the great blackness of feathers she was spitting from her mouth, Berenice marched up to Father Maglinn and informed him that her twin had perished of her throat in the night and required a pit dug for her grave.
    The passions of the twins toppled their siblings into two camps. You were either for one or the other. Plump Pertilly and feverish little Ida followed vivacious Berenice; blonde Oona and I were with Enda, who had a natural elegance about her. Enda was tender and sweet, brushing her favourites’ hair and saving us morsels from her plate.
    So Oona was guilty of leading Ida into the estate woods and leaving her there with a promise of a visit from a leprechaun. Berenice found her only when the moon was high and Ida’s imagination had confected a wolf crouching in the bushes. The beast was so real to her that Berenice had to beat the bush with a stick before Ida would consent to come home. The next morning Ida herself hid by the woodpile, reaching out a sly hand to trip up Oona, leaving the pretty ankles on her flailing in the air. Then there was Oona stuffing straw under the blanket where it lay atop Pertilly so the Dunlavin banshee or the horned Witch of Slievenamon, when those ladies called on our cottage in the dead of night, would see the grand mound, think it a fine fat girl, and devour Pertilly first. Nor was I innocent. I earned Ida’s little fists windmilling at my hip after she saw a piece of mischief I wrote about her on the barn wall.
    The only one not aligned was Darcy, who feared no one but relied on everyone to be afraid of her. She did not scruple to give any man, woman or rabid dog the length and breadth of her tongue at any time at all, and the flat of her hard hand might win prizes for its warlike prowess too.
    ‘It is ashamed you should be of yourselves,’ were the words that most frequently issued from between Annora’s gapped teeth as she gave us a clatter on the rump or shoulder or whichever fleeting bit of us she could catch. Ashamed? We rarely were that. My sisters’ tempers and their fears were generally too much aroused to allow for any quiet contemplation of our faults. Seven is too many for that: even if one of us had a moment’s pause, she’d soon be distracted by Ida’s war cries or a foaming fury of Berenice’s.
    But there was also the Devil’s match in plain love. When I sat on Enda’s warm lap, even when I was far too big for it, with Oona’s gentle fingers braiding my hair, I felt safe from all the world, except for Darcy and, until the troll came to meet me on the bridge, God.
     
    Annora raised us in the True Faith, the true faith of poverty and Irishness and oppression, not to mention illiteracy. Annora herself, like fully one quarter of the Catholics in Harristown, could not read. But she could still enforce the Lord’s word like a soldier and insist that we spoke ‘educated, like the ladies your father intended’. She faithfully beat us for our many sins, including the dipping of our fingers in the broken jar where she kept her donations for the poor Pope in Rome and the uttering of tongue-lovely but forbidden words like ‘bejappers’. Or for mocking imitations of her voice when she wandered the garden calling and keening for the latest goosely incarnation of Phiala.
    Our mother kept us clean, laundering our skin and hair in thin suds left over from the washing she took in. In the summer she brightened the grey water with the squeezed haws of the wild dog-roses. She eased our knots and molested the