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

lice with a series of wooden combs she whittled herself by the fire of an evening – no luxury of horn, gutta-percha or rubber for the young Swiney sisters.
    The creamy elegance of the Church of Ireland’s spire at Carnalway was not for us either. The ruined old chapel at Harristown’s Catholic graveyard served as our place of worship, and a wretched walk it was too, with the rain beating on our heads most Sundays and the slow crows making pessimistic comments all the way, and the coldness reaching up out of the earth to clutch at our legs. The fat estate sheep lifted their docked tails as we passed, reserving their most derisive choruses for us.
    ‘Bah!’ they sneered at every passing Swiney. ‘Bah!’
    We kept our heads down as we walked on toes that never saw a shoe except on Sundays. And when those shoes died, they were given ragged dresses and seed eyes, and served as faithful dollies. Their glory was of course their hair, for each of us placed our nightly combings in a crude wooden crib that Annora grandly called a ‘hair-receiver’, until there was enough to wig a dolly in our own real curls. Our mother insisted that the hairs of our heads were all numbered by the Almighty, who would expect us to account for every one on the Day of Judgement. None must ever be thrown away. In the meantime she permitted us to lend them to our dollies.
    One day we would do better than our shoe darlings – grander and better – but at that time we loved our rough honeys and danced them through balls attended by swarthy foreign dukes confected from boots and briar. I regret to mention that, when not romancing dukes, the shoe dollies also fought a sight of Swiney wars: in our doll family there were no amicable feminine tea parties but rather regular slayings and grisly beatings. There were at least two full scalpings and my darling Enda’s baby – always dressed the most fashionably of all our dolls – suffered her wooden head cracked in two by her twin’s.
    For all our internecine strife, we Swineys were clannish and secretive. We did not like to be looked at. We were chary of strangers, hiding our drabness in the tall weeds if one set foot on the sparse Swiney soil.
    Only one personage regularly encroached upon the land of Swiney: the Eileen O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt, who continued year on year a sworn enemy to Darcy and yet was unable to tear herself away from Swineys all the same.
    It was as if she were an eighth, ghostly sister, living on the margins of our scrap of land. Though she’d never taken herself a step inside our deal door – for fear of Darcy’s fists – I often found her lingering outside it, with a finger and ‘shhh’ upon her pale lips. I would nod and keep her secret. No matter how Darcy threatened her, or beat her, the butcher’s runt would return. Her light reddish hair gave her away when she hid in the long grass; so did the single eye, blue as a cornflower, she pressed to the window, watching us, even late at night. No one missed her at home: her father drank and her mother ran to sloe gin too.
    So the Eileen O’Reilly was free to spend all her time a-haunting Swineys.

Chapter 3
    I cannot remember a time when there was not war between the butcher’s runt and Darcy. Enda always said they were born bellicose, being the same age within a week and a day. The legend was that there was a constitutional inability in each one of them to stand the sight of the other, and this from the first time they were laid side by side on the counter at the dispensary at Kilcullen where mothers took their babies to be weighed. In a minute both babies were in a mortal tangle on the floor, and the only reason they were not gnashing and biting was because they didn’t have the teeth for it.
    They were only eight in the summer of ’54, when the Eileen O’Reilly dared Darcy to meet her at midnight in Byrne’s Hollow at Cowpasture, where ghosts were known to cluster after dark. When Darcy did not appear, the