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

butcher’s runt had it all around the school that Darcy Swiney was a coward whose fierceness stretched only as far as the end of her tongue.
    ‘Not a hair I care,’ said Darcy, but she lay in wait after school and rolled the runt down the mossy bank into the Liffey.
    The next day the Eileen O’Reilly crept up behind Darcy at school and hoisted the back of her skirt. Before Darcy could turn round, the butcher’s runt had pinned a note to her drawers. It said: A Penny a Look at the Forked Tail Under Here .
    Then Darcy nailed a lurid paper to a tree outside the school. It proclaimed that the runt’s butcher da was wanted for digging up Famine bodies and selling their meat as rashers. She had illustrated the detail in red pencil.
    The Eileen O’Reilly ripped the poster from the tree and carried it all the way to our yard.
    ‘Come out, ye great arse of a swine!’ she yelled.
    Darcy was not going to be resisting such an invitation.
    There followed, by all accounts, a great tournament of insults and threats that ended with the both of them dried out in the mouth and tottering on glass legs. Some of the curses that Darcy and the butcher’s runt smelted in the ferocious heat of their two brains that day became general currency in Harristown for years after. They were frequently heard in our cottage, as Enda and Berenice, who witnessed it all, showed a precocious talent for tucking grand insults away in their memories for future use.
    Darcy commenced it, by wishing a smothering and drowning on the butcher’s runt. ‘May the fishes eat you, you dirty little spalpeen! And then the worms eat the fishes. And the worms wither their guts on the nastiness of your bits inside of them.’
    ‘Here’s at you! A burning and a scorching on ye!’ was the runt’s retort.
    ‘I will plant a tree in your dirty ear,’ shouted Darcy, ‘and slap you in its shade.’
    ‘It is yerself that’s filthied me ear wid the great black tongue on ye, so it is.’
    ‘Stones on your meaty bones!’
    Then the runt wished black sorrow on Darcy’s guardian angel, ‘all red-eyed from shame at havin’ to do wid ye!’
    According to Darcy, her guardian angel was presently sending her regards to the Devil who would carry the Eileen O’Reilly around on his pitchfork till she was putrid and dropping off in lumps.
    The runt replied, ‘Your heart wouldn’t even make a sausage, so small and shrivelled it is, Darcy Swinehead, with seven drops of the Divil’s blood inside it. Soup made of Jesus’s dead bones wouldn’t choke you , ye bold black torment.’
    ‘Is that the way of you? You are a grand mouse-sucker and a rat-friend and a knock-knee thing besides.’
    ‘No need for them poor sisters on yours to go hungry when ye could haunt houses for a living, great unnatural-lookin’ baste that ye are.’
    Darcy replied loftily, ‘When I look at your face, I am proud of my rear end.’
    ‘The sheep drop dead when they see ye, Arsey Swiney. They are happy to die.’
    The beggarly brains on the runt, Darcy now suggested, could barely keep her skinny legs walking.
    The Eileen O’Reilly countered, ‘Three hundred hairy things to ye. May your black hair strangle ye wid its great tendrils in the night till ye’re found hangin’ dead from the rafthers.’
    ‘May every maggot in your father’s shop crawl up your nostrils and the dead pigs rise up on their trotters in the night and trample you flatter than a wafer.’
    ‘I hope the lightning sthrikes ye in the privy midden so ye fall dead and mulch there, and not a dry stitch on your whole carcass.’
    ‘May a famined dog lift its leg on you,’ replied Darcy, ‘until you turn entirely dirty yellow like your toenails. It wouldn’t bite you, of course, for fear of getting rabies.’
    ‘A high windy gallows for ye and a nail in the knot that hangs ye by your trembling throttle till the eyes jump out of your head and visit your cousins in the pigsty, ye great pig of a Swiney thing.’
    Darcy wished that