Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of Healing
Spring in Kildare does not arrive with a fanfare of warm days; it arrives with three weeks of gray rain that turns the sheep meadows into a bright, impossible green that hurts the eyes when the sun finally breaks through the clouds at four in the afternoon.
In the garden behind the white cottage, the rhubarb had pushed its red, crinkled heads through the straw, and the twelve brown hens had begun laying six eggs a day in the cedar nesting boxes Erin had built from old shipping pallets.
I was standing at the wooden trestle table under the eaves of the scullery, washing six small red potatoes in a bucket of cold well water. The water was clear, freezing, smelling faintly of limestone and deep earth.
Through the gate, I could see Ellie and Maddie coming down the lane from the school bus stop at the bridge.
Ellie was nine now. She had grown two inches during the winter, her legs long and straight in her navy-blue school uniform pinafore. She was carrying her book satchel by the handle, swinging it in time with her steps, her dark honey-colored braids tied with proper green ribbons that she had learned to knot herself without using the hall mirror.
Maddie was five. She was running three paces ahead, her yellow wellies coated in gray river mud up to the buckles, holding a clump of yellow primroses in both hands as if she were carrying a torch to an altar.
"Mom!" Maddie screamed, her voice carrying over the stone walls and the bleating of the black-faced sheep on the hill. "Look! Mrs. O’Connor said the primroses mean the winter is dead! She said we can take our sweaters off if the sun stays out until teatime!"
"Your sweater stays on until May, young lady," I called back, wiping my wet hands on my apron as they reached the latch of the gate.
Maddie threw herself against my knees, nearly knocking the bucket of potatoes off the bench. She smelled of wet wool, sour apple drops, and the peat smoke that hung over the schoolhouse chimney all day.
"Barnaby had tea with the headmaster," Maddie announced, thrusting her primroses into the potato bucket where they floated like three small yellow boats on the dark water. "He sat on the desk right beside the big bell. Mr. Flynn said Barnaby is the best-behaved dog in the junior infants because he doesn't bark when the priest comes in."
"Mr. Flynn has very low standards for dogs," Ellie said, walking through the gate with that slow, dignified stride she had adopted since she had been moved up to the senior reading group in February.
She set her satchel on the bench, reached into her pocket, and pulled out an envelope made of thick, creamy paper with a gold-and-blue crest in the corner.
"What’s that, Ellie?" I asked.
"The headmaster gave it to me," she said. Her eyes were very wide, very bright, reflecting the pale blue of the afternoon sky that was clearing over the Wicklow Mountains to the south. "He said it’s from the music academy in Dublin. The one where we went for the choir audition in January."
I dried my fingers on the tea towel, took the envelope, and slid my thumb under the heavy paper flap.
Inside was a single sheet of watermarked vellum, signed by the director of the preparatory division of the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
We are pleased to inform you that Eleanor Bennett Clark has been awarded the St. Cecilia Junior Scholarship for choral studies and pianoforte for the Michaelmas term...
I read the three paragraphs twice.
The scholarship covered the tuition, the train fare from Kildare into the city two afternoons a week, and twenty-five pounds a term for sheet music and materials.
"Did I pass?" Ellie asked, her fingers twisting the bottom of her navy pinafore until the hem was wrinkled.
I looked at her. Her face had lost the pinched, pale look it had carried through that terrible September in Ohio. Her cheeks were pink from the lane wind, her forehead was clear, and her crooked smile—the one I used to think belonged to Grant—was entirely her own. It belonged to the girl who had spent five months learning how to play three-part harmonies on Erin’s old upright piano while the peat fire hissed in the grate.
"You didn't just pass, Ellie," I told her, kneeling down on the damp gravel of the scullery yard so I could look directly into her eyes. "You won the scholarship. You’re going to study in Dublin. In the big hall with the pipe organ and the red velvet seats."
Ellie didn't jump. She didn't scream like Maddie did when she found a shiny beetle in the woodpile.
She simply stood there, looking at the creamy paper in my hands, and then she let out a long, slow breath that smelled of the tea and milk they had served with the school biscuits at noon.
"Can we take the train with the green doors?" she asked.
"Every Tuesday and Thursday," I said. "And we’ll have tea at the shop near the green with the little chocolate buns that have the cherries on top."
"Aunt Erin too?"
"Aunt Erin too," a voice said from the scullery door.
Erin was standing there, holding an empty egg basket, her face smeared with a smudge of gray charcoal from the sketch she had been working on by the window. She looked at the letter in my hand, then at Ellie, and a slow, wide grin spread across her mouth until she looked twelve years old again, standing on the dock at Lake Erie with a bucket of sunfish.
"The girl’s got Clark ears," Erin said, tapping Ellie’s left earlobe with a charcoal-stained thumb. "Grandpa Clark could tune a fiddle by listening to the whistle of the five o'clock freight through Urbana. A Bennett wouldn't know a B-flat from a property tax assessment."
May you like
Maddie pulled a primrose out of the potato water and stuck the dripping stem into the buttonhole of Ellie’s uniform.
"Now you look like the queen," Maddie said. "The queen of the music."
