Never had and never would.
The reasons for this were of some interest to Hanna, because, as soon as her father was out with the cattle, her granny took her aside — as though there were crowds to observe them — and pressed a pound note into her hand.
‘Go in to your uncle’s for me,’ she said. ‘And ask for some of that last cream.’
The cream was for something old-lady and horrible.
‘What’ll I say?’ said Hanna.
‘Oh no need, no need,’ said her granny. ‘He’ll know.’
Constance used to be in charge of this, clearly, and now it was Hanna’s turn.
‘OK,’ said Hanna.
The pound note her granny pressed into her hand was folded in half and rolled up again. Hanna did not know where to put it so she stuck it down her sock for safe keeping, sliding it down along the ankle bone. She looked out one window at the hard sea light, and out the other at the road towards town.
They did not get along, the Considines and the Madigans.
When Hanna’s father came in the door for his cup of tea, he filled the doorframe so he had to stoop, and Hanna wished her granny could ask her own son for the cream, whatever it was, though she sensed it had something to do with the bright blood she saw in her granny’s commode, which was a chair with a hole cut into it, and the potty slotted in beneath.
There were four rooms in the house at Boolavaun. Hanna went into each of them and listened to the different sounds of the rain. She stood in the back bedroom her father used to share with his two younger brothers, who were in America now. She looked at the three beds where they once slept.
Out in the kitchen, her father sat over his tea, and her granny read the newspaper that he brought to her from town, each day. Bertie, the house cat, was straining against her granny’s old feet, and the radio wandered off-station. On the range, a big pot of water was coming, with epic slowness, to the boil.
After the rain, they went out to look for eggs. Her granny carried a white enamel bowl with a thin blue rim, that was chipped, here and there, to black. She walked in a quick crouch beyond the hen-house to the hedge that divided the yard from the haggart. She scrabbled along the bushes, peering down between the branches.
‘Oho,’ she said. ‘I have you now.’
Hanna crawled in by her granny’s bunioned feet to retrieve the egg that was laid under the hedge. The egg was brown and streaked with hen-do. Granny held it up to admire before putting it in the empty dish where it rolled about with a hollow, dangerous sound.
‘Get down there for me,’ she said to Hanna, ‘and check the holes in the wall.’
Hanna got right down. The walls, which were everywhere on the land, were forbidden to her and to Emmet for fear they’d knock the stones on top of themselves. The walls were older than the house, her granny said; thousands of years old, they were the oldest walls in Ireland. Up close, the stones were dappled with white and scattered with coins of yellow lichen, like money in the sunlight. And there was a white egg, not even dirty, tucked into a crevice where the ragwort grew.
‘Aha,’ said her granny.
Hanna placed the egg in the bowl and her granny put her fingers in there to stop the two eggs banging off each other. Hanna dipped into the wooden hen-house to collect the rest of them, in the rancid smell of old straw and feathers, while her granny stood out in the doorway and lowered the bowl for each new egg she found. As they turned back to the house, the old woman reached down and lifted one of the scratching birds — so easily — she didn’t even set the eggs aside. If Hanna ever tried tried to catch a hen, they jinked away so fast she was afraid she might give them a heart attack, but her granny just picked one up, and there it was, tucked under the crook of her arm, its red-brown feathers shining in the sun. A young cock, by the stubby black in his tail that would be, when he was grown, a proud array, shimmering with green.
As they walked across the back yard, Hanna’s father came out of the car house, which was an open-sided outhouse between the cowshed and the little alcove for turf. Her granny stood on tiptoe to shrug the bird over to him and it swung down from her father’s hand as he turned away. He was holding the bird by the feet and in his other hand was a hatchet, held close to the blade. He got the heft of this as he went to a broken bench Hanna had never noticed, which lived under the shelter of the car house roof. He slung the bird’s head on to the wood, so the beak strained forwards, and he chopped it off.
It was done as easy as her granny picking the bird up off the ground, it was done all in one go. He held the slaughtered thing up and away from him as the blood pumped and dribbled on to the cobblestones.
‘Oh.’ Her granny gave a little cry, as though some goodness had been lost, and the cats were suddenly there, lifting up on to their hind feet, under the bird’s open neck.
‘Go ’way,’ said her father, shoving one aside with his boot, then he handed the bird, still flapping, over to Hanna to hold.
Hanna was surprised by the warmth of the chicken’s feet, that were scaly and bony and should not be warm at all. She could feel her father laughing at her, as he left her to it and went into the house. Hanna held the chicken away from herself with both hands and tried not to drop the thing as it flapped and twisted over the space where its head used to be. One of the cats already had the fleshy cockscomb in its little cat’s teeth, and was running away with the head bobbing under its little white chin. Hanna might have screamed at all that — at the dangling, ragged neck and the cock’s outraged eye — but she was too busy keeping the corpse from jerking out of her hands. The wings were agape, the russet feathers all ruffled back and showing their yellow under-down, and the body was shitting out from under the black tail feathers, in squirts that mimicked the squirting blood.
Her father came out of the kitchen with the big pot of water, which he set on the cobbles.
‘Still going,’ he said.
‘Dada!’ said Hanna.
‘It’s just reflexes,’ he said. But Hanna knew he was laughing at her, because as soon as it was all over, the thing gave another jerk and her granny gave a sound Hanna had not heard before, a delighted crowing she felt on the skin of her neck. The old woman turned back into the kitchen to leave the eggs on the dresser, and came out fumbling a piece of twine out of her apron pocket as Hanna’s father took the chicken from her, finally, and dunked the thing in the vat of steaming water.
Even then, the body twitched, and the wings banged strongly, twice, against the sides of the pot.
In and out the carcass went. And then it was still.
‘That’s you now,’ he said to his mother, as he held a leg out for her to tie with her piece of twine.
After this, Hanna watched her granny string the chicken up by one leg on to a hook in the car house and pull the feathers off the bird with a loud ripping sound. The wet feathers stuck to her fingers in clumps: she had to slap her hands together and wipe them on the apron.
‘Come here now and I’ll show you how it’s done,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Hanna, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.
‘Ah now,’ said her granny.
‘I will not,’ said Hanna, who was crying.
‘Ah darling.’
And Hanna turned her face away in shame.
Hanna was always crying — that was the thing about Hanna. She was always ‘snottering’, as Emmet put it. Oh, your bladder’s very close to your eyes, her mother used to say, or Your waterworks, Constance called it, and that was another phrase they all used, Here come the waterworks, even though it was her brothers and sister who made her cry. Emmet especially, who won her tears from her, pulled them out of her face, hot and sore, and ran off with them, exulting.