Roseanne's Testimony of Herself
Some weeks later it must have been, I was with my father on a particular job.
Rats start to breed with a vengeance in early spring, so late winter is a good time to go get them, when they have not expanded in numbers for a while, and the weather is not too murderous to the rat-catcher. I suppose looking back it was a queer thing to bring a young girl on the trail of rodents, but I did take a great interest in it, especially after my father read me the manual, which presented the task as one highly skilled, even verging on the vocational and the magical.
He had been working a few nights already in the Protestant orphanage, a strange place in its own right, rats or no rats. It was already about two hundred years old, and my father knew old stories attached to the place, and I do not think it was a very good idea to be an orphan in centuries gone by, judging by what he said. Perhaps in those days it was a decent place enough. He intended to work from the roof down, which was the proper way to do it, ridding the place of rats floor by floor. The upper attics had been cleared, and the top floor, and there were three floors to do, where the orphan girls actually lived, about two hundred of them in their nice canvaslike pinnies, which they wore in their beds.
'They've a bed each these times, Roseanne, yes,' said my father. 'But in the times of your grandfather, or maybe it was his grandfather, but anyway, things were very different. Your grandfather, or perhaps your grandfather's grandfather, used to tell a terrible tale about this place. He came in here, inspector of buildings he was, and had been commissioned by the government in Dublin at the time, because there had been an outcry against the practices in these places, an outcry. He came in here,' and we were standing out in the ancient courtyard at the time, in a rather murky light, with two cages of rats full as you like, and Bob the dog looking very pleased with himself, having chased the rats through the very walls, which were seven or eight feet thick in places, with cavities galore, 'say maybe in one of those big rooms up there,' and he pointed up the gloomy stones of the building to the second floor, 'and there was what looked to him like an acre of beds, and on each bed was babies, maybe twenty of them, newborn or nearly, lying side by side, and he came in there with the ould nurse, as manky now as you like, as you can imagine, and he surveys the sea of babies, and he notices that there was no glass in some of the windows, not like now, and just a little fire in the huge grate, not enough to warm anything, and indeed holes in the ceiling also with the cold drear winter wind howling in, and he exclaims, "My God, woman," or however they might speak in those times, "my God, woman, but these children are not being cared for, by God," he says, "they are not even clothed," and sure enough, Roseanne, they had barely a scrap of clothing between them. And the old woman says, like it was the most reasonable and ordinary thing in the world, "But sure, Mister, aren't they lying in here to die." And he realised that these arrangements were meant, and it was a way to be rid of the sickly or surplus babies. And that was a great scandal in those days, for a while, I suppose.'
He worked away at the traps for a while, and I stood near him, the night wind moaning a little where it crept along the buildings. There was a cold cheap cankered-looking moon risen, just sitting on the roof of the orphanage. My father was dousing the rats with paraffin, preparatory to throwing them on the fire one by one, a fire he had managed to get lit in the centre of the courtyard, using smelly old boards and the like from one of the stores. This was his own method of disposing of the rats, that he had devised, working on from the manual, and he was quite proud of the method. When I think back it was perhaps a little unfortunate that the rats were still alive going into the flames, but I do not think it ever struck my father as cruel, and maybe he hoped it might serve as a warning to other rats if they were watching from the shadows. Which would be to some degree how my father's mind worked.
At any rate he was opening the traps, grabbing the rats one by one as I said and now I think of it, giving each a rap over the head before the flames, that has just popped up in my head as a picture, thank God, and chatting away to me, and maybe it was because he was not able to give it his full concentration, because I was with him, but didn't one of the rats escape between the trap and the knock on the head, wriggling out of his fingers suddenly, skirting the astonished Bob, who had nary a chance to react, and was gone back towards the orphanage in a dark blaze of blackness, but with that characteristic galloping motion…Myfather cursed gently and maybe thought no more of it, thinking he would get that rat again the following day.
So he worked away at the remainder, registering no doubt the squeaking yelp that each rat gave as he dispatched it, soaked in the paraffin, and threw it onto the bonfire, a sound that I imagine he heard in his dreams. And after about an hour, he wrapped up his bits and bobs, slung his traps around his body, put Bob on his habitual string, and we passed back through the dark orphanage to the street side, where it presented a rather elaborate carved front to the town, being no doubt the result of much philanthropic cash in the vanished century of its building. It was when we were just crossing the street that we heard a roaring, and turned about and looked up.
There was a strange, full, mysterious sound coming from the building, high up on the floor where the girls were sleeping. Although not all sleeping now, because pushing up through the slates of the roof was a thick black smoke, and a grey smoke, and a white smoke, all eerily lit by nothing but the moon and the meagre illuminations of Sligo. Now we heard the glass of windows break somewhere, and suddenly a long thin arm of bright yellow flame came streaking out, seemed to hang solidly in the night air, showing up my father's upturned face, and no doubt mine, and then just as strangely retrieved itself, with a horrible roaring moan, worse than any wind. It seemed to me in my enormous fright that the fire had spoken a word: 'Death, death,' said the fire I thought.
'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,' said my father, like a man paralysed by some awful turn in his blood and brain, and as he spoke the doors of the orphanage opened, no doubt sending up a wild fierce blow of wind through the house, and a few stunned girls, their pinnies covered in ash and dirt, came stumbling out, their faces wild like little demons. I had never seen such terror. Two or three of the attendants of the place, a woman and two men, also tumbled out, in their black clothes, and hurried out onto the cobbles to see what could be seen.
What could be seen – and now the fire engines could be heard in the distance, clanging their bells – was the floor of girls bright as day, with a foaming of flames behind the great windows, and though we were at a strict angle, the faces and arms of girls beating at the windows like moths do in daytime, or sleeping butterflies in winter when a room is suddenly heated, fatally thinking spring has come. Then some of the windows seemed to explode out, sending lethal shards and fragments of glass down towards us, making everyone run for the other side of the street. People came out of their houses, women with hands to their faces, wailing strangely, and men in their long johns from their beds, shouting and calling, and if they had never felt compassion for those parentless girls, they felt it now, calling out to them like fathers and mothers.
We could see the fire burn even fiercer behind them, offering an enormous flower of yellow and red, with such a noise as mortal never heard before hell, and indeed as hell might be thought to be in nightmares. And the girls, most of them my own age in that particular chamber, started to climb out through the windows onto the wide ledge, every one with their pinnies already burning, screaming and screaming. And when they could do no better, and had no hope of any other sort of rescue, they jumped from the ledge in little groups and single, their clothes burning and burning, the flames blown up from the pinnies till they dragged above them like veritable wings, and these burning girls fell the height of that grand old mansion, and struck the cobbles. A continuous wave of them, a wave of mere girls pouring abundantly from the windows, burning and screaming and dying before our eyes.