Dolly

Dolly looked down at us with her soft brown eyes. We held out the sugar lumps on our flattened palms to stop us losing our fingers; our heads turned slightly away, our eyes partly closed in nervous anticipation. She bent her head and dragged her sloppy wet lips across our hands. The sugar was gone, replaced by her slimy spit which we quickly wiped on the back of our short itching trousers, our noses crinkled in the air. Dolly threw her head back and snorted visible air from her flaring nostrils. We had taken a step back by then because we knew what was coming. She liked sugar.

She was tied to a convenient electricity pole outside Keating’s pub. The reins were gradually sticking to the oozing tar used to stop the pole from rotting. By the time Dolly’s owner was ready to go home they would be well and truly set in the cooling of the day. The cart she pulled to town each day lay behind her, resting on its red painted shafts. Three milk churns, empty now, glistened in the warming sun. The metal hoops protecting the wooden wheels would soon be too hot to touch but perfect for watching spit bubble and sizzle. In the shade under the cart a feedbag of oats stood next to a bucket of shimmering water from the nearby village tap.

The milk squeezed that morning from the few cows that chewed enough pasture from the small mountain farm that was Dolly’s home had been exchanged earlier at the creamery for the money now being spent in the shade of the pub. The queue of horse drawn churns with the occasional small tractor was already stretched back up to the main street as we passed each day on our way to school. Leaning and smoking farmers discussed and argued about the vagaries of weather, prices and other issues that dictated their mastery of the land and its bounty. This short circular finance journey had been repeated each day since the death of the farmer’s wife. Guinness and whiskey chasers replaced the comfort gleaned from going home to a warm fire and future. They offered shade from the glare of the day, the emptiness, the loneliness, the futility of ripping a precarious and now unshared living from the reluctant land. He had cleared the land by hand, the leaning stone walls of his thirty acres testament to the backbreaking toil of exposing enough soil to encourage pasture. He had ripped the farm out of the grasp of the mountain framing a defiant green spot within its brown shadow. Over the years he had resisted the overtures of the Forestry Commission offering him inducements to leave. Norway spruce and fir had spread across the slopes constantly changing the hues with its planting, quick growth and harvesting. His hawthorn ditches stood in prickly defiance of this soulless cultivation. He had watched horses progress to tractors to drag the long straight trees to trucks waiting on the dirt roads that scarred the lower slopes. He had exchanged his home made poteen for a bit of firing for the winter with the forestry workers. His days began before they arrived and finished long after they had made their collective way on their Raleigh bikes back to the glow of the village nestling in the valley.  Light and weather were the timepieces that dictated the length

and labour of his days. Clocks had no place in ordering his life until he got the radio and tuned in each night eager for crackling news of the world that had coaxed and taken five of his seven children. The only two that stayed at home were taken early and lay waiting in his grave. He dutifully visited them with his wife after Mass each Sunday. The ritual prayers for the departed had given way over the years to silence as he watched her tending the space, never quite weeding out the loss.

We only saw his wife on Sundays. She had worn black for as long as we knew her, always mourning for some loss. She was a small woman who walked quickly with short steps, her eyes fixed firmly on the ground. She tended to stand beside and slightly behind her taller husband allowing him to dictate her inclusion or exclusion from conversation. She always seemed in a hurry to go as if the after Mass crowd milling round was too much for her to cope with, the ricocheting voices a stark contrast to the silence of the hills. She was never seen shopping in the village preferring instead to send notes with her husband on his daily creamery trips that were filled in the grocery side of the public house. It was charged to a note book and settled each Monday. There was always more milk on Monday after the weekend break. She wasn’t a local woman. She came ‘from somewhere over the hill in Waterford’ a statement which implied lack of knowledge of her stock and which could be used to explain away any eccentricities. My father used to say that ‘if she had had any sense she should have come over the mountain a bit further and not get stuck up in that godforsaken place’. His appreciation of the obvious beauty of the mountains had long ago been washed away by his daily grind as a forestry worker.

She was gone now, laying near her children under the shade of her mountain home, the warmth of her company gone from the house, the sounds of her birdlike movements echoing in its coldness. No need for him to be in a hurry home. The warmth of the whiskey, the ever lit fire and the conversation of the regulars would do him now for the time he had left. That evening, as every evening, we returned to see Dolly. I had pulled the three threes and nine from the Angelus bell in the churchyard an hour before. The feedbag was empty, the water bucket replaced next to the empty beer barrels round the back of the pub. She was sprightly, alert, tossing her head, moving her legs in a circular dance with the restraining reins in anticipation of the next part of the daily ritual. The publican and a customer were preparing to back her between the shafts of the cart, collar bit and bridle in place for the journey home. Her owner appeared, blinking into the evening light, slightly the worse for drink but sniffing expertly for any smell of rain. With a little help he eased his rheumatic limbs, the results of too many soakings, onto the cart. The now upright churns stood like sentinels towards the back. The bag of messages was placed carefully against the side stays with admonitions of taking care of fragile items which were totally ignored. He tucked the reins under him, folded his coat for a pillow and then turned to us.

“It’s been a long aul day. Time for a dacent man to get some rest. Go on then, I’m ready. Tell her.”

“Home Dolly,” we shouted. She received the familiar instruction with a snorting whip of her head as if to assure herself that the load behind was placed in such a way as to resist the two mile hill track journey home. She turned round a half circle and set off, the metal bands of the wheels carving tracks in the loose gravel of the recent resurfacing of the main street, her metal shoes echoing off the high walled street houses.

One Monday Dolly didn’t turn up for the creamery. Everyone knew what was wrong. His emigrant children visited to lay him to rest and then went away again. He left the farm to his oldest son, to tradition.  For some unknown reason it was never sold. Dolly disappeared from our lives as the demands of growing away from simplicity took hold.

I’ve trudged up the overgrown track from the mountain road. The wheel ruts from Dolly’s daily journeys are now more memory than markings. Nettles and brambles have regained their grasping, stinging dominance of the space. The stone walls continue their inevitable crumble back to the land from which they were torn. The unchecked hawthorn still fends off the progress of forestry while it strains against the ever tightening grip of ivy. The black eyes of the roofless house cloak and fold inwards the secrets of the lives lived out in this remote place.

One day it will seem as if nobody was ever there; even Dolly would no longer find her way home.

Excerpt from Big Tom & Ozzy by Bill Griffin