EVERY WEEK MARY WALKED TO TOWN WITH HER WORK STRAPPED TO her back.
‘Let me come with you,’ Con begged and pleaded with her, but she refused. Truth to tell, she did not want her son to see the hollow-faced hungry and sick who besieged the town.
The dressmaker inspected each shroud as if it were a pretty dress or fine coat for a customer, meticulously checking the seams and stitching. Happy with Mary’s work, she went to the drawer in the back room and, taking out some money, counted the coins for her.
‘Would you be able to make another eight shrouds for me for next week?’ she asked.
Mary nodded, delighted to have more work.
‘Then I will measure out the yards of linen for you.’
‘If it is all right with you, Miss Barry, I will return in a while and collect it on my way home?’
‘Aye, it’s better not to be traipsing it around,’ agreed the dressmaker. ‘I’ll have it ready for you.’
Mary made her way to the soup kitchen, took the broth and was grateful, for it sustained her after her long walk. Then she went to see her sister.
Bridgetown had become a place of sickness and reeked with the smell of human ordure. Brazen rats scurried along the filthy muddy lanes, under the eaves of the thatched roofs and across the filthy floors as there was not a dog nor cat left to hunt them.
‘The Murphys and Molloys should have kept their cats,’ complained Kathleen, ‘for now we are plagued night and day by those stinking, filthy vermin. I heard that one or two have trapped and boiled them, but they can make you fierce sick. That is one thing I would never do.’
Mary’s stomach heaved at the thought of it.
The cottage was even dirtier than on her previous visit. The straw had not been replaced and the children were unwashed. Her once pretty sister’s face was haggard and grey, her body run to bones, just like her own. Four-year-old Lizzie was weak and listless, her small stomach swollen like a ball. She lay on her sister’s lap as pale as a ghost.
‘She will not take even a spoon of water and gruel for me,’ fretted Kathleen.
Mary gave her sister two of her precious pennies to buy cow’s milk for Lizzie in the hope that that would help.
‘I shouldn’t take it off you, but the milk might give her new strength,’ thanked Kathleen. ‘We have nothing since the works closed. Every day Joe disappears down to the river for hours, sitting on the bank fishing.’
‘Maybe he’ll have luck,’ Mary encouraged.
‘Joe’s no fisherman and the river has been near fished out,’ her sister said bitterly.
‘Are you all right, Kathleen?’ Mary asked, suddenly concerned for her.
‘I’m tired, Mary. More tired than I have ever been in my life,’ she admitted quietly. ‘I don’t know what will become of us.’
Mary had never seen her sister like this. Kathleen had always been the headstrong, carefree older sister who had gone against her parents’ wishes to marry handsome Joseph Casey. She usually shrugged and laughed off all her cares and woes, but now she seemed defeated, done in by her circumstances.
‘I’m glad that Mother and Father did not live to see these terrible times,’ Kathleen continued despairingly, ‘and what has befallen us and our children. And poor James and Denis, and their families at home in Goleen. ’Tis meant to be fierce bad there. I thank God that I have you, my sister.’
‘We have each other,’ Mary reassured her as she hugged Kathleen goodbye, promising to see her again the following week.
Mary felt like crying as she handed over the meagre pennies she earned to buy some oats, flour and tea in Healy’s. The prices had all gone up. As she turned for home, she called in to Honora’s shop to collect the material.
‘I have already sold two of the shrouds so I have added more material for you to make an extra two for me if you can,’ Honora declared.
Mary accepted, but was torn between delight at the fact she would earn more pennies and guilt that so many shrouds were needed.
Her load of material was extra heavy as Mary walked the road to Creagh, and every time she heard a cart, or a pony and trap near her, she looked up hopefully. But no luck. People passed her by and then it began to rain. She wrapped her shawl around her precious bundle of linen and provisions, trying to ignore the pain in her back, shoulders and arms, and kept going.
She was about two miles from home when she spotted Con sheltering under a tree, waiting for her.
‘Da sent me to help you.’ He grinned and took the wrapped oats and flour from her arms.
With her load lightened, she was glad of her eldest boy’s company.
‘I worry for your aunt and her family living in Bridgetown,’ she confided in him as they walked home, telling him how terrible things were for the people in the town.
She cooked a large pot of meal that evening. When they had finished eating, she sent John over the fields to Flor and Molly’s with a bowl of it along with a screw of tea. The old couple barely stirred from their cottage these days. The Sullivans had little enough to share, but she and John did their best to visit the pair, for they were family.