FRUIT OF THY… FRUIT of thy… pray for us now and in the hour… That’s all you could hear, all the way to the street; the murmur of private rosaries, the clean slide and clack of the beads. As soon as the word flew out that old Mags Breen was dying, the wake was started right there in her front room just like that. Everyone from the street was in, filling up the little house. Sometimes the whisper-prayers all fell in together, and then it was the hissing parts you heard, the trespasses, trespass, trespass against, like steam over the bowed heads. The women took turns sitting with her, and old Mags sent down for anyone she wanted to talk to.
Molly and her friend Jackie hung about the feet and got given bits of bread with jam. They weren’t expected to say the Rosary. Someone tied a rope up for them on the lamppost outside Mag’s front door, and they took turns swinging on it.
Probably no one sent word up about two little Ard Rhí girls wanting to see Mags, and if they had, maybe Mags wouldn’t have known them from any of the other Cow Town children. But the thing is, they had something important to tell Mags, some message she needed to bring into death for them… Molly can’t remember what it was now. But old Mags sent down for Molly’s sister, Kat, who had to be fetched from Viking Road, where she was helping the seamstress sisters. She was called up and sat a long time with old Mags. It was a great thing to be called up to the bedside, for old Mags was the grande dame of the whole of Cow Town. Everyone thought Kat was a great girl, and their brother Mick too, and Molly’s dada. A Black and Tan threw Kat against the wall when she was only three years old and everyone thought she was a great girl on account of she got back up, her hand to her bleeding head, and said, ‘Bad man.’ But Molly was born after, so she missed all that terrible business. For a time, Dada kept a gun up the chimney, which Molly was allowed to clean with Vaseline, but he got rid of that after Mam cried about it one night.
*
‘Tell me this and tell me no more…’
‘Yes, Grandma? Tell you what?’
‘What was that message, tell me?’