Good Friday

By EDNA O'BRIEN

Mv aunt and her sons had gone to the chapel since noon, and Granny carried her wicker chair and her two feather cushions into, the plantation, announcing gravely that she was going to keep silence. Out of her pocket she drew her worn horn rosary beads and prayed aloud in a wailful voice. 'She wears four skirts altogether,' my sister Mary said. 'Four black cotton skirts: Mary slept with my grandmother, and made it seem that there was something odd and very private about the old woman's undressing.

`She wears red baize next to her skin, and she has a bunch of medals attached with a safety-pin to her vest, and she uses eucalyptus,' these things Mary told me with obvious distaste. The smell of baize and eucalyptus, mingled with the smell of clay and geraniums through the little window (for my aunt was a fiendish gardener and choked the front of the house with ivy, rambling roses and geraniums); made her sick. She wished we could go back to her own room at home, with the starched net curtains billowing in and out, carrying draughts of fresh clean wind. But our father was on one of his drinking sprees and we could not go home until he was sober again.

Behind the house were hills ridged with points of limestone, and between the hills was the ribbon of narrow, sandy road that came steeply down from nowhere. A cart came into view and I said to her, 'There's someone coming.

They rose dust as they came. Their laughter, and the crunching of the cart on the mountain road, came ahead of them. A dashing band, gipsies, men with black waved hair, women with unwashed greasy faces and hooped ear-rings. The cart was laden with children, buckets, cotton rugs and a half-opened concertina. They stopped and spoke. - `We're looking for feathers, ma'am.'

'On Good Friday?', she asked sarcastically.

'On any day we can get them,' the man said, and added, 'Could we see the boss?' Saying that, he just touched rawly my grandmother's pride. Boss? Who was boss? The question troubled her hourly, and she debated it, when they sent her, to feed cats or gather kindling sticks or pick frockens for wine. For years she was waiting for a chance to make a decision, and now 'she had an opportunity.

'Oh, we can .pay you cash,' said the tall black gipsy, 'or we can pay you with goods. Buckets, lace, linoleum . .

The tall black gipsy disappeared into the loft and fvr a time we lost him, except for the noise of his boots moving over the rafters. The yellow- haired woman with the curtain rings had come into the porch to sell something. In her hands she held things, displaying them temptingly . . . ex- quisite white lace runners and beaded table mats, the colours of which in memory become magnifi- cent. The colours suggested that gipsies led a great vivid life, because, of .course, we did not know that they slept in stuffy caravans or that their clothes smelt of ashes and wood smoke or that their children drank blue watery milk or sometimes no milk at all.

'Buy nothing,' my grandmother called, and the yellow-haired woman began to ask for things— bread, bacon, old clothes, milk—persisting in this until Granny came and told her to go away. Little jets of fierce anger flowed from her small pale mouth, and, strutting down the path, she topped six daffodils on way.

The tall black gipsy came down out of the loft with a grey cobweb stuck to his face and feathers all over his clothes. He had two big sacks, and looking inside we saw goose feathers, turkey feathers, the feathers of Rhode Island Reds, the coloured feathers of wild birds; years of careful saving.

Drawing two notes -from a thick wad, he said indifferently, 'You wouldn't be interested in lino, I suppose?' She. thought for a minute, but before she could draw breath the two blond men had carried huge rolls of linoleum into the. kitchen . . four, five, six, seven rolls of linoleum. They pushed furniture back against the wall and began unrolling it on the floor, one sheet on top of another. The sheets were all of the same size. The tall black gipsy went and looked at the parlour and swore that any of the pieces of linoleuin would fit it. My grandmother said, 'I must think this out. It's a big decision,' and, turn- fling* her back on us, she looked out of the window. The kitchen was swarming with gipsy children and two of them were making off with some fresh scones from the dresser. Grandmother turned around and, facing us, she said firmly, 'I'll take the one with the rosebuds.'

Mary, who had gone to get the eggs from the hen house in case the gipsies might think of hellp• ing themselves, ran in and said, 'Auntie is back. I hear the trap going up around to the yard gate.'

'Oh, hurry. Hurry out of here,' said my grand- mother. They began to drag the huge sacks of feathers away and hoisted rolls of linoleum on to their shoulders. The yellow-haired woman lifted the children and their mangy spotted dog and bundled them on to the cart. The men came back for more lino, and the tall black gipsy gave Granny a luck penny and, pointing to a roll against the corner, he said, 'That's a good bargain you got.' Somehow the children, the woman, the dog, the buckets, the concertina, the two blond men and the rolls of lino were all piled into the cart and, turning it around, the tall black gipsy took the reins and belted away down the road.

My aunt came in the door just then, grumbling about the torn daffodils, and Granny, who was smiling to herself, said, 'Well, I got you a great bargain today, Delia.'

'You got no bargain from that crowd, so don't tell me.'

'I did..You wait until you see the lovely piece of lino I got for the parlour inside.'

`For how much?' My aunt was barely able to control her anger.

`For nothing at all. I just gave them the old feathers in the loft. I cleared them all out for you.'

'The feathers in the loft,' my aunt was now almost crying, and for an instant she refused to believe that my grandmother had been foolish enough to barter that great amount of feathers. `There was at least ten pounds' worth of feathers there,' she said, and her voice had broken with emotion.

'But the lino is beautiful,' we said, wanting to make it all right for grandmother, and between us we all dragged the roll into the parlour. Open- ing it, our hearts sank, because it had not a rosebud pattern as we thought, but had garish yellow squares on a light-brown background.

`Imagine anyone getting yellow linoleum for this room,' my aunt said, waving her hands to communicate some of her fierce anger, and not being able to resist calling grandmother a fool when we discovered that the roll was only half a small square and that it didn't cover one-third of the floor.

'There's been a mistake,' said grandmother nobly, and she told us to re-roll it, because the gipsies would come back as soon as they realised their mistake. For days she expected them. She would walk down the road, past the corner, and sit brooding on the ditch listening for a sound of their cart. They must come, they must come back and save her pride.

But they didn't, and finally my aunt put news- papers on the parlour floor and laid the linoleum on the cold red tiles. A comedy it was, so mean, so miserable, so inadequate.

And yet after grandmother's death nothing evoked her memory so poignantly as that piece of lino with its ugly yellow squares. The bread she baked, the churns of butter she made were soon forgotten, but her mistake in buying from the gipsies on Good Friday is told with playful tenderness to her great-grandchildren, and my aunt invariably cries when she remembers that she called the old woman a fool.